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Q u o t e:
You mention missing taunt as though it were the only reason for stacking hit, and it makes me giggle.

More to the point: a paladin with abyssmal levels of hit and expertise can still well out-threat a soft-capped warrior, deathknight, or druid in 99 situations out of 100, and to top it all off it can be done with a 1-button macro.

This needs to be fixed.

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I wasn't saying that things were balanced. I was just responding to the assertion that paladins don't need to stack those stats at all. Any relative differences in threat or other tanking staples (which I fully acknowledge are there - the classes are far from equal on these things) are due to class mechanics, and not to the stats themselves. A good paladin tank, I would imagine, tries to stack as much hit and tries to soft-cap on expertise as well as other tanks.

Perhaps it's habit of having to gear for uncrushable for so long that caused me to always want to be at 102.4 combined even after crushing blows were removed. Or the fact that having some ( obviously not much) mitigation on every incoming melee hit is a good thing. But my overall avoidance hasn't changed much since Naxx honestly.

I was maybe 10% more block higher than I am now and most of that went to dodge. Obviously other paladin tanks didn't stick to the old ways even though it's still better imo. But basically for those of us that stuck to it, you're nerfing our avoidance by 20% because we've gained 10? I just don't get it.

Also, gear selection should be a choice. Right. Tell that to all the shield tanks that "chose" to get block/unhittable gear for anub adds. Yes, we so "chose" to do that. No, we were forced to.

You also touched on the removal of defense from gear in the next expansion. Sure, that makes gearing easier since we don't have to worry about being crit, and it also works for reducing over all avoidance since defense does give those. My question to you is. In this next expansion, how do you expect people to go back and do some old content even for fun with some of the changes you're proposing?

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With a 20% dodge nerf parry becomes infinitely more appealing than dodge since it doesn't suffer from an automatic 20% diminishing return, and stam becomes more appealing since it has no DR.

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Agreed, yet some people claim that all tanks are equally affected.

This may seem a little contrite but I'm pretty sure no one is worried about normal, at least not in this thread. I'm pretty sure we're all only worried about Heroic.

P.S. Not that I mean to say you guys shouldn't worry about normal, I completely understand you have to and a lot of people do run normals. I'm just saying the people who post in the tanking forum and in this kind of thread typically only worry about heroic level.

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I'll address this one more time and then leave it because I think players are more interested in trying to turn this into a huge tanking nerf than understand what's going on.

We would not have this problem if Icecrown gear had been item level 245 or so, as we originally intended. We added a few extra tiers of gear to support heroic modes. We felt like we had to do that to have different difficulty levels and make raiding more accessible overall. We felt like we had to reward the harder modes with the better gear or nobody would have been very interested.

The proportions of relative stats on your gear are not the problem. They are proportional, give or take a little, at every tier except for stats like hit that cap out. The problem is not the class and item teams being out of sync. In fact, they are the same team.

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I know hindsight is 20/20, but was there ever any thought on keeping the ilvls the same between hard and normal, just having the hard gear look way better or something? Like different graphical effects to really set things apart so everyone in dalaran doesn't look identical?




Hey, it had to happen it had to happen, have little doubt you guys know what's best for the game, even though right now with our limited view it kinda stinks. I'm just wondering now what this is going to do on the healing side of things, since both tanking and healing have always shared a close relationship. When this went in with Sunwell and a boss like Brutallus, we only were able to keep up with it with things like downranking, which are no longer in the game. But it sounds like instead of things hitting insanely hard, just lower but faster? This could solve the "healers having too much mana" issue that's plagued the expansion, but man this is a lot to juggle for a change you guys just slipped in because you realized things were spiraling out of control.



I guess what I'm asking, is along with this change, is anything being done on the healing side of things too since both of these roles have always gone hand in hand?

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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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Apologies if it was covered already, but:

Why not have the tooltip just state the hit vs. numbers, e.g.:

0 Hit Rating:
(Tooltip reads):

95% vs Level 80
90% vs Level 81
87% vs Level 82
83% vs Level 83

I realize those numbers aren't accurate, but you get the idea.

I'm sorry to say GC, but this all sounds like the playerbase is paying for the mistakes you have made (you as in Blizzard, not you yourself). I can understand the issue (higher iLevel than originally intended), but shouldn't this have been anticipated for a very long time and dealt with in a better manner. No one liked Sunwell Radiance.

Also, what effect will this have on non-ICC encounters? I'm having flash backs to where all my hard earned tanking gear stays in my bags because the current tier of tanking items make it near impossible to maintain threat because the avoidance is so high (but appropriately reduced in sunwell).

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G

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otta love the ICC tanking trinkets.

Item - Icecrown 10 Normal Tank Trinket - Each time you dodge an attack, you gain 24 stamina for the next 10 sec, stacking up to 10 times.

Item - Icecrown 10 Heroic Tank Trinket - Each time you dodge an attack, you gain 27 stamina for the next 10 sec, stacking up to 10 times.

/endsarcasm.


Look, I understand the reasoning behind the avoidance nerf. Its the design behind some items that leave me scratching my head in confusion, from the libram, to the T10 4pc bonus for Paladins to the tanking trinket.

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If you conclusion is that anything that improves your avoidance is now bad as a result of this change, you should think through it a little more. If you didn't like avoidance before, nothing changes. If you liked avoidance before, nothing changes. You just have less of it now. The relative value should not change, unless you get to the point where bosses no longer two-shot tanks so much, in which case the relative value of avoidance increases.

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Yup, if these trinkets go live, I don't think any self respecing tank will touch them with a 10-foot pole. With dodge basically nerfed to the ground and then some......what are the chances of you getting 10 stacks up and keeping them up for any sustained amount of time???

