On Saturday I did a quick Heroic ToC-5 with some guildees (I need badges for BOA stuff…) and during the Eadric fight I noticed something I haven’t seen in a long time on my pally: a big red number pop up. A crit. What the hell? Granted, it was only for 9k damage, but that was a bit shocking.

My immediate worry was I still had some Ret gear on from running around and doing the Loremaster grind. I popped open my character sheet and noticed a calm, reassuring defense number that was well about 540. I wasn’t sitting, either, so what could it have been? I knew that some bosses in game had spells giving them higher than normal crit chances (aka, greater than 5.6%), but I wasn’t aware that Eadric was one of them.

When perusing the tanking forums for my daily dose of bile-inducement I spotted this great thread which was compiling just such a list. And, of course, Eadric was on the list thanks to his Vengeance ability. I recommend checking out the initial post in full, but I wanted to share a few of these little cheaters for general awareness.

• The Argent Lightwielder mob in ToC-5 has an Unbalancing Strike that acts a little like the similarly named attack that Thorim uses in Ulduar.
• It is suspected that San’layn bosses (such Prince Keleseth in UK) passively have higher than normal crit chances. This may be an issue in Icecrown Citadel where we will be facing off against the Queen of the San’layn.
• One last thing to double-check: if you’re at 540 defense but get crit, hover your mouse over the defense number and see if your uncrittability number is at 5.6% or higher. There is a rounding error where you can be at 540 defense but only 5.59% uncrit, which would still allow you to be critically struck.

• Agility: The amount of agility required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This change required recalibrating the amount of dodge a player has with 0 agility by a slight amount as well, so all players will see their dodge percentage vary a small amount.
• Dodge Rating: The amount of dodge rating required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply.
• Parry Rating: The amount of parry rating required per percentage of parry has been reduced by 8%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply. Parry still diminishes more quickly than dodge.

Ach!

So three things to take away from this: Avoidance will be decreasing across the board by a significant number (and by significant I mean non-trivial, I may be being a bit dramatic in my word choice), Agility will end up being a worse avoidance stat than Defense, and Parry gems won’t automatically be a bad-tank red flag anymore (alas).

Before this change:

• 39.35 dodge rating was 1% dodge
• 49.18 parry rating was 1% parry
• 52.08 agility was 1% dodge

And now the numbers are:

• 45.25 dodge rating is 1% dodge
• 45.25 parry rating is 1% parry
• 59.89 agility is 1% dodge

Defense remains 123 rating as 1% dodge, 1% parry, and 1% miss (aka 3% avoidance, so 41 rating per 1% avoidance).

So, now that I vomited up all these numbers, what does this mean? For gems, the values of avoidance per gem are now (and I’m using values of 8, because as we discussed before, all your gems should have 12 stam as half of their worth):

• 8 parry is .18% avoidance
• 8 dodge is .18% avoidance
• 8 def is .19% avoidance (.064% dodge, parry, and miss)
• 8 agi is .13% avoidance (.146% with Kings)

Thus, shockingly, Enduring gems are now the best for avoidance out of all four. Before this change, Regal gems were worth .20% avoidance, but no more. And agility gems will no longer be close enough to justify using them over pure dodge. This doesn’t mean you want to start filling red slots with Endurings come 3.2, but it is interesting nonetheless.

Ultimately it makes sense that they would nerf avoidance, considering how the next tier of gear will make us even harder to hit. I’m not happy that I’ll be losing avoidance come next patch, but it’s not the end of the world.

One major caveat emptor: All these numbers I’ve cited are before diminishing returns. YMMV depending on how much avoidance you are currently rocking. (E.g., miss suffers a steep DR decline, so at a certain point dodge makes up for the .01% deficient and you’ll get more avoidance per point with dodge than defense.)