Brutallus

I sit around 23k fully buffed with imp and commanding shout on this fight. I tell you what. I love the ancient aqir artifact for this. Having another ironshield pot on top of your normal one is amazing. With a 20 second duration you can pop it a few seconds before the stomp and not have to worry about it falling off unlike the watch. I do use the watch as my other trinket.

I think it is very important to have an avoidance or mitigation trinket to pop during stomp. Makes a huge difference.

These two trinkets are both on a 2 minute cooldown. I am the offtank and everytime I take a stomp I have a trinket available.
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http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Demon+Soul&n=Havn

The numbers I was trying to put together had nothing to do with paladin-versus-warrior or paladin-versus-druid. In fact I lumped warrior/paladin into the same vein because ultimately their effective health works out to be about the same over a "four hits in <5 seconds" scenario. Since the case being assumed is that all four hits are not avoided, it's guarenteed that the warrior's shield block charges will be gone after the first two, leaving them at a ~40% chance to take an unblocked swing to a paladin's ~10% (numbers vary with gear and redoubt uptime). Playing odds, it's fairly likely that the warrior will take at least one less block than a paladin in this case, and the 300-400 blocked damage will compensate for the 4% gap on IRF vs Def Stance over the course of the 4 swings. As has been pointed out, see WWS entries if you need hard field data.

What I was trying to do was benchmark the point at which adding more hp doesn't do you any good for surviving stomp + 2x2. At some threshold value, you effectively need one less major heal to survive stomp. Once your HP hits that mark, more HP doesn't really reduce the amount of heals-per-attack that you need. Below that point you'd need either a substantial amount of HoT/quick healing, or an additional large heal. I'm not saying 23k without seed is absolutely essential, I was more getting at passing that mark is fairly worthless; if you get X big heals you live instead of needing X+1, but if you get X-1 you're still dead, just from a higher base health %. However, I believe I used a poor modeling scenario for healing, and that the catchpoint should actually be about 1k lower. Unfortunately we didn't raid last night so I didn't get to observe any numbers/patterns to try and crunch out a more feasible scenario.

-Splug
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(Usually) Prot warrior: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Illidan&n=Splug

We always call out tank transitions and stomps on vent . Anyways, today I went and got a 240 armor enchant on my gloves (used to have threat on them) and I also went and got a sun eater and slapped mongoose on it. And I died a lot less. I also went with dual stamina trinkets btw. I don't have the damn insignia and I *have* tried the pocket watch, but it's not up during every stomp anyway - ofc I can alternate with seeds and you 're right about later stomps being taunted off. But after much much thought after my deaths with the different trinkets I 've concluded the stamina works best for me. I pop a stone or a seed during a stomp if I feel in danger.

I 'm at 24k fully buffed and with stamina trinkets btw. I appreciate your efforts at theorycraft Splug but I really fail to see how any stamina is pointless. I 've noticed myself dropping to low hp numerous times, even below 1k hp and yet surviving.

I 'm really in love with mongoose right now btw. It must have been the placebo effect but I felt like seeing it up all the time.

Anyways, we didn't kill him but at least my death wasn't the issue. We took him to 10% best try wiping to enrage and I 'm confident we 'll get him once the dps gear up a tad more.

During 20 tries, the commendation trinket triggered 47 times >.>
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Killed him today, I went back to 12 dodge on cape, got mongoose on tempest of chaos, respecced back into more avoidance (not loads of difference) only gained total of 2% or so. I put 40 spell dmg on unbreakable will and swapped to it during (just before) stomps.

Had 22.6k HP before trinkets (on the kill I forgot to use food buff so had 22.2...), used SM Insignia and Nightmare seed for stomps nr 1/2 and 4/5, stomp nr3 was just praying :p (I was first tank).

We stopped doing the whole "stomp then taunt" thing that we were doing later on in the fight, just kept it going normally but doing clever "natural" taunting. Stomp seems to get delayed by burn and slashes, just like silence does at gruul by ground slam/shatter time. We did "taunting in 5 secs" with stomp 2-3 seconds away, and it would happen that the tank would get stomped and then I'd taunt 2-3 seconds into the other tanks stomp, and he would be fine still. Just thought I'd mention that as it did cause a few wipes.

Quite pleased we got him before enrage as well .
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Finally downed kalecgos so onto this guy

Looks like im going to be ret for this, hope my gear is up to scratch,

Unbuffed i have 31% crit, 1900ap, 699 armor reduction. Hopefully will be able to do 1400+ dps
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Question for those of you who have successfully tanked this guy...

How much avoidance do you consider to be "enough"? I have at my dispoal the ability to get up to 62% or so pure avoidance, but I drop to roughly 21.5k buffed HP (our warlocks refuse to drop imps so that's just normal raid buffs + commanding shout.) I'm looking at 22500 armor w/ Ironshields (28k w/ Inspiration), what kind of HP pool should I be shooting for here? Splug, I see you've done the math, in your opinion is 22k sufficient? I can drop some avoidance and pick up enough HP to get over 23k, but I'd drop roughly 7-8% avoidance. Is it worth it?

Even if i didn't tank it, i'd just mindlessly stack HP and armor, and then go with the avoidance you got in that set.
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I'm ready to just throw the calculation for "target max health" out the window. The model I used for tank healing during stomp was pretty far off. I CAN state that there is a good chance of taking a damage spike as high as 21k right as stomp goes off, so not having at least 21k health during stomp is leaving open a fairly high probability of a wipe that no amount of clutch healing is going to save you from. If you have a shadowmoon insignia, you can rotate that with nightmare seeds and effectively increase your health pool by 2k during stomp, but I still wouldn't recommend running at less than 21k.

Beyond that, I'll be honest: when I tanked him, I just found the highest item-level tanking gear I could and that turned out to be the best set to tank with. For trinkets I ran shadowmoon and the commendation, due to the commendation going off almost every stomp (occasionally, damage before the stomp would trip it, but usually the stomp was what made things dangerous).

-Splug

EDIT: I forgot to answer the question! If you just look at total defensive item allocation, 1k hp is roughly 85 stam. 85 stam equates to 57 "item rating." 57 item rating invested in dodge would get you roughly 3% dodge. Therefore, 6-7% avoidance is generally a bad trade for 1k hp. And while I think my max HP calculation is whack, the avoidance benefits are correct (that's just simple probability). I'd say there's ample justification for meeting 21-22k hp and then going for anything you can, and if avoidance is more efficient, stick to that.
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(Usually) Prot warrior: http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Illidan&n=Splug