Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

[Spider-MM]

I kinda miss the days when Blizzard didn't felt as obligated to answer to all whine shit that occurs with any change incoming in any direction.

Give more unforgivning spells and abilities, and don't care so much if every fucktard understands them (they won't anyways).

When wow was new and nobody knew shit about all theorycraftig if was all just more magic.

[Pokchop]

The avoidance change is nice. Makes healer's life less spammy.

Though it comes at the cost of making tanks feel less awesome and feel like they took a downgrade again. I know the feeling. Hopefully they come up with a better solution than this in Cataclysm.

But what about DPS? Boss health goes up and you still on average kill bosses in 5 minutes regardless of your bigger crit numbers. Sure it means those bigger crit numbers make bosses on farm die faster, but just like tanking if you tanked naxx or ulduar right now you still have that extra dodge. It's all relative.

Actually this guy says it better:

IF you think healing and damage stats dont suffer some sort of reduction, well they do but in a round-about way.

Pulling numbers out of my ass, let's say a tank has 30,000hp, boss hits for 12,000, and you heal for 6,000. You healed 20% of his max life and half of the damage done.
You gear up and now you heal for 10,000, but the tank has 50,000hp and the boss hits for 20,000. You're still healing 20% of the tank's max life and half of the damage done.

Similar process for damage dealers, your damage per spell goes up but so does boss hp, so you're still removing roughly the same % of health each time.

[grianna]

Frankly this really is a way to make shield wearing tanks guaranteed tops again, DKs lose threat and avoidance, druids lose 35-45% of their avoidance (most druids in t9 are between 45-50% dodge losing 20% of 50% = 40% loss in avoidance). Paladins and Warriors both tend to have about 30% dodge and 20% parry right now in ToC gear meaning they will go to about 30% avoidance and druids will fall to about 25%. The only difference is the plate classes can swap gear / gems / chants to mess with this druid has no options.

[Sulika]

Frankly this really is a way to make shield wearing tanks guaranteed tops again, DKs lose threat and avoidance, druids lose 35-45% of their avoidance (most druids in t9 are between 45-50% dodge losing 20% of 50% = 40% loss in avoidance). Paladins and Warriors both tend to have about 30% dodge and 20% parry right now in ToC gear meaning they will go to about 30% avoidance and druids will fall to about 25%. The only difference is the plate classes can swap gear / gems / chants to mess with this druid has no options.

Of course you can that argue with their bigger health pools, higher armor and the way savage defense covers the entirety of the unavoided damage spectrum druids are the tanks that are optimised for low avoidance situations. Going from 55% avoidance to 35% avoidance as druids do means a 44% increase in incoming damage on the druid. Going from 60% avoidance to 40% avoidance for a warrior means a 50% increase in incoming damage on the warrior.

But lets go a bit further, assume that warrior also has 25% block and that each block reduces the damage from that hit by 10%.

Now we have a warrior with:

10% miss, 30% dodge, 20% parry, 25% (10% reduced), 15% full damage.

Going to:
10% miss, 10% dodge, 20% parry, 25% (10% reduced), 35% full damage.

In that case the incoming damage on the warrior has gone up by 53.3%.

So this is going to hit warriors much harder, the druid only takes 44% more damage while the warrior takes 53.5% more damage. The change hits warriors 21.5% harder than it hits druids!

If you rate shield block a bit higher and say it reduces damage from blocked attacks by 20% then the warrior will be taking 57.14% increased damage, meaning the incoming damage on the warrior will be scaled up 35.7% more than the incoming damage on druids will scale up.

So if right now you consider warriors and druids as equal, after this change druids will be flat out better since proportionally they will be taking less damage after the change.


If you think about it it is obvious. If two tanks are balanced, one has 20% avoidance, the other has 80% avoidance losing 20% avoidance each is a much bigger hit to the guy at 80% avoidance, the first tank will take 25% more damage after the nerf, the second would take 100% more damage after the nerf. So, counterintuitively a flat avoidance nerf applied equally to all tanks hits the tanks with the most avoidance the hardest.

