Avoidance vs Mastery (ie. Blood Shield)

[Insolence]

Premonition Tank:

• Reforging:
  Hit ---> Avoidance.
• Gemming:
  Full Stamina, 1 Hybrid Avoidance for Meta.
• Enchanting:
  Stamina priority > Mastery.
• Runeforge:
  Stoneskin Gargoyle
• Hit / Expertise:
  2.07% / 12
• Build:
  Sub-Spec Frost (Lichborne)

Exodus Tank:

• Reforging:
  Haste ---> Mastery on 1 item. Other items: Avoidance.
• Gemming:
  Full Stamina 1 Hybrid Mastery for Meta.
• Enchanting:
  Stamina priority > Mastery.
• Runeforge:
  Fallen Crusader
• Hit / Expertise:
  2.01% / 22
• Build:
  Sub-Spec Unholy - No Bloodworms???!!!!!

Juggernaut Tank:

• Reforging:
  Parry ---> Dodge.
  Expertise ---> Mastery.
• Gemming:
  Some Solid Staminas, a lot of Hybrid Mastery/Stamina and solid Mastery, 1 Parry/Stamina.
• Enchanting:
  Mostly Stamina, 1 Mastery Enchant.
• Runeforge:
  Swordshattering
• Hit / Expertise:
  1.10 / 12
• Build:
  Sub-Spec Frost (Lichborne)

Are we playing the same game, or am I missing something obvious here that they're not?

[Sidh]

It can mean two things - either people are trying different builds and haven't come up with something that is superior to everything else, or... a lot of builds are viable and performing well.

I would really prefer the latter one.

[Insolence]

Builds, sure. But these guys are all Stamina Tanks. They even Reforge Hit and Expertise for Avoidance. Stamina Enchants, Gems, etc. WotLK 4.0 Tank?

[Ram]

Maybe they got different roles among their Tanks. It seems reasonable to make the DK the "Staminatank".

[Insolence]

For what reason however? Mastery is just so much better. Especially compared to RNG Avoidance.

[Sidh]

Avoidance has a lot of pluses over mastery - passive; not affected by haste debuffs; works even if you have to use runes on something else. Basically, in avoidance/stamina build you avoid a lot of attacks and then when you get a streak of bad RNG, you have enough health to survive and use DS to cover that up. As for hit/expertise - you really don't need those in such a build. At all.

That can work pretty well.

[zaronic]

Could be interesting to look at some of the parses from their boss fights to see if tank deaths are part of their wipes or if they really have more health than they need? Some of them could be effectively under geared for the content they are trying (vs what it was tuned for) and thus they really do need to be pushing STA to survive?

[Insolence]

Are there any more Tanks we could compare to from Top Guilds? I tried Stars but they all show up naked to me (old Armory, seems new TW B.net side isn't up yet).

I'll try and see if I can catch the Ensidia guy in his/her Tanking Gear.

[Ska]

The quick answer is that mastery isn't better.

I would guess from this that the amount of damage you avoid far outstrips the benefit of the self heal and shield.

Strangely enough mastery/DS is much more random then avoidance is. Yes avoidance is RNG, but with the removal of non-predictable killing blows, a string of hits isn't fatal. DS on the other hand is directly effected by damage intake, which produces more random results because the effectiveness of the blood shield is weakened by avoidance and any other sort of damage absorb (priest shield).

My biggest issue with DS over all now is that it provides a measure of protection based around what HAS happened, not what will happen.


[This might be derailing the toptic more into the DS vs Avoid thread; sorry in advance]

More relevant to this thread is that it seams hit/exp are not very useful to tanks. And if they are there is enough raid buffs and food buffs to counterbalance

[Sconnell]

