Avoidance Tanks, Meet Your New Worst Enemy: Chill of the Throne

You may have read, here or otherwise, about a zone-wide debuff in Icecrown Citadel that causes one or two-percent damage every few seconds to each player in your group. Though the Warcraft community is prone to complaining about any and every change made to the game, no matter how asinine, they were right about this one: it was a truly terrible idea! I think it fits for the Lich King to have some kind of noticeable, imposing presence. You are in his domain, after all, but this just wasn’t the way to go about it.

Icecrown Citadel challenges tanks as never before with Chill of the Throne.

It’s since come to light that the debuff was never really intended to punish a raid for idling or taking a break in-between encounters. Though natural health regen would probably account for most of the damage done, nothing would be worse than unnecessarily burdening the healers or coming back to find everyone dead for just standing there. Instead, it seems that “Chill of the Throne,” as the effect is now being called, was supposed to even out the amount of damage the tank was taking during boss encounters.

In order to better facilitate this policy, Blizzard has changed the spell to allow mobs to outright ignore 20% of their target’s chance to dodge. Before you jump to conclusions, read the following for a more detailed account of their decision:

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 don’t tank, so I certainly don’t have as strong a stance on this as I’m sure some of you readers out there do, but if this is something they plan to continue addressing in Cataclysm, then it couldn’t hurt to start getting used to it now. And frankly, from an outside point of view, I’m hoping that the mitigation of spiky damage will keep me from seeing surprise tank deaths as often as I do now. Nothing’s worse than DPSing or healing your heart out for most of an encounter only for the boss to destroy your tank in less than a second.

Certainly this is going to create a bit of a problem for classes that don’t have built-in proficiency for Block or Defense values. Chime in with your thoughts on this understandably controversial issue below!