Icecrown Radiance

[Trase]

I believe they saw the problem coming given the change they made the Agility and Dodge Rating a few patches ago, but they could only realistically band-aid it until the next expansion where they can make sweeping systemic changes. Hell, even if they had frozen avoidance at Naxxramas levels and only continued to add threat stats, we'd have been Expertise and Hit hard capped by the end of Ulduar and would only see upgrades that gave us more Stamina and Strength and sometimes Block Value. I don't envy the position they're in. No one is ever happy and almost everyone jumps to blame them immediately when something goes awry. That's not to say that dumb decisions never make it through, but hopefully this time, in the next expansion cycle they won't have to resort to something like Sunwell Radiance again. Time will tell!

EDIT: Many spelling errors!

[Arkesh]

Well they didn't really plan for Hardmodes with this expansion, it just kinda happened after sarth, then everything was given hardmodes. The moment that happened it was too late. There was always going to be 4 tiers in this expansion, just not 4 tiers + hardmodes. Also, KT didn't help, that meant they had to go back and bump up ilvls on Ulduar stuffs.

[hoho]

What I mean is that could they not see how the ilevel of gear, given four tier levels this expansion, followed by hard modes which only further increase the ilevels...

Hardmode loot was an afterthought added to the game in very late phases. Had they really decided to rework itemization they would also have to rebalance pretty much all 5-mans and raids. That's a lot of work and I'm quite sure higher management didn't allow it. Had they come up with hardmode concept sooner I'm sure it would have been better

And what I meant about longevity is that this game has been around for what? Four years now? They're replicating an issue they had in BC that only had 3 tier levels and no hard mode loot. Could they not have foreseen that 4 tier levels with additional hard mode ilevels just *might* have caused a problem? Seems to me they expanded, and expanded, and expanded, and then went "oh shit, too big! Too big! Mash it down!"

Well, they did try to make things better with diminishing returns on avoidance, as you know it wasn't enough. Increasing DR wouldn't have been too good option as then upgrades wouldn't really have been much of an upgrades.

[Jonesy]

So, two things (or one thing, really, with two consequences). I think it's amazingly unlikely they're going to make stacking avoidance compelling. The value of an avoidance level a against a boss with a swing timer p is basically

Code: Select all

1-(1-a)^(1/p)

unfortunately, the value of avoidance in current content design is basically "junk", so they would, I'd say, need to increase it so that it was about 1.5x as powerful as it is at the moment before people were interested. Dropping 20 percentage points of avoidance implies that they have to lower swing timers to 0.8s after the tank debuff, or make bosses swing approximately 3x as fast (or, practically, about twice as fast and dual-wield). Unfortunately this would make block look extremely attractive. I credit them with a little more design nous than to put in "block penetration", and without that it would leave paladins much stronger than any other tank for any other tier of content before.

So I think they're going to end up encouraging stam-stacking until Cataclysm.

The second effect of this is that they can make Rune Strike just as good as it is by lowering swing timers to about 1.6s - either by actually lowering swing timers, or, for the threat-sensitive bosses, having adds that can be tanked or cleaved down (think Onyxia whelps).

[Snake-Aes]

And what I meant about longevity is that this game has been around for what? Four years now? They're replicating an issue they had in BC that only had 3 tier levels and no hard mode loot. Could they not have foreseen that 4 tier levels with additional hard mode ilevels just *might* have caused a problem? Seems to me they expanded, and expanded, and expanded, and then went "oh shit, too big! Too big! Mash it down!"

Don't forget the smug retard that goes out of his way to say "I told you so, boss"
(in my last company that was me. I made sure to put it very clearly in their faces that it'd be their damn fault if stuff got out of hand like it often did)

[ulushnar]

So. At the end of all of this... if we hadn't been given the current garbage T9 content... we'd've been fine. So not only was T9 bland and boring and a hasty patch, but it's also messed us up a bit for Icecrown and made them go back on their words.

T9 is here because they wanted to do a new Arena season and that meant they also had to give the PVEers gear parity. Also I suspect they wanted to avoid the BT > Sunwell situation of having an extended period with no new raid content.

It's shitty, but I suspect most of the dev's efforts were aimed at Icecrown even back then.

[hoho]

It's shitty, but I suspect most of the dev's efforts were aimed at Icecrown even back then.

I wouldn't call it too bad actually. Fight mechanics are certainly quite fun, just the "instance" is kind of boring. Had there been a room for each boss with a couple of trashpacks between it would have been great raid.

