Chill of the Throne

Chill of the Throne
Gear and Avoidance numbers going too high
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. (Source)

Chill of the Throne
1. Can we expect more unavoidable, devastating melee-based attacks in ICC? If so, what point do they serve from a design stand point?
1. Probably. They serve as challenges that your group needs to overcome by making sure enough healers are focused on the big damage spike and cooldowns (the tank’s or external ones) are used appropriately. If you could avoid those attacks they would need to hit for even harder to compensate. If you could avoid those hits, then sometimes you would just let lucky and make it through the encounter unscathed and other times you'd get gibbed. Believe me; you want those to be unavoidable.

2. Are we finally going to get away from the 2 hits back to back will gib the tank situation we are in now?
2. The idea behind the Chill is to lower boss damage per hit but keep damage per time the same overall. The reason I caveat that statement so much is I know that we’re going to see lots of tanks that die in Icecrown and then ask us to nerf the encounters or buff their tanks. The purpose of these changes is not to prevent tank deaths. You will die. Probably a lot. You are going into the Lich King’s home after all.

3. How are you going to handle Chill of the Throne when the pre-Cata patch comes out and we lose another ~18% avoidance when Defense goes away as a stat?
3. I dunno. I imagine we will just drop it. We’ll have a lot of fixin’ up to do before Cat is ready to go live.

Parry vs. Dodge
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. (Source)

Effective Health
Well, to be fair most theorycrafting tanks on Tankspot and other places who really understand the concept of EH won’t tell you it’s the only thing that matters, just that it is very important. The problem is that some players who perhaps don’t understand the theorycrafting as well try to take the notion to illogical extremes.

If we buffed DK parry to 99% and dropped their health 5K then it would be a huge EH nerf but they would probably be the best tanks by a wide margin. Now that's a very contrived scenario but you can't argue that just because tank avoidance happens to be close right now that avoidance is irrelevant as a stat when determining survivability.

[...] This thread was yet another “my EH is too low, please buff” thread. I wanted to point out why there was a disconnect between many of the threads on this forum and the developers. The disconnect comes in too many attempts to convert cooldowns as different as AD and VB into EH, stack rack the tanks based on that questionable estimate, and then complain about the order.

The discussion got distracted a little with the “GC says avoidance is better than stamina” nonsense, but the above was my original intent. (Source)

Avoidance and Spikes
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. (Source)

Bosses in Icecrown Citadel and effects of Chill of the Throne
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.

Gone