Icewell Radiance.... lulz...

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:

• "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."

This addition has come to be (un)affectionately named Icewell Radiance, a comedic portmanteau derived from Sunwell Radiance. Sunwell Radiance did essentially the same thing that Chill of the Throne will be doing, reducing a tank's chance to dodge (post-diminishing return) by 20%. The reasoning behind this addition is the same reason for including it in Sunwell Plateau, namely that tank avoidance is climbing too high to keep healers from having aneurysms (more on that in a minute). There are three major points I would like to hit concerning this change: why avoidance is a pain (specifically, my experience both tanking and tank healing), why the developers screwed up, and why it's forgivable that they did screw up.

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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Tier-10 Set Bonuses: Paladin (Prot)

Today is part 2 of X (where X is the number of posts it takes for me to get tired of writing about set bonuses), and in this post I will be examining the Protection Paladin Tier-10 set bonuses. I have had the most tanking experience as a Paladin aside from my Druid. I have been tanking as a Paladin since BC, where Prot Paladins were un-hittable block machines that craved spellpower, an odd remnant of the old ways of itemizing and paladin spell mechanics. The class has undergone quite a few changes, especially in the tanking department, to the point where the once AoE masters now have solid single-target threat and are quite capable main-tanks. Tier-10 has some interesting things in store for the Prot Paladin, not the least of which is the 4-piece set bonus. Here are the set bonuses as they exist on the PTR now:

• 2 Pieces (Tank): Your Hammer of the Righteous ability deals 20% increased damage.
• 4 Pieces (Tank): When you activate Divine Plea, you gain 12% dodge for 10 seconds.

As with the last post, I'll start with the 2-piece bonus. Hammer of the Righteous is a core Prot Paladin tanking ability (it is, after all, the Protection 51-point talent). It is a strong ability that, when glyhped, will strike 4 targets. The 2-piece bonus will grant it additional damage. 20% is nothing to scoff at. It is a quite major increase in the damage of an ability that can effectively glue 4 mobs to the Paladin at one time without much work. On top of that, it will apply stacks of Seal of Vengeance/Corruption for even more threat on tertiary targets. Again, as with the Druid feral 2-piece, it's not terribly exciting, but it is, nonetheless, a significant boost to a strong ability.

And now the 4-piece. Ah, yes, here we get our ability altering bonus. Divine Plea is a favored ability by any Paladin spec, but especially so to a Prot Paladin thanks to the Glyph of Divine Plea, which grants the Paladin 3% damage reduction for the duration of Divine Plea; thanks to talents, Divine Plea can be kept up indefinitely. The trick to this bonus, however, is that it pops up when you activate Divine Plea. What this means is you must use the ability (which is on a 1-minute CD). No a huge issue, except that you will almost always pop Divine Plea while running in to engage a mob. Like I said, it won't ruin the bonus, unless there happens to be an encounter in the Citadel that requires massive avoidance boosts within the first minute but not in the first 10 seconds. Anyway, on to the usefulness. 12% dodge is a truck-ton of dodge. My Paladin sits at about 53% avoidance against a level 83 mob in a 10-man raid. This bonus will put her up to my Death Knight in terms of avoidance, and WAY past my Druid. Also note that it says 12 percent, so you will get the full amount as it does not suffer diminished returns the way dodge rating would. It may sound good, but it has two serious drawbacks compared to the Druid bonus.

See, avoidance does nothing to mitigate or otherwise prevent spell damage. It is useless against spells. It does, however, make it quite good for trash and add tanking, where I find avoidance to be quite useful since usually adds and trash are primarily physical based. The other major drawback is that increases your change to dodge does only that; increases your chance to dodge. It is up to the RNG to determine if you actually do succeed in your dodge. Avoidance tanks are scary to heal because, while they can go long strings of taking no damage, the damage they DO take is usually quite spikey. Also, because of the chance to dodge, anything that keeps you from being able to dodge, like getting stunned, completely negates the effect of this bonus.

The bonuses aren't terrible, and likely you will drop your old sets for them, but the Paladin 4T10 bonus is definitely on the weaker side of the tanking bonuses. I would much prefer something that buffed my Bubble Wall, but the dodge is a unique bonus that may find its niche in the Citadel encounters.

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Army of the Dead, oh how I hate you

What I'd like to talk about today comes from experiences I've had with a little Death Knight ability called Army of the Dead. See, this ability is one of the most frustrating things you can use while you are NOT the tank, and it got me thinking about some of the things that people do while I'm tanking that really set me off. Stick to these tips, and you will have a happy tank. A happy tank that just might actually get his main character to run that next heroic because he likes you so much, he wants you to have fast, effortless badges.

