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.
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/info/underdev/3p3/newdungeonsystem.xml
(Source)
As another feral tank, yeah this kind of sucks for us as far as avoidance goes; but as the above poster pointed out druids will still take less damage with armour and talent reduction still superior to plate classes, and larger health pools. Druids will still be the best damage soaker. Unfortunately, Blizz set this up for themselves with gear stats, most tanks stack pure stam gems in endgame gear, avoidance comes from the gear, it is a gear problem.
And healers should not be one-shotted during a fight because of because of this. I personally have never seen a healer come close to over-taking threat with semi-skilled tank, unless they were needlessly healing during a pull with more then one mob.
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druids need to look at it this way our armor cap 35k which when moused over you get a super high amount of absorbed damage i am currently working on reaching it but at just under 30k i am absorbing 60% of all incomming damage so sitting me next to a pally or a dk will show im taking less damage per hit then other tanks.
now combine that with having 48% dodge and you can see that the times i do get hit its considerably less. druids will not be destroyed by this buff or nerf or debuff or whatever it will be but we will actually be wanted more then now for the simple fact that a few more hits at lower value equates to less incomming damage overall when compared to the rest of the tanks.
ill admit i dont know what every druid tank focuses on but i focus on my total agility because it offers both my avoidance and mitigation and then i work on my hp which just happens to scale with the gear but im not afraid of this im actually looking forward to it going live and having fun testing it out side by side with the other tanks that are out and about
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The game has been lacking in real challenges for a long time. I’m looking forward to seeing how this changes tank builds and raid mechanics. Blizzard is the leading force in the MMO world and I’m sure they know what they’re doing. The reason for the PTR is to see if changes and additions actually work. If they see that it’s not workable or too difficult then they will remove it. Simple as that.
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I am a blood tank still working up dodge rating and I say even when my dodge is higher, this will be bad for DKs because they can only parry and dodge. I’m not saying dks should have shields [that would really nerf dks] but I’m saying that blizzard should either take away that debuff or reduce it a little or I will be extremely pissed off at blizzard. I own a warrior too [prot] but my dk is better geared so I think this will be a huge nerf in ICC for tanks who are either bad at dodging, or can ONLY dodge. Everybody good luck in ICC get ready for the damage taken and healing done. I mostly wish our tanks good luck. Bye Lich King!
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Cant w8 to get to Worgen tank but they will nerf it in otherway till then all we need is to do is survive. Go for stamina, parry and hopefully block raiting which is almost non existing on ourdays gear. Use block raiting gems
. Looking forward to few weeks of wipes till this info reaches general population. By by dodge city!
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20% dodge nerf, isn’t a bad thing. Evertime they change the mechanics of raiding it makes the game more enjoyable. If they didn’t occasionally change it, so that we have to change our strategies, the way we gear and so on, the game would become very repetitive and boring.
Most healers have at least 50% overheals. As a pally i tend to have 80% overheals when I try. As for mana pools running out, I think mana regen for healers is so ridiculus we need to have more to heal. Is raiding a challenge when your healer can’t OOM!!?
Loking for to the new ICC content, it’s gonna sweet!!
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I have a DK tank, and it saddens me that they are nerfing them the way they are..I love my DK and love to tank, but since the first nerf I’ve rolled a warrior that I hardly play now, because I’d rather play my DK. But, to finally reply on druid tanks I’d have to agree with all those that dislike them… Why? I have a druid which I quickly re-spec’d to Balance and duel spec as Resto.. AAAAwsome combo!!!!!!! Best of both worlds of the Druid..
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people need to remember that the gears stats will be increased a lot since it is going to like a 270+ item level from 245 or the 258 from togc 25.
blizz might instead of giving high dodge on all the gear like they have done with the tank gear from ulduar and toc, instead give higher parry and block rating.
i dont think this will greaty effect a druid as they have a very large health pool and with the gear from ICC 10 and 25 that health pool will increase a fair ammount, druids can still focus on dodge and instead of having like 50% before the ‘nerf’ they may still have around 40 due to the gear increase from ICC.
dk tanks may be effected as they rely on dodging for their rune strike and they dont have a large health pool like druids and they dont have block. a dk may want to stack parry for ICC.
