I am going to attempt to explain the disconnect the community and the developers have over effective health.

When I first learned to tank, long before I came to Blizzard, I learned that effective health is a measurement of your stamina in relationship to your armor. This is a pretty easy number to generate. It's reasonable to include say shield block and other simple forms of mitigation into the calculation.

However, you cannot directly translate effective health into best tank. Avoidance matters. If it didn't, we would have no reason to nerf it in Icecrown. Good tanks don't depend too much on avoidance, but great tanks understand its value.

Furthermore, your estimations of effective health become less and less accurate the more variables you try to factor in. Most saliently, you can't easily account for cooldowns. You can't compare a short duration that reduces damage by 80% to a long duration that reduces damage by 10%. Mathematically they might generate the same effective health number, but in reality they work pretty differently and each has their own benefits in certain situations, which vary depending on boss mechanics. (I'd generally take the first one though.)

We purposely made the cooldowns difficult to compare from class to class. You shouldn't then be surprised when we take your effective health calculations based on direct comparisons of said cooldowns with a grain of salt.

It's fine to compare health, armor, avoidance or cooldowns. I would not recommend putting too much faith in one ubernumber that you generate by combining all of them.

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
Great tanks understand that maximising EH is all that matters at the moment. You've designed encounters with major boss cooldowns that are undodgeable (Impale, Frozen Slash, etc.). Avoidance literally means nothing for these key moments. Saying that great tanks value avoidance is not only hyperbole, it's untrue.

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If that were true, then the Icecrown aura would be a Mortal Strike debuff instead of an avoidance nerf.

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
Shield Wall=shared by DKs+Paladins almost exactly, Druids have one that's at 1/2 effectiveness for 1/2 cooldown

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What I was trying to say above was that a half strength cooldown that is available twice as often is not the same. You can multiply the numbers to convert them to the same relative uptime but that doesn't mean they are of the same utility.

Would you rather have a cooldown that prevented 90% of incoming damage once a fight or a cooldown that prevented 5% of damage eighteen times a fight? You might be able to make arguments for both, probably depending on encounter specifics, but I find it hard to argue that the decision is irrelevant.

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
You'd have a better sales pitch if you used the explanation Daelo used in his post about Chill of the Throne. Here is the condensed version: High avoidance requires the boss to hit hard because he is connecting less often. Otherwise the tanks are never in danger of dying. Boss damage has had to scale to the point where 2 back to back hits can kill the tank, and its a bad design. Chill of the Throne is really in place so that bosses don't have to hit for 40-55% of your health bar each hit. This allows for better healing strats than "spam Holy Light on the tank while cycling cooldowns".

You'd have a much easier time saying that then trying to convince us that avoidance is that important. To us it isn't. We've purposefully neglected it since Naxx25. We might change our minds when we only have like 40% total avoidance in ICC, but so far our experience based on your encounter designs tells us avoidance isn't very important.

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High avoidance is important because it makes the bosses hit hard. If avoidance was nigh irrelevant then bosses would not need to hit harder. They hit harder because you are avoiding so much damage. I'm not sure how many other ways to say it. I'm not arguing you should gem parry, but I find the arguments that avoidance is irrelevant and only health matters to be specious.

[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
What he said was in fact 100% true. EH is all that matters AT THE MOMENT.

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That's just not true. If you turned your back on a mob, your armor and health would not change. The boss would hit you a lot more. You would be a worse tank. If you could somehow remove all of your dodge and parry, you would take more damage.

I think what is happening here is that some of you are adhering too tightly to the guideline that since bosses can potentially two-shot you that avoidance is unreliable and health * armor is king. I understand that logic. But don't take it to the illogical conclusion that avoidance is irrelevant. If your 50-60% avoidance went to 0% you would notice quickly.

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

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Q u o t e:
Avoidance is not irrelevant. It's just irrelevant when determining what stats to itemize/gem/enchant for.

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That may be true, but it's not really the point I am arguing. Many players here are confusing the distinction between whether avoidance matters and whether it's a worthwhile stat to stack on gear.

Here is the misstep I see several of you making:

I don’t gear for avoidance. Therefore avoidance doesn’t matter in my gear decisions. Therefore avoidance has no effect on survival. Oops.

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Q u o t e:
1. Can we expect more unavoidable, devastating melee-based attacks in ICC? If so, what point do they serve from a design stand point?
2. Are we finally going to get away from the 2 hits back to back will gib the tank situation we are in now?
3. How are you going to handle Chill of the Throne when the pre-Cata patch comes out and we lose another ~18% avoidance when Defense goes away as a stat?

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1. Probably. They serve as challenges that your group needs to overcome by making sure enough healers are focused on the big damage spike and cooldowns (the tank’s or external ones) are used appropriately. If you could avoid those attacks they would need to hit for even harder to compensate. If you could avoid those hits, then sometimes you would just let lucky and make it through the encounter unscathed and other times you'd get gibbed. Believe me; you want those to be unavoidable.

2. The idea behind the Chill is to lower boss damage per hit but keep damage per time the same overall. The reason I caveat that statement so much is I know that we’re going to see lots of tanks that die in Icecrown and then ask us to nerf the encounters or buff their tanks. The purpose of these changes is not to prevent tank deaths. You will die. Probably a lot. You are going into the Lich King’s home after all.

3. I dunno. I imagine we will just drop it. We’ll have a lot of fixin’ up to do before Cat is ready to go live.

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Q u o t e:
He said that EH isn't the end-all-be-all that sites like tankspot tell you it is.

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Well, to be fair most theorycrafting tanks on Tankspot and other places who really understand the concept of EH won’t tell you it’s the only thing that matters, just that it is very important. The problem is that some players who perhaps don’t understand the theorycrafting as well try to take the notion to illogical extremes.

If we buffed DK parry to 99% and dropped their health 5K then it would be a huge EH nerf but they would probably be the best tanks by a wide margin. Now that's a very contrived scenario but you can't argue that just because tank avoidance happens to be close right now that avoidance is irrelevant as a stat when determining survivability.

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Q u o t e:
It seems like GC is answering (as he frequently does) a different discussion than what was posted.

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This thread was yet another “my EH is too low, please buff” thread. I wanted to point out why there was a disconnect between many of the threads on this forum and the developers. The disconnect comes in too many attempts to convert cooldowns as different as AD and VB into EH, stack rack the tanks based on that questionable estimate, and then complain about the order.

The discussion got distracted a little with the “GC says avoidance is better than stamina” nonsense, but the above was my original intent.

It's fine if you disagree with us. I just wanted to address all of the "Everyone agrees we need to be buffed but Blizzard" arguments.

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Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer