Frankly, I'm not happy with how this particular installment of the EH series came out and will be revisiting the point at some point next week or in the near future, but the underlying problem is that players on the Tanking forum chirp endlessly on about a stat that they refuse to place in context. EH by itself doesn't mean anything, more particularly the series of static numbers that get pulled out on the forums to show that bears need to be nerfed and warriors need to be buffed.

This may well be (and I think there's some truth to the claim that warrior health needs to scale better), but left unsaid is that how cooldowns are deployed during the encounter -- and how intelligently the raid plays -- winds up impacting tank survivability more than anything else. Saying "I died because I didn't have enough EH" or "I can't tank that encounter but this other person can because of EH" is foolish. Assuming the required level of gear, all tanks have tanked ToGC just fine (with the exception of the Death Knight on Anub'arak, they're kinda screwed there when it comes to doing either the MT or OT job) and the burden of proof is on the player insisting that it can't be done because they're playing the "wrong" class.

I don't like stupidity, but I hate mulish stupidity even more. I don't think I made the observational transition in this outing very well, but I'd much rather that people on the forums asked better questions about how people die on these encounters. If you're, say, a tank who's consistently dying on ToGC Gormok-25 and howling on the forums that your class needs a buff, and your raid reports show that there's no improved AP reduction on the boss, your hunters aren't using Scorpid Sting, your priests/shammys are letting the 10% physical damage reduction buff drop off you regularly, you're not consistently Earth Shielded, etc. etc. -- then all available evidence points to the fact that your raid isn't working to keep you alive.

These articles are ideally about how an otherwise good concept (EH) is getting twisted into a catch-all excuse for tank failure. I hope the cooldown article makes the argument a bit better.