Ok, a friend and i were discussing paladin tanking and he said that the avoidance stats would be gemmed for in cataclysm. I said EH would always be king after x important stat ( like def rating or whatever is applicable) is achieved. I see things from the "i'd rather survive that huge hit with more health" than "maybe i'll that huge hit that would kill me" school of thought but i'm always open to being utterly wrong.

So, from the beta so far which theory is more correct - eh or dodge?

A mountain dew is resting on your answers!

I'm not sure that serious tanks will ever gem dodge or parry at the expense of Stamina to any great degree. As long as dragons breathe, there will be elements of encounters where health is more useful than avoidance.

However, I think avoidance overall will still be more valuable in Cataclysm than it is on Live today when your healers risk running out of mana. The theoretical tank with a huge health pool and 0% avoidance should feel like a liability instead of the holy grail it is viewed as today.

We're trying to shake [some] tanks out of the mentality that something is garbage unless it improves health or armor. That's not the same as saying that tanks will value dodge and parry and view health and armor as garbage instead.

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Q u o t e:
I don't think the point is to make avoidance so much better than stamina--the point is to make avoidance better than it is NOW, to the point where you would want to use an ilvl 277 Corpse Tongue Coin over an ilvl 200 Black Heart. Right now no one who knew what they were doing would pick the former.

In any case, tanking cannot always be broken down into what offers you the most benefit via a spreadsheet like DPS can.

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Yes. Especially that last sentence. :)

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Q u o t e:
If you have to use your inefficient heal too much, you will go OOM.
If you take too much damage, you force your healers to use their inefficient heals more.

Avoidance reduces damage. Stamina does not.

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I think the issue is that some players are rejecting the notion that mana will ever matter, in which case there is no reason to approach surviving as a tank any different than you do today. There's not much we can do to disabuse anyone of that notion until they see the content.

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Q u o t e:
So it's the dragons' fault. Why can't you give us something we can stack and get on gear which will reduce magical damage taken? Perhaps a "mitigation rating" which will reduce all damage taken, like resilience does in PvP, though at a rate less than armor or avoidance reduces physical damage.

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Couple of reasons. One, every boss (well, with a couple of weird exceptions) does physical damage, but there are plenty of bosses that do only physical damage. Second, we want the dragon breathing to be a scary moment that requires you and the healers to consider using your cooldowns. I realize the strategy of a tank is to try and do whatever you can to make those moments not scary, but as soon as you accomplish that, then the fights become a lot less exciting. Roller coasters that move slowly might feel more safe, but they're not as much fun. We have to nail that sometimes narrow line between letting you prepare for a fight without minimizing the danger (assuming its appropriate for your level of progression, etc.)

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Q u o t e:
But, the bottom line is, I still won. Your healers won't go oom if you stack stamina.

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This isn't what I was trying to say above. I was saying I'm not sure tanks will swap over to gemming avoidance instead of health. But we would like to see avoidance trinkets valued instead of skipped over as they are today. Our goal is for tanking guides a year from now to say "your gear should have a mix of avoidance and mitigation."

Healers will definitely run out of mana, or our entire combat model won't work. When healers don't care about mana, then fast expensive heals aren't expensive... they are just fast heals. DPS classes won't value survival-oriented talents because they'll know the healers can keep them alive. Regen stats on gear and regen talents will be skipped over, because regen isn't important when your pool never risks emptying. In vanilla and BC, mana mattered more. That's all we're taking about here.

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Q u o t e:
Specifically to cataclysm, it depends on how it is implemented. Even if the tank dies in 7-8 hits, if avoidance is relied on too much, the RNG can still kill you.

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Only if your strategy is for your healers to heal you once every 7-8 hits. Even if your healers were asleep through 4 of those hits, they should be able to wake up, realize how quickly your health is going down, and get a few heal bombs on you to slowly bring you back up. Failing to get a dodge 7 hits in a row won't ever kill you unless the healers are silenced. However, failing to get a dodge 7 hits in a row will cause your healers to waste a lot of mana.