Avoidance vs Effective Health: Content we Undergear
The 3rd installment of our series discussing Avoidance and Effective Health. The previous 2 talked about myths surrounding the two gearing ideologies as well as talked about healer preferences. Today, we’re going to look at what I consider an extremely rare situation…
Content we Undergear
Yup, especially these days, it’s very rare that we as tanks undergear content. There’s a reason Ensidia (A professional raid guild) completed all the content in a few days. There really doesn’t currently exist any huge gear checks. There was no need to really farm gear to reach an encounter’s tanking, healing or dps requirements. Which isn’t to say all the content currently is super easy nor that getting additional gear isn’t beneficial, it’s just to say that you can’t blame gear. None of these current realities defeat the concept behind things though.
Questioning the Conceptual
Effective Health at it’s roots is all about tanking content we undergear, but why is this? The answer is we require a minimum amount of Health and Armor in order to survive an attack(s) from a boss. But, this answer results in more questions than answers, most notably, why is this the answer?
For fights that we undergear, we have two choices:
- Sufficient Health and Armor (Effective Health)
- Sufficient Avoidance
Without enough Effective Health, we’ll need to avoid a higher than average amount of attacks from a boss in order to survive and in the most extreme case, we’ll have to literally avoid all attacks from a boss. Without enough Avoidance, we’ll need a higher than average amount of healing/second and in the most extreme case, we’ll have to constantly have more healing/second coming in than damage/second taken.
Looking at things in extremes has a way of clarifying things you could say. While yes, it’s unrealistic for the extremes to ever be realities that doesn’t change that the extreme case of having to avoid all attacks is unsolvable whereas the extreme case of throwing more healers at a tank taking an unreal amount of damage is very solvable. That’s what tanking content we undergear all comes down to… we can solve one, we cannot solve the other.
But, how do we approach things if nothing is solvable? What if making it possible, but difficult isn’t an option?
What if we’re Underhealing content?
Which is to say, what if we don’t bring enough healers? Lack of healers is a very real issue for even the best guild and while it’s true it can be handled by respecing and alts, what if one day you find yourself with 5 healers for an encounter that requires 8? Should this affect how you gear?
Yup, this is where Avoidance is king. Why? Because no one’s going to have enough healers for the encounter including yourself. (the tank) This is the big benefit of Avoidance, it’s best for when healers can’t keep up.
Well if that’s the case…
Why not always gear for Avoidance and always underheal encounters? Because, you’re rolling the dice. It’s not a good situation. During your progression with fewer healers, you’re sometimes just going to take a string of hits and it’s game over. We’re stuck gearing in a way to make the best of bad scenario.
Why not always gear for Avoidance when we do have enough healers then? Because, you’re still rolling the dice. Now certainly you’re in a better situation than when you didn’t have enough healers, but it’s still a gamble. Gearing for Effective Health will always mean that you have a better chance of surviving the worst case scenario because the worst cause scenario doesn’t involve avoiding attacks.
How is this useful to us?
It allows us to understand how we should approach encounters. When attempting the unknown, we’re always best starting with Effective Health. If the healers can’t keep up then we should put on more Avoidance. However, if the healers can’t keep up and as a result, the raid leader addresses this problem with giving us more healers then we’re best sticking with our Effective Health set. If the healers continue to struggle despite there being more of them then we’re back at the situation of wanting more Avoidance.
But, I never deal with the Unknown
Just because you read up on bosses ahead of time does not mean that you don’t deal with the unknown. What do you think Burst damage is? Dragons especially are notorious for this type of attack, but it’s also not uncommon to be facing a demonly type that randomly throws a nasty cleave at you. The difference between these two gearing ideologies is one handles Burst damage (the unknown) better whereas the other handles Consistent damage better. (by helping healers keep up) The skill to gearing is in being able to gauge the number (and to some extent the quality) of your healers and being able to gear yourself accordingly as your guild learns a new encounter. (or even farms an old troublesome one)
I’m not sure if it’s ironic or simply strangely amusing, but I want you to really ponder the point that I’m presenting. Effective Health utilizes consistency to survive randomness. Avoidance utilizes randomness to survive consistency.
Perfect or Poetic?
April 14th, 2009 at 4:31 am
I see it this way: every fight has a minimum effective health requirement. A requirement which also avoidance tanks need to acquire.