[Varuk]

You know, I come to this site for serious discussion and theorycrafting, and when I see people like SnakeAE's spouting utter crap about how Icecrown Radiance doesn't change the value of dodge it just makes me sad.

The more avoidance you stack, the more each additional percentage of avoidance is worth.

Going from 70% to 70.5% avoidance decreases melee damage taken by 1.66%.
Going from 50% to 50.5% avoidance decreases melee damage taken by 0.99%.

This nerf is post DR, meaning it'll take the same amount of itemization to go from 50 to 50.5 with it as it would to go from 70 to 70.5 without. So, for the same amount of itemization, I'm getting 40% less mitigation. If that isn't a significant nerf, if that doesn't change the value of avoidance stats, then I don't know what will.

I agree with the nerf. I agree it needed to be done. But anyone claiming that the nerf isn't going to change the value of avoidance stats needs to get their head checked. Each point of dodge, defense, and parry rating is mitigating 35 to 40% less damage, and that is absolutely going to change our weightings of those stats vs. SBR and SBV.

[Wrathy]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... fwGRUi#304

It is ironic because I was the one he was replying to in that case. I also pointed out that he took the least civilized of my posts because I was basically mocking the ICC10 trinket.

And sadly, I gotta go for the time being, need to head back to work.

The thing is... you went there all smug and his reply is no lie. How do you want him to reply in a manner that won't make our unpleasable fanbase complain? Bonus in your case that you made it personal.

Can we now stop bitching at the devs? Like I said, it got tiring long ago, and it won't go anywhere.

I guess I am late to this morning's discussion, but I wanted to chime in on this a bit. As much as I agree that bitching at the devs does absolutely nothing, I have to support Klaudandus and his question. I do not see his question as smug, but rather an astute observation regarding the philosophy behind the trinkets. if you are going to nerf dodge by 20%, why would you make a trinket that procs of said statistic.

For all intensive purposes, we value stamina much more than dodge at this point. I can see where this trinket would force the purists to focus a bit more on dodge, to get their precious stamina, but why not just make it parry? That way we get our stamina, and it is not effected by Chill of the Throne or the gear curve that comes with new content. This makes this trinket a painful bag slot until we have T10 four piece, at which time it is a great addition to an effective health set.

[Meloree]

People who say that avoidance will become even more useless than it is now are wrong in my oppinin assuming that bosses in IC won't get big unavoidable hits a'la anub/icehowl/impaler.

"Almost" this. Recall Sunwell. Sunwell radiance was a 25% avoidance drop. Sunwell was still very challenging *and* avoidance was more important than ever there.
The whole "bosses now have their own hit, expertise and the like" thing lets us scale up, while letting the boss also scale up on a much more manageable level, without taking the importance out of avoidance.

You really can't apply your Sunwell experience to IceCrown. The game has changed on a fundamental level to too many areas for the comparisons to hold valid at the level of detail you are taking them.

Good luck, boss. I tried that two pages ago. With lots of supporting arguments and stuff.

[Klaudandus]

The thing is... you went there all smug and his reply is no lie. How do you want him to reply in a manner that won't make our unpleasable fanbase complain? Bonus in your case that you made it personal.

Can we now stop bitching at the devs? Like I said, it got tiring long ago, and it won't go anywhere.

I wasn't even trying to make it personal. My original comment (and intent) was on the perception of disconnect between GC's goals on avoidance (which dates to pre 3.1) and the itemization team as they seemed to be pushing on opposite directions.

Almost all my comments have been of that nature, trying to figure out the rationale behind some items. He just picked out the one I was being snarky. I've even mentioned if they want to cut avoidance, does that mean that T10/Libram is gonna be reworked so paladins instead get DR as it seems we would have quite the dodge advantage over the other tanks.

Also, should I mention again that I've been supportive of the IR the whole time?

I guess I am late to this morning's discussion, but I wanted to chime in on this a bit. As much as I agree that bitching at the devs does absolutely nothing, I have to support Klaudandus and his question. I do not see his question as smug, but rather an astute observation regarding the philosophy behind the trinkets. if you are going to nerf dodge by 20%, why would you make a trinket that procs of said statistic.

For all intensive purposes, we value stamina much more than dodge at this point. I can see where this trinket would force the purists to focus a bit more on dodge, to get their precious stamina, but why not just make it parry? That way we get our stamina, and it is not effected by Chill of the Throne or the gear curve that comes with new content. This makes this trinket a painful bag slot until we have T10 four piece, at which time it is a great addition to an effective health set.

