Ghostcrawler post about Chill of the Throne
Since there was a lot of disappointment about Chill of the Throne Ghostcrawler has responded a blue post to satisfy their complaints. Here is what went down.
Tank Avoidance (Source)
Our original estimations for tank avoidance would have worked fine had we not decided to add extra tiers of gear to reward heroic boss kills halfway through the expansion.
The Cataclysm design will keep tank avoidance at more manageable levels. The loss of defense skill counts for a lot right there. We are also considering giving bosses expertise or other ways of baking in Icewell Radiance — basically the concept that bosses scale with gear rather than just hitting harder and taking more hits.
Best in Slot and Itemization (Source)
You are making the common mistake in thinking that our goal for itemization is to give you the best possible gear that we can. Itemizing your character is supposed to be a choice. There will be better pieces and worse pieces. There will be pieces that combine stats your really want with stats you don’t really need. Wearing the best gear for their character (which is not the same as wearing the best gear) is one way players have to demonstrate mastery of the game.
This is also why I always preach to take BiS lists with a grain of salt. Merely reaching for the item declared to be BiS by a spreadsheet or system you might not even understand could lead you to making bad gear choices, often of the variety of passing over the good upgrade because it’s not the best possible upgrade.
Will you let us know the exact values for mob expertise? (Source)
Yes. We would probably just let you see the numbers directly. I consider it a design flaw that players have to experiment to determine thinks like hit and expertise caps. We’re all for experimentation and theorycrafting, but we don’t think it’s fair to require some players to go out and do a lot of work to generate specific numbers that all players feel like they need to know.
If avoidance is a problem, just have the item team put less avoidance on tank gear (Source)
We just don’t think that works. If you put very unattractive stats on gear then players just go back the previous tier of gear and complain that we don’t know how to itemize. If you put bonus stamina on the tier 10 gear, then that means the next tier of gear better have bonus stamina as well. If it has avoidance instead of that bonus stamina, tanks just shrug and go back to the tier 10 gear.
This is not a tank only problem. Casters won’t upgrade to gear that doesn’t have more spell power on it, because spell power tends to trump everything else for purposes of their dps or healing.
We put a little bonus armor on non-armor items (necks, rings, trinkets and the occasional cloak). We don’t put bonus armor on gloves and chests because that gear would be too good.
It’s an item level problem. If we added another raid tier to Lich King, we couldn’t just keep avoiding avoidance and avoid it for every tier going forward. We just need a system where you avoid a Naxx boss 30% of the time and an Icecrown boss 30% of the time, the same way the Icecrown bosses have e.g. 30% larger health bars and thus take 30% more damage to kill. Otherwise the stats don’t scale and bad thing happen (in this case the boss having to land so much damage to account for the fact that it misses so often).
Items with +Armor instead of Dodge or Parry (Source)
There are some plate ones. There aren’t leather ones any longer, and even the plate ones as you mentioned become so attractive that it’s hard to get players to replace them. I’m not sure we’ll continue to be able to do them in the future.
We’re going to continue to itemize different gear differently. We don’t want the PvE gear to become even more like the PvP gear where all the stats advance in lockstep with item level. Fundamentally, we just don’t buy the argument that if we didn’t put avoidance on gear that avoidance wouldn’t get too high. Stats increase because players power level increases, not because of the mix on a particular tier piece.
Chill of the Throne’s effect on Rune Strike — oversight? (Source)
It’s not an oversight. The question is how many times are you prepared to use Rune Strike but can’t because you haven’t gotten a dodge or parry. If you are replacing most of your white swings with Rune Strikes, then you shouldn’t see much of a difference.
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Yeah, per my previous response we are looking at Rune Strike. We’re not convinced it will be a problem yet.
Remove avoidance from items (Source)
And your tier 10 gear looks exactly like your tier 9 gear with just 13 more stat points.
Even worse, many tanks will decide that threat isn’t their problem to solve or else they can’t afford the luxury of threat since they need to survive, and those stats will be considered junk.
Bosses in Icecrown (Source)
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’s Icecrown. It’s not going to be Naxx.
Naxx was but a setback….
This just makes the dodge stat worse (Source)
Nerfing dodge does not make the dodge stat worse. It only makes the amount of dodge on your dude worse. Would you stop stacking stamina if we nerfed your health?
There was too much item inflation, causing the need for Chill of the Throne (Source)
We would not have this problem if Icecrown gear had been item level 245 or so, as we originally intended. We added a few extra tiers of gear to support heroic modes. We felt like we had to do that to have different difficulty levels and make raiding more accessible overall. We felt like we had to reward the harder modes with the better gear or nobody would have been very interested.
The proportions of relative stats on your gear are not the problem. They are proportional, give or take a little, at every tier except for stats like hit that cap out. The problem is not the class and item teams being out of sync. In fact, they are the same team.
Will Chill of the Throne mess with diminishing returns on dodge and parry? (Source)
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.
The whole point of this change is so bosses can hit less hard but more often, for the same damage over time but with fewer deadly spikes. That should feel better to everyone overall. The reason I am reluctant to say that is because some players are going to go into Icecrown, find it hard, and then expect us to buff their class.
