Developers announce Chill of the Throne

Lead Encounter Designer Daelo announced something earlier involving the Icecrown Citadel coming out in patch 3.3 that is causing a lot of debate and whining especially within the tank community. The developers are implementing a spell in the Icecrown Citadel raid dungeon called Chill of the Throne which will affect every creature inside the raid. Chill of the Throne will allow these creatures to ignore 20% of it’s melee target’s dodge chance. So if you normally have 30% chance to dodge, you’ll only have 10% inside the Icecrown Citadel.

icecrown citadel

Before going into the issue itself, I just find it quite interesting because this whole thing looks like a way to show how badass the Lich King is and adding to the whole epic difficulty feel of the place but the devs said that it was something they didn’t have to do if not for something you would originally think would be the reason. According to Ghostcrawler, they didn’t anticipate that they would add more gear tiers because of the heroic modes so their avoidance numbers are messed up. He also said that Cataclsym will better handle the avoidance numbers.

So players have actually seen this before with a buff that mobs in the Sunwell Plateau had called Sunwell Radiance. According to them they would want tanks to take a constant stream of damage over time but having high avoidance numbers would make their incoming damage more spiky than the raid would want. They would want healers to better plan their heals and for tanks to better react to incoming damage using cooldowns.

I have to be honest. I don’t tank and only have a very limited knowledge of all this technical stuff concerning tanking stats. This reasoning actually sounds to me like it’s actually better for the raid that tank avoidance is getting nerfed. That doesn’t sound right to me any way I look at it. It makes more sense to me if they just said that “we want the place to be badass so we’re nerfing your tanks”.

Right or wrong, there’s now a debate going in the forums about how this change will affect the avoidance tanks as opposed to the mitigation tanks. All tanks are affected by this of course but it seems like druids and death knights who rely a lot on avoidance (death knights need to dodge or parry to get a rune strike going, which is one of their threat increasing tools) are going to be affected more than the paladins and warriors. Others say that there really won’t be a big difference and that druids might even come out ok because of their high health pool levels.

Whatever the right answer is, this announcement surely is causing a ruckus in the tanking community and I’m sure it will add to the epic difficult benefiting a raid dungeon like the Icecrown Citadel and a boss like the Lich King.