[Synapse]

Source: Astemus Druids' only avoidance stat is dodge, besides the 5% base miss chance. Sporting 50-60% avoidance as a plate wearer typically means you've got 30-40% dodge and 20-30% parry. A druid with that much avoidance has only dodge. Pretty clearly a bigger nerf to druids than any other class. I'll be dropping to very scary levels of avoidance. Not that I don't think this change is needed, but could have easily been avoided (lol) by simply not increasing the avoidance available on armor for hard mode tiers of gear, and found a way to penalize druids until the formulas for agi to dodge can be reworked along with everything else in the expansion, if it was even needed.

If the druid had 60% avoidance and lost 20% avoidance..and the warrior had 60% avoidance and lost 20% avoidance...how is it worse for the druid than the warrior?
No ICC-ready tank has less than 20% dodge. The blow will hit everyone, and those with higher total avoidance will feel it the most.

[Reev]

That's what I was getting at Synapse. If I'm not mistaken, druid avoidance is generally similar or lower than their plate wearing counterparts. The higher your avoidance is, the more the 20% loss will hurt.

Going from 60% avoidance to 40% is a 50% increase in the % of hits you take. Going from 40% avoidance to 20% avoidance is a 33% increase in the % of hits you take.

This should end up being the same or nearly the same for the majority of tanks, and I don't see how druids "clearly" have it worse.

[Synapse]

Source: Reev That's what I was getting at Synapse. If I'm not mistaken, druid avoidance is generally similar or lower than their plate wearing counterparts. The higher your avoidance is, the more the 20% loss will hurt. Going from 60% avoidance to 40% is a 50% increase in the % of hits you take. Going from 40% avoidance to 20% avoidance is a 33% increase in the % of hits you take. This should end up being the same or nearly the same for the majority of tanks, and I don't see how druids "clearly" have it worse.

Thought you were disagreeing o.O

Warrior has 30% dodge and 20% parry.
Druid has 50% dodge.
Both lose 20% dodge.
Warrior has 10% dodge and 20% parry.
Druid has 30% dodge.

It's as big a loss for the druid as it is for a warrior, dk or paladin, for druids have always been designed with a smoother dodge DR curve because they only use dodge in the first place.

[Maèl]

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.

So they did that for my benefit?
That's awfully considerate.

My guess is they will hold back on the 60k white boss hits. But that explanation is just a joke. I would have expected an explanation like that from a politician explaining how his wedding tackle got stuck in that teenage girl who somehow did turn out not to be his wife. Doubleplusungood. I feel vaguely insulted.

[Liquidska]

Source: Synapse If the druid had 60% avoidance and lost 20% avoidance..and the warrior had 60% avoidance and lost 20% avoidance...how is it worse for the druid than the warrior? No ICC-ready tank has less than 20% dodge. The blow will hit everyone, and those with higher total avoidance will feel it the most.

Because you guys have other options on how you can work around this. What am I supposed to do, Start gemming for Shield block and hope Savage Defense starts getting reliable?

I am going to go break out my Blue Berry set again, maybe if I can ROFL 70k I might still be worth a damn.

But all of this is just kinda panic mode right now, maybe this won't have as big of an effect on us as I think and this is all QQ. No real good way to know until we are actualy in Icecrown. I wonder though, if this will prompt tanks to have 2 set's of "defualt" gear. "Icecrown" Gear and "Everything else" gear.

[Reev]

Druids have the same options we do. You don't have parry, but you will have dodge, to work with, just like we do. Our dodge and parry, and your dodge will likely be on similar diminishing returns, although the parry will diminish faster the more we get.

We have shield blocking. You have savage defense. Where do we have more options than you?

On top of that, it's irrelevant. It's like saying we have more options than you right now. If we could grow our survivability and avoidance faster than you with chill of the throne, we should be able to do the same now, yet we don't.

[Omok]

Source: Meeks I did not realize there were any tanks left that had not ditched avoidance for stam a long long time ago. Only avoidance most tanks have is what just happens to be on their stam gear. It is kind of funny that it still got out of control.

I think there are still a few out there, but they are definitely a dying breed. I have never socketed anything except straight up stamina, unless it was a gimmick encounter. And as far as the comment someone made earlier regarding reverting to Sunwell days, that does seem to be true in a way. The difference between then and now, is we are on the cusp of a huge overhaul of all stats in the game. While they may have been afraid to kill off avoidance in it's older form then, I think they're going to finally put it out of it's misery now.

[Synapse]

Source: Liquidska Because you guys have other options on how you can work around this. What am I supposed to do, Start gemming for Shield block and hope Savage Defense starts getting reliable? I am going to go break out my Blue Berry set again, maybe if I can ROFL 70k I might still be worth a damn. But all of this is just kinda panic mode right now, maybe this won't have as big of an effect on us as I think and this is all QQ. No real good way to know until we are actualy in Icecrown. I wonder though, if this will prompt tanks to have 2 set's of "defualt" gear. "Icecrown" Gear and "Everything else" gear.

Uhh no one has a workaround for that 20% dodge loss.
Yes, you are panicking. Your gearing won't change, mine won't change, we'll all just see a rather smaller total avoidance. The only ones who seem to be losing something more are dks and their rune strike procs.

[Liquidska]

Panic bear panics to much. I should of hit beserk...

