This is something I wrote for my guild and I would like input from the paladin tank community on math errors or other things I may have gotten wrong, forgotten about etc. It's kinda long but if you have the time to go over it I would appreciate the input.
The purpose of this post is to explain how I believe a paladin tank should choose to gear themselves and why in regards to tanking raid level bosses that they are either somewhat under geared for or for progression content. All comments made are done so assuming the paladin has already reached 490 defense and is un-critable. It is also assumed that the paladin tank can also push crushing blows off the table with the use of holy shield (102.4% combined miss, dodge, parry, block total vs a level 70) The information is also relevant to other tanks, more so warriors then druids.
Some of this information I have gathered from my own experience, and some I have gathered from various forums such as tankspot, maintankadin, elitist jerks, and yes, even the wow offical forums(shudder). It is a long post, so if you don't want to read all the details or theorycraft the conclusion is in nice bold text at the bottom.
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This guide: http://www.tankspot.com/index.php?pageid=EffectiveHealth
Was written with the raiding warrior tank in mind. It explains how having more armor, health, and block value gives you more survivability vs new content than having higher avoidance. It also goes a little into how taking a steady stream of damage is better for threat generation. The main idea is that as a progression tank saving the healers mana is not your primary concern, but surviving as much damage intake as possible is. Each healer can use mana pots, and there are many other ways to supply healers with mana throughout the course of a fight. However, there is only ONE way to reliably prevent getting two shotted by some boss you've never faced before and that is to have as much of a buffer as possible to endure the unknown amount of incoming damage.
*Pre 2.3* Well how does this relate to a paladin tanks' survivability. Even more so then an equally geared warrior, tankadins need to be concerned about surviving burst damage. The reason for this is that a paladin starts out with over 1k less health then a warrior, automatically giving the paladin less of a buffer to work with. A paladin tank who chooses to gear for avoidance rather then effective health makes a frustrating, but surmountable obstacle into a very serious, perhaps fatal issue. *Pre 2.3*
With the changes in 2.3 allowing for 10% more stamina through talents, paladins are now put mostly on equal ground with warriors in terms of health. This does not mean that paladins who geared for effective health will now race past warriors and can ease up on effective health, but instead only evens the playing field for the most part. Warriors who have had the edge in health have been gearing this way for some time for a good reason, now that we have close to their health it would be a good idea to follow in their footsteps.
Not only does gearing for effective health provide for the best protection against burst damage, but it also provides the longest _reliable_ time until death possible. Time until death can be measured by your base incoming dps, compared to you're remaining effective health. For example if I have 18k armor and 12k health left after taking a hit, I then have slightly over 30k effective health left. If I am getting hit for 3k raw damage per second then I have 10 seconds until death assuming I don't take a crushing blow. The more damage I can take through the stacking of health, armor, and block value the longer I can stay alive. Aside from surviving a bad burst or occasional crushing blow, this is the other main survivability advantage of gearing for effective health.
*As a side note more armor increases effective health and reduces incoming physical dps where as stamina only increases effective health. While this would seem to point in favor of high armor and medium stamina, a post explaining the relationship between the two and how balance is important can be found here
http://evilempireguild.org/guides/acstamina.php *
I leveled both engineering and blacksmithing to narrow the gap between myself and a warrior for the pre-patch health difference because I knew that encounters were primarily designed around warrior style mitigation/health. Mine started out lower on both accounts so I wanted to do something to make sure I wasn't going to get in the way of downing bosses. While I don't believe all the effort I put in was required, it has certainly proven worth the time/gold to me when I see my health get very low at points and I know beyond a shadow of a doubt I prevented a wipe by having that extra health/armor. On our first gruul kill I remember taking a 10k+ hit followed by an 8k+ hit immediately after (non crushing). I had about 19.4k fully buffed in that gear set. If I hadn't leveled those professions, and I had chosen to gem for dodge instead of stamina there is a good chance I would have been two shotted. Instead I survived (until 20% anyways.. silences=bad)
*As a side note I also did not have ironshield pots on that fight which is a big no-no for tanking a hard hitting progression encounter imo. Those hits would have been noticeably weaker if I had been using them *
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I believe that covers the general survivability bonus that gearing for effective health provides the paladin tank. Lets take a look at how gearing for effective health affects some of the paladin tanking talents and threat generation.
Reckoning:
This talent gives the paladin a 10% chance on any damage taken to gain 4 extra attacks in the next 8 seconds. This is a huge spike in extra threat that becomes more and more as a tankadins' spell dmg increases, although the scalability is not nearly as large as on other threat abilities. The usefulness of this talent however is debated and one of the arguments against it is at least partially nullified by effective health theory. The argument against it is that as gear improves pure avoidance goes up (dodge, miss, parry % ) and so the chance for reckoning to proc goes down. A paladin tank who focuses on block rating instead of dodge, parry, and defense to be uncrushable can maintain a somewhat constant level of pure avoidance and thus preserve the value of reckoning. A paladin tank who gears for avoidance will see a drop in this talent's value.
As a rule, reckoning will have a chance to proc that is equal to (1/10th) of (100% minus your total miss, dodge and parry percentage) An example would be if I have 40% combined to miss, dodge, or parry then there is 60% left of the combat table covered by block. 1/10th of 60% is 6%, giving me a 6% proc rate on reckoning. If I have 50% pure avoidance then I am left with a 5% proc rate on reckoning.
