Chill of the Throne
Our Blizzard overlords have decreed the following:
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%.
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October 30th, 2009 at 12:17 pm
It’s an excellent, and needed change for the game.
Just to abuse the (perhaps first) post
The sky is not falling. Everything will be fine.
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October 30th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
how can anyone be surprised when most tanks had ~60% avoidance in not even BiS gear already.
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Veneretio reply on October 30, 2009 12:43 pm:
I’m a little surprised only because I figured they’d have a new solution to it this time around. I knew something was coming though. I think we’ll find it’s going to be a good thing for the instance though as this way bosses are going to swing for basically the same amount as the previous tier maybe even less.
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Kavtor reply on October 30, 2009 12:57 pm:
Nah, the bosses are still going to hit for an amount that’s going to scare you the first few times through. We’ve got all this extra armour and health, and healers with more haste and spellpower. I think it’s going to be even more surprising how hard we’re getting hit because tanks aren’t generally challenged in ToC. (Gormok and P3 Anub / heroic anub adds being the exceptions)
It’s just that they don’t have to really get carried away to account for the possibility of tanks with ridiculously high avoidance. Even with Sunwell Radiance, Sathrovaar right out of the gate made it clear that they weren’t going easy on tanks.
Like GC said. This is Icecrown, not Naxx.
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October 30th, 2009 at 12:55 pm
It’s stupid that they have to do this, but it’s a good thing to do. I would much rather a situation where we die to enrage timers from bringing too many healers, then a situation like Gormok, where, If I am going to die, 5 extra healers wouldn’t make a difference.
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Veneretio reply on October 30, 2009 1:43 pm:
Interestingly enough, I’ve never had Gormok just randomly kill me. I just always make sure I’ve got Shield Wall or Last Stand up for the later Impales.
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Brugamenn reply on October 30, 2009 2:37 pm:
you are extremely lucky then. 45k to 0 in .2 seconds on several occasions
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Brugamenn reply on October 30, 2009 2:38 pm:
well on second thought maybe i am extremely unlucky
Gyneonco reply on November 2, 2009 1:26 am:
That’s actually happened to me, and i was just the 2nd tank in the rotation. Died as soon as i taunted off the first tank
Sephirawth reply on November 2, 2009 8:24 am:
You are not extremely unlucky I have had it right at the beginning of a fight before. 60k Damage in less than a second is not fun.
Roff reply on November 5, 2009 11:07 am:
Its all bout timing cooldowns, if you are using a 3tank rotation just make sure that you have Shieldwall and Last stand ready for the last time you tank your 2 or 3 impales (w/e tactic you use).
October 30th, 2009 at 1:24 pm
Vene and Kobe have the right of it. It’s lame that they have to resort to something they’re clearly not happy doing but it’s functionally necessary.
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October 30th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
I personally welcome the change. I only started playing WoW post WOTLK, so I was never around for the Sunwell Radiance BC implementation, but I would imagine it’s very similar to what this is.
As a warrior tank who cut my teeth in WOTLK and am currently able to tank TOC25 and TOGC10, I welcome this change. Even with all my gear and avoidance, bosses still hit obscenely hard, and I always feel it’s cheap when I die in 2 shots. I feel like as a tank I should be a damage sponge, able to soak up hits for a good 5-10 seconds w/o heals if the healer gets distracted / incapacitated. As it currently stands I need a dedicated healer and a backup healer, and even with both and over 47k buffed HP, there is still a good chance I could die in the 2-3 sec window where they both might be casting spells. Smoothing it out and making it a bit more predictable will make things better.
Also I have experienced the Gormak insta kill. Had 2 stacks of impale, took a reg 20k hit, then he parry hasted me and hit me again about 3/4 of a second later for another 22k, and then a tick of impale for 6k. It felt incredibly cheap, so I am all for changes that keep me from taking 50k damage in under 1 sec.
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Furiat/Vege reply on November 1, 2009 7:41 am:
Gormok can’t parry haste since second week of ToGC release. It’s combined timers of melee, impale hit and impale ticks that does that silly tricks. Had few of those, seems that another (smart) way of using cooldowns helps with those combos, just like Vene wrote.
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October 30th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
That being said, I am deathly afraid of what this means for straight stamina stacking. The logic I see a lot of people touting is that dodge doesn’t matter, so ignore avoidance and just stack stm as a higher HP pool is all you need. I’m sure this is where the comment “it’s IC, not Naxx” comes into play regarding enemy damage values. I hope they tune it properly so it doesn’t feel like we’re taking TOC sized hits with less avoidance overall, but I still see some nerfs coming in 3.3.1 to make things easier after they get some live feedback from non-testers / PTR players (Faction Champs anyone?)
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October 30th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
Many tanks said, when 3.0 was on live servers, that this will be a problem in higher tier raids. Seems that Blizz ignored community and had to use brute force method once again. Its only sad part here, it wont be gamebreaking, we just have to live with it.
