Oct 29

Before I say anything else, I will say this: this is not a QQ post. In fact, I think Chill of the Throne is, in the end, a good idea (at least now that we’ve dug into the itemization hole, as it were).

What Is It

Chill of the Throne is a buff, similar to Sunwell Radiance in BC, that allows all enemy mobs in Icecrown Citadel (coming in 3.3, currently on the PTR) ignore 20% of their targets dodge. Essentially, if you are tanking IC, you can subtract 20% from your total avoidance; however, boss hits will be adjusted to compensate. Let’s continue the disussion.

Why Is It Here?

A couple people from WoW’s development team explain why they are implementing this spell, and Ghostcrawler discusses it a bit more. To summarize, tank avoidance is too high. This is primary because the team that planned out Wrath’s gear did not count on having hardmodes with higher item level gear–in the end, the gear people have is better than the gear the development team thought it would be. This means that, in order to offer any chance of a challenge to a raid, the hits that do actually hit the tank (ie, the ones that are not avoided) have to hit really hard in order to have any chance of killing the tank. What you end up with is healers having to time their big heals to land right after a bit hit (or else spam their biggest heals) and tanks that are unable to reactively use cooldowns.

Ideally (and Ghostcrawler has stated multiple times that this is the aim for Cataclysm), damage from a raid boss should be lower but more consistant (”smoother”), and the challenge in keeping tanks alive should be healers having to worry about running out of mana (i.e., not overhealing) and tanks having to use cooldowns more retroactively.

So, to try to push things that direction for the last raid of this expansion, Blizzard is nerfing avoidance artificially and also nerfing the amount of damage the bosses do (resulting, basically, in lower avoidance but higher mitigation, albeit mitigation via less damage), hoping to smooth out all these giant spikey hits while still creating a risk that the tank will die.

What It Is Not

This is not a worse nerf for druids than other tanks. Let me repeat myself: druids will not suffer worse from this nerf than other tanks. “But druids can only dodge!” you might say. Well, let’s take a look here.

Theoretical (i.e. made up) Avoidance Outside Icecrown

Adjusted with 20% Less Dodge

It’s easy to see that both tanks end up with the same amount of total avoidance. Now, you could go and make arguments about dodge being better than parry for certain tanks, etc. etc. but the main point is that other tanks are being hit just as hard as druids.

Another Note on Gear and Item Level

Guys, just because new gear has a higher item level does not always mean it is better. Ghostcrawler has said time and time again that it’s not designed that way–gear should be a choice, you shouldn’t be able to train a monkey to buy all the newer, higher item level gear and be a better tank/healer/DPS than you were. (This is part of my issue with gear scores in general.)

This public service announcement provided to you by The Altoholic.

Related posts:

1. Two Runes Enter: Stoneskin Gargoyle vs. Swordshattering
2. Role Consolidation, or “Great, Now I’m Useless”
3. PTR 3.0.8 Live
4. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Gear
5. So, You Wanna Play a Death Knight: Tanking

Oct 16

I thought I would share with you this post by Ghostcrawler on the forums, posted in response to a rant about people obsessing over gear scores:

We actually talked today about adding an item level 300 shirt that did absolutely nothing but mess with mods that attempt to boil down players to gear scores.

The interesting part, though, is the next post, in which he elaborates a little, and I agree 100% with his point. Emphasis below is mine:

The ubershirt solution would be pretty easy to bypass unfortunately.

Ultimately, we’re really not that interested in trying to shut mods like this down. Players will always have the Armory and to a lesser extent Inspect with which to judge other players.

It’s not an easy problem to solve. On the one hand, we can recognize that there is value in being able to determine if that guy you are considering for your pug is much less experienced and talented than he claims to be and is going to drag everyone else down and cause other players to leave. On the other hand, the WoW community seems to have become so obsessed with efficiency and so adverse to wiping that there is, in my opinion, an unreasonable demand for player skill and gear requirements even for relatively easy content. It’s one thing if your VoA tank is in all blues. It’s another if you’re asking for Ulduar gear for your Naxx run.

Many players are perfectly reasonable. However we’ve all run into That Guy who takes any attempt at measuring his awesomeness in the game (gearscore, achievements, dps meters) way too seriously and looks for the same in others.

While I agree with the OP that some people really do seem to be obsessive about their gear scores and much, much less about their skill or attitude (two things that are, in my opinion, much more important), what I’m really interested in is the other point GC makes.

Last night, a guildie got mad and quit a ToC 10 Normal run because we wiped four times on Northrend Beasts (each time at a different spot), even though we were running in the “second group,” a group put together by a couple of go-getter non-officers when the “official” Thursday ToC 10 run filled up. Apparently, four times is far, far too many times to wipe on Northrend Beasts.

Now, I can understand getting frustrated when people make the same mistakes over and over, won’t listen, etc. But many, many times this isn’t the case. Many times, some of your players just aren’t as geared as you’re used to. Maybe they’re new to the fights (as was the case in this ToC 10).

So my question is, what is it that has made the WoW community so “obsessed with efficiency and so adverse to wiping?” I will share my opinion: I believe this is mostly because of the decreased difficulty in content in Wrath. Things are much easier, on the whole, and people have become accustomed to facerolling through anything but the hardest content–any semblance to something that may be the slightest bit hard or even take a little effort is too much.

What do you folks think?

Related posts:

1. Pissed, but for Different Reasons
2. Forum Post of the Week: The End
3. Two Pugs Enter: Stupidity vs. Ignorance
4. Why Gearing for Naxx Matters to Me
5. Dual Specs Not Dead Yet