Well, you guys are right, end of the day this is a tank thing, not a druid thing. Having my one avoidence stat nerfed still feels like a kick to the balls though. I have been stacking stam over avoidence for a while now, so suppose this doesn't exactly change much for me.

Still though... 30% dodge? Sucky...

[Mecer]

I have a couple of concerns with respect to this:

1) DK's lose the same avoidance as everyone else, I understand that. However they currently have the lower AC than the other 3, so the hits would hit slightly harder.

2) Is the debuff going to be the same between 25man and 10man raids? Strict 10man tanks have worse gear, can we expect this debuff to scale accordingly.

3) Most importantly, is it 'ignore' or 'reduce by' 20%. There is a significant difference, as abilies (runestrike) and trinkets (the new IC10 tanking trinket) rely on dodge to be effective. If you still 'dodged' but took the damage and allowed these procs/abilities to go off, it would effectively allow the avoidance reduction without harming DK threat.

[Synapse]

Source: Mecer I have a couple of concerns with respect to this: 1) DK's lose the same avoidance as everyone else, I understand that. However they currently have the lower AC than the other 3, so the hits would hit slightly harder. 2) Is the debuff going to be the same between 25man and 10man raids? Strict 10man tanks have worse gear, can we expect this debuff to scale accordingly. 3) Most importantly, is it 'ignore' or 'reduce by' 20%. There is a significant difference, as abilies (runestrike) and trinkets (the new IC10 tanking trinket) rely on dodge to be effective. If you still 'dodged' but took the damage and allowed these procs/abilities to go off, it would effectively allow the avoidance reduction without harming DK threat.

It's pseudoexpertise. We have no indications that "would have dodged" will be taken in consideration. Hopefully a blue will voice it soon.

[Sproutster]

If bosses are going to be hitting us a lot more often for less % of our health, is there any chance that block sets could become viable for regular raiding? Makes me wish I had a heroic anub set to test out.

[Worldie]

I like this. Back to avoidance gemming in Icecrown.

[Horacio]

I stack Stam as best I can and sit at hrm....40.8K/26.5/21.3 unbuffed. Gormok rapes me on a regular basis but last ngiht for the first time, we got to the worms with enough people left to make a go of it. Still need work there (This being heroic mode)

Its disappointing that these stop-gap measures have to be implemented to fix errors and runaway statistical inflation but oh well, you roll with the punches.

This doesn't really change my gearing strategy as right or wrong, I'm an EH whore. Going forward, with the ideas they are putting forth for Cataclysm in terms of tanking 'sound' great but we'll see.

Though, I may invest in a few avoidance heavy items to throw at Gormok on heroic and see if that helps some.

[fuddjupp]

What about Revenge and Runestrike? Warriors still can hope from proccs throug parry and block but DKs can only hope for proccs from their parry.

I'm not a math king but 20% less dodge = 20% less chance for Revenge/Runestrike to procc?

[Kavtor]

Source: Sproutster If bosses are going to be hitting us a lot more often for less % of our health, is there any chance that block sets could become viable for regular raiding? Makes me wish I had a heroic anub set to test out.

This is the same as sunwell. Bosses aren't really going to hit for any less, they'll hit harder than they do now. Tank damage taken is still going to go up. Especially compared to ToC, where spike tank death is really only a concern in P1 Beasts and P3 Anub. They just don't have to really, really inflate it to keep avoidance sets from getting out of control.

[Synapse]

Source: fuddjupp What about Revenge and Runestrike? Warriors still can hope from proccs throug parry and block but DKs can only hope for proccs from their parry. I'm not a math king but 20% less dodge = 20% less chance for Revenge/Runestrike to procc?

I haven't seen revenge see much use lately, but yeah, revenge will proc less.
Runestrike is our biggest victim if it can be used "on cd". and your math is wrong =P 20% less dodge will mean a variable amount of less rune strike procs, relative to total avoidance. If your tank has 60% avoidance, his relative loss of avoided blows is 20/60, or 1/3. rune strike, on a 60% avoidance tank, will proc only two thirds of what it used to.
(20/avoidanceBeforeRadiance, basically)

[Petninja]

I'm wondering if 10-man will see the same love 25-man is seeing with Radiance. There are those of us who do not do 25's ever, and don't have access to the gear from there. A 20% debuff on dodge is going to take a higher % of avoidance from me than it will from a 25-man. Then again, no one considers 10 man raiders important. 10 mans are there to fill in gaps in gearing for 25 man raiders .

[Reev]

If you're going from 60% avoidance on a DK to 40%, you still have 40% chance every 2 seconds to proc runestrike. You may get a couple of swings in a row where you won't proc this, but then you'll get a few in a row where you do, and can go nuts dropping your RP. This only really becomes a problem if your avoidance drops so low that your procs can't keep up with your RP generation. If you have a really bad string (hello warrior rage starvation), you always have death coil as a backup.

[Synapse]

Source: Kavtor This is the same as sunwell. Bosses aren't really going to hit for any less, they'll hit harder than they do now. Tank damage taken is still going to go up. Especially compared to ToC, where spike tank death is really only a concern in P1 Beasts and P3 Anub. They just don't have to really, really inflate it to keep avoidance sets from getting out of control.

This is interesting, because on the biggest "zomg heal the tank is dead oh jesus this hurts so much" boss was Brutallus, whose ideal tanking gear was the old "get this much EH, then go go go avoidance". We might very well see a comeback of avoidance.