When undergearing content thefirst and foremost imortant is getting to that minimum effective health requirement. After that you continue getting more EH or avoidance.
Also if is tank is bruteforce healable by throwing more healers at him it’s good for raids learning a fight. Yes you might get an enrage timer or all your healers out of mana, you’ll still wipe but at least the raid has learned a lot about the mechanics of the fight. Which is a lot better then 5 seconds of fight and wipe because your undergeared avoidance tank got unlucky.
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April 14th, 2009 at 4:40 am
The concept of “Effective Avoidance” is a good one, especially in the context of underhealing. We’ve used underhealing to crank out the DPS for the timed achievements and finding the right amount of avoidance to use that still gives sufficient threat was something of a minigame. I actually have a set in item rack for this I called “enough” but I may just change it to “EA.”
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April 14th, 2009 at 7:29 am
Avoidance isn’t really random. Sure, at any given point, the RNG could be in your favor, or not, but over the long term, you’re going to get consistent results.
With EH, you’re more likely to survive a worst case scenario. With avoidance, you’re going to have fewer worst case scenarios to try to survive. (assuming physical damage)
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Thom reply on April 14, 2009 11:01 am:
Avoidance is random, much like a coin toss. Yes, if you toss a coin a million times, you will have ~50% heads vs. tails. In a repeating series of 5-10 coin tosses though, there is a good chance of ending up with 5 or 10 tosses of heads in a row eventually. If you are “unlucky” enough to get 10 losses (hits) in a row and your EH isn’t high enough to soak it, you lose.
Hence, random.
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Kavtor reply on April 14, 2009 12:34 pm:
EH can be just as random. Did you get topped off, or is that nuke going to kill you anyway? Or is that extra 2k health not doing anything for you?
Avoidance is still a long term, reliable source of burst damage reduction. Sometimes it’ll fail you, but EH will as well. Avoidance tanks will take less damage.
It’s not getting hit 10 times in a row that’s a problem. If you haven’t gotten a heal by then, it doesn’t matter. It’s about reliably breaking up strings of 3-4 hits in a row. You always need -enough- EH to survive the baseline hit. It’s after that where gear choices get more interesting.
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Spaz reply on April 14, 2009 12:56 pm:
Sounds to me that it’s your healers’ performance that you’re saying is random, not that Effective Health itself is random.
Chet reply on April 14, 2009 3:53 pm:
well, assuming 50% avoidance, which isn’t high by any means, finding the likelyhood of getting 10 hits in a row is pretty simple. (1/2)^10 which is approximately .0010, or one time every thousand hits that you’ll get a string like that. 5 hits isn’t nearly so random though, approximately 3 times every 100 hits. To push 5 hit streaks back to an almost negligible number like we did above, you’d need more like 75% avoidance. At that level you wouldn’t have to worry much about long strings of hits. In fact at 75% avoidance, your chances of getting 10 hits in a row are literally about one in a million.
Wow, I feel like a nerd, breaking this stuff down into numbers. I guess my education wasn’t completely wasted lol
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Orcstar reply on April 15, 2009 1:03 am:
That’s not how statistics and random works.
You need to consider a string of hits, that’s where avoidance will shine.
Saying that’s a coin toss doesn’t do justice to avoidance.
50% avoidance: chance to get 3 hits in a row: 0.5^3=0.125=12,5% This will happen almost every fighta lot of times.
75% avoidance: .25^3=0.015625=1.56% Will happen once or twice per fight.
80% avoidance:.2^3=0.008=0.8% Will happen maybe once per fight.
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Rulinus reply on May 8, 2009 11:01 am:
EH is random because you cannot guarantee consistent damage output from the mob you’re fighting.
Vene, I liked your article until “Well if that’s the case”. The EH vs Avoidance debate’s biggest problem is having the binary perception of random vs non-random. I.e. Avoidance is random, EH isn’t. There’s nothing non-random about EH. Just because the numbers aren’t shown as percentages to the players doesnt mean there aren’t dices being thrown in the background.
Satrina made an excellent article about this argument a while ago and it still holds water although we need to factor in diminishing returns these days (http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f63/40003-diminishing-returns-avoidance.html)
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April 14th, 2009 at 9:07 am
If you’re entering Ulduar tomorrow you should defo stack as much health/EH as possible. Till you kill something your primary concern should be to be able to survive the big hits. Since content is largely unknown you want a big buffer.
