[Garrek]

I think your 2nd and 3rd examples are essentially the same statements with the 3rd having clever spin to make it sound more appealing.

The whole notion of being on a treadmill is true no matter if you state it in terms of your avoidance on progression never really advancing noticeably or not. We ride a treadmill today with EH where "the next boss" is perpetually telling us that we don't have enough. The only difference is that we're not shown a percentage on our character sheet that relates our health to the average damage from a progression boss. As we get more and more health, we're also taking on bosses that do more and more damage.

If you could come up with a reliable number to relate the two, I would imagine that the number would be very close to constant as one progressed just the same as you would have to explain avoidance hovering close to constant on progression bosses if they smoothly scaled a boss's anti-avoidance attributes. I think it would actually be more likely that you'd have a roughly constant decline (albeit slight) in the effectiveness of all of our stats in order to further simulate an increase in difficulty from one boss/tier to the next. It doesn't change gearing strategies in any way, it just means there's increasingly less room for mistakes on the execution side of things.

[WarTotem]

Source: Machus Current system, guide says: You need to have some stamina in your gear to take less damage on average. When you start out expect to have about 40% and near the endgame about 60%. At the endgame though the developers will reduce it by 20% at some point, so you'll be at around 40% again.

Healer thinks: Like I care, I'll assume you have 0% avoidance anyway, and hope you avoid stuff when I don't get a couple of crits.

Smoothly scaling bosses, guide says: You need to have avoidance in your gear to take less damage. As you progress you'll get more avoidance, but bosses will get expertise, so you'll end up avoiding avoid about 30% in every tier of content when you're geared appropriately.

Healer thinks: So I'm on a treadmill. Every fight has the same randomness of healing requirement, just that numbers get larger as I progress. /snore

Making avoidance a lesser part of the fights, guide says: You need to have stamina to take the worst hits and avoidance to avoid extra random damage. When you start you'll avoid about a third of what is avoidable, but as you progress and build up high avoidance you'll avoid most of it, and fights will feel more stable.

Healer thinks: Half the damage in worst case scenarios is unavoidable. The other half I can't rely on you avoiding. I'm back to case 1.


The way to make it interesting is to combine 2 & 3 in a decent balance.
Disregarding mana issues, tank healing atm is being a glorified HoT. You don't have any choice. You heal and hope he doesn't take 2 worst case scenarios chained together because then he'll certainly die.
I'm hoping that in Cataclysm healing will be reactive, because then you'll need to make choices (and that's what healing is all about tbh), which means you need unpredictable damage, but not enough to kill a tank in 2-3 seconds.

[Kanny]

TBH... I didnt read all here..

But asfar as I did read a lot of ppl are whining about "OMG we gonna die"

But as I can see, Blizzard has been CLEAR on the following:

Bosses do NOT hit your harder!!
Bosses dont attack faster!!!

for tanks(and raid members) YOUR avoidance drops a lot, TRUE.

BUT. As you get better gear, you get more stamina.
BUT. As you get better gear, you get more avoidance.
BUT. As you get better gear, you get more mitigation.

So... in the end.. Blizzard does not expect you to raid the citadel with ilvl 200 items,
at the point you might be low on avoidance indeed.

if you go in here.. with full 245 ilvl gear, you have none buffed and propperly gemmed/enchanted as the gear was designed for ..
(Not gemming crap like stamina ONLY nor Avoidance ONLY..)
Then your dodge should be above 30% anyway.
Then with YOUR choice of gemming and fully raid buffed including procs, you can go towards 35-42% dodge..

Now... lets calculate... you go -20% dodge.. leave's 15-22% dodge.
SHITLOADS of stamina (60-75k raid buffed hp??)
healers with better gear, more haste / int / sp
Healing faster bigger and longer...

What is the bloody trouble??

Stop whining about what blizzard wants to do.
You dont like it? stop playing it.

next to that, they wont listen to us on forums anyway, only to propper feedback on PTR's.

So just wait and see ^^ in mean time, get max gear you can, and enjoy the game.
Or do what I do, safe some money, buy a new computer so you can play on max graphics again if you dont allready ^^

The game still is AMAZING nice!

--ps
No offence to anyone, including blizzard ^^

[Ciderhelm]

Source: Kanny next to that, they wont listen to us on forums anyway, only to propper feedback on PTR's.

Just picking at this in the interest of keeping people engaged: I can easily point to at least a dozen major and real changes in the game that have been, as far as we know, directly influenced by posts and news on TankSpot. Just scroll through the WotLK beta period of news.