GC said himself that they decided to go with IR just the night prior to the announcement. Some items had already been created and given a certain stat budget when at the time they when IR was not set in stone. It's not unlikely that the trinket (and maybe even the T10 for paladins) to be reworked because of the dodge "nerf"

The reason why it aint parry is because the only avoidance stat shared by all tank classes is dodge, simple as that -- which is also why it was the only avoidance stat that got hit.

And no, I ain't really trying to give grief to the developers/programmers, but you really gotta wonder what they were thinking in the first place -- which goes back to my comments regarding between the goals and the actual development, at least from an outside perspective.

Also, hindsight being 20/20, when GC started talking about the avoidance levels right before 3.1 he coulda have gone and nerfed the ilvl of many of the items. If the ilvl progression had been smoother, we might had been able to avoid this entirely.

They coulda have gone and make all of Naxx25 gear be 207 and Kt's be 214, Uld10 could be 207 and Uld25 be 214, with hard modes being perhaps 3 ilvl more than the base drops. We just had a severe stat inflation, specially moving from Uld to ToC

[Snake-Aes]

The thing is... you went there all smug and his reply is no lie. How do you want him to reply in a manner that won't make our unpleasable fanbase complain? Bonus in your case that you made it personal.

Can we now stop bitching at the devs? Like I said, it got tiring long ago, and it won't go anywhere.

I wasn't even trying to make it personal. My original comment (and intent) was on the perception of disconnect between GC's goals on avoidance (which dates to pre 3.1) and the itemization team as they seemed to be pushing on opposite directions.

Almost all my comments have been of that nature, trying to figure out the rationale behind some items. He just picked out the one I was being snarky. I've even mentioned if they want to cut avoidance, does that mean that T10/Libram is gonna be reworked so paladins instead get DR as it seems we would have quite the dodge advantage over the other tanks.

His goals on avoidance never changed. Itemization didn't change because it's value had to go somewhere, that's why they created a whole dr curve instead of just cutting off the power in the gear.

They coulda have gone and make all of Naxx25 gear be 207 and Kt's be 214, Uld10 could be 207 and Uld25 be 214, with hard modes being perhaps 3 ilvl more than the base drops. We just had a severe stat inflation, specially moving from Uld to ToC

Maybe they could. It's unheard of though. There's always a very noticeable pattern in item levels they follow, and for a hardmode to drop gear "worth it", one would have to have the difference you saw there. Why would I do Freya+3 when Freya+0 drops a ring that is just 5sp behind? That mentality has a much bigger effect than most assume. Cosmetic Rewards don't quite work in group play.

[Klaudandus]

His goals on avoidance never changed. Itemization didn't change because it's value had to go somewhere, that's why they created a whole dr curve instead of just cutting off the power in the gear.

Itemization coulda have been better. Most people will prefer an item that has both Dodge & Parry over just about everything else. Had they eliminated that kind of itemization it coulda have been controlled as well. They could have made items that would have a bit extra of armor and dodge or hit and doge, or parry and armor or parry and expertise... I'm sure you get where I'm heading too. People were grabbing the dodge+parry pieces because they were available in the first place, add the ilvl inflation and you're gonna end up with tanks with a lot of avoidance.

Maybe they could. It's unheard of though. There's always a very noticeable pattern in item levels they follow, and for a hardmode to drop gear "worth it", one would have to have the difference you saw there. Why would I do Freya+3 when Freya+0 drops a ring that is just 5sp behind? That mentality has a much bigger effect than most assume. Cosmetic Rewards don't quite work in group play.

Well, I personally have no interest in hard modes whatsoever, but I'm sure min/maxers would still try to get the hard mode kill if only for those +5sp.

[honorshammer]

Maybe they could. It's unheard of though. There's always a very noticeable pattern in item levels they follow, and for a hardmode to drop gear "worth it", one would have to have the difference you saw there. Why would I do Freya+3 when Freya+0 drops a ring that is just 5sp behind? That mentality has a much bigger effect than most assume. Cosmetic Rewards don't quite work in group play.

We don't do Hard Modes so much for the loot. We do them because Normal ToC is a snoozefest. We run only to farm badges basically. We were one shotting Bosses in there the NIGHT THEY WERE RELEASED.

And no we aren't some uber world first guild. We're a 10 man strict guild that had done maybe 4 or 5 hard modes in Ulduar (basically we were working on Thorim and Freya+3)

[theckhd]

You know, I come to this site for serious discussion and theorycrafting, and when I see people like SnakeAE's spouting utter crap about how Icecrown Radiance doesn't change the value of dodge it just makes me sad.

The more avoidance you stack, the more each additional percentage of avoidance is worth.