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October 30th, 2009 at 4:27 pm
I personally don’t care. It’s how they chose to implement combat mechanics in ICC, so be it. They could have let the dodge how it is and change the speed at which bosses hit or they could have made them hit harder… Statistically it tends to make incoming damage less spiky… which is… what it is lol. It doesn’t change anything on the gear requirement for the instance. ToC gear will still be required to tank/heal/dps this, so this should have no or minor affect on how to be ready for ICC. I have seen any change about diminishing returns yet, and there is probably not going to be any this time. That means, no one will gear/enchant/gem for avoidance but EH or pure HP instead. In other words, nothing is going to change for players.
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October 30th, 2009 at 4:42 pm
As long as the boss dps output is tuned properly, I could have 0% avoidance or 80% avoidance and not care. The dps output must be sufficiently high to challenge the healers and yet not stupidly high to randomly kill me if my raid is playing well and wearing gear appropriate to the instance.
The numbers mean nothing, the encounters mean everything. Let’s see what GC et al come up with…
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October 30th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
This will make me look at 2 things
1. can I gear for 0 dodge and stack block//parry for more overall avoidance counting the -20% dodge.
2. It feels like a large amount of dodge to overcome this penalty, so if the first option is viable I might talent out of the dodge talent for a more survivable build. (sounds backwards).
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October 30th, 2009 at 9:40 pm
With 540 DR and whatever random Dodge Rating bonuses that are on gear, it’ll be completely innane to think you’ll not already be close to “20%” dodge. In addition, DR are still in full effect, thus you’ll most often find that gemming for dodge gives better avoidance returns than gemming for parry.
IN short: Don’t fool yourself into thinking you can ignore dodge, because right now you can’t, and to do so would likely HURT your avoidance, not improve it.
- Eddie
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Ruphi reply on October 31, 2009 5:52 am:
They said bosses will hit softer, how much softer I don’t know;
I can juggle around with gear and lose 6% dodge (which would put me under 20), but I would gain 2% parry and 14% block rating. I didn’t look at the block value. I think a large portion of this will depend on how icecrown gear is itemized though.
This lets me keep the general cookie cutter spec, but drop 5 points in anticipation to get improved disciplines, improved revenge, and 5/5 shield specialization.
I’m not recommending to DE all your gear with Dodge on it, but to test out a specialized set, sort of like a passive unhitable set.
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Drae reply on November 2, 2009 6:28 am:
Dodge is still > parry > Block. The DR curve on parry flattens out very quickly, meaning you will still receive more avoidance from dodge then parry pt for pt. Block is not avoidance, it is not a replacement for avoidance.
This is not game changing. This should not change your gearing strategy. Most fights will likely still benefit stamina stacking, the only place this will not be true is encounters which strain healing mana. A current example would be a fight like G.V. Hardmode.
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Clint reply on November 2, 2009 8:06 am:
In my current gearset (and likely yours as well if you are in ToGC), parry is slighly better than dodge *after* diminishing returns. I’m not sure how this “-20% dodge” is going to interact with the DR curve, but if it is applied after DR is, then I suspect we will be gemming for either parry/stam or def/stam, or just stam all the way.
October 30th, 2009 at 10:42 pm
First time, long time. Ive been tanking at one level or another now for several years in WoW. From the noob in pvp gear asking “whats stam stacking?” to leading 25s into runs we had no buisness in. All that i would have thought would lead me to have a different opinion than what ive developed but honestly…im indifferent. The only real “change” i can see in this is that when we’ll need to pop cd’s will be a little more apparent a little sooner. Possibly a small threat dip with what could be fewer revenges but to be honest at this level threat gen isnt a problem unless they want it to be (Hodir, Maly, etc) and even then its not really an issue. To be honest i kind of felt some of the QQ ive read shined a light on something ive found comical since ive discovered what its like to really tank…some of us (myself at times included) take way too much credit for things we have no control over. How many times have you or someone else been told “you are a great tank!” cause they were easy to heal? Because they avoided a ton of damage. Not because of a great pick up, or nice kiting or higher threat gen than thier gear should allow for, but based solely on thier toons ability to avoid getting hit. Every time i pug into something and i get that i always wanna ask “you know i cant actually make him dodge/parry its just the math of the game”.
I dont think this will really alter much more than what Blizz thinks and is implementing it to do which is just normalize the dmg recieved which should normalize heals needed and cd’s used. My only real fear is w/o those OH @&$% moments it may get a little less heart pounding which would suck imho cause w/o those moments whats the big deal about tanking?
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October 31st, 2009 at 2:59 am
Well it’s a gear/content balance change. Hard to feel strongly about it. For example if they said “You DPSers do silly DPS and so every boss has an extra 10M HP’ we’d go “okay”.
