AHH MAH GAWD WORD IS ENDIN' NOZE!
Oh wait, no it's not.
Incoming with the release of Icecrown Citadel is a new raid-wide NPC mob buff called Chill of the Throne. The short version of the change is:
To start, for those who don't know (which is likely none of you, since, to my knowledge, there aren't any people outside of my guild who read this) I have four tanks and two healers. Three of my tanks have tanked ToC raids, both of my healers have healed them, and two of my tanks and one of my healers have been to or through ToGC 10. I've seen the issue from both sides. As a tank, I stamina stack, not because I'm focusing on being an EH tank, but because with the natural evolution 0f iLvl on gear, avoidance from gear is enough for raids. Avoidance works great on melee attacks, but stamina has the added benefit of keeping you alive through magic damage and those unavoidable special abilities (Gormok's Impale bleed, for example). Stamina is also a guarantee. There isn't a random chance that my hit-points will count. They will always be there. Avoidance is very tricky, and can lead to a false sense of being on top of the healing from a healer's perspective.
As an example, I tanked VoA 10 on my warrior last night. Her gear is decent, but not nearly as good as my other tanks. I was the boss tank for the Emalon encounter. I watched my incoming damage because I was benchmarking my warrior. I noticed a string of avoids, a good three or four of them, followed by a melee hit which brought me down near 50%. I then took a second hit which near killed me. It was primarily thanks to Emalon not hitting as hard as Heroic Northrend Beasts that I didn't drop instantly. Sure, I got some quick heals too, but I wondered if, had the boss not hit as hard and I not avoid as much, I wouldn't have gotten so low to begin with. More on this in a minute.
The first thing that came across my mind when I saw the announcement of lolnododge was "Again?". We've seen tank avoidance get too high before. This same change had to be put in place at the end of BC. Diminishing returns were specifically put in place to prevent this from having to be done. So why did it happen again? Item level grew too fast, and itemization of avoidance became greatly inflated. Some tanks began to stack avoidance because of the sheer power of it (and necessity in some encounters), but even stam-stackers like myself saw avoidance numbers climb incredibly high. The developers point to the additional iLvl tiers from hard modes to be the prevailing cause of this, but as far as I'm concerned that was poor foresight. I understand that there needs to be better tank gear from hard modes, and that's fine, but if the lesson learned from BC was tone down avoidance, then to increase avoidance drastically on the hard mode gear. Give a crap ton more stamina, add a socket, or add more hit/expertise. I don't think any tank would turn down an item that had the same amount of avoidance, but also came with expertise. Balancing threat stats while gearing a tank is a delicate art, and rewarding a tank who completes a hard mode with gear that makes choosing pieces easier is a great reward. So good game, itemization team. I have yet to see one post from a blue explaining why they chose to add more avoidance over threat stats or armor to hard mode items.
But I'm not going to hate the devs for making this mistake. In fact, I'm going to forgive them, not only for Chill of the Throne, but Sunwell Radiance as well. As the devs have stated, each new tier of content requires that a boss put out X damage per second on the tank. Damage taken per second varies drastically as you add avoidance to the mix. To ensure that a tank still takes that same damage per second, you need to drastically increase the strength of a melee swing or ability. It's not as much an issue when starting out in Naxx, since the DTPS requirements are lower and tank avoidance is lower, so the hit that DOES land doesn't have to be as strong. In ToGC, however, avoidance is so high, and because it is the 3rd tier of content the DTPS is high (as a natural evolution). So when you avoid 60-70% of the attacks, that one that DOES land needs to hit incredibly hard to bring up the average damage taken. It needs to come up so high, in fact, that if the second hit is not avoided, a tank will likely die.
This isn't fun for a healer. There is less reliance on big, effective heals, and more reliance on spamming fast healers, even if the tank isn't taking damage, because he just may end up getting hit mid cast, and you can't afford to not get a heal off immediately. By bringing down avoidance, they are able to reduce a boss's melee damage to still achieve the same DTPS by the tank. Healers don't have to be as twitchy, tanks can better predict incoming damage (and therefore cooldown use), and everyone can worry less about having a stress-induced heart attack.
I don't fault Blizz for having to add Chill or Radiance, because they came from respect for the player-base. In BC, the goal was to end the expansion with Black Temple. WotLK development was taking longer than expected, so to keep players in the game they rolled out Sunwell Plateau. Problem was, tanks going into Sunwell were full T6 geared, so they were nigh-unkillable. That was acceptable for T6 raids, because you should be able to trivialize a raid when you outgear that raid. They wanted that gear to be great, because they hadn't originally intended on adding another tier. When that did end up happening, they had to reduce avoidance to keep tanks from being insta-gibbed (having never been in Sunwell, as I understand it avoidance was reduced but boss damage continued to scale. I hear Brutallis was quite the stressful encounter.). For WotLK, it was necessary to nerf dodge in ICC because of the popularity of hard modes. Sartharion was such a fun new idea that when the players called for more hard modes, Blizz ran with it. Yes, the gear scaled way too fast because of this, but I (and I bet all of you) wouldn't give up access to hard modes just to NOT get dodge nerfed in ICC.
Unforeseen circumstances brought about the necessity of the dodge nerfs, but they only resulted in a better game overall. We have better content, scalable instances (to some degree), and overall more polish to the encounters. A necessary evil that resulted from so much good. So Blizz, great work. And for all you people who think the sky is falling, crunch the numbers. You'll live. The world isn't ending in 3.3.
