The Quick Guide to Effective Health
Effective Health is a measurement based upon the level of the enemy you are fighting, your armor and your health. To save you the messy formulas you can calculate it using my Effective Health Calculator. Block Value is an additional factor that is sometimes added into determining this measurement and you can calculate your Effective Health with Block Value using the Tankspot Calculator.
What about Dodge and Parry?
Dodge and Parry, often known as Avoidance, does not factor into this measurement because while they are useful and necessary for a tank, they are also based on random chance. Which brings me to…
Why does Effective Health matter?
The higher Effective Health you have the less likely that a continuous string of attacks landed by a boss with kill you. (It’ll also increase your chances of survival in the unlikely event that you get Crushing Blowed) It’s basically all about being able to take as much Burst Damage as possible. You could almost think of it as PvPing against a boss 
How do I get as much Effective Health as possible?
It’s pretty simple really since the big factors are Armor and Stamina, just get as much Armor and Stamina as possible. (while maintaining 490 Defense)
- Socket with only Solid Stars of Elune
- Enchant your cloak with 120 Armor
- Get the Zul’Gurub enchant for your helm
But my Avoidance is going to be Low! What’s the Point?
Yes, it will suffer, but the point is that no matter how much avoidance you have eventually you are going to get hit multiple times in a row. Stamina and Armor is what is going to save you. I won’t deny that gearing yourself this way will make you require more healing over the course of an entire fight, but it will also give your healers a better chance to actaully heal you after a massive barrage of damage. You can’t be healed if you are dead.
So I should get as much Effective Health as possible?
Yes, especially for new encounters. It’s going to allow for the best chance to recover from unfamiliar situations. Once everyone is more familiar with how an encounter works then you can start shifting around pieces of your gear to allow for generating additional threat.
I’m noticing links to past articles in here… you’ve been feeding us this stuff the whole time haven’t you?
Yup. I have Here’s one more blast from the past: 3 Sets of Tanking Gear
How do you gear your tank?
- Stamina and Armor. Effective Health all the way! (72%, 309 Votes)
- Dodge and Stamina does the trick! (20%, 85 Votes)
- Just Stamina Sir! (8%, 33 Votes)
- All Dodge Baby! (0%, 2 Votes)
Total Voters: 429
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October 18th, 2007 at 8:33 pm
On the other hand, the more avoidance you have, the less likely such a long row of attacks is. And there are always going to be long rows of attacks that you cannot survive no matter how much stamina and armor (limited possibilities) you stack.
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October 18th, 2007 at 9:36 pm
One thing that I think you forgot to mention Vene is how going with effective health helps with threat generation. You have a constant flow of rage, whereas if you dogde 2-3 attacks in a row, you may just be auto-attacking.
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October 19th, 2007 at 2:40 am
I voted for just stamina. I’m not a tank, but Iz in ur formz!
On a side note, you should post a vote for “I’m not a tank” so I can see the results without having to mess with the results from the vote.
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October 19th, 2007 at 6:55 am
Speidel speaks the truth.
A vast majority of your rage generation will come from damage TAKEN not dealt. More rage = more threat dump = boss death faster.
Tank the shaman in the Karathress fight or Morogrim and you will see why effective health is much more effective than avoidance.
Especially with new encounters, you will get hit not a question of if but when.
Your healers are on a rotation and need to stay on a rhythm. They can’t wait to see if you get hit to cast that heal, they cast it regardless. So if you dodge/parry it…it was a wasted heal. You are going to get the heal anyway so why take the chance of the burst damage and less rage?
Effective health is the clear cut hands down winner.
- Bodd
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Joe128 reply on June 13, 2008 8:09 pm:
I play both a healer and a tank and have been through half of sunwell.
There really should be a balance of both. If there’s a choice between taking a couple of hundred more hp or taking more avoidance, I’m taking the avoidance.
As a paladin, I can’t say how many times where healers fall behind when I’m quite low on hp and the next string of attacks on me are dodges, parries, and misses.
