Thoughts on the current Prot Pally tree

#0 - July 21, 2010, 8:03 p.m.

Incoming wall of text. Read if you're interested, if not, spare me the request for TLDR. Thanks.

Toughness - Mandatory, but all tanks pretty much have it, so no big deal.

Seals of the Pure - I'm OK with the mild threat talent at the top here, but it is disappointing that it only effects seal damage. It's considered a lackluster talent on live when it increases Judgment damage as well, and we lost that portion of it? It's being taken at this point only because 20 seconds off HoJ is really useless.

Imp HoJ - PvP talent for Holy and Ret. We get it, you needed to give them something to sub spec into. Could you try to make it interesting for us somehow? Maybe by creating a bottom of the tree talent that reduces the cooldown further, removes the stun component, and MAKES IT OUR INTERRUPT? Just asking...

Judgements of the Just - I'm glad this is in range for other spec'd paladins to take, even though I highly doubt they will. However, it does still frustrate me that it only effects one target at a time as opposed to Thunderclap, but that's a minor inconvenience.

Protector of the Innocent - Can you just remove this talent please? First of all, it's probably going to feel mandatory for Holy Pallies to bring 6% extra healing (yay, they've replaced Druids!), which gives them no ability to go into Ret instead if they want PoJ, Crusade, or Rule of Law. Secondly, if you aren't giving us 3% extra DR, you might give paladins and warriors the same stamina scaling. The fact is, the average pug leader in this game is stupid. They don't understand the basics of "DR" and "EH", they look at the health bars, and whoever is winning the "health bar epeen contest" is who MT's. Period. I've had someone make the druid MT the boss over me because he had 700 more health. No matter how many times everyone tried to point out that if he only had 700 more health than me, I grossly outgeared him. Please don't expect a PuG raid leader to know that 3% DR will result in less healing, they won't. They'll just make me OT adds.

Guardian's Favor - Meh, Ret/Holy PvP talent again. We get it, again. But did we REALLY need two ret/holy PvP talents in our tree that are borderline useful as tanks? I guess it at least gives us places that we know we'll never put our talents... but that doesn't feel like "choice" there at all.

Divine Guardian - This is grossly OP, and pretty much guarantees that every raid will need a minimum of one prot pally, even if we don't get our other issues fixed. Is this OP cooldown why you're not giving us a workable AD? Are you planning to do anything to make sure that DG's can't be chained by just making all your tanks prot pallies? 20% DR for the entire raid is just too much.

Sanctuary - Thank you for making this not a blessing anymore. Really, that was getting annoying! Better place for crit immunity too. Can we talk about the mana return percentage, now that we don't have SA anymore? 3% is nothing. I mean, it's awesome when we go pull insane amounts of trash to never run out of mana, but I'm worried about where we used to have SA, we're hosed now. Is Divine Plea still lvl 71? What are little lowbie pallies supposed to do for mana? I know everyone likes to say the game starts at max level, but it doesn't. It starts at 1, and that's especially important for this expansion. PLEASE make sure little lowbie pallies have mana to tank their SM runs. And make sure I don't run out when tanking Ragnaros v. 2.0.

Hallowed Ground - I find myself iffy on this talent... I can see it being useful if we needed the 20% extra damage on it, but I have a hard time believing I won't be able to push the button every 15 seconds or so. I just can't see the 20% extra damage on it being more important than other options I could put the points towards in Ret or Holy.

Wrath of the Faithful - Again, feeling iffy. I mean, thanks for the damage buff and crit strike buff, and thanks for giving us some sort of snap AoE threat. Really! But if we're not really having a world of "AoE the ever loving hell out of every instance from start to finish" like Wrath, and CC and single target nuking down the dangerous bad guys is important... then I only need to keep Bad Guy off my healer. Snap aggro is great. YAY! But do I really need to use 2 talent points to increase its damage/threat? Or will I keep aggro off my healer as is? And why do I really feel like I may need to use my dual spec for an AoE build and a Boss build?

More wall of text in next post...

Ghostcrawler

#10 - July 21, 2010, 8:49 p.m.

Ardent Defender - Activate to reduce damage taken by 20% for 10 sec. While active, attacks which would otherwise kill you cause you to be healed for 15% of your maximum health. 3 minute cooldown. Off the GCD.

Subject to further balance tweaking of course.

Ghostcrawler

#71 - July 22, 2010, 7:59 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Divine Protection - major cooldown, 2 minutes.
Divine Guardian - minor cooldown, 2 minutes.
Ardent Defender - minor cooldown, 3 minutes.

Divine Guardian doesn't affect the paladin. Otherwise we feared it would just get used as another tank cooldown instead of for the raid utility for which it was intended.

We're strongly considering changing Divine Protection into a short cooldown. It is currently a clone of Shield Wall. Considering the paladin 85 also offers strong emergency damage reduction, we thought they could use a short cooldown ability (say 30-60 sec). Shield Block for warriors is being repositioned more as a short cooldown ability.

EDIT: Re-reading that just now, it sounds confusing. Try this:

Short cooldowns: Divine Protection, Shield Block (and Enraged Regen and Word of Glory if you want to count those)

Long cooldowns: Ardent Defender, Guardian of Ancient Kings, Last Stand, Shield Wall

Ghostcrawler

#72 - July 22, 2010, 8:18 p.m.