I’m more interested in how they design Cataclysm so that characters feel they are advancing and yet % stats continue to behave right throughout the expansion.
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October 31st, 2009 at 4:06 am
You know Thursday I was doing 25 ony with my guild, and I was main tanking so I picked up the big adds in phase 2, I have around 60% hard avoidance, and 43k health raid buffed, as well as 30k armor unbuffed, not sure about buffed. The add brought me from 43k to 0 in under 3 seconds, I have no idea what happened but after that I like the, bosses don’t his as hard but you avoid less, so tanks wont die like dogs due to rng screwage.
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Sephirawth reply on November 2, 2009 10:04 am:
They have an ability that reduces your armor by 75%. It’s nasty.
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October 31st, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Vene, I was going to send an email to you, but I figured it’s somewhat relevant to this discussion.
I believe this change will simply put a greater emphasis on Effective Health (don’t just read stamina). I’m specifically taking about the importance of armour.
I’m currently pushing TotGC 25, with Gormok hitting me for ridiculous amounts towards the end, coupled with the stuns, I’m really starting to believe that those little armour boosts (such as +225 cloak enchant, Saronite Plated Leggards, Ardent Guard, Band of the Twin Val’kyr) are going to make a great difference.
Just HOW much weight do you currently place in armour, Vene? I’m sitting on 26k unbuffed armour, 60% avoidance raid buffed (after DR) and 51k HP raid buffed but, as I said, I’m starting to shift my focus to armour and see what all this fuss is about.
Note: useful tidbit. The difference between 26k armour and 30k (roughly where Vene is at/where I’d be at with armour changes such as TotC Neck/ring & Saronite Plated Leggards) is about a 2% damage reduction.
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Veneretio reply on October 31, 2009 5:50 pm:
Being that I wear Armor rings, neck, trinket, use every Armor enchant and even use an Armor weapon, I think you can safely say that I gear for Armor pretty aggressively, probably more so than most.
It’s difficult to really say how much weight I put on Armor. When presented with the choice of Armor on one item or Avoidance on another, I always choose the Armor when comparing similar item level pieces. I rank Avoidance a lot higher than stuff like Block rating, Block value and Hit rating though so it’s not that I’m especially opposed to it either.
In the end, it’s situational. I’ve got an effective health-ish set that you probably are seeing me wearing now, but I’ve also got a Hit rating set to compliment my Glyph of Taunt in my survival spec for fights where I never want a Taunt to miss. I sacrifice a lot of Armor in order to make that set work.
My best advice would be get lots of gear. If a piece is similar item level to what you have, but different and is going to be DEed, just grab it. It’s very likely that in some situation you’ll use it. I’m still kicking myself for not grabbing a lot of Block gear as I’m finding myself using on things like Anub’arak Heroic for add tanking.
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October 31st, 2009 at 1:32 pm
the only thing im irked about is how they said at the end of BC that they would take steps to make sure that a tank doesn’t avoid more than 50% of hits coming at them. Again here we are at the end of an expansion and blizzard is once again applying a band-aid fix.
It just makes me worry that if they are doing this yet again and will be removing the defense stat in cata, what are they going to divert the budget to then? Adding it all onto stamina just doesn’t make sense, so i honestly foresee a deathwing related bandaid at the end of cataclysm.
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Veneretio reply on October 31, 2009 5:41 pm:
Well keep in mind that Defense offers a similar level of Avoidance to Dodge and more than Parry so even if the entire investment of Defense was transferred to Dodge, we’d end up in about the same place as we are now, not more.
Likely the Defense budget will be distributed across a few different stats which will result in a net loss of Avoidance. The Defense change if anything will help make sure this doesn’t happen again.
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October 31st, 2009 at 2:45 pm
It won’t be game breaking, but is a bit stupid, especially if you think that they gave us lots of dodge in 3.2 (and no block at all). If they felt that the avoidance was getting too high, they could have given us more block. We wouldn’t wear t8 for avoidance due to less life, so everyone would have been happy. Giving away something and then taking it back is not fun, even if it was a mistake.
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Drae reply on November 2, 2009 6:35 am:
I agree avoidance is too high.
I would not be happy if they gave us more block related stats on gear.
I would’ve been happy with less dodge and more armor tho.
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October 31st, 2009 at 4:33 pm
If it means no more being two-shot, I’m all for it.
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October 31st, 2009 at 10:58 pm
Glyph of Indominability seems to be insanely good (better) come 3.3
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November 1st, 2009 at 2:44 am
I voted “Hate it”, but by this I don’t mean I really hate it. I have no feelings about it, but I admit it’s a bad solution. Unnatural…
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November 1st, 2009 at 1:43 pm
I think it is a great idea. With most content currently, armor and stamina are more important than evasion(except on a couple of fights). As gear progresses, so does passive survival. I think it will balance out the gear w/ the content and make it more fun.
