It's not really a big Death Knight buff as such, but rather a small parry buff. All tanking classes will be losing avoidance over this, Death Knights will just lose very slightly less. Sounds like parry still has its very nasty diminishing returns, so that 30-40 rating is only be a small amount of avoidance for a raid buffed Death Knight. Needing 15% more dodge rating and agility will result in a similar avoidance loss for the plate tanking classes, while the parry gain might give a death knight a small parry advantage overall. Not that huge of a difference overall. Druids will likely be the ones the most hurt by this.

Assuming 250 parry rating for a Paladin or Warrior, and 662 parry rating (250 parry rating and 1648 strength) for a Death Knight.

Paladin 3.1 4.77% diminished
Paladin 3.2 5.14% diminished
gains 0.37% parry diminished

DK 3.1 10.83% diminished
DK 3.2 11.48% diminished
gains 0.65% parry diminished

So overall a Death Knight will be gaining about 0.28% parry more than a Paladin from the change, and losing about the same amount of dodge in equal gear.

Encouarages a slightly more balanced value on Dodge vs. Parry, I think - right now, nobody really wants parry because it's bad. After this change, it'll still be meh, but gear with parry will be noticably less in the way of wasted stats for tanks.

That is to say, tanks should notice that it's better and go 'Huh', before going back to gearing exactly the same way as before.

I've just realised that this whole Coliseum tribute/Immortal thing seems to be exclusive to 25-man raiding? They're claiming things are easier now that they split off heroic (old "hard mode") from normal instancing, but I'm still confused. Previously, it seemed that there was a Normal 10/25 instance called Trial of the Crusader, and a Heroic 10/25 instance called Trial of the Grand Crusader. But it seems that the tribute run aspect of that heroic instance is exclusive to the 25-man version? Or at least, the 25-man version is all that counts as far as Achievements and rewards are concerned.

Trial of the Grand Crusader is hard mode 10/25.
Trial of the Crusader is easy mode 10/25.

You can see this as evidenced by the varying achievements:

• A Tribute to Immortality - In the Trial of the Grand Crusader, reach a Tribute Chest with 50 attempts remaining and without allowing any raid member to die during any of the boss encounters in 25-player mode

• A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity - In the Trial of the Grand Crusader, reach a Tribute Chest with 50 attempts remaining in 10-player mode, without any raid member ever having equipped, at any point during the boss encounters for that raid lockout, an item more powerful than those obtainable in the 10-player Trial of the Grand Crusader. (Title Reward: Argent Defender)

It is nice to see the realm firsts seem to be continuing the Ulduar style of awarding the hard mode feats rather than the horrible 3.0 first kill option.

So, is that old, Naxx-style Immortal or new one, not limited to 1 reset? Can't be quite sure with all those descriptions.

I am amazed they did this. I actually think it's a great change to help the tedium of leveling for the umpteenth time, but I really didn't expect them to let us fly during Northrend leveling content until the next expansion. On the other hand, pre-77 is about the only world PvP still around, and this will kill it. I suppose sub-80 BGs will become a lot more popular next patch, but I'm not sure how much of a meaningful distinction there will be between PvE and PvP servers at that point.

With the wording of "more powerful" I'm going to guess it's simply a fancy way of saying ilvl.

The word "ilvl" is used like second nature around here, but don't forget it's still a relatively esoteric mechanic of the game for many players. This shift in wording should make these achievements more readily understandable to those players.

I think 1-2 recent achievements that actually mentioned "ilvl" by name, are some of the only examples ingame whereby Blizzard exposes players to the mechanic directly. (Without using third party addons and websites). Suddenly springing this myterious word/concept on players wouldn't seem wise, when you could simply use 'more powerful' worded synonyms instead, which effectively mean the same thing.

Now the truth is, using the word "ilvl" for an Algalon achievement shouldn't really matter. Players who can defeat Mimiron hardmode are likely players who understand exactly what it means. Players who have no idea what the concept is, don't need to worry, as Algalon doesn't concern them anyway.

