Chill is costing Druids raid spots

#0 - Dec. 14, 2009, 2:25 a.m.

While Chill doesn't actually hurt Druids more than other tanks, the perception that it does is very strong. Even skilled players and guilds often don't have a strong understanding of theory. (Remember the discussion about Ensidia's tanks a while back?) As often is the case, the perception that Druids are obviously made underpowered by Chill is more powerful than the reality that they are not.

It's a communication problem. If the debuff had been worded "reduces avoidance by 20%" and had the exact same effect for those above 20% dodge, I doubt this would be an issue.

Ghostcrawler

#42 - Dec. 15, 2009, 1:08 a.m.

It's challenging to design around misperceptions. On the one hand, you don't want to propagate stereotypes. On the other hand, I agree that at some point players just need to commit to understanding something if they are going to claim to be authorities on it.

The player base has developed an almost neurosis about efficiency. It was one thing back in the day if you pugged Scholomance and ended up wiping 4 hours before the trash respawned. Clearly that was a waste of time and not particularly fun and the kind of situation you want to avoid at all cost. It also doesn't really happen anymore. If you get "the wrong character" to tank for you today, especially a 5-player dungeon but even a pug raid, yeah maybe the run takes slightly longer or you die once or twice. For some reason that is seen as unacceptable by players these days. They are so scared of being wrong, that they become very risk adverse.

It does make more of a difference on cutting-edge content like hard modes, but usually the players attempting such content have a pretty solid guild or enough smart players that they aren't likely to exclude in this case a bear tank because "Yo dawg, I heard druids can't dodge no more."