Also on a different note its my belief that people should maximize not only EH when it comes to gear but also spec accordingly. For example I think its just wrong to step in ulduar with a 15/5/xx deep wounds build. DPS will naturally be hesitant to go all out due to unknown factors and mechanics and your job will be to survive, not pull massive threat (which you can still do with a conservative build). So I personally will be sporting:
1. Improved Disciplines + possibly glyph of SW for 1min cd(or 2? confused with constant glyph changes on ptr)
2. Imp spell reflect purely for the 4% spell resist
I feel that http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LVZhxZVItrg0didIzsGo is the optimal build for learning encounters backed up by a solid EH gearset.
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Veneretio reply on April 14, 2009 10:33 am:
I agree having more of a survival oriented spec is important for walking into new content. The beauty of dual specs though is that we can have our Deep Wounds spec and we can have our survival spec which is one of the scenarios I’m entertaining.
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Chet reply on April 14, 2009 11:24 am:
You know, I was just thinking about this last night/today. Wowhead is down so I can’t look at your spec, but I was thinking maybe something very similar to the “core + EH” type of setup Vene has posted before, possibly taking points out of Focused Rage, since I’m not exactly expecting to be rage starved. I haven’t decided yet though. If I do that, those points would go into 5/5 shield spec.
Also, somewhat unrelated, did you see the change to glyph of last stand?
Glyph of Last Stand: Now reduces the cooldown of Last Stand by 60 seconds. The penalty on maximum health gained has been removed.
Looks like it’s a pretty solid 3rd glyph now
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Veneretio reply on April 14, 2009 12:19 pm:
Agreed, Glyph of Last Stand is looking very nice especially in combination with Glyph of Shield Wall in a survival oriented spec.
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Kavtor reply on April 14, 2009 12:27 pm:
For a survival Ulduar spec, you want to pick up imp. Demo shout. 5% damage reduction is about the best return you can get.
Something to the tune of
http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LVZhiZVItrx0ziduzsGo
5/10/52 +4
With the extra 4 in spell reflect, cruelty, booming voice, etc
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Harbinger reply on April 14, 2009 1:03 pm:
Well, 99% of the guilds out there have at least one fury warrior. They should be picking imp demo (in our guild they do).
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April 14th, 2009 at 9:52 am
Yup, especially these days, it’s very rare that we as tanks undergear content.
Unfortunately for some of us, this is not always the case. I find myself in the situation where most raiding content i go into I am undergeared for as I am the main tank in a casual guild that has a total of 8 level 80’s. I am never at a loss for instances to run with the guild but then again, we end up bringing extra healers to make up for the undergearing.
This being said, I tend to concentrate on EH due to a lack of gear
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April 14th, 2009 at 10:59 am
Hey Vene, to add to what Harbringer said, I wanted to further discuss the potential use of dual spec for storming through Ulduar this week.
I am thinking about making these 2 builds:
1- Threat Build
(http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LAM00fZhbZMItrx0zidIzsGo)
My Glyphs will be
a - Blocking (ofc)
b - Heroic Strike (+5% crit)
c - Vigilance (+5% threat from vigi - can result to >=5% inc in final threat)
2- Survivability Build
(http://www.wowhead.com/?talent=LVZhi00xZVhtMg0dVdIzsGo)
a - Blocking (*might* change w/ sumtin else)
b - Shield Wall (yummy)
c - Last Stand (why not)
Obviously I’ll use these with my threat, EH, avoidance gears (or combination of them). So, I’ll firstly walk in with my usual threat spec and boss-threat gear, if encounter seems harsh keep the spec but switch to survival gear, and if I’m devastated yet again switch the spec too.
My question to you is if I have taken the Survival spec to a huge extreme as to severely gimp my TPS and put a real restrain on my fellow DPS. I felt bad while making way to 5/5 Imp. Shouts by cutting off from Incite, Gag Order and Imp Revenge - do you think these will be fatal? I just figured since I’m turning myself into a walking-castle why not go all the way. Looking forward to your thoughts people…
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Veneretio reply on April 14, 2009 12:18 pm:
I think that having a survival oriented primary spec is important, but I think you can accomplish it without losing too much threat. I’ll try to get a post up on this topic quickly.
