The argument of avoidance vs. effective health has been argued to death, but most of the examples cited by both sides have been from progression-based raiding. Here, we take a minute to consider the same in the context of Heroics and trash mobs.
From the standpoint of raiding, avoidance and effective health both have strong arguments to support its theories. In terms of taking damage, taking no damage at all will always be superior to taking reduced damage. However, because hits in World of Warcraft are based on a roll system, tanks who focus on avoidance stats may see much spikier damage than tanks who focus on effective health and get “RNG’d”. In the same way that a sword-specced warrior with windfury can instagib a druid in arenas, avoidance based tanks can get destroyed very quickly by hard-hitting bosses. Though an avoidance tank may take less overall damage, proponents of effective health argue that more steady and predictable damage is much easier to heal. For an extremely in-depth discussion of EH vs. Avoidance, refer to this excellent series of posts by Ciderhelm and Cronedog.
Heroics and 25-mans have a few key differences.
1. Mobs don’t hit nearly as hard
2. Mobs die much faster
3. People take heroics much less seriously, which leads to…
4. DPSers tend to start DPSing right away
Because of the design of heroic instances, a tank’s threat generation becomes much more important than his ability to mitigate damage. Since DPSers are reluctant to wait for threat and because the mobs die so fast, tanks in heroics (given that they have decent gear and aren’t in danger of dying) should put emphasis on maximizing threat. How does this relate to Avoidance tanking vs. Effective Health Tanking? It lies in the fact that avoided hits don’t generate rage. A tank’s threat generation is directly correlated to the amount of rage that he has to work with and thus, having high avoidance in a heroic makes threat generation very difficult. Very commonly, tanks with high avoidance will see a long string of dodges, parries, and some more dodges. When this happens, it becomes extremely difficult to hold aggro against DPS.
If the tank has sacrificed health and armor for even higher amounts of avoidance, this can lull healers into a false sense of security. They’ll watch the tank sit at full health for long periods of time, finally take a hit, then not take another one for another long period of time. When that unlucky string of unavoided hits come, sleepy healers may not be ready for the sudden spike of damage.
So, the verdict? For tanking heroics, Effective Health > Avoidance.
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Tags: avoidance, effective health, heroics, karazhan, Tanking, threat
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