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Q u o t e:


That logic doesn't really work. It's like saying instead of nerfing armor pen, we should have just put less and less on higher level gear.

If we had avoided avoidance on tank gear, then every piece of tank gear would have hit and expertise (and maybe crit, haste and armor pen). Stamina and armor are static amounts, and if they were not, then those pieces immediately become the only pieces players would pay attention to.

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Why are you taking 20% of our dodge away and giving paladins a cooldown (through 4pc t10) that increase their dodge by 12%?

That doesn't seems logic now.

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Q u o t e:


That logic doesn't really work. It's like saying instead of nerfing armor pen, we should have just put less and less on higher level gear.

If we had avoided avoidance on tank gear, then every piece of tank gear would have hit and expertise (and maybe crit, haste and armor pen). Stamina and armor are static amounts, and if they were not, then those pieces immediately become the only pieces players would pay attention to.

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You realize there are items where dodge or parry have been replaced by +armor right?

In fact, I just replaced my +armor pants, which I LOVED with---You guessed it, a 3 way avoidance split.

Look at my gear GC---Every chance you guys have given me to avoid avoidance (Funny LOL), I have---Bonus armor is good----Its very good, we like it, we like it a lot.

Argh, GC beat me to it. The alternative would be to put threat stats or AC/STA. Well, threat is capped. Once you go with a few select threat pieces, you'd then do nothing but AC/STA pieces. The choice would be lost.

Now, that said, I'm not 100% sure we really need a choice.

I'm really worried about Rune Strike.

What about?

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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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Ugh this is a terrible suggestion. Obviously coming from a tank =/

More items like this.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=45267

Less items like this.

http://www.wowhead.com/?item=48544

Makes us all happier.

The second item could have eliminated 1%~ or so avoidance by giving us armor. Kind of solves your problems, doesn't it?

Your stat distribution could be Defense/Dodge/Armor or Defense/Parry/Armor or Defense/Dodge/Hit or Defense/Armor/Hit---You can make tons and tons of permutations WITHOUT ever doing a 3 way avoidance split.

The 3 way avoidance splits are bad, BAD.

As others have said, I am more than slightly concerned over the use of my primary threat ability being cut by 50% (~40-20=20). I understand the need for a radiance type in the zone and have thought you would put it in for a while, but with this change it may become necessary to reevaluate Death Knight threat or a least take another look at rune strike.

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Q u o t e:


That logic doesn't really work. It's like saying instead of nerfing armor pen, we should have just put less and less on higher level gear.

If we had avoided avoidance on tank gear, then every piece of tank gear would have hit and expertise (and maybe crit, haste and armor pen). Stamina and armor are static amounts, and if they were not, then those pieces immediately become the only pieces players would pay attention to.

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As opposed to nerfing it and continuing to stack tons of it on high level gear so avoiding it is more and more difficult? I mean, I understand the nerf, but mutilate rogues, enhancement shamans, etc. were already having to dance around it. Then you nerfed it and other classes started trying to avoid the massive amounts of it, only getting to the mjollnir runestone softcap. I personally believe you guys handled the armor penetration situation poorly (when you take into consideration the nerf AND the itemization).

You need to raise the level cap.


This notion of reducing the effectiveness of avoidance is supposed to be offset by increasing diminishing returns due to level.

You've simply given us too much gear at level 80. The same effect can be seen in Healer's mana regen. You can only pump up a level 80 with better and better gear for so long before it becomes meaningless.

To a lesser extent, how does this affect Revenge? I haven't tanked on a Warrior in years, is that a significant issue Warriors will face?

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Q u o t e:
Argh, GC beat me to it. The alternative would be to put threat stats or AC/STA. Well, threat is capped. Once you go with a few select threat pieces, you'd then do nothing but AC/STA pieces. The choice would be lost.

Now, that said, I'm not 100% sure we really need a choice.

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The gear choice is ALREADY lost. Their entire game design either breaks the system or makes the choice inevertiable, why not offer progression that *might* be one dimensional, but at least doesn't actually break their system?

Because right now, the choice is still one dimensional---We don't even HAVE the option of choosing armor on many pieces, the only difference now is that this "one dimensional" choice has produces a need for an artificial mechanic which is going to throw off some basic tanking mechanics.

IE---Savage defense becomes much more valuable.
Rune strike just lost a lot of threat generation.

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Q u o t e:
Ugh this is a terrible suggestion. Obviously coming from a tank =/

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Making healing less bursty is a horrible idea? I always though healing was more fun when it was reactive - increasing health pools size versus the damage done (exactly what would have to be done to accommodate a 30% healing drop) would do exactly that, no more instant-deaths from AoE, melee, or anything and more time for healers to respond to danger, though the pressure may be sustained for longer (since a single heal would not be enough to top someone off).

