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Q u o t e:


When I find one, I'll let you know. Most of the raiders I have talked to who have beaten heroic Anub 25 consider him one of if not the hardest boss in WoW.

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I'll bite. Twins in an appropriate entry level of difficulty for a 5-boss t9 instance, imo, and Anub is appropriate for an endboss, maybe just a hair too easy. But the first three bosses of heroic 25man ToC were, and still are, badly undertuned, in my opinion. Frankly, I think both Beasts and Jaraxxus could have been amazing encounters, and it makes me a little bit sad.

Is anyone taking a stance with blizzard on this ? I mean I dont see alot of theory crafting going on and I see lots of nonsense comments from most of you guys. Just wait and see how it plays out and if your going to sit here and say " Its not that bad for warriors or druid tanks but for us death knights or pallies it makes no sense" you think Blizzard doesn't take all tanking classes into consideration ? Good players find ways to make it work , they take what they get and adjust properly , those that look for the easy way out complain and look for holes in the system to blame their noobness on. I know ill get flamed for this but same with mages I never complained I adjusted , please see if thats feasible before you start completely bashing and making unalculated assumptions. Blizzard had to compensate by providing tier 9 gear cause noobs like most of you are could not do hardmodes , now that they gave you the tier 9 stuff your saying that " blizzard messed up and now are not fixing issue but rather patching it" is the dumbest thing I heard in a while. They did that cause the same people complained it was tooo hard etc etc now you throw it in their face ? Dont turn this into " let bash blizzard mechanics " in this forum , its loosing its importance and ghostwalker is loosing his patience with stupid remarks.

Hard to side with them when they're go to response to something in the past year is to nerf the crap out of things. Sure some of the reasons may be valid. But it doesn't change the fact that it's been they're go to response to fixing things.

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Q u o t e:
Is anyone taking a stance with blizzard on this ? I mean I dont see alot of theory crafting going on and I see lots of nonsense comments from most of you guys. Just wait and see how it plays out and if your going to sit here and say " Its not that bad for warriors or druid tanks but for us death knights or pallies it makes no sense" you think Blizzard doesn't take all tanking classes into consideration ? Good players find ways to make it work , they take what they get and adjust properly , those that look for the easy way out complain and look for holes in the system to blame their noobness on. I know ill get flamed for this but same with mages I never complained I adjusted , please see if thats feasible before you start completely bashing and making unalculated assumptions. Blizzard had to compensate by providing tier 9 gear cause noobs like most of you are could not do hardmodes , now that they gave you the tier 9 stuff your saying that " blizzard messed up and now are not fixing issue but rather patching it" is the dumbest thing I heard in a while. They did that cause the same people complained it was tooo hard etc etc now you throw it in their face ? Dont turn this into " let bash blizzard mechanics " in this forum , its loosing its importance and ghostwalker is loosing his patience with stupid remarks.

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You're so great you don't even need things like paragraphs!

The reasons why they're doing this are clear, that doesn't mean there aren't problems with it, or that we need to be happy about it.

There are serious issues involving threat caused by moves based on avoiding attacks, this is especially true for Death Knights (arguably the weakest threat tank already) who rely on Rune Strike for an absurd percentage of threat.

There are other issues regarding how this effects the utility of avoidance stats (do we favor armor and stamina even more (if we can) than we currently do?)

And there's the extremely annoying sensations of treading water: gearing, gearing, and gearing to maintain the same level of survivability that we possessed in Naxxramas.

If the same approach were necessary for DPS, I'm sure there'd be a little grumbling: "Hey guys, I know you're in great gear now, but you're only going to be able to do 3K top end again, like in Naxx. Sure we'll adjust boss health so that 3K is enough, so it'll have no real effect on the game." I'm sure you guys would love that as well, even if (theoretically) it were known to be necessary.

And lastly, you're not a tank so perhaps you don't realize that no amount of player skill or adjustments can overcome things like survivability adjustments - no matter how great of a player you are you simply can't dodge more because you're so terrific, you only dodge when Blizzard says you do, and when your survival and threat depend on that, there's nothing you can do.

