Friday, October 30, 2009 at 8:13PM | Llyra Chill of the Throne
I’m trying to make sense of the Chill of the Throne effect they’re talking about. On the one hand there’s 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.
So if the tank dodges less often, they will be getting hit more. Conversely, the bosses won’t be hitting as hard, so individual hits will be for less damage. Since the boss formula is that he will be hitting an appropriately geared tank for X damage per second, after mitigation, they’ve had to make those bosses do surprising amounts of damage to cover spans of dodging. This dampens and smoothes the DPS curve incoming against the tank, which should make tank healing easier and less subject to the whims of the random number generator.
But then I wonder, how much dodge does the average tank have? Do they all have at least 20% dodge? If they do, then this is probably an equal opportunity hit. Everyone’s avoidance drops by the same amount. If not, then it will hit Druids a little harder than others, since they don’t have parry or block to fall back on. I’ll assume for now that it’s equal. It’s not even a nerf then, since the bosses are being reduced in potency by the same amount. The area under the curve remains the same, it’s just the shape of the curve that is being changed.
There’s other issues here though. First, remember that bit about not wanting tanks to die because of 2 back-to-back hits?
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.
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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 sounds like when they say healing will be easier, they are comparing it to some of the pathological cases out there. Spikiness aside, your tanks are going to be taking end game raid-level damage. The bosses in Sunwell hit very very hard. So will these. Adjust your tank healing priorities accordingly.
And these parts just confuse me.
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.
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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.
Diminishing returns on avoidance? Are there tanks out there with more than 100% avoidance? I’d be surprised if that was the case. So what does it mean to have diminishing return on an avoidance stat? Do these stats not convert to percentages on a linear scale?
And why is Ghostcrawler telling us this will increase the value of avoidance? It sounds like they are saying that they got themselves in over their heads on avoidance and would rather everyone go over to mitigation. So why not go all in on that? Flatten the incoming damage curve to a straight line by removing avoidance entirely. As long as the healer HPS > boss DPS the tank wins.
Anyone able to shed some light on these issues?
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Reader Comments (11)
Avoidance stats, like dodge rating and parry rating suffer from DR, even below 100% total avoidance. That is why Paladin tanks, for example, keep dodge and parry at a 1.88/1 ratio to maximize avoidance after DR.
Haven't tanked in a while, but I believe for all tanks avoidance = 5% base + dodge % + parry % + avoidance from def. (Fusti can explain this better than I).
Block + SBV + armor are mitigation effects. And block mitigation is still pretty bleh against a boss hitting for 90k.
The diminishing returns aren't on avoidance, per se, but parry rating and dodge rating both have diminishing returns in contributing to parry and dodge %. So he's talking about how the change relates to that. Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is part of why raid tanks are stacking stam anyway (aside from the need to absorb a spike or two) which is that there is no diminishing return on stam, whereas there is a soft-cap for def, dodge, and parry and by Ulduar you get almost all you need from gear.
I actually understand what GC is describing about the problem - I think the confusion comes in because they haven't figured out exactly how to solve a complicated problem, so the proposed mechanics of the fix are fuzzy. Anyway, regardless of what comes out of the initial changes, I do really think it's a good thing for raiding that they are looking at it.
One issue that may come up is Runestrike is a key part of DK tanking and i believe only activates on avoidance, which could be a threat nerf. Still, I suspect Blizz will address that either in the initial changes or in a quick patch.
Personally I kind of suspect the qq might come from pally healers rather than tanks. Pally healers, after all, are ruling tank healing right now because the majority of their healing is consistent spike healing. And the HL glyph means they get nice splash healing out of doing so. But, the change may simply push pallies back to spamming FoL rather than HL, and it will make sacred shield even more valuable. Regardless, pallies more than other healers seem displeased when asked to change their healing style. It may benefit druids and disc priests the most. Maybe.
The story of diminishing returns on avoidance:
In TBC, by tier 6 and Sunwell level gear it was possible for certain tanks (well, druids and rogues) (yes, rogues) to stack avoidance to the point where they were literally unhittable given the right conditions. This is because avoidance stacked as an absolute value; that is to say, for example, 50% avoidance plus 20% avoidance equals 70% avoidance. This is the same way that crit stacks. However, in this model, if you go from 0% avoidance to 1% avoidance, you are reducing the damage you take by 1%. But if you go from 50% to 51%, you are reducing the damage you take by 2%. This means that avoidance gets more and more valuable the more you get, to the point where the benefit from going from 75% avoidance to 76% avoidance is a massive 4% reduction in damage.
