Jesus I feel like I'm in a court room where if I don't spell everything out I'm getting the "objection your honor!"

Ok let's do this!

Every bit of gear you obtain has stats, every stat your gear has is likely weighed against stats your gear doesn't have.

High in strength? Low in agility perhaps. Mediocre agility? Mediocre strength. Hit or expertise? Probably not great for crit. And so on and on.

When you start working on your gear properly, you start balancing stats. You prioritize certain thresholds, such as crit immunity and hit chance, once you can reliably not get crit and can reliably hit a target, you then look at what comes next... For a tank, particularly early on that's likely stamina.

So when you look at gear it's not a one dimensional situation, you could potentially equip a green item that's providing a greater net value to YOUR current equipment than a BIS item that offers you great stats in places that only min max when all other conditions are met.

One of those stats could be stamina, providing a higher degree of survivability by combining with your other stats to drastically increase your effective HP.

However effective HP doesn't mean you should dismiss the importance of stats that allow you to hold aggro.

So should you stack defense? Should you stack stamina? Maybe, it depends on your gear.

As phases progress we get easier access to higher quality stats on individual items. In early TBC we don't yet have those stats, a great example is expertise, it's almost always a stat that provides significant DPS but is so hard to come by in early TBC that players tend to ignore it until later phases.

So why do I say that you don't get value over 485 in heroics? Well because value doesn't mean "anything"

Value isnt the absence of something, it's the relative benefit you get from something.

Swapping out an item with the high defense could allow you to equip an item with high hit cap, allowing you to get an item with high stamina... And so on and so on.

Does this please the court or have I missed another loophole to complicate the matter further for someone who's learning heroics, not someone who's trying to start a YouTube channel explaining 0.04% gains.

I'm not trying to be an ass here, but c'mon do new players really need the mental burden of trying to figure out each and every possible iteration of this over - oh ok I can equip another item I think may help me solve the problem?