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November 1st, 2009 at 3:47 pm
I think I agree with a lot of other posters.
I don’t really like it, but it is a reasonable solution to what seems to be going on right now.
I’ve suffered the bad luck insta-kill from Gormok (that was pre-parry haste removal though) and it was pretty crappy. Very demoralising at the time.
I wonder if they’ll penalise anyone who (technically) ends up with a negative dodge (I don’t think that’s actually possible).
I’m hoping this will also bring about a bit more parry stuff. I’ve always preferred parry to dodge (parry-haste for threat and rage, especially pre-rage changes), more so now that they are equal in value.
I’d like to see the situation back more toward the case where a tank can actually sponge damage (without a healer). But that’s just my personal preference and feelings to how each role should be.
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November 1st, 2009 at 7:30 pm
I only Hate it because it is yet another uninspired work-around that avoids proper game design and planning. We saw this in Sunwell when they overshot the gearing mark and failed to plan content according to the gear level of players and the current distribution of stats on gear.
They say this is a sign of things to come in Cataclysm, well, fix it in Cataclysm, don’t force a half-ass fix on us during current content. This is just a band-aid game mechanic, and I think they could do better… but they let things snowball.
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November 2nd, 2009 at 1:47 am
I echo a lot of posters here, actually.
1) I’m indifferent. We’ve been adapting this whole expansion, so I see little difference here.
2) Depending on “how” hard bosses hit, block rating and, particularly, block value could see a resurgence.
3) Two-shots are extremely demoralizing; I wholeheartedly support any mechanic that limits that.
Finally (and most importantly):
4) This shows a chronic lack of foresight on the part of the developers. How on earth could they not see this happening if they had planned the entire expansion properly? The fact Ghostcrawler has repeatedly said that avoiding a repeat of Sunwell Radiance was an absolute priority, makes this even more baffling now that we have a repeat.
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Drae reply on November 2, 2009 6:38 am:
He blames it on the addition of “hard mode” loot. Basically saying that hard mode drops from ulduar forced them to use higher item lvls for normal ToC gear, to say nothing about ToC hard-mode gear.
Although with good due diligence it would have been apparent that increasing the avoidance on all this extra loot would cause the same imbalances they saw in sunwell.
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Zellviren reply on November 3, 2009 2:24 am:
I understand all that and even agree that further tiers were going to be difficult to itemize, because you can’t have two tiers of raiding with completely different stats on them. However, I remain shocked that they didn’t plan out the entire expansion, particularly gear tiers and scaling, before time.
Just seems like awfully bad planning to me, arguably proven by them having to do something one of the lead developers was commitedly determined to avoid.
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November 2nd, 2009 at 1:55 am
I was dreaming about a blocking juggernaut-warrior since they announced most WotLK pieces having block way before the patch, maybe this is finally the point where all those block gears will shine, because of the -20% dodge? I mean hello beartanks, whaddayagonnadoooo.
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Drae reply on November 2, 2009 6:41 am:
Actually because of bears ridiculously high EH they were a preferred tank in SWP, I would not be surprised to see that trend repeat it’s self. Personally, I think we would need obscene levels of SBV to make it useful. Like if block is gonna be “it” in IC, I would need to see ~5000 SBV to consider it a viable gearing strategy, even then…
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Steele reply on November 2, 2009 7:16 am:
Just for us newbs who never seen Sunwell.. what was that debuff there exactly, dont see the info in this thread
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Veneretio reply on November 2, 2009 9:55 am:
http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=45769
November 2nd, 2009 at 2:35 am
The problem I see with this fix is that tanks that currently have dodge as their sole avoidance stat (bears) may suffer a bit more than wars/palas/dks — for instance if we see a resurgence in block itemization and block becoming more important, where does that leave DKs and Druids in a “bring the player not the class” world? I hope that rather than shift focus from the universal avoidance stat (dodge) to a more specialized one (block) we see more a shift to more EH based itemization. I miss sitting at the armor cap on my bear as I did in BC
I have always been a fan of EH gearing on both of my tanks (warrior and bear) as it does reduce the infuriating, bang head on desk two-shot scenario, and hopefully this is a sign of Blizz moving more in that direction as well.
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November 2nd, 2009 at 4:46 am
I think it will affect healers more than tanks. Obviously we may need to rethink our gearing strategy, but I feel that’s nothing compared to the swap from no damage no damage no damage BIG DAMAGE no damage to a more steady flow. I play disc priest as well as warrior tank and I must say, I am quite pleased with the idea. It’ll mean less spamming to catch the huge strike and… more spamming to cover comparatively consistent damage.
I do, however, feel that implementing it through a debuff is a clunky cop out. Blizzard were aware of how tank damage was progressing, as well as how the huge amount of avoidance on gear would scale. Why didn’t they change something about the way we actually work, instead of just slapping a big in-your-face chunk of text in the way? It just feels poorly done.
