Illustrating Chill of the Throne

[Bovinity]

But the time in which they have to deal with that damage increases, giving the players enough time to make choices.

^ that!

[Bishoptwo]

would you mind sourcing this? I'm not worried that you're being disingenuous or anything, i'm just interested to read what he actually said. the change seems counter-intuitive if tanks are still going to be dying in 2 hits.

3) Tank healing was fun in Sunwell, IMO. Sunwell was challenging. That's what a lot of players are looking for in the final raid tier. If you don't like the challenge of healing a tank then I'm not sure why you'd want to be a healer. Now as I've said, we're not saying Icecrown is only for the Sunwell crowd. But I am pretty convinced there are going to be a lot of "Icecrown is too hard because my tank died" posts here when it goes live.

I still expect many tanks will die in two hits until they get geared up a little. But they will, and then the ability to survive two hits in a row won't be as big an issue.

Source of all his quotes: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Icewell Radiance is in! and all of his contradictions.

[Bovinity]

The important part of his wording is that...yes...people just going in there on the bleeding edge of progression are liable to die in 2 hits. But he also specifies that it won't be thus once people are geared up.

That's a bit different from how it is now, when even if you have some ToC gear you're in danger of going splat pretty much all the time in some situations.

[Meeks]

would you mind sourcing this? I'm not worried that you're being disingenuous or anything, i'm just interested to read what he actually said. the change seems counter-intuitive if tanks are still going to be dying in 2 hits.

From ghost crawler:

"I still expect many tanks will die in two hits until they get geared up a little. But they will, and then the ability to survive two hits in a row won't be as big an issue."

[Bishoptwo]

The important part of his wording is that...yes...people just going in there on the bleeding edge of progression are liable to die in 2 hits. But he also specifies that it won't be thus once people are geared up.

That's a bit different from how it is now, when even if you have some ToC gear you're in danger of going splat pretty much all the time in some situations.

I have never died to crazy spike damage in ToGC 25 that couldn't be healed through or CD'ed through appropriately. Anytime I have died has either been human error on my part or someone else's.

[Bovinity]

That's true, but it's irrelevant to the topic of the paradigm shifting from 2-shotting even geared tanks to (hopefully) seeing longer reaction time possibilities.

Of course, its all speculation at this point.

[Satorri]

Content is balanced, usually, to be challenging to people who are running it with gear from that instance, but only enough so that once you're geared it isn't a cake walk.

Of course tanks coming in a full tier lower in gear are going to get hammered. The distinction is, in ToC, Anub still hits a tank for half his health on every swing, but that is not the way they want it to be.


So to try to return to the original point of this post, what is it that you see is the big bad deal here? Maybe it's premature for all of this since we have no solid numbers to work with yet, but why are you so bent on assuming they're trying to break the game?

[Adrael]

When I said they should give less avoidance on ICC gear, I did mean they should compensate by adding stamina, my bad for not pointing it out.

I haven't seen any statement saying we'll have to deal with more avoidable hits. I think I saw a post mentioning non-avoidable damage referring to the use of cooldowns for predictable damage bursts.

There's another aspect for reducing avoidance. Like Satorri wrote, we don't really see the true mitigation from avoidance in short fights. The variance is big enough so that even a tank with theoretical 65% avoidance could see only 50% or less avoided hits on his/her combat log. If the fight lasts long enough we see the proper avoidance mitigation. I suppose we don't know this for sure, but from what I understand there's a good chance they will not only nerf avoidance but also increase bosses' attack speed. This means that the proper avoidance mitigation will show on our combat logs sooner than it is on current encounters.

Bottom line: with increased attack speed, avoidance becomes a bit more reliable, and that's actually a minor buff on avoidance.

Ofc I don't know if we'll see an increase in the average ICC boss attack speed.

[Reev]

We probably won't see an increased boss swing speed, but we'll see lower damage per swing. It will still be in increase in total damage a tank takes. Lower damage per hit also makes avoidance more reliable.

