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  1. #1

    Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    Update - Added Ghostcrawler's posts

    Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!
    Originally Posted by Daelo (Blue Tracker)
    For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.

    Why are we doing this?

    The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more "spiky" than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react. Tanks could use their cooldowns more reactively. Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn't avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens.

    We've been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There's a limit to what we can do, however. So to give us a bit of breathing room we’ve implemented Chill of the Throne. Going forward past Icecrown Citadel, we have plans to keep tank avoidance from growing so high again.

    We'll have this on the PTR soon so players can see the effects inside Icecrown Raid.
    Ghostcrawler also posted about that a few minutes later.
    Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler (Blue Tracker)

    Our original estimations for tank avoidance would have worked fine had we not decided to add extra tiers of gear to reward heroic boss kills halfway through the expansion.

    The Cataclysm design will keep tank avoidance at more manageable levels. The loss of defense skill counts for a lot right there. We are also considering giving bosses expertise or other ways of baking in Icewell Radiance -- basically the concept that bosses scale with gear rather than just hitting harder and taking more hits.

    It would still be fine if the itemization team had designed the gear accordingly. In a full 258 setup for warrior tanks, precisely two pieces have anything but a 3 way split of pure avoidance stats on them. There's 3 different avoidance stats on 3 different diminishing returns, and pumping them all up like that can really make avoidance numbers go way out of whack. Meanwhile, we lose out on things like Expertise, and the preciously rare Hit Rating which is available on *1* piece of 258 tanking gear and end up having to swap gear around to cover those deficiencies.
    You are making the common mistake in thinking that our goal for itemization is to give you the best possible gear that we can. Itemizing your character is supposed to be a choice. There will be better pieces and worse pieces. There will be pieces that combine stats your really want with stats you don't really need. Wearing the best gear for their character (which is not the same as wearing the best gear) is one way players have to demonstrate mastery of the game.

    This is also why I always preach to take BiS lists with a grain of salt. Merely reaching for the item declared to be BiS by a spreadsheet or system you might not even understand could lead you to making bad gear choices, often of the variety of passing over the good upgrade because it's not the best possible upgrade.

    Also, if you're going to give mobs expertise, can you please make a spell or some kind of method to determine the level of expertise without us having to do parses?
    Yes. We would probably just let you see the numbers directly. I consider it a design flaw that players have to experiment to determine thinks like hit and expertise caps. We're all for experimentation and theorycrafting, but we don't think it's fair to require some players to go out and do a lot of work to generate specific numbers that all players feel like they need to know.

    Putting so much avoidance on gear isn't a bad idea because other stats are better. It was a bad idea because it causes tank scaling to fail and makes Radiance necessary.
    That logic doesn't really work. It's like saying instead of nerfing armor pen, we should have just put less and less on higher level gear.

    If we had avoided avoidance on tank gear, then every piece of tank gear would have hit and expertise (and maybe crit, haste and armor pen). Stamina and armor are static amounts, and if they were not, then those pieces immediately become the only pieces players would pay attention to.

    If you want ICC damage to be steadier, why don't you just walk over to the item team and say "Hey, we'd like less avoidance, can you cut out half of the avoidance from the ICC gear and replace it with stamina?" Or if you're worried people will get too much stamina, make it Frost Resistance and put in so much Frost damage you couldn't hope to survive long with TotGC gear alone.

    We just don't think that works. If you put very unattractive stats on gear then players just go back the previous tier of gear and complain that we don't know how to itemize. If you put bonus stamina on the tier 10 gear, then that means the next tier of gear better have bonus stamina as well. If it has avoidance instead of that bonus stamina, tanks just shrug and go back to the tier 10 gear.

    This is not a tank only problem. Casters won't upgrade to gear that doesn't have more spell power on it, because spell power tends to trump everything else for purposes of their dps or healing.

    We put a little bonus armor on non-armor items (necks, rings, trinkets and the occasional cloak). We don't put bonus armor on gloves and chests because that gear would be too good.

    It's an item level problem. If we added another raid tier to Lich King, we couldn't just keep avoiding avoidance and avoid it for every tier going forward. We just need a system where you avoid a Naxx boss 30% of the time and an Icecrown boss 30% of the time, the same way the Icecrown bosses have e.g. 30% larger health bars and thus take 30% more damage to kill. Otherwise the stats don't scale and bad thing happen (in this case the boss having to land so much damage to account for the fact that it misses so often).

  2. #2
    Deleted

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    just like swp

  3. #3

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    Ooooh Cool.

  4. #4

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    Aaaaand queue SWP-tanking again.
    Oh well, atleast all classes are welcome to actually raid in ICC...<.<

    Edit: The three of my characters that I'd probably do ICC with is my druid tank, resto shaman, and my hunter.
    This won't affect me at all on hunter, but will be on other two chars, Jesus, seems to me like you didn't put too much thought into this because, yes, there are some feral tanks out there, and our only avoidance is through dodge, will this mean I won't be able to tank ICC the moment it comes out? Do I have to accumulate feral pieces by healing this goddamned place? Not sure how I'll be handling this on my shaman tho, because I remember Sunwell Radiance to be a total freaking biatch... GG Blizz, I personally don't think this is the best way to counter what you call too spiky damage, whaaat? With good healers this shouldn't be an issue at all, if you can't deal with some spike damage, do one of the following;
    1) Don't heal
    2) Get better at it (Today, this is basically the same as number 3 tho...)
    3) Get better gear (Today, this is basically the same as number 2 tho...)