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Oh wait, no it's not.
Incoming with the release of Icecrown Citadel is a new raid-wide NPC mob buff called Chill of the Throne. The short version of the change is:
- "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."
To start, for those who don't know (which is likely none of you, since, to my knowledge, there aren't any people outside of my guild who read this) I have four tanks and two healers. Three of my tanks have tanked ToC raids, both of my healers have healed them, and two of my tanks and one of my healers have been to or through ToGC 10. I've seen the issue from both sides. As a tank, I stamina stack, not because I'm focusing on being an EH tank, but because with the natural evolution 0f iLvl on gear, avoidance from gear is enough for raids. Avoidance works great on melee attacks, but stamina has the added benefit of keeping you alive through magic damage and those unavoidable special abilities (Gormok's Impale bleed, for example). Stamina is also a guarantee. There isn't a random chance that my hit-points will count. They will always be there. Avoidance is very tricky, and can lead to a false sense of being on top of the healing from a healer's perspective.
As an example, I tanked VoA 10 on my warrior last night. Her gear is decent, but not nearly as good as my other tanks. I was the boss tank for the Emalon encounter. I watched my incoming damage because I was benchmarking my warrior. I noticed a string of avoids, a good three or four of them, followed by a melee hit which brought me down near 50%. I then took a second hit which near killed me. It was primarily thanks to Emalon not hitting as hard as Heroic Northrend Beasts that I didn't drop instantly. Sure, I got some quick heals too, but I wondered if, had the boss not hit as hard and I not avoid as much, I wouldn't have gotten so low to begin with. More on this in a minute.
The first thing that came across my mind when I saw the announcement of lolnododge was "Again?". We've seen tank avoidance get too high before. This same change had to be put in place at the end of BC. Diminishing returns were specifically put in place to prevent this from having to be done. So why did it happen again? Item level grew too fast, and itemization of avoidance became greatly inflated. Some tanks began to stack avoidance because of the sheer power of it (and necessity in some encounters), but even stam-stackers like myself saw avoidance numbers climb incredibly high. The developers point to the additional iLvl tiers from hard modes to be the prevailing cause of this, but as far as I'm concerned that was poor foresight. I understand that there needs to be better tank gear from hard modes, and that's fine, but if the lesson learned from BC was tone down avoidance, then to increase avoidance drastically on the hard mode gear. Give a crap ton more stamina, add a socket, or add more hit/expertise. I don't think any tank would turn down an item that had the same amount of avoidance, but also came with expertise. Balancing threat stats while gearing a tank is a delicate art, and rewarding a tank who completes a hard mode with gear that makes choosing pieces easier is a great reward. So good game, itemization team. I have yet to see one post from a blue explaining why they chose to add more avoidance over threat stats or armor to hard mode items.
But I'm not going to hate the devs for making this mistake. In fact, I'm going to forgive them, not only for Chill of the Throne, but Sunwell Radiance as well. As the devs have stated, each new tier of content requires that a boss put out X damage per second on the tank. Damage taken per second varies drastically as you add avoidance to the mix. To ensure that a tank still takes that same damage per second, you need to drastically increase the strength of a melee swing or ability. It's not as much an issue when starting out in Naxx, since the DTPS requirements are lower and tank avoidance is lower, so the hit that DOES land doesn't have to be as strong. In ToGC, however, avoidance is so high, and because it is the 3rd tier of content the DTPS is high (as a natural evolution). So when you avoid 60-70% of the attacks, that one that DOES land needs to hit incredibly hard to bring up the average damage taken. It needs to come up so high, in fact, that if the second hit is not avoided, a tank will likely die.
This isn't fun for a healer. There is less reliance on big, effective heals, and more reliance on spamming fast healers, even if the tank isn't taking damage, because he just may end up getting hit mid cast, and you can't afford to not get a heal off immediately. By bringing down avoidance, they are able to reduce a boss's melee damage to still achieve the same DTPS by the tank. Healers don't have to be as twitchy, tanks can better predict incoming damage (and therefore cooldown use), and everyone can worry less about having a stress-induced heart attack.
I don't fault Blizz for having to add Chill or Radiance, because they came from respect for the player-base. In BC, the goal was to end the expansion with Black Temple. WotLK development was taking longer than expected, so to keep players in the game they rolled out Sunwell Plateau. Problem was, tanks going into Sunwell were full T6 geared, so they were nigh-unkillable. That was acceptable for T6 raids, because you should be able to trivialize a raid when you outgear that raid. They wanted that gear to be great, because they hadn't originally intended on adding another tier. When that did end up happening, they had to reduce avoidance to keep tanks from being insta-gibbed (having never been in Sunwell, as I understand it avoidance was reduced but boss damage continued to scale. I hear Brutallis was quite the stressful encounter.). For WotLK, it was necessary to nerf dodge in ICC because of the popularity of hard modes. Sartharion was such a fun new idea that when the players called for more hard modes, Blizz ran with it. Yes, the gear scaled way too fast because of this, but I (and I bet all of you) wouldn't give up access to hard modes just to NOT get dodge nerfed in ICC.
Unforeseen circumstances brought about the necessity of the dodge nerfs, but they only resulted in a better game overall. We have better content, scalable instances (to some degree), and overall more polish to the encounters. A necessary evil that resulted from so much good. So Blizz, great work. And for all you people who think the sky is falling, crunch the numbers. You'll live. The world isn't ending in 3.3.