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November 2nd, 2009 at 4:57 am
For the current bossdesigns and gear build-up the Chill of the Throne affect is the sensible thing to do for ICC right now. In this level of content there is always the clash of percentages that only count over a longer period of time and the amount of damage a boss hit must do to make it challenging.
A more lasting solution would ofcourse be to let the rating to percentage conversion scale with the “ilevel” of the content you are fighting. Now all bosses are level 83 and combat calculations are the same for Naxx bosses and ICC bosses.
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Drae reply on November 2, 2009 6:43 am:
They have considered something similar to that… giving bosses varying levels of Expertise.
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November 2nd, 2009 at 6:43 am
They’ve made mistake in tiers… Started with stupid mathematic in Ulduar10 that made bigest possibile mistake later, if they advanced by +13 iLvL per tier it would be much better and smoother
Ingame:
200: Nax10/OS10/Heroic5
213: KT10/OSHM/Maly
219: Uld10/ToC 5 (Ulduar10 was first mistake)
226: KT25/Maly25/Uld10hm
232: Uld25 weapons/ToC10
239: Uld25 hm
245: ToC10hm/ToC25
258: ToC25 hm
272: Tribute chest cloaks
Should be:
200: Start - Nax10/Heroics
213: KT/Maly/Nax25 AND Ulduar10
226: KT/Maly25/Ulduar25/Uld10 hm AND TOC10
239: Uld25hm/ToC25/ToC10hm and Icecrown 10
252: ToC25hm/Icecrown10hm/Icecrown25
265: Icecrown25hm/Ulduar tribute
278: Imba items of imbaness from some special feature from Icecrown.
Soz for this spam, but bottom point is that Blizzard was behaving bit more like Santa this expansion, and messed up with some numbers that technicaly yielded “one tier too much” in the game. That moved numbers up too much.
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Machus reply on November 2, 2009 7:34 am:
Personally I’d rather ToC give the same tier items at Ulduar with no progression at all, just greater accessibility. Ulduar is a fantastic instance and I find it a shame we left it so soon for the boring ToC. The point of ToC is surely to reset the gear differences caused by varying Ulduar progression. If Ulduar and ToC gave equivalent gear for equivalent difficulty levels, of which in practice ToC is easier, you could have a more fun but harder raid in Ulduar or a gearing up night in ToC.
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Veneretio reply on November 2, 2009 10:00 am:
I agree ToC would have been better served as another instance in the same tier as Ulduar. That said, the first boss in ToC on Heroic is definitely far more of a gear check than a lot of Heroic bosses in Ulduar. So, as long as they adjusted that, I think it’d be perfect.
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Bhig reply on November 2, 2009 1:11 pm:
Yech… I personally hate everyone treating 25’s as the logical progression step from 10s. Blizz proclaimed they were going to try and make both raid sizes a viable progression path… I think they failed, not epically, but I don’t think they did a very good job. ToGC10, seems like you really need all Uld25/ToC25 gear to be successful. Uld10 HMs are particularly challenging with only 10 man available gears.
Granted I guess my group isn’t the uber elite, but we were pretty good, and there have been several fights were it looks seriously like without the 25man gear we would be pushing poo uphill with half a toothpick.
(really a post for another day… /grumble)
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Zellviren reply on November 3, 2009 2:38 am:
Personally, I think they got the difficulty right.
As you can see, we’ve only just managed to clear the heroic Northrend Beasts on the 10 man version, but it’s a significant challenge for most raids who only do 10 man content and that, in my view, is as it should be. Our problems were not down to gear, but getting tank cooldowns right, worm positioning (whole raid) and generally costly individual mistakes. With Lord Jaraxxus, we had similar issues; the plan was right, but the execution was off - with the night ending early due to a couple of peeps having to leave due to unforeseen circumstances.
The first time you step into a new instance, you SHOULD be challenged. Because people were using 25 man content to effectively “over-gear” the next tier of 10 man, that’s where the problems came in and have continued. The player base (in my view) was looking at progression from the wrong perspective and that lead to some content being a bit underwhelming when first tried.
The progression was supposed to be:
Sartharion/Naxxramas/Malygos (10)
Ulduar (10)
Trial of the Crusader (10)
Trial of the Grand Crusader (10)
Icecrown Citadel (10)
Instead, players warped it into (or similar to):
Sartharion/Naxxramas/Malygos (10)
Sartharion/Naxxramas/Malygos (25)
Ulduar (10)
Ulduar (25)
Trial of the Crusader (10)
Trial of the Crusader (25)
Trial of the Grand Crusader (10)
Trial of the Grand Crusader (25)
Icecrown Citadel (10)
Icecrown Citadel (25)
Not including hard modes, I think this is what has contributed to overall instance balance, as well as the questionable itemization on loot. I agree with the above and think Trial of the Crusader should have been T8 along with Ulduar (and can’t really fathom why this wasn’t the case), but it’s players that have warped the progression path and not the developers.
