Defense or Dodge - Here are the graphs

[majiben]

Use this you lazy saps .

[Veilan]

Tank need be lazy, tank need preserve calories.

(Oh, and thanks.)

[theothersteve7]

Heh, everything I said went right out the window when you fixed it. ^_^ I'll just shut up and let the masters do their thing.

Nice spreadsheet. Wow.

[DisRuptive1]

I don't have Excel

[Ascendant]

I thought defense would be best by far as well. thanks for the info, it helps a lot.

[Petrus]

I'm just slightly confused on how to read the graph. I have 833 Defense Rating (relatively high) and only 87 Dodge Rating, giving a total of 920. You say that corresponds to something on the graph, but I'm not really sure what or where.

Edit: I have about 47% pure avoidance total if that helps reading the graph for me.

[harlekin]

Petrus: If you look at the 1000 curve, which is pretty close to your combined ratings, and go to the point on the curve that corresponds to 833 defense rating, you'll see that you are to the right of the max line. You could maximize your avoidance by replacing some of your defense rating with dodge rating. As that's not always the easiest thing to do, I would just make sure that when you find upgrades, gems, and enchants that you increase your dodge rating to be more balanced.

Also, keep in mind that the avoidance on this chart is from defense and dodge only. Your talented and base avoidance numbers are not included and are not affected by diminishing returns.

[majiben]

Petrus: If you look at the 1000 curve, which is pretty close to your combined ratings, and go to the point on the curve that corresponds to 833 defense rating, you'll see that you are to the right of the max line. You could maximize your avoidance by replacing some of your defense rating with dodge rating. As that's not always the easiest thing to do, I would just make sure that when you find upgrades, gems, and enchants that you increase your dodge rating to be more balanced.

Also, keep in mind that the avoidance on this chart is from defense and dodge only. Your talented and base avoidance numbers are not included and are not affected by diminishing returns.

Just a reminder to all those reading that this system only takes into account avoidance and not block. You are always better off getting defense over dodge until you are block capped. Defense is better than dodge for reaching the block cap.

[Petrus]

Indeed, I certainly knew intuitively that I needed more dodge, but I think I sort of see how the graph works now.

[Kelarik]

I don't have Excel

OpenOffice works perfectly, and is free.

[PsiVen]

Practically speaking, this means that once you hit 102.4% you should never gem for defense again. Interesting, but I think we need to more thoroughly examine how we reach that mark. Are raid buffs affected by the DR? How can we find the point unbuffed that translates to buffed 102.4%? Do we even have the formulae right? How much is the character screen lying?

Also: How does the DR differ between classes? Dodge certainly diminishes less with druids, but what about parry for DKs, etc.

[harlekin]

DR affects anything that increases your agility or ratings, but nothing that gives a flat percentage of dodge/parry/miss. The formulas seem to have been pretty well vetted at elitist jerks, with the exception of the coefficient for miss, which is only obtainable through large data sets. I'm working under the assumption that ziggyunderslashone's numbers are close.

As far as class based variation goes, it looks like all three of the plate classes have the same coefficients. The numbers for all of the classes are on the elitist jerks thread, but the theorycrafting is ridiculously dense there.

[majiben]

This must hit DKs really hard. Honestly they may not scale well. I could see higher end DKs pushing armor and stamina simply because their parry levels have little to advance due to DR. Even my DK who just got out of the starting area is seeing significant loses in parry from str. Str is not the great survival/threat hybrid it is for warriors and paladins. It's threat with ever decreasing amount of survival for them.

[Mex]

A friend in my guild has rolled DK, and powered to 80 with an intent to tank. He's already in 4T7 (25), and probably the most geared DK tank on the server. He's been doing a lot of theorycrafting, and we've been looking a lot at the differences between our two classes and how well they mitigate damage.

Basically the idea behind DK avoidance is to increase boneshield uptime. For those that are unaware, boneshield is a flat 40% damage reduction (much more than what you'd get from going from 2h to 1h+shield), but with 4 charges that are eaten up by taking hits, and a 1 minute (?) cooldown on its use. With high avoidance ratings, boneshield uptime also increases. With appropriate cooldown usage and gearing choices, against a slow hitting boss (ie not a DWer or patchwork's hatefuls), it will be theoretically possible to obtain very close to 100% bone shield uptime within a tier or two of gear.

That strikes me as slightly implausible, and I haven't had time to look at the numbers myself, but as far as I know, that's the basic drive behind DK avoidance, the fact that it also increases your boneshield uptime and gives you an almost permanent shield wall.

At the moment, I've been gemming aggressively for defense, to the point that I'm now at 570ish. This is basically done with the intention of giving me the latitude to swap out trinkets etc (ie stam for tanking malygos breath, armor for patchwork, etc), and also because my napkin math valued it at pretty much the same level as dodge.

I think once my gear's at the point where the passive defense on the items is enough to cap me, I'll switch to a def/stam in yellow, dodge/stam in blue, and def/dodge in red style gemming pattern, or possibly dodge/stam in red and straight stam in blue, depending on what sort of fights we're looking at for the next tier.

At the moment I don't see much point in stacking stam beyond what Maly's breath hits for. Really, unless you can get past 40k comfortably (2 unresisted KT frostbolts, or a sparked breath from maly), then it doesn't seem worth going beyond about 33-34k.

Steering back on-topic though, I think versatility is a good thing to aim for at the moment, at least until more solid information on Ulduar becomes available.

[majiben]

That's for only one spec of DK unfortunately.