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Q u o t e:
If the same approach were necessary for DPS, I'm sure there'd be a little grumbling: "Hey guys, I know you're in great gear now, but you're only going to be able to do 3K top end again, like in Naxx. Sure we'll adjust boss health so that 3K is enough, so it'll have no real effect on the game." I'm sure you guys would love that as well, even if (theoretically) it were known to be necessary.
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just throwing my own opinion out, but i wouldn't really mind that. if we don't do that, everyone will be doing something obscene like 15000 dps in cata (maybe even 20000) and that's just a ridiculous number.

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The main thing about block is that as the average damage dealt per hit goes down, the relative strength of block increases (hence why shield tanks are terrific on weak-hitting adds, and weak-hitting bosses such as those found in heroic 5 mans). This, in my opinion, is a good thing, except that they've rebalanced paladins do not need blocking to be more survivable than other tanks - oops - "By the Light I'm Immortal!"

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That will depend on the severity. They've altered bosses in the past, most recently Ingis to attack faster and with smaller hits, but it wasn't significant enough to all the sudden make blocking a great thing. Assuming they did this in Sunwell, where they last used this type of an effect, blocking wasn't used for anything but crushing blow mitigation on the few bosses there that could still crush. GC has said tanks will be getting killed from 2 hits, meaning 25K + hit sizes, that's not going to swing things towards blocking, especially when you are no longer blocking all attacks.

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Q u o t e:
Tank healing was fun in Sunwell, IMO. Sunwell was challenging. That's what a lot of players are looking for in the final raid tier. If you don't like the challenge of healing a tank then I'm not sure why you'd want to be a healer. Now as I've said, we're not saying Icecrown is only for the Sunwell crowd. But I am pretty convinced there are going to be a lot of "Icecrown is too hard because my tank died" posts here when it goes live.

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Again, tank healing was ONLY fun in Sunwell because it was only possible with downranking. This was counting the insane buff all spirit healers got regen wise.



Our guild kill Brutallus using 3 holy priest healers, all staggering their gheals. To this, we used a rank 2 or so normally, a rank 4 as it got close to the stomp, and nothing but max ranks when stomp was on, then back down to lowest possible rank. Even doing this, with potting every 2 minutes, mana was a chore in this fight for us. We don't have that kind of options anymore downranking wise, so that's my only real concern over this change. Then again, you've said there are no Brutallus like encounters there, so that's cool. Still somewhat concerned I guess, since Gheal isn't even on a priest's spel lbar anymore since the poofing of downranking.

I can certainly understand the implementation of "Chill of the Throne", although as a DK who does occasionally tank, I am slightly concerned for DK tanks. As of the 3.2 patch, I have seen many warrior and paladin tanks come close to similar dodge and parry rates as DKs, they still have higher armor (at least the tanks I have come accros), and they have the ability to mitigate a bit more damage using block.

With the implementation of "Chill of the Throne", will the developement team be looking at DK abilities to help balance DK tanks so they may be on par with the other tank classes such as reverting the armor increase from Frost Pressence back to 80%?

Edit: Im sorry, Im speaking of the 20% dodge nerf that is being put in.

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Rune Strike might need to be buffed to compensate for the change.

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Sounds good, although I'd personally be happier with threat moved out of RS to make our threat a little more predictable. I won't complain if things stay the same for 3.3 though, I hold out hope for the eventual RS/HS/Maul reword you guys mentioned a while back.

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Q u o t e:
I can certainly understand the implementation of "Chill of the Throne", although as a DK who does occasionally tank, I am slightly concerned for DK tanks. As of the 3.2 patch, I have seen many warrior and paladin tanks come close to similar dodge and parry rates as DKs, they still have higher armor (at least the tanks I have come accros), and they have the ability to mitigate a bit more damage using block.

With the implementation of "Chill of the Throne", will the developement team be looking at DK abilities to help balance DK tanks so they may be on par with the other tank classes such as reverting the armor increase from Frost Pressence back to 80%?