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Seriously, this anyone who is screaming “this will make tanking harder” needs to read what he said. I know most of you only saw “20% less dodge” and flipped out. This is NOT a nerf to tanks, this is a BUFF for healers. Think about it this way. The game designers (the people who make the raids) want to make the raids hard. If they are to easy, it defeats the purpose of the raid, and people will complain. There are many approaches to making the raid feel the pressure, one of them being AoE raid damage. This puts pressure on the healer, which makes it so the healers have to heal the DPS/healers instead of mindlessly clicking your healing spell on the tank, who is taking the most hits. An example of this in use is Loken, and the AoE nova. Another way they can wipe the raid is hard-enrage timers, in which they put a clock on the dps, and if you do not meet the timer, he will enrage and wipe the raid. Obviously, if they make it to small of a time, you will not be able to kill him unless you have very very good dps, so this is used but most of the time not worried about. Also, on the same note, the whole making the boss start on a timer is similar, because it puts pressure on the DPS to push out as much as possible or wipe the raid. (10 man H ToC anyone?) The last thing they can do, is spike damage. Spike damage is something we know all about, which includes soft-enrages (gluth), and fights that the boss does alot of damage really quickly. If the tank dies because of the damage, its the way to wipe the raid. There are two types of boss damage, very spiky, which are long but powerful hits (what most of wrath is), and predictable large amounts of fast but weak hits. If you have a tank with 50% avoidance, then most of the fast small hits will be avoided, meaning that fast and small hits put very little pressure on the healer, and making the encounter meaningless. So, with that much avoidance, the ONLY way to put that much pressure on the tank is to make the damage slow but spiky, so that the healer can miss-click and the tank dies. This has been the trend for most of wrath, and with that the problem. Once you get to a certain point, the tank will have so much avoidance (remember, after each dungeon you get better gear, so the next raid will have to be way harder), that constant fast hits because even less usable, and spike damage becomes king. This puts a lot of pressure on the healer, and if you get hit with two 30k hits in a row, you can easily die if your healer doesn’t react in time. The whole reason they are removing 20% dodge is to make non spike damage a viable threat to the safety of the raid, thus making it so the tank doesn’t go from full to zero in 1 GCD. Thus, tanks in general will not be effected by this too much, because they will be taking less damage to compensate. And, all you druids out there, which class has the HIGHEST mitigation of them all (insane armor plus ? Druids. Which class has the highest health pool of them all? Druids. Druids are tailor made to take none spike damage (hence the really high armor and health pools,) and they will make their life easier. DK’s will be slightly affected, since they are more built for anti spike damage (with some of the best CD’s in the game,) but if the development team does this in the right way, tanks will not notice the difference to much, and healers will be thanking blizzard for not making 1 second kill the tank because the devil that is RNG hates you that day.
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(pallytank) Reducing the dodge chance by that much will put many tanks under their 102.4%. Likely to be a 15-20% gap for a lot of em at the start where they’ll be taking unblocked hits only mitigated by armor. Not sure what that says about the balancing of ‘spikey’ damage and imagine it won’t be any easier on the healers unless there’s followup mechanic in there somewhere I’m not seeing.
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Quote:
Hefizar
November 1st, 2009 | 10:49 am
Also, Blizzard, you have considered our healh pools, but not others mana pools.? A constant stream of 7k hits is going to create serious mana problems. You need to recobsider these ideas and not only see how it affects tanks, but healers as well.
This is not completely true. My favorite mode of healing as a paly is beacon the tank and flash of light the raid. sacred shield the tank and put the hot on him then spam the raid with flashes. My flashes crit (50% of the time are crits) for a little over 6.5k. Along with the sacred shield and some other healers hots, that would keep them alive by itself.
what im trying to say is that flash of light holy/prot palys and disc priest and maybe trees will be better off with the constant stream rather than the huge spikes also.
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Well since I play a paladin, this could actually be a good thing. Theyre lowering damage bosses do but increasing the importance of mitigation like trying to stack armor and health and for palys and wars, block. My paladins main spec is healing, but i tank alot also. From a healers perspective, right now hard mode raids are a pain because bad luck results in tanks dying in less that 2 seconds. I for one am glad that blizzard is trying to steer it away from random death mode that it is now, and moving toward keeping us busy actually healing damage than spamming our most expensive heals on a tank with full health for fear of him dying instantly.
