Avoidance Tanking

After reading the Great Stam Stack vs Avoidance Debate, my friends and I decided that we should see how a high avoidance build worked out. Here is my armory profile:

http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Alterac+Mountains&n=Diazepam

What you don't see there is my raid buffed stats, which come in at around 16k HP and nearly 37% Dodge. So far, I have not run in to any tanking situations that I could not handle. Some of the 10-Man encounters, i.e. Prince, have become so trivial at this point that my healers have to do very little work.

I have not, however, seen very many Prot Pally's, or Prot Warriors for that matter, gear like this. My guild leader's response to was, "That's impressive. It's not my personal style, I prefer to stack Stam and Block." So, I was asked to put this out here, to get some opinions and what not.

Threat generation is not an issue for me in this set. My assessment logs show me that, on average, 65%-75% of all incoming melee attacks are completely avoided, and another 10% or so of incoming melee attacks are blocked.

So, is this crazy? Right on the money? Is there something I'm missing perhaps? Any comments would be appreciated.
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My MT set has stacked avoidance too and I have never had a problem, tried with a stacked stamina set and didn't like it. You're right, fights like Prince DO become trivial, it's pretty cool.
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Thats the thing,

Avoidance tanking is less effective for progression tanking where you are trying to reach 'effective health minimums' and these vary alot..

For instance I could not physically survive prince beforeI got 15-16k health buffed or another example is how gruul past growth 12 would kill me easily at 12.8k health unbuffed.

I noticed something my old guilds main tank had about 13.9k health unbuffed and later on in BC i was back at gruul and this tank had 13.9k health but WAY more avoidance. 29% dodge etc, it seemed to help them kill gruul but yet at the same time it was the healers who were being dicey..and thats why hed gone dodge...

Now looking at your gear you dont have the VE rep ring..Changing gems would grant you about 1400health then again you probably would not be uncrushable at all.
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To face death and glory with an equal smile

well, its both great and bad. really depends on who you are talking to i guess. EH via mitigation is the fotm sometimes, avoidance is the other. effective health is what most of the people subscribe to, and thats the stamina route.

my only feedback is that you might want to consider a balance. you don't need 32%, you might want to keep around 25-27%, and use the freed up item points for other things. for one, i would put andormu's tear in your bank, its a leveling up ring, and helps get to uncrushable, but thats about as far as it goes.

you will face encounters later on that would hit you for 50% of your HP. do you really want to have a 30% chance to be hit for 50% of your HP? if you suffer two hits in a row, while unlikely, what chance do you think you would live? what if the hits were only 40% or 30% of your hp?
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Something else to consider about the block vs dodge debate is that block is a serious multi-tasker for a warrior. Block value isn't just effective health, it's threat. Warriors have an incentive to stack it beyond simple effective health value increase. Because paladin tanking is relatively new conceptually, most of our theorycraft is still being borrowed from warriors. A lot of our gear lists, too.

Block is good for us, as is block value. But I think it should hold less importance in our set, for two reasons. 1) we can stay uncrushable for a more consistent amount of time, and 2) because of this, we don't have to rely on half a dozen pieces of block rating gear to keep our spike damage down. Because we can move more dodge into our gear this way, block value becomes less valuable because we're blocking less. That's not to say that block value is useless. I just think that block value - as well as block rating - need to have less prominence in our gear because it's a unitasker stat. The only thing it serves is to increase our effective health. if that's all it does, aren't we served just as well by adding to our armor or health? Granted, block value is important for AOE tanking, but for boss tanking, I'd take dodge over block - rating OR value - any day.
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Drink Time, Wimps! -- A blog.

That's a bit excessive not your avoidance, but your lack of health. For instance if Magtheridon were to ever hit you with an Autoattack and a Cleave, you'd almost certainly be dead. This is why I'm not a big fan of stacking avoidance or effective health for that matter. Often we hear folks talk about avoidance is better than effective health or vise versa. The problem is there needs to be a context when people say that. There are thresholds to consider, especially on the effective health side. For instance, when you are at a point where 2 successive hits will kill you from max health, you are taking a tremendous gamble, because you are going to get hit twice in a row at some point no matter what your avoidance is.