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if a warrior has the same avoidance as you without gimping his HP, it is because he has much better gear than you. if you are a tthe same gear level and the same avoidance, you will have a more than significant Health advantage. You also take less damage thanks to FP+BB> Def stance.

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Sounds good, although I'd personally be happier with threat moved out of RS to make our threat a little more predictable. I won't complain if things stay the same for 3.3 though, I hold out hope for the eventual RS/HS/Maul reword you guys mentioned a while back.

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If things stay "exactly the same," we're going to have worse threat. Not OMG THE SKY IS FALLING worse, but our threat will be worse off than it was this patch.

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I think what you are comparing here is a tank with high avoidance to one with lower avoidance. Your definition of "spiky" here is just that the tank with lower avoidance gets hit more often. That's usually not what players are talking about though. If you compare a tank with 50% avoidance to a tank with 0% avoidance, then the latter guy is taking a ton more damage, but he is taking the same damage every hit. For every unit of time, the incoming damage is the same, which is generally easier for healers and the tank himself to plan around.

When people say high avoidance causes spikes, what they usually mean is that a tank who chooses avoidance over mitigation (armor) will avoid some damage completely but then suddenly get clobbered. That's a spike. By reducing the amount of attacks that a boss fails to land (because of dodge), we can lower the amount of damage that a boss does per hit while still keeping the same boss damage over time. We need to keep the same damage over time because that is scaled to healing over time. If we just nerfed dodge without adjusting boss damage, then we'd just be killing tanks more often.

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But that's exactly what I said, the only way that high avoidance causes spikes is if you give up armor or health to get it, I said exactly that. I get that the change in boss hit size is a de facto, health and armor buff in this narrow context, but if we are still getting killed in 2-3 hits, it's not proportionate. The amount of damage that avoidance reduces isn't linear, but your change to boss DPS will be. Spikes will be caused by chain hits, and there will be more of them. It's worth noting though, that the context of my quote was in response to the effect that this will have on various tanks, not that damage put out in this manner is a bad thing.

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2) Tanks that avoid less are generally easier for healers to heal (provided the numbers aren't just too great).

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Again, this is only if you imply that the tank with higher avoidance is taking bigger hits. Armor is fairly static within a tier, and so is the base health on pieces of gear. The only options are really when it comes to gemming/enchanting, which most people go for EH or picking an item with mutliple avoidance stats versus an item with hit or expertise. If two tanks have nearly identical armor and health, which is generally the case among the equally geared, the one with the higher avoidance is obviously going to be easier to heal.

This is actually an informative thread (QQ's aside).

Here is something from the EJ forums. Not my post, mind you, but the numbers appear to be reasonable, so take this with a grain of salt.

TLDR: Most likely the threat generation problem for Death Knights as a result of Sunwell Radiance is going to be somewhere in the 10% range (my guess is 5-10%).

If true, this change will be noticeable, but not class-breaking, but I would be interested in knowing the following:

1) How much a 'flavor' difference will now exist between the highest and lowest threat-generating tanks..
2) How DK multi-mob threat gen will be affected (as it's a common trick for DK tanks to tab-target mobs and rune strike different ones to get the AoE threat up there.



http://elitistjerks.com/f72/t44638-sunos_fireside_chat_dk_endgame_tanking_updated/p81/#post1442460


from "elfatto"

I've decided to do some napkin math to get a rough idea of how much Chill of the Throne will impact our threat. I'm too lazy to see if there's parses for actual Icecrown bosses, so I've applied the -20% dodge modifier to data from a Jaraxxus parse I had, as this fight is pretty much straight tanking with no quirky mechanics from a MT perspective. If my reasoning or math is wrong please feel free to correct it/mock me.

Even though I am a blood spec in this parse, for simplicity I'm only considering threat from damage done and not from any self-healing through deathstrike.