Progression is supposed to be difficult and challenging and I strongly dislike the analogy that is currently predominating:
“We just wiped - we need better gear.”
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Eraser reply on November 3, 2009 8:17 am:
Hey Guys,
I too am from a 10man only guild, Hard Mode ToC isn’t that hard - at least in my opinion. We were able to do Mimiron hard mode before 3.2 went live (so maybe we are that good), and let me tell you that was a fight and a half and we haven’t faced another challenge like that since.
Granted Beasts catches everyone by surprise with the amount of incoming damage, but once you’ve passed that, Jaraxxus -> Twin Valks are a walk in the park. Anub’arak is a fair bit challenging, but if you’ve made it this far you should be able to down him in a night or two.
I’m of the opinion was that ToC wasn’t made to be ground breakingly hard. Or else they wouldn’t have attached this tribute run thing onto it.
I fully agree with this though, people have been confusing 25man progression and 10man progression. We have recently been dissed by the reigning 25man guild because their 10man group has completed 10man progression and we haven’t. To me 10mans are hard for those of us who do only 10mans, likewise 25mans are hard for their gear content. The two shouldn’t be put together, and 25 mans shouldn’t pride themselves on 10man content!
Bhig reply on November 3, 2009 2:39 pm:
(sorry to carry this off-topic on a bit…)
I agree. The players have created the situation, but the Blizz developers have just catered to it IMO. They haven’t really taken steps to try and separate the two progression streams. E.G. Effectively giving 25man guild 4 lockouts for TOC (ToC 10/25, TOGC 10/25). Where as a 10 man raider (let’s assume the cannot do 25’s due to hardware restrictions) only gets two.
I do slightly disagree with the TOGC difficulty. I think it was a little bit too tough, or rather I think TOC was too easy in comparison.
I guess the difficulty step (normal to heroic) seems more like the old BC dungeons, where the heroic setting really was quite heroic compared to normal.
We practically facerolled through ToC10 (only faction champs gave us any real issues) and then went to try ToGC. I was expecting it to be hard and really challenging. But after an hour it became apparent that it wasn’t just hard, but nearly impossible for our players. Considering how well we got through normal it was demoralising.
We look forward to getting past Gormok/Beasts as we’ve heard the other four fights are a lot of fun and should be easily do-able with practice.
Oh yeah. Eraser. AMEH brother. Those 25man guilds P me off when they parade around their 10 man achieves.
Shadamehr reply on November 4, 2009 6:23 am:
25 mans are only more “difficult” than 10 mans because the raid leader has 15 additional cats to herd; management and logistics make it more difficult, not the encounters themselves. Content is tuned for the size of raid it accommodates. If some 25 man raiders look down on 10 mans as easymode, it’s because they’re hitting 10 mans at half a tier above the intended gearing.
It shouldn’t be rocket science to figure this out, really.
25 mans and 10 mans are seperate, but equally valid progression paths. I’m happy to have completed heroic CC10 with my 10 man only raid; my achievement is more valid than a 25 man raider having done the same (because, wouldn’t you know it, no one’s cleared CC25 Heroic on my server yet)
The crowd that like to “afk” on Krasus’ Landing with their raid drakes will always argue they are better than anyone else. But that’s fine, because we’ll keep laughing at them.
Shadamehr reply on November 4, 2009 6:28 am:
To clarify, I’m referring to CC10 heroic above. CC10 normal was way undertuned for a raid that had cleared Ulduar 10, no question about that. Those criticisms are absolutely valid.
Zellviren reply on November 6, 2009 1:25 am:
Agreed, Shad.
In saying that, I still don’t see why they didn’t have TotC on the same tier as Ulduar while incorporating some of the heroic mechanics into the normal version of the raid to increase difficulty (having to destroy portals in the Jaraxxus encounter, for example).
Then they could have jettisoned the heroic version altogether and kept gear in sync with the rest of the expansion.
November 2nd, 2009 at 11:21 am
I have long argued that a plate tank with 200lbs of armor should be dodging less and mitigating more anway. Maybe this is a step in the right direction of logical tank class mechanics:
Bears dodge more due to their natural agility
Paladins Block more as master of the shield
Warriors mitigate more through higher armor values [would require a new physical damage absortbiton skill]
DKs would avoid/mitigate through parry and magic damage reduction and compensate through their self healing.
Yes this is an oversimplified verison of how I think tanking mechanics should work and i am more of a retired tank now anyway.
Just my 2 cents.
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Bhig reply on November 2, 2009 1:06 pm:
I would vote for bringing back flavours to the game too. As much as the homogenisation of classes made everything more accessible, playable, and generally made life a bit easier. I do miss everything having a flavour.