It won’t be Brutallus hard, at least most of the bosses and at least on normal mode. We’re not going to be particularly sympathetic to players who find heroic mode too hard.
Blue Posts
General update on all the latest blue posts.
Blizzard’s thoughts on Effective Health (Source)
I am going to attempt to explain the disconnect the community and the developers have over effective health.
When I first learned to tank, long before I came to Blizzard, I learned that effective health is a measurement of your stamina in relationship to your armor. This is a pretty easy number to generate. It’s reasonable to include say shield block and other simple forms of mitigation into the calculation.
However, you cannot directly translate effective health into best tank. Avoidance matters. If it didn’t, we would have no reason to nerf it in Icecrown. Good tanks don’t depend too much on avoidance, but great tanks understand its value.
Furthermore, your estimations of effective health become less and less accurate the more variables you try to factor in. Most saliently, you can’t easily account for cooldowns. You can’t compare a short duration that reduces damage by 80% to a long duration that reduces damage by 10%. Mathematically they might generate the same effective health number, but in reality they work pretty differently and each has their own benefits in certain situations, which vary depending on boss mechanics. (I’d generally take the first one though.)
We purposely made the cooldowns difficult to compare from class to class. You shouldn’t then be surprised when we take your effective health calculations based on direct comparisons of said cooldowns with a grain of salt.
It’s fine to compare health, armor, avoidance or cooldowns. I would not recommend putting too much faith in one ubernumber that you generate by combining all of them.
Avoidance is irrelevant (Source)
That’s just not true. If you turned your back on a mob, your armor and health would not change. The boss would hit you a lot more. You would be a worse tank. If you could somehow remove all of your dodge and parry, you would take more damage.
I think what is happening here is that some of you are adhering too tightly to the guideline that since bosses can potentially two-shot you that avoidance is unreliable and health * armor is king. I understand that logic. But don’t take it to the illogical conclusion that avoidance is irrelevant. If your 50-60% avoidance went to 0% you would notice quickly.
Dungeon system gear restrictions (Source)
It uses all the items you own to make that determination, not just what you have equipped.
Honestly though, we are really relaxed about how we use this restriction. It’s basically in there to prevent newly minted 80s in quest greens from rolling into a heroic dungeon that is likely to kick their butt. Most players sophisticated enough to be on these boards won’t run into it day to day practice.
Should the LFG channel be world-wide? (Source)
I don’t think a world-wide LFG channel would be something you’d really want. It would immediately become the global chat channel for trade, spam and Chuck Norris jokes.
On live it’s restricted to people using the LFG tool. The new dungeon tool honestly makes matches so quickly under most conditions that that implementation won’t work. We feared people would just use the /trade channel if we didn’t make a similar /lfg channel.
Weapon swapping (Source)
We think the problems with swapping weapons get overstated a lot. There is some theoretical evidence that you can get a small dps increase by swapping weapons. In reality, many of the rogues who try it find that it’s too prone to error given the marginal benefit. If you can make it work, that’s great for you, but we don’t think that weapon swapping will be the typical way for rogues to max out their dps.
Now if it got the point where the typical raiding rogue was dependent on swapping weapons, we’d probably do something about it.
Give casters wands at level 1 (Source)
As far as wands go, we definitely do not want to give them to casters at level 1. Wands play a very different role for casters than melee weapons do for melee classes. They’re generally used as mana conservation DPS. We are removing the Attack button from level 1 casters’ action bars specifically so new players aren’t inclined to walk around trying to melee foes without learning the way the spells available to them function. Giving them a wand and placing the Shoot icon on the action bar would lead to the same issue for players new to the game rolling casters. They might be inclined to run around using their wands rather than learning their class spells.
With mana regeneration being greatly improved for the level 1-10 experience in patch 3.3, mana issues should not warrant the use of wands too often when players are getting started. Because of this, we want to make sure new players are focused purely on learning how to use spells to kill enemy targets.
Paladin
Retribution viability in arenas (Source)
Ret should be viable in Arena and all aspects of the game. You have to be very careful when you analyze Arena statistics however. If say Shadow priests aren’t viable in Arena, then many Shadow priests would rather stop competing than to go Disc. We have found that many paladins will switch specs at the drop of a hat for PvP purposes. You individually may not, but that doesn’t prove the trend invalid. So if actual Ret spec paladins are low, you have to ask yourself how many of them are essentially behaving like Ret paladins but going to get a great talent deep in Holy or Prot. How many of them switched to Prot because Prot is too good at healing? You can’t just jump to a “buff Ret” solution.
Rogue
Why the Vanish fix was reverted (Source)
It actually wasn’t working well on the PTR because some casts that should not have broken it still broke it and it also prevented legitimate stealth breakers from functioning well. We probably could have lived with one of those problems, but with both it didn’t seem worth the change.
I know it’s more fun to blame it on forum QQ though.
Why are rogues being given dual wield at level 1 in 3.3? (Source)
While other classes can viably dual wield, it’s a core part of the rogue class. As one aspect of the many changes we’re making in patch 3.3 to improve the learning curve for brand new players, we’re making it so that rogues, by default, know how to dual wield.
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