[Bovinity]

Swing speed isn't changing, GC already covered that in the initial thread. So no worries there.

[Satorri]

Like Satorri wrote, we don't really see the true mitigation from avoidance in short fights. The variance is big enough so that even a tank with theoretical 65% avoidance could see only 50% or less avoided hits on his/her combat log.

You only present one side and so miss the point.

In a fight you can see 80% avoidance. The tricky thing about avoidance is that it is not static on every hit, which is why many people have shunned it, for fear of the RNG.

It averages out in the end, but it can be a range of effect on short fights.

As an example, when Naxx was fresh content and I was an Unholy DK tanking Hatefuls on Patchwerk, I had a fight where I avoided 78% of his attacks, I had Bone Shield up nearly 100% of the fight because he never chewed through charges before the CD was finished.

The point of all of this is that Chill of the Throne does nothing severe enough to diminish the value of avoidance, and largely I think the sheeple portion of the community has overblown ideas about avoidance being a poor survival value already.

[Bovinity]

Yeah...assuming that everything GC says is accurate in this case and that our interpretation of it is correct, this change should significantly increase the value of avoidance.

If you go from a 2-hit death to a 3-hit or even 4-hit death system, avoidance just keeps getting more and more valuable for preventing those strings. Will there still be unavoidable attacks? Sure, that's already been addressed and it'll probably be how dangerous those attacks are that determine where tanks put their gearing priorities.

It's entirely possible that even with this change we'll be forced to stack enormous amounts of EH. Or it might be possible that gearing for a large amount of avoidance becomes viable again. We'll just have to see.

[lyd]

Yeah...assuming that everything GC says is accurate in this case and that our interpretation of it is correct, this change should significantly increase the value of avoidance.

It increases the value of your remaining avoidance after the tax. that's true. but remember that this is a balancing act on Blizzard's part. it will be harder to get back up to where you were prior to Totc through upgrades than it would be normally, because the DR from upgrades will still function off your base avoidance and not your post-CotT avoidance. tanks will still be stacking stamina and letting avoidance come from gear alone. EHP is still king with this change, i'm afraid.

[robbon]

People refer to the sunwell factor, again it has to be remembered that only a small % of guilds and players actually experienced sunwell compared to the masses that Blizz want to now experience Icecrown.

As such whilst im expecting the change in mechanic to affect tanks / healers play style and im certainly anticipating a gem change in most tanks (is this a means of blizz moving tanks away from pure stam stacking ?) for those that have raided ToGC im not anticipating a significant impact on their progression.

The guilds that are only now just hitting Anub 25 normal..or even just 10 man normal may have a slightly steeper ramp to climb.

Instead of the stamina stacking would a move to increase dodge rating compensate for chill of the throne ? or would it be more of a case to stack more stamina and simply soak the additional hits.

Until it lands and we experience it its speculation. The one thing i do
know is that at the moment im in the best gear im going to get (given my guild/server/ability) this side of the release so there isnt much i can do until then...possibly apart from get some nice dodge trinkets..some dodge/stam gems and look at a few more expertise enchants...

I also remember somewhere that expertise was going to play a much bigger role in tank mechanics ?? and also defence rating was going to change. IS this all going to occur at patch ? or cataclysm..

Sorry its a little disjointed im at work

[Reev]

People refer to the sunwell factor, again it has to be remembered that only a small % of guilds and players actually experienced sunwell compared to the masses that Blizz want to now experience Icecrown.

As such whilst im expecting the change in mechanic to affect tanks / healers play style and im certainly anticipating a gem change in most tanks (is this a means of blizz moving tanks away from pure stam stacking ?) for those that have raided ToGC im not anticipating a significant impact on their progression.

The guilds that are only now just hitting Anub 25 normal..or even just 10 man normal may have a slightly steeper ramp to climb.

Instead of the stamina stacking would a move to increase dodge rating compensate for chill of the throne ? or would it be more of a case to stack more stamina and simply soak the additional hits.

