Balancing Survival and Mitigation in Rawr 2.1.6

I spent some time today chatting with Astrylian, the author of Rawr, about how to best balance Survival and Mitigation. From the Rawr.Bear tooltip, we see that “Survival Points represent the total raw physical damage (pre-mitigation) you can take before dying.” Essentially it is a quantitative measure of your health and stamina related stats.

One thing I’ve been noticing lately and have talked about with Hautian one of our Paladin tanks, is that Rawr seems to like Stamina a whole lot. More than I expected. This is what I wanted to ask Astrylian about. I wanted to understand the balance and understand how to control it better.

It turns out that since version 2.1.5 there has been a feature in the Bear model that lets you put a “soft cap” on the Survival statistic. This means the relative weighting of the Mitigation statistic starts to go up as you cross over the soft cap. "PERFECT!” I said, “How does it work?”

First, how you set it up. Open Rawr and select the Bear Model. Your current Survival value will be listed in the “Summary” section of the Stats tab as shown in this screenshot:

So with the gear I have on in this Rawr profile, I’ve got 137,385 Survival Points. That number is when I am buffed as I would expect in a typical 10-man Naxx raid. When typically 25-man buffed I’m up over 145k.

Now let’s look at how the Survival Soft Cap is configured:

As you can see, the default value is 140,000. Talking to Astrylian, that number was chosen as ‘about right’ for current 25-man boss. It happens to be around the amount of unmitigated damage from three of Patchwerk’s Hateful Strikes (25-man version) or three of Sartharion’s hits (with three drakes up). This formula isn’t precise, but is something he and some of the other folks on Elitist Jerks worked out. And as you can see, I’m short a few points, which explains why Rawr wants me to stack more Stamina right now, but with 25-man buffs I actually cross over that 140k line and it starts to focus more on Mitigation.

I asked Astrylian what the soft cap does to the relative weighting of Survival and Mitigation and he sent me this graph to show how it works (click to see full-sized):

This graph is for a 140,000 softcap. The X-axis is the raw unscaled Survival and the Y-axis shows the scaled Survival. As you can see up to 140,000, the values match (the scaling is 1). After 140,000, however, the value slowly falls off.

What this does in the long run is weight the Mitigation stats higher in the Rawr Overall points system.

Other softcap values courtesy of Astrylian:

Content	Softcap
Planning for Ulduar 25-man Raiding	160,000
25-man Raiding	140,000
10-man Raiding / Heroic 5-mans	120,000
5-man Dungeons	100,000

SWEET! Thanks again to Astrylian and the rest of the Rawr team for this amazing tool.