Developers do actively read sites like ours, and we do have an impact.

[Kanny]

I might been wrong there then ^^

but in the end, it's still stupid to be QQ'ing ^^

[KnThrak]

Source: WarTotem I'm hoping that in Cataclysm healing will be reactive, because then you'll need to make choices (and that's what healing is all about tbh), which means you need unpredictable damage, but not enough to kill a tank in 2-3 seconds.

GC seems to be implying this with larger HP pools, smaller damage, less avoidance and much smaller heals at same mana cost.

Effectively we'd need a lot of heals to get a tank back up to full (and probably someone else too), but they wouldn't die in 2-3 attacks either, I would be thinking more like 8-10.

So the race is how to organize the mana in such a way that the healing gets covered before the damage sums up to lethal, while at the same time not abandoning mana efficiency to the point where you run out of mana too quickly.


It could work. I remain sceptic. :P

[WarTotem]

@KnThrak:

The challenge is to build an expansion where even at end-level, tanks can survive for 3+ seconds. This will give the healers the breathing room to be reactive rather than just spamming heals. It also makes more sense lore-wise. Because I don't know if Icehowl is gonna rip off my tanks arm or leg next, but whatever it is, it'll be re-attached half a second later cause all the healers are simply spamming that one button.

[Nephelai]

Source: Ciderhelm Just picking at this in the interest of keeping people engaged: I can easily point to at least a dozen major and real changes in the game that have been, as far as we know, directly influenced by posts and news on TankSpot. Just scroll through the WotLK beta period of news. Developers do actively read sites like ours, and we do have an impact.

Do I see somebody vieing to be immortalized by a Trinket? Maybe "Ciderhelm's Impending Marmot?"

lol

[Dresk]

Source: Ciderhelm Just picking at this in the interest of keeping people engaged: I can easily point to at least a dozen major and real changes in the game that have been, as far as we know, directly influenced by posts and news on TankSpot. Just scroll through the WotLK beta period of news. Developers do actively read sites like ours, and we do have an impact.

I was in the WoTLK beta. GC clearly was reading tankspot and EJ. Add in the fact that discussion from one forum will very often spill into another forum and even if GC and the other devs were not reading tankspot the information from here was clearly reaching them.

Our discussions here are far from meaningless.

[Sharona]

Source: Nephelai Do I see somebody vieing to be immortalized by a Trinket? Maybe "Ciderhelm's Impending Marmot?" lol

I would so wear that.

[Maèl]

Source: Ciderhelm Just picking at this in the interest of keeping people engaged: I can easily point to at least a dozen major and real changes in the game that have been, as far as we know, directly influenced by posts and news on TankSpot. Just scroll through the WotLK beta period of news. Developers do actively read sites like ours, and we do have an impact.

Blizz does read the forums. They greatly respect EJ and I wouldn't be surprised if they also read TS with interest. They don't necessarily come to the same conclusions. Or they find another way that hasn't been suggested in forums. But if there is a real problem they will acknowledge it.

Truth is, even tho they design the game they are regularly surprised by the way stuff gets used by the users.

But just so you don't get me wrong. they have their own direction they want to move things. As I have said before and as I will repeat here:

Chill of the Throne is a complete non-issue. If it is either that or bosses hitting even harder than in ToGC25 then I'll pick the chill any time. Blizz has gone on record saying exactly that. There is no hidden message between the lines. There is nothing to find when you read it out backwards. There is no conspiracy that involves Leonardo Da Vinci. Agents Scully and Mulder won't uncover alien corpses in the basment of Blizz HQ.

WarTotem hit it bang on the head. This mechanic has nothing to do with tanks. It is a healer issue. And as such I completely approve of it.

Stuff will be balanced around that. But I don't have to fear that despite of close to 70% avoid my tank will be hit by an unlucky streak with my incoming heal(which I will be spamming anyways) landing 0.1 seconds too late. That's like flipping the coin if you get loot or a repair bill.
That, boys and girls, for lack of other terms simply sucks. A dead tank ruins every healers day. Especially if there is not much you could do about it. Oh, and it also causes a wipe.

Warning: this text may include hyperbole but I am used to tanks not severely outgearing the stuff they are tanking. So it doesn't stray too far from the realities I have to face in some fights.

[Baervar]

Source: Maèl WarTotem hit it bang on the head. This mechanic has nothing to do with tanks. It is a healer issue. And as such I completely approve of it.

