[Aberen]

Hey guys, I thought of this idea on my way to work today. This is just an idea that probably would need adjustment to work properly in WoW. Figured I'd post it here, take any suggestions, and then come up with a good submission for the offical blizz forums.

I think they should introduce a new ability or talent for protection classes. For now I will name it Dispersion. This ability would start a buff that would stack with every attack made against the tank that wasn't blocked, dodged, or parried. Once this ability reaches 5 stacks the next damaging attack made to the tank that causes more than 70% of the tanks total health in damage gets dispersed over the next 6 seconds. (both the 70% and the time of 6 seconds could be adjusted to keep the ability viable or from becoming "OP") This effect cannot happen more than once every minute. (the "every minute" clause could be adjusted too).

My thought would be that this would help smooth out huge tank damage spikes that make some encounters a real headache. It might also allow tanks to stack more than Stamina to survive.

What do you think. I haven't been around since the begining of WoW, maybe they already had something like this.

[Stengel]

The goal of the big damage spike is to force you to gear up, use your cooldowns wisely and cooperate with healers or other players that can provide cooldowns.

The only thing that is a headache is the disparity between the tanking classes in some cases when it comes to handling such big damage spike, or when it is completely random.

Why would you want to basically remove big hits? They often are what makes a fight interesting.

The last thing we need are automatic tank savers, Ardent Defender was already a big mistake.

[vine]

I'm guessing you haven't been reading the patch notes. They are changing tank damage in Icecrown to be more even. We'll avoid less hits, but each hit will be lower, taking out a lot of the spikes.

Ardent Defender is seriously OP, however as a healer I love it. Looking at our last ToGC clear, it procced something like four times. That's four potential wipes averted simply by having a paladin tank. Bring the player? Yeah right Blizzard.

[TomHuxley]

Source: vine I'm guessing you haven't been reading the patch notes. They are changing tank damage in Icecrown to be more even. We'll avoid less hits, but each hit will be lower, taking out a lot of the spikes.

Whoa! That's not exactly true. They are adjusting it so we won't have to take even larger spikes than we are now. GC has said several times that people are going to probably complain because their tanks will be two or three shot on some encounters until they gear up to the content.

They are doing it because once avoidance gets past 60% on towards 70% they need to start making bosses hit for like 80% or more of your health to make the few hits that get through life-threatening, and this causes a whole lot of problems, including the fact that many times they tanks death will simply be unavoidable RNG.

Now in Cataclysm they actually will be changing the tank/healing/boss dynamic a bit, but the IC radiance bit just stops the "bosses hit for ever more of your health" issue from spiraling out of control in the last tier of bosses. It's NOT going to mean that all the IC bosses do less spike damage than we see in Ulduar or ToC, it just means they won't have to hit even harder.

[wazdaa]

Source: vine I'm guessing you haven't been reading the patch notes. They are changing tank damage in Icecrown to be more even. We'll avoid less hits, but each hit will be lower, taking out a lot of the spikes. Ardent Defender is seriously OP, however as a healer I love it. Looking at our last ToGC clear, it procced something like four times. That's four potential wipes averted simply by having a paladin tank. Bring the player? Yeah right Blizzard.

only that is a very wrong way of looking at ardent defender.

just take beasts for example all tanks rotate cd's when they tanking gormok, enraged worm, icehowl. paladin can't to the same extend chain cd's so where an other tank would still have a cd and be able to take the damage and not die. a paladin can't and just has to hope AD jumps in.

So if at the end of ToGC AD proc'ed 4 times that doesn't necessairly mean an other tank would have died 4 times.

[Spazlord]

Ardent Defender is seriously OP, however as a healer I love it. Looking at our last ToGC clear, it procced something like four times. That's four potential wipes averted simply by having a paladin tank. Bring the player? Yeah right Blizzard.

That's a very shallow way of looking at Ardent Defender. AD is passive. Other tanks have pro-active cooldowns to use. A warrior for example could pre-empt a big damage spike, or get nice and hard be brought to say 10% health, hit Last Stand for a 14k HP boost, be healed back up and your wipe has just been averted the same as if AD kicked in. Only difference - the warrior needed to be awake whereas the Paladin was AFK.

It's not seriously OP, it's just fucking stupid.

[vine]

What shallow way? I said I loved AD, regardless of the mechanics of limited cooldowns.

[jere]

He's referring to the part where you said it saved you from 4 potential wipes simply by having a paladin tank. Other tanks could have used their cooldowns to prevent the wipe in those same exact instances. Of course it takes more skill for the other tanks, but the result could have been the same if the tank was good enough. I don't think it is fair, but the AD save is part of our answer to not having another cooldown, so AD saves don't indicate not having a paladin being a failure. Good tanks would have made it through those instances as well.

[Satorri]

It's not a bad idea in some ways, but I think there are two points for you to consider:

1.) That's not *actually* easy to implement. It would take as much coding as any other new spell, and it's a little more complicated because how do you add it? Where do you add it? DK's have 3 trees, do you add it to every tree? Do you add it to stances (for pallies that'd have to be Righteous Fury, but then what about Retadins or Holy Pallies in pvp? And DK's in pvp?)?

2.) It's a patch to try and fix and unfortunate situation, treating the symptoms rather than the problem. Blizz knows the problem and they're stepping us towards a place where they can fix the problem (i.e. Cataclysm). Their patch is Chill of the Throne. The logic being that we take HUGE hits because we have to in order to regulate the nature of high avoidance on the amount of damage you take. Like TomHuxley said, they're not exactly toning down the size of the hits, but they are keeping them from over-inflating, and we'll get higher health to manage that as we gear up in t10 content.

[PatrikL]

With the talk of decreasing dodge and increasing the hit speed of bosses in IC I have though a bit about it and come to the following question: Cant this whole problem be solved by say doubling the bosses/mobs attack speed and decreasing the damage their attacks do? Wouldnt this atuomaticlly lead to a more even damage? Sure we would still dodge/parry some of their attacks but then the next one would come so much sooner that the spiky behaviour of today would be smaller (still spiky but we cant have a totally even damage either)

Its partially the way they are going with the Icewell radiance but why complicate it with the decrease of avoidance when this simple solution should produce pretty much the same result. If double the attack speed/half the damage isnt enough then make it tripple.

[Satorri]

There are practical limits to how quickly a boss can attack. There are several nuances that get tricky to balance, and it doesn't make things easier really.

The issue with playing down avoidance is to allow higher total damage taken with smaller hits, but without making bosses hit too fast.

Just because a small step of some sort is a good idea, does NOT mean that a big step of the same method is a good or better idea.