In WotLK they changed avoidance to work more like armor does. For armor, each point is always precisely as valuable as the last and the next; it always provides the same effective percentage reduction in damage taken. This means that the absolute reduction in damage caused by armor rating is a curve that flattens off as it approaches the armor cap.
Now avoidance essentially works on the same principal (but with different and more confusing numbers). Each point of dodge rating or whatever is meant to reduce your damage intake by the same percentage, so that 1% worth of dodge rating at 0% dodge will be a 1% decrease in damage (you go from 0% dodge to 1% dodge), but 1% worth of dodge rating at 50% dodge will also be a 1% decrease in damage (so you go from 50% to 50.5%).
The effect of Sunwell Ra^H^H^H^H Chill of the Throne is to make avoidance more consistantly usefu*. If you have 50% avoidance but two hits will kill you, then avoidance is only valuable if you avoid that killer hit and your healers have to spam heal you as if you were not avoiding anything (thus almost completely negating the point of avoidance). However if you have 30% avoidance and 3 hits will kill you, then not avoiding a hit becomes a lot less problematic and in theory your healers have more space to take advantage of hits that you do avoid.
In the former example, avoidance RNG can save your life or it can kill you and not much in between. In the latter example, avoidance RNG can ease or increase the strain on your healers for periods but is potentially neither lethal nor life-saving.
Back in Burning Crusade my rogue was only 10-15% avoidance away from hitting 100% in bear tank leather. Thus the Sunwell Radiance effect-by making it not quite possible to avoid every hit tanks must gear up enough armor and health to survive a few hits.
Fusti only had about 18.5% dodge(unbuffed) when the Sunwell was released, but that was doing straight stamina/armor stacking at the time, using mostly T5/ZA gear. I would have had much more in T6, and would have needed it to survive those encounters. If you don't have 20% dodge stepping into icecrown, you probably don't belong there.
I remember Blizzard's rational for the 15% dodge nerf (and 8% parry buff) a little while back; I saw a blue post that said since they hadn't planned on hard-mode ilvl gear when designing WotLK, tanks with hard mode 25-man Icecrown gear might have hit 100% avoidance.
Oh, and because I like examples- Fustigator's unbuffed avoidance stats before DR in his hit capped gear are:
dodge 27.43%
parry 21.06%
miss 12.04%
Most warriors and paladins I've seen have had between 22-30% dodge. Bears of course have lots more, but I'm not sure about deathknights - I know they never gem for parry since they get a bunch for free from strength. All those dodge gems may push them a little higher.
@Coral:
I highly doubt I'll be QQing about using more FoL, although I highly doubt it'll be like that. This situation is very, very similar to Sunwell Plateau and that was the place where Holy Light really started to shine. What will be happening instead is that the tanks will be taking a constant stream of heavy damage, instead of spike damage, which means less overheal in general for tank healers, but will still need constant heals, generally big heals. If the tanks are taking so little damage as to be kept up almost entirely but FoL right from the word go, then ICC is far, far too easy.
Actually, while Coral's is generally correct, he is wrong in that avoidance stats get worse the more you have of them. The cap is lower than 100% (for parry and miss, much lower) and the DR is much steeper than what he described. For example, for a paladin, at 50% dodge, 1% dodge from gear is actually worth 0.409% dodge (though, ironically, 1% at 0% dodge is worth 1.033% dodge). Another thing to note is that parry caps way lower than dodge (47% vs 88 for normal people or 116% for druids).
No edit button sucks. The reason they're not removing avoidance altogether is because then the healing of tanks would be boring, knowing that if you heal the tank every 3 seconds he will live. Also, another note, everyone already _is_ on the EH train, it's just that ghostcrawler refuses to admit it.
Yeah, I was being a smartass when I suggested they make damage linear. "Yeah, then they could remove crits, too, and everything would be perfect."
As for edit buttons, I'll see what I can do. I know the system supports it, because I have edit buttons on all of them. I think there might be multiple levels of user registration going on...
@Codi: I apologize for that - I was mostly ripping on the class forums, not on good holy pallies who successfully adapt to whatever changes are thrown at them. :P
Lore included a good video explanation of the Sunwell R^*|#$&& "Chill of the Throne" in his podcast - the weekly marmot #2.
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