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First off: I am a druid tank, have been one for almost 4 years
the way I understand this is, avoidance is being nerfed on tanks , but at the same time incomming damage is also being lowered, and the massive quick sucession damage spikes that we are intended to either dodge or soak up are also being lowered considerably,
With this in mind I approve of the direction this is going for the rest of the raid group, my healers can spare a little more concentration towards the DPS, and actually plan out more of a healing strategy than just super spamming heals on me, as the raid gradually succumbs to attrition.
And as with all the previous X-pacs and patches that have made changes in our mechanics, worry not a bit, we are druids.. we always make it work in the end
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I think you can get two Onyxia Blood Talismans… This is the ways its rumored to be possible:
To get it, you turn in the head of Onyxia and complete the quest for your original faction, then switch factions and do it again. Voila.
Of course, you get to do all the opposing factions’ quests and get a mountain of gold. And since you’ll already be very well geared, you should breeze through all of them and get the gold very quickly. Almost makes it worth the money for a faction transfer.
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Paladinsword…I want to know how it is you think you’re getting 2 Onyxia Blood Talismans? Ony doesn’t drop a head with a blue ! . You’ll get one, and be happy….
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Also, Blizzard, you have considered our healh pools, but not others mana pools.? A constant stream of 7k hits is going to create serious mana problems. You need to recobsider these ideas and not only see how it affects tanks, but healers as well.
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I feel this is a slap to both Druid and DK tanks. Neither of them can use Block giving them less gear and avoidance. Unless something happensbwhere dks can use shield this will suck. I will have to give up all of my 200g stam gems for some +10 dodge gems just to be viable. There is already a Dk bias on my server and i think this is the nail in the coffing for us. I hope you come to your senses and reduce this 20%. At that rate, my avoidqnce will only be at 30% which is another insane amount of damage. I dont wan to only be able to run IC in the next expansion
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This won’t affect druids any more than any other class, don’t even worry about it.
Before you all start a flame war on me, let me go ahead and state my qualifications. I have two tanks at present, a Pre-Uld geared DK. I’m about as good as I can get in that bracket. I never got to MT when Uld came out, and my guild made me use my shammy shortly afterward. While Gemming Dodge, not Parry, I had ROUGHLY 20% parry. This means that even if I swapped all my gems over to parry instead of dodge, I’d still have roughly 20% dodge. Hey, whatcha know, that’s the EXACT amount that’s being nerfed! I think you’ll find that even if every tank re-gems to another viable stat, they will be hit by roughly the same amount (give or tank a percent or two).
At present, I’ll be entering Icecrown on my Feral Druid tank, and don’t expect any issues.
That being said, it’s STUPID that Blizz did this in the first place. Tanks are SUPPOSED to have insane mitigation, that’s why they’re TANKS. If they don’t want mitigation to go up for icecrown, have all the gear increase stam, not agi/dodge/def from what it already was, or heck, have it increase str for extra threat. This is just Blizz’s cop-out for them being retards again.
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@green, bear tanks suck? what game are you playing? bear tanks can finally jump in and do more than boss fights, we are beasts on aoe threat as well.
sounds like you are one of those warriors that gets passed up for druids.
for the nerf, yeah i see this coming a while ago, but its with druids in mind not DKs, DKs just sort of became collateral damage.
i mean look at all the /warrior paladin QQ about druid tanking
/sigh
its no biggie debuff or not ill be in ICC doing what i do best.
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This seems a really strange way to stabilise healing or damage taken.
Every tanking class rely on dodge, the plate wears have parry to fall back on but DK’s lose threat, druids cant parry at all but they can block (savage defense) although its for about 2k on a decent gear druid. Which as mentioned above is nothing compared to what we get clobbered with raiding. So what will be the reality of it all? I think we’re only seeing half the changes. They will reduce the dodge but most likely increase the attack speed and reduce the dmg per strike on most fights to make block worth while. DK’s will probably be given a magical block mechanic similar to 3.1′s savage defence for druids.
These are all possibilities but what seems a certainty is that we will all stack Stam, which most of us have been doing for TOC anyway AND we will continue to stack dodge because even with 20% reduction Druids will still reach 33% or more dodge and plate wearers will still have 33% avoidance. The ICC gear is going to be a significant leap in stats again..how high did you want our dodge to get?