Army of the Dead: I'm gonna start with this one because it's what got me thinking in the first place. I'd like to explain something beforehand, though. I think this is a really cool ability, and it's very defining of the class. In fact, it's what got me most excited about Death Knights from the pre-release videos. The problem lies with execution. See, it's not, from what I can tell, meant to be used during a boss encounter. Why do I think that? Well, if you read the tooltip of the spell, it states "Summons an entire legion of Ghouls to fight for the Death Knight. The Ghouls will swarm the area, taunting and fighting anything they can. While channelling Army of the Dead, the Death Knight takes less damage equal to Dodge plus Parry chance.". Re-read that second sentence. They taunt. They TAUNT. Now, tanks often get frustrated when a hunter accidentally leaves Growl turned on for their pet, and that's only one attacker. This is a Legion of ghouls. As a tank, I am trained to watch my Target of Target window for any change, along with several alerts when I lose aggro. When I see something amiss, my first reaction is taunt it back, find the answer later. But in this case, all that will happen is the boss will be taunting back off me by one of your stupid ghouls. And these ghouls are not meant to tank. In fact, they will systematically be one-shot until they are gone, and in the mean time, I'm not getting attacked, so you have nerfed my threat. Although there have been changes to improve tank threat when not being targeted, I still rely on some incoming attacks to maximize threat. So you waste a long cool-down, you nerf the tank's threat, and you generally just piss me off. Do some reading on which bosses can and can't be taunted by this ability, and save it for then.

Overanxious DPS: Hey, Mr. Rogue. Guess what? I have 30,000 more hit points than you do, as well as talents that flat reduce the damage I take. That boss won't even bother to chew when he gets a hold of you. Why do you insist on engaging the encounter for me? I am perfectly capable of grabbing that patrol, or starting this fight. I don't need you to do it for me. Sure, you might get lucky and my tank reflexes will kick in, sending me running for my snap aggro button, but why risk it? What profit you to begin DPS'ing before anyone if you lay flat on the ground by the end? And while we're at it, don't go straight into your DPS rotation, blowing all your cool-downs at the start of the fight. Walk up, get in position, and give me a three count on a boss. It's going to be a long fight, and if you die in the first seven seconds, it'll be that much longer, except you won't be a part of it. You're playing this game for fun, or at least I assume that is the case. Why would you jeopardize that fun by attacking early? Just chill a second longer, and slowly ramp up into your rotation, because next time I may just suppress that tank reflex.

Stand BEHIND the tank: In a perfect world, this wouldn't be an issue. Sure, I can understand jumping the gun on DPS during a fight. I've been guilty of it myself. But this one really gets me. Imagine this: you're in a heroic. See that patrol coming? Well, so do I. And as a tank, I have learned that patrol's path. I know how close they will get. I am standing in a place that will either give me the best chance of snap aggro, or will allow me to avoid pulling them or double pulling two packs. So do the world a favor, and get behind me. Unless I tell you otherwise, always ALWAYS stand behind where I am standing. I'm there for a reason, I want you there too. Think of the tank as your shield. You wouldn't run at an opponent with your shield behind you, would you? No, that would be stupid. So don't do it. Grant me, at the very least, that little luxury.

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Questions I am often asked

There has been a lot of WoW news hitting in the past few days, namely leaked information about the (still unconfirmed) upcoming expansion Cataclysm. I will do some write-ups about that stuff over the next few days, but rather than let the site sit idle until then, I thought I'd keep it rolling with some more (though admittedly less exciting) on my play style and my characters by answering some questions that I frequently get asked by other players. Join me, won't you?

How do you have the time to play so many alts?

The first part of this question is fairly simple. I just spent the last 4 years as a college student. As a college student, I had a lot of down time during the day, especially in between classes, which, to avoid taking a nap and sleeping through a later classes, allowed me to stay awake by knocking out a few quests. In addition, because I took the time to learn the class well and how to maximize output while minimizing downtime, I was able to avoid wasted time. That's the most important thing while leveling is to maximize XP per hour. So really, I didn't spend every waking hour of my life leveling, I just did it right, and used my time well.

Why do you play so many alts?

As a frame of reference, my Icecrown character list is full with one of every class. I have played each class to at least 40. My lowest level character is a 32 Warlock, who I rerolled when my previous lock hit 40. Why do I play every class? This goes back to wanting to learn any and all classes in the game. Fellow guild mates have always looked to me for advice on classes they don't play much or how to best utilize certain abilities/talents, so my playing alts is an extension of this. If I'm going to help someone, I need to know the class I'm helping them with. What better way to help someone with Priest mana issues than playing a priest in a Naxx raid? It also helps tremendously when leading a raid to know what you can reasonably expect from your players at their gear/skill level.

Why so many tanks?

I get this quite often (it happens when you play a Druid, Warrior, Paladin, and Death knight, all tanks, all level 80). Why so many tanks goes back to the previous question, but instead it's for my own assistance. I have always identified myself primarily as a tank (at least for raiding). I want to be the best tank that I can be, so to do that, I have to know what I can do to separate my Druid from the rest of the tanks. What do they have that I don't, and what do I have that they don't? I also feel like I have a responsibility to provide for the raid the highest threat producing, most damage mitigating, easiest to heal tank, so I keep up with the gear/skill of all my tanks, always watching for the day when it will be of best service to my guild to discontinue raiding on my Druid. Luckily, thanks to changes in feral tanking, staying on top of gearing, and the massive damage I can put out as a cat, I haven't yet had the need to retire my druid.

