Icecrown Citadel to reduce tank avoidance

[masterkiller]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?sid=1&topicId=20677352542&ST=US-3019140-4TaCAICccE1I5jpJ5K4iFEyhcpvkqwkQ7M9

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.

[Splug]

Sunwell Radiance was a good idea, and I'm glad they brought it back.  But I am kind of chuckling at that last line, since it was said at the end of the previous expansion as well.

-Splug

[masterkiller]

Sunwell Radiance was a good idea, and I'm glad they brought it back.  But I am kind of chuckling at that last line, since it was said at the end of the previous expansion as well.

-Splug

Tell me if I'm wrong here, but it sounds like they are making healing easier with this change. Personally I enjoy the difficulty and complexity of having healers time big heals for potential spike damage. This also seems as though the bosses will have to hit lighter, which increases the value in block.

Also, it is specific to dodge and not all avoidance or miss/parry. Seems DK's would get some benefit out of that and could begin to weigh parry as a stat more heavily then before and reduce the value in dodge.

[Desecrate]

Sunwell Radiance was a good idea, and I'm glad they brought it back.  But I am kind of chuckling at that last line, since it was said at the end of the previous expansion as well.

-Splug

But then, the difference between then and now is that halfway through they put in gear from Heroic Modes. We're going into Cataclysm expecting increase ilevel from hardmodes.

It's pretty interesting, even though it'll suck for my tank toon.

[Vexill]

Tell me if I'm wrong here, but it sounds like they are making healing easier with this change. Personally I enjoy the difficulty and complexity of having healers time big heals for potential spike damage. This also seems as though the bosses will have to hit lighter, which increases the value in block.

Also, it is specific to dodge and not all avoidance or miss/parry. Seems DK's would get some benefit out of that and could begin to weigh parry as a stat more heavily then before and reduce the value in dodge.

I think the idea is to actually make healing more interesting. Currently healing is a pretty simple equation whereby healers just drop their fastest biggest heal on the tank over and over. This is because if they don't there is a chance that a tank will get hit 2 or 3 times in a row and die. That in turn is an artifact of bosses all hitting like trucks. Which comes directly out of tanks avoiding so much, if bosses just hit for less we would never be in danger of dying because we would avoid a huge number of strikes and barely take damage.  This change should allow healers some more latitude in their healing methods.

There is certainly a chance that this change will lead to smaller individual boss hits and thus more effective blocking, but it might also lead to slower bigger hits. At the moment bosses have to hit both hard and fast to counter our avoidance scores (algalon), or they have to hit at a reasonable rate and use additional melee strikes (gormok). This change will allow blizz to tune them to hit slow and big or small and fast with more freedom.

Having it only affect dodge is an interesting choice, though I can kind of see why it was done, if avoidance was dropped by an arbitrary % eg: 50% if would be a larger nerf to the tanks that are tuned to have high avoidance than to those with lower avoidance scores, and clearly you can't do anything that reduces parry by an amount as druids don't even use it. As it stands with dodge being the only score touched it might, as you have said, mean we start to value parry and miss a lot more.

[masterkiller]

Ouch, Rune Strike works off dodge so unless something is changed we are going to lose threat due to less dodges.

Also, more reading sounds like they plan for the bosses to "hit less" and "hit faster" including dual wielding bosses again. Depending on the size of the hits, and not to create panic, but this doesn't look to be in our favor.

[dywolf]

icewell radiance. lame.
no mmo has ever truly solved the twin problems of healing and tanking. dps they can make engaging and give different styles to. but healing is always mind numbingly boring repitition, and tanking always enters multiple broken zones at some point where 100% mitigation abilities come into play (and now in wow they're saying its happened twice).

[Baconknight]

Ouch, Rune Strike works off dodge so unless something is changed we are going to lose threat due to less dodges.

Also, more reading sounds like they plan for the bosses to "hit less" and "hit faster" including dual wielding bosses again. Depending on the size of the hits, and not to create panic, but this doesn't look to be in our favor.

Based on what I've read from the boards it seems Blizz is watching the data on Rune Strike, but they seem to think as long as we are getting enough Rune Strikes to replace white strikes, we will be fine.  I wonder how high our dodge will need to be to ensure we are able to replace all white strikes with Rune Strikes (as mine has dipped a bit low atm).

Also, I guess I don't pay much attention to Rune Strike since I just macro'd it to all my strikes and forgotten about it day 1 of WotLK, but will it only go off when we would be having a white strike, or are we going to have to watch it carefully to make sure we are only using it during a white strike and NOT using it when we could be using one of our other strikes (ie Blood Strike) less we risk a huge threat drop.  I sure hope we can still just macro and forget about it, because I already get bad enough tunnel vision in raids watching Runes/Runic power/disease timers, I don't want to have to also stare at Rune Strike and my swing timer at the same time.

[Vexill]

Re: runestrike, I'm mostly concerned about what it will do to DW viability. 2H tanking is unlikely to be overly affected imo due to the number of dodges you will get in a a swing timer. However for DW there are a hell of a lot more white strikes, most of which currently convert to rune strikes. This change will kill that.

[masterkiller]

A reduction in Rune Strikes also reduces our avoidance we receive from Sigil.

on 2nd thought we'll still get a rune strike in every 20 seconds so it shouldnt effect sigil

[Vexill]

The 20% reduction is being applied after the DR. This means that there will be no benefit to going for parry over dodge any earlier than we do right now. The 2.2:1 ratio will remain the rule for effective avoidance gemming.

[Charodej]

But doesnt that mean that the has between block tanks and Deathknights will increase even more? On the other hand, if we will get more stable damage we will be able to use DS more effectively. But oh man that is still a huge hit on unholy tanks.

[deadpriest]

For those wondering about the impact on RS and threat, here is a copy/paste of a post I've done on mmo-champ:

Chill of the Throne: DK threat nerf ?
« on: October 30, 2009, 09:56:22 am »

Hi everyone

As everybody has already seen it, ICC will have its own SWP Radiance: Chill of the Throne.
I'm not going to tell if it's good or not for damages taken, every tank (whatever its class) will suffer in the same way.

The concern for us is about the loss of threat from RS.

I've done some simulations taking into account: (for a 2H blood dk)

    * Character
          o dodge and parry
          o average damage of swing and RS
          o weapon speed
          o hit and expertise
    * Boss
          o hit speed
          o combat length


With all those things taken into account, you have an increase of 56% of threat from swing, a decrease of 40% of threat from RS and a decrease of swing+RS threat of 25%. It's really huge but it's not over.

If you consider that in 3.2.2, swing is about 13% of your total threat and RS is about 29%, the effective result is only a decrease of the total threat of 4.32%. It's not that huge.

Remember that the simulations were made with average values of a 2H blood tank. I can post later the sheet of calculation if you want.

[Gravity]

The 20% reduction is being applied after the DR. This means that there will be no benefit to going for parry over dodge any earlier than we do right now. The 2.2:1 ratio will remain the rule for effective avoidance gemming.

Actually.

Because dodge loses 20%, it effectively means the dodge % you gain per item value is going to be reduced by 66% or so (since you go from 30% dodge to 10%, you are losing 2/3rd of all item value you had in dodge).

[Gravity]

a post I've done on mmo-champ:

why post there? it's a jungle of noobs.