Avoidance vs Effective Health: Content we Undergear

Posted by admin on 04 14th, 2009

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The 3rd installment of our series discussing Avoidance and Effective Health. The previous 2 talked about myths surrounding the two gearing ideologies as well as talked about healer preferences . Today, we’re going to look at what I consider an extremely rare situation… Content we Undergear Yup, especially these days, it’s very rare that we as tanks undergear content. There’s a reason Ensidia (A professional raid guild) completed all the content in a few days. There really doesn’t currently exist any huge gear checks. There was no need to really farm gear to reach an encounter’s tanking, healing or dps requirements. Which isn’t to say all the content currently is super easy nor that getting additional gear isn’t beneficial, it’s just to say that you can’t blame gear. None of these current realities defeat the concept behind things though. Questioning the Conceptual Effective Health at it’s roots is all about tanking content we undergear, but why is this? The answer is we require a minimum amount of Health and Armor in order to survive an attack(s) from a boss. But, this answer results in more questions than answers, most notably, why is this the answer? For fights that we undergear, we have two choices: Sufficient Health and Armor (Effective Health) Sufficient Avoidance Without enough Effective Health, we’ll need to avoid a higher than average amount of attacks from a boss in order to survive and in the most extreme case, we’ll have to literally avoid all attacks from a boss. Without enough Avoidance, we’ll need a higher than average amount of healing/second and in the most extreme case, we’ll have to constantly have more healing/second coming in than damage/second taken. Looking at things in extremes has a way of clarifying things you could say. While yes, it’s unrealistic for the extremes to every be realities that doesn’t change that the extreme case of having to avoid all attacks is unsolvable whereas the extreme case of throwing more healers at a tank taking an unreal amount of damage is very solvable. That’s what tanking content we undergear all comes down to… we can solve one, we cannot solve the other. But, how do we approach things if nothing is solvable? What if making it possible, but difficult isn’t an option? What if we’re Underhealing content? Which is to say, what if we don’t bring enough healers? Lack of healers is a very real issue for even the best guild and while it’s true it can be handled by respecing and alts, what if one day you find yourself with 5 healers for an encounter that requires 8? Should this affect how you gear? Yup, this is where Avoidance is king. Why? Because no one’s going to have enough healers for the encounter including yourself. (the tank) This is the big benefit of Avoidance, it’s best for when healers can’t keep up. Well if that’s the case… Why not always gear for Avoidance and always underheal encounters? Because, you’re rolling the dice. It’s not a good situation. During your progression with fewer healers, you’re sometimes just going to take a string of hits and it’s game over. We’re stuck gearing in a way to make the best of bad scenario. Why not always gear for Avoidance when we do have enough healers then? Because, you’re still rolling the dice. Now certainly you’re in a better situation than when you didn’t have enough healers, but it’s still a gamble. Gearing for Effective Health will always mean that you have a better chance of surviving the worst case scenario because the worst cause scenario doesn’t involve avoiding attacks. How is this useful to us? It allows us to understand how we should approach encounters. When attempting the unknown, we’re always best starting with Effective Health. If the healers can’t keep up then we should put on more Avoidance. However, if the healers can’t keep up and as a result, the raid leader addresses this problem with giving us more healers then we’re best sticking with our Effective Health set. If the healers continue to struggle despite there being more of them then we’re back at the situation of wanting more Avoidance. But, I never deal with the Unknown Just because you read up on bosses ahead of time does not mean that you don’t deal with the unknown. What do you think Burst damage is? Dragons especially are notorious for this type of attack, but it’s also not uncommon to be facing a demonly type that randomly throws a nasty cleave at you. The difference between these two gearing ideologies is one handles Burst damage (the unknown) better whereas the other handles Consistent damage better. (by helping healers keep up) The skill to gearing is in being able to gauge the number (and to some extent the quality) of your healers and being able to gear yourself accordingly as your guild learns a new encounter. (or even farms an old troublesome one) I’m not sure if it’s ironic or simply strangely amusing, but I want you to really ponder the point that I’m presenting. Effective Health utilizes consistency to survive randomness. Avoidance utilizes randomness to survive consistency. Perfect or Poetic?

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