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Tanks - More HP or less damage?
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Post by
skribs
When I’m looking at my characters, I have a druid main and a DK alt, I see tanks now are in the debate:
Death Knights – Mastery (extra shield power) vs. Stamina, Druids – Agility (dodge, armor, AP and Crit for Savage Defense) vs. Stamina, Paladins – Mastery (block chance) vs. Stamina, and Warriors – Whatever (I haven’t actually looked) vs. Stamina (I’m assuming, based on the other three).
The main issue is whether you want more damage reduction vs. a bigger health pool. For the most part, the DR that is mentioned only applies to physical damage, but it will reduce your damage taken from those effects, thus reducing the amount of heals one needs. With mana being more important for healers, and with damage/healing taken being a lot smaller compared to your health pools (so tanks are going to take several hits to die either way, as opposed to being hit for 80% even if gemmed pure stamina) , it makes a lot of sense to gem for damage reduction than for health.
However, extra health will be a bigger buffer zone. Even if you get a lot of block, dodge or a lot of shields, those do not always have 100% up-time. There are times when you get no benefit from these (like when stunned; for example, on Halfus with a drake up during Furious Roar, our OT had issues staying alive), which are times when you will take the same amount of damage regardless of how much mastery or agility you have. Combined with the fact that many bosses do a lot of magic damage, and you have a prime candidate for Stamina.
Personally, I’m in the first boat (Agi/Mastery), mainly because I play a healer, and know that on most fights, a tank reducing the damage they take is really nice. However, I can see the other side, especially with the difficulty of keeping the OT alive on Halfus (granted, we normally would have killed the drake, but we were doing 25 instead of 10 for some reason, which of course meant we were carrying 6 DPSers who couldn’t get above the tanks, and we just didn’t have time to do an extra 14 mil damage).
I’m wondering what the thoughts are from other people, to this in particular. I know that a much bigger difference will be made by a tank knowing how to play (e.g. don’t turn your back, move out of fire, interrupt, their cooldowns, don’t break CC, etc.) than by a tank choosing to gem for Stamina or a DR stat, so I’d rather the first several posts NOT say “Skill > gem choice” and actually address the question of which stat is better to stack.
Post by
2698
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Varaconn
I prefer mitigation. Getting yourself to a point where your incoming damage is extremely stable and predictable is something healers love.
Post by
226992
This post was from a user who has deleted their account.
Post by
Doring
Currently, the numbers and performance are in the air as well as things changing too fast to have a definitive answer. What I have found is that with healers getting more mileage from hots and low to middle grade aoe heals/hots it really does come down to a balance of absorption (health) and mitigation (block/dodge/parry/armor). For me, being a DK tank, I have to look to a lot of my mitigation is in my mastery/self healing and honestly, with the amount of damage coming out of fights now days, stamina stacking is great, however, mitigation conserves more healer mana.
In general, as I advance in gear, I am going to look toward building a healthy level of mitigation/mastery trying to balance it with stamina. I am quite sure that in the near future, a lot more info is going to come out as more and more runs are done and more information is gathered so the guys at elitistjerks can crank out the numbers. My gut says the days of "stamina is the holy grail of tanking" are over and you have to balance things. As a DK, likely I am going to favor stacking mastery because it has a bit more ROI than just stacking stamina and it doesn't cost healer mana.
Post by
Porcell
I'm so rarely at full health that my actual health pool doesn't matter. When I do get a string of avoidance, or the boss takes a few moments to cast a spell and I do get topped off, it's not that big of a deal that I'm at merely 160k health instead of 165k health (if I were gemmed for stamina) or 177k health (if I ran double stamina trinkets).
Avoidance and mastery is so much better as it eases the incoming damage, allowing HoTs and low-cost heals to build you up over time.
The "three hit string" really isn't a factor anymore, and was the reason why you stacked stamina against uber hitting bosses. Back when you only had 60k-70k health and bosses were hitting for 35k+, stamina was frickin' important. Healers could bomb gigantic heals into you and you just had to survive for a couple hits as the heals keep coming.
Now days mastery and avoidance work to slow incoming damage. For example I tanked the Twin Dragons in BoT last week. I took 12 full hits of 49k average, 106 blocks of 27k average, 23 dodges, 3 misses, and 33 parries. With that kind of incoming damage, it doesn't matter if you have 160k or 180k health. Most of the time I'm bouncing around in the 60-80% health range anyway, HoTs ticking away and healers just pumping cheap heals into me. If I weren't all avoidance and mastery gem/enchant/reforged, I'd avoid and block much less which could cause healers to switch to high mana cost spells for a while.
It's just better on the healers. Tanks shouldn't normally be "topped off" anyway, and thus max health doesn't REALLY matter in the degree that gemming would provide.
Post by
Thror
It has been proven, both theoretically and practically, that gearing heavily for Agility (a.k.a. Mitigation + Avoidance) is currently the best way to gear a Feral Druid. I am using 0 pure stamina gems at the moment, and i have no trouble tanking content.
It is useless to gear to be a mana sponge in the times of mana crisis.
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