Over the course of a fight, I would rather see
Boss hits you for 5k
Boss misses you.
You dodge bosses attack.
Boss hits you for 5k
than
Boss hits you for 5k
Boss hits you for 5k
Boss hits you for 5k
Boss hits you for 5k.
Sure, healers can’t heal you when you’re dead, but healers can’t heal when they’re oom.
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October 19th, 2007 at 8:13 am
You will get hit but you will still get hit less often. Rage generation with raid bosses is also seldom an issue, they hit hard enough and one hit fills up a great deal of your rage bar so some of those hit’s will just be rage that you cannot use. Healers know how to interrupt heals when they are not needed so they can actually save mana.
And at the end of the day, the avoidance you do have and mob boss hit damage variance do add a random element to the damage you take whether you stack it or not. Crushing blows are more likely to land the less avoidance you have too.
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October 19th, 2007 at 8:26 am
Well I have done an experiment. I have an avoidance tanking set and an effective health tanking set. I am in a guild that is 5/6 in SSC and 1/4 in TK. (working on Al’ar). I’ve tanked in both sets and there is a fairly significant difference in TPS - about 100 - 150 TPS. That is too much for me to sacrifice especially on enraged timed encounters.
Yes I get hit a little less but I am sacrificing TPS and effective health in doing so.
If it works for you, great. Most people I talk to prefer effective health though.
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October 19th, 2007 at 9:21 am
When I was just tanking Kara I used to try to spread my gems and enchants to stack stam and avoidance equally. Once I started tanking Gruul, Mag, TK, etc, I started to focus on my effective health stats and changed out all my enchants and gems for stam. The difference is undeniable. You end up a bit of a mana drain, but I promise you’ll die half as much. ;D Gruul and Mag can easily hit you for well over 10k, blocked, non-crushing dmg. Even with 17k+ armor. You’ve got to have the health to counteract that…you can’t rely on avoidance to save ya. Murphy’s Law, after all.
Also, ask any experienced healer…they would much rather you be taking constant, reliable damage rather than being suprised by a freak butt whooping because your avoidance failed you.
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October 19th, 2007 at 9:45 am
Boddugh: so you have a noticeable difference in how much you are able to use your threat-generating abilities?
I don’t much like only anecdotal evidence since you can find people representing each and every opinion based on their own experiences very easily… Would be nice to see hard numbers comparing taken damage, tps and so on between an avoidance tank and mitigation-heavy one. Still, even if you may be eating 10k hits, you can’t really gear to withstand more than 2 of those (maybe barely) so there is some limit to how much sta stacking will be any good.
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October 19th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Well, in a raid I have over 22k health and 18k armor fully buffed. If I get hit for over 10k its either from Mag’s cleave or Gruul on 12+ growths. Just saying you can’t trust avoidance to save you because its all chance.
The numbers are simple…you take a lot more damage as an EH tank than an avoidance tank…it’s just all about being stable and not “disappearing off the face of the planet” like a low health, high avoidance tank tends to do from time to time. A tank like that does very poorly against slow swinging, heavy hitters.
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October 19th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Aside from taking a parse of 2 fights with I don’t know how I could “prove” my TPS differences.
I’ve seen this debated for months now and decided to do my own experiment to see for myself. That way “I” would feel secure in what gear to use.
Assuming you have 2 sets of tanking gear and I would encourage every tank to try this…don’t take my word (or anyone elses for that matter)…pick a mob, good one could be the last boss in Steamvault where it is a tank and spank. Tank him a few times in each gear and see if you notice a difference. If you have the luxury, try a raid boss like Morogrim, Gruul or Magtheridon.
All I know is that I tried BOTH ways….this was BEFORE I had an opinion of what was better. After doing it, and seeing how much more my TPS was with effective health gear, I was sold. I had more rage from which to work with and when I was wearing the avoidance gear there were times where I was rage starved from a string of dodges and parries. Auto attacks for 5 secs killed my TPS and puts a strain on the DPS.
