Quoted from Ghostcrawler on the Wrath of the Lich King Beta forums.
Also remember that people get hung up sometimes on the avoidance tank who dodges, dodges and then dies when a hit connects. Without crushing blows, you aren’t going to run into as many situations where the very next hit can kill you, unless you’re undergeared for the instance. There are certainly bosses that can do it either because they hit fast or healing is prevented for some reason. But it should happen less than in BC.
But in reality you aren’t often in that situation. In BC, you could get a boss that hits with a special and a crushing blow within the same second and see a tank drop 15 maybe 20K in one sec. From that point they are one attack away from death.
On mobs that attack quickly, say someone with thrash, you still run the risk of hit, hit, hit. But most of the time on slower-swinging mobs if there are three healers on the tank, a heal is going to land in between those hits. Also remember that dual-wielding mobs do pay the DW penalty (at least last time I checked) and miss more often.
Put another away, imagine a boss that hits 300 times a second for 1 point of damage. In that case, the avoidance tank with 50% dodge probably will avoid around half the hits per second, while the mitigation tank with 50% damage reduction will absorb half of every hit. It’s possible the avoidance tank will miss his dodge roll 300 times in that second, but it’s statistically unlikely. It’s more likely that both tanks take the same amount of damage.
Now imagine the very slow boss who swings once every minute for 25K damage. The avoidance tank will die if he ever fails to dodge twice in a row, but you are almost certainly going to heal him back up in between swings so that doesn’t happen. In this other ridiculous extreme, the difference between mitigation and avoidance is also not a big deal.
The streaky nature of avoidance is only a problem when you fail to avoid several times in a row on mobs that hit faster than you can heal, or when the hits can be really large. Without crushing blows, the hits will be smaller.
The other problem with avoidance is when healers just can’t get into the rythym of healing and overheal a lot, run OOM, or get caught by surprise. But that varies a lot depending on the skill of the healer and the types of spells. (src)
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