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Zellviren reply on November 5, 2009 1:59 am:
I’m with you, Shivan; particularly on the warrior and armour correlation. As things stand, paladins have higher armour due to Devotion Aura, block more with similar block value, have higher health due to higher stamina coefficients, have bettern cooldowns and our avoidance is roughly the same. In short, the paladin is far more durable than the warrior for some utterly inexplicable reason.
Far from causing balance issues, I think bringing back flavours could solve many of them.
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November 2nd, 2009 at 6:03 pm
This still begs the question, what will be the ideal way to gear in ICC now. Block or EH?
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Veneretio reply on November 2, 2009 9:46 pm:
I’m pretty sure Avoidance is still a lot better way to gear than Block. As to whether it’s EH or Avoidance, nothing really changes. They both have the same advantages they had before. So, if you favoured EH before, stick with it. If you favoured Avoidance before, stick with it.
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November 3rd, 2009 at 2:13 am
The whole thing is that I didn’t “feel” it to be needed. The avoidance levels of tanks are nowhere near the levels where they were end-black temple.
60-65% is in no way comparable to the 80-85% some tanks were having coming into SWP.
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Kavtor reply on November 3, 2009 10:01 am:
Bears maybe. I’m about where I was coming out of BT in terms of avoidance. And that’s with stam trinkets and expertise gems rather than the all mighty pocket watch and dodge gems.
Changing a few gems / enchants / gear choices around could get me to foolish levels of avoidance in a hurry. And I haven’t picked up any 258 yet.
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November 3rd, 2009 at 7:34 am
Again Blizzard appears to put in a bandaid solution for a situation they did not plan for. Every since BC, Blizzard has implemented a series of fixes (especially for the tanking mechanics) where their combat math breaks down. Surely they must have a plan where they simulate the evolution of the game mathematics and design the encounters and gear to match. But instead we continue to see fixes that seem to be ad hoc. Perhaps its time to perform a whole scale revamp of all the combat math, for all the classes and provide a template for the encounters and expansions to come not next, but into the distant future.
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Elunesbuddy reply on November 5, 2009 11:56 am:
I don’t see how Blizz did not plan for it. I mean they design the gear, content, etc. they knew that a TOC gear tank would be around this level of avoidance.
They probably had planned ICC to be different and they realized they’d rather have boss hit for less and tanks avoid less often than having tanks die in 1second..
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November 3rd, 2009 at 5:19 pm
I think most of us agree here that the change was something we were expecting. Avoidance was too high. Most even welcome it, since we don’t like to be 2-shotted cause our healer “had fallen asleep” after a strike of dodge/parries.
The point is, every item has a budget, spend on different stats. This change gets us badly itemized gear. Gives us gear with a stat that doesn’t count. To be honest I would have welcomed a compensation of the lost stat in the form of another. 10% extra armor for example, which applies to all tanks, regardless of class. That would make me feel less of an idiot trying to gear myself up for the next instance, and having a stat nerfed to oblivion.
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November 5th, 2009 at 3:52 am
This “hidden debuff” is just a neat way to resolve a lot of current in-game issues.
As Blizzard has said (and others have already agreed), our avoidance at the moment is off the scale and they will be changing this wholesale in Cataclysm.
I’m pretty certain that when Cataclysm is released and tanking avoidance and block is re-designed this hidden debuff will be removed.
So this is simply a “band-aid” - a short-term patch to fix the current problem until it’s healed. When everything’s better it can simply be removed - sounds like quite a neat piece of design from Blizzard imo.
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November 5th, 2009 at 4:49 am
This skill if it doesn’t just ignore 20% dodge but 20% of target’s dodge then it will be on a tank having 30% dodge like he has -20% of 30% dodge so it will only ignore 6% of his dodge and leaving the tank with 24% dodge.
Simple maths correct me if i’m wrong here.
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Veneretio reply on November 5, 2009 12:27 pm:
If you have 30% dodge then in Icecrown, you will have 10%.
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November 5th, 2009 at 7:25 am
I’d have been indifferent towards “Chill of he Throne” prior to last weekend. Now, I’m not sure what to make of it. Let me illustrate.
In WLK I’ve tended towards EH gearing and it hasn’t failed me. Not until Heroic Anub last weekend. For our first night of attempts I was on adds and the paladin on Anub, both of us equally geared. Got the boss sub 30% on too many tries, we called it eventually.
Next night of attempts we decided to swap tank roles to see how much difference a constant 5 stacks of sunder would make to our melee heavy group. So in I go in full EH kit. 4 wipes in and our disc priest (a great healer and someone whose opinion I respect) tells me “you’re far more difficult to heal than the paladin was” Which I wasn’t expecting to hear. So against my instincts, I swapped out my Royal Seal and Glyph of Indomitability for the Ony Blood Talisman and…Repelling Charge. Bumped my avoidance way up at the cost of a lot of health and armor.