Until it lands and we experience it its speculation. The one thing i do
know is that at the moment im in the best gear im going to get (given my guild/server/ability) this side of the release so there isnt much i can do until then...possibly apart from get some nice dodge trinkets..some dodge/stam gems and look at a few more expertise enchants...

I also remember somewhere that expertise was going to play a much bigger role in tank mechanics ?? and also defence rating was going to change. IS this all going to occur at patch ? or cataclysm..

Sorry its a little disjointed im at work

I think you're thinking of Cataclysm. In Cat, bosses may have something similar to Expertise. Also in Cat, defense rating will no longer exist, and crit immunity will come from Prot talents, completely removing hard barriers to entry on heroics, and theoretically swelling the ranks of tanks.

[Kavtor]

Instead of the stamina stacking would a move to increase dodge rating compensate for chill of the throne ? or would it be more of a case to stack more stamina and simply soak the additional hits.

Chill doesn't change the theory of tank gearing at all.

Stack stamina / armour until you can survive the worst case.
Stack threat until your DPS aren't holding back to make the enrage timer.
Stack avoidance until your healers aren't stressed out.

then stack DPS until you move on to the next tier of content to keep things interesting.

Stacking pure stamina has never been the only thing that's mattered. It's just what you do heading into a new tier of content to address the first point.

[Satorri]

Everything about Clysm so far is just expectations and nice ideas, nothing has taken shape yet, and how Icecrown works in application will shape that, be sure.


People seem to want to think that Chill of the Thrown will change anything about what stats people pick up. Everyone will gear the same way, make the same choices, because none of the values have actually changed. It is only perception that is taking a big step. It may be that this leaves some people feeling less like they *have* to stack stamina endlessly, but in truth, none of our priorities have really changed, it will only change the way it feels.

[Adrael]

You only present one side and so miss the point.

In a fight you can see 80% avoidance. The tricky thing about avoidance is that it is not static on every hit, which is why many people have shunned it, for fear of the RNG.

It averages out in the end, but it can be a range of effect on short fights.

As an example, when Naxx was fresh content and I was an Unholy DK tanking Hatefuls on Patchwerk, I had a fight where I avoided 78% of his attacks, I had Bone Shield up nearly 100% of the fight because he never chewed through charges before the CD was finished.

The point of all of this is that Chill of the Throne does nothing severe enough to diminish the value of avoidance, and largely I think the sheeple portion of the community has overblown ideas about avoidance being a poor survival value already.

Maybe I should've been more clear, but what I said was that avoidance is more reliable on faster small chunk hitters. I never said it was 'better' in mitigating. The thing is that being on the good side of the variance isn't a problem (usually results in more overheal), it's the bad side that really counts. The smaller chunks you get, the less influence avoidance variance has, and the faster the boss hits, the sooner proper avoidance values appear on the combat log.

More reliable avoidance means it's less likely to save you but it's also less likely to kill you. Interestingly, this is the same effect CotT has. It lowers the mitigation from avoidance so tanks are less dependent on it. It's also less likely to kill, or save a tank.

Avoidance has a cap that varies for encounters and healers. A tank needs to have enough avoidance to enable a decent gap between DPS and HPS intake. Too much avoidance over EH is never a good thing.

All that said, avoidance is a VERY important stat as the fight progresses, since it directly effects DPS taken by the tank. If the DPS taken is too close to the healer's HPS the tank dies.

[Satorri]

Actually, I think this is a case of perception mistakenly flavoring statistics. It seems like it should, and it makes sense in a way, but in reality, it's no different. Hard to explain that though.

[Phillycheese]

Good post. however, anyone who hasn't figured out this simply logic already is a moron. A bunch of the people complaining are idiots who can only see the "20% LESS AVOIDANCE OMG SCREW YOU BLIZZARD" part of it, and blindly ignoring the part where the bosses do less damage per hit.