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The Light and How to Swing It: No more avoidance caps
Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com. Oh, and I still love the Grand Crusader proc graphics even though they're unrelated to today's article. One thing that we've been taught as tanks throughout most of World of Warcraft is that you had to be capped at something in order to not be insta-killed by bosses. Back when I started playing, this was referred to as reaching uncrushable. You would have to stack up 102.4 percent avoidance in order to push the dreaded crushing blows off of the boss's list of possible attacks he could hit you with. This also meant that all incoming hits were avoided or mitigated in some way, shape or form. That primary form was blocks, and abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield at that time were custom tailored to this environment. With the release of Wrath of the Lich King, crushing blows were deemed a thing of the past and bosses would no longer be employing them against tanks. However, we quickly had a new cap to deal with instead of that called the defense cap, aka reaching uncrittable. This meant accumulating 540 defense skill against raid bosses in order to remove bosses of being able to hit us with a critical melee attack. In early raiding tiers, this was a constant balance between gems, enchants and trinkets, as each piece of gear we accumulated could change how the scales tipped.
Stats on updated T10 tank plate revealed
If you like tanking (sure, we all do) you may be interest in this update to yesterday's post about tier 10 tanking gear: the dodge on gloves and defense on chests is being removed and the armor is being increased to bring them in line with the off-set tanking pieces due to the popularity of higher armor in Icecrown Citadel, and we now finally have hard numbers. So far, it looks as if the armor increases are pretty significant (882 armor on iLevel 251 gloves, 1064 armor on iLevel 251 set chestplates) and should make up for the dodge or defense lost, especially as armor has increased in popularity due to the Chill of the Throne debuff in ICC. We're told that the armor increase scales with iLevel so the iLevel 264 and 277 versions will also have proportionate armor increases. This is a patch 3.3.2 change so don't panic if your gear doesn't have the armor yet. This makes me even more happy that I chose to focus on my tier set over offset pieces to get the four piece bonus as soon as possible. It makes these pieces far more attractive when compared to the high armor offset Cataclysm Chestguard and Gauntlers of the Kraken. (the Sanctified 264 versions should have exactly the same armor). I'd like to have seen a little more armor on the pieces, myself, but it's still pretty solid.
Upcoming tier 10 tank armor stat changes
With Icecrown Citadel's unpopular Chill of the Throne debuff, or as we like to call it, "Getting out of Dodge," tanks have had to re-prioritize in terms of avoidance and mitigation stats to the point where tier 10 gear might not be as desirable as Blizzard intended. Thankfully, they appear to have realized this, and change is coming! To tier 10 tank gear, anyway. Blizzard CM Zarhym posted a note on the official forums announcing their plans for said gear: "We recognize that many plate tanks are making their gear choices based on the amount of armor they're provided, as this is currently the most preferred stat. In order to make the tier-10 plate tanking sets more desirable, we will be adjusting the stats on the gloves and chest pieces in order to inflate the amount of armor they provide in the next minor patch. This will apply to all item levels of the tier-10 death knight, warrior, and paladin tanking gloves and chest pieces." He also noted that Emblem gear will continue to be comparable to the tier gear in terms of stats and, for those concerned about Feral tanks, they'll be keeping an eye on gear scaling on druid tank gear as well.
The Daily Quest: Icecrown, tunnelvision, and something more
We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Tales of a Priest discusses tunnevlsion for healers, and how to prevent it with better mod placement. World of Matticus's Lodur brings is more PUG tales, this time detailing the Val'anyr curse. Gray Matter asks, was Chill of the Throne enough to keep WoW raiding under control until Cataclysm? Should it have impacted DPS, too? Forever a Noob keeps the great rogue advice coming. Deathbringer Saurfang is your next target. This is our last link of the day, but it's the most important. Vigilance, a new warrior blog, honors the memory of a fallen guildmate. Rest well, Revanx. A word to the author, from me personally, is that you guys are not alone. Hang in there. Click here to submit a link to TDQ
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Design vs. Itemization
Very often, what seem to be class balance issues or problems with a class or spec aren't, in fact, problems with that class/spec at all. They are instead consequences of encounter design or gearing issues. One example of this is the current state of the DPS warrior: on paper, there's nothing really tremendously wrong with either arms or fury for DPS in PvE content. Having used arms to great success in PvP recently, I sat down and really looked at what was hampering me when I switched to it for PvE DPS, and the problems I found seemed to be as follows.
Patch 3.3: Lord Marrowgar and Chill of the Throne impressions
The next wave of Icecrown Citadel testing began today. A new patch 3.3 build was uploaded just hours before testing was scheduled to begin. Tonight, we'd take on Lord Marrowgar and Festergut. Raid loot had been implemented so we were anxious to see what some of the drops would be like. Not only that, today marked the first time Chill of the Throne would be active on the PTRs. Players could tackle the raid content to determine how it felt. My thoughts on Chill of the Throne will come after the break and after I finish my Lord Marrowgar impressions. %Gallery-76227%
The Queue: Icecrown Radiance
Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky be your host today. One question that has been coming up a lot lately: What are we going to do when Cataclysm's open beta starts? The answer is The Queue is going to turn back into its original inception of Ask a Beta Tester, except we're still going to leave the name as The Queue. Today's Queue will focus on the multitude of questions we've received about Chill of the Throne, or more snarkingly called, Icecrown Radiance. Read on for questions and answers, and a tale of Little Jimmy using his obesity to mitigate the damage caused by his brother. Good times! A couple million people complained... "Won't the 20% dodge nerf from Icecrown Radiance make tanking impossible in patch 3.3?"
Chill of the Throne: Dodge nerfed 20% in Icecrown Citadel
In patch 3.3 Blizzard is implementing a 20% dodge reduction via a spell that will be present in Icecrown Citadel's raid called Chill of the Throne. As Daelo points out, if your tank had 30% dodge, he now has 10%. They are doing this in order to negate the spike damage that's become prevalent in raids lately. So while dodge will be nerfed, the ceiling on damage given to a tank will likely decrease. This will in turn, at least theoretically, make healing more about strategy (applying HoTs and planning heals) and less reactive (twitch response to apply the biggest heal at exactly the right time). This is interesting to note as it's a move towards the Cataclysm way of tanking, as has been explained by Ghostcrawler: less avoidance on tanks, less spike damage, and thus requiring smaller heals. Daelo's and Ghostcrawler's full statements after the break. This post is currently being edited.