Like I said, if it works for you then great, stick with it. It really depends on what you are tanking as well. When you get to heavy hitters, it becomes much more noticeable. Avoidance is fine in Kara and heroics, you can get away with it. Once you get to 25 mans, it is a different story. At least in my experiences.
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October 19th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
Well if you have logs to offer, that’s great and would be very interesting to see them. The agruments for both approaches have been heard to death. I just wanted to give some balance here and repeat some of the counterarguments that exist for the effective health approach since everything has it’s good and bad sides.
You could also argue that the TPS is a stat that you should not concern yourself much with when you’re still trying to survive new encounters instead of just farming them.
If avoidance tanking results in lower TPS it’s all right if you also are able to survive tougher situations. Not claiming that is the case but it just might be the wrong number to use to decide which is superior. Or are you trying to get +hit much? That’s a very good way to increase TPS.
I’m not totally clear on the relative strengths and weaknesses either which is why I’d really love to see some real numbers comparing a similar-quality avoidance and mitigation -gear.
And like I already said and I didn’t even come up with that myself by the way, whether or not you stack avoidance there will always be an undeniable random element in fights. No amount of stamina will make it go away. But certainly thinking purely in terms of how much you could get hit if unlucky, there’s gotta be some amount that is enough for a given level encounter and after that avoidance is more useful. There’s more to it than that of course. But if you are only thinking about how to survive a unlucky streak, you gotta be asking yourself how much is enough instead of just going all out.
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October 19th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Hmm, can’t say I’d buy into the “how much is enough” theory. So let’s say you’re doing some boss, and you “know” that the most you could possibly get hit for is 15k. Would you put on 16k health and the rest into avoidance? The problem with this way of thinking relates directly to your comment on how you cannot eliminate the random element of fights. Going with the “just enough” style, you’d be sitting at 1k health and at this point you’re simply rolling a dice as to whether or not you die. Whereas, if you go the all out Eff. Health route, you’ll be sitting at a much higher amount of remaining life, depending on something that is MUCH less random, the awareness of your healers.
BUT…
Like you’ve said Nigh, this is a pretty biased argument. As you can see, most of the people here (according to the biased poll..rofl Vene) buy into the Eff. Health style. You can make a counter-argument against effective health EVERY time an EH tank dies. Because you can say “don’t you wish you woulda dodged that attack that killed you?”
Being a warlock as my main, I’ll try to relate this argument to DPS’ing. Effective Health is sorta like spell hit rating. If you stack spell hit, you aren’t going to crit very much, and you won’t hit as hard as other people. But your damage is going to be much more steady and probably higher in the long run. Whereas Avoidance is like spell crit. Who doesn’t love crits? Big flashy numbers. Chaining a couple of crits together is awesome, but at some point the crits will stop, and you will chain together a string of sub-par non-crits. Avoidance is amazing when it works. But you never know WHEN it’s going to work, and when it doesn’t work, look out. Eff. Health is steady and boring, but most likely better in the long run.
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October 20th, 2007 at 10:42 am
I tried both. Came to the conclusion that all the following are true.
Point 1: Stacking stam gives more TPS esp in the start of an encounter. Stacking avoidance offers noticably less TPS in the start of encounters and overall. When you stack avoidance you can not neglect threat gen enhancements.
Point 2: Stacking stam cost the healers more mana. Stacking avoidance saves healer mana. Loosing a healer, even 2 may not wipe u on an avoidance tank.
Point 3: Stamina gives you headroom for accidents that avoidance wont. Avoidance makes accidents less likely but they are never impossible with either model.
Point 4: Some fights favor stamina others avoidance, others resistance.
Point 5: Stamina is reliable, predictable and easier for the raid to “groove to”, if you have the mana.
The dynamics of the game force you to make choices all of the time. This is probably why I have so much respect for the designers. Each one of the choices forces you to determine what your Raid needs most. Picking 1 way over the other also means you have to setup differently to accomodate for the weakness of that style. Example: Add things that improve hit rate and damage rate rather than more stamina.