But if Blizzard plan to make similar accomplishements in future to the Algalon one, tailored to a larger audience (not just Algalon raids!) the changes make sense.

Nevermind, already been said and better, at that.

As a side note, Blizzard is including item level in the default UI. It's an option that needs to be turned on.

A few other notes for Achievements-

* Argent Confessor On separate visits to the Coliseum, get credit for defeating Argent Confessor Paletress after suppressing five different memories of the past on Heroic Difficulty.
*** This achievement then goes on with the long list of memories that are there.

For the 5-man, it lists different class-based champions -- Hunter, Mage, Rogue, Shaman, and Warrior.

There's also the possibility of the Achievements interface tracking number of attempts before a player's first kill, and number of attempts overall.

This might just be nitpicking, but the DK will actually lose very slightly less dodge% because DKs have 6% undiminished dodge while Paladins have only 5%.

It does seem a little odd that they would take such semantic care of their ilevel-based achievement's wording at the same time that they would put in a UI feature to allow players to view ilevels without having to resort to an addon.

Remember that originally there was no ilvl 232 loot in 10 man, but then when they upgraded the weapons to 232 they had to revise the ilvl on the achievement. By simply stating the "power level" of the items without referring to a specific mechanic, they save themselves from having this issue again if the ilvl of some items needs to be adjusted for one reason or another.

As ildon said, it covers themselves for any iLvl disparity between different classes of loot and any changes they may make in the future, and also it just more intuitively conveys the spirit of the achievement, which is to complete the 10-man version without 25-man gear. Anyone who hasn't memorised the ilvls of each tier will look at an achievement that states a specific Item Level and it won't necessarily mean much, even if they do have a working knowledge of the mechanic.

Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle provides 1% undiminished Dodge, Parry and Miss to Death Knight tanks. I would guess that's where the 6% number came from.

Yes, but 25 defense that is not affected by diminishing returns should not have anything to do with how much dodge you gain from dodge rating, should it?

No, it doesn't. But that 1% of undiminished dodge is unaffected by the nerf. If right now a Warrior and DK both have 30% dodge, after the patch the Warrior will have 26.25% dodge and the DK will have 26.40% dodge, because the dodge rating nerf applied to 25% of the Warrior's 30% but only 24% of the DK's 30%.

Yes, but that is because the Warrior had better gear to begin with and not because the DK had 6% extra dodge. A Warrior with 20% dodge from gear will lose the same amount as a DK with 20% dodge from gear

Exactly. If the warrior or paladin and the DK both had 30% dodge, and the DK was using Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle (which is far from assured -- most seem to use Swordshattering for the extra avoidance and threat), then the DK has 1% less effective dodge rating from gear to begin with, so of course he's going to be affected less, relatively speaking, than the warrior/paladin.

Does anyone know what the policy will be for CC PTR testing here on EJ? It starts tonight, and given that they've stated something along the lines of "...if you can beat Uld hardmodes, you should faceroll this," it doesn't seem like there'll exactly be a progression race. For the moment I'll assume it's the same as Ulduar (i.e., no encounter details), but a policy should likely be stickied before testing starts (shortly on the EU).

They allowed testing of the final boss of Crusaders' Coliseum. It has never happened before. We never saw Kil'Jaeden or Yogg-Saron or Illidan before the patches went live. This may mean one of the two things:
- Blizzard moved more of their resources to the new MMO they have coming and spoil even the last boses by letting us test them. It's really sad.
OR
- Anub'Arak isn't the last boss. Assuming that the floor of the Coliseum is destroyed by Arthas and players fall underground, maybe there will be another batch of bosses there? Azjol Nerub anyone?

It's probably a pipe dream, but wouldn't that be great...

I don't think we can read too much into it since they haven't shown even a single Heroic version of the bosses. And they even mentioned the Heroic versions will not be available on the PTR.