Damage/threat breakdown, split into runestrike, as this is what we're interested in, and everything else.
Damage from runestrike: 170743 dmg, from 32 hits
Damage from everything else: 714273 dmg

Threat from runestrike: 170743 x 1.5 (runestrike modifier) x 2.0735 (frost pres.) ~= 521053 threat, with a mean of 16282.9 threat per runestrike.
Threat from everything else: 714273 x 2.0735 (frost pres.) ~= 1481045 threat

So a total threat of 2002098, over a fight duration of 304 seconds gives approx. 6586 TPS, with 35.8% of the total threat coming from runestrike.

During this fight Jaraxxus melees at me 86 times with 56 hits being avoided.
Avoidance breakdown into dodge and parry, as these proc runestrike.
Dodged: 32 hits
Parried: 15 hits
Thus, off the runestrike procs, 32/47 = 68.1% of them should have procced from dodges.
Also, runestrike was procced 47 times but only 32 actually got off due to overlap between my swing timer and the boss'. So we assume that only approx. 68% of avoided hits will translate into actual runestrikes.

Now let's apply the Icecrown -20% dodge modifier.
My dodge % for that fight was roughly 37.2%, making it 17.2% in Icecrown.
So my dodged hits in Icecrown are now 86 x 0.172 = 14.79, so approx. 15.
Assuming parries stay the same, I now proc runestrike 30 times. But not all avoided hits will translate to runestrikes, so we have to modify that by 68%. Thus, 30 x 0.68 = 20.4, so approx. 20 actual runestrikes will hit.
Multiply that by the average of 16282.9 threat per runestrike, and you get 325658 total threat from runestrike.

So total threat with the -20% dodge modifier is, 325658 threat + 1481045 threat = 1806703 threat, over 304 seconds is 5943.1 TPS.

From this example this is about a 10% reduction in TPS relative to the scenario without Icecrown radiance.

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Q u o t e:

I may have quoted an inappropriate post above. My bad. I was trying to offer a response to all of the misinformed folks who said “You are nerfing dodge so now my +dodge gear is bad.” I agree the trinkets that proc on dodge will need to be buffed to compensate for the change. Rune Strike might need to be buffed to compensate for the change.

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This is good to hear. Seeing that trinket initially I was pretty underwhelmed. Add the dodge reduction into the equation and the trinket gets down right bad. :(

Regarding Rune Strike, I'd honestly prefer if you buffed something else rather than RS. We rely on its threat far too much already making the start of a pull a pretty scary place to be when the avoidance gods frown on you and you fail to avoid for a while. I already have trouble keeping my dps from going nuts off the bat, and lowering my chance to dodge will only increase the chance of it taking a while to get a Rune Strike proc.

Finally, I'm curious about what happens if I happen to have less than 20% dodge when Chill of the Throne hits me. I haven't really looked too hard at it, but I'm only ~6% above 20% right now. What if I changed my gear to swap out dodge for other (avoidance) stats? I suppose then dodge would _actually_ become a worthless stat (until it went back above 20%) so it would hurt me in the long run.

Ok since it appears that in Cataclysm the bosses scale hit, expertise, etc. with each tier which I think is a good idea, this should have done this way back in vanilla wow.

With that said, I think you should get rid of diminishing returns also. I personnally hate dimishing returns on avoidance. Lets say 30 dodge rating = 1% dodge = 45 stamina, with dimishing returns that whole equation goes to waste and at a certain point 30 dodge rating = 0.5 % dodge rating and is not = to 45 stamina anymore.

I was all for avoidance in TBC, but with dimishing returns avoidance is no longer attractive, the stats you get on your gear is sufficient enough, and you pretty much have to go with stamina in all gems slots, trinkets, enchant, etc.

If youre going with boss scaling hit and expertise with each tier just get rid of avoidance dimishing returns as well.

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I agree the trinkets that proc on dodge will need to be buffed to compensate for the change. Rune Strike might need to be buffed to compensate for the change.

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While you are evaluating this, please do not forget to test the impact this may have on DK tanking sigils. If bosses are swinging at the same speed, and we have less avoidance, our sigils will proc less frequently due to the decrease in rune strikes. This may impact the uptime of our tanking sigils, which would further harm DK tanks.

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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.

