Blizzard made a post today detailing a new change to the Icecrown Citadel raid.  All mobs will be affected by a “Chill of the Throne” buff that will allow all mobs to ignore 20% of their melee target’s dodge chance.  The purpose of the change is to make tank damage less bursty and easier to heal.  According to Daelo, “This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden their spell options, and simply give more time to react.” Its also a move toward the direction they want to take tank damage in Cataclysm, with higher stamina values and smaller heals.  The effect of the change is that bosses in Icecrown won’t be hitting as hard as they would otherwise.  Ghostcrawler also chimed in quite a bit on the change in this thread.

Making Icecrown Easier

The good news for us healers is that we’ll have more time to react when a tank’s health goes down.  There is less risk of the tank dying purely to bad luck.  You can be more confident that your Holy Light will go off in time without the risk of the tank taking a killing blow during the cast time.  This change makes the use of Holy Light on the tank more appealing.  In current content, its really useful to get some constant quick small heals or HoTs on a tank when he gets hit to bump him into a health range that will prevent him from getting killed by the next hit while waiting for the big heals to come in shortly after that heal him back up to full.  However, if in Icecrown most tanks won’t get 2-shot anyway, then there should be plenty of time for those big heals to land without risking the tank’s life.  This means that total heals per second will be more important than having a constant, reliable,  smaller stream of heals like what happens when using Flash of Light and HoTs.

To give an example, Holy Light is clearly the best spell to use on the Death Knight Understudies in the Instructor Rasuvious encounter in Naxxramas because it provides the most heals per second and there’s no chance of the understudies dying during the cast time.  On the other hand, Holy Shock is clearly the best heal to use on someone who’s hit with Kel’thuzad’s Frost Blast because your immediate concern is to get the person out of the kill zone until he can later be healed up properly.  High avoidance is like someone being continously hit with Frost Blasts at random times.  Blizzard wants tanks to become more like Death Knight Understudies and this change should help do that.

Despite the change, Icecrown Citadel is still going to be difficult.  I’d wager that many tanks are still going to get 2-shot in the early weeks as they gear up.  Icecrown is still Icecrown and its supposed to be the most difficult content this expansion.  But this new change to the raid should make it a little more bearable.