Enchanting Your Gloves: 2% vs 20 +dmg vs Mitigation

This is a very often-asked question, so here's a quick guide to glove enhancements.

When enchanting your gloves, you have two choices: threat or survivability. Most tankadins have multiple sets for different situations, so enchant accordingly!


Threat
2% Threat
2% threat will grant you more aggro than +20 spell damage as long as you are generating more than 500 TPS. If you are generating less than 500 threat per second, you are probably not level 70 and shouldn't be worrying about glove enchants anyway.
+20 Spell Damage
20 extra spell damage will net you about an extra 10 TPS. If you are in an AoE tanking situation with your consecration doing 100 damage a tick or higher, you will get more out of this enchant.
+15 Spellhit
15 spell hit grants you 1.2%. This is generally not that important, as many of our abilities do not rely on spell hit.
Invisusira recommends: 2% Threat!


Survivability
240 Armor
At first glance, it may not seem like much - this option is very often passed over. However, depending on your gear level, it will actually give you about twice the effective health as a +10 stamina kit would. (.8% vs .4% at your average T4/T5 gear level.)
+10 Stamina
10 stamina will net you 128 hp with your talents. If you have no need for further avoidance, that's basically like an inexpensive socket in your gear.
+15 Agility
With Kings, 15 agility grants you .66% dodge and 35 armor. A good, if not somewhat expensive, way to get that last bit of uncrushability if you have no other options.
+8 Defense
8 defense rating gives you about 4 defense. If you're not at the defense cap already, this is a viable choice.
Invisusira recommends: 240 Armor!

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240 Armor: Addendum
Rather than clog up the main post with these numbers, I thought I'd add them on the end. People love teh staminas, so here's the hard math behind how 240 ac provides you with more EH than 10 stam.

After 15k armor, assuming constant damage (1000 DPS), an extra 240 armor effectively reduces the damage per second by 4.32.
After 20k armor, assuming constant damage (1000 DPS), an extra 240 armor effectively reduces the damage per second by 2.88.

Most tanks have armor values that fall neatly between those two. These numbers show that an extra 240 armor yields approximately 3-6health/second. Comparing this with the +10 stamina enchant, a fight would have to last longer than 15-33 seconds for the two to be comparable (most fights obviously do). The armor enchant is much more valuable when it comes to survivability than anything else (including agility) when it comes to MELEE bosses/mobs.

Please note that 240 armor is completely useless again caster mobs and bosses, and that some abilities do bypass armor!

Here are the maths:

The extra health is static, while the armour continues to work.

~120 health is ~120 health, whereas the mitigation from the armour will mitigate much much more damage over the course of a boss fight.

No one is saying that stamina is bad, but if you really need that extra ~120 health to survive the burst of the encounter, then something is probably up.
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Retired untill Whatlick

No, no no no... 120 health is not static.

That 120 health is working HARDER for you than your armor. It's providing a constant meat buffer for both melee and spell damage absorption before you die!

IMHO this is what is wrong with some of the tanking theory.

I'm happy to admit I'm wrong, but someone explain to me how that HP doesn't increase your EH just like armor does. And flat out 120 HP -is- a far larger EH increase than 240 armor at anything above like 1K armor.
(and for 25% of the ILEVEL)

The only thing armor does for you is decrease your incoming DPS. If healers have spare capacity to match that increased incoming DPS than armor provides you virtually nothing compared to stam.

Edit: fixed typos.
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Mmm, I'm too tired to nut out the math for it (a big eff you, uni), but I'm sure one of the harder theory crafters will come up with something.

Either that or you'll keep on the stam is king train. *shrug*
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Retired untill Whatlick

I'd far prefer to be corrected and gearing my pally correctly, however I'm finding it really hard to agree with the math being presented.

I don't disagree that armor can beat stam with sufficient amounts of it but simply that people are over-rating it significantly.

I'd love to reach an agreement as to what 240 armor is actually worth in EH compared to a value in stam.
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Completely understandable. I understand the math behind it, but am not putting it forward in any kind of conclusive way due to being overtired. Maybe I'll come back tomorrow or Sunday with a fresh head and see if I can articulate the numbers better, and maybe show some math proof if no one else has. =]
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Retired untill Whatlick

There is no single correct answer, Armor benefits to effective health are relative and scale with the length of the battle. While Stamina offers a once-off increased HP pool armor reduce the incoming damage by a % for every physical attack taken. Given that your HP pool is big enough to handle the damage-spikes the encounter has to offer, the point where armor surpass stam is where the fight is long enough for you to have mitigated enough incoming dmg to match the static HP buff from stamina.

http://www.theoryspot.com/forums/tankspot-library/1060-effective-health-theory.html

Hmm.

Stam and armor are generally added only to increase effective health.
Mitigation of incoming DPS to decrease healer load is generally unnecessary.

So whilst it is true to say that armor provides a net DPS decrease over the entire fight, it doesn't mean that the statement has any real value. (When we're talking about +-10%). Perhaps my lack of experience is showing but in every fight, up to and including Kael/Vashj overheal has always been quite high (ie. their is a lot of excess healing capacity).

The real argument is where you say 'HP pool is big enough to handle the damage-spikes the encounter has to offer'. This is the crux of it. For the fight do you have enough EH? Now if you already do, then you should be adding more threat. If you don't, then stam seems to be your friend.
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It depends on how you look at marginal stamina. Is that +10 sta kit providing your first 126 hitpoints, in which case you're getting an extra 126 hp from it every time a heal takes you back to full? Is it your last 126 hps, in which case you may not ever need it at all? Somewhere in between? Either way, stamina doesn't provide any mitigation of incoming damage, it just makes that damage less likely to kill you.

I think looking at it from a "which one makes me harder to kill from full health" perspective makes the most sense. In my case, armor wins. I'm not sure where the breaking point is, but 10 sta may win out for some tanks.
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Last seen wearing...

According to my spreadsheet (using the calculations found here) the 10 stamina and 240 armor enchants will be equal at around 15,5k hp and 20k armor (randomly chosen values, this isn't linear). At higher hp/lower armor the 240 armor patch will win out for EH. And well (assuming the calculations are correct! ), I honestly can't see any non-bears running around with stats that would make the 10 stamina superior to 240 armor for physical EH.
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the gloves and cloak armor enchants seem not affected by the toughness talent btw.
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