In order to get the juices flowing and get some more out of the WoW than just healing your average raid or heroic and doing dailies, I decided to pick up the art of tanking again. Slowly. This time not to support our raiding in a karazhan-esque situation, but just to have another option when lacking tanks for a random heroic. (yes that didn’t make sense, but I thought it would be fun to append -esque to a word, and it made me glow proudly for a second or two, which is good enough)
As usual I started surfing around for the latest Druid tanking mechanics information to get myself up to date. Pretty soon I stumbled upon the big “Dimished returns on Avoidance stats”-thing. I still find it hard to get an exact measure on how it actually works and what the consequences of it are. Our beloved wowwiki seems poorly edited on everything WotLK, and all that’s left are scattered guesses and hear-say.
So, here’s the link you’ll find and of which you won’t be able to make much sense out of:
http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t29453-combat_ratings_level_80_a/
What does it all mean?
Here’s what I think it means and what I think it does Not mean;
- Dodge, Parry and Miss are under diminished returns
- Those are calculated separately (in order to force tanks to spread their stats)
- Everything stat that Gives you Dodge, Parry or Miss, is Not under diminished returns until it is fully added to everything else
- So if you add gear with Dodge rating, and then go over to Agility, you’ll still be adding to the pool of dodge with the exact same diminished value for each dodge skill point
- Stories about defense being worth more than dodge rating at a certain point, is not because defense will give you more dodge, but because it will still give you more Miss
I don’t think that on any moment during the Burning Crusade that I ever had to think about that fancy little feature via Defense that gives you a “Chance to be missed”.
So take a look at the new table for druids; No more crushes (because they don’t happen anymore if you’re only 2 or 3 levels lower than your average boss), No more crits (because our SotF got upgraded), just Hit, Dodge, and Miss.
Should this make you any happier? Not really, because the mobs/bosses just plainly hit harder and your Dodge isn’t what it used to be anymore.
What about Armor?
It ain’t what it used to be anymore, the multiplier doesn’t apply to every gearslot anymore. In return we got some wanna-be-mitigation things like fixed percentage damage reduction talents which we won’t be able to influence by gear.
What about Health?
Now here’s the big ol’ rub about this all. Like in every cap-level update we’ve had since vanilla WoW, is that stats like agility, dodge rating, defense rating and armor will give you less value, because the conversion rates are level dependent. Add “another” diminished return to the pool of dodge and chance to be missed, and you’ll have a lot of fun seeing your fancy 10 agility upgrade to have the value of mass produced plastic spoons.
Health, as in Stamina, however, still has the good ol’ HP=BaseHP+Stamina*10*talentedmultiplier conversion formula.
So now, when you happen to stumble upon our trusted source of gear indexation; Emmerald, and you’ll first be like “omg this item has more dodge and armor etc, why is it lower than that item” like I was, then consider all of the above.
So what are we missing?
You’re missing that Healers do not have an infinite amount of mana. Simply stacking stamina will still make you wipe like mad because healers will simply not have the ability to keep up until the end of the fight.
So even though everything seems to work against us in our heads, there’s still one stat that will still be able to be the biggest factor in our tanking: Armor. Even though armor is of lesser value, and your damage reduction doesn’t look fancy enough like in the old days, with every little bit you will still reduce the amount of damage taken during long fights in a linear way with every little bit of armor you collect.
What about this Chance to be missed?
The base chance to be missed is quite low, mainly because our level is 3 levels down from raid bosses. This means we’ll have to compensate that with A Lot of defense, which we can’t anymore gear-wise. Rumours about the magic dodge number to be 50% before going over to defense doesn’t seem to have any source or fancy graph, but it “might” be true. The question of how you’re going to collect 50% dodge however I won’t be able to answer…
Meanwhile
I’m determined to find the exact ins and outs, but I fear I won’t get the same kind of easy to use spreadsheets like we were used to having. Add that to limited openings in my schedule, a lot of raiding and healing, and plenty of other things to worry about.
So back to sleeping, working, and then continuing to collect champion seals for that awesome Teldrassil Sproutling.
