Over the course of WoW’s lifetime, many aspects of the game have changed. One thing that has remained the same is the job of the tank, and simply put, that is to take a beating. There have been many ways to measure how much of a beating a tank could take (Effective Health, Damage Taken Per Second etc), and these metrics have guided our gearing and enchanting philosophies. Over the past 6 months, a new metric has been developed and has become adopted by the tanking theory crafting community. An explanation to the Theck-Meloree Index (TMI) can be found here. If you enjoy math, this is a very good read. Simply put, TMI is a measure of how much damage the tank could be in danger of taking over a 6 second period, reported as #k in damage which you can instantly read as a % of your health. Its more than just “spike damage” since it considers all of the hits to either side of that “big swing”. Keep in mind that TMI does not factor in any “non-rotational” cooldowns. Instead it paints a picture of how vulnerable your character is during periods not covered by cooldowns
Lucky for us, some WarcraftLogs are now displaying this number, allowing us to see just how we are doing week to week. Effective TMI includes heals/shields from all sources. Normal TMI is only self-heals and absorbs.
In this example, the tank effectively took 80% of his life in damage in 6 seconds! Ouchies!! But now that we know this, the healers can better respond to tank and raid damage. In addition, we can compare TMI to TMI(e) to get an idea of how well a tank is using his defensive cooldowns.
Secondary Stats
So how do we reduce our TMI and prevent our healers from screaming at us? As always, through our gear, gems and enchants. But in WoD, Blizzard has introduced some new secondary stats to the mix.
Crit: Crit changes the percentage of damaging attacks and healing spells that result in a critical strike for generally 200% of the effect. In addition, most tank classes generate extra resources to fuel their active mitigation when they crit on an attack.
Haste: Haste affects the rate at which melee auto-attacks are dealt, the cast time of spells, the tick rate of damage over time, heal over time, and channeled spells, the channel time of spells (but not the duration of DoTs/HoTs), and spells' global cooldown. Additionally, haste increases the regeneration rate of energy, runes, and focus. There are no haste breakpoints, as DoTs and HoTs get a partial tick at the end, equal in damage/healing to the ratio of that time and the full tick time.
Mastery: Mastery is an attribute that has different effects for each classes active mitigation. In addition, mastery also gives AP for tanks (roughly 90% based on current math).
Multistrike: Multistrike gives most abilities up to two separate chances to hit their original target an additional time for 30% of the original amount. Additionally, each tick of a DoT or HoT has an independent chance to land a multistrike. Multistrikes crit independently of the original attack—that is, the main attack does not have to crit for the multistrike to crit.
Versatility: Versatility increases outgoing damage, healing, and absorbs and to a lesser extent, reduces incoming damage. With 5% Versatility, players do 5% more damage and healing, enlarge their absorbs by 5%, and take 2.5% less damage. The healing increase applies to self-heals as well.
Bonus Armor: Bonus Armor is the tank-only stat, and provides armor that would not normally appear on non-armor items. Bonus Armor also provides attack power.
Stat Priority
All of these stats were feed into SimulationCraft to determine the basic stat weights for each tank.
DK: Bonus Armor > Mastery = Multistrike > Versatility > Haste > Crit
Druid: Bonus Armor > Mastery > Multistrike (10% buffed) > Haste > Crit > Versatility
Monk: Bonus Armor > Haste (until comfortable with regen) > Versatility > Crit > Multistrike > Mastery
Paladin: Mastery > Bonus Armor > Versatility > Haste (50%) > Crit > Multistrike
Warrior: Bonus Armor > Mastery = Crit > Versatility > Haste > Multistrike
As we can see, Bonus Armor is the go to stat for everyone. Sadly this coveted stat is only on a few pieces of gear (neck, cloak, rings and shield) and cannot be gemmed or enchanted for.
If we remove BA from the above lists, we can start to see the top 3 stats each class really wants.
DK: Mastery = Multistrike > Versatility
Druid: Mastery > Multistrike (10% buffed) > Haste
Monk: Haste (until comfortable with regen) > Versatility > Crit
Paladin: Mastery > Versatility > Haste (50%)
Warrior: Mastery = Crit > Versatility
Now we are starting to get a clearer picture of our gearing and enchanting priorities. But keep in mind, these stats do not scale in a vacuum, but rather they scale dynamically with each other. This means as a tank, you need to be aware of your damage intake and look at your TMI at the end of the raid and see how that new piece of gear changed things. In the first tier, we will probably just stack one stat. But once we start seeing mythic gear, or move onto a new tier with more raw stats, we will need to be conscious of diminishing returns and help our TMI by enchanting & gemming differently. AskMrRobot will offer a “Compare Logs” and “Analyze Logs” to see how we stack up against others. These are currently not working until WoD, so we will have to wait until then to see how accurate they are. In the end, if you are OCD and need to mix-max to the 5th decimal point download and use SimC whenever you replace gear.
Hopefully this all made sense. Let me know if you have any questions.
Hos
Edit: Stickied and put space between Haste and Mastery as they were blended together. -Krit
