"You don't die on Gormok from his melee. You die from a combination of his melee + the stupid high bleed damage."
That sentence is self-contradicting, much like the article itself. If you died to a combination of melee and bleed, and since the bleed is unavoidable, then the melee is what finished you off.

CD usage is whole different story altogether. It's class/raid dependent and always important regardless of how much EH or avoidance you have.

@Allison
You are right that clearly a tank shouldn't die "only" to the bleed ability. However, what a tank does die to is the massive spike of damage that occurs when unfavourable RNG lines up 3 of Gormok's abilities occur within 1-2 seconds of each other (Impale DoT + Impale Hit + Melee swing). That's a near instant spike of upwards of 50K HP on a TOC-25 geared tank. The bleed itself is not burst damage, but the combination of his 3 hits together very much is. Since the Impale DoT + Impale Hit are unavoidable, the only way to survive is to have enough HP left to make sure the melee swing doesn't finish off the tank. In essence, it is very much the melee hit that kills the tank, which makes stacking stamina (EH) and/or using CDs mandatory.

You're agreeing with us, William. Yes, it makes CD's mandatory. That's the entire point. The Impale and the bleed from the Impale are unavoidable and the DoT is not affected by armor. The only part of your equation that utilizes effective health is the melee hit and the bad luck of possibly having the Impale land near a melee swing, which is a VERY rare occurrence. When he has 4 stack of Rising Anger, you either have a tank that stacks stamina (not armor, not effective health, but raw stamina) or you blow cooldowns. Regardless of which you choose, the strategy for tank survival in that encounter is not to stack effective health.

"When he has 4 stack of Rising Anger, you either have a tank that stacks stamina (not armor, not effective health, but raw stamina)"

You and Allison are both missing the point of Effective Health, and using the term incorrectly.

The true definition of Effective Health is "the amount of raw damage a creature has to deal to kill you." Most mathematical definitions (see Satrina's work for example) have made the assumption that this is physical damage, and formulate their derivations using Armor as the primary mitigation stat. This is because when those derivations were performed in Burning Crusade, physical damage was usually the type of damage that caused spike deaths.

However, nothing in the definition of EH says that it needs to be physical damage. I have derived a formula for EH that is valid for ANY type of damage over at maintankadin (which I would gladly link you to if I could, but MT is down at the moment). It is basically a weighted average of the inverse of your mitigation for each type of damage.

That means that for a fight with a considerable amount of incoming damage from magical or bleed sources (where armor does nothing), your Effective Health needs to be calculated differently. You still need enough Effective Health to survive the worst-case burst scenario (with or without cooldowns, as appropriate for the fight).

Saying that "Effective Health" has to die is somewhat silly, since Effective Health is not a game mechanic. It is a tool that measures survivability, nothing more. The fact that people don't understand the tool, or use it improperly as you have in this article, doesn't make it a bad tool.

As an analogy, a hammer doesn't become a bad tool because some people choose to try and use it to drive in a screw. A tape measure doesn't become a bad tool because someone tries to use it to measure the distance between two cities. One has to make sure they're using the tool appropriately and in the right scenarios (for example, EH is a fairly useless tool for Faction Champions).

-Theck

Maintankadin is back up. Here's the link:
http://maintankadin.failsafedesign.com/forum/index.php?p=514810&rb_v=viewtopic#p514810

Allison,

Whether "EH needs to die" was meant as a blanket condemnation or not, that's how it reads.

I have read both articles, and I understand your complaint. Unfortunately, while the message is reasonably clear from the article (that you're frustrated with the over-emphasis and misuse of EH on the blizzard forums), the title is doing you a great disservice by suggesting to your readership that you think the either the concept itself or the underlying game mechanics that make it a useful metric are at fault.

Perhaps a better title for the article would have been, "Why EH isn't everything," or something similar. In other words, something that more accurately reflects your point rather than misrepresenting it.

Furthermore, you make some fundamental errors in both articles that distract from the argument. As another commenter pointed out, you're not even using the proper form of the old EH definition, which was Health / (1 - Mitigation). You've jumped directly to the version that assumes "mitigation = armor." While that may be representative of the type of erroneous uses you see on the Tanking forums, it isn't the correct definition, and gives informed readers the impression that you know little more about what EH means than the posters you're chiding in the article.

This also leads to mistakes like this one:
"but death knights weren't overpowered in Tier 7 and Tier 8 because they were the highest-HP tank. They were overpowered because they always had a cooldown up to trivialize the high-damage boss attacks that occurred at predictable intervals during the fight."
This is *still* an issue of Effective Health. A mitigation cooldown is a temporary increase in effective health. By chaining mitigation cooldowns, a DK was able to have on-demand EH, which was very strong for fights which were patterned with large, fairly predictable damage spikes. The fact of the matter is that they were able to achieve the highest EH of any tank, on demand, exactly when it was needed.

In several places, you suggest that because attacks are magical or bleed sources, they don't reward EH stacking. Again, this is a mistake borne out of the incorrect definition of EH. Any time a tank encounters burst damage, it becomes a question of "Do I have enough EH to survive this burst?"

In another comment, you said you didn't like how this article came out. I think that the problem is that you're trying to fit too much into one article, and aren't able to do it all justice as a result. I think this article (meaning just "Part 2") would have been stronger if it had been split into two:
-one focusing on "This is the *wrong* definition of EH, this is why it's wrong, and here's the right one"
-another focusing on how cooldowns and raid buffs interact with EH, how other factors influence tank death as much or more than just having enough passive EH, and showing that this is why the "my class needs more EH" argument falls flat on its face.

"Part 1" did a decent job of giving the history of tanking balance and how EH was thought up in the first place. But "Part 2" just feels like it's trying to tackle too much content, and doing so insufficiently in the process.