Avoidance & Mitigation Sets: What for?
Since I heard about various tanking sets back in my early days I was eager to build those. An avoidance set, an EH-set and a threat-set. There was still one question left, though: When to wear what? Generally you’ll consider the boss and his abilites, but I’m gonna give you something else to think about.
Just in case you drop out at some point throughout this post, here’s the most important message all of the following will come down to:
Only wear effective health gear as far as it’s necessary, because in fact you do not help your healers with it, you just reach an important buffer. As you are past this point, avoidance and threat stats are superior.
Let’s have a look at what your gear sets are achieving:
- Effective Health gives you a health buffer for damage peaks
- Avoidance reduces hits, thus overall incoming damage
- Threat gives a lot of rage, thus threat, and gives your dps room to get crazy
Usually you’d gear to the encounter, along those lines:
- Boss does peak damage? Effective Health gear. Patchwerk, Maexxna, Dragons
- Boss hits moderate? Avoidance gear. Grobbulus, Gluth, Anub’Rhekan
- Boss is a sissy? Threat gear. Heigan, Gothik, Noth
But we can translate this into a more general approach:
- Damage is not the issue. Threat gear.
- Incoming hits can be mitigated to bareable numbers. Avoidance gear.
- Mitigation is not enough due to too high hits. Effective Health.
Now with the last list here we can get onto other aspects that might impact your gearing decision. First of all we have to realize why the heck we use different gear sets, really. Our job is the same, we use the same abilities, so what’s that gearing all about?
You don’t gear to make your job easier, but to make the healers’ job easier.
So let’s have a look at gear sets from a healing-required perspective, with some simplified examples. I’ll assume a boss hitting for 5,000 damage net every second throughout a 400 second fight. This means we get an overall damage of 2,000,000. The sets shalth be as follows:
- Effective health: 30k health, 30% combined avoidance
- Avoidance: 25k health, 50% combined avoidance
Effective health requires much more healing
You skip avoidance stats in favor of as much stamina and armor as you can get. While your buffer for hits becomes bigger and grants the healers more room for to land their heals, they will have to heal you for more overall. 30% avoided means that there’s 1.4 million incoming damage left to heal, so divided by our 400 seconds that means 3,500 hps are to be healed.
Effective Health: 1.4 million incoming damage, 3,500 heal per second requried
Avoidance makes the healer’s job easier
The math says it all: 50% avoided means 1 million incoming damage to heal, thus 2,500 hps – that’s almost 30% less healing. On the other hand, the EH set here gives an extra 20% buffer for heals to land.
Avoidance: 1 million incoming damage, 2,500 heal per second required
Let’s say you try patchwerk. Two scenarios:
Of course you put on your effective health gear. For three minutes your health constantly stays above 50%, but then your healers run out of mana. Reevaluate: Your health pool was not the problem. Try your avoidance set. You will grant the healers 30% more healing endurance.
To have less overall damage you put on your avoidance gear. After about a minute and popping all your cooldowns you go down like a gnome schoolgirl. Reevaluate: Overall damage wasn’t the problem. Try your effective health set. You will grant the healers 20% more buffer to react.
So what does that mean, now?
It means that you should not only gear towards the encounter, but also cater to your healers. It also shows that you will only want to wear effective health gear when it’s necessary, because in fact you do not help your healers with it, you just reach an important buffer. As you are past this point, avoidance or threat stats are superior.
It also means that as your avoidance gear develops and grants you enough effective health for fights you would usually use your effective health euipment, or if your healers are outstanding and you need less effective health due to their performance, you should always seek to not use the effective health set. Your decision can also depend on the buffs you got. If you’re blessing of kings / improved mark of the wild / powerword: fortitude buffed it’s very likely you can leave your effective health set at home.
Let me repeat the most important thing, bold and shiny, because all I see are effective health geared tanks running around with gimped threat and avoidance stats:
Only wear effective health gear as far as it’s necessary, because in fact you do not help your healers with it, you just reach an important buffer. As you are past this point, avoidance and threat stats are superior.
Very well put. I’ll have to take this into account, especially when not running with the healers I’m used to in Naxx10, because I’m pretty sure they all overgear the instance by now
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” The sets shalth be as follows:
Effective health: 30k health, 30% combined avoidance
Avoidance: 25k health, 50% combined avoidance ”
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Are these real stats for the two sets? If not then what should I aim for with the stats? Love the post and thanks for your help.
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Talldar Reply:
March 26th, 2009 at 8:08 pm
These stats are just figuratively to make the math in the example easy. It really depends on where you stand gear-wise how the numbers turn out, so it’s hard to say what to aim for. There is, unfortunately, no “step-by-step” gear guide for warriors these days. We need (not literally, but it makes everyone’s life much, much easier) different gear sets for different situations.
Basically you will want an avoidance set with a lot of dodge and parry and an effective health set with a hell lot of stamina, but you’ll also have to know when to wear either of them.
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Siggy Reply:
March 27th, 2009 at 5:04 am
Thanks for the reply. Sorry for the noob questions just trying to get a good understanding on this. I have all 200 and 213 gear with more then one of some slots. With the 2 sets do you still have to balance your threat stats in them? Just dont want to give up to much of one thing to get another. Thanks for your help.
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Antonidas&n=Siggyone
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You didnt mention the RNG part of the avoidance set. That you can have a streak of not avoiding and therefore taxing your healers ability to heal fast enough or just simply dying. This is part of the reason EH is usually superior.
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Talldar Reply:
March 29th, 2009 at 1:36 am
First off there’s no “usually”. Effective Health is a tool you use to reach a health buffer that is big enough for mistakes or plain huge hits in an encounter you do not yet outgear. Only stacking EH “because it’s usually superior” is prejudging and a disservice to your healing team in many cases. If you do not need the extra buffer, you shouldn’t use your EH set.
Second: With the EH-set you will always eat all those hits, so you are taxing your healers ability to heal a lot more. There is a point for every encounter where EH just doesn’t make things better. And you plain simply make your healers’ job harder stacking EH beyond this point.
The faster you make your healers burn through their mana the more stressful every encounter becomes. A tank dropping to 20% health can be a breathtaker for the whole raid, but a healer going oom will most likely strangle it.
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The problem in wotlk is – there is no real reason to use anything except EH because of the design of many encounters. Take e.g. Sarth 3D, massive magic hits for the MT, avoidance is nearly useless. In Ulduar there’s lots of fights, where it is simply neccessary to have max health to give healers reaction time because of spell interrupts (Ignis) or funny movement (Hodir).
Additionally up until now I don’t have heard a healer complain about their mana, they have half full pools at the end of the fight.
Don’t get me wrong, I hate gearing for EH, because it is simply brainless and definitely not optimal for a warrior. But it happens all the time when I wear an avoidance set, that healers after many dodges or parries don’t react to the one big hit – bam, warrior death. It is so disappointing that you are gearing the right way and the EH tanks are preferred for most of the fights.
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