Stamina vs dodge is a debate that has been going on since the beginning of time. Stamina obviously gives you a larger health pool, which means you can take more hits before a healer needs to worry about you. It also allows you to survive the high bursts of some of the harder bosses. Dodge, on the other hand, lets you take less hits. This not only reduces the amount of heals that you need, but it also reduces the amount of time you’re at low health, due to dodgeing during bursts, which gives healers time to heal you back up to full.

In this guide, I hope to clear up some of the common misconceptions associated with the topic, and intend to inform you as to why stacking dodge can be valuable. I may be a bit long-winded at some parts, and may not explain some things as much as I should. If you notice something that you think should be changed, please don’t be afraid to speak up. Keep in mind I’m no math expert, and I’m not in one of the top raiding guilds, so the information here is just what I’ve picked up through my own tanking experiences, and from reading many other threads. So, on with the guide, and I hope that it helps you.

Now, a topic that often comes up in the discussion of dodge vs stam is “Playing to the class’s strength”. Namely, a high health pool. For this, go ahead and throw on that polar set with full stam gems. Grab that essence of gossamer and go to town. Feel free to get your hp as high as you want. However, which bosses require that? The only thing that comes to mind which absolutely requires more health than can be gotten by maintaining a balance of dodge and stam, is 3 drake sartharian. No other fight currently requires that much health, so it’s pointless to have that much. If a boss can be tanked with 35k hp, who do you think will tank it better. The bear with 60k hp and 20% dodge, or the bear with 35k hp and 40% dodge? Obviously, the higher health one might keep a fuller health bar through the fight, but his healers will have less mana, and he’ll have taken more overall damage.

Yes, dodge does have a diminishing return. However, it was mainly put in place to stop people from becoming unhittable (Which rogues, and I believe druids, could do towards the end of BC), and as such doesn’t have much effect until you hit the higher percentages of dodge. Of course, when higher raids come out and you start seeing those higher levels of dodge, feel free to shift more towards defense and stamina. At the current gear level, however, you shouldn’t worry too much about the DR.

Something that helped me think of dodge as more than just reducing incoming damage was a thread by Hypatia on the Tankspot.com forums.

From “The power of avoidance (preliminary results)” (http://www.tankspot.com/forums/f200/37241-power-avoidance-preliminary-results.html)

“Assume a tank is within one hit of dying. How long, on average, do the tank and healers have to prevent tank death?” This is called the “Reaction time”. Unless you have rediculous amounts of health (Enough to take a full burst and still have enough health to take a few more hits from the boss before you need a heal), you will eventually get low on health. You may not see it as much in most naxx fights since they’re all fairly easy as far as tank damage goes, but on bosses like patchwerk that provide a steady stream of high incoming damage, you’ll notice that, unless you outgear it, you’re going to be at low health once in a while. This is where reaction time comes in. How long do you have during that period of low health to be healed, so you don’t die?

Having more health doesn’t help in this situation, since the boss takes you down from full to low with a burst before any heals can land, meaning unless you can get enough health to take another hit, that extra stam is useless. Dodge, however, is very useful in this situation. On top of reducing the likelihood of taking a full burst (which is explained below as burst time), dodge can increase the amount of time you can be at low health before being healed.

Now, I know what you’re thinking. Since dodge is just a percentage, there’s no guarantee that you will dodge that hit at low health, and you might die just as easily. However, since I’ve already explained how stam doesn’t help in this situation, a chance at not being killed is better than nothing. Also, don’t think that getting enough stam to survive another hit is easy. With bosses hitting as much as they do, you would need a large amount of stamina just to get in the range of surviving the hit, and even then things can go wrong.

Also from the above mentioned thread, is “Burst time”, described as such.
“Assume a tank is kept at full Health whenever possible. In particular, assume that whenever a tank is missed at least once by a boss, there’s always enough time for healing spells to arrive which will top him off. How long, on average, will it be until the tank is hit enough times in a row to at least kill him unless he is healed during the string of hits?”

Basically, this is the time between periods of low health. Since a boss can burst you to low health, you need to either be healed during the burst, or dodge an attack. Once again, more stamina doesn’t help unless you get enough to take another hit, which is hard to do. So, the only thing that will help you here is dodge. The higher your dodge, the more likely you are to dodge an attack during the burst, and the less likely your healers are to die from a heart attack while constantly big healing you from the brink of death.