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Furiat/Vege reply on April 17, 2009 10:30 am:
Heroic Strike glyph seems to be again +10 rage on crits.
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April 14th, 2009 at 11:33 am
So basically the logical troubleshooting progression for encounters would be:
start w/ EH—–>add avoidance—–>add healers—–>add more avoidance.
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Veneretio reply on April 14, 2009 12:26 pm:
I’d look at this way:
1. Gear for EH
2. You’re dieing, did they assign you more healers?
[Yes] Stick with EH
[No] Add Avoidance
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April 15th, 2009 at 1:49 pm
It seems we cannot reach an agreement when it comes to theory. But what about the real world practice. As a paladin or warrior what does it even mean to gear for EH versus gearing up for avoidance? What options do we have going into Ulduar?
Since Wrath there’s no armor difference no matter what gear choices you make as long as it’s plate, which translates to:
- EH = block rating/value/stamina.
- Avoidance = dodge/parry/def.
Enchants don’t offer a whole lot of flexibility since there’s usually a clear winner for every slot. When gemming, one has the choice to go for stamina or put some extra avoidance with defense/parry/dodge. Block value scales way too poorly with strength to even be factored, it’s mostly a threat stat as it is. Block rating is already overkill for paladins, being easily unhittable with holy shield and the amount blocked brings up the question whether it is really worth it.
Bottom line is there’s no “effective way” of improving effective health. We’re left with stacking stamina through trinkets and sockets, disregarding bonuses (which is not a smart decision in most cases).
Maybe reworking block will fix that, maybe not.
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Veneretio reply on April 15, 2009 2:41 pm:
There are huge Armor differences in selection of Rings, Trinkets, Neckpieces and Cloaks. There’s also Stamina differences between different item levels such as the head slot where the Blacksmithing helm is a massive EH upgrade.
Block Rating and Block Value are not part of EH.
Enchants offer a tremendous amount of flexibility in many slots such as again the cloak (armor enchant) or even the shield (18 stamina vs 20 defense) and many other spots.
Gemming especially makes the biggest difference with so many pieces having sockets. Stamina socketing will increase the EH of a piece whereas Defense or Dodge socketing will improve it’s Avoidance.
Frankly, it seems like you’re looking at this from a Paladin perspective and as such, maybe your points have validity, but unfortunately, that just doesn’t matter here. It’s a Warrior tanking site exclusively. If other classes get something out of it, great, but I wouldn’t ever expect the information to be anything other than relevant to Warrior Tanks.
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Funtodin reply on April 17, 2009 8:04 am:
I realize this is a warrior tanking site, but regarding survival, paladins and warriors have pretty much the same priorities except for block rating.
That being said, I liked a lot the previous article on healers and the approach to EH x avoidance. Everything you said applies to pretty much all tanking classes, the principles are the same, except for some different flavours. I just wish there were better pieces of EH gear available to us, and maybe some armor gems.
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April 15th, 2009 at 5:25 pm
I like the summary at the end of your post.
One way to think about avoidance is what fraction of hits do you need to avoid reliably in order to survive. Suppose you have 50% avoidance.
Must avoid 1/1 hits - 50% chance to die each hit.
Must avoid 1/2 hits - 25% chance to die every two hits.
Must avoid 1/3 hits - 13% chance to die every three hits.
Must avoid 1/4 hits - 6% chance to die every four hits.
Must avoid 1/5 hits - 3% chance to die every five hits.
Clearly that’s not a gamble to take at the low numbers of hits, but at some point it’s going to start to make sense. If tanking was entirely passive you’d need such large numbers of hits to make avoidance reliable that it would be boring. But because you and your healers can react to a string of hits using cooldowns avoidance starts to be usable much earlier. I’m guessing that at around 1/4 or 1/5 hits it becomes usable as a survival mechanism.
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April 16th, 2009 at 9:47 am
thx for threads - interesting reading - the summary was ofc the icing
but I also always thought of my EH equipment to be used in Boss fights with high spell DMG (magic) and the avoidance gear had its great advantages against bosses that did high melee DMG (non magic) or am i too pre wotlk or even pre tbc.
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Rob the Tank reply on April 16, 2009 3:44 pm:
That’s how I gear my DK, high stam for the magic encounters ( /me waves at Ignis the BBQ’er) and high avoidance for the melee fights (See: XT-002)
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