Agi/Stam vs Dodge/Stam Gems

Question: Which will I take less DPS and avoid more than Dodge gems vs Agi Gems.

Research: I haven't changed any gear/enchants for the past 2 months. Also General Data is from Normal 25man Mode where as XT-002 is from Hard Mode 25man Mode.

Hypothesis: Dodge > Agi for pure physical damage survivability .

The BEFORE and AFTER of swapping Agility Gems for Dodge Gems.
DATA:
General
-BEFORE
July 1 - 2447 DTPS - 59.7% Avoided
July 8 - 2739 DTPS - 61% Avoided
July 16 - 2638 DTPS - 61.4% Avoided
-AFTER
July 29 - 2937 DTPS - 52.2% Avoided
July 23 - 3066 DTPS - 50.5% Avoided

XT
-BEFORE
June 30 - 2156 DTPS - 49.6% Avoided
July 14 - 2831 DTPS - 56.4% Avoided
-AFTER
July 21 - 1658 DTPS - 66.7% Avoided
July 28 - 2041 DTPS - 59.3% Avoided

Analysis: My Agility gems were better at survival during General however Dodge gems proved better in survival on XT.

Conclusion: N/A

Anyone help me figure out this conclusion?

You essentially answered your own question. I gem agi/stam gems over dodge/stam gems because of extra mitigation from physical attacks. You're going to have inspiration (or some similar buff) on you 99% of any boss fight. Agi = armor and will scale with these said buffs. Dodge gems are just kinda "meh" for me. You can dodge and dodge and dodge, but eventually you WILL get hit. Why not reduce a 30k hit to something just a little bit less. The amount of dodge through dodge gems gained over agi gems is minimal at best anyway. The extra crit is a decent threat bonus as well. I don't think i'll be gemming dodge ever again.

EDIT: You're also talking about a TON of RNG here. With your small sample size it's hard to draw any conclusion. Some nights I feel invincible, others I get stomped. Just how the game works.

--Race

Avoidance as used in the tanking community, is not mitigation and dodge provides none at all.

I use the word mitigation in the sense that both agi and dodge would lower the amount of damage I take whether it be minimal(agi) or completely(dodge).

The issues with using mitigation to apply to the average damage prevented by avoidance is it makes the distinction between avoidance and mitigation needless muddled but it also makes little sense to apply such a system in other areas.

For instance, on average mitigation will let you avoid damage (this is just the start of the confusion) but unless you have more than 51.8% avoidance, you on average will not mitigate a hit with avoidance. This makes avoidance mitigation for an ulduar tank but not a naxx one on average? And almost never for a druid? Bleh, let's do a way with such an clumsy and unintuitive system.

It's much simpler and clearer for discussion as well as fitting in the current vocabulary if mitigation and avoidance with the following definitions:

Avoidance: The chance for an individual attack to completely fail to connect with a player or mob.
(Note that the values commonly used do not take into account combat table modification by level differences in part to save on notations and confusion from improper or inconsistent use; such differences are taken into account reader side if applicable)

Mitigation: Reducing damage from an attack that connects with a player or mob, even if that damage is completely mitigated.

The key points being that it's not the averages of damage per boss swing that are looked at but on a per attack, successful (for mitigation and avoidance) or unsuccessful (avoidance).

Cidx wrote:I use the word mitigation in the sense that both agi and dodge would lower the amount of damage I take whether it be minimal(agi) or completely(dodge).

A more direct response here, but agility is 85% as effective as dodge rating for avoidance alone and should not be called minimal in the same breath that dodge is called completely.

Your experiences are statistically insignificant, and there are far too many unknown variables even if you logged everything you've ever tanked. Theorycrafting is the only way you're going to appreciate the difference between agility and dodge rating. In the case of gem choice, the difference is so small that it's nearly impossible to test.

It should be noted that if you were hypothetically to find that your DTPS the same with agi and dodge gems, the advantage would be to the Agi as a component of it is mitigation/EH which provides a more stable damage rate. As far as I know this is not the case, but most consider the crit benefit the tipping point anyway.

And yes, please keep terminology consistent here. Typically: Avoidance = dodge/parry/miss. Mitigation = block/armor/DR%. EH = mitigation/health.

As far as dodge goes next patch, will agi gems become even more prevelant with the dodge nerf? Or is this dodge rating nerf affecting agility gems somehow as well?

--Race

Items: General
Agility: The amount of agility required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This change required recalibrating the amount of dodge a player has with 0 agility by a slight amount as well, so all players will see their dodge percentage vary a small amount.

agi > dodge % got nerfed as well

Racerover wrote:As far as dodge goes next patch, will agi gems become even more prevelant with the dodge nerf? Or is this dodge rating nerf affecting agility gems somehow as well?

--Race

Yes, the dodge from agility will be nerfed as well. Dodge rating will still be more avoidance per point, by the same ratio.

However, IMO agility gems will be, relatively speaking, a better choice in 3.2. Since dodge is being nerfed across the board, the armor you get from agility will be an even stronger selling point to fill those red slots.

I changed the word mitigation to survival to clear up what I am looking for.

Also I planned to put in more data for the AFTER effect. However my GM figured that I should post it anyways because he's worried about his General HM MT taking more damage now than I was taking when I used agi gems.

According to your data for General, you avoided more attacks when you were using agility gemming than dodge gemming. This just illustrates how a small sample size like one fight is subject to RNG, as with dodge gemming you obviously had higher dodge than you would have with agility gemming. For example on a steelbreaker last kill the other week I avoided 49% of physical attacks. The previous unsuccessful attempt in the same night had 63% of physical attacks avoided. The average over course of the evening's attempts was 59%. Your sample size renders the data somewhat meaningless I'm afraid.

I've for a few weeks been bouncing between Agi/Stam and Dodge/Stam gems too. I'm in the same position as OP no clear winner.

Howver in 3.2, all Inspiration effects are being changed so that rather than increasing armour by a certain % (influenced by agility ofc), it now reduces damage taken. This is a buff against non-physical attacks, which is great. But now my question is will this change will effect Agil/Stam getting? I usually have a near 100% uptime of inspiration (<3 disc priest).

So in short, 3.2 inspiration changes bad for Agil/Stam gems, enough to push people more towards Dodge/Stam?

Inimicus wrote:I've for a few weeks been bouncing between Agi/Stam and Dodge/Stam gems too. I'm in the same position as OP no clear winner.

Howver in 3.2, all Inspiration effects are being changed so that rather than increasing armour by a certain % (influenced by agility ofc), it now reduces damage taken. This is a buff against non-physical attacks, which is great. But now my question is will this change will effect Agil/Stam getting? I usually have a near 100% uptime of inspiration (<3 disc priest).

So in short, 3.2 inspiration changes bad for Agil/Stam gems, enough to push people more towards Dodge/Stam?

Inspiration Rank 3
Reduces your target's physical damage taken by 10% for 15 sec after getting a critical effect from your Flash Heal, Heal, Greater Heal, Binding Heal, Penance, Prayer of Healing, or Circle of Healing spell.

it's not a buff to non-physical damage mitigation from it because it only affects physical damage
it was changed so that it still has the full effect if the buff would put you past the armor cap making some of it useless

as for the nerf to agi/dodge, i'll still be gemming agi even though it won't be affected by inspiration, the armor is just too yummy, and with the nerf, the difference between the dodge from agi and the dodge from dodge rating will be even smaller