I actually think it's more about tank healer + tank co-op on how to burn cooldowns and general reactive healing/cd usage.
If i'm reading this right Blizzard's expecting avoidance to be more of a healer helper rather than a healer annoyer (as it was in togc), so, besides special abilities and such i'm thinking it's gonna be along the lines of
tank healer: normal heal x10
tank: gets hit x7, avoid x3
And if within a certain ammount of hits you don't avoid any ammount of the hits the boss is throwing at you, either you have to burn a cd for the healer to catch up on healing OR the healer has to burn up a cooldown so you're in check again. Again, special abilities excluded on this.

Which means it will be about balancing out a certain ammount of avoidance to make sure it's just enough to give your healers some breathing space and all the rest of the focus on mitigation and hp (maybe some extra gear swapping depending on the boss); not a huge difference from before really, just a bit more focus on avoidance (which will come in big values with better gear anyway).

What bugs me about all of this isn't the method as much as the form though. Blizzard just put bigger and bigger values on items every time a new patch got out at rates so high that it gave them too little space to change any (more or less) unpredictable gameplay changes that may occur with increasing the item values. So when they meet up with the problem they just do something that screams "oh we didn't think about this let's just implement something cheesy like an aura in the raid to fix it". Bleh /rant

[Maèl]

Source: Baervar What bugs me about all of this isn't the method as much as the form though. Blizzard just put bigger and bigger values on items every time a new patch got out at rates so high that it gave them too little space to change any (more or less) unpredictable gameplay changes that may occur with increasing the item values. So when they meet up with the problem they just do something that screams "oh we didn't think about this let's just implement something cheesy like an aura in the raid to fix it". Bleh /rant

Yep. They also confessed that they messed this up. They seem not to have planned the TOC content and had a whole item level more before IC. Otherwise IC would have been like TOC.

I think they must have planned on the complete mechanics/stat overhaul in Cata for a long, long time.

[Liongale]

I guess this is the kind of thing where we're going to have to experience it to believe it. I, too, have the fear they're not going to truely compensate, and we're going to face Sunwell-esque difficulty despite them saying they would never put out something that hard again- not on purpose, mind you. Blizzard has an admitted track record of releasing things harder at first, then scaling back as needed.

If our tanks are getting clobbered, I'm sure they'll scale the damage back/lessen the Chill appropriately- nerfing their own encounters is something we can always count on :P

[WarTotem]

To all the nay-sayers claiming they're gonna still increase the dmg output of bosses as if it wasn't there;

When I'm tank healing in ToC, I already assume you have 0% avoidance. Anything that can drop you in 3 seconds almost requires the constant spam of 1 tankhealer atleast. In fact, if you were in max PvP gear gemmed fully stamina, I probably only would see the difference on healing meters or the fact you have more sta/armor. Thta's something that wasn't true in Sunwell.

Ok, that was slightly exaggerated, I do know avoidance helps me, but I still can't rely on it as a healer in the current raiding environment (which is not something I like btw). Paladins have the mana pool, Disc Priests stack shield, Resto Shams keep up Ancestral Healing and all the other healers are usually raid healing, so you're gonna get spammed anyway, Icewell Radiance is not going to change anything about that, if only give me more threat (like THAT's a problem).

I'm more concerned about the cause of the problem (the gear scaling not being probably forseen & corrected) than the solution (Icewell Radiance)

PS: On a more comical side; If we get such a powerful chill effect on us just by stepping inside this giant Citadel, how bad you think Arthas has it sitting on the source of all that? I mean, you'ld think he would freeze his balls off, right?

[Kazeyonoma]

Frostmourne keeps him warm. Sindragosa keeps a toasty fire by his throne. :P

[felhoof]

Back a few pages - I wanted to clarify what I think Icecrown was going to be vs what it is.

Icecrown will be 'easier' to heal via chill than it was before. That doesn't mean healing will be less spammy. Basically Icecrown was getting to the point where in order to challenge healing, healing had to be spammy AND cooldowns would likely be forced to be used on a strict basis.

Now, instead you'll just have massively spammy heals.

I fully expect bosses to hit with normals + specials hard enough that not receiving a heal within a couple seconds will mean death. This change will just mean that you'll not need a heal within 1 second.

[Hire]

BEAR. RAWR!

That is all.



Almost all. I wonder how many naysayers have done any ptr testing. Regardless of whatever Blizz throws at us, I will still beserk and eat faces.