[Ion]

Source: Hamburglar Ghostcrawler's posts are all maddening. He has no idea what he's talking about and he's getting all defensive now dealing with the posters.

Every time someone says that I flay a kitten and dip it in lemon juice.

To suggest that he has no idea what he's talking about is completely nonsensical. He's the only person who absolutely 100% certainly DOES know what he's talking about. It's his game.

You happen, clearly, to not agree with him; however that doesn't make HIM the one that's wrong.

Every single person who says that someone at Blizzard doesn't know what they're doing or talking about or are making dumb decisions have clearly never worked on something complex. Or at least I hope you haven't...

[Kavtor]

Sunwell radiance has nothing to do with rogues, and icewell radiance doesn't significantly adversely effect any class more than any other.

The sky is not falling. Just like the sky did not fall 18 months ago when we got this the first time.

And no. You probably don't have a better understanding of how the game works than the people who develop it.

[Darksend]

Source: Junkyard I can vouch for this I got banned for saying I didn't like his leadership, and where the Dev team has led the game. One question that should be posed here is which tanking class does this hurt the most? I would guess the highest avoidance tanks currently, and does this truely make stam king without any arguement. I do have another question sunwell radiance was put into place because of rogues from what I recall of videos of rogues in T6 gear being unhittable, and seeing one tank Illidan. Isn't that why sunwell radiance came into the game? If thats true we have 2 very different reasons for this radiance compared to the sunwell version.

druids wore rogue gear. druids are tanks. if rogues could do it so could druids. I myself was able to get 90%ish on fights like bloodboil and mother.

[mero12513]

Source: Junkyard I can vouch for this I got banned for saying I didn't like his leadership, and where the Dev team has led the game. One question that should be posed here is which tanking class does this hurt the most? I would guess the highest avoidance tanks currently, and does this truely make stam king without any arguement. I do have another question sunwell radiance was put into place because of rogues from what I recall of videos of rogues in T6 gear being unhittable, and seeing one tank Illidan. Isn't that why sunwell radiance came into the game? If thats true we have 2 very different reasons for this radiance compared to the sunwell version.

No rogues ever realistically tanked anything in actual guilds. After they completely out geared all content they could pull some hilarious gimmicks. Sunwell and Icecrown radiance exist for the same reason: bosses were required to hit too hard to make tank death a viable threat.

On the topic of EH stacking becoming more important because of this change, it's simply not true. I remember the original arguments of EH vs Avoidance that I read in BC. Basically, EH is only important on certain plateaus that correspond to being able to take a discreet number of hits from the boss. Unless you can take one extra hit from the boss, then avoidance is almost always better. Super-high levels of avoidance forced encounter design to the point where you had to stack every point of stam you could to survive any multiple hits at all. Icecrown radiance brings us to the point where you can reasonably take two or perhaps even 3 hits without heals, without dying, which puts the ability to avoid a hit drastically more useful in terms of easing the load on healers.



P.S. You got banned because the WoW forums don't exist for you to talk about GC. They exist to talk about WoW. Interestingly, the same is true of these forums.

[Reev]

Source: Hamburglar Ghostcrawler's posts are all maddening. He has no idea what he's talking about and he's getting all defensive now dealing with the posters.

Explain to me why he has no idea what he's talking about.

[Khanus]

Someone mentioned a few posts back that Druids became king-stuff for Brut. Correct me if I'm wrong (and I could be), but that was BEFORE druids lost their armor-cap ability, yes? It shouldn't propel druids ahead of the others in quite that regard this time around.

[fuddjupp]

More frequent hits / steady incoming damage + 20% less avoid = NEVER ENDING RAGE BAR!

I'm looking forward to getting crazy on my mouse-wheel for HS Spam with my 100/100 Rage! NOT!

[shiz98]

Source: Meeks I did not realize there were any tanks left that had not ditched avoidance for stam a long long time ago

*Raises hand*

Yeah, I started stacking avoidance coming out of Ulduar. In ToC it's still a bit in EH's favor (even ignoring fights like Gormok where there's a stam gimmick), but it's close, and I expected Icecrown to tip the scales.

Quite simply, the harder bosses hit, the better avoidance gets and the worse stam gets. Each % avoidance gets better and better the more a boss hits for, while the amount of EH needed to survive for one extra hit gets larger and larger - eventually the balance tips straight over to avoidance because your EH only makes a tiny difference. If a boss hits for 20k and I have 30k HP, I need 10k more HP to make survive one more hit. If my EH gear gets me only 8k HP, whats the point? It's not going to help me survive one more hit, while the avoidance I could get from those itemization points devoted to stam is a direct benefit.

I'm extremely certain ICC was going to be the place where we'd stack avoidance if this change hadn't gone though. We may still stack avoidance depending on how things are balanced, but the aura at least gives EH some more breathing room.

Source: Darksend THIS CHANGE WILL AFFECT HEALERS MUCH MORE THAN IT WILL EFFECT TANKS. The goal is to make damage on tanks predictable rather than healers thumb in but or with 200K overhealing after 4 straight dodges.

This is the truth.

[Mhoram]

Source: mero12513 P.S. You got banned because the WoW forums don't exist for you to talk about GC. They exist to talk about WoW. Interestingly, the same is true of these forums.

