Tanking and Gemming for the Asshats

This is a little related to the previous post, which is why i titled the post that way. but... it is not entirely. What i do like to talk about is the issue of tanks. No, not asshat tanks, but asshat healers or dps who look at a tank's health and decide that they have a crap tank. what i mean is this...

I zone into an instance and see four other players, one of which is the tank. now the very first thing i look at is who's the tank, and so i can set my focus on him. i rarely look at his HP if im dps, but i will glance at it if i was healing him. His health will give me a guage of exactly how much attention i have to give to him while healing the instance. that's basically it. i dont check his gear to see if he's crit immune, or check to see if he's even got the right types of gear on. i just take it by faith that the tank knows what he's doing, no matter the level of HP he may have.

Why do i say this is because i oftentimes find people commenting on the tank's health as the determining factor as to how well an instance will go, or if there are hiccups, who the first person to blame would be if we were to have to point fingers. of course, in a bad pull, the tank will usually die first, or if the tank has abilities on cooldown, the dps and healer may die before the tank has the opportunity to grab aggro. this happened to me the other night where adds aggroed and went straight for the AoE-ing dps and i couldnt do anything to stop them for maybe 4-5 seconds.

New tank
When people do see a tank with say, 25k health, a few things go through their minds, im sure. and one of these things is that the tank is "new". new to what? well, for a lot of people, they may assume the tank is "new" to tanking itself. a person new to tanking may be a liability for the group, as the dps and healer may feel like guinea pigs at this point. but the fact of the matter is everyone's learning, we just dont want them to learn while pugging with us, ESPECIALLY if they're tanks. correct? i mean we can deal with bad dps, or bad healing (even bad healing has its limits), but bad tanking is a no no. a new tanks, 25k health tanks all somehow equate to possibly bad tanks.

New 80
There are many who have been in the game for a while leveling their alt tank and barely reached 80. there are also others who have joined the game several months earlier and have finally made it to 80, ready to tank heroics. i've encountered many people who do 2k dps, heal wonderfully and tank like leetsauce who have just dinged 80 that day, the day before, or somethind during the same week. last week i had the experience of seeing one party member say, i just dinged 80 today, with three more people saying how they're new to 80 as well. i was the only one who couldnt say that. instead, i said i dinged 80 a year ago.

it was kind of refreshing to see fresh new 80s running heroics and not judging each other. what's funny, or sad, is that it's usually always the raiders who seem to compare and belittle everyone else. now i am not saying every raider does it. what i am saying is that when it does happen, its more likely than not, a raiding individual pugging his daily random heroic for his frosties.

So these tanks with 25k-ish health who just dinged 80 are often criticized for their low health, but my contention is why? that's usually what tanks had the day they started heroics when wrath came out. and that's a somewhat middle-ground. i started tanking at 23k health. and before ulduar hit, i had maybe 28k health at most. i struggled to even get close to 30k health. but now we see tanks with 40k health and think that everyone, upon reaching 80, should have those numbers. its almost infuriating to see people who really do not have any idea how overboard that number is. i mean think of it this way, if a new 80 tank were to tank normal utgarde keep or nexus, that's basically what a 40k health tank is like doing heroics.

The Fallacy of HP
I just came across a post this morning about effective health found here. Think Tank on Armor. He thinks about armor pretty much the same way i think about avoidance. it basically increases your effective health. now he has a pretty detailed example of how it relates to healing, and i cannot agree with him more about that. although in heroics, the amount of overpowered healing can bsically negate his claims, in raids, it is quite different. armor is king. avoidance is queen. and HP is the jester.... according to me.

Before we go on, i'd like to tell you my stand on HP. its subpar. it really is. anyone telling you to stack stamina as long as you have the minimum defense rating has no idea what he's talking about. it does make sense on its own tho. if you take everything else out of the equation, of course, the more stamina you have, the more damage you can take. but we live in a very multi-faceted world (of warcraft) and therefore, we have to take many other factors into consideration.

Note: the following examples will not include hard numbers but will describe the basic concept of the stats i will be talking about. if you want exact numbers please go to sites like elitist jerks or tankspot.

Mitigation: What Armor Does. the person who prioritizes armor when gearing will see a lot less damage per hit. overall, he might have more damage if he doesnt have enough avoidance. assuming that he's being healed sufficiently, his armor is negating a fair amount of the hits. the more armor he has, the less damage he takes per hit.

Example. Lets suppose a mob does an auto attack for 10k health. Lets suppose he only does auto attacks.

If the person taking the hits has zero armor on, each attack will damage him by 10k hp. If he has 40k health, he will die after the 4th hit.

Lets say the person puts on armor (all other things being equal, including health, i know, not realistic, but this is to prove a point) so that he will negate 50% of the damage made to him.

If the person has armor to negate 50% damage, each attack will damage him by 5k hp. If he has 40k health, he will die after the 8th hit.

Now consider that each hit from the mob takes 1 second. if he had zero armor, he would die in 4 seconds. if he had 50% damage mitigation from armor, he will die after 8 seconds. (i just made a quick example of TTL, or time to live).

Armor increases TTL, reduces damage taken per hit and makes life for the healers a whole lot easier.

See how armor works there? HP isnt really the "end all" of all tanking stats. by all means no. lets move on to the next item.


