Icewell Radiance is in!

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.

Q u o t e:
It would still be fine if the itemization team had designed the gear accordingly. In a full 258 setup for warrior tanks, precisely two pieces have anything but a 3 way split of pure avoidance stats on them. There's 3 different avoidance stats on 3 different diminishing returns, and pumping them all up like that can really make avoidance numbers go way out of whack. Meanwhile, we lose out on things like Expertise, and the preciously rare Hit Rating which is available on *1* piece of 258 tanking gear and end up having to swap gear around to cover those deficiencies.

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.

Q u o t e:
Also, if you're going to give mobs expertise, can you please make a spell or some kind of method to determine the level of expertise without us having to do parses?

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.

Q u o t e:
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.

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.

Q u o t e:
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.

We just don't think that works. If you put very unattractive stats on gear then players just go back the previous tier of gear and complain that we don't know how to itemize. If you put bonus stamina on the tier 10 gear, then that means the next tier of gear better have bonus stamina as well. If it has avoidance instead of that bonus stamina, tanks just shrug and go back to the tier 10 gear.

This is not a tank only problem. Casters won't upgrade to gear that doesn't have more spell power on it, because spell power tends to trump everything else for purposes of their dps or healing.

We put a little bonus armor on non-armor items (necks, rings, trinkets and the occasional cloak). We don't put bonus armor on gloves and chests because that gear would be too good.

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).

Q u o t e:
You realize there are items where dodge or parry have been replaced by +armor right?

There are some plate ones. There aren't leather ones any longer, and even the plate ones as you mentioned become so attractive that it's hard to get players to replace them. I'm not sure we'll continue to be able to do them in the future.

We're going to continue to itemize different gear differently. We don't want the PvE gear to become even more like the PvP gear where all the stats advance in lockstep with item level. Fundamentally, we just don't buy the argument that if we didn't put avoidance on gear that avoidance wouldn't get too high. Stats increase because players power level increases, not because of the mix on a particular tier piece.

Q u o t e:
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?

We'd be more likely to just put it on the stats screen as a tooltip for your hit chance for example. To get the information from particular creatures will require a little more work on our part.

Q u o t e:
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.

It's not an oversight. The question is how many times are you prepared to use Rune Strike but can't because you haven't gotten a dodge or parry. If you are replacing most of your white swings with Rune Strikes, then you shouldn't see much of a difference.

Q u o t e:
Your stripping defense is going to solve the issue, so I guess its a non-issue in regards to that. However, I think DKs have a pretty big concern that is very warranted. What about rune strike, GC?

Yeah, per my previous response we are looking at Rune Strike. We're not convinced it will be a problem yet.

Q u o t e:
That can't possibly be accurate. We would have had more avoidance leaving naxx than we will now with this ability and the increased DR we got last patch. Certainly the extra tiers didn't help, but Icecrown Radiance was going to come with the original calculations.

I don't think so. We didn't decide until last night to do the Icecrown Radiance. Without the extra tiers that the Ulduar and ToC hard modes included, then the max gear level might have been more like ToC normal 25 is today, and we didn't add Jormungar Radiance.

Q u o t e:
Itemize mitigation and threat, drop avoidance from itemization, problem solved.

And your tier 10 gear looks exactly like your tier 9 gear with just 13 more stat points.

Even worse, many tanks will decide that threat isn't their problem to solve or else they can't afford the luxury of threat since they need to survive, and those stats will be considered junk.

Q u o t e:
Well, all I'll say is that I really hope the damage will be smoother, and tanks won't be getting 2 shot without a significant heal in between. Because in sunwell avoidance was reduced AND each boss hit was really hard.

I am pretty sure on day one of 3.3 going live this forum will be filled with tanks who died and respond with "I thought bosses weren't going to hit hard."

It's Icecrown. It's not going to be Naxx.

Naxx was but a setback....

Q u o t e:
This would actually be BAD. If I am in T10 gear and go back to do a T7 Boss, I expect that boss to barely touch me. I expect to dodge more, parry more, block more, etc, etc. If you did this, it would be called: "The Hogger Effect". Meaning that what killed you at level 10 would kill you at 20 or 50 or 80.

