Tank Toughness Level & Interpreting Tank Simulator Results

Simple Q & A
1

Let me start off by saying that I am not a main tank. I only sub when one of our tanks is out and tank the occasional M+. As such, my gear is heavily skewed toward DPS - specifically, I don’t have tank trinkets. I’m not particularly good at tanking, either, but sometimes a panda’s gotta do what a panda’s gotta do. AMR has been an enormous help in getting me more comfortable with tanking. And before I forget, here’s my snapshot ID:

3225a0659b1b49888a6d7c8ae8195af0

I’m trying to figure out where to set my Toughness Level for tanking. If I’m not mistaken, there used to be suggestions for where to set it based on what level of raid or M+ you were running. But those are gone so I’m trying to find my own personal sweet spot. To that end, I ran some simulations to see what effect the slider actually has. Here’s what I got:

Raid results:
All DPS: 3030 DPS, 5922 HPS, 95.35% TUF
Midpoint: 2196 DPS, 5244 HPS, 95.92% TUF
All TUF: 2199 DPS, 5238 HPS, 96.00% TUF

M+ results (set to M+14 with fortified affix):
All DPS: 4758 DPS, 6250 HPS, 88.53% TUF
Midpoint: 3987 DPS, 6496 HPS, 89.39% TUF
All TUF: 3987 DPS, 6505 HPS, 89.45% TUF

When I look at this, my first impression is that the TUF values really aren’t changing. In the case of raid tanking, going from all DPS to all TUF loses 27% DPS, loses 12% HPS and gains only 0.68% TUF. On the M+ side, I give up 16% DPS to gain 4.1% HPS and 1% TUF.

At first blush, it hardly seems worth it to do anything but all DPS. But I know the WoW is a game of margins, so maybe that marginal increase of 1% TUF is actually a really big deal? I’m also pretty well geared at this point (ilvl 224). Maybe it’s the case that TUF is more a function of item level while DPS depends more on secondary stats?

I guess that’s enough rambling for now. I’m going to set my slider to all DPS for now. But I’d love to hear what anyone else has to say about the matter.

Thanks,
Korra the Occasional Brewmaster

2

You should try increasing the NPC damage multiplier on the simulations to where you TUF level is a bit lower, like the 60-70% range. Then you might see more of a difference. Tank simulation/optimization is pretty relative – toughness only “matters” when you’re right in that sweet spot where the fight isn’t too hard or too easy for your gear.

That said… most people have a hard time “feeling” much of a difference between e.g. running tank trinkets vs. DPS trinkets. Usually it’s not gonna make or break you in the toughness department. Same with which secondary stats you choose. All of them are at least somewhat useful for staying alive.

We took the labels off because the toughness slider is very relative… which level of content you’ll be able to handle with that gear depends a lot on how you play, and your team. So it’s meant to be a thing you just set to wherever feels good to you.