This debate about Stamina vs. Dodge has been going on since the beginning of time. It is for sure that Stamina gives you a larger health pool and allows you to survive the high bursts of some of the harder bosses. Dodge lets you take fewer hits. This reduces the mount of heals that you need and the amount of time you're at low health, due to dodging during bursts, giving healers time to heal you back up to full.
   Here we want to clear up some of the common misconceptions and intend to inform you as to why stacking dodge can be valuable. If you notice something that you think should be changed, do not be afraid to speak up, we can together deal with this problem. Note that the information we are willing to talk about is just picked up through our own experiences, but we hope with this guide, it can help you a lot.
   A topic comes up in the discussion of Dodge vs. Stamina is "Playing to the class's strength". Namely, it is a high health pool. For this, you should go ahead and throw on that polar set with full Stamina gems. Grab that essence of gossamer and go to town. Feel free to get your HP as high as you want. But which bosses require that? The only thing that comes to mind which absolutely asks for more health than can be gotten by maintaining a balance of Dodge and Stamina. No other fight requires that much health, so it's pointless to have that much. If a boss can be tanked with 35k HP, who do you think will tank it better. The bear with 60k hp and 20% dodge, or the bear with 35k hp and 40% dodge? The higher health one might keep a fuller health bar through the fight, but his healers will have less mana, and he'll have taken more overall damage.
   Dodge has a diminishing return. But it was mainly put in place to stop people from becoming unhittable and as such doesn't have much effect until you hit the higher percentages of Dodge. When higher raids come out and you start seeing those higher levels of Dodge, feel free to shift more towards defense and stamina. At the current gear level, you shouldn't worry too much about the DR.
   Assuming a tank is within one hit of dying, how long do the tank and heals has to prevent tank death? This is called the reaction time. Unless you have ridiculous amounts of health, you will eventually get low on health. You may not see it as much in most Naxx fights since they're all fairly easy as far as tank damage goes, but on bosses like patchwerk that provide a steady stream of high incoming damage, you'll notice that, unless you outgear it, you're going to be at low health once in a while. This is where reaction time comes in. How long do you have during that period of low health to be healed, so you don't die?
   In this situation, having more health doesn't help since the boss takes you down from full to low with a burst before any heals can land, which means that unless you can get enough health to take another hit, that extra Stamina is useless. However, Dodge is very useful in this situation. It can increase the amount of time you can be at low health before being healed apart from reducing the likelihood of taking a full burst.

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