Avoidance: Total Avoidance is the sum of several stats, including Dodge, Parry, and Block. These stats are the basis of helping a tank NOT take damage. What i mean is a dodged attach will hit for zero damage. a parried attack will hit for zero damage. block is a different animal and has its own damage reduction amounts and things. but we know for sure one thing, dodge and parry negates 100% of any hit.

So lets take block out of the equation to make things simpler and pretend we're talking about DK tanks or bear tanks.

Lets take the tank from the Armor example and say he has 40k health, with 50% damage mitigation from armor. that is what we'll work with.

Lets say it's a DK with a dodge percentage of 24% and a parry percentage of 21%. This gives the DK a total of 45% avoidance.

This means that 45% of the mobs attack will not hit the dk at all. With some math here, we can estimate that per swing, the mob will get about 2750 damage. since each swing is 1 second apart, the tank will essentially take 2750 damage per second. with a tank of 40k health, it will take the mob 14.55 seconds to kill the tank.

Now 14.55 seconds is better than 8 seconds (armor only) and a whole lot better than 4 seconds (no mitigation).

Note/Edit: Please note that avoidance is on "chance per swing" and not an actual percentage of damage reduction. because of this, if you get unlucky and get hit on all swings, your TTL will actually be 8 seconds. If you're lucky and are missed on all swings, your TTL will be indefinite, or forever. Because of this reasoning, a more statistical analysis will have to be done, as in, if each hit from a boss has a 45% chance to miss (55% chance to land), what's the probability that the tank will survive for 15 seconds? i believe this will result in some z-score and bell curve with deviations and such. but if all swings were to be distributed evenly, i would give the tank about 15 seconds to live. again, more complex (and more accurate) calculations can be fould elsewhere. i am merely giving an overview, showing the basic concept.

To Sum Things Up
I know this has been a long post but i really wanted to go through just what exactly soaks up damage. i know that on a 1 to 1 ratio, health points can be seen and understood universally among everyone. if a mob hits a tank for 3k damage, that's 3k health gone. but what they do not see is that the mob usually hits everyone else for 8k damage and that the tank is often parrying or dodging attacks more than half of the time. they dont see that. dps usually does not see that. it is really only the tank and healers who really see this mechanic at work. why else would a boss 1hit a warlock to death? but dps doesnt see that and calls himself a squishy. sure, he's truly a squishy, but he doesnt exactly know why or how or what it all really means.

AND in order to help ease the minds of these misguided dps, the tanks do not take the time to explain all of this to the dps. instead, they appease the dps by gemming for stamina, enchanting for stamina, use health/stamina enhancing armorkits and drink elixirs of mighty fortitude. The tanks end up trying to make the dps and healers feel a little more at ease by enhancing the only number the dps and healers can actually see but because of this, they leave little room, if any, for other stats like armor and avoidance.

True, as people gear up, they will encounter gear with higher amounts of stamina and armor. so why bother when you already have 560 defense rating and a billion armor points? shouldnt they be entitled to spread out their stats with more stamina/health? well with better armor comes more stamina anyway, so the inverse can also be argued. why not gem defense when you now have more stamina? see what i did there?

But instead, i see bear tanks gemming for stamina. I see dk's gemming for stamina. i see paladins and warriors gemming for stamina. and as a healer, i always have to cringe at these tanks. i hate, as much as i complain about boring heroic runs, i hate healing 50k health tanks who stack stamina. i constantly have to heal them. there is really no break for me at all in heroics when healing these guys. this takes a toll on the healer (so the dps, although they feel really comfortable running along with a 50k health tank, they dont realize that there is less time and mana for me to heal them should they need any kind of healing) and when we get into harder fights where there's collateral damage, aoe damage, or just random damage, i find little time to heal the dps or myself.

ATTENTION ALL TANKS: THERE ARE BETTER STATS THAN STAMINA!!!

For bears:
Gem for Agility. Agility (Agi) will increase your armor. with the bear shapeshift multiplier to armor, you get even more armor per point of agi than the other plate wearing classes would.
Agi also increases your dodge percentage. this is your only aviodance stat, so beef (or bear) it up as much as you can with agi. Its really easy for bears. we only need one stat to deal with.

For plate wearers:
Gem for Defense even past the crit immune level (currently at 535 for heroics and 540 for raids). The more Defense (Def) you have, the more you're able to dodge and parry at the very least. not only will you increase your chance to avoid a hit, you're also giving yourself a Def buffer should you get a better piece of gear with less Def but having more Armor/Stam/Dodge/Parry/etc.
You cannot gem for Armor, but you can enchant and use armor kits for more armor. However, i would try to go for the best piece of gear with the highest built-in armor, gem for defense, enchant it with stats, armsman, or threat.

For both bears and plate wearers: There are plenty of resources online. I know things can be confusing and information can be scattered over the internet. but the information is out there. If you have any questions or need directions on where to go for your class, please feel free to reply and i will try my best to point you in the right direction.
Also, there is the argument about magical damage ignoring all armor and even avoidance. In this case, if armor and avoidance are negated, then a thinking person would indeed switch out his gear and use some magic resistance gear or stamina gear. Now if the fight was a mix of mostly physical hits with some magic damage, then the thinking person will have to evaluate which he prefers to mitigate and which would be more important to mitigate on the whole of the fight. you can always change gear after the fight to suit the needs of the next fight.

Again, to all tanks, there are better stats that just stamina. to all dps and maybe healers, there are much better ways to guage and judge a tank than by his health pool.