Two excellent points raised that bear repeating:


1) How badly does this affect DK threat?
2) Savage Defense, already superior to warrior block for bosses, becomes by far the best "blocking" mechanic.

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Q u o t e:
I'm very new to DK tanking, so this may be a stupid question. . .

If runestrike is dependent on Parry and Dodge, will such a drastic dodge nerf reduce the ammount of Runestrikes DKs can do and thus their threat?

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Yup, and it's our main threat builder. So basically, it's gonna be available less often.

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Q u o t e:
This should be interesting when Cataclysm hits for anyone who wants to go back and do Icecrown. With Defense gone, Dodge will plummet, and tanks will just get railed on. AWESOME.

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Sunwell Radiance went away with 3.0. Icewell Radiance will go away with 4.0.

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Q u o t e:
As a side effect this makes Savage Defense much better than blocking. It makes Warrior blocking less guaranteed when SB is down, and Pallies definitely won't have guaranteed blocking, leaving the bear shield as the only guaranteed block.

Interesting if you think about it.

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Savage Defense isn't guaranteed either. You don't proc it on every melee attack.

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Q u o t e:


I suspect that we'll see some long ass fights in ICC with lots of AOE damage to be healed. The fight for the healers will be against their mana bar, not the tanks health bar though.

Maybe.

Probably just wishful thinking though.

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It'd be too easy to "unbalance" that though; in a world where you can stack druids (especially cats!) to the sky without losing dps, innervate is all too easy to raid stack for, as well as stuff like mana tide. I doubt we'll see any real mana challenges to healers till cataclysm, it'd require too many mechanics and gear changes.

Also, of the known bosses we have 2 big abomination types, a giant skeletal dragon, and Arthas wielding frostmourne. Odds are that these guys hit hard in hard mode.

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Q u o t e:
I'm very new to DK tanking, so this may be a stupid question. . .

If runestrike is dependent on Parry and Dodge, will such a drastic dodge nerf reduce the ammount of Runestrikes DKs can do and thus their threat?

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Yes it is.

And another horrible design decision Blizzard's part, for a number of reasons.

At the moment the general tanking mantra is nothing but Effective Health. Most raid tanks will more-or-less ignore avoidance on gear, and refuse to use avoidance trinkets, enchants, etc. if they can use anything that provides armor, stamina, or even threat stats instead. The result is that all of the avoidance on the gear that Blue is now complaining about, is there because they put it there. Additionally the power of Effective Health has reduced tank gearing to a ridiculous level of simplicity: stamina, stamina, stamina, stamina (maybe some armor). There are no choices or trade offs made here.

So, why in response to this environment, would you go after avoidance which is only a problem because Blizzard's itemization folks have apparently made it a problem? It stacks the favor even more to the side of Effective Health since avoidance scales off itself (not in rating terms due to DR, but in % terms) the 20% reduction to avoidance means that avoidance stats are even weaker than they were before. So we have even less incentive to use the avoidance stats that the item designers are apparently going to slather all over the gear again.

Instead of allowing tanks to adopt a balanced approach between avoidance and effective health, and addressing the ridiculous insta-gib nature of content, they're going to (once again) slap on a band-aid avoidance penalty to make Effective Health the King of Kings.

There's a good suggestion in another thread: instead of reducing everyone's dodge by 20%, reduce all healing done by 30% and adjust boss damage accordingly. If you don't want tanks to have 65-70% avoidance than swap some of those avoidance stats for bonus armor, we won't complain. And give us some reason to actually put thought into our gear rather than mindlessly stacking stamina.

Oh I know, it's only on crit. I just assumed bears crit enough that it had a pretty high uptime, which would be higher than now than Paladin/Warrior effective block uptime.

I didn't really do the math though on the uptime rate on SD so I could be off.

P.S. GC, you guys define BiS though. How do you define it? Via the bosses you toss at us. If you give us a boss where if you absolutely don't dodge that 2nd or 3rd hit you'll be dead, it'll favor one thing. If you give us a boss that's almost impossible to build threat on, it'll favor another thing.

So you tossed bosses at us that hit insanely hard. Don't you think that's going to make us gear in a particular way?

Why does every piece of gear have to have the same set of stats on it?

Why can't we go back to a system where plate gloves X have 250 stamina, plate pants Y have 300 dodge rating, and plate helm Z has 500 expertise rating?


Then, all you have to do if avoidance gets out of control is nerf *one set of items*.


This would also make gearing a CHOICE that has CONSEQUENCES instead of a blind iLevel check.

