#321 - Oct. 30, 2009, 10:01 p.m.
Q u o t e:
Avoidance is not irrelevant. It's just irrelevant when determining what stats to itemize/gem/enchant for.
That may be true, but it's not really the point I am arguing. Many players here are confusing the distinction between whether avoidance matters and whether it's a worthwhile stat to stack on gear.
Here is the misstep I see several of you making:
I don’t gear for avoidance. Therefore avoidance doesn’t matter in my gear decisions. Therefore avoidance has no effect on survival. Oops.
Q u o t e:
1. Can we expect more unavoidable, devastating melee-based attacks in ICC? If so, what point do they serve from a design stand point?
2. Are we finally going to get away from the 2 hits back to back will gib the tank situation we are in now?
3. How are you going to handle Chill of the Throne when the pre-Cata patch comes out and we lose another ~18% avoidance when Defense goes away as a stat?
1. Probably. They serve as challenges that your group needs to overcome by making sure enough healers are focused on the big damage spike and cooldowns (the tank’s or external ones) are used appropriately. If you could avoid those attacks they would need to hit for even harder to compensate. If you could avoid those hits, then sometimes you would just let lucky and make it through the encounter unscathed and other times you'd get gibbed. Believe me; you want those to be unavoidable.
2. The idea behind the Chill is to lower boss damage per hit but keep damage per time the same overall. The reason I caveat that statement so much is I know that we’re going to see lots of tanks that die in Icecrown and then ask us to nerf the encounters or buff their tanks. The purpose of these changes is not to prevent tank deaths. You will die. Probably a lot. You are going into the Lich King’s home after all.
3. I dunno. I imagine we will just drop it. We’ll have a lot of fixin’ up to do before Cat is ready to go live.
Q u o t e:
He said that EH isn't the end-all-be-all that sites like tankspot tell you it is.
Well, to be fair most theorycrafting tanks on Tankspot and other places who really understand the concept of EH won’t tell you it’s the only thing that matters, just that it is very important. The problem is that some players who perhaps don’t understand the theorycrafting as well try to take the notion to illogical extremes.
If we buffed DK parry to 99% and dropped their health 5K then it would be a huge EH nerf but they would probably be the best tanks by a wide margin. Now that's a very contrived scenario but you can't argue that just because tank avoidance happens to be close right now that avoidance is irrelevant as a stat when determining survivability.
Q u o t e:
It seems like GC is answering (as he frequently does) a different discussion than what was posted.
This thread was yet another “my EH is too low, please buff” thread. I wanted to point out why there was a disconnect between many of the threads on this forum and the developers. The disconnect comes in too many attempts to convert cooldowns as different as AD and VB into EH, stack rack the tanks based on that questionable estimate, and then complain about the order.
The discussion got distracted a little with the “GC says avoidance is better than stamina” nonsense, but the above was my original intent.
It's fine if you disagree with us. I just wanted to address all of the "Everyone agrees we need to be buffed but Blizzard" arguments.