Chill of the Throne / Tanking (See Chill of the Throne, Tanking, and You!)
Reasons behind the change
I'll address this one more time and then leave it because I think players are more interested in trying to turn this into a huge tanking nerf than understand what's going on.
We would not have this problem if Icecrown gear had been item level 245 or so, as we originally intended. We added a few extra tiers of gear to support heroic modes. We felt like we had to do that to have different difficulty levels and make raiding more accessible overall. We felt like we had to reward the harder modes with the better gear or nobody would have been very interested.
The proportions of relative stats on your gear are not the problem. They are proportional, give or take a little, at every tier except for stats like hit that cap out. The problem is not the class and item teams being out of sync. In fact, they are the same team. (Source)
Diminishing returns
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. (Source)
Stamina less important?
It arguably makes stam less important (though it will always be important for tanks). Many players are probably telling you right now that only stamina and armor are important because if you ever fail to avoid two boss hits in a row that you're going to die. Under that environment, avoidance loses a lot of value.
If bosses hit for less in IC (which they will, since they will hit more often) then the value of avoidance for purposes of survival increases.
I still expect many tanks will die in two hits until they get geared up a little. But they will, and then the ability to survive two hits in a row won't be as big an issue. (Source)
Effective Health
I am going to attempt to explain the disconnect the community and the developers have over effective health.
When I first learned to tank, long before I came to Blizzard, I learned that effective health is a measurement of your stamina in relationship to your armor. This is a pretty easy number to generate. It's reasonable to include say shield block and other simple forms of mitigation into the calculation.
However, you cannot directly translate effective health into best tank. Avoidance matters. If it didn't, we would have no reason to nerf it in Icecrown. Good tanks don't depend too much on avoidance, but great tanks understand its value.
Furthermore, your estimations of effective health become less and less accurate the more variables you try to factor in. Most saliently, you can't easily account for cooldowns. You can't compare a short duration that reduces damage by 80% to a long duration that reduces damage by 10%. Mathematically they might generate the same effective health number, but in reality they work pretty differently and each has their own benefits in certain situations, which vary depending on boss mechanics. (I'd generally take the first one though.)
We purposely made the cooldowns difficult to compare from class to class. You shouldn't then be surprised when we take your effective health calculations based on direct comparisons of said cooldowns with a grain of salt.
It's fine to compare health, armor, avoidance or cooldowns. I would not recommend putting too much faith in one ubernumber that you generate by combining all of them. (Source)
Icecrown isn't Naxxramas
I am pretty sure on day one of 3.3 going live this forum will be filled with tanks who died and respond with "I thought bosses weren't going to hit hard."
It's Icecrown. It's not going to be Naxx. (Source)
Avoidance relative value
If you conclusion is that anything that improves your avoidance is now bad as a result of this change, you should think through it a little more. If you didn't like avoidance before, nothing changes. If you liked avoidance before, nothing changes. You just have less of it now. The relative value should not change, unless you get to the point where bosses no longer two-shot tanks so much, in which case the relative value of avoidance increases. (Source)