[Anvar]

Beggining of WotlK:
"Givez us Sunwell-type raid!!! Those are too casual modez, WTH is Naxxramas???! Givez us hard modes. QQ!!!"

Icecrown:
"WTF!!!??? Sunwell-like? Sunwell was horrible! they promised they wuld never do it again!!! QQ!!!"

I find this situation really amusing.

[Sulika]

Beggining of WotlK:
"Givez us Sunwell-type raid!!! Those are too casual modez, WTH is Naxxramas???! Givez us hard modes. QQ!!!"

Icecrown:
"WTF!!!??? Sunwell-like? Sunwell was horrible! they promised they wuld never do it again!!! QQ!!!"

I find this situation really amusing.

You do understand that those arguments were made by different people right?

[hammiedinns]

ok im a DK tank (the class that is getting fucked over aparently) i currently have about 29% dodge, 14% miss, 26% parry, then take buffs into that i get upto about 33-34% dodge, 27.5% parry.

so there raid buffed i am sitting at around 75% avoidance (gogo dw frost)

so they plan to make bosses hit more for less, can any tank seriously argue that they wouldnt spaw avoidance for the equivelant dmg reduction.

ok, ill try to but it simple, for the QQers, if they reduce dmg taken by same amount as they nerf avoidance its a BUFF for tanking

if there was a biss that hit for 40kevery 2secs, would you prefer the tank with 50k health and 75% avoidance, or the tank with 25% avoidnce who mitigates the attacks down to around 20k

[Alianthos]

Amazing, this thread's QQ rate is higher than the one with nerfed Holydins...

Stop nerdraging, we don't even know how hard the boss will hit so stop complaining. And every class whining about their tanking potential destroyed with this Spell makes me laugh. In the end, you will still go tanking there right ? Your guild will still down bosses hmmm ? They won't fire you because you're a DK tank and you will suck (more than usual) !

[grenolith]

as a healer im positively thrilled with this. yes, some tanks (druidzzz) might go back to "i absorb all dmg with my retarded health pool and 75% melee dmg reduction" but for me thats fine, it allows healers to think out of the box and not just stand around spamming their biggest heal (yay, holy paladin is so fun aint it!?) in order to not let the poor tank die from those giant Mfucking 30k hits they can take sometimes.
and before we see every druid reroll kitty spec and all the top guild only use "insert whatever class has most avoidance after this" tanks in their ICC raids. i wont QQ at all, at least not about this great change, and to the part about giving mobs expertise, hit rating and maybe even other stats, im quite positive aswell, sounds like a good plan to me. at least if they dont make us do hour long parses to find the amounts...

[Suntalon]

just a question, apart from the dodge nerfing QQ

can someone (preferably someone from blizzard =p) tell me

WHY ON EARTH THE (current) HIGHEST RAIDISTANCE BOSSES WILL HIT LIKE BABIES COMPARED TO ALGALON??

that doesn't make sence at allllllllllllllllllllllll if they're damage is going down by the same 20% as dodge is (figuratively speaking) then YS should pwn Arthas rather then Arthas being b****king and we killing YS first >.>

[Secret81]

I love you all so much for this !
It doens´t matter what blizz does, everything is bad.

When they make almost every class have the same abilities (e.g. mana-reg : in BC it was the role of a shadow, now it´s also hunter, paladin, ....) the people shout "OMG! Everyone is the same here. What is going on. We need classes to have different roles and functions, we don´t like the "bring the player, not the class" appoach from blizz.

Now we might have a raidinstance where some classes do fit better into the conditions than others, and guess whats going on ? "mimimi my class is not exactly on the same level as the other tank classes. mimimi every tank class should have identical conditions..."

