Just wanted to point out this awesome post over at Maintankadin for any aspiring tanks or, hell, any folks trying to determine when to sacrifice avoidance for more effective health.

Go to this post and scroll down a little to the descriptions of the tank levels, find yourself and your recommended number. Then, scroll down a little bit more to where it says “How to stack stamina” and gem or enchant down the line as your tank level would recommend.

Awesome guide based on some rock-solid math from Theck and Meloree. I was pleasantly surprised to find I’m doing all but the last three, and strongly considering the third from the bottom: replacing the Argent Crusade head enchant with the Engineering one.

If you’re debating the value of one gem/enchant over another through the lens of EH, this is a great tool to help you along the right path.

My colleagues Honors and Wrathy have already written about this, but I wanted to throw my two cents in.

The conventional wisdom for a while now has been that 11 armor is equivalent to 1 stamina. Theck, however, has turned this assumption on its head by plotting out the value of armor based on how much of a fight is magical damage. In this post he has a graph basically showing various armor/stamina values–with this as the money quote:

So for a purely physical fight, armor seems like a pretty good deal. But for even a fight with 20% magical damage, Armor becomes devalued by 20%. This will generally be enough to make a Stamina trinket provide more EH than an armor trinket.

For an example, let’s look at the Glyph of Indomitability, since that’s what started this thread. It gives 1792 armor, which is equivalent to 153 stamina. However, for a fight with Y=20%, we get only (1-Y)=80% of that, or 123 stamina. For a fight with 30% magical damage, it’s only worth 107 stamina, and so forth.

It’s interesting because just about every fight has *some* magical component to them which means that the old 11:1 figure is just about worthless. This kind of throws out the window the ancient understanding of EH as a figure of armor and stamina, with no vacillating in between. Now, serious vacillation is needed.

What this means is that if you’re evaluating two pieces of gear, one with lots of armor and one with lots of stamina, you should choose the piece with more stamina (assuming the excess armor doesn’t exceed the value of excess stamina for the amount of magical damage in that fight). All that means, ultimately, is this is another point in the column of “stamina > all”. Stamina remains the safest bet, sadly.

Well, not totally, armor does have some worth. Just not as much worth as we assumed it had before.

EH as most of you probably already know stands for Effective Health, which is basically how much raw damage a mob has to deal to kill you. It’s a pretty potent number for determining proper gearing, derived from your total HP and your total armor.

Now, as I’ve blogged previously, I’m planning to drop Mining and pick up Engineering (for the +800 armor to gloves, among other reasons). Some people around here (looking at you Logan!) have been arguing against the switch, and with excellent points at that. So I’ve been holding off on pulling the trigger because the prospect of losing 50 stamina seemed pretty daunting.

Finally though I sat down and crunched some numbers, and I think I finally have the ammunition I need to make the jump.

Here are the EH numbers I received from this awesome calculator on the Tanking Tips site for each scenario:

Mining (33274 HP/25074 Armor): 83428

Mining with Toughness affected by Kings (33324 HP/25074 Armor): 83553

Engineering (32704 HP/25874 Armor): 83572

So, no matter what, it’s an EH gain. I think I’m making the right choice.