Chill of the Throne

• Chill of the Throne
• The chilling presence of the Frozen Throne reduces the chance of an enemy to dodge melee attacks by 20%.

Chill of the Throne was a zone-wide aura in Icecrown Citadel that affected all players, permanently reducing their chance to dodge by 20% while within the raid.

Much like the earlier [Sunwell Radiance] (a hidden zone-wide buff on creatures within the Sunwell Plateau raid), this effect was introduced in an effort to counter the high levels of avoidance most tanks had obtained throughout the expansion's progression, with the goal to allow for smoother incoming tank damage from raid boss auto-attacks.

Chill of the Throne was later removed in patch 4.0.1, as the introduction of major changes to class mechanics, talent trees, itemization, and tank avoidance (notably the removal of the defense skill) made the effect no longer necessary.

Background

Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You! | 2009-10-29 18:02 |  Daelo

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.

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Other Blizzard comments

Icewell Radiance is in! | 2009-10-29 18:19 |  Ghostcrawler

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.

Q u o t e:

Also, if you're going to give mobs expertise, can you please make a spell or some kind of method to determine the level of expertise without us having to do parses?

Yes. We would probably just let you see the numbers directly. I consider it a design flaw that players have to experiment to determine thinks like hit and expertise caps. We're all for experimentation and theorycrafting, but we don't think it's fair to require some players to go out and do a lot of work to generate specific numbers that all players feel like they need to know.

Q u o t e:

Putting so much avoidance on gear isn't a bad idea because other stats are better. It was a bad idea because it causes tank scaling to fail and makes Radiance necessary.

That logic doesn't really work. It's like saying instead of nerfing armor pen, we should have just put less and less on higher level gear.

If we had avoided avoidance on tank gear, then every piece of tank gear would have hit and expertise (and maybe crit, haste and armor pen). Stamina and armor are static amounts, and if they were not, then those pieces immediately become the only pieces players would pay attention to.

Q u o t e:

If you want ICC damage to be steadier, why don't you just walk over to the item team and say "Hey, we'd like less avoidance, can you cut out half of the avoidance from the ICC gear and replace it with stamina?" Or if you're worried people will get too much stamina, make it Frost Resistance and put in so much Frost damage you couldn't hope to survive long with TotGC gear alone.

We just don't think that works. If you put very unattractive stats on gear then players just go back the previous tier of gear and complain that we don't know how to itemize. If you put bonus stamina on the tier 10 gear, then that means the next tier of gear better have bonus stamina as well. If it has avoidance instead of that bonus stamina, tanks just shrug and go back to the tier 10 gear.

This is not a tank only problem. Casters won't upgrade to gear that doesn't have more spell power on it, because spell power tends to trump everything else for purposes of their dps or healing.

We put a little bonus armor on non-armor items (necks, rings, trinkets and the occasional cloak). We don't put bonus armor on gloves and chests because that gear would be too good.

It's an item level problem. If we added another raid tier to Lich King, we couldn't just keep avoiding avoidance and avoid it for every tier going forward. We just need a system where you avoid a Naxx boss 30% of the time and an Icecrown boss 30% of the time, the same way the Icecrown bosses have e.g. 30% larger health bars and thus take 30% more damage to kill. Otherwise the stats don't scale and bad thing happen (in this case the boss having to land so much damage to account for the fact that it misses so often).

Q u o t e:

That can't possibly be accurate. We would have had more avoidance leaving naxx than we will now with this ability and the increased DR we got last patch. Certainly the extra tiers didn't help, but Icecrown Radiance was going to come with the original calculations.

I don't think so. We didn't decide until last night to do the Icecrown Radiance. Without the extra tiers that the Ulduar and ToC hard modes included, then the max gear level might have been more like ToC normal 25 is today, and we didn't add Jormungar Radiance.

Q u o t e:

This would actually be BAD. If I am in T10 gear and go back to do a T7 Boss, I expect that boss to barely touch me. I expect to dodge more, parry more, block more, etc, etc. If you did this, it would be called: "The Hogger Effect". Meaning that what killed you at level 10 would kill you at 20 or 50 or 80.

I'm talking about an Icecrown boss being tougher than an Ulduar boss, not that the Ulduar bosses look at how much gear you have and scale themselves up accordingly.

Bosses get more damage and health. If they also got more expertise, defense and maybe armor then as character item level grew their relative strength to boss stats would not increase. As it is they increase enormously, requiring the bosses to have even more health and even more damage. Shifting some of that health and damage to other stats would fix a lot of problems.

Q u o t e:

So if you're essentially removing 20% dodge from us all does it alter the Diminishing Returns relationship between parry and dodge at all? i.e. Is a dodge rating of 30% going to have the DR applied to it as though it were 30% or 10%? Is it now a case of Parry is king period? I'd also like to second the notion that you don't do something stupid like put in a boss such as Brutallus that can 2-shot a tank at the same time as you nerf our avoidance.

The 20% nerf is applied after diminishing returns. That is why I am saying it won't affect the relative value of dodge and parry. The Icewell Radiance won't get you closer to diminishing returns by itself.

The whole point of this change is so bosses can hit less hard but more often, for the same damage over time but with fewer deadly spikes. That should feel better to everyone overall. The reason I am reluctant to say that is because some players are going to go into Icecrown, find it hard, and then expect us to buff their class.

It won't be Brutallus hard, at least most of the bosses and at least on normal mode. We're not going to be particularly sympathetic to players who find heroic mode too hard.

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Trivia

• The aura appeared as a debuff on the player.
• During early PTR testing for the raid, Chill of the Throne was present as a permanent zone-wide DoT effect, dealing frost damage equal to 1% of maximum health every 3 seconds to all players while they remained within the raid.
  • This version was later stated to be a bug by Blizzard, before being changed into its current effect.

Patch changes

• Patch 4.0.1 (2010-10-12): Removed.
  
• Patch 3.3.0 (2009-12-08): Added.
  

External links

• Wowhead
• WoWDB