GC Please stop understating 15% block.

#0 - Aug. 6, 2010, 9:14 p.m.

Sure, 15% block isn't 15% physical damage reduction currently in the beta. But it can be.

I'm mainly talking about a paladin, since we currently are the only needing to maintain 15% block.

Let's look at some conservative ,"possible", entry raid ready, avoidance numbers for a Paladin.
Ignoring the 2.4% avoidance reduction from 3 level higher mobs:
10% dodge
10% parry
5% miss
5% base block
20% mastery block(16+4% from mastery).

Using the 100 hit table it works out something like:
25% for 0 damage (IE avoidance)
25% for 70% damage (IE block)
50% for Full Damage (IE hit).
*Below will probably get boggled because I fail at posting on forums and keeping formats*

Assigning the values numbers based on grouping avoidance=x, Block=y.
Another way to write this would be:
(x*0) (y *0.7) [100-(y+x)] 0 17.5 50 67.5
___ + ____ + ________ =___ + ___ + ___ = ___ or 67.5% of damage
100 100 100 100 100 100 100

25 * .7= 17.5

When you add in Holy Shield 15% block to the y you instead will get:
(25*0) (40*0.7) [100-(25+40)]
____ + ______ + __________ = 63 % of damage.
100 100 100

If anyone says that this is only 4.5% damage reduction they are wrong. Using the base value of "67.5%", IE without shield block, and evaluating that as 1 we can then find the actual damage reduction by dividing 67.5 by 63 and subtracting 1(the value of 67.5) .
67.5
___ - 1= 0.0714 or 7.14% damage reduction.
63

If you increase dodge, parry, and mastery block by 5 %, first ignoring Holy Shield :
(35*0) (30*0.7) [100-(35+30)]
_____ +______ + ___________ = 0.56
100 100 100

Then with holy shield:
(35*0) (45 * 0.7) [100-(35+45)]
_____+ _______ + ___________ = 0.515
100 100 100

0.56
_____ - 1= 0.874 or 8.74% damage reduction. 1.6% more then before
0.515

It's value keeps increasing. Also take notice that 5% more dodge, parry, and block with holy shield takes you from 63%--->51.5% or 22.33% damage reduction. Lawl.

I understand the logic in saying that a statistical 7% or more damage reduction won't kill you because you might not even prevent any of the damage. I get that. But you can't say I it isn't possible to prove it isn't there.

The difference between having holy shield up in the first example is a 50% chance to take full damage, vs a 35% chance to take full damage. That's nearly 1/3 reduction in chance. I know that if I don't have Holy Shield up, and I take a full hit, that there was nearly a 1 in 3 chance that I would have reduced the hit by 30%. That is a very, very powerful reason in a world where "healing matters".

I get the desire to make me want to maintain survival. DK's need to time Deathstrike(if bubble doesn't stack), keep diseases up, and maintain blood boil debuff; druids...need to roll their face across the keyboard?+maintain their demo shout; and warriors have to keep up Tclap and Demo Shout.

However, currently the only other class that has some sort of thinking in maintaining survival in any normal raid environment are the Paladin and DK. Swing speed is easily taken care of by any Dk, most feral druids, and a slightly odd spec'd Ret paladin. Demo shout could be performed by your off tank paladin..lawl or any warrior, warlock, hunter pet...for you crabcakes, pants that fit. If those are maintained for me...what do I get? They are part of normal rotation.

I'll make a suggestion with a hard implementation and an awkward awareness component. In otherwords, not much different then Holy Power---Shield block now :D. Anytime a mob that I'm targeting is affected by another players ability to reduce attack speed or reduce attack power, I gain the holy shield (+15% block) :D. Then I can think about using my Self heal like a DK does instead of "oh god did my crusader get parried/missed/dodge" FML.

Real Suggestion
Or you could just make Shield of Righteousness increase the duration of holy shield. Sure newbs will just stack Holy Shield Duration, but the rest of us will only stack it enough to begin weaving in some of those new holy power heals. I could even *gasp* heal someone else. Paladin Intervene rawr!

Soooo the tanks then look like
Warrior= rage-->threat priority, spell reflect, intervent.etc
Druid=Rage-->threat priority (....maybe some weird charge thing to get haste lol?)
Paladin-->Self heal timing, Holy shield weaving, threat priority
Dk--->DS Timing, Threat priority.