I think the stamina gemming is a combination of continuing WotLK era gear strategy for the traditional "best in worst case scenario" reasons, and not feeling like they're at the "enough health" point where gemming something else might be desirable. Perhaps at higher levels of boss dps, a tank dying due to a succession of unavoided hits is much more of a threat. The question "what is causing tanks to die" needs to be answered before we can work out how best to gear to avoid deaths.
Re: bloodworms and the tank with unholy subspec - do we have any data on how bloodworms are actually performing in raids? I'm not sure if there's been a proper look at it at 85. Or - it could be an aoe spec for a specific fight.
I don't think it's clear that mastery is so much better then avoidance. The RNG element of avoidance doesn't really come into play when you are comparing it with mastery in terms of reducing average damage.
As I've noted in an earlier post, reforging hit/expertise for avoidance makes sense if you don't have a large amount of mastery. As your mastery goes up, the value of hit/expertise goes up. So if you aren't focusing on mastery there's less call for hit/expertise. So you end up with:
Mastery: gem mastery-leaning, reforge avoidance to hit/expertise soft caps and then to mastery.
Avoidance: gem stamina, reforge mastery/hit/expertise to avoidance.
The question is: is having to spend rating points in hit/expertise to make mastery more consistent too high a cost? If you don't go mastery, you get to reforge hit/expertise into avoidance.
I had been assuming that you'd want to be at or close to the hit/expertise caps anyway for threat. However, the way threat is working, once you get threat there are no problems holding it, so there's less call for hit/expertise later in a fight. So, all those rating points are potentially available for avoidance, which more directly reduces damage.

[Sconnell]

Ska - I think it's too early to come to a firm conclusion, especially as the right gear strategy might change at different tiers of gear. Diminishing returns on avoidance might come into play at some point, too. It might be that it's worth getting parry/dodge to a certain level and then diminishing returns means further points are best placed in mastery.

The math that's been done so far has shown suggests mastery and avoidance are close, but DS/minute is a big factor, which is where hit/expertise come in.

Clever timing of DS goes a long way towards mitigating the RNG element of blood shield.

I can sort of see the argument about DS not protecting against what will happen. If you have a boss that hits for low damage and then after a point high damage, a death strike during the first period won't be great at protecting you in the second. However, you still have the same chance to avoid a hard-hitting attack or a weak one. I don't think this is a big issue though because it can be mitigated by DSing while taking high damage.

The thing about hit/expertise being useful is that their usefulness depends on your mastery level, not that they aren't useful.

[Ska]

I agree that a firm overall conclusion can't be made, however most of us are aiming at the same content the players linked have completed. It is not an accident they cleared the current content using similar stat weighting and priority. These guys have already walked the walk and in this level of gear for this content, it looks like mastery isn't better. As much as I like the math and theory crafting, reverse engineering what works is always the best place to start when trying to figure out what is best. I put a lot more value on what those players do then piles of spreadsheets and sims. What works best for tanking is best for tanking regardless of math showing results being equal, there are way to many intangibles.

[edit: expanded my comments]

[Sconnell]

We don't know whether the current gear strategies have been arrived at after trial-and-erroring different ones, or whether the tanks we're looking at have settled on a similar initial strategy, which may or may not be the best one. It seems to me that this especially applies to stamina gemming, which has traditionally been the approach taken, which might make it a default starting approach. Personally I am expecting to change my gear strategy around several times once we're raiding regularly again, and ask the healers if there's a noticeable different.
What would be really handy is to hear from someone who's tried some different approaches, especially
- heavy effective health or not (ie gemming stam or otherwise), and
- avoidance vs blood shield.
edit: hopefully Insolence's post on EJ will get us some more information. The most valuable information we can get is "I tried x, but it didn't work because y", rather than "I'm currenly doing a, because I think bcd"

[Sconnell]

I also had a look at Riggins, who sometimes posts at ej:
http://us.battle.net/wow/en/character/i ... s/advanced

spec: Lichborne
gems: dodge/stam, stam and parry/mastery
runeforge: stoneskin
reforging: dodge

[TheYanger]

Hah, funny to look and see my armory here and on the EJ link of this post
Right now, I've been going heavily mastery. I liked it in beta what little I got to try any raiding, and I still like it, but I concur that without hit/exp it's a gamble. I can be pretty badass sometimes with huge heal+shields on myself for clutch saves, but when you whiff 3 times trying to time a death strike you get pretty hosed. SSG is still probably my enchant of choice ATM, was just messing with swordshattering and planning to read the logs later, a lot of that gear was either gotten just last night/this week, or in the case of some enchant choices, limited by maelstrom supply in all honesty. This is a good time to experiment. I feel Stam is still important till about 200k buffed atm, possibly that'll raise, but most people only have experience with a couple hard modes honestly so who knows. Avoidance is pretty amazing, so at this point I'd say it's just a matter of combing logs trying to compare what's going on with people who are geared differently still. I'm no theory master, I prefer to analyze the logs after the fact and see what can be changed /shrug.