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I can understand their point in the sense, the high dodge etc that we can get, can cause big damage spikes, sometimes meaning healers stop healing, then we take a few shots and die, this has happened a few times on my DK tank, but at the same time, when we do get hit, we get hit harder than some other classes, and only survive due to avoiding hits allowing healers to catch up, we start avoiding less, healers are really gonna struggle to keep up unless they decide to up a DK’s mitigation as well. as some people say, block isnt absolutely fantastic, but it can make a big difference blocking 2k damage every few shots over a long fight.
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As has been mentioned, Blizz hasn’t kept up with scaling Block (either Rating or Value) in WoTLK. Furthermore there are zero items with Block Rating in Ony or ToC raids, and only the Shields in ToC have Block Value on em. So it appears that Blizzard has programmed themselves into a corner and with the current best Block Rating gear for many slots being all the way down in Naxx 25 there seems little anyone can do here but stack ever more avoidance, this announcement just means you may want to reconsider your expertise, strength, and stamina gems for yet more avoidence to counter the throne nerf-aura.
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This is a bit of a nasty blow for dk’s, I have a dk tank atm with around 30% dodge and 19.5% parry. sometimes i can struggle for agro as it is against high hitting warlocks and mages etc, runestrike is one of our main agro attacks and now we get to use it less… not good… not to mention a lack of mitigation, i wouldnt mind the avaidance nerf so much if we had better mitigation, this is going to hurt dk tanks.
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From a RPG point of view, bear has a really thick fur, so they should be less affected by this chill environment. From the reply, I read that bear tank as a really large health pool. This is true for high geared tank, and it’s getting to achieve that gear score. Piece of leather with stamina don’t fall out in every dungeon compare to plate tanking gear.
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personally, i think another good way to dissuade from high avoidance is to make gem cuts/enchants for block value and rating…*hinthint* =D
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I play both a Resto Shaman and a Prot Pally. From a healer perspective; Tanks taking damage are going to be getting heals whether they are dodging or not, Overall healing done isn’t going to change, but you can expect that overhealing will be reduced ;-P Might make healing a bit more challenging. Furture more,I am a fan of mitigation over avoidance. Paladins talking about how high they’ve gotten their avoidance makes me sick when these same Tankadins have hardly any block Value or rating. I’d rather a tank smoothing out incoming damage constantly instead of in fits and starts like a spastic child.
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Idk. true this will suck but it’ll just make gearing for it a lil more difficult. ATM everythin out is ezmode… it’ll be nice to have somethin difficult to do and that requires a lil more skill than the raid’s we’re seeing right now
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While this might druids not work, don’t put block in there as a viable stat. Sure, as a paladin tank I can get block up to 60% or so consistently. Then when I get hit for and 18k shot, I can reduce that number by almost 2000! Block is not a viable enough stat to hang your hat on.
I see what they are trying to do, and if they reduce the spike incoming to balance the reduction of avoidance, it’ll work. But don’t say ‘druids are screwed’ because warriors and paladins can rely on block, because block is realistically worthless as it is now.
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DK tanks are going to be out too. Avoidance is the foundation of a good percentage of our threat. Less avoidance = Less runestrikes.
I’m not very happy about this change. Looks like I may need to go main spec DPS?
DK are not going to be able to compete with Warriors, Paladins or even Druids with lower HP overall and now minus 20% avoidance.
I sure hope they make more changes than just this to remedy the “spiky” damage problem.
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this is fairly weak, as a dk its kinda cool having 30% dodge and 20% parry, and its not like im stacking the stats either – but if blizz is going to implement something like this atleast make mitigation stronger on tanks that dont have shields (dks and druids)… beacase getting hit but 7k from mobs and not being able to dodge kinda sucks….
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This is terrible. I have a druid tank and have been very happy with how blizz has finally made druid tanking viable. Now they are going to slap our only avoidance stat with the nerf bat and make it near impossible for me to do anything but let dust gather on my druid tank, Nevermind that he has been great main tanking ToC 10 and 25
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This will put alot more focus on block for paladins and warriors (like it should be) and DKs parry (also like it should be).
True, Druids stand to take the largest blow, but Druids also have the highest health pools and they cap out Defense quickly. I’m sure they’ll pull through.
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this is just going to put more emphasis on health pools, so i think druid tanks will still be O.K
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Watch your druid tanks go from decent to unwanted. Druid’s have only one avoidance stat, dodge. Everyone else can stack parry and block.
Please continue to make druid tanking unwanted.. watch all those bears die to stupid bandaid “fixes”
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