As I said. I love you for this ! Because qqing will never stop and it´s a daily fun to read all the qq posts, no matter blizz is doing.

[Deleted]

how nobody unterstands that this will hit druids harder than any other class (DK threat, too, of course) -.-

sitting at 2000 agility raidbuffed DR are already fucking an avoidance gemmed druid up so much, that he is ~6% behind in avoidance compared to full stamina-warriors (who then has as much HP as the druid). while this may be okay right now overall, it is a complete scaling mess for druids. DR are going to hit even harder AND agility on gear has DR in terms of "item-level costs", too.

[Dejohn]

We would not have this problem if Icecrown gear had been item level 245 or so, as we originally intended. We added a few extra tiers of gear to support heroic modes. We felt like we had to do that to have different difficulty levels and make raiding more accessible overall. We felt like we had to reward the harder modes with the better gear or nobody would have been very interested. -GC


Naked I have 10% dodge on my pally. With gear I have 27%. With diminishing returns I am gaining 17% dodge from my 245 gear. This statement above is complete nonsense. They are taking away more dodge than my gear even provides me currently. There is no way that the difference between 245 gear and the expected IC gear is to blame. 20% seems way too high, its higher than my gear even provides. I could see MAYBE 10% but when its higher than gear provides it seems like a poor solution. I now have a completely wasted stat on my gear. If I had no dodge on my gear and no "We are grasping at straws" debuff I would be 3% ahead of the game.

[kiertokanki]

this method is very welcome imo, since its been noted since release of wotlk that avoidance stats were too high even with the first tier parts compared to tbc for example

healers need to do more and tanks need to rotate cooldowns, brings back that actually if youre skilled you can make them small differences. And not to mention the thing that makes me most happy is that you need to think about socketing/enchants rather than just be a common wotlk tank and "stack as much stamina as you can to make you imba"

if you think about 25 normal mode raiding (wich is the thing most guilds do) theres no really much to do these days.. i mean you can carry 10 slackers and still get trough the encounters. And yes theres many players that are skilled for 25 hardmodes, but their guilds dont have enough skill/players to do them so theyre stuck at normals. No one whos cleared BT and Sunwell pre 3.0 cant say that raids have been "ok" difficulty wise..Ulduar brought bit with Yogg-Saron being hard when Ulduar patch came(prenerffed Yogg i mean)
and now is worthless when ppl get better gear by just doing dailies and pugging toc10 everyweek..

hopefully this makes the instance a little more worth to clear/farm

sum up.. best news this far during this expension pve wise, i think only poor skilled idle types can complain about this debuff in icecrown =)

[Ohly]

At least we won't be losing tanks in less than a second anymore. Thanks for implementing this Blizzard!

[Lassy]

That is blatent nonsense. Premonition, Ensidia, Vodka, Method all these guilds use warrior tanks and all use them on Northrend Beasts. As a warrior tank you have the same miss, dodge, parry, armor, health pool and mitigation as a DK or Paladin. Yeah a paladin will block more often but they don't have anything near the quality of defensive cooldowns you get as a warrior.

If you are dying on that encounter more than the other tanks it is because you are not playing well. Are you 5/15/51 specced? Are you keeping up imp demo shout? Are you using Potions of Invincibility? Are you using shield block for the entire 10 seconds you will be tanking at 2 stacks? Is the tank after you quick about taunting at the end of your rotation? Have you arranged to tell a healer when you need one of their defensive cooldowns to be used if you don't have your own ready? Do you have 40k health unbuffed? Have you either Last Stand or Shield Wall active coming to the transition with a trinket and ideally enraged regeneration popped as well just as the last stack is applied? If you answered no to any one of those then the problem is you.

Even if you aren't doing any of those things Impale + Autoattack can happen to you at most a total of 6 times over the entire fight. Last stand and shield wall, used correctly will cover the 4 of those, if you glyph and talent for either you can cover all six.

