The Future of Stats and How That Relates to Tanking

With the exception of bonus armor, tank stats are basically going away in the next expansion. While tanks previous had dodge and parry to stack up - stats that were undeniably for tanks, and were useful (if not optimal) for every tank (ok, technically parry wasn't useful for Druids) - in the future, we'll be using the exact same array of stats as DPS and Healers.

We'll also be getting new secondary stats: Amplify, Readiness and Multistrike.

There is something a bit problematic with this, though.

Tanks have always geared for survival. While threat was something that one had to work for before Cataclysm (and, to be fair, you still need to put in some effort,) your gearing strategy tended to be focused around surviving the damage taken by the big bad guys.

Tank gear that had avoidance stats, as well as the defunct Defense and Block ratings, was clearly useful in that regard. It used to be that haste or critical strike were utterly pointless for a tank - the best you'd get out of them was a little extra threat, and while that extra threat is by no means unwelcome, it would be ill-advised to focus too much on it.

There is a fundamental, underlying problem that causes this issue, and that is the relevance of throughput.

DPS and Healers grow more effective the greater their throughput is. A Rogue who hits harder with every strike is doing her job better. She is there to reduce the enemy's health as fast as possible, and thus, extra Agility, and therefore attack power, will always make her more effective at her job. A healing Druid, likewise, benefits greatly from having more powerful heals. If his regrowth ticks for twice as much as it did before, that means that he can be more efficient, using fewer heals to keep people alive and also producing greater heals to rescue players from high-damage situations.

Admittedly, a healer's job, much like a tank's is a bit of a binary situation - pass or fail. But a healer can do his or her job more effectively with greater throughput.

In the case of tanks, however, throughput is not really relevant. In an era when tanks are unlikely to lose threat on an enemy once they have them, the need to constantly push their damage-per-second higher diminishes. Sure, it doesn't hurt to have a tank do more damage, but this does not aid them in their primary role.

And that's why stats like Crit and Multistrike are in danger of being junk stats for tanks.

With changes to the Paladin passive skills, Paladin tanks began to benefit from haste - using the reduced cool downs on their main rotational abilities to maximize uptime on Shield of the Righteous. Death Knights benefit from haste as well, as more haste means more Death Strikes. But Warriors are left in the cold, basically only getting to auto-attack more frequently.

Likewise, crit grants essentially no benefit to DK and Paladin tanks.

So how are we going to navigate the brave new world where there are not typically tank stats on gear?

My best solution I can come up with is to tie survival to throughput. Active Mitigation provides a context for this that makes sense. In the case of Druids, for example, one of their passives allows their Maul ability to create a damage shield proportional to the damage done by the attack. Effectively, this means that the stronger that Maul is - and if it crits, it's twice as strong - the greater survival benefit of the tank.

I realize this isn't a perfect solution. Subtractive damage mitigation, like the way that Block originally worked, has always been problematic. It tends to be too powerful against lightly-hitting enemies and not powerful enough against hard-hitting bosses.

But I would like to see the damage a tank does tie into his or her survival. Otherwise, many of the existing stats will not merely be sub-optimal, but actually useless, and that flies in the face of the new gearing philosophy.