Which toon is your favorite/most fun?

I'll start of by talking about my tanks first. Each tank has a unique play style to it. The Paladin is very defensive, parking in one spot and keeping the mobs there. The Warrior, on the other hand, is a very offensive based tank, with a variety of melee attacks and capable of some pretty solid damage. The Death Knight fits somewhere in the middle, but is a very active tank, especially with Death Grip (you'll know a good DK tank when you see this used effectively). The Druid, however, doesn't really fit into these labels. It's a lot harder to spot a great Druid tank instead of a good one. Most people won't know the difference until they have had a truly great Druid tank in their group. The Druid doesn't really come alive until larger raid content, where the shifting aspect can really come into play. So to answer the first part of the question, my favorite tank is my Druid. It takes planning to be able to pop an Innervate or Battle Rez on someone while still main tanking a boss, or to squeeze out some extra DPS in cat form at the right moment.

As for most fun tank, I'm gonna have to go with my Warrior. Warriors are great fun to play. I actually enjoy running heroics as a Warrior tank. Warriors don't fall into the rotation tanking of the other three tank classes. They play more like a DPS class. You have a priority system, but you also watch for Revenge or Sword and Board procs. A warrior tank is like a Swiss Army knife where one of the attachments is another Swiss Army knife. There are so many abilities to utilize and they all have a purpose (and you will, more than likely, use ALL of them on a given pull). Warrior tanking really is a challenge, and a rewarding one at that.

Now, if I extend this to all of my toons, I have been having a lot of fun lately playing my Shaman. Enhance shaman are incredibly fun. Finally, with WotLK, WoW has a "Battle Mage". If you haven't seen them in action, a high end raiding enhance shaman will deal a large portion of their damage through spell attacks. It's really quite fun. Toss on the massive burst damage potential and you can really impress some people on a boss fight.

So that about wraps up this little Q/A session. If anyone has any questions about tank classes, tanking in general, or raiding, toss them in the comments and I'll be sure to answer them.

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Meet My Toons: Khanus (Feral Druid)

Here is part one of the series Meet My Toons. First up in the series, you get to meet my main character, the one who bears my namesake (or rather, whose name I choose to go by). Khanus is currently a level 80 Elite Tauren Chie...., errr, level 80 Tauren Feral Druid. Khanus is the first toon I created on live realms. I went with a druid because my brief exposure to WoW during the beta saw me playing as a druid (also named Khanus, but at that time as a Night Elf). I was instantly drawn to the druid class because I hadn't seen anything like it in any of the other games I have played, and I was sold on the idea when I first saw a level 10 Druid on the beta realms. If you haven't played a druid, or aren't familiar with the class (you're missing out), level 10 is the level when a young druid first begins his/her path of the claw by capturing within them the essence of the wild bear (layman's terms: i m a bear, lololz). I just thought "Wow, that's too cool for words. I want to be a bear!" I had no idea what a druid was capable of (hint: not much, at least at that time), just that I wanted to be a bear...

That is, until I got cat form...

Cat Form opened up a second whole new world for me as a leveling druid. I could now actually put out some damage, and without having played the other classes, or for that matter grouping with them much, the paltry DPS I was putting out seemed like a lot. Leveling was a breeze with the increased run speed, and Leader of the Pack heals removed all down time. It was around the middle of my leveling that I learned the fate of all druids: Healing. I was sorely disappointed, but, knowing that I wanted to raid, I gave it a go, and at level 46 I respecced to Restoration, and healed my first instance.

And I didn't hate it. I actually enjoyed it. Sure I wasn't shredding faces, but I had a much larger impact on the group's success. A lot more responsibility lay on me now. Furthermore, I was damn good at healing. I didn't manage to raid much when I did end up hitting 60, though, as The Burning Crusade expansion was just a few weeks away. When it hit, I kept my resto spec. In fact, I enjoyed it more now that I had some actual spellpower gear. But at the same time, I couldn't help but collect some feral gear. I always tried to grab feral gear when I could, and collected myself a nice set. Then one day, while questing through Zangarmarsh, at level 64, something clicked and I got really REALLY tired of the painfully slow leveling speed of restoration.

Sure, it was nice to heal an instance every now and then, but what good was that if I wouldn't hit max level... ever? So I put my feral gear to good use, respecced, gave the new talents a whirl, and LOVED it. WOW! This was a new type of feral. I had some solid damage, and what's more, I could TANK stuff now. I tanked my first instance ever that day (Underbog), and I found out that not only did I think I was a capable tank, so did the rest of the group. I had fun tanking, but having people thank me for it? That was icing. Delicious icing. And what's more, I had control over the group. I was the leader. The other players followed ME. I was their guardian. I had found my place in the World of Warcraft. I would be a tank, but not just any tank, I would be a feral druid, and I would put every aspect of my character, and later characters, to work in a fight. I learned to maximize my survivability, to balance my gear for threat generation when needed, and optimize my DPS gear for those fights that I wasn't needed to tank. I would be an asset, not a liability. But most importantly, I would forever be a tank.

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