Anyway, a few wipes later we downed Anub. The healers (disc priest and resto druid) said it was noticable how much easier I was to keep up, and I have to agree that I noticed the difference too. My health bar wasn’t spiking all over the place as much as it had been when in EH gear. Which is the exact *opposite* of what I have come to expect.
It’s made me rethink everything I thought I knew about EH versus avoidance; I’m not sure that’s a good or bad thing with “Chill of the Throne” on the horizon.
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Elunesbuddy reply on November 5, 2009 12:00 pm:
I don’t think this example is relevant or has actually anything to do with Chill of the Throne.
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Bhig reply on November 5, 2009 2:04 pm:
I think I can see what Shad is trying to illustrate.
For him, and probably alot of others too, EH gear has always worked. They been able to complete fights etc without too much issue. Now a boss like Anub possibly penalises heavy EHers? The leeching means high (pure) stam potentially gives Anub more health back. Add to this a low avoidance and you have a tank who healers are trying to conservatively heal (guessing/extrapolating here) but is taking many more hits to the face. The healers focus is spread a bit more (guessing again) to make sure that everyone is low health but not dead, and all the extra attention required by the tanks constant intake of damage makes the fight harder.
Okay. Starting to waffle a little but bear with me.
Now, with a change to gain more avoidance, the stream of intake damage is reduced, and with that comes a bit more spare attention time for the healers.
It was mentioned before, the biggest strength of avoidance is the ability to avoid taking long strings of big hits, which potentially gives the healers a chance to replenish the tanks hp a little easier (that stream of big heals will eventually get the tank to 100%), and afford some time to divert healing attention (tank is at 100% with HOTs still on, chances are you can let him take a hit or two and he probabyl won’t die because that third and fourth p-r-o-b-a-b-l-y won’t land).
Gawd, that was waffley.. but hopefully explains what I got from the post.
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Shadamehr reply on November 9, 2009 6:05 am:
That’s pretty much what I meant Bhig, yes. I don’t know whether to stay with EH or go Avoidance in Icecrown, is what it boils down to. A couple weeks ago I’d have automatically assumed EH, no question. Now I’m not so sure.
November 5th, 2009 at 11:02 am
“will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets”
So this doesn’t apply to ranged attacks? Why am I now picturing a ranged-heavy raid with the tank kiting the boss around the raid? Or taunting off each other to keep the boss ping-ponging across the room?
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Veneretio reply on November 5, 2009 12:26 pm:
Taunt has Diminishing Returns and kiting a boss will still result in him meleeing your tank.
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November 6th, 2009 at 1:30 am
All I can say is yay for a new challenge, the existing ones were getting stale and I am tired of tweaking gear/spec to experiment with different scenarios.
on a side note, I will be intrigued to see how those feral druids who stack dodge for tanking will cope with this deduction
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November 6th, 2009 at 4:56 am
Well Vene, I have finally decided to look into your website more than I have in the past, and even make a post!
In regards to the new Aura in ICC:
I find myself hating and loving it at the same time.
I have been tanking for several years now (just started the pally as you know) and have been quite fond of avoidance/EH tanking. With the 20% avoidance reduction, I find myself leaning more towards EH gear and less avoidance. This being said, I cannot see myself leaving avoidance/EH behind, so I keep my extra gear and trinkets in the bags, in hopes I can find a fight where said gear is effective in ICC. Should be a great challenge for both our 25man and the 10man.
Let’s wish for some tank love
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November 9th, 2009 at 10:58 am
Since I have read your web site and since I am pretty newb to tanking I have always wonder : is it more important to go stam only or should I be sure to stack something else ? For example dodge, parry or block? You kinda answered my question in another post but I’m still not sure. What I usually hear from other warrior tanks is that dodge is not as good as parry && block because as a warrior u have to get hit in order to build rage. I couldn’t as of yet find any place that confirms that. Thnkz for the help.
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November 12th, 2009 at 9:14 am
This will make no difference in how a good tank healer heals. They are (or should be) spamming large heals on you anyway, not being selective.
Recap:
Your behavior as a tank should not change.
Your healers’ behaviors should not change.
Hmm….
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Dreador reply on November 12, 2009 9:18 am:
Forgot the other though I had:
Regarding stacking stamina or avoidance.
Well, I did not get past BT, my guild never did Sunwell. But you can guarantee I watched the armory profiles of the tanks that cleared it. As they collected pieces they started matching more socket bonuses. A red socket would have 20 (10) dodge rating, and yellow would have either defense or hit depending on the person. Some tanks now (warriors at least) have over 50k buffed as it is. Here’s my advice on gemming:
Do what the norm is for progression. Keep your T9 level stuff gemmed for stamina. But as you start getting pieces from ICC, you may think about wanting to factor in some more avoidance in the form of gems.
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