Game-changing shift in tanking coming in 3.3

[Vitandus]

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.
Daelo
Lead Encounter Designer

[Vitandus]

Ghostcrawler's thoughts:

Healing has always been challenging and to some extent thankless in WoW. I don't think LK fundamentally changed that.

When I heal, I like to be challenged. Just buffing healing overall, or taking some of the challenge away from the healers, I don't think makes the game more fun for them. It might be fun for a week as everyone thanks you for doing such an amazing job all the time, but playing any game in godmode typically gets old after the initial rush.

What I mean is that one of the most boring experiences I can have in the game is to be a healer for a milk run in which a wipe is unlikely and nobody is going to take much damage. By contrast, you can still have fun in that situation as a DPS spec. You can see how fast the boss dies. You can see how much damage you can do. It can even be fun as a tank, because you can usually afford to drop some of your defenses in order to improve your dps and try and make the fight shorter. At the very least, you can try and see how much damage you can mitigate. It's possible to do some pulls and even weaker bosses with almost no incoming damage. All a healer can really do is try to heal as little or efficiently as possible, which really just means you're standing around a lot. Maybe you're tossing the occasional Wrath or SW:Pain or something, but that dps contribution is pretty trivial even compared to the trying-to-DPS-a-little tank.

Where I will agree we need to improve healing in WoW is in relationship to how much damage the tank is taking (or even a teammate in PvP). Damage to health is too high in almost all scenarios, such that only the really big, really fast, or really broad (group-based) heals count for much. Things that are fun for a healer, such as trying to be mana-efficient or matching the right heal to the right damaged character go away when you're just spamming like mad. None of this should come as news to readers of this forum, because it's the kind of thing we've said before.

What I would like to see in Cataclysm is higher health pools but also lower heals (and tank avoidance) overall. Hopefully everyone won't be on the verge of almost dying, yet the risk of overhealing will be more real such that you can't just madly spam all of the time if you want to make it to the end of the encounter.

A similar thing is true for PvP. If health pools are larger, but heals smaller, then you see folks with health in between 100% and 0% more often.
Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

[Vitandus]

And one more comment:

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.
Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

[Vitandus]

My thoughts:

• The current system of explosive damage on both ends does make for nice short raids, but it also means one-shot-tank-kills in Heroics, and two or three shots and done in normal ones under a fear or lag. Fixing the encounters is key.
• Dodge is the key avoidance statistic for Druids and Death Knights. I wonder what they are doing to counter the buff without making Paladins even more over-powered? I won't mention Warriors since they are the baseline.
• Healing is ridiculous now. Mashing one key over and over is not fun. Back in classic WoW days, you thought about which spells to cast and when. I enjoyed healing then- it took a while for Leon (Waydol) to get used to me dropping heals when I wanted versus spamming, but he never died on my watch.

[Daemus]

I'm not sure what to say on this.  I read GC's comments earlier today (re: healing), and thought to myself, yeah at times I find myself sitting there snoozing because of hardly any damage going on, and then I can think of times being in that same encounter with a different setup/differently geared people, and have found myself to be pumping out more healing then I normally would.

I welcome this change from a healing point of view, as long as it doesn't take things to the opposite end of the spectrum where you can't effectively heal the encounter because you haven't hit that gear plateau.

[Ethics]

and they had to fuck the tank I decided to level....

[wildcard]

Well, what they failed to manage and I'm sure will happen is, if they're gonna nerf dodge so heavily to make damage less spikey and more predictable, they're gonna have to lessen the damage bosses will do.  As long as it's balanced from both ends, I'm sure healers will like a more steady damage threshold.