This brings up another interesting point. Healer mana efficiency. If you’re constantly at low health, your healers will only be able to use their quick, mana inefficient heals, due to a higher risk of you dying while they queue up a long heal. While if you dodge during the burst, your healers have more chance to provide constant, less spiky healing, which lets them last longer. No matter how much stam you have, if your healers are out of mana, you’re dead. There’s not much more to say about this, but I would like to stress the fact that dodge increasing mana efficiency is very important. Noone wants to be that mana sponge who runs his or her healers oom after every trash pull.

All in all, it’s up to you how you choose to gear. If you really want to stack stam, then go ahead and stack stam. I’m not here to tell you that you’re doing it wrong, just to show you my opinion. Talk to your healers, see if they think you’re a mana sponge. If they do, you might want to look at getting more dodge. If they don’t, keep on doing what you’re doing. Just please don’t preach on the forums about how stacking stam is the only way, because it really isn’t.

TLDR: Stamina is nice to have, but, at least in my opinion, the benefits do not outweigh the cost. Taking more overall damage, and putting more stress on the healers are both side effects of stacking stam, and if you have enough health to survive, dodge is the better choice. Of course, harder hitting bosses in later raids might require more stamina stacking, and if you get enough dodge to feel the diminishing returns, you might want to look at stam more.

This post is meant to inform you as to the required health for various bosses. After you reach the required health, you can either get more health, or get more dodge, depending on your playstyle and the specific encounter. The sentence immediately following the boss names will state the required health.

Entry level raiding – Sarth 3D, Patchwerk, and KT.

I chose these three bosses because they’re the best examples of the different types of fights, and they’re also the three hardest fights in this tier of raids. Sarth is almost full magic damage, Patchwerk is full melee damage, and KT is a mix of both.

If you see something wrong with anything that I have written, feel free to point it out, but please keep any criticism constructive.

Sartharion 3D: 40k+ health, the higher the better.
Alright, first – the math. With 3 drakes up, you have a -25% health debuff, and a +100% fire damage debuff to worry about. According to wowhead, Sarth’s flame breath does 10,938-14,062 damage. With the debuff on you, that’s 21,876-28,124 damage. Add in PotP, and that’s still a 25k hit.
If you have, say 40k health raid buffed before you start the encounter, you’ll have 30k after Vesperon’s debuff. This means you have a 5k buffer for melee hits. 45K health, 8750 buffer.

Keep in mind that if you have both shadron and vesperon up at the same time, you’re likely to get vesperon’s portal debuff on top of shadron’s debuff. I’m not positive as to how the debuffs stack, but if it’s a straight 175%, you would be taking 38,670 damage max, with that being reduced to a pretty much straight 34k after PotP. Unless you have over 45k health before the debuff, you’ll die in one hit. Even if you do have over 45k, pretty much any melee hit afterwards would finish you off. As such, cooldown usage would be necessary in such a scenario. There’s quite a few ways to do it, but I won’t get into that here.

Patchwerk: Health depends on healing, generally 35k+.
Unlike Sarth, patchwerk does melee damage only. As such, armor comes into play here. The calcs would look something like the following: 79,000 to 81,000 hateful, 80,000 on average. 80,000*.88(PotP)=70,400. 70,400*.306(I currently have 69.4% armor in bear selfed) = 21542.4. So patch would hit me, on average, for 21.5k assuming these calculations are correct.

Don’t look at that and think you can tank it with 25k health, though, because it would make your healers cry. Say you have 25k health raid buffed and you take a 21.5k hateful. Your healers have the time between hatefuls(1 second) to heal you for over 18k, in order for you to survive the next hateful. With 35k health, however, they only need to heal you for a bit over 8k in order for you to survive. Of course, this changes depending on how close to full your healers are able to get you between hatefuls, but it’s generally accepted that around 35-40k is best for patchwerk.

Kel’thuzad: Health depends on a variety of things, generally the same gear as patchwerk is fine.
Kel’thuzad is an interesting fight, because the incoming damage depends entirely on how much interrupting is done. Worst case scenario, though, is getting hit by every frost bolt. After PotP, they do about 27k damage. Given the multiple sources of damage, and the possibility of having to tank a scarab along with kel if your offtanks can’t get them all, 35k+ health is generally a good number.

source: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=13909408292&sid=1

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Tags: dodge, Druid, stamina, tanking, world-of-warcraft, wotlk, wow, wow-guide