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