What Defense Cap? Can You Have Too Much Avoidance?

In itemizing gear, tanks have several main priorities:

  • Become Uncrittable (490 Defense, 224 Resilience, or some mix thereof)
  • Become Uncrushable (102.4% Total Avoidance)
  • Increase Stamina (You can never have too much)
  • Increase Threat Generation (Keep ahead of the raid)

As a Paladin, point number two is particularly important. It takes some care to ensure that as you strive for higher stamina and threat generation, you don’t dip below the avoidance threshold. This leads me to a conclusion that people often overlook - Defense is always valueable.

Is There a Defense “Cap”? Hell No!

The other day, one of our warriors was complaining that he had 520+ Defense. “This is too much!” he said. He wanted 490 Defense, and no more. The rest should be stamina, block value, or maybe dodge rating.

Why hate on Defense?

The initial assumption is that Defense is needed for one thing - achieving crit immunity. In this area, yes, anything over 490 Defense is “wasted.”

However, it fulfills another important goal. It raises your overall avoidance. 17 points of Defense Rating yields 7 Defense Rating - .28% Dodge, Miss, Parry, and Block. In other words, 17 Defense Rating yields 0.84% of complete avoidance (no damage) and 0.28% chance to block (avoid crushes and mitigate damage).

As a Paladin, this is incredibly useful. The “cheapest” way to gain avoidance is through Block Rating - at a rate of ~8 Block Rating per 1% of avoidance. However, this still leaves you open to taking large amounts of damage. The next cheapest way is through Defense Rating - where ~15 Defense Rating yields 1% of avoidance, including .75% of complete avoidance. This is cheaper than Dodge Rating (~19 Rating per 1%) and Parry Rating (~23 Rating per 1%).

For a Paladin, then, there is absolutely nothing wrong with stacking Defense up to 520, 530, or maybe 540. Every bit of that Defense is helping push you towards the avoidance threshold and increasing your complete avoidance. As a goal, I’d say roughly 50% complete avoidance and 52.4% block (including Holy Shield) is a good mix up.

What About Warriors? They Don’t Need Help Avoiding Things!

Yes, Warriors get to cheat. Err, I mean they get to use Shield Block. Shield Block boosts a Warriors chance to block by a whopping 75% - meaning he or she only needs 27.4% of other avoidance. Assuming the Warrior is uncrittable, he has 120 Defense, which yields ~5% to Miss, Dodge, Block, and Parry. Tack on the base miss rate of 5% to mobs, and a warrior only needs to itemize an additional ~2.5% of avoidance to become uncrushable.

Totally not fair.

Let’s forget about that for a moment. Is Defense Rating still useful for a Warrior?

Besides reaching uncrushability, a warrior still wants to increase his or her overall avoidance. 50% is a good goal, I’d say, to make it easier to heal through the hard hitting raid bosses. That leaves a need for fitting 20-30% of avoidance into your item budget.

The two best bets would be Defense Rating and Dodge Rating. As we established before, ~15 Defense Rating offers 1% of avoidance while ~19 Dodge Rating offers 1% of avoidance. However, the Defense Rating includes 0.25% chance to block - which doesn’t help the warrior totally avoid an attack.

Which of the two ratings is “cheaper” in terms of complete avoidance? If we throw out the chance to block, it takes roughly 20 Defense Rating to reach 1% of complete avoidance. That is slightly more expensive than the Dodge Rating, but pretty comparable.

In other words, Defense Rating is still useful for a Warrior to increase the number of attacks he complete avoids. Stop whining, take the Defense, and be happy you have it easy.

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