Icecrown Radiance

[Nadir]

So, how about that avoidance versus EH debate? I wish Blizzard would have went with a less heavy handed method of lowering avoidance. For instance, they could stop putting two-three avoidance stats on a piece of armor. We all know T9 had a severe lack of hit pieces yet plenty of the armor had three avoidance stats on it. The designers could have easily dropped tank avoidance or kept it at the current levels by investing more of the item budget into more threat oriented stats like BV, STR, hit, and expertise or something like an extra socket or bonus armor.

[wrong]Dodge trinket on-uses and dodge librams are going to become relatively worthless. Parry will become quite attractive in terms of bang for the avoidance buck.[/wrong]

From Daelo:

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.

[theckhd]

So, how about that avoidance versus EH debate? I wish Blizzard would have went with a less heavy handed method of lowering avoidance. Dodge trinket on-uses and dodge librams are going to become relatively worthless. Parry will become quite attractive in terms of bang for the avoidance buck.

Why would this change the relative value of dodge or parry at all, again? Mathematically a dodge trinket that gave you x% dodge before IR will still give you x% dodge after IR, and a parry gem will similarly give you equal amounts of parry whether you're in IC or elsewhere.

In other words, if Icecrown Radiance is applied after diminishing returns (which is almost a certainty, based on how goofy the mechanic would be if it applied pre-DR), The 1.88:1 ratio rule-of-thumb doesn't change at all.

[Nadir]

So, how about that avoidance versus EH debate? I wish Blizzard would have went with a less heavy handed method of lowering avoidance. Dodge trinket on-uses and dodge librams are going to become relatively worthless. Parry will become quite attractive in terms of bang for the avoidance buck.

Why would this change the relative value of dodge or parry at all, again? Mathematically a dodge trinket that gave you x% dodge before IR will still give you x% dodge after IR, and a parry gem will similarly give you equal amounts of parry whether you're in IC or elsewhere.

In other words, if Icecrown Radiance is applied after diminishing returns (which is almost a certainty, based on how goofy the mechanic would be if it applied pre-DR), The 1.88:1 ratio rule-of-thumb doesn't change at all.

Doh, you're absolutely right. It'll lower the value of avoidance overall in terms of % damage taken but the relative values will stay constant as long as you have more than 20% raid buffed dodge.

[Marilee]

Yes, looks like a flat 20%, meaning that nothing is really changed in gearing... we'll just get hit more.

Now if they were taking off a scaling 20% of YOUR total dodge, stacking parry would make sense... but as a flat 20% decrease in chance to dodge...

Something that COULD change is that bosses are going to be hitting lighter now theoretically... maybe block will become more attractive. I don't think the chances of that are huge, but it is something we'll have to look out for as numbers start rolling in. (I don't think the chances are huge because by hitting "lighter" they probably will be hitting like bosses in Ulduar, not bosses in Naxx, and by Ulduar we were already avoiding block.)

[Arkesh]

Block might become a little more useful, but I doubt it'll be desirable as we won't be hovering near the block cap anymore, it'll be handy, but not something to gear for unless we end up with another heroic anub type fight.

Glad to see they're thinking ahead to prevent this happening *again* in Cata though.

[theckhd]

Doh, you're absolutely right. It'll lower the value of avoidance overall in terms of % damage taken but the relative values will stay constant as long as you have more than 20% raid buffed dodge.

Now there's an interesting question....

The "value" of dodge compared to parry is constant if you have more than 20% dodge raid-buffed. However, it's a piecewise function, because the "value" of dodge is 0 if you have, for example, 18% dodge raid-buffed, assuming your dodge is calculated with a max() function.

In other words, I'm assuming x dodge rating gives you max(base_dodge+dodge_dr(x)-20;0) dodge % after Icecrown Radiance, such that Icecrown Radiance can't reduce your dodge below 0%. Given that, if you had 18% dodge, adding a gem worth X% (where X<1 for argument's sake) dodge would give you no net effect (because max(18-20;0) is the same as max(18+X%-20;0), i.e. 0).

In that situation, you might naively never gem dodge, because it gives you no contribution while parry gives you something. One could extend this (again, naively) to say that in that situation, you should ignore dodge entirely and stack parry forever.

So the 'interesting question' is this: At what amount of parry rating do the higher DR coefficients on parry make stacking dodge from below 20% to above 20% worth doing?

[theckhd]

Glad to see they're thinking ahead to prevent this happening *again* in Cata though.

Don't worry, they'll screw something else up so we can have Deathwing Radiance.

[Marilee]

WTB somebody less lazy than myself to put together a good sample progression set with <20% dodge.

[Nikachelle]

Glad to see they're thinking ahead to prevent this happening *again* in Cata though.

Don't worry, they'll screw something else up so we can have Deathwing Radiance.

You heard it here first, folks!

[Snake-Aes]

Glad to see they're thinking ahead to prevent this happening *again* in Cata though.

Don't worry, they'll screw something else up so we can have Deathwing Radiance.

You heard it here first, folks!

MAELSTROM Radiance.

[Njall]

Don't worry, they'll screw something else up so we can have Deathwing Radiance.

You heard it here first, folks!

MAELSTROM Radiance.[/quote]

Hogger Radiance.

Njall

[Flex]

MAELSTROM Radiance.

Lowers your health by 20%.

since the plan is to increase health pools to not have people in danger of dying all the time.

[Nikachelle]

Hogger Radiance.

Njall

He already has that. >.<

[Teranoid]

"Why are we doing this?"

I have an easy answer to that. Its because your retarded item designers once again screwed up. This is no different then "lol sorry we fucked up by putting too much ArP on gear so we are going to have to change it". This is "lol sorry we again screwed the pooch and now are just gonna put a big bandaid on the lifeless remains of this expansion"

Unbelieveable.

Chill of the Throne: Lowers your interest in this game by 20% for the duration of your login.

[Snake-Aes]

I think we need to dig those sunwell radiance replies about dropping dodge, make them huge stickies, with a stupidly obnoxious writing "ICECROWN RADIANCE DOES NOT MATTER. IGNORE IT. SERIOUSLY". Because in fact, the only change in gearing that Icecrown Radiance will make is that we won't have to scornfully disdain the block rating we can't get rid of... We will just disdain it.