Necessary change. Bosses hitting for 44k on heroic (enraged worm in HToC25) was silly.
Now instead of having 75% avoidance people will have 55% avoidance (60 after new gear) and bosses will hit for 25-30k instead, and land hits twice as often.

Who gains: Paladins, Warriors - now both scale with block rating/block value. Hits are now smaller and therefore block decreases damage taken by a larger %.
Who also gains: Bears - historically they have the armor/HP thing - but that has been nerfed and they gained a shield block like mechanism. Savage bubble will absorb a higher % of incoming damage. Of course additional gear will cause this to be up more often with a higher value.
Who loses: DK's - If swing timers slow down and you have less DW mobs they lose runic power. Also, they have no ability that reduces damage by X amount.

Impacts on healing:
You won't need 2 beacon pallies to keep up 1 tank.

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Q u o t e:


You are making the common mistake in thinking that our goal for itemization is to give you the best possible gear that we can. Itemizing your character is supposed to be a choice. There will be better pieces and worse pieces. There will be pieces that combine stats your really want with stats you don't really need. Wearing the best gear for their character (which is not the same as wearing the best gear) is one way players have to demonstrate mastery of the game.

This is also why I always preach to take BiS lists with a grain of salt. Merely reaching for the item declared to be BiS by a spreadsheet or system you might not even understand could lead you to making bad gear choices, often of the variety of passing over the good upgrade because it's not the best possible upgrade.

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You are missing the point.

Putting so much avoidance on gear isn't a bad idea because other stats are better. It was a bad idea because it causes tank scaling to fail and makes Radiance necessary.

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Q u o t e:


You are making the common mistake in thinking that our goal for itemization is to give you the best possible gear that we can. Itemizing your character is supposed to be a choice. There will be better pieces and worse pieces. There will be pieces that combine stats your really want with stats you don't really need. Wearing the best gear for their character (which is not the same as wearing the best gear) is one way players have to demonstrate mastery of the game.

This is also why I always preach to take BiS lists with a grain of salt. Merely reaching for the item declared to be BiS by a spreadsheet or system you might not even understand could lead you to making bad gear choices, often of the variety of passing over the good upgrade because it's not the best possible upgrade.

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Your overriding goal should have been "lets not break the game by doing 3 way avoidance splits."

You can make inferior gear choices without resorting to making avoidance ridiculous, you know. Bonus armor, hit, expertise---these are all fine suggestions.

The fact is that a three way avoidance split IS the best choice usually for overall damage reduction and you guys do it WAY too much. That is what he was trying to say. Your itemization team dropped the ball--not by being too stingy but by focusing way too much on particular stat sub sets.

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Q u o t e:

Yes it is.

And another horrible design decision Blizzard's part, for a number of reasons.

At the moment the general tanking mantra is nothing but Effective Health. Most raid tanks will more-or-less ignore avoidance on gear, and refuse to use avoidance trinkets, enchants, etc. if they can use anything that provides armor, stamina, or even threat stats instead. The result is that all of the avoidance on the gear that Blue is now complaining about, is there because they put it there. Additionally the power of Effective Health has reduced tank gearing to a ridiculous level of simplicity: stamina, stamina, stamina, stamina (maybe some armor). There are no choices or trade offs made here.

So, why in response to this environment, would you go after avoidance which is only a problem because Blizzard's itemization folks have apparently made it a problem? It stacks the favor even more to the side of Effective Health since avoidance scales off itself (not in rating terms due to DR, but in % terms) the 20% reduction to avoidance means that avoidance stats are even weaker than they were before. So we have even less incentive to use the avoidance stats that the item designers are apparently going to slather all over the gear again.

Instead of allowing tanks to adopt a balanced approach between avoidance and effective health, and addressing the ridiculous insta-gib nature of content, they're going to (once again) slap on a band-aid avoidance penalty to make Effective Health the King of Kings.

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Uhm, they are obviously going to reduce boss damage with Icecrown Radiance going in. The reason STA is king is because avoidance is so high. They have to make every boss threaten a two-shot or everyone would just stack avoidance and healing would be utterly trivial. With ICR, they don't need to do that. If bosses don't threaten instagibs, EH is greatly devalued because it doesn't actually prevent damage.

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Q u o t e:
There's a good suggestion in another thread: instead of reducing everyone's dodge by 20%, reduce all healing done by 30% and adjust boss damage accordingly. If you don't want tanks to have 65-70% avoidance than swap some of those avoidance stats for bonus armor, we won't complain. And give us some reason to actually put thought into our gear rather than mindlessly stacking stamina.

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How exactly would you "reduce healing by 30%" and only have it apply to the tanks?

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Q u o t e:
Our original estimations for tank avoidance would have worked fine had we not decided to add extra tiers of gear to reward heroic boss kills halfway through the expansion.