The best thing about this game is that you can try many ways to combat encounters. You get to make a style all your own. Dont fall into boring traps of becoming a stat copy of anyone. People tend to say .. who is that tank taking down Illidan? I want to copy his build and gear. Their build and gear are reliant on how they play the class and an entire raid of other specs and gear makeups backing them up.
We tend to get into battles of numbers here but the real way to test the theories are to do them! If it feels like its working and you are downing the bosses easier , faster or safer, then do it that way. Or dont! Its all about the fun
Oh and I now choose avoidance. I secretly changed out my gear in a few runs and raids . My healers picked up on the difference quickly. We shall see how it goes.
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October 22nd, 2007 at 12:33 pm
Good post Max.
Our healers never seem to have mana issues but we supplement our raid with Shadow Priests whose impact cannot be understated.
They seem to prefer the steady reliable healing patterns that effective health lends itself to. Some have that itch to patch when the tank isn’t taking damage and in doing so might miss a string of hits otherwise. We have a tank who is heavier on avoidance and it takes more of an effort sometimes to keep him up. And he does get rage starved, or so he says.
Effective health is my insurance policy that I have a longer chance to stay alive. One of the things I love about this game is the reliance on other people in order to be successful. I have to have faith in my healers, and going effective health gives me that peace of mind.
Let us know how the avoidance tanking gear works for you.
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October 24th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
It really depends on the encounter.
On something like Magtheridon or Lurker, you’ve got a bunch of healers looking only at you. High armour / Stam is the way to go. They shouldn’t go OOM and you aren’t going to get huge damage spikes. Plus, lots of rage is always good.
On the other hand, when you’re looking at Morogrim or Tidelvass, you may only have a couple healers on you. You can surely get unlucky on spike damage, but in general, you’ll break up the incoming damage more often to give your healer a chance to rest, or catch up. And you decrease the chance of taking large damage spikes that only a few healers may not be able to deal with quickly.
I’ve always geared primarily towards armour and stam. But There are certainly times where excessive avoidance is far more helpful.
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October 29th, 2007 at 2:25 am
Stacking stamina may cost your healers more mana, but any well geared priest will have more than 200 regen, unbuffed, while casting. If mana is still an issue during an encounter, they should be ready to take consumables early on and possibly again when the cooldown is up.
Stacking avoidance, your healer has to be on their game casting and canceling if the damage isn’t taken. If a healer is stacked on plus healing, the large heals incoming should hit right after every damage spike.
Either way you go on this, I think it comes down to knowing your healers when deciding.
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November 8th, 2007 at 1:21 am
I’ve focused around being an avoidance tank since I began. Just about every other tank in my guild is stacking stamina, I’m stacking, dodge/parry, agi, and strength. Couple of pointts
#1: Hunter always misdirect me so holding aggro isn’t exactly hard and I spec for anger management and get my 5% chance to hit to compensate for not getting rage from being hit. Rage generation is not an issue for an avoidance tank
#2: When we use a big health tank (feral druid) to MT fights healers do run oom and have to constantly spam heals on him. When I am tanking they have healing rotations so that two people are always casting heals on me while the third conserves mana by not casting at all… hasn’t been a problem for the encounter we’ve been attempting.
#3: Yes an avoidance tank isn’t going to win over every possibly encounter, there’ll obviously be certain aspects of stamina tanks that’ll come on top. Good guilds stack both. However some fights avoidance tanks have obvious advantages. On Al’ar for example all the big health tanks would get raped by melted armor when taunt would resist. However because I’m dodging and parrying roughly 60% of all attacks (with agi totem) I’m able to survive the entire melt armor debuff.
#4: Avoidance is not entirely luck based. I have the scarab of displacement and the moroes pocket watch, popping either of these ensures even higher dodge/parry. When you have a 70% chance to dodge/parry you go beyond calling it merely “luck” and call it “inevitable.” Luck is something you attribute to rare occurances or rolling a dice, not to a statistical inevitability. Its lucky I dodged? No its stats.