I have found the overall threat increase from this talent to be around 3-4% so preserving it's proc rate while having it did produce noticeable results. I also found it to cause a noticeable more amount of parries by bosses, which leads me to my next point.
In patch 2.3 this talent for most people will become unjustifiable in a 25 man content raiding guild. The old weapon expertise talent is being replaced by one with + expertise and 10% stamina. There is also a ret talent to boost raidwide dps being moved low into the ret tree which really should not be given up unless there is always a ret pally available. This is 8 talent points that would be silly not to have as a main tank or off tank in 25 man content, leaving a 5 point talent such as reckoning pretty much in the dust.
Reckoning R.I.P You were good to paladins in all your versions.
Improved Holy Shield:
Having 8 chances to block an attack in 10 seconds is a marvelous thing. When wipes on progression fights most often occur due to spike damage suffered by the tank this talents' value is obvious. Also, Holy shield combined with blessing of sanctuary does about 700 threat per block with my current spell damage and normally accounts for about 15-20% of my total threat. How does all this relate to effective health theory?
One of the main points of gearing for stamina, armor, and block value is to reduce the severity of spike damage. The point of having improved holy shield is to minimize the occurrence of crushing blows which is the second worst form of spike damage. The two combined create a scenario that allows the least severe spike damage possible for the paladin tank.
There is also the threat generated from holy shield. Combined with blessing of sanctuary I do about 700 threat per block. With a 60% block rate and a 2.5 attack speed on average I block 3 attacks every 10 seconds generating 210 threat per second with holy shield alone. Attack speed can increase this threat or decrease it by a large margin, but more importantly to this thread how much pure avoidance a paladin tank has affects this portion of threat generation. A paladin tank with 50% pure avoidance will see on average a drop of 70 threat per second compared to myself (vs 2.5 attack speed) and when our tanks atm are doing anywhere from 700-1k TPS that is a noticeable portion of one's total threat that has just disappeared. Combine that with the additional threat lost from less reckoning procs and the avoidance tankadin will find themselves working much harder to keep aggro then I do.
Spiritual attunement: While not a talent this is a core paladin tanking ability and is affected by effective health theory.
Gearing for more armor, stam, and block value has a twofold positive affect on this ability. The first is mana regen. A long string of dodges, misses, or parries will leave a paladin tank mana starved which will hurt their ability to generate threat just the same as a warrior or druid getting rage starved. The second is that mana gained from spiritual attunement generates threat in and of itself at a rate of [threat=amount healed*.1*.5}. For those not math inclined this means that roughly 5% of the amount you are healed translates into threat you generate. The whole point of gearing for avoidance is to take less damage, which means you get healed less. This means in yet another way, gearing for effective health over avoidance provides superior threat.
Argent Defender:
This is a passive talent that causes the paladin tank to take 30% less damage when they are below 35% health.
The relationship between more health and this talent is to extend active range of this talent. 35% of every point of health you gain serves to increase the chance this talent will save your life and your raid's life. For example at 19k health buffed this talent kicks in at 6649 health, but at 17k raid buffed the range is lowered to 5949 . It's not a huge amount, but it still matters as I will explain.
On our last attempts on Magtheridon. I had a near worst case scenario where I took a larger then normal cleave, a normal hit, then Magtheridon parried my attack and hit me normally again. The first two combined brought me to well below that 6.6k mark and the third brought me to somewhere just above dead before I was healed up again. Had the third hit not been reduced by 30% I am pretty sure I would have been three shotted. Mags was hitting me anywhere from 4.5 to 6.8k (while using ironshield potions) on his normal hits due to varying armor increase procs from crit heals and just a rather large dmg range on his attacks to begin with. His cleaves were anywhere from 6.5k to close to just under 9k. Extending the active range from 5949 (17k health in max avoidance gear) to a potential 6.9-7k (20k health in max stam gear) translates into a decent boost in survivability considering the damage range of Magtheridons attacks.
The affect that armor and block value have on this talent is to increase the total percentage of incoming damage mitigated while the talent is active and to decrease the change the talent will be 'leapfrogged' by lowering the amount of each hit taken.
Sacred Duty:
6% extra stamina per point gives a 6% greater efficiency on itemization points spent on stamina. This is the same as free gear. There are no such talents to increase the efficiency of avoidance stats for a paladin except for blessing of kings which provides a 10% boost to agility. (Kings gives the same benefit to stam, so there is a double benefit for stam and only single for agility)
Toughness:
10% extra armor per point. This does not include armor enchants. Same concept as sacred duty giving you free gear for investing in armor vs avoidance.
Shield specialization
30% extra block value. Same concept as sacred duty and toughness.
Combat expertise
This increases expertise rating by 5 and stamina by 10 %.
This talent combined with sacred duty adds a total of 16... yes six-teen percent stamina. Protection paladins need more itemization points to do the same job and as a result have been forced to work very hard to be useful in a raid environment. In some cases even all this hard work still doesn't give them the stats needed to do the job. This talent combined with the others like it helps give a paladin tank much needed breathing room to not only have the needed effective health for a situation, but also make sure their spell damage is up to par etc for threat.
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In short gearing for more effective health (Stamina, armor, block value) increases survivability, threat, and the stability of the paladin tank more then gearing for avoidance. There are situations that are an exception to this, but overall I have come to see that our abilities and talents for tanking are best complimented by gearing in this manner.
I hope you were as obliterated reading this wall of text as I was writing it
Elson
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Zeal without wisdom is folly
elson
Tue Nov 13, 2007 4:54 am
