Avoidance vs Effective Health

There are two schools of thought about what to prioritise when tanking: Avoidance or Effective Health.

Some people go for avoidance, stacking parry, dodge and defense so that they avoid as many incoming attacks as possible. If you dodge, parry, or are missed after all, you take no damage. However, since it's impossible to get a combined Dodge, Parry and Miss chance of 102.4%, then you have to accept that sooner or later you will get hit, and hit hard.

This is where Effective Health comes in. Simply put, Effective health is a measure of how much damage you can take before you die. This includes Armor and your Shield Block value. The problem with an overreliance on Effective Health is that you tend to become more of a sponge than a tank, requiring your healers to chain their larger, more expensive heals constantly to keep your massive health pool topped up.

In Ulu's regular tank gear, I try to balance both Effective Health and Avoidance along with enough spelldamage to ensure solid threat generation over our sometimes triggerhappy DPSers. I do have specialised sets set up that focus more on either Effective Health or avoidance that I equip depending on the situation.

When deciding what the situation requires, then ask yourself what's killing you. If you're dying to massive spike damage, then it's an Effective Health fight. If you're dying because your healers are running out of mana, then get some more Avoidance in there.

Oh and if you can't be bothered keeping track of all those annoying EH calculations, I can heartily reccomend downloading Tankpoints. Whilst I pay no attention to the actual Tankpoints calculator, it does a great job of calculating Effective Health and uncrushability.