I'm talking about an Icecrown boss being tougher than an Ulduar boss, not that the Ulduar bosses look at how much gear you have and scale themselves up accordingly.

Bosses get more damage and health. If they also got more expertise, defense and maybe armor then as character item level grew their relative strength to boss stats would not increase. As it is they increase enormously, requiring the bosses to have even more health and even more damage. Shifting some of that health and damage to other stats would fix a lot of problems.

Q u o t e:
Gotta 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.

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.

Q u o t e:
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???

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?

Q u o t e:
If you truly believe it will not be a problem please explain your logic. As many people have stated, DK threat is already in a weak place. Especially snap threat. So much so that DKs have macro every single ability to Runestrike in order to ensure it's immediate use. Let's just use some rough numbers. If I have 30% raid buffed dodge and that is dropped to 10% with the debuff. That is a 66% less chance to dodge then I had before, causing 66% less rune strikes.

There are a couple of flaws in your argument here. DKs macro Rune Strike not because they suffer for threat, but because more threat is generally better for a tank and there is no real penalty for macroing the ability. Players tend to macro attacks when the macro performs for them, not when they are really, really desperate to use the ability.

Second, you can't assume that less dodge turns into less Rune Strikes in such a simple manner. You have to look at how many white hits you convert to Rune Strike now and then how many you would convert to Rune Strike after losing dodge. If you have enough of a window in between dodges to still get a Rune Strike off, then you would see no effect. I suspect that's not the case, but I also don't think you'll see your threat plummet.

We also don't see too many appropriately geared tank of any class having sustained single-target threat problems in cases where you aren't supposed to have threat problems. Yes your dps classes may sometimes get dangerously close to pulling. That is part of the game. We're a long way from when the warlock would crit on a Molten Destroyer and wipe the raid because he didn't wait for 5 Sunders.

Q u o t e:
So, will you be helping druid tanks in another way? Since druids really only have four methods of increased survivability (Health, Armor, Dodge and Savage Defense) and the other three tanks all have Parry and two of the three have Block.

I just feel like I'm getting the shaft again, as a druid tank I've seen several nerfs and not very many buffs this expansion pack while other tanks (mostly warriors) have gotten many buffs. I know death knight tanks also have received nerfs, but I don't play a death knight so I'll leave their issues to them, since they know their class better than I do.

Also, I do hope that you don't leave the bosses hitting so hard that they can still 2 shot a tank... if that's the case then all you'll have managed to accomplish is increase the number of occurrences that a tank is 2 shot, increasing player frustration and drama.

You "feel like you are getting the shaft" by just assuming this must be a nerf without really taking the time to understand if it is or how. This change does not change the relationship between dodge and parry. If it has been a nerf to parry, then it would have been a bigger problem.

Q u o t e:
Wasn't there just a post by GC about how Avoidance is still important and EH isn't the be-all, end-all stat the community makes it out to be?

And now they're lopping 20% off of everyone's dodge.. So.. won't Stam-stacking (and as a byproduct, EH) be even more important now?

It arguably makes stam less important (though it will always be important for tanks). Many players are probably telling you right now that only stamina and armor are important because if you ever fail to avoid two boss hits in a row that you're going to die. Under that environment, avoidance loses a lot of value.

If bosses hit for less in IC (which they will, since they will hit more often) then the value of avoidance for purposes of survival increases.

I still expect many tanks will die in two hits until they get geared up a little. But they will, and then the ability to survive two hits in a row won't be as big an issue.

Q u o t e:
I wouldn't blame only the Itemization team at all.

It is more of a disconnect I think between the teams, which if you have ever worked in a large corporate environment isn't a hard thing to accomplish.

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.

Q u o t e:
You should pick and choose, which is fine but flawed.

No, picking and choosing is precisely the intent. If every new piece was always an upgrade, then loot would start to feel a lot less interesting pretty quickly.

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

Q u o t e:
So if you're essentially removing 20% dodge from us all does it alter the Diminishing Returns relationship between parry and dodge at all?
i.e. Is a dodge rating of 30% going to have the DR applied to it as though it were 30% or 10%? Is it now a case of Parry is king period?