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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This isn't exactly true. What you're not taking into account is that the DR is remaining the same and just having less of it now naturally makes increases in avoidance less valuable. Let's "think it through a little more."

In very general terms:

If you have 60% avoidance, you can take 1/.4 = 2.5x more damage on average. Gaining 10% of avoidance would allow you to take 1/.3 = 3.333...x more damage on average. This is a gain of 3.333/2.5 = 33.333% more damage taken on average.

If you nerf avoidance by a flat 20%, you now can take 1/.6 = 1.6666...x more damage. Gaining 10% of avoidance would allow you to take 1/.5 = 2x more damage, for a gain of 2/1.6666 = 20% more damage on average.

In both cases, 10% more avoidance would cost the same amount stat-wise since the 20% nerf is applied after the DRs. This causes that avoidance to be .2/.33333 = only 60% as effective as before in this case, which is clearly a significant reduction in the relative value of the stat.

So you are incorrect. This absolutely does make the dodge stat worse(as well as parry and defense). To answer your other question, this same effect does not occur if you were to nerf health. Stamina scales linearly, a flat reduction doesn't affect its value in the same way as a flat reduction in avoidance.

Bosses hitting for less does increase the value of EH relative to avoidance, but you're out of luck if you think significantly nerfing the value of avoidance is going to be offset by whatever decrease in damage you have planned for bosses. You'd have to lower their damage so significantly to put Avoidance on top of EH, that at that point it wouldn't matter what you geared for since surviving would be trivial regardless of how you geared. Since there's no chance of damage reductions being that extreme, EH is going to stay on top, even more so going forward.

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There were many things in your post I don’t agree with, but I’ll pick on just this one. Tanks don’t stack parry because it’s more expensive to gear for parry than dodge (and usually gearing for armor and health when available are superior to both). The reason parry > dodge (which makes it more expensive) is because parry gives you a slight threat increase over dodge because of the weapon swing speedup. The “parry gibs” phenomenon you are describing was a much bigger deal in the age of crushing blows (which ironically you are nostalgic for). Today, the increased damage that a parry-stacking tank would suffer from parry speedup is pretty trivial. Besides, we turn it off on many bosses for which it would cause a problem.

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Wait a minute I tought dodge and parry had the same point cost, it was changed in a recent patch were dodge and parry gave the same % at the same cost per rating point ?

This data is taken from wow Wiki

Rating Effect Requires
Level 60 Level 70 Level 80
Defense Skill 1 defense skill 1.5 2.37 4.92
Defense Skill 1% combined miss/dodge/parry/block 9.375 14.8125 30.75
Defense Skill 1% combined miss/dodge/parry 12.5 19.75 41
Dodge 1% dodge 13.8 21.76 45.25
Parry 1% parry 13.8 21.76 45.25
Block 1% block chance 5 7.88 16.39

All of these Ratings have the same "point cost" when determining the level of an item. (See the article on Item values for an in-depth discussion.) For comparison, 1 point of Block Value, which decreases the damage taken when a block occurs by 1, costs 0.65 as much as 1 point of any of these Ratings.

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Wait a minute I tought dodge and parry had the same point cost, it was changed in a recent patch were dodge and parry gave the same % at the same cost per rating point ?

This data is taken from wow Wiki

Rating Effect Requires
Level 60 Level 70 Level 80
Defense Skill 1 defense skill 1.5 2.37 4.92
Defense Skill 1% combined miss/dodge/parry/block 9.375 14.8125 30.75
Defense Skill 1% combined miss/dodge/parry 12.5 19.75 41
Dodge 1% dodge 13.8 21.76 45.25
Parry 1% parry 13.8 21.76 45.25
Block 1% block chance 5 7.88 16.39

All of these Ratings have the same "point cost" when determining the level of an item. (See the article on Item values for an in-depth discussion.) For comparison, 1 point of Block Value, which decreases the damage taken when a block occurs by 1, costs 0.65 as much as 1 point of any of these Ratings.

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They do have the same point cost, but the Diminishing Returns on parry is higher.