Blizzard recently released a bit of a shocker to the raiding community the return of a Sunwell Radiance-esque type of effect with the raid-wide debuff Chill of the Throne.

To summarize for those who weren’t around in BC, or were around but weren’t party of the “Royalty” guilds of the time, a raid effect called Sunwell Radiance was introduced in the last raid of the expansion to shift focus away from avoidance and introduce more steady streams  of damage. (Gravity wrote about the change over at pwnwear.com and has the blue posts embedded if you missed them.)

Lucky us, history has decided to repeat itself in the form of a 20% dodge reduction Chill of the Throne (which, interestingly enough, was originally planned as a raid-wide constant damage aura). Though dodge was the only possible stat to reduce due to being the common avoidance stat among tanks, this severely gimps already dwindling Druid tanks as that’s their only form of avoidance, whereas DKs and those other two tank classes can still parry. Some interesting discussion regarding the further impact of this change can be found on the original forum post, as well as Gravity’s site.

This opens up an interesting window into Blizzard’s design philosophies though. From Ghostcrawler’s responses on the subject, its clear that having multiple tiers of gear available from heroics and hardmodes was not in the original plan. Blizzard claims that this is the cause of the problem for the avoidance scaling getting so out of hand, but even without all the tiers of gear popping up in Wrath, this was bound to happen again eventually. Conveniently, it sounds like Blizzard already has a change coming in Cataclsym to stamp out this problem once and for all, with the possible introduction of  boss expertise. This will change tanking so that at higher levels of gear, you’ll still be taking the same amount of hits from the end boss of each raid. Some solid discussion also at Tankspot.

Sounds like a plan to me, and makes sense. It’s easy to compensate for high dps on a boss, just give it more health, but high tanking stats cause some wonky problems.

Here’s hoping they get it right and working properly. Interesting they announce this now, after testing has already occurred, as all the previously collected boss data is now completely worthless, aside from health pools.

Tiki is a moderator of the DPS forums here on DeathKnight.info, as well as a contributor to the Tanking section of old. He’s been around the site since its conception back before release, and continues to spread his diseases to anyone within range. His profile, including an armory link and a bit more about him, can be found here. He’s an avid gamer on WoW, Xbox, and flash games when he’s supposed to be paying attention in class. Tiki is also a big fan of writing in the third person about himself, and is considered by many impartial interviewees to be super attractive. Like, really.