Ulduar Tanking - HP vs Avoidance

Good tanking isn't about stacking one or the other to an extreme. You can have 100k hp and 0 avoidance and stroke your e-peen, but your healers will run out of mana and you'll still die.

99% avoidance and 5k hp, and 100 hits into the fight you get crushedpwnfaced.

What you should ask is, do I have enough EH to eat whatever special ability the boss has and a melee swing right after, or 2 back to back melee swings without any heals?

If no, stack more stm. Once you have the EH minimums, you can stack more stm to give your healers more room for error, or stack avoidance for overall DR, and giving your healers more mana.

Argali wrote:[...]You can have 100k hp and 0 avoidance[...]99% avoidance and 5k hp[...]

with the exeption of general vexaz i would absolutly take tank #1. i think that "avoidance tanks take
less heals" is wrong - they'll just lead to more overhealing most of the time. hots are ticking regardless
of the tank taking damage or not.. healers may use less mana effiecient heals / overheal more on that
tank cause in the worst case scenario he'll die sooner than his mitigation counterpart. avoidance+low hp
tanks are more stressful to the healers, really

avoidance is really cool when: your healers have limited mana + they actually care for you avoiding hits
mitigation is great when: you take damage, that cant be avoided (ie. plasma blast) or your healers dont
have manaproblems anyway

for most ulduar encounter its the latter

Why do so many people believe avoidance works something like : dodge dodge parry parry miss hit hit hit hit hit.
I don't understand that? Avoidance is very well distributed in short periods of time, there are very few times when I noticed, at least when I was tanking Sunwell(and had good avoidance lvls) getting more than 3 hits/blocked succesively with 55-60% pure avoidance(miss+parry+dodge).

Since WotLK I've mainly been a healer or a dps and just recently returned to tanking, and from the healer PoV I can say hp stacking is the worse thing for my mana, I am running with almost 50% holy crit and around 350 haste and in Ulduar Hp stacker tanks run me out of mana, and it just so happens we have 1 paladin tank wich favors lower ammounts of hp while using some decent avoidance aswell, he barely needs heals sometimes , and burst on him rarely happens, avoidance buys healers time to heal, while the hp stacking tank needs to be almost constantly spammed, yes it it "predictible" but i'd rather drop an extra holy shock on the avoidance tank and heal him with fols than chainspam HL on the hp stacker tank. "Avoidance tanks" can usually cope with just 1-2 healers max healing them, when maintanking, while hp stackers need prehaps 3 healers - this comes from our guild's Ulduar runs healing asignements so far.

My opinion is that the best way to go is to figure out a minimum ammount of hp you would need for all encounters you are expected to tank(maybe add 3-5k more hp as buffer) and then go for avoidance where you can. Ofcourse this is not really possible on progression as usually there is not enough EH running about, and you need to sacrifice whatever avoidance you can to gain the minimum EH needed for the specific encounter.

Just my 2c...

caboom wrote:"Avoidance tanks" can usually cope with just 1-2 healers max healing them, when maintanking, while hp stackers need prehaps 3 healers - this comes from our guild's Ulduar runs healing asignements so far.

This, i was wondering about it for quite some time now, just didn't happen to ask just yet.

So how many healersdo you usually bring to raid, and how many do you assign to your tanks? And ofc, the most important factor, is your tank gearing for stam or not? :>

EDIT:
For my guild it would be 6-7 healers in total in raid;
2 healers on MT (usually me, gearing to keep >30k hp and all the rest for avoidance wherever i can get some)

Not so. Patterns with small sample sizes are rarely well distributed.

MrDuck wrote:So how many healersdo you usually bring to raid, and how many do you assign to your tanks? And ofc, the most important factor, is your tank gearing for stam or not? :>

EDIT:
For my guild it would be 6-7 healers in total in raid;
2 healers on MT (usually me, gearing to keep >30k hp and all the rest for avoidance wherever i can get some)

6-8 healers usually depending on the night(we are a semihardcore-casual guild) and we're running with 2 healers/tank(usually).

