a controversal topic: avoidance vs mitigation

Many many words have already been written about this topic but I would like to know your opinion. I'll start with the way I see things.

Avoidance does as the name says avoid all damage.

Pros:
- there is no damage take in any form.

Cons:
- no damage needs to healed so no mana is gained from SA
- no incoming hit so no return damage from aura/blessing
- no block so no use of holy shield charges making it less mana efficient and giving less threat
- no procs from hit possible

Mitigation reduces the amount of damage you take when you get hit.

Pros:
- You take less damage
- You take damage so you need healing and get mana from SA
- You get hit so you return damage from your aura/blessing
- You still want to be uncrushable so you block ad use a charge of holy shield making it more efficient and making more TPS
- You can proc rebout/reckoning/others...

Cons:
- You still need to get healed

Let's bring in the other tanking classes.
Warrior and druids only need 11k damage to fill up their rage bar. A paladin needs 50k healing to fill a 5k mana bar.
On top warriors and druids can generate rage by hitting the mob. Paladins can only rely on SoW/JoW for that utility and it keeps them from using SoC/JoC if they do so.

Neither warriors nor druids get procs from being hit. They don't really want to get hit more then needed for rage generation.
A paladin on the other hand loves to get hit. They will get healing for that and so mana. They will get more TPS and make more effective use of SA and holyshield. They have procs coming in to help them even more.

Therefor I think the paladins are the kings of block. Block makes sure paladins don't get crushed, it makes sure they get hit and such get all the advantages of that.

It is clear that blocking something brings more damage then plain avoiding things. There for a paladin should imo invest in mitigation more then in avoidance. This can be done in percentages and pure numbers.

Let's see where paladins get help on mitigation:

In precentages:
- armor
- Ardent defender
- Improved rightious fury
- Thoughness

In pure numbers:
- Block value
- Shield Specialisation
- Blessing of Sanctuary

The percentage stats go for all combat. Only AD can be gimped by big hit due to frogleaping.
For armor paladins can't compete with druids but then paladin can be uncrushable. The use of Improved Devotion Aura gives paladins an edge over warriors. It comes at the loss of other aura thou.
Ardent defender is something only paladins have and it works better on multiple smaller hits then on few big hits so AD is another advocate for mitigation against avoidance.
IRF will get 6% off from all damage you take.
Thougness helps on the armor part.

The pure numbers help are clearly better for smaller hits althou not to small. A full block won't gain any mana.
Blockvalue might be the stat you would like to stack after you reach uncrushable. It takes of a fixed amount of the damage you take. It can even make you completly immune to some attacks.
SS helps on the BV. The more BV you have the more efficient SS gets.
Blessing of Sanctuary is just... bad... when you look at mitigation. Due to the higher blockrate suggested it will help a good bit on TPS thou. It is good for roughly 20 BV.


So do I suggest dropping out on all dodge and parry? Are they bad? Should Deflection be skipped?
No I did never say that!

You for sure need some avoidance to make sure you survive the fights.
What I'm saying is that a paladin is made to block and as such we should use that edge and block as much as we can.

go stack mitigation in Bt and tell me how it goes kgo.

ok I should have explained that part better. There is a minimum of avoidance you need for each level of progression.

I just don't understand the way some tanks tend to stack avoidance sky high. It is not really into the philosophie of paladins imho.

in raid bosses, lack of mana due to avoidance is something that simply doesn't exist until you grossly overgear it. Some will never be manaless given their output is tenfold higher than the amount of SA-mana you can possibly spend.

And good luck stacking block value to reduce the income of 7k+ hits, as with pretty much any boss in bt.

For boss tanking, you want as much armor and stamina possible until you can survive a few hits unhealed. From there you stack avoidance in order to not give your healers a heart attack.
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Spankadin in development.
.'>';

Paladins can actually stock more dodge and similar than warriors, holy shield and righteous aura are a small proportion of our threat compared to seals / consecrate, and our mana can be refilled using external sources such as shamans, shadow priests and mana pots, given sufficient external mana a paladin can tank without ever getting hit, and losing 20-30% of threat at most (the reactive threat).

This external resource plays well to our strengths, getting hit benefits us far more in an aoe situation than a single target situation anyway, a boss with a 2.5s swing timer will add maybe 50-200tps if he hits us with every swing on holy shield, however that would likely force a lot of healing on us requiring healing in / 2.5s to be equal to the bosses damage, otherwise we would quickly die.

Stacking block then becomes ineffective, I have around 900 in my block set, and could likely push 1k-1.2k if I really needed to, on a boss doing 6k hits ish thats a fixed 16-20% reduction roughly, however to acquire that block value required most of my gear to be dedicated to that role, if instead I stack avoidance I can reach 55-57% avoidance, now removing the static part of that to say 35-37% avoidance, I have decreased the incoming damage and allowed healers to roughly ignore 1 attack in 3 beyond the original number, extrapolating that means a 3.75s heal time compared to the original 2.5s to keep me near full health. Thats a significant change in incoming healing for swapping block to avoidance. (please not back of the envelope stuff here, am completely ignoring the original 20% miss/parry/dodge in this an assuming every hit on block gear connects).

The mana issue generated by regaining 1200 mana/ 7.5s rather than 1800 mana / 7.5s is largely a non-issue as a threat cycle is roughly 10s long, and consumes in the region of 1-1.5k mana, so an external source can likely easily keep the paladin stocked in mana for this difference. On smaller hitting bosses / trash of course block becomes better as it represents a larger proportion of the hit, and with multiple hits it smooths out the damage rather than the risk of spikes with avoidance.

Overall, avoidance would appear to win in my opinion, lacking a reliable external source block value and its ability to regenerate more mana and smooth damage consistently (like a druid really) may win, however avoidance offers more bang for the buck in terms of availability and stackability it would seem.
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Ahh, but you have heard of me.

http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Lightbringer&n=elyria

Why all this theory crafting? It's simple.

If you go OOM, you have to much avoidance.
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Damned you stick very well to the lore of dwarfs

Short clear and blunt

I don't want to be Kalganized, I want to tank Bosses.
On bosses, Avoiding a 10k hit 55 - 60% of the time is far better than reducing it to 9K 100% of the time. The other 40 - 55% of the hits that do get mitigated by blocking the hit fill my mana bar up nicely unless I am ridiculously overpowered for the fight.
If I am low on mana I can pop potions, switch to ret aura, judge/seal wis or switch to my healer shield to lower my AC and give me Mana/5.

On trash, avoaidance is less desirable than mitigation, but I can still handle a tonne of adds with high avoidance and medium mitigation. I just take more spikey damage from the little buggers.
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Avoidance vs. Mitigation is a flawed argument, since you can't sacrifice all of one to max the other. The gear doesn't exist. Furthermore, one is not "better" than the other - they each contribute in different ways towards your overall survivability.

Which is better for you is easy to figure out. If you're dying to spike damage, you need more mitigation. If you're dying because healers can't keep up with your damage intake (or go OOM), you need more avoidance.
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I can keep rhythm with no metronome.