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Q u o t e:
As others have said, I am more than slightly concerned over the use of my primary threat ability being cut by 50% (~40-20=20). I understand the need for a radiance type in the zone and have thought you would put it in for a while, but with this change it may become necessary to reevaluate Death Knight threat or a least take another look at rune strike.

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Reevaluate not only DK threat but our DPS!

Rune Strike is actually about 30%+ my dps!

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Q u o t e:

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.

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No, the problem is right now avoidance is bad is because even with 90% avoidance, eventually you're going to take two hits in a row. If you don't have the EH to live, you're dead. So healers have to heal you under the assumption that your avoidance is zero, and spam heals proactively. If boss damage is reduced, healers don't have to make that assumption since you won't gib before they can react. That makes avoidance valuable, because it can prevent them from having to heal you at all.

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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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So you're saying that all players might get something like Beast Lore in Cataclysm that shows us our chance to hit/crit/avoid their attacks?

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Q u o t e:


That logic doesn't really work. It's like saying instead of nerfing armor pen, we should have just put less and less on higher level gear.

If we had avoided avoidance on tank gear, then every piece of tank gear would have hit and expertise (and maybe crit, haste and armor pen). Stamina and armor are static amounts, and if they were not, then those pieces immediately become the only pieces players would pay attention to.

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The thing is...what chill effectively does is put approximately -1.5% dodge on every piece of gear tanks have. So it's the same effect as not putting extra avoidance on higher-ilvl items, and putting nothing extra to compensate.

Hit/expertise/crit/haste/arpen are better than nothing, surely.

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Q u o t e:
Argh, GC beat me to it. The alternative would be to put threat stats or AC/STA. Well, threat is capped. Once you go with a few select threat pieces, you'd then do nothing but AC/STA pieces. The choice would be lost.

Now, that said, I'm not 100% sure we really need a choice.

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And I say they should, atleast starting in Cataclysm (talking about adding crit and hit and expertise on tanking gear). Tank DPS and threat for that matter has not scaled well compared to the damage and threat that DPS scaled at. And why is that? We are getting the same amount of AP as DPSers are (atleast from Str). But the difference is that dpsers are also getting more crit and more hit and more expertise and armor pen (though I don't need armor pen as a paladin tank).

You check tanking gear in ToC and there is very little hit but tons of expertise, it was the contrary in Ulduar where you had alot of hit but very little expertise. So you could never really get a balance for expertise and hit. And then we also don't get any crit whatsoever.

If you check the DPS that tanks used to do in Naxx compared to real DPSers, we were doing about 50% to 60% of a true dpsers damage. In ulduar that slipped to around 40%, in ToC I haven't really checked, but I would say it probably lowered to about 35% or so. In ICC it will probably go below 30%. Which makes us feel less and less usefull in the fight other then being a meat shield.

Not to mention making it harder and harder on threat. I see it often on fights with buffs from that boss encounter where it increases DPSers damage but not the tank, I also see it on AoE fights, where my AoE threat increased by very little, while DPSers AoE damage and consequently their threat has increase by alot. For some of them it's been doubled.

Yes, after thinking about it, this "Icewell Radiance" is giving me serious concerns about DK threat. With our main threat mechanic being based off of how much we dodge or parry, and the 20% dodge nerf being implemented, that cuts Runestrike procs by ~50%, give or take.

In 3.2, we're already at the bottom of the totem pole. A nerf to threat due to this "Icewell Radiance" is unnecessary. This needs to be addressed somehow, as it seems to have been an oversight by developers.

Desirable tank stats include:

always present - str, sta
almost always present - def
often present - exp, dodge, parry
rarely present - block value, hit
nonexistant in coliseum - block rat

Block value and block rating are war/pal only and useless to dk's, so there has been a trend towards plate items that fall in the "often" bucket - exp, dodge and parry. In Coliseum, there seems to be a strange absence of good items with hit so that becomes three: exp, dodge, parry.

It's not really surprising that str, sta, dodge, parry items are so prevalent, that we have such high avoidance, and that this sort of thing was all but inevitable. You could see it in Ulduar too. People didn't take the set, they took off-set items and there was huge threads about how much it sucked that the warrior tier (so very desirable for it's 4pc) had block rating everywhere. Well, this is the end result, really... they can't just keep giving us def/dodge/parry forever.

edit: oh hey a GC reply:

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Q u o t e:
It's an item level problem. If we added another raid tier to Lich King, we couldn't just keep avoiding avoidance and avoid it for every tier going forward. We just need a system where you avoid a Naxx boss 30% of the time and an Icecrown boss 30% of the time, the same way the Icecrown bosses have e.g. 30% larger health bars and thus take 30% more damage to kill. Otherwise the stats don't scale and bad thing happen (in this case the boss having to land so much damage to account for the fact that it misses so often).

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This reads like you're coming around to the idea of npc gains in a new tier offsetting pc gains in the new tier, resulting in us playing a game where we gain in power wrt older tiers of content but only keep pace with the cutting edge.

Which i'm not sure I mind, really.