I'd also like to second the notion that you don't do something stupid like put in a boss such as Brutallus that can 2-shot a tank at the same time as you nerf our avoidance.

The 20% nerf is applied after diminishing returns. That is why I am saying it won't affect the relative value of dodge and parry. The Icewell Radiance won't get you closer to diminishing returns by itself.

The whole point of this change is so bosses can hit less hard but more often, for the same damage over time but with fewer deadly spikes. That should feel better to everyone overall. The reason I am reluctant to say that is because some players are going to go into Icecrown, find it hard, and then expect us to buff their class.

It won't be Brutallus hard, at least most of the bosses and at least on normal mode. We're not going to be particularly sympathetic to players who find heroic mode too hard.

Q u o t e:
So you are going to sit there with a straight face and say that this will not harm our threat more than all the other classes when we only have 2 abilities with a threat modifier and this is going to effect one of them?

I will sit here with a straight face and say we like to balance around numbers, not hand-waving. :)

Q u o t e:
They don't care. They really don't.

This whole X-Pac has but nothing but patch after patch of 'oops we didn't forsee...' fill in completely obvious results of silly scaling. They have no interest in balancing the game, they really don't care if one class is more OP than another. It takes 2 seconds for them to toss on BIS gear of a level 80, and walk into an instance and see how things work, if they wanted to, on top of knowing before hand all the equations (and not having to reverse engineer them from combat parses) and they can't be bothered to do even that.

Banned for excessive QQ.

If you can't help yourself, please just read along and don't feel the need to post.

Q u o t e:
Like how you're not particularly sympathetic to players who find ToC hard too easy?

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.

Q u o t e:
Heroics/Nax 10 - 200
Uld 10 / Nax 25 - 213
Uld 10 H / Uld 25 / ToC 10 - 226
Uld 25 H / ToC 25 / ToC 10 H - 239
ToC 10 T / Toc 25 H - 245
ToC 25 Tribute - 258

The fact that we now have iLvL 275 cloaks is "your fault". This was a simple problem that could've been fixed easily, and you can see in my list that it woudln't be hard to match PvP gear at those tiers.

Of course it was "our fault." We're not blaming anyone. I was just explaining why avoidance still got so high despite our best intentions. You may have scaled the gear down had you been in our shoes, but we picked the numbers we thought would be enticing enough to get players to try the hard modes while still allowing everyone to feel like they could upgrade their gear.

It wasn't inevitable either. We debated Chill of the Throne long and hard. We easily could have gone the other way. We think the encounters will be more fun with the current implementation though.

Q u o t e:
Also, lowering your avoidance does not make damage steady, it makes it much more spiky. Spikes are caused by consecutive hits landing, higher avoidance drastically lowers the frequency of that occurring. The only way higher avoidance can cause things to get spiky, is if you are trading tons of health and armor for it, so that each hit is for a larger portion of your health pool. In this case, our health and armor are not increasing, we are simply losing avoidance, so spike events will be much more common. For a tank with 65% avoidance, they'll see in increase of 3 hit chains by about 425% under Icecrown Radiance, a tank with 45% avoidance will see an increase by about 250%.

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.

Q u o t e:
So the bosses hit faster for less damage, so really the bosses aren't doing any less damage over all. Avoidance is just cut by 20%.

"A durrr we dun put it in fer Sunweel! Lets dun put it n nao!"

Remember how fun tank healing was in sunwell? Oh boy I can't wait.

Three points:
1) Bosses won't swing faster. More of their swings will hit.
2) Tanks that avoid less are generally easier for healers to heal (provided the numbers aren't just too great).
3) 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.

Q u o t e:
Tanks do not stack Parry. Even though you have evened Parry out with Dodge point-wise, Tanks will not stack Parry. You don't know why. When we Parry, we get a faster next attack on a mob which we are standing in front of, which has a change to Parry us, giving it an extra attack.

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.

Q u o t e:
These are not dodge trinkets, these are trinekts that proc off of dodging.

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.