Going from 70% to 70.5% avoidance decreases melee damage taken by 1.66%.
Going from 50% to 50.5% avoidance decreases melee damage taken by 0.99%.

This nerf is post DR, meaning it'll take the same amount of itemization to go from 50 to 50.5 with it as it would to go from 70 to 70.5 without. So, for the same amount of itemization, I'm getting 40% less mitigation. If that isn't a significant nerf, if that doesn't change the value of avoidance stats, then I don't know what will.

I agree with the nerf. I agree it needed to be done. But anyone claiming that the nerf isn't going to change the value of avoidance stats needs to get their head checked. Each point of dodge, defense, and parry rating is mitigating 35 to 40% less damage, and that is absolutely going to change our weightings of those stats vs. SBR and SBV.

So does it become less "utter crap" and more "serious discussion and theorycrafting" when I say it, or am I spouting utter crap now too?

First of all, despite the fact that you're now going from 50% to 50.5% instead of 70% to 70.5%, you're still getting 0.5% avoidance for those itemization points. So the itemization->avoidance value is unchanged.

Since we're all well above the 20% dodge threshold, the value of dodge relative to parry is unchanged.

You're absolutely right about the fact that the 0.5% avoidance you've gained is now much weaker at reducing incoming damage. In that sense, the value of avoidance has dropped compared to pre-patch. From that point of view, it makes Stamina stacking a stronger strategy than avoidance stacking. Unfortunately, given healers with infinite mana pools and lots of overheal (something that even GC has said probably won't change until Cataclysm), total damage intake isn't the most important stat to focus on.

More interestingly, let's look at spike damage. Your avoidance is a, so your chance to take N hits in a row is simply (1-a)^N. Plotting this as a function of a for several reasonable values of N:


Note that for N=1 it's linear; every 1% extra chance to dodge reduces your chance to take a hit by 1%, as expected.

For N>1, it's nonlinear, and weighted towards the low end of the scale. In other words, you reduce the chance to take 2 hits in a row more by going from 50-51 than you do by going from 70-71. This is also the reason expertise is relatively strong contender (on appropriate bosses) as far as reducing spike events when one has high avoidance. If your avoidance is low, you're usually considerably better off stacking more avoidance than stacking expertise.

Perhaps it's more obvious if we plot the reduction, or diff((1-a)^N):



This graph makes it very clear that avoidance gets worse at reducing spike damage events the more you have of it. Note that you'll still take fewer overall spike events with more avoidance, but each extra point of avoidance you add gives you less return at that level.
(And note that this is all ignoring DR, since DR has no relevance until you start talking about the rating->% conversion).

In other words, by nerfing your avoidance 20%, they made each point of dodge rating much more efficient at reducing spike intake, simply because you're now taking more spikes again.

So to tally it up:

• The value of avoidance is unchanged in terms of raw rating->% conversion
• The value of dodge is unchanged relative to parry in all reasonable circumstances
• The value of avoidance for reducing total damage intake is weaker, because we're effectively hitting DR earlier than we would be in the absence of IR.
• The value of avoidance for reducing spike damage events (i.e. N consecutive hits) is noticeably increased, by more than a factor of 2 for N=2 (0.49% per point at 60% avoidance compared to 1.1% per point at 40% avoidance), and even higher for N>2

So according to your own figures, it's a (1-0.99/1.6)*100 = 40% nerf to total damage reduction, but a 200% buff to reducing spike damage events. Most of us are more than willing to make that tradeoff, since the consensus seems to be that spike damage is the most dangerous thing in current content, and the most likely thing to kill us.

The amount of dodge you get per rating is certainly going to be far weaker now than it was when we were at 40% avoidance without IR, which artificially inflates the value of Stamina in a strict "per itemization allocation" analysis. But there's certainly an argument to be made that avoidance is a decent survivability stat, especially if you want to consider spike damage.


I'd say GC was pretty spot-on with his assessment that if you liked stamina before, you'll like stamina after, and if you liked avoidance before, you'll still like avoidance after.

Keep in mind that it's hard to judge a relative value shift between the two because it's not a simple linear relationship, and will depend heavily on the Icecrown encounters. The reason few people "like" avoidance now is that many of the spike damage sources in ToC are unavoidable. If Icecrown uses a lot of similar unavoidable spike sources, then avoidance will still be viewed as a weaker stat. If most of the spike comes from (unavoidable ability)+2-3 boss melees, then avoidance is still a pretty strong contender. Better yet, if the boss has an avoidable special ability that's used fairly frequently (like a 5k strike that gives you a stacking damage increase debuff, cast every 10 seconds), you might see people shift back towards avoidance gemming.