The Cataclysm design will keep tank avoidance at more manageable levels. The loss of defense skill counts for a lot right there. We are also considering giving bosses expertise or other ways of baking in Icewell Radiance -- basically the concept that bosses scale with gear rather than just hitting harder and taking more hits.

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My problem with this idea is that you seem to add it to fix a problem but forget about the consequences and leave things as is. What I mean is in Sunwell you decided to add the sunwell radiance to compensate for the insane avoidance numbers so instead of having bosses hit for so much damage that they can 2 shot tanks and 1 shot people, you can make it so they hit less harder but more often. Instead you added sunwell radiance and left the insane damage that the bosses would normally do if we had high avoidance. Brutallus was hitting so hard that we had to find some way of getting back our original amount of avoidance we used to have to be able to dodge some of his attacks or it would mean that the tank would die very quickly.

I'm fine with lowering our avoidance, but if you do, then you need to lower the damage the bosses do. If the point of this change and what you ultimately want to do, is to make the damage more frequent but less hectic so healers don't have to spam heal all the time. Then you can't have bosses in Icecrown hitting as hard as Northrend beast on heroic or Anub or his adds on heroic. They would have to hit alot less then that, but since we would have 20% less avoidance, we'll take more hits. But you can't just remove 20% and leave the damage per hit as it was before and expect everything to be alright.

Like you said, the reason for these 30K to 40K damage per hit on special abilities or whatnot is because of our high avoidance, if we lose that advantage then it stands to reason that they shouldn't be hitting for 30K to 40K damage anymore, special ability or not. I want to feel like I have some sort of control on the fight instead of praying on RNG that I don't get 2 shotted like it was on Brutallus or to a lesser extent Kalecgos and Felmyst and so on.

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Q u o t e:
Uhm, they are obviously going to reduce boss damage with Icecrown Radiance going in. The reason STA is king is because avoidance is so high. They have to make every boss threaten a two-shot or everyone would just stack avoidance and healing would be utterly trivial. With ICR, they don't need to do that. If bosses don't threaten instagibs, EH is greatly devalued because it doesn't actually prevent damage

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Reducing avoidance inherently reduces the value of more avoidance, especially since the 20% is not likely to reduce the diminishing returns suffered on our gear (in other words we'll need the same rating to go from 9-10% dodge that we used to need to go from 29-30% dodge).

To put this in perspective, going from 70% to 71% avoidance leads to an average of 1/30, or 3.3% less damage taken. Going from 50% to 51% avoidance leads to an average of 1/50 or 2% less damage taken.

With avoidance already considered a weak stat, it will only become weaker when its effects are so greatly diminished: stamina is all there is.

Is there a plan to give DK's an upfront threat boost to compensate for the RS loss that will result from this change? I already felt like too much of our threat is tied up in a button we can't push on demand (we're like the anti paladin in that regard), this just makes that aspect of our playstyle that much worse.

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Q u o t e:
?

Yes. We would probably just let you see the numbers directly. I consider it a design flaw that players have to experiment to determine thinks like hit and expertise caps. We're all for experimentation and theorycrafting, but we don't think it's fair to require some players to go out and do a lot of work to generate specific numbers that all players feel like they need to know.

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Genuine question here GC...

If you want ICC damage to be steadier, why don't you just walk over to the item team and say "Hey, we'd like less avoidance, can you cut out half of the avoidance from the ICC gear and replace it with stamina?"

Or if you're worried people will get too much stamina, make it Frost Resistance and put in so much Frost damage you couldn't hope to survive long with TotGC gear alone.


*edit*

I guess I post too quickly... I still don't get your point GC. *You guys dictate everything we pick up in ICC*

Period. We HAVE to wear what you give us. You even make the rules re: stamina being static.

Why can't you tweak them instead of every exp requiring a "Youscaletoowell Radiance"?

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Q u o t e:
?

Yes. We would probably just let you see the numbers directly. I consider it a design flaw that players have to experiment to determine thinks like hit and expertise caps. We're all for experimentation and theorycrafting, but we don't think it's fair to require some players to go out and do a lot of work to generate specific numbers that all players feel like they need to know.

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Awesome, I'm happy.

Part of the reasons mobs hitting harder felt "like progession" is because a mobs damage was so transparent. You really can't get that from "number of attacks landed", so simply landing more attacks won't feel like the mob is any tougher---even if we know it is.

Us being able to SEE how much more he is going to hit us though---well, then that transparency is carried over. If I take a look at the lich king and that bad boy is rocking -10% dodge, I know he is tough.

Anyway, thanks GC, this is good news.