Posted by Amatera on Friday, October 30th, 2009 - 15 Comments
Tags: 3.3, arthas, avoidance, block, chill of the throne, defense, dodge, icc, icecrown citadel, ptr, raiding, Tanks
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!
Related Posts: Rogues Can Tank Too!, Tanking 101: Stats Part 3: Mitigation, Tanking 101: Stats Part 1: Defense, Tanking 101: Stats Part 2: Avoidance, Random Heroes: Meet Mortimer,
By Peter on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 5:19 am
First
By Brightow on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 5:43 am
Im soo glad Blizz did something about the spikes. I cant count the times ive been tanking along nice and problem free, then two hits later im down too 10%. And with the gear thats out there you cant help to get big increases in avoidence.
So cudos Blizz.Cant wait.
By Jay Pompano on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 6:03 am
HAHAHAHA….”Peter”…Hahahaha….haaaah….
By Phanttas on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 7:18 am
I’m glad that they are trying to do something about the problem. I don’t see how the original Chill of the throne would do it quite as well, but I really don’t want them to take it out.
It may mean players would die if they afk or something, but I think it really adds to the who epic scale of the dungeon. It would make healing annoying and those close calls even closer, but Icecrown wasn’t designed or made out to be easy, and covered with flowers where the enemies you defeat bring you cups of warm Coa-coa to congratulate your victory! It is supposed to be hard. We are fighting the final villain of Wrath of the Lick king! I want to feel his WRATH! I want the little children to go home crying because they can’t get past the first trash mobs! I want to face the most powerful 10/25 man raid bosses WoW has seen so far! That is what Icecrown Citadel should be about!
IMO keep both changes!
(Although I think we all know how much Blizz will nerf it when the QQers come out. I DONT want another ToC normal faceroll situation)
By iTZKooPA on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 9:51 am
Damnit, now rogue tanking IC is totally impossible!
By Amatera on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
@Phanttas
I’ll be honest. I wouldn’t have minded if they kept the debuff up while engaging bosses ONLY. Trust me, there are plenty of ways to die in the rest of the dungeon right now due to carelessness!
@iTZKooPA
Srsly. Evasion is pretty much worthless now!
By grandobsidian on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
bull. If they don’t like the “spikey”tanking STOP MAKING DODGE GEAR. That’s all i get as a tank. Every thing has dodge. FIX THAT! I can’t get anything with block rating or parry.
I’ve never had a problem with dodge. I might get a couple lucky strikes and drop near dead but since most healers keep a HoT up and I can use several instant regen moves in a couple seconds.
By barduck on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 3:24 pm
Oh great, yet another druid nerf then. Just what we needed, as if reducing the dodge by it self lately wasn’nt enough
By 4Khazmodan on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 3:29 pm
Being a pally tank, I don’t really rely on dodge though i do agree with grandobsidain. I personally do not try to get dodge, yet, low and behold, my dodge is 20%. Blizzard has put dodge on a lot of my tanking gear. I would much rather parry or block, the latter giving me more threat.
By Noric on Friday, October 30th, 2009 at 3:41 pm
I have a DK tank and my dodge is almost 50%. I would far and away prefer parry and obviously block is useless for me but. Parry is much better mitigation for a DK. Hard on the blades though, over 70% of my repair bills go to my blades.
By grandobsidian on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 2:01 am
@4khazmodan
wow, someone agreed with me during one of nerd rages.
By Mordraiv on Saturday, October 31st, 2009 at 11:51 pm
@grandobsidian
you do realize block sucks? ypee! i ignored 2k dmg off a 14k attack… all u need is 20 block and gtg… you WANT parry and dodge.. no need to stack block.. besides.. if ur a paladin tank and u cant keep over 100% avoidance /w 20% dodge gone.. then u obviously aren’t geared for IC…
By Albullno on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 8:27 am
my druid tank has around 39% dodge just sitting in bear form without buffs and procs. if that goes, all i’ll have is my armor which peaks at around 36 - 37k when procs go my way. things will start to get interesting without my dodge
By Staffan on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 4:41 am
Guys, the reason it’s a dodge nerf is that dodge is the only avoidance all tanks have. It’s not targeting bears disproportionately.
I don’t know what numbers top-level tanks have, but let’s say that a Tier 9 Warrior is sporting something like 40% dodge and 20% parry, for a total of 60% avoidance (block doesn’t count, since it’s only a slight damage reduction). With Chill, he’s down to 20% dodge and 20% parry, total 40%.
Let’s then look at a bear, who instead has 50% dodge. Drop 20%, and he has 30%. Both have lost out on a total of 20% avoidance.
If the nerf instead had been “halve all dodge values”, that would have hit bears a lot harder than plate-tanks, but this? This is the same all around. It might even benefit bears, since you guys get more benefit from stamina than other classes, and that’s going to be more important.
By Blahbahblah on Monday, November 2nd, 2009 at 12:29 pm
/agree with Staffan