These aren't the stats you're looking for...

As a tank, stats used to be pretty straight forward in WotLK. You stacked stamina to high hell and that was it. Right? Right. After defense rating was eliminated, even I went that route. But again, I decided to go for more hit and expertise mixed in there for threat since our dps could essentially pull aggro any time they seemingly wanted. But what about now?

Cataclysm introduced many changes. Aside from the introduction of mastery (which is pretty fantastic for every tank), boss mechanics changed too. Bosses no longer do enough damage to one or two shot tanks. Healers don't have to spam heal them all the time anymore. So is stamina as useful as it once was?

While gearing up my death knight, I still went by the wrath standard of stam, stam, stam. Everything was stam on me. When running heroics my healers and I noticed that I was extremely spikey. Well, I'm a death knight. That's normal, right? Sure, to some extent. After some experimenting, I decided to go the mastery route. For a dk, gearing can go one of two ways: mastery or avoidance. When raiding in t11, I experimented with an avoidance build for fights when I was the add tank. My shields from my mastery would constantly be destroyed in seconds with so many adds, so avoidance seemed logical. Although it seemed good in theory (multiple mobs and therefore many melee swings), RNG did not tend to smile upon me enough for it to work for me. That's essentially what I took away from that experiment. Avoidance builds, although completely viable, are too dependent on RNG for me to feel comfortable. I like the amount of control over my own survival the mastery build gives me. Also, it's kind of a sense of personal satisfaction when I can do some crazy things and survive in most cases when other tanks would surely die.

When my guild first started doing heroic Firelands, I took it very seriously. I went to Elitist Jerks and read everything I could about gearing for heroics. It seems a good majority of dk tanks have gone the stamina route due to high boss damage. The reasoning being that bosses are designed to challenge tanks survivability, aka paladins with full CTC. So the death knight gets the short end of the stick there, with us taking more damage than any other tank class. We started with Shannox, as most guilds did. I remember reading a post on EJ detailing the average amount of damage per melee swing from him on each tank class. The ridiculous 71k average swing on a dk tank got me worried, and I continued to read more to see what tanks did to help out with this. Stamina, that's all they mostly talk about here. Using stamina trinkets, stacking stamina gems, using Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle... anything and everything to make their health pool larger. They also went more towards hit and expertise cap to guarantee Death Strike would connect. That clutch heal needs to connect. So, I decided to try it.

I ended up increasing my health pool around 50k with raid buffs. It seemed like an absurd amount of health, 221.6k at the time. So away we went. I noticed I didn't seem any more spikey than usual. My shields were noticeably smaller due to gearing. My Death Strikes didn't fail to connect, which was nice. But the shield was so small and was popped immediately in the next swing that I still had to spam Death Strike. We downed him and moved on to other regular bosses.

When I reviewed the logs from a couple regular bosses that week versus last week, I saw some pretty crazy numbers. When comparing Beth'tilac on normal, my healing on the stamina build had increased around 400k. More Death Strikes landing and Rune Tap healing for more. But I took around 1.4m more damage. All our healers had higher healing numbers than the previous week as well. This could be from people making more mistakes, but also because I had to be healed more. Although I could clearly see they were capable of healing me with this build, it seemed to essentially be doing the exact opposite of what I like to do as a tank; make the healer feel as useless as possible. Forcing a healer to use larger, less efficient heals on me isn't right. I want to make the healer feel secure that a slower, smaller heal will make it before I need more healing. The cast cancel game isn't a fun one for healers, I imagine.

The second thing I was shocked by in the logs was the average melee swing damage on me: 36k. Where did that 71k figure come from on EJ? Was the death knight tank wearing dps gear and in unholy presence or something? 36k was pretty typical damage from Ragnoros on normal to me. So, back to the mastery build I went. At present, I sit around 185k health, 36-37% avoidance, and mastery increasing my shield to 151% of the heal from Death Strike raid buffed. These numbers seem more than sufficient for the content I'm currently doing.

Before someone goes off about pre-nerf versus post-nerf, the nerf to Shannox on heroic was 15%, not 50%, and he definitely was doing close to 50% less damage to me than what was previously stated.

The main thing I took away from all this is that while stamina is still important, it's not at all what it used to be. Bosses are not one or two shotting me. Maybe heroic Ragnaros will, I don't know. We're not there yet. We're only 3/7 heroic. But for the content my group is currently doing, stacking stamina is not necessary and only strains your healers. So don't do it. Instead, just go for socket bonuses, which are always stamina on plate tank gear. Use some hybrid gems that have avoidance/mastery with stamina on them to achieve those bonuses. But prioritize avoidance or mastery above all else. You'll get plenty of stamina that way without giving up potential mitigation.