At the same time, if you let your avoidance get too low, the rate of incoming damage can be quite high and difficult to heal through, and if your healers can't keep you topped up the inevitible spikes can be a problem.

The prince really favors avoidance because his ability to burst comes via multiple attacks, and crushing blows aside, you can pretty consistently minimize those with lots of avoidance. I mean he really needs to land quite a few hits in a short amount of time, since his individual hits aren't that hard. 16K health is plenty to tank him, hell the first time I tanked him back in mostly blues and when the Karazhan epics kind of sucked I didn't have quite that much health and way less armor than you have. So he becomes trivial because your health is above a reasonable threshold for the type of damage he can do, and you are avoiding tons of his hits which reduces spike frequency.

That changes though when you go to the 25mans or even some of the ZA bosses, where they can hit very hard and with specials can do so right on top of an autoattack. Once your health is to a threshold where you can survive a reasonable amount of time (relative to the boss' attack speed and power, often 3 hits is the rule of thumb applied here) without being healed, then looking to favor some avoidance can help, but even then there's no reason to just blindly put dodge gems on everything.

Anyhow, if tanking some of the big hitters is in your future, I'd really recommend looking at a more balanced gearing strategy.
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Prince also dual weilds, which has the pseudo effect of raising your avoidance. (His miss rate suffers the dual wield penalty)
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Raid buffed for Avoidance :
HP - 15647
Dodge - 38.16%
Parry - 17.69%
Block - 13.96%
Miss - 11.68%
Total Avoidance - 81.49%

Raid buffed for Stam :
HP - 16527
Dodge - 35.72%
Parry - 17.69%
Block - 13.96%
Miss - 11.68%
Total Avoidance - 79.05%

Raid buffed for Avoidance, I only have a 10.5% chance to get hit 2 times in a row, a 3.4% chance to get hit 3 times in a row, and a 1.1% chance to get hit 4 times in a row. At this point, if my healers are even remotely on the ball, the odds of me getting 2 shot are slim and the odds of me getting 3 shot are laughable. Assuming Mag hits for his full hit value, I could be 3 shot, but the odds of that happening are statistically small. Even then, a 4th hit in a row would kill most stam stacked tanks.

As for my threat, I consistently stay around 800 or so TPS. The additional dodges have not appeared to affect my overall very much.
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Ooops, didn't mean to leave block in there.
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If you want to be your progression tank then you stack stam.

If you want to be your farmed boss tank the stack pure avoidance, as your avoidance set should have the stam you need as it's a farmed boss.


I'm sure everything you are tanking is farmed content and your gear can tank it what every gems you have in it so like people have said if you stack dodge you still have the hp thats needed to take 3 shots in a row but you dodge loads.

People stack stam for the one reason and one only it's to do progression kills... (or maybe if it's a caster mob but then druids can tank that stuff)

If your sitting there in heavy dodge set it's very hard for healers that are learning the fight as you can be in 16k hp be dodge dodge 5k hit dodge dodge dodge 5k 6k 4k dodge 6k etc.. If you want to help your healers out you stack stam so you can take more hits in a row and make them just spam heal you and not worry about over heals. Ok you can dodge 5-7 hits in a row or pure aovid them, helers are like wth this is easy then he hits you 3 times in a row and your sitting on 4k hp and there like f**k and start to cast there big heals. I know healers should just spam heal and just jump or that if the heal isn't needed but there is the chance that they will cancle the heal and you w8 2-3 secs before loads of stupid big heals land on you. In those moments you pray that you can dodge hits for like 4 secs untill your full hp. all the praying in the worl will not make it happen. you die raid annoyed and points in a stam tank.

and the even better "holy shield lag" how the f**k did i get crushed will happen when you don't want it to.
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http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Bloodfeather&n=Erlata