Your comments on defense are misleading in a few ways.

Defense -is itself- an avoidance stat. Adding to defense reduces your chance to be critically hit, this is correct. However, at the same time, it also adds to your block, your parry, your dodge, AND your chance that the mob will just plumb miss you in the first place.

Complicating all of this is the effect of diminishing returns. The more of a given avoidance statistic you have, the less effect you get from adding additional rating for that statistic. And even MORE complicating is that parry has a high rate of diminishing returns, dodge has a lower rate, block has no diminishing at all, and nobody knows what "to be missed" diminishes to, just that it diminishes somehow.

Comparing point-for-point as far as item budget is concerned, a point of defense will always give you more avoidance than a point of parry. Dodge gives you a little more avoidance than defense unless you've got a whole ton of dodge (though it's close and exactly where the change-over is depends on that "to be missed" number that we can't calculate). However, if you're a warrior or paladin, you're also getting mitigation (and DPS) through additional block rating. So, at heart, it's never bad to stack defense as opposed to an avoidance stat.

You're right about the stamina, though. Your real balancing act is going to be additional stamina (and armor) versus avoidance stats versus aggro stats (and expertise is an avoidance AND an aggro stat, while block value and rating is mitigation and aggro...)

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