As it is now:
Paladin--Holy shield maintenance. Press crusader strike on cooldown. Shield of Righteousness at 3 holy power. Press other buttons on cooldown. Boring : (.

I don't mind hating my life in heroics. I'm selfish. I like all the buffs I can get and raids are the place to do that. Just don't make me hate my life just the same in raids....*sadness*

Ghostcrawler

#14 - Aug. 7, 2010, 2:57 a.m.

Yeah, as some of the other posters said the issue is not really whether 4.5% or 8% (which is pretty liberal) is the amount of damage reduced. You're comparing full uptime to no uptime. If a paladin refuses to use their mitigation talents (i.e. stubbornly or sloppily choose not to use Holy Shield ever) then they are going to take more damage and suffer the consequences.

The issue is how catastrophic is it if you are sloppy and let Holy Shield slip off for a short time or choose to use Word of Glory instead. The answer is probably: not very.

Fifteen percent block is rarely going to make the difference between you being alive or dead. It will make a difference over the course of a fight in how much damage you take and therefore how much mana your healers need to invest. For that reason it's an excellent idea to keep Holy Shield up a lot. But if you let it fall down every now and then, you probably won't explode. (And let's remember there are several emergency buttons if you are on the verge of explodination that will mitigate a lot more damage than a block.)

The reason I keep comparing it to 15% damage reduction, is because damage reduction affects every hit you take. Block is a chance to take less damage on every swing. Integrated over the course of an entire fight, you will probably block 15% more with Holy Shield up. But if you let it drop for a few boss swings, you are going to take far less than 15% more damage. In fact, you may take no extra damage at all (i.e. you would have blocked anyway). In fact, you may take no damage at all (i.e. you dodged or parried).

Ghostcrawler

#17 - Aug. 7, 2010, 3:12 a.m.

Q u o t e:
In short we relize what your saying is true but we also feel we're losing control of our ability to survive

I would say we are actually giving you control over your ability to survive. Today paladin tanking is very automated. Today the control isn't in your hands. We need to change that.

Look, nothing on normal mode is going to be tuned to the point where a paladin tank who lets Holy Shield fall down wipes the group. On heroic mode, yes, you will probably be asked to play to the best of your ability. That's the purpose of those challenges.

Ghostcrawler

#47 - Aug. 7, 2010, 6:56 a.m.

Q u o t e:
EDIT: Alternatively, increase the duration of Holy Shield by another 10 seconds or so. Having to "maintain" the buff wouldn't be so bad if the margins weren't so narrow.

The reason we haven't done that is we're concerned that once you have any Holy Power left for extra things, that you then assume you'd be balanced around those extra things. So for example, the model goes from paladins having to keep 15% block up to having to keep 15% block up *and* heal themselves every rotation. That's still a model we might consider though.

We're happy with the bones of the design. The details and tuning aren't quite right yet, but we have many ideas left to try.

Ghostcrawler

#118 - Aug. 9, 2010, 1:46 a.m.

Mihli's post was longer than this, but I wanted to focus on these three sentences.

Q u o t e:
Paladins were always the "Block first, ask questions later" tank class of TBC and Wrath. Yes warriors use shields too, but Holy Shield made us block far more than the other guy.

We're just not happy with the way Prot paladins have been playing in Lich King. If you've followed these forums for some time that should come as no surprise. It's difficult to do that without breaking some eggs / butchering some sacred cows / insert your own metaphor here. Now we don't want to lose what it is that attracted you to the class in the first place, but we do need some space to come up with something we think is fun.

Q u o t e:
Holy Power as a mechanic is far from a polished entity.

I would agree. It just went in a few weeks ago. But we have plenty of time before we ship.

Q u o t e:
TLDR: 1) Please rethink the Holy Power = Mitigation philosophy and work it into Holy Power = Burst Threat philosophy.

The problem with this is that survival tends to trump threat concerns for tanks much of the time, and that's a totally logical response to have given the encounters you're asked to tank. While there are some fights where burst threat matters, there are plenty that don't. Almost every fight involves the tank staying alive however. We didn't want to introduce this new mechanic which was supposed to add some interest to all three paladin trees, and then have Prot paladins fall back on just mashing buttons on cooldown the way they play today, at least on the fights where threat wasn't tight.

Ghostcrawler

#160 - Aug. 10, 2010, 12:10 a.m.