Saying you don't like the direction of the game or the way it's being developed is talking about WoW, isn't it? Isn't that what we're doing here? If he'd said something about GC personally, that would be different. Expressing an opinion about what is happening to the game you pay to play is totally different. At least it used to be. Maybe that's why I don't visit official game forums anymore. Too... elitist? Imagine that.

And just to stay on topic, I agree with Kazeynoma. I remember the devs saying, "We know Sunwell Radiance sucks, and we're going to design things better in WotLK so we don't have to screw around with bandaids like this again." Flash-forward a year or so, and here we are again. I've really wondered whose vision is actually being followed by the design team for some time now, and this only makes me more unsure of this game's future. Those who don't learn from history, and all that.

[mero12513]

Source: Mhoram Saying you don't like the direction of the game or the way it's being developed is talking about WoW, isn't it? Isn't that what we're doing here? If he'd said something about GC personally, that would be different. Expressing an opinion about what is happening to the game you pay to play is totally different. At least it used to be. Maybe that's why I don't visit official game forums anymore. Too... elitist? Imagine that.

Source: Junyard I can vouch for this I got banned for saying I didn't like his leadership, and where the Dev team has led the game

I might consider that something about GC personally. I can definitely see your point though and I definitely agree that not agreeing with the direction of the game is a valid concern. "I don't like the direction of the game" and "I don't like your leadership" seem inherently different to me personally, but I can understand that they do mean essentially the same thing.

[shiz98]

Source: Ghostcrawler The 20% nerf is applied after diminishing returns. That is why I am saying it won't affect the relative value of dodge and parry. The Icewell Radiance won't get you closer to diminishing returns by itself.

For those of you wondering.

[Junkyard]

One thing that really irritates me is making it sound like players were somehow responsible for this coming about when people have been practically screaming about it since Ulduar came out. And it's not like they didn't have a previous example of this happening in the past "Sunwell Radiance". I mean if you can't learn from history, and retain the lessons from it I'm sorry but your dumb that might be mean or blunt, but it's true.

[Manginae]

Coming up next: Tanks continue to die due to a overpowered nerf!

Still it should be used, but not as strong a nerf.

[Reev]

Junkyard, first of all, I don't see how they make it sound like it's the player's fault. Secondly, Blizzard did have a plan to avoid this, but partway into it, their premise changed in that they decided to implement hard modes. I'm more than happy to deal with Chill of the Throne to have Normal/Hard be part of the game.

[jere]

Source: mero12513 I might consider that something about GC personally. I can definitely see your point though and I definitely agree that not agreeing with the direction of the game is a valid concern. "I don't like the direction of the game" and "I don't like your leadership" seem inherently different to me personally, but I can understand that they do mean essentially the same thing.

Yeah, the tone of Junkyard's post on the forums in that thread was pretty rough (whether it was intended to be or not). I don't think he said anything too terrible, but it was more the way he conveyed it than the content. The devs don't typically ban people for disagreeing with them, but they do ban them for "how" they disagree with them.

If I remember correctly he had said they missed the mark, but then went into about how he was the worst at various things and asked them if they were going to fix it or let warriors sit there and take it (or something like that...it was a long time ago in the thread where Ghostcrawler made the comment about how they were initially worried about block but probably should have been worried about cooldowns more).


On topic:
The hit to dodge is pretty interesting. Makes the block uptime of a paladin non-EH and makes the set bonus a bit worse. I think we will still tank like normal without much changes, but it still sucks to lose so much avoidance.

[Ollin]

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.

Yeah. Get out of panic mode, take a deep breath, and think for a minute: If the Icewell radiance nerf to avoidance makes the content untankable then they'll have to change it.

Simple as that.

If druids get screwed by this moreso than the other tanks and creates a noticeable trend they'll fix it. They're doing this in the first place so that healers don't have nervous break-downs and anurisms trying to heal through a new tier of massive damage spikes. You're supposed to be fighting the boss...not the RNG.

And no, you won't need a second set of gear. That would be stupid.

The debuff is there so that they can make the bosses hit less hard but land attacks more frequently.

Thats MORE HITS but LESS DAMAGE PER HIT.

Tank avoidance is going to go down, but we're not actually being penalized because they're going to change the bosses to compensate. This debuff basically negates the dodge you get from stacking the 140 defense you need to become uncritable in the first place. Druids can't avoid dodge so it works out there as well because the buff is counted after dodge's DR.

Source: Insahnity What I was wondering is why they don't use other tools at hand. Specifically, magic damage is a great tool.

Because that would make DKs very nearly the be-all end-all tanks for all of ICC. Between AMS/AMZ and Acclimation they would have to band-aid the band-aid.

[Tharr]

I doubt this will change the way each class currently tanks. What I'm curious about is if it will put added pressure on the EH difference between the tanks.

[felhoof]

I wrote a fairly lengthy explanation about how awesome this is going to make druids over on my blog:
ThinkTank: [General, Druid] Icewell radiance, bears, and you

[Norrath]

The instance will obviously be designed around the debuff. If it isn't when it comes out of the gate, it will get fixed eventually. They DO know what they're doing.

Expertise for bosses isn't really that bad an idea -- we get Expertise, why shouldn't they? As long as the game is balanced around it, we'll be fine.

[Masterkiller]

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.

This sounds to me like Block becomes much more valuable.