Q u o t e:
With Crusader Strike's cooldown being 4 seconds. Having 2 attacks reset its cooldown seems almost meaningless. It'll always be up on its own after using it and an additional attack.

Grand Crusader no longer affects Crusader Strike. That was an older model we were trying.

Q u o t e:
No silence on Avenger's Shield has to be a bug,

Avenger's Shield silences as a baseline effect. It no longer dazes, since all that seemed to accomplish was making pulling take longer.

Q u o t e:
CS doesn't benefit from RF's threat multiplier

Righteous Fury now affects all threat.

Q u o t e:
Your forgetting holy shield and the glyph of salvation. Personally i like the idea of being a CD tank =D

I'm not optimistic that we'll keep the Salv glyph, but we'll see. As to Holy Shield, it is going through rapid iteration. Our current implementation has it providing 5% block per stack of Holy Power, up to a max of 15%. So you can use Holy Power for threat, healing or mitigation depending on current circumstances. You should be able to keep the 15% block up all the time with a very small amount of effort.

Warriors get 15% block baseline, so this means the paladin has to work harder for it. Seeing as how the paladin doesn't have to maintain Demo Shout or Thunderclap's debuff, this doesn't seem too great a burden.

Since I am sure it will be asked based on that info, paladins and warriors have the same Stamina curves now. A naked warrior and paladin of the same race will have the same health at 85. Both Protection trees get the same amount of Stamina as a passive. That number will likely be something like 10 or 15% Stamina depending on tuning. (In our current build it is 15%.) In similar gear, their health should be very similar. We'll provide the differences in their cooldowns and how they tank. DKs and druids are likely to have different amounts of health as well.

Again, this could change. :)

Ghostcrawler

#145 - July 22, 2010, 10:06 p.m.

Q u o t e:
Also, Holy Wrath - which now damages everything - might be able to apply Vindication. It might be nice if HW was simply a guaranteed way to apply Vindication.

This is, in fact, exactly what we did.

Q u o t e:
Vindication probably could stand to last a little longer, too. They upped TC from 10 sec to 30, give Vindication the same treatment.

Ditto.

Ghostcrawler

#211 - July 23, 2010, 12:20 a.m.

Q u o t e:
The problem is in expecting Paladins to be the only tank class that has to wait until level 85 to get their major defensive cooldown while the rest of them get it dozens of levels earlier

We don't make a lot of effort to support outdated raid content once the level cap rises. There will be the period in between the class changes and the world changes that we'll have to worry about, but there are hundreds of balance issues we're going to have to worry about in that time period. Besides, with a 30% buff on the content most raiders are running, you should be fine. You don't need a whole stable of defensive cooldowns to do level up dungeons. If you're going to raid at level 60 or 70 as you level up, you're just going to be in a pretty small minority.

Ghostcrawler

#216 - July 23, 2010, 12:29 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Brandt hit some very important nails on the head. If the concern is making some part of "doing Prot Paladin" as active as "doing Prot Warrior", I would far far prefer that come in maximizing threat rather than maintaining basic survivability statistics.

We expect both warriors and paladins to have to actively manage both threat and survivability. Warriors are going to have to do more too with Shield Block that has a rage cost and is on a cooldown.

As a response to some of the sky falling rhetoric in this thread (not specifically the post I quoted, which was worded quite reasonably) and others like it, allow me to offer the following:

We have said many times in the past several months that we don't think paladins have enough going on. Now that we're starting to deliver on that, it doesn't surprise me at all to see some concern that things are changing. I'm sure there are some players out there that just really liked the 6969 rotation, but in a game as large as WoW, there are some players who like anything. We need to do what we think is right for the game, and that includes adding some depth to the paladin class. Our goal is to make the class more fun. We don't expect every forum poster is going to 100% agree that we're going about that in the same way they would. We think in the end though that the class will be more fun.

Ghostcrawler

#224 - July 23, 2010, 12:50 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Holy Power: Will this get a new UI element similar to the Warlock shards or Rogue combo points?

Yes.

Q u o t e:
What happened to "Touched by the Light", and will there be an equivalent?

Prot paladins get it as a passive. It converts Str to spell power but does not affect healing. Part of what we're trying to do is get paladins to specialize more and be less capable of doing everything with one spec.

Q u o t e:
Is Holy Shield and Inquisition our only two uses for Holy Power? (excepting Words of Glory as I'm not sure I can rightfully consider it useful for Protection yet)

All paladins can use the heal (Word of Glory) and the self-buff (Inquisition). Prot paladins have a talent to allow them to get a defensive use (Holy Shield). Proper use of Holy Power will distinguish a good paladin from a bad, but the system is far more forgiving than combo points. Consider that if you totally ignored Holy Shield you'd be giving up 15% block. Decent, but not life-threatening.

Q u o t e:
What is the plan on itemizing shields and tanking weapons, both of which have lost a lot of potential stat choices?

We are making two kinds of shield (healer and tank) and one-handed tanking weapons. We are trying to make all of the tanking weapons about the same speed (no slow vs. fast). With all of the changes, using a one-handed Str weapon might be a reasonable substitute in many cases. We might eventually decide to no longer make tanking weapons (since druids and DKs don't really have them) but we're still doing it for now.