Here is the current design we have in our local builds. It might not appear in the next beta build, but could be the one after that. There's also a chance we will have changed it again before you get a chance to try it.

Holy Shield is a 15% block buff with a 20 sec duration. It no longer has stacks and can be overwritten to refresh its duration. It is caused by both Shield of the Righteous and Inquisition. You can Crusader Strike -> Shield of the Righteous over and over if you'd like, but the Shield of the Righteous will hit for much less without 3 stacks (it will hit softer with <3 stacks than it does today, more like TV does in the beta). Likewise, Inquisition will fall off pretty quickly without 3 stacks (with 3 stacks it lasts 12 sec for Prot and 30 sec for Ret), so there is some motivation to go for the longer buff.

The idea is that you can use Shield of the Righteous for single targets or use Inquisition to buff a larger variety of abilities when AE tanking. Furthermore, if you ever let Holy Shield drop off, you should be able to get it back up pretty quickly at full strength.

There is a chance we will allow Word of Glory to also proc Holy Shield, but we're very concerned about the right way to play becoming to just spam heals on yourself. We still don't want you to have to keep up both Inquisition and a 3 stack Shield of the Righteous at once, because we think that crosses the line into being too maintenance-y, and once you can do it, you'll feel like you have to do it.

Ghostcrawler

#188 - Aug. 10, 2010, 4:02 a.m.

Q u o t e:
It sounds like we're still able to put up Inquisition, and within those 15 seconds, stack another three Zeal to use a max-power Shield of the Righteous. It sounds like that would be a bit too much damage, honestly, even given the setup time required. Inquisition would be down for a bit after that, but we could just repeat the process a few seconds later.

Doh. I meant 12 sec for Prot (and edited). We don't want 100% uptime for Inquisition for Prot, because then you'll be balanced around that, which would be frustrating given the amount of hit and expertise you're likely to be rocking as a tank. Hopefully there will be room for very skilled tanks to line up their biggest Holy attacks with Inquisition being up (again, in an AE situation) without it being a huge dps / threat loss if you fail to do so.

Ret still has 30 sec Inquisition, because we do want them to keep it up almost all of the time and have room in their cycles to hit Templar's Verdict or Divine Storm.

Ghostcrawler

#198 - Aug. 10, 2010, 5:45 a.m.

Q u o t e:
The issue here is threat is binary, either a tank has it or not. What will happen is a tank will maintain threat and this will be a non-issue and therefore pointless or required for threat and tanks will be penalized for blinking or making that choice.

That's like saying speed is binary because you either won the race or not, or within the game that health is binary because you're either alive or dead. Whether or not you hold aggro may be binary (because it's yes or no) but threat is very much a continuum from zero to a very big number.

Good tanks are better at generating threat just like good rogues are better at generating dps. As long as the low end of the tank and the rogue isn't painfully low for less skilled players (and it really never has been), you should be fine.

Ghostcrawler

#204 - Aug. 10, 2010, 7:47 a.m.

Q u o t e:
But if I am ahead of the dps with a comfortable lead, I am probably not doing enough damage to turn a loss into a win (in some rare cases yes, but it will be the exception). So again why would I want to manage a resource that, we are balanced around having, which may not be available at that time. Now I am not in the beta, but from what I'm reading I don't see this as a buff.

I guess I'm trying to understand what separates this from a DPS or mitigation button on the same CD? If I'm doing lower threat to generate a high threat strike or mitigation ability why can't they just be on the same CD and use mana without the build up/drop cycle of a totally separate resource that will be available in the same time frame assuming I'm managing a basic rotation. I'll be using it every CD (or time I have full holy power) anyway?

It's not intended to be a buff. It's not intended to be a nerf either, but given that one of things we're trying to do is provide more skill between good and bad tanks, it may feel like one. In reality, it is intended to make paladin tanking more engaging than the 6969 rotation. The other 3 tanks have a resource that often limits what ability they can push when (especially after rage normalization). Prot paladins don't really manage mana as a resource. We could have gone that way too, but it always risks them wanting to try and wear caster gear or gem for int or whatever. Instead your main resource is Holy Power. Holy paladins worry less about Holy Power but a lot more about mana.

Ghostcrawler

#229 - Aug. 11, 2010, 4:17 a.m.

Q u o t e:
Currently Inquisition isn't obtained until level 81 and Shield of the Righteous is a talent that can only be obtained once you get HS.

Shield of the Righteous is a prereq for Holy Shield.