    /Nerdrageoff

    (Edit 2: Been thinking a bit, and I must say, this is quite a hit to me as a feral druid, but I guess this change will only turn me into a bigger meat-shield, since I know I will stop gemming for agi completely, and go for 100% stam.. GG)

  5. #5

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    The Raid that killed Paladin tanks...

    1 Defensive CD is awesome guise!
    Quote Originally Posted by Deathflame
    Going for avoidance is like playing Russian Roulette.
    Quote Originally Posted by GaaraofSand
    It's time to eat Grandpa!
    It's time to eat, Grandpa!

    Grammar.. it saves lives.

  6. #6

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    this is actually well thought out.
    Me likey.
    "Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid..."
    -A. Einstein.

  7. #7

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    srsly Blizzard this again is just to make life harder for Healers better do something what could make life harder for tanks like abilitys does less treat or something or if you don't move while tank you do 30% less treat each stack something like Hodir debuff but only for tank... but no nerf avoidance just to make healers life worse..

  8. #8

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    DRUIDS

  9. #9

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    so now the healers have to carry the raid....

  10. #10

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    Quote Originally Posted by Unionoob
    srsly Blizzard this again is just to make life harder for Healers better do something what could make life harder for tanks like abilitys does less treat or something or if you don't move while tank you do 30% less treat each stack something like Hodir debuff but only for tank... but no nerf avoidance just to make healers life worse..
    Did you actually read the entire post? They aren't just nerfing avoidance and calling it a day. They're nerfing avoidance and lowering the damage per attack of the bosses so that tanks take a steady stream of damage instead of no damage for ten seconds then two seconds that'd kill them if a big heal doesn't land. It's to make healers' lives EASIER.

  11. #11

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    Quote Originally Posted by Unionoob
    srsly Blizzard this again is just to make life harder for Healers better do something what could make life harder for tanks like abilitys does less treat or something or if you don't move while tank you do 30% less treat each stack something like Hodir debuff but only for tank... but no nerf avoidance just to make healers life worse..
    Yes, because healers love damage spikes right? Baaaaaw some more.

    (Inb4 a stream of people that just read "-10% dodge" and fire off their QQ rockets. Oh wait...)
    I'm in the "I don't have an obnoxiously large signature" club.

  12. #12

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    So instead of adopting the whole "We don't want another Sunwell Radiance" and coming up with a creative solution to the problem, they just cheese it with the same stupid mechanic.

  13. #13

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    Why dont they make Bosses hit faster?

    http://www.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Barthilas&n=Strykie

  14. #14

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    They never learn. They promised Sunwell Radiance would never happen again, OH WAIT.

    GG druids, have fun trying to tank this god forsaken place

  15. #15

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    I don't hate the idea, but druids sort of only have dodge as damage reduction.

    Not looking good for ferals I guess?

  16. #16

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    Quote Originally Posted by Strykzor
    Why dont they make Bosses hit faster?
    Quote Originally Posted by BluePost
    We've been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks.
    Oh hey, they did. It wasn't enough. Cataclysm will finally stick a nail in the too much avoidance coffin. It's impossible without 5 levels of rating decay and a total itemization revamp to fix this without an expansion. The stopgaps didn't work. They didn't want to have to do it, but they do. It'll never happen again, though, due to Cataclysm changes.

  17. #17

    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    before ppl freak out, they most likely reduce the boss dmg to compensate for this. the reason for this wasnt to make the raid harder, it was to fix the high spike dmg on takns since their avoidance was just to high so they needed to make the bosses to hit extremely hard. now with this, they dont need to hit as hard as the tank wont dodge as much.


    imo, this shouldnt affect frost DKs...cmon they are frost... also bears, i mean, they are fat like hell

  18. #18
    Old God conscript's Avatar
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    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    Quote Originally Posted by Xentropy
    Did you actually read the entire post? They aren't just nerfing avoidance and calling it a day. They're nerfing avoidance and lowering the damage per attack of the bosses so that tanks take a steady stream of damage instead of no damage for ten seconds then two seconds that'd kill them if a big heal doesn't land. It's to make healers' lives EASIER.
    I'm very happy about the "steady stream" change. Having a boss use an ability and then melee hit right after it is a real pain. Its a lot of fun to watch a tank get hit with Impale and get white hit and drop from 47k to 0 in .5 seconds. This change should make healing a lot more fluid rather than staring at the timer on Bigwigs and timing your heal to land exactly when the boss uses an ability.

    Poor Druid Tanks... Thank god my guilds MTs are Warriors and Paladins.

  19. #19
    Pandaren Monk Ravasha's Avatar
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    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    Wonder how they're going to do this in Cataclysm, as it will most likely only go higher.

  20. #20
    The Lightbringer
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    Re: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

    Sunwell yay Sorry I'm happy for this change, I'm a healer aswell as a tank and I can't wait, something had to be done with the high avoidance tanks could have. Healers should be given a big burden in the END OF THE EXPANSION content. Some believe healers have easier job than dps... I find this hard to believe, I always felt healers had the biggest responsbility in a raid, and this debuff just makes my stance firm again. Tanks will now have to re-think gear choices perhaps and maybe some tanks may feel a bit down due to their CDs or what not, but hey I'm sure Blizz will think of something, this was long awaited in current content. Welcome back Sunwell I missed you!

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