Effective health's affect on Paladin tanks. (need input)

It does seem to be. A warrior can generate a lot more threat without rage than a paladin can without mana, and it takes a lot more avoidance to starve a warrior than it does a paladin. While a paladin can out-HP a warrior, they can't out-avoid, because that means they'll simply starve in threat. They won't holy shield, they won't regen mana, they won't get any aura...all they'll do is their melee/SoR or SoV damage.

Thus, warriors have the ability to go both big on avoidance or big on mitigation. Mitigation is better for overall threat generation, but in some fights that's not as important as raw avoidance is. Furthermore, healers like avoidance better over mitigation. And even worse than this, warriors get to stack block value to increase their threat, and that adds even more mitigation. So in general, a warrior will take less damage even when having the same avoidance as a paladin just because of itemization.

You are right, it is anecdotal, but giving my opinion from far too many hours raid healing as holy, I would have a 100% preference for damage mitigation over avoidance. A constant flow of reduced damage is alot easier to heal then spikey incoming damage. Especially with the nature of healing I have seen in BC, and the levels of overhealing, I think the majority of tank death can be attributed to spike damage rather then their healers not being able to keep up with incoming damage, or going oom. (Correct me if I am wrong)

Now that I understand what you are saying kalbear I can put in a better response.

I very much disagree that a warrior with high avoidance has less of an issue with threat then a paladin with high avoidance. In my level of content (2/4 TK, 1/6 SSC) the level of incoming damage is low enough that a string of not getting hit creates a very real problem. Meanwhile a paladin with high avoidance will also run into problems, but has more tools at their disposal to regain mana then a warrior does rage. I don't see any clear advantage to a warrior in this regard because of all the tanks in my experience gearing for avoidance hurts warrior threat the most.

Much of where I think we disagree is actually about effective health theory vs avoidance itself not so much anything about warriors compared to paladins. If you disagree with effective health theory being the superior way to gear for the majority of progression encounters as a main tank then my entire post is pretty much worthless .

*this post has been edited*
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Zeal without wisdom is folly

I am a support of the effective heal theory for 2 reason

1)As a tank, i needed to depend on holyshield for threat generation. In my limited tanking experience, i find that doing the 2nd tank role in which you are to maintain 2nd on the threat meter is harder for pally tanks simply because we arent getting hit with holy shield on.

2)As a healer, i dont really like avoidance tanks. They have large spikes in health that are harder to heal. A string of lucky hits means healers have no time to heal you back up. It works better to have a tank with High HP and High armor where HOTs and flash heals can really maintain the tank at a safe level of health.Of course..healing is hard work coz u gotta constantly be casting.

My personal choice will be to stack block rating, HP and Armor when possible. I skip parry(besides talents i dont gear for this) and get dodge. when required.

I was very happy as my 13/38/10 before the patch, just enough in holy to be viable, the necessities in prot cept AS which i did fine without, and was able to pick up the +parry.

Now, im pretty much screwed lol. Id say i do about 50/50 tanking and healing. The best build i could come up with was a 15/46/0. (http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=sVxhbZVMtIx0zMgqt - perhaps tweaked justa bit but something like this) The things I really didnt want to lose were the parry and the 15% speed. Im still up in the air about precision, imp Loh, and pvp talents like stoicism and UF.

When i thought about really not wanting to lose the parry, I wondered if maybe it wasnt such a bad thing. I dont really MT any raid bosses, I play to my strengths as a paladin tank by handling all my guilds aoe tanking and doing a lot of OTing. Itd probaly be better for me to go all out EH and not worry too much about avoidance, and being able to at least get into tier 3 of the holy tree.

With our health scaling so good now, and warriors still the balanced all-around tank for raid bosses, perhaps itd be best to play to strengths. EH and good TPS, but there will be no room for respectable avoidance. But I guess nothings stopping me from not vendoring avoidances pieces for when I need them.

If you don't have to MT you can afford the loss of Deflection.

Still you will have to get that 5% avoidance from somewhere if needed.
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