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Nerfing dodge does not make the dodge stat worse. It only makes the amount of dodge on your dude worse. Would you stop stacking stamina if we nerfed your health?

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Do you really not get what the poster you quoted was saying? Do you not understand what the trinkets do? The trinkets proc provides STAMINA (not avoidance) when an attack is DODGED.With Dodge being almost entirely eliminated, the trinkets will seldom proc, and almost never proc enough to stack. This means that the trinkets will almost never provide STAMINA. Nowhere did the poster you quoted mention not taking avoidance; he said that no one will take trinkets that proc from a nearly non-existent avoidance stat.

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Agreed, yet some people claim that all tanks are equally affected.

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Dodge is better than parry for all tanks with or without chill of the throne.

Druids are least effected by this change.

The math has been presented, but you can continue to stick your fingers in your ears if you would like.

I'll present it again just for fun.

Lets say the druid has 50% avoidance and the warrior has 60% avoidance. The druid takes 50% of attacks and the warrior takes 40%

Lets take away 20% dodge from both.

The druid has 30% avoidance and the warrior has 40% avoidance. The druid takes 70% of attacks and the warrior takes 60%.

The druid is taking 40% more attacks than before (50%*1.4=70%).

The warrior is taking 50% more attacks than before. (40%*1.5=60%)

The druid is affected least.

The warrior's stat scaling is unaffected. If he wants to increase avoidance, dodge is still the fastest way to do it.

If you want to contest the above, please use math, and not just your gut feeling that because druids only have dodge that it somehow affects them the most, or that it affects a tank with lower avoidance more than one with higher avoidance. Because both are the opposite of the truth.

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I think what Fridmarr said bears repeating since it was asked a ton.

This is a buff applied to the mob. This means dodge is calculated exactly as if the buff did not exist. This means DR is in no way affected.

Again, DR is not affected at all by this. It'll be exactly as it always has been. It's just that after all the calculation is done, subtract 20% dodge.

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Well that's my assumption based on the way it was worded. I haven't actually seen it in action, but in Sunwell it was a buff on the mobs. If they have that portion finalized, maybe GC could comment on it.

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Agreed, yet some people claim that all tanks are equally affected.

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Prove your ignorance some more. Parry has a harsh DR.

And it doesnt affect all tanks equally, Druids are the least affected.

I don't know, if the worst problem that comes from this is that you're nigh unkillable in older content, I think that's a problem I'll just learn to deal with.

I think overall the only two outstanding issues are the DK Rune Strike/Warrior Revenge issue, and that hopefully Don't Gib Me Bro style bosses don't continue in ICC.

P.S. Fridmarr, it's in the original post itself.

"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."

One thing not being addressed here is that this is all in reference to melee, you cant dodge magic damage and that is a fundamental reason behind EH and stam stacking especially for classes such as the Druid with no magic mitigation or a class like the warrior with no means to mitigate the bleed of Gormokks Impale.

When magic and other non melee damage is taken out of the picture then avoidance stats become much more appealing.

We also have choices. The Devs could design with no non melee abilities on bosses. Players could choose to go with their strengths and stack avoidance and mitigate melee as much as possible leaving non melee as their bane. But because we are stuck in a system where we are not going to have, for the most part, melee only fights and where players are going to realize that having EH covers not just melee but non melee damage as well, it reduces our options to the ubiquitous tanking stats, AC, Stamina and Dodge.

The devs are painted into a corner, have huge hits to avoid making Stam tanking trivial or have every fight be a melee frenzy so that avoidance tanking isnt trivial. Taking either path leaves the other with problems and stuck re-gearing.

By implementing a reduction to dodge and increasing melee frequency of IC bosses versus current bosses, there is more damage to avoid or absorb via your preference.

Stamina is the only other option. Do you want them to reduce Stamina? At this point they have to reduce, we already have the gear so the option isnt there to gather new gear. The reduction has to be across the board and as fair as possible to all tanks. Dodge is the only answer and this is why in SW and now in IC it is the only solution.

It is what we have, we have to live with it.

For the future there are many options.

DR on Stam is what I would look at first.

Smaller carrots via item ilvl is an option but we have already run into problems where players have lost interest because the upgrades between the three sets of TOC gear is marginal.

Bosses that scale with defense and expertise etc. are a solution but come with their own problems of raising player caps while having those caps hidden from the player. Imagine not knowing that the boss is considered 3 levels above the player. How do you even begin to know how to gear. And if that information is released it becomes a myriad of caps versus gear and your progression in a world where it is difficult for many players to keep the current set caps and numbers straight, let alone those looking to switch to a tanking class or just have fun.

The Devs have their work cut out for them and I hope that their iteration in Cat brings as much success as WotLK has brought, despite the end result of resorting to this measure.

Druids don't have magic mitigation?

The ilvl cop out isn't fooling anybody. If we ended with 245 gear as opposed to 265 (or whatever ICC will be) it wouldn't have made a difference between avoidance working and avoidance being broken. The amount one stat would go up would have been trivial. All you'd have to do is tell your itemization team "Hey, don't put dodge/parry on pants and helmet for ICC" and your original projections could have aligned with the new higher ilvls. A few percent avoidance isn't game breaking, the problem was we had game breaking levels of avoidance in Nax.

This entire discussion is giving me deja vu. While we're at it I'm coining Blackwell Radiance, you know it's coming.

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You also need to cut the conspiracy theories. They aren't appropriate here.

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Oh cut the crap GC, you and I both know that this is all part of your master plan to make everyone race change into a gnome.

Don't ask me about the details, I've been too busy working on making my tinfoil hat to really flesh the theory out.

Those tank stamina trinkets become almost useless to non druids as well.