[Hamburglar]

From the raids forum:

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!

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.

I hope I'm missing the "lol jk noobs" somewhere in this.

[Unfurth]

The post seems a bit too well worded to have been a joke. Welcome to Sunwell 2.0. And based on the wording "will allow creatures to ignore 20%" not reduce players dodge chance by 20%, I think its unlikely to have any effect on our DR on dodge.

[Kazeyonoma]

wow... wasn't avoidance DR implemented to prevent this sort of thing? sigh

[Hamburglar]

I wonder if this resets the DR on dodge rating? That would blow to have your dodge so low and get less out of dodge rating. I am going to be furious if I see bosses hitting for 25k in Icecrown after this. Also, I hope this doesn't require us to re-gem all our sets for avoidance like in Sunwell to survive. If I gemmed avoidance that would mean no more ToC for me.

[Dtain]

I think this just drastically increased the value of parry.

[Hamburglar]

Source: Dtain I think this just drastically increased the value of parry.

Not really. It depends on whether dodge or parry rating gives you more avoidance depending on your gear setup. Avoidance is avoidance regardless of whether its defense, dodge or parry and is still subject to the same diminishing returns. It will be interesting to see if the Chill resets your dodge DR or not. That could make dodge rating better if it does.

[Ion]

Nope...dodge will still be better until you get past the DR-switchover point.

Edit: Yeah, what hamburglar said...he said it better than I did.

[Synapse]

The relationship and relative value of dodge rating and parry rating did not change. Getting X dodge will still be worth Y% more avoidance. If your dodge% is greater than 20%, dodge rating does NOT lose value. I also doubt the reduction will be pre-DR, or it'd not be truly 20% and thus pointless.

[drae]

I cried a little when I read that.

Do the people that design the gear sets have any relationship with the people who design the encounters? Like crap like this shouldn't be necessary.

[Hamburglar]

We'll see if the encounters in Icecrown adjust or if bosses will continue to melee a tank for 50% of his HP.

[Aggathon]

Source: drae I cried a little when I read that. Do the people that design the gear sets have any relationship with the people who design the encounters? Like crap like this shouldn't be necessary.

^ This

As far as dodge vs. parry. You'll still have to account for DRs, if your dodge gets closer to 32% or so w/o this Chill shenanigans but your parry is still around 20% then parry rating is probably more avoidance.

However: I think this just further cements ruthless stam gearing as the way tanks should gear up, the post almost seems like a round-about admission that that's what's ended up happening in this expansion.

[dadricvertanis]

Isn't this going to be a little screwy considering you can't go negative and people could in theory have less than 20% dodge with a custom gearset/spec?

I mean if I in theory had 19% dodge, and a I have to choose between an item with dodge and an item with parry, the dodge gives me nothing because it would still reduce me to 0% but the parry gives something.

Could it then be possible to purposely avoid dodge altogether for some tanks and just stack parry/block/etc? I dunno, this is just a ridiculous change to me. The math hurts my brain right now to think it through properly.

[Synapse]

Source: dadricvertanis Isn't this going to be a little screwy considering you can't go negative and people could in theory have less than 20% dodge with a custom gearset/spec? I mean if I in theory had 19% dodge, and a I have to choose between an item with dodge and an item with parry, the dodge gives me nothing because it would still reduce me to 0% but the parry gives something. Could it then be possible to purposely avoid dodge altogether for some tanks and just stack parry/block/etc? I dunno, this is just a ridiculous change to me. The math hurts my brain right now to think it through properly.

First of all, it's impossible to gather a tank set worth a damn and not have 20% dodge or very close to it( definitely impossible in icecrown-ready gear). Second,Icecrown Radiance won't affect the DR curve of avoidances. This means that if 10 dodge was better than 10 parry before Icecrown Radiance, then 10 dodge will be better than 10 parry after Icecrown Radiance.

Those of you that were around in late bc will remember Sunwell. It's exactly the same thing in every possible intention and effect.

[Stompya]

Dadric, that reasoning seems nonsense because no tank going into ICC will have under 25% dodge from gear and talents.

[Tendo]

Source: Aggathon However: I think this just further cements ruthless stam gearing as the way tanks should gear up, the post almost seems like a round-about admission that that's what's ended up happening in this expansion.

I heard a rumor that Defense was being reworked/tossed out for straight up stam boosts? I can't be arsed to find where some support is; it was just a little birdie. Can anyone confirm/deny please?

[Unfurth]

Defense will be removed as a stat in Cataclysm. Crit immunity will come from talents.

[Regill]

The really sad part is that avoidance is too high, and almost no tanks are even gemming / chanting for it. Ok well not counting anubarak warrior tanks. We all gem for Stamina, and avoidance is *still* too high. I was pretty suprised the other day when I added up my dodge, parry, and miss and got 63%. That reminds me of sunwell levels.

As for being under 20%... well if your in icecrown, you are wearing gear suitable to IC, which means you are over 20% dodge. I don't see how it would be possible to skip the stat, its on most of our gear. Assuming it was possible, by intentionally skipping dodge to do this you would be getting lots of parry instead, and run into the harsh parry diminishing returns.

Right now you get avoidance by balancing the amount of dodge and parry you get. Skipping one would just push that much extra DR onto parry, and probably hurt more than it helps.

And I highly doubt this will reset the dodge DR. Its a buff on the boss mob it sounds like, so you the tank are still at say 30% dodge, with the corresponding DR. But when an IC mob attacks you, that mob sees it as 10%.

Its a good change, in IC gear I know I would have reached 66-68% avoidance, and it creates very annoying rage starvation streaks, not to mention the absurd spikiness of the damage, and the dead in 2 hit, in 1.5 seconds problem.

Maybe with cataclysm the encounter team, the gear team, and the class team can schedule a meeting or something. Ya know, discuss this sort of stuff in advance. Bring a white board. Because fixing the problem like this is an ugly bandaid fix, and blizz knows it.

Edit: wow this thread is being posted in fast, couple people beat me to a few answers lol.

[dadricvertanis]

Ok ok, I wasn't stating something reasonable so much as a thought. I'm well aware of what gearsets look like at top end levels (I've cleared most everything myself) but I was more curious about the capability of perhaps SOME tank with a finely tuned gearset to aim for parry / stam and ignore dodge entirely. Yes, it isn't normal and yes, no sane tank has it...

hah... I felt hostility from suggesting that thought. wow.

[Synapse]

It's just too large a gap. Parry dr would molest your avoidance. Cheaper to just brute force that dodge.

[dadricvertanis]

Well its pretty clear they just molested our avoidance anyways :P