As a healer, you’re going to be running with a number of different kinds of tanks.  Druids, paladins, warriors and death knights each have their own flavor to tanking  and you can even find a big difference in tanking styles between tanks of the same class, depending on their gear, spec, and skill.  Its always good as a healer to have a good understanding of how tanks work and how that affects your healing.

What are all these things anyway?

A Mitigation tank is a tank that focuses on reducing how much damage he takes from each hit.  He does this through the use of Block Value, Block Rating, and Armor.

An Avoidance tank is a tank that focuses on not taking hits at all.  When hit, an avoidance tank will be hit harder, but in return he gets hit less often.  The applicable stats here include Dodge and Parry.

A Stamina tank is a tank that focuses on living longer by having an extra large health pool.  The primary stat here is Stamina.

Which is better, mitigation, avoidance or stamina?

There is a lot of debate within the tanking community over what the best strategy is when gearing up your tank.  It also depends quite a bit on the fight and even your group and your healers.  As a healer, I’ve often found that mitigation and high stamina tanks are often easier to keep alive.  The reason is because mitigation and stamina rely less on the random number generator and help create more constant damage and less bursty damage, which is easier to heal.  On the other hand, avoidance tanks have the possibility of getting a string of bad luck where they may take 3 or 4 large hits in a row, killing them and wiping the raid.  I don’t like leaving the fate of my raid to the RNG.

The case for Avoidance

However, there are a lot of benefits to using avoidance gear rather than mitigation.  You can see some of those below.

1.  First of all, avoidance tanks tend to take less damage overall.  Where mitigation tanks absorb a portion of each hit, avoidance tanks will avoid the hit completely.  This is especially true when comparing avoidance vs. stamina.  A high stamina tank will require a great deal of healing and mana, while an avoidance tank will simply take less damage.

2.  There are some fights (like Patchwerk) where the boss will hit for over 50% of the tank’s health (sometimes as much as 80% per hit) regardless of how much mitigation or stamina the tank has.  It’s just not possible at that point to stack your stamina or mitigation so high that you can live through more than 2 hits without a heal.  If that’s the case, mitigation and stamina are mostly worthless and the only useful stat is avoidance.

3.  Even on fights with weaker, but faster hitting bosses, avoidance often wins out.  In fact, you could argue that avoidance is more useful the faster the boss attacks, since the more attacks happen, the more the RNG gets rounded out.  The faster the attacks are, the more your avoidance tank starts looking and acting like a mitigation tank.

Mitigation, Avoidance, and Stamina are all important stats for a tank.  However, if given the choice, I would prefer an avoidance tank for the reasons listed above.  Despite the higher reliance on the RNG and the greater chance of death, avoidance tanks have a few key advantages.  They may sometimes be more difficult to heal, but they take less damage overall and when good luck kicks in they can be extremely easy to keep alive and can save you a ton of mana.

Healing an Avoidance Tank

Death Knights are the ultimate avoidance tanks, but each of the other tanks can gather their own avoidance sets as well.  Healing an avoidance tank can be a nail-biting, exciting experience.  The key to remember is to not get complacent.  You need to be prepared to quickly throw a large heal at all times, even if your tank hasn’t taken any damage in the last 10 seconds.  Avoidance tanks can often get very lucky with their avoidance, but those are the times when they are most likely to die as the healer sits back a bit and gets bored or unprepared.  You’ll probably need to use Holy Shock more with an avoidance tank as well as stop-casting Holy Lights.  To save mana, you’ll want to only finish your Holy Light cast if the tank has taken damage.  Its always best to have a heal ready to land than it is to have to start up a heal after the tank has taken damage.  You’ll probably end up with a lot more overhealing with an avoidance tank.  An avoidance tank can sometimes drain your mana faster than the other two types if you’re not careful and do too much overhealing.

Healing a Mitigation and Stamina Tank

Druids are the ultimate stamina tank, while paladins and warriors both tend to use mitigation.  Just like avoidance, any tank can get a gear set for mitigation or stamina.  Healing both types of tanks requires a similiar strategy, although the stamina tank will take more of your mana and require larger heals.  You’ll probably want to use more mana efficient heals (like Flash of Light) for a mitigation tank and you may not need to use Holy Shock at all in both cases.  You’re less likely to do overhealing, which means you’re more free to spam your heals without worrying about the tank’s health, however you’ll have to watch your mana more closely if you’re doing that.

Summary

How damage comes in usually has a lot more to do with the encounter itself than with the tank you’re healing.  Each tank you come across will probably be better in one of these areas compared to the others.  However, a solid tank will have a good balance of all three of these types of stats in order to take advantage of the benefits of each.  Regardless of which tank you’re healing, the most important thing is to makes sure to keep him alive.  If your mana can handle it, feel free to spam heals on your avoidance tank and don’t hesitate to use Holy Shock if your mitigation tank is about to die.  However, knowing how your tank is going to respond to incoming damage can help you know which spells you need to both save your mana and keep him alive.