Health vs AvoidanceFollow

Currently sitting on 14k hp.

Should i gem all my gear with HP gems and forget avoidance?

Or should i get gems for the socket bonus and stuff instead.

not really sure whats best, HP or Avoidance. And i know I should try to balance it out and all. Just looking for advice

Me

I guess my question is: replace all gems with stamina ones? or leave as they are?

If the question is socketing, and not gearing in general, then the answer is simple. Socket for stam, period. Avoidance in your gear tends to take care of itself, you shouldn't have to socket for it. Past kara, it's generally safer to go the AC/Stam route while working on new content, to give your healers more of a buffer of health to work with. As content becomes something that your guild is farming, rather than learning, it's safe to cut back on your AC/Stam gear and throw more avoidance on...especially because your HP is probably naturally becoming the 'minimum' for that raid zone as you get gear from it, so it's safe for you to focus less on stam.

Socket stam in almost all cases. The rare exceptions are on things like the Khorium Destroyer. Having a yellow hit rating gem in there is nice, since you get a stam bonus from having a yellow ANYWAYS. In most other cases however, the rewards you get from avoidance gemming and the socket bonuses that come with it are fairly minimal by comparison.

Since the socketing question was answered, what do you guys think about this in terms of gearing. I reached 490 Defense but don't know what gear to wear.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Garithos&n=Lunamite

For example, should I wear my Dauntless Handguards with more avoidance http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=25788;source=live

or the Felsteel Gloves with potentially more Stamina but less avoidance?
http://wow.allakhazam.com/db/item.html?witem=23517;source=live

Thanks.

Life after 490 Defense

With 528 Defense, you can surely get rid of the + def gems and stack stam instead. I want to say that 528 Def is a little overkill, but defense still adds minimal stats to Parry, dodge, and block though, but you can sub it with stam imo, as long as you stay at 490 def in the end.

Maybe he's using a different operational definition of avoidance. Since block does not have the true qualities of completely negating the damage (except on weaker attacks or supremely overgeared tanks) that falls under the main OD of avoidance, in regards to crushing blows there is another OD: avoidance is what when stacked to 102.4% will negate crushing blows. This is something that other forms of mitigation (-% to be critted, -% crit damage, armor, maybe resistances) do not do, since they do not modify the attack table in such a way to push crushing blows off of it.

So in reality there are 2 operational definitions of avoidance, one is a bit more exlusive than the other:
1. Any effect which when stacked to 102.4% will make it impossible to recieve a crushing blow or critical strike.
2. Any effect or the chance of an effect to occur which results in 0 damage and no harmful effects being given to the defender from the given attack.

Note that all of those included in OD 2 (miss, dodge, parry) are included in 1 as well.

Yea, I guess I wasn't clear =/. I meant avoidance in terms of reaching 102.4% to prevent crushing blow. Your advice still helps though Fletus. I think the Felsteel Gloves only reduced my CB by less than 1%, which is an acceptable tradeoff for the armor and stamina.

Thanks =D.

I think what you mean by this is:

Once you block with SB up, a CB will be able to penetrate your avoidance/block without SB until you can get SB up again. Therefore if you dodge/parry an attack, the attack will not waste a charge of SB, and will keep you crush immune for a bigger portion of the fight.

Also, the reason mitigation builds probably have more health is because they need it...even with more armor if you take a CB (or even a crit if you dont go for crit-immune) you're going to take a lot more damage, and the extra health is needed as a buffer.



Apparently they are quite often lumped into avoidance, because I quite often see people considering block "avoidance" when the conversation is on the topic of avoiding CBs. Note the particular word I chose: avoiding. This is because block helps you avoid CBs. It's somewhat of a stretch, but I think many people read it that way - that avoidance stats help you avoid higher quality hits (e.g. CBs and crits) by pushing them off the table.

I'm saying both that blocking is avoidance and it isnt. It helps a lot to avoid CBs (I'm pretty sure that if CB's weren't in the game, and a warrior was already crit-immune, he may stop using GCD's and rage on blocking when it may only mitigate a small amount of damage). But it isn't avoidance in the sense that it makes it so the attack never occured. So there are the dual definitions, because until someone comes up with another definition to lump block with the avoidance stats, "avoidance" will be used to denote what stats you need 102.4% combined to be crush immune.

One last nitpicky bit...you said:
Not true. If you parry an attack, you gain up to 40% attack speed on your next attack. Something happens, but no damage comes as a result. Also, cooldowns may be spent, so you will be unable to use that ability again for a while if you are avoided. If the attack worked as if it had never happened, then no cooldowns would be spent and no rage/energy/mana/focus would have been spent in the first place.

If you're going to be nitpicky, I'm gonna be even more. You think you have a hard head? I spent all of my lunches in 8th grade banging my head on a wall repeatedly b/c I had nothing else to do. Hasn't affected me at all. Does anyone else see a clown killing doves?

Avoidance refers to totally avoiding damage.
Mitigation refers to mitigating some of the damage, from reductions to damage taken (armor being the primary example).

Blocking can avoid all the damage, but it is in fact a form of Mitigation. It reduces a flat amount of damage that is incoming. But it definitely is NOT considered a form of Avoidance, in regards to tanking terms of the tanking internet communities.

Crushing blows can be avoided. Block parry dodge and miss rate affect your crushing blow rate, but this is a combined total of forms of Avoidance and Mitigation.

Mitigation builds vrs Avoidance builds;

Mitigation builds should not take crushing blows
Neither should Avoidance builds.

Now, I'm referring directly to MT type tanking. OT tanking is different.

With ~50% dodge/parry/miss (reasonable amount for kara grade gear) on a Mitigation tank build (myself) I have only had a very very low CB rate (less then 1% CB total career). I have stacked Avoidance in place of it before, specifically when I was first entering kara. And it works as a form of tanking, but it depends too much on luck and healer persistence of proper healing. That being; Healer starts casting, and before they finish casting, jump/cancel casting, and start casting again. They let the cast finish IF you take damage. Preemptive healing is required for raids, unless the raid is severely over geared for the instance.

But I socket Sta, and chant Sta no matter what for boss tanking gear (where CB's come from).

My reasoning is simple. Threat.

You do not get rage from Avoidance. You DO get rage from Mitigation. Rage = Threat. Parry should not be a majority of your TPS. White damage is such a minor part of TPS and rage development for tanking raid bosses. How much of your gear do you focus on AP? It shouldn't even come up as a gear stat on your tanking gear for MT boss tanking, IMHO. The better TPS you can provide, while still taking damage and surviving without depleting your healers mana pools too quickly, the faster your DPS can take it down.

For OT tanking, quite contrarily, I find Avoidance is more useful.

Firstly, you don't have as many healers focused on you at once.

Secondly, OT builds are usually specced fury/arms. Which means they have other DPS -> TPS talents, and generally don't require stacking as much Avoidance or Mitigation to be proficient as OT's. They can start stacking AP/Crit/Hit gear along with Avoidance stats. This gives the OT more rage to TPS with from just the white hits alone, as well as higher DPS -> TPS.

Thirdly, the OT targets tend to be secondary or tertiary in regards to DPS. So you don't require as much threat to hold agro until the MT comes over (hopefully the target is taunt-able, but it usually doesn't matter on trash), and have much longer amounts of time to build threat with before DPS focuses.