Combat table coverage/unhittable/uncrushable

I've read some posts on forums where people discuss that tanks should have all their mitigation: miss, dodge, parry and block add up to 102.5% in order to never receive an ordinary hit from a boss. In tbc this was done to eliminate crushing blows (which were removed in wotlk). In cata I remember reforging a ton into mastery in order to get block rating high enough to reach 102.5% and never receive a normal hit. But in wrath everyone talks about 420 defense cap and then just gems full stamina. I've never seen anyone talk about becoming unhittable in wotlk. Why is that? Is it a bad strategy? Do bosses hit too weak in wotlk or are tanks so op that they can afford to get hit all they want?

Nope, not possible. You can't get enough def to avoid being hit all together, you can't get to 100% block with items, same goes for dodge and parry.
But you, as a paladin, have Holy Shield which increases block chance and should be kept up all the time.
Def cap is 540 and that's enough so that bosses can't crit and that's all you need because normal attacks which don't crit can be controlled by armor, block and parry or even defensives. Going above that cap does benefit you, but it's not necessary even though you will pass the cap from gear alone.
So what was uncrushable in TBC is uncrittable in wotlk, same effect, different way of getting there.

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Originally Posted by dolcokidol

Nope, not possible. You can't get enough def to avoid being hit all together, you can't get to 100% block with items, same goes for dodge and parry.
But you, as a paladin, have Holy Shield which increases block chance and should be kept up all the time.
Def cap is 540 and that's enough so that bosses can't crit and that's all you need because normal attacks which don't crit can be controlled by armor, block and parry or even defensives. Going above that cap does benefit you, but it's not necessary even though you will pass the cap from gear alone.
So what was uncrushable in TBC is uncrittable in wotlk, same effect, different way of getting there.

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Well currently I play on frostmourne (naxx content) and have 3.6k gs and i am gemmed almost full defense and with holy shield active I have around 98% total mitigation unbuffed. With some better gear i think it's very possible to reach 102.5% with holy shield active ofc. Idk what warriors have but I think they also have some +block rating skill or talent. My question is whether this approach (going full defense and mitigation) is better than the 420def + stack stamina approach.

Hey, so this is a common misconception that alot of players have. This is adressed by the following wiki article http://wowwiki.wikia.com/Attack_table Basically, you can only have 100% of possible results, in the priority of Miss > Dodge > Parry > Glancing Blow > Block > Critical hit > Crushing Blow > Ordinary hit

TL;DR; There is a common misconception that if you have 50% chance to crit and 10% chance to miss, that only 45% of your overall attacks will crit. THIS IS INCORRECT
Instead, in this scenario, looking at the attack table mechanic, overall 10% of your attack would miss, 50% would crit, and the remaining 40% would hit normally.

This is due to the Attack Table mechanic outlined in the article. Now relating this back to Paladins; Most def capped paladins will have roughly a 5% chance for attacks to miss them from their defense skill, and lets say a rounded 20% parry chance, and a 20% dodge chance to make calculating things easy.
5%+ miss + 20% Parry + 20% Dodge only leaves 55% chance left for other possibilities.

Now depnding on your Block Rating, most paladins in Tier 7 armor easily have somewhere between 15%~20% base block chance without shield block rating gear.
We then also have our Holy Shield skill which provides another 30% Block chance, and the talent Redoubt which provides another 30% Block chance. Overall, this is sufficient Block Chance to easily fill out the entire Attack Table and effectively push Criticals off the table... but only for normal mobs that follow the general priority. Bosses and other special mobs can critically hit, and have this critical attack be blocked. So this form of crit supression is not viable for raid or boss tanking.

In any case, even if this worked on bosses, it's still not worth going for. With just Holy Shield active, we can see that 5% miss+ 20% Dodge + 20% Parry + 15% Base Block + 30%Block from holy shield = 90%, leaving 10% open for other possibilities like getting critical'd when Redoubt is not active.

You could theoretically stack 10% more Dodge/Parry/Block Rating to make up for this, but in essence this is not considered worthwhile, as you might as well just gem for a little bit of extra Defense Rating and get crit supression conventionally, which is much more beneficial due to the miss chance/dodge/parry that defense rating also provides.

Also make sure you are aware of how block works: A block does not completely negate an attack https://wowwiki.fandom.com/wiki/Block
With a full set of gear that has no Block Value, a typical block reduces the damage from an attack by around about 1k~1.5k damage depending on your gear, but with alot of block value gear this number can easily reach 3~4k for paladins in T7 armor.

As a general rule of thumb, you can consider Block RATING as a fairly ineffective stat, whereas Block VALUE is a fairly decent stat. But for boss-tanking (slow bosses that hit hard), Parry and Dodge rating is superior in terms of mitigation, and for tanking situations with many weak rapid attacks, Block Value becomes higher mitigation than parry/dodge.

Of course, EHP stats such as Stamina/Armor are always preferred over mitigation stats in WotLK, but now that's an entirely different topic.

Edit: Raid bosses, (some?) Elites, and player vs player YELLOW damage cannot be crit supressed through criticals according to the wiki sources. You can crit suppress yourself againt PvP auto attack (white damage) and against normal mobs though. As always Wiki sources may not always be 100% reliable.

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Originally Posted by RockOn

Well currently I play on frostmourne (naxx content) and have 3.6k gs and i am gemmed almost full defense and with holy shield active I have around 98% total mitigation unbuffed. With some better gear i think it's very possible to reach 102.5% with holy shield active ofc. Idk what warriors have but I think they also have some +block rating skill or talent. My question is whether this approach (going full defense and mitigation) is better than the 420def + stack stamina approach.