Of course if you are just showing up with 35k health, flask in hand and expecting to do hard modes then you will die, it is HARD you need to play efficiently. Crying that hard mode is hard is as stupid as people crying that the easy modes are easy. If the hard modes were going to be easy then there wouldn't be any point in having them now would there?

If there are many, many warriors out there tanking on these encounters with no difficulty have you considered that maybe, just maybe, the problem is you? You see the same in every forum, bear druids, dk tanks, paladins all saying they are getting shelved on that boss because all the other tanks in their guild take less damage and have more health. The reality is that these players for the most part just plain suck. All classes can and have tanked all of these encounters and there are players of every class that can repeatedly and consistently tank them successfully. It is more likely that you just happen to be the least skilled tank in your guild. Some tank in every guild has to be the least skilled, just accept that in your guild it is probably you and they are too polite to say so and nod in agreement when you claim it is your class that is to blame.

The guilds you named are 25man guilds. They have access to gear that I, as a 10man strict raider, do not have access to. Before you start calling me a scrub, in many fancy words, consider that perhaps I was talking in a hyperbole.

I can and once have tanked ToGC beasts. The fact that the healers cry and it's a 50/50 chance if I die or not is what's the problem. Defensive cooldowns you ask? Exactly which defensive cooldowns am I supposed to get from druids? Our paladin helps out, but again, it's a hit-and-miss situation. When I layer Radiance over my experiences thus far... Things don't look pretty. And bosses won't hit less hard than they do know, they will be hitting for the same amount, where one would expect them to hit harder in a new tier of raiding.

Also, claim again that warriors have the same healthpools as paladins and I'll assume you've had an aneurysm, rather than just having a slip of the tongue. Stamina scaling, look into it.

Buuut, that's all slightly besides the point up for discussion, isn't it?

As for the "lets turn healing into mana managment" point, has any healer in the history of the game ever said the game would be more fun if they had to just manage their mana better? Of course not because having to manage your mana is very, very boring.

Really? I could swear the masses QQ'd when downranking was removed. I seem to vaguely recall arguments like "That was the only skill required in healing! That's the only thing that made healing fun!" Downranking was all about mana management...

[cavalier]

What I intend to enjoy, and by enjoy I mean caress myself with a cheese grater, is that this works and will make ICC more difficult for uber geared tanks...

But ueber geared tanks will min/max themselves and equip themselves to handle the nerf more effectively..

Which means if I ever want to run non-ICC content with them, they will get spanked as they have less mitigation...

Soooo.. yay for no longer just spamming flash heal going christ is this the one is this theo ne maybe this one gahhh keep on spamming hope dps kill them quickly

To... ICC fine, TOTGC/ulduar hardmodes christ is this the one is this the one is this the one...

[Deleted]

How are they going to balance shield block, if bosses hit more often for less? Wasnt anub hc clear enough of how op shield block is when mobs hit often but less?

[tauromania]

i think the spell should be re-maked that way:
"Enemy bosses and mobs ignore up to 20% of your dodge, block or parry chances, depending on your higest".
otherwise it will be a lot more effective for druids than other classes that focus on other avoidance stat.
for an example, if a paladin has 19.50% dodge chance and 30% parry chance the chill of the throne will be less effective compared to a tank that has 20% or more dodge.

[Grob]

I can and once have tanked ToGC beasts. The fact that the healers cry and it's a 50/50 chance if I die or not is what's the problem. Defensive cooldowns you ask? Exactly which defensive cooldowns am I supposed to get from druids?

you dont need cooldowns from healers in ToGC 10.
So you dont know how to tank Gormok, but cry about him and make your healers cry with you. Good reason to nerf boss hits and nerf everybody with -20% dodge, right?


And

They have access to gear that I, as a 10man strict raider, do not have access to.

ToC 25 is easily puggable.

At least we won't be losing bad tanks in less than a second anymore. Thanks for implementing this Blizzard!

fixed