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I admit, this worries me a bit from a tenuous-tank-balance standpoint. Perhaps someone more knowledgeable about tanks can comment on this post and enlighten me, but I remember this kind of aura changing up what tanks were good in Sunwell, favoring HP-based tanks over avoidance-based tanks.
Update: Kal, who blogs about tanks at WoWThinkTank, commented on this at:
ThinkTank: [General, Druid] Icewell radiance, bears, and you
His summary:
my conclusion is similar to yours: this should favor tanks with higher health/armor more. In some situation – for example, in a fight like Brutallus 2.0 where you could take 4 hits within 1.5 seconds that could kill a tank, tanks with higher avoidance will have a better chance of being ‘lucky’ and surviving (about 20% vs 10%) but it won’t change healing patterns; both tanks would have to be healed the same way, and it’s very likely that superior bear health will allow bears to take an additional hit where other tanks cannot.
His article is definitely worth clicking through and reading though, he goes into good detail. Thanks Kal!
The Blizzard post is now below the cut since this article has gotten long.
Daelo: Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!
For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%.
Why are we doing this?
The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more "spiky" than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react. Tanks could use their cooldowns more reactively. Instead, the current situation is that if we make a hard hitting melee boss and a tank doesn't avoid two successive swings then the tank could very well be dead in that 1-2 second window. The use of reactive defensive abilities instead becomes a methodically planned affair, healers have to spam their largest heals just in case the huge damage spike happens.
We've been trying to do a fair amount to mitigate the effect of high tank avoidance on the encounter side of things during this expansion with faster melee swings, additional melee strikes, dual wielding, narrowing the normal variance of melee swing damage, and various other tricks. There's a limit to what we can do, however. So to give us a bit of breathing room we’ve implemented Chill of the Throne. Going forward past Icecrown Citadel, we have plans to keep tank avoidance from growing so high again.
We'll have this on the PTR soon so players can see the effects inside Icecrown Raid.
A thing worth mentioning/griping about:
Lower avoid numbers plus the indication (I've misplaced the link at the moment) that they're going to try to control avoid streaks with fast swing timers for smaller increments rather than slow big hits has the (possibly intentional?) side effect of nerfing duration on charge-based abilities.
So, for example, the nice little resurgence Unholy tanking was having for DKs is over because Bone Shield will be back to the minimum duration (however long it takes for charges to be eaten through with the ICD on charge munching).
This basically made it so ferals were insane during Sunwell, being able to reach like, 100% dodge due to no DR on it. It made other tanks have to gem pure dodge as well.
My largest concern is the gigantic hit to threat that DKs will see. The vast portion of DK threat is from Rune Strike. Most parses I have seen show Rune Strike at 30-40% of a DK's threat. Vastly fewer dodges == vastly fewer rune strikes.
aka blizzard messed up again.
Well, the design going forward is that every tier of content past entry level will have some-or-other version of Sunwell Radiance, if not through a raid-wide buff then by giving mobs expertise, or something else. So the classes have to be balanced around this kind of thing anyway. My only disappointment with this is that it wasn't called Icecrown Radiance with a tooltip starting "The cold radiance of the Frozen Thrown empowers ...". That would have been amusing.
This is going to screw DK tanks badly. Moreover, here's my question for Blizzard: If you want tanks using their suvivability cooldowns more often, why do you insist on INCREASING the time time for which they're down and nerfing them? Seriously, it seems that DKs have gotten nothing but hit after after every patch.
And to top this all off, don't forget the debuff (possibly this same one) that will be applied to the entire raid during fights: Drains 1% of your maximum health every 3 seconds while fighting in Icecrown.
I suppose tanks will have to stack gear with high avoidance...kinda like Anub'arak in heroic ToC. Warrior tanks are back in business!
Can those of you suggesting heavy avoidance gear please explain your reasoning?
I understand that a reduction in dodge leaves tanks without some of their previous avoidance, but I do not understand why it needs replacing.
It doesn't change anything in class balance as all tanks already have above 20% dodge. Maybe threat for dks.
Also it _almost_ doesn't change usefulness of any stat. If you had total of 60% avoidance, upgrade to 61% would have given you 2.5% less dmg. Now you will have 40% and upgrading to 41% will only give you 1.6% less dmg at the same cost. So instead of avoidance being almost useless it's going to be completely useless.
Whoa. What debuff is being talked about above? I havent read a damn thing about it, so unless I missed something (possible) dont leave random info laying around without citation.
As far as the tank hit. It depends on how much Blizzard really intends to nerf boss damage. MT for a strictly 10-Man guild. Have 25+% dodge in most of our setups. So I roll into ICC with 5%. If I regem all of my stam gems, I take a huge hit to my EH, but would make up some of the avoidance = Not worth it.
My biggest concern is that the boss damage nerf Blizzard feels is enough will actually stretch my healers more; because in truth it wont be enough.
Time will tell.
Uaeko
Baelgun
I wrote something up on my blog that might be useful, kyth:
http://wowthinktank.blogspot.com/2009/10/general-druid-icewell-radiance-...
If you don't want to read the article, my conclusion is similar to yours: this should favor tanks with higher health/armor more. In some situation - for example, in a fight like Brutallus 2.0 where you could take 4 hits within 1.5 seconds that could kill a tank, tanks with higher avoidance will have a better chance of being 'lucky' and surviving (about 20% vs 10%) but it won't change healing patterns; both tanks would have to be healed the same way, and it's very likely that superior bear health will allow bears to take an additional hit where other tanks cannot.
This is correct Kal. The only encounters where avoidance tanks could be better would be vary fast hitting bosses, so nothing new here.
"...at the same cost."
This is far from accurate. At the simplest level 'cost' is affected by DR which will have different impact at the two levels. The rabbit hole only gets deeper from there.
No. The cost of 1% of avoidance isn't changing. The DR on avoidance is calculated before the 20% reduction is put into effect, so if you're at 40% dodge now and have DR X, after this change you'll have 20% dodge but your DR will still be X.
So that 1% avoidance will be worth less than it was from a relative value.
Okay, I see where you were coming from now, I put your post in the wrong context. You're correct that you pay a higher cost per percent damage reduced if the baseline is current damage being taken.
Article author
Hey thanks Kal! I'm going to add this to the main post as a link so people can see it rather than it hiding in these horribly-formatted comments.