#5: Healers will always prefer to heal tanks with a lot of stamina because they don’t start healing until the tank take dmg. If a MT has hots on him and earthshield on top with only 17K health he can be crushed twice in a row and still survive. An argument against avoidance tanking cannot be that your healers suck.
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November 27th, 2007 at 10:34 am
Bonus I have to partially agree with you on that, while most tanks I know are mitigation tanks…I often have less block/ and about 1k less armor and HP.
my armor is currently 14800k+ and HP unbuffed is sitting at 13.6k+ I’m the MT for my guild which is running 2 karazhan groups and gonna try gruuls this week, zodran on illidan look me up.
anyway, I’m clearly an avoidance tank even though I can match most other tanks doing karazhan despite them having T4 gear and kings defender where I use the sun eater. I really like the way avoidance works…I dont like being consider a big sponge, dodging and parrying and superior tanking skills is what sets warriors apart from other tanks. I’m actually happy with how little damage I take, even on prince its never a struggle if luck from infernals goes our way..2 healers can heal me just fine on prince and any other fight in karazhan…while I dont think my mitigation is low compared to other tanks at my lvl..actually it tends to be higher. I do agree that threat generation and rage starvation sometimes are an issue…Its become noticeable and other tanks tell me I have high avoidance which has diminishingi returns, how do I play to combat this? Broch’s badge necklace gives + 20-23 expertise and hit rating… re-specting to anger management/+5 pct crit/Improved heroic strike. 11/6/43, also getting the kings defender + to hit rating….that way I wont have aggro generation issues also stacking more block which I can get up to 26 pct by switching trinkets…if anything it will be just as good as anyone elses…I’ll also take less damage….I dont doubt that at some point I will start stacking armor and HP more then I do now, but I like being different then the standard tank model..but having a reason why and proving that its just as effective.
anyone that thinks avoidance is luck, Eh I tend to believe its stats…just like its likely you will be hit, the number inevitably lead to you dodging…it cannot be denied or erased from the table as a non factor.
In conclusion, my only issue now is rage starvation and some threat generation, other then that I can handle anything in karazhan as far as incoming damage.
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November 27th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
@zodran: I think the issue you are having here with grasping the concept is that Karazhan isn’t really intended for Effective Health gearing. Prince IS an avoidance fight due to his attack speed. You are going to find when encountering High King, Gruul, Magtheridon, and many, many bosses beyond that focusing on Armor and Stamina is much, much more advantageous.
Here’s what it comes down to, these bosses are going to hit an avoidance tank for 6k, they’ll hit an EH for 5k. 3 hits in a row with an avoidance setup = death. 3 hits in a row with an EH setup = easily alive. You may not think these will come that fast, but the reality is your attacks will get parried and those multiple hits can rain down on you in seconds.
My advice: even if you don’t use it, start collecting an Armor/Stamina set, you’ll thank me when you kill Gruul
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January 2nd, 2008 at 11:21 am
I think Shield Block Value is kinda intended as the poor man’s armor. “Stacking” armor is pretty much impossible, as the only pieces you’ve really got options with are rings, cloak and an enchant or two.
However, once you start getting geared past Kara, and you start to see those blocks preventing 500-600-700 damage, you start to realize just how much armor equivalency that works out to. Especially against bosses, where we can run about a 99% block rate, that’s almost like having a thousands more armor.
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January 2nd, 2008 at 2:01 pm
@Kavel:
Actually, Stacking armor isn’t impossible really. A perfect example is using the Season 2 Gladiator shield over Gruul’s. Many people don’t do this and it makes a big difference especially if you compare it to Nightbane’s shield. The same goes for using Panzer vs Armorsmith chest or S3 Gladiator Chest.
High Armor pieces are out there, you just have to know where to look and as you’ve said already the ring, cloak, and couple enchants are there too. Utilizing those slots effectively is the difference of as much as 1000 armor.
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