I think reaction time is a part of throughput. But I can see now that the simulation properly represents the tank side of that.

I do think your hunch is right about the effect small heals can have on this. They are sort of mitigation in a way. We shouldn’t underestimate the ones the tank can use themselves.

Thanks for the explanation.

Rather, it’s a switching time argument. They can’t keep high throughput up all fight, of course, nor do they need to. Instead, they use high-efficiency heals like HoTs to handle the low-throughput phases, and then switch into high-throughput mode when they see the tank dip significantly. The speed at which they make that switch dictates whether you live or die – if they do it instantly, you’re safe and topped off; if not, you might be in trouble.

Both mitigation and stamina extend that time. I think the “extra health was useless” argument was heavily overplayed even in ICC – extra health is rarely useless, not the least of which because bosses do not hit for fixed amounts. Boss melee swings have a pretty broad range of damage values, and then there’s magical/environmental damage to consider.

The simulation covers most (all?) of the mitigation choices we actually have. Reducing spike size increases the average time healers have to react, so looking at spike data essentially ranks the stamina and mitigation options in those terms.

Which we could do, but it’s a lot of work for not much benefit. It won’t have any effect on the top three or four levels of representation anyway, which is all we look at. It will thin out the numbers below that, but we ignore them anyway.

As far as TDR, it won’t change that much. Overall damage taken will be lower, obviously, and specs with smoother damage will probably see a little lower TDR than they “should” if more of those procs were overheal. But even that is subjective, since it forces the assumption that you overheal a lot. When in reality, your healers could spend those GCDs elsewhere.

In the simulations we mainly look at spike damage and not at sustained damage. I remember a while back in icecrown there was a discussion about armor and we ended up concluding that there was spike damage, and slow death ( trickly down death ) . Now I am going to asume ( I have missed a bit ) that since then the slow death has been incorporated and is represented by the long spikes here ( 6 or 7 hits ) . So that should be covered.

However that doesn’t have me fully convinced that throughput alltogether isn’t an issue at all. We know mana isn’t, but is hps? The whole slow death idea was about the fact that if a healer can’t keep you topped during a long spike, that the extra health was useless and should be converted into mitigation ( not avoidance ) .

Now this post makes it very clear that throughput in general isn’t an issue at all. But what about during long spikes. I am especially wondering this since in this post you again brought up the possibility of underestimating extra heals during spikes. And extra hps is comparable to mitigation.

In the end we could wonder if we have any mitigation alternatives to health. There are plenty of stats but nothing is always on. There is no real effective health increase like armor.

I hope the question makes sence like this. I have a bit of trouble figuring how to put it. It is quite possible this was already answered and I missed it.