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As stated in my above reply, this is not a reliable way to get crit suppressed against raid bosses, but if the mentality of a EHP vs Avoidance approach topic sounds interesting to you, I cover this in my Tanking guide, which is admittedly aimed at Druids but this particular section applies equally to all tanks in WotLK and is a great read for ANY tank.

Spoiler: Show

06. Why EHP and not Avoidance in raids?


EHP Stands for Effective Hit Points: It's the concept of how much damage you can REALLY take before dying, without receiving any heals. This is made up of 2 things:
1)Damage Reduction Effects (Usually Armor, for physical damage)
2)Hit Points (Usually Stamina)

Say you have 51% damage reduction (Damage taken = 49%), and 100,000 Hit Points. Your EHP would be just over 200,000, as given by formula
EHP = (100/Damage Taken%) x HP
So in this case,
EHP = (100/49) x 100,000
=2.04082 x 100,000
=204,082 EHP

Back to our explanation of why we're obsessed with EHP:
In WotLK, If you are tanking challenging bosses such as in Heroics, a Tank's health bar receives a HUGE amount of both DAMAGE and HEALING, resulting in the HP bar rapidly bouncing up and down like a yo-yo. The problem comes because Healing and Damage don't arrive in a steady stream - Tanks are capable of receiving 100k in burst healing in just a few seconds, but are also easily capable of RECEIVING 100k in burst DAMAGE in just a few seconds.
Bursts of healing might come in while you're already at Max HP, turning into USELESS overhealing. Looking at the flipside, a burst of Damage that makes your HP touch 0, for even a split second, makes you instantly DEAD.
There's just simply no reliable way to "smooth" out the incoming damage you take besides from just having a huge amount of Effective Hit Points to always be prepared for the worst.


Avoidance is a great stat on paper, but should NOT be considered a reliable way to keep yourself alive in a raiding scenario. Avoidance and mitigation helps you take less damage, and makes you EASIER TO HEAL, but does nothing for your Time-To-Live rating which is the sole deciding factor of your survival in WotLK raiding content.
Consider that by the end of Icecrown Citadel, bosses inflict enough damage to kill a tank in under a second, but healers are also able to fully heal a tank in just as short a time frame. This is NOT a healthy nor consistant way for tanks to survive.
You have to be able to survive ALL the hits, ALL the time. You can't rely on a "chance" to keep you alive. Your goal is to use "guaranteed" options for survival; Your Health bar is ALWAYS guaranteed to be there, but your dodge chance is anything EXCEPT guaranteed to save you from a lethal attack.
There's a very huge difference between "taking less damage", and "Being hard to kill". It is not hard for WotLK raid bosses to kill you, and the only thing keeping you alive is the fact that your healers have a few precious moments to heal you before you die; Your best option is to increase the size on how long these few precious moments are and maximise the time your healers have. A CHANCE to extend this time (by dodging an attack) simply doesn't cut it for consistancy. IE, your sole worth as a tank in End game raiding is based on your guaranteed EHP.

Why EHP became so important in WotLK
EHP is extremely important in WotLK due to game design errors present in WotLK, which made tank avoidance so high at end-game that in order to make Raid Bosses a challenge, melee attacks from bosses had to almost one-hit-kill tanks or else fights would be too easy for healers. Think about this: If a tank has 75% avoidance, this means only 1 in 4 boss attacks hit. If a Boss attacks every 2 seconds, it means the tank only gets hit once every 8 seconds.
Healers are easily capable of healing 10k healing per second, and there's 5 healers in the 25man raid. 50k Healing per second, and the boss hits once per 8 seconds, that means the boss would melee for 400k damage per auto attack just to keep up with the tank's avoidance and possible healing... which of course would just 1 shot K.O any tank in the game. This exact reason is why Blizzard implemented -20% dodge debuffs for ICC and Halion, as well as redesigned bosses to hit faster but in smaller damage per attack to "smooth" out damage and try to lessen instantly-dead tanks. Still, despite their best efforts some tanks will end up just dying randomly in under 2 seconds and there's nothing anyone could have done - Unfortunately the only fix for this is to have ridiculous amounts of EHP to compensate.

Read more about it here: Blizzard messes up tank avoidance, and is forced to make drastic changes to make raiding at end game possible at all.

Posted by Daelo, the Lead Encounter Designer (the person who designs and balances boss fights):

"The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more "spiky" than is healthy for raiding."
"Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn't avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens."
"We've been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There's a limit to what we can do, however."

Just before Cataclysm was released,GhostCrawler, Lead Systems Designer admitted to the mistakes made during WotLK and explained how the team would fix them in future expansions:
"Our original estimations for tank avoidance would have worked fine had we not decided to add extra tiers of gear to reward heroic boss kills halfway through the expansion."
"The Cataclysm design will keep tank avoidance at more manageable levels[than WotLK]."
"What I would like to see in Cataclysm is higher health pools but also lower heals ... Hopefully everyone won't be on the verge of almost dying"

So the recap - The CREATORS of WotLK admitted that tanks could die in 1-2 second windows. That Healers have to spam their "largest heals " in case of "huge damage spikes". Then the fix they implemented in Cataclysm? "Higher health pools"

Long story short, the experts who designed the game, the best tanks in the game, and all the mathematicians behind the most advanced theory crafting done in World of Warcraft all agree on a single fact:

>>Effective Health is by far the most valuable tool that keeps a tank alive<<

Effective Health is, and should be every tank's number 1 priority. Get those +30 Stamina Gems out and get Stam-stacking