Tanking in Icecrown

Any thoughts on the implications of this:

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%.

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In the current implementation this will effectively reduce our dodge to zero. I am not quite sure what that means, but potentially it would make any dodge scaling we do receive much more effective which means less diminishing returns, assuming we get any dodge scaling in the first place.

They say that they are making boss damage less spikey because of this, which, given our tanking style, might actually be a very good thing since spike damage is still our biggest weakness. Potentially a change like this could mean pet tanking could be very much more usefull, or alternatively completely useless.

I wouldn't be too surprised if pets didn't get the debuff either It wouldn't be the first time aura buffs weren't applied.

I actually wrote a post about that but had to delete it sadly... It is a buff to enemy creatures, not a debuff on us, so I would imagine it is highly unlikely.

This is actually a very interesting change from a theory craft perspective. In terms of total avoidance this 20% reduction won't be as big a relative reduction to pets are it is to regular tanks. I know this sounds backwards since pets have such little avoidance, but think about it more in terms of hits that land, not hits that are avoided.

For example if a tank has 60% avoidance against a raid boss (which is about right for some of the best geared tanks around), they're getting hit 40% of the time. Subtract 20% dodge and now they're getting hit 60% of the time, so if the bosses did the same amount of damage, going from 40% chance to be hit to 60% chance to be hit they'd be taking 50% more damage because of this change.

A pet on the other hand has around 30% avoidance after talents. That means its getting hit 70% of the time. Subtract out 20% dodge, then pets will be taking 90% of the attacks. While this sounds pretty brutal, its only a 29% increase in damage taken.

Pets will have a really how amount of avoidance in Icecrown, but the difficulty will be tuned around traditional tanks and this change is more harmful to them than it is to us. Assuming we can keep up in terms of Armor mitigation and health pools, this seems to be a net buff.

However, don't forget that other tanks have both parry and block. Pets do as well, but these don't have any way to improve them, other than by tiny amounts through buffs.

Normal tanks can get block/parry equipment from elsewhere to offset this disadvantage. Our pets can't. They can just stack stamina ATM.

Unless the pets get more scaling in stats (and I don't see that happening with 3.3), pets are giong t obe at a big disadvantage for tanking Icecrown, I think. Not completely out of it, potentially, since the damage won't be as spiky (supposedly), but still at a big disadvantage.

this seems to be a net buff

I agree, it effectively adds a couple of percentage points dodge to us as well since we are now treated as if we had 20% dodge even though we had only 16% to begin with.

In addition, if we DO get scaling we get more advantage from stacking dodge because of diminishing returns mechanics.

Remember what the goal is of the change, to make damage less spikey. Yes we get the reduction but if you take their word for it, overall damage remains the same, so anything that maintains overall damage while smoothing things out will only make pet tanking more viable.

Dont forget also that this is intended to give tanks more time to react, which will only benefit us more so since we need that reaction time even more, since we control our tank remotely.

I just realized that depending on whether or not pets get dodge from agility, this change would actually give up three free talent points. If pets don't get dodge from agility, then a pet with full dodge talents will have a little under 16% dodge against a raid boss, so Catlike Reflexes would have no effect after subtracting 20% dodge. If you're going to have zero percent dodge either way, you might as well throw those points into something else.

I fiddled around with that myself, but I couldn't find any place to spend those darned points tbh, plus the Kill Command loss is actually quite significant from a thunderstomp perspective.

It would have been epic if Scorpid was on Improved Stings though

Admittedly its not the most useful 3 talent points in the world. I plan on using two of the points to get Improved Mend Pet, which I normally wouldn't bother with in a raid tanking spec, and the third point to fill out Mortal Shots.

My build these days only has one point in Mend and no points in Revive (I figure if the pet dies that is all she wrote in any case what with the limitations we have on our taunt).

That means I can fill out Mortal Shots anyhow, I would probably end up sticking with exactly the same build if it came down to it sadly.