About the gearing part, I think 30k hp unbuffed can be enough for the whole of Ulduar, the correct answer to how much hp you need is prolly somewhere burried in the big pile of threads in the Ulduar forum. Beyond that ppl should chose over avoidance or threat, in my case I think avoidance is best.

After been in Ulduar for the past couple weeks, I am having the GROWING feeling that Avoidance > Block. I have actually been trying to minimize my block as much as possible while maintaining block cap because regardless of my block value, a blocked hit still rapes my face. What to do? Stack more Avoidance and maintain block cap as main tank? or Go for a healthy balance and boost my value as much as possible?

In uld, avoidance is > block. As bosses hit like, IIRC 5k plus blocked, so avoiding the whole attack is more preferable.

Overhealing happens not matter what tank you heal, whether it's a hp stacked tank or a avoidance stacking tank. The only difference is that, unless your healers are facerollers who think healing is spamming 1 button all the time, tanks that favour avoidance more allow the healers to sub in the occasional lesser heal instead of their mana expensive, larger heals. Also, they can get away with using a GCD to do things other than heal the tank.

Anecdotal evidence
In TBC when I had a healing career, and illumination was still stupid (100% mana back), when I healed a warr or pala, with a SP in the group, I could occasionally get more mana back than I was using. On bear tanks, mana was always in danger of running out.

In wotlk, a long time ago, when naxx was still hard, there were times when our shamans could not cast bloodlust on patchwerk, because they could not risk the GCD. I was usually on hateful strike duty, due to being able to block more. With the pressure of maintaining uncrittable, and stacking stm to survive 2 hatefuls in a row, IIRC, my avoidance was ~40-45%. When we cleared naxx more, and I got more avoidance, the problem was less prevalent. It did crop up more often when I had to drop some avoidance for stm gear ( due to being on hateful duty, when paired with a hp stacking MT).

And ofc when we all got gear, we 3 man healed patchwerk, so it wasn't a case of healers sucking.

TL;DR - avoidance gives healers mana and free GCD, hp gives them margin of error for lag, or just being bad.

34000 HP unbuffed, working my way to 36000 if thats even remotely doable.

I can tell you one thing, we killed hodir and Thorim hardmode last week, and without the amount of stamina, it probably would not have been doable at all, my healers agree.

Hard mode is a whole other matter entirely, ofcourse the hp requirements increase when moving on from just ordinary kills, however abusing EH still after you don't need it anymore is just making life harder for your healers(and not only), the discution on this thread is either if to use more HP than necesary to stay alive for bursts and if avoidance is better than the extra HP.

When talking about enough EH to survive 2 hits in a row without heals: How can I survive 2 unavoided ~25-27k hits from the Runemaster in the Iron Council fight?

And yes, avoidance is not "miss miss miss miss dodge dodge dodge parry parry hit hit hit hit hit hit hit", but 10x dodge and 2-3x hit is enough (as in my example).

With that said, I'm a big fan of avoidance, just wondering how's it possible that druids and DKs are not the best tanks, when it seems to me they're the only classes that can survive 2 hits in a row due to their higher armor +hp (that's a naive way of thinking, of course, born from being bored, not from reasonable thinking, but I'm still curious), and that's what kills tanks, not 5% more dmg taken overall throughout the fight.

Simply because they pay for that ammount of HP in other ways(lower avoidance for druids).

caboom wrote:Simply because they pay for that ammount of HP in other ways(lower avoidance for druids).

How does DK pay exactly? Perhaps they produce less single target TPS, but they have high avoidance as well as vastly superior and more frequent cool downs necessary for hard mode encounters.

Worse scaling, lower multipliers, lower passive damage reductions, lower threat and having to gear for threat.

[quote]Worse scaling, lower multipliers, lower passive damage reductions, lower threat and having to gear for threat.[/quote]

^exactly!

Firm believer paladins are the best tanks. If only we could do sunders so the melee would stop crying.

*One of these days I'll learn how to quote properly.

/r
Dal