Reason for new Protection Paladin changes?

#1 - July 9, 2013, 2:21 a.m.

Seal of Insight no longer has a chance to restore mana on attacks.

Glyph of Battle Healer has been redesigned. The glyph now causes Seal of Insight to heal the most wounded raid or party member instead of the Paladin.

Grand Crusader no longer has a chance to activate from Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous, but now has a 30% chance to activate when dodging or parrying a melee attack (up from 12%).

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Ok, fine. I'll concede Battle Healer...

But what's with the change to Seal of Insight? Napkin math has us use 6% of our mana per second but only get back 3% of our mana back thru GbtL. Which is only aggravated by our love for Haste.

Talking about Haste. The GC change/nerf is retaliation for our love affair with Haste, something that was brought up on the beta forums early into the testing, and fell on deaf ears at that time.

GC at one point wrote: We knew haste would be attractive to Protection when we gave them Sanctity of Battle, which only Retribution had previously. That's why we gave them Sanctity of Battle. Even if you have a tanking set with no haste, there are haste buffs in the game. We wanted all the tanks to benefit somewhat from what were traditionally DPS stats, since part of the active mitigation design was to make tanks care more about hitting things with sword (and claws). It only gets to be a problem, as I said previously, if dodge and parry (which are going to be on some gear) are perceived as pointless. (They aren't pointless, but that's really beside the point at this stage.) We aren't going to reitemize every plate piece in the game to remove dodge and parry. We also don't want to nerf haste for paladins, because it is fun, and for the most part working as intended. We don't have a solution yet that we're willing to share, but that's the intent.

Later on, I remember there was a discussion on not trying to shoehorn a square peg into a round hole by trying to change our playstyle again mid-expac... although they seem to have gone back on this.

Lore, I really hope you read this, cuz dude... bro... you were one of us!

Lore

Community Manager

#55 - July 9, 2013, 10:57 p.m.

The Seal of Insight change is not intended as a Protection nerf, or to make haste less attractive. In fact, the change is being made because of a Holy concern. Although Seal of Insight does benefit from haste, the stat’s real value for Protection comes from Sanctity of Battle. Regardless, we will be making adjustments to make sure Protection doesn’t start having mana issues. Current thinking is to increase the mana gain from Guarded by the Light to 10%.

Glyph of the Battle Healer was something we had originally intended to allow Holy to adopt a “melee healer” playstyle, but as class design changes shifted Protection towards using Seal of Insight primarily, it has become both mandatory and overpowered. It’s just significantly stronger than a glyph should be. We think that the redesign will still allow it to be useful for Protection, but much more situationally, which is fine.

The Grand Crusader changes are indeed intended to make avoidance more attractive. The goal isn’t to nerf haste; as I mentioned, Sanctity of Battle is where the majority of haste’s value lies (along with other secondary benefits such as its interaction with Sacred Shield). However, we’ve seen overwhelming feedback that dodge and parry feel like wasted stats to Paladin tanks. It’s fine if you still prefer haste over avoidance, but we still intend to put avoidance on plate tanking gear, and we don’t want you to feel like those stats don’t benefit you when you get them.

We are paying careful attention to your feedback while we work through these changes. Please keep in mind that specific feedback regarding what exactly your concerns are about the changes is significantly more useful to us than sweeping generalizations. Thanks :)

Lore

Community Manager

#69 - July 9, 2013, 11:52 p.m.

Please just stop it with Grand Crusader. I don't say useless, but Parry and Dodge are surely the least useful things to get. Why do you acknowledge we like Haste and it works well, then emphasize poorer (or at least 'lumpy' damage intake) gearing setups? Smoothness is key.

The goal is not to get you to prefer one over the other. We want you to like haste AND avoidance.

Lore

Community Manager

#81 - July 10, 2013, 12:45 a.m.

We know you guys like active mitigation. We like it too. We totally agree -- it feels a lot better (and a lot more fun) than passive mitigation.

However, in the short term, dodge and parry still exist. We want them to serve at least some value to tanks. They don't have to be your best stats, we just want them to feel like they're at least accomplishing something.

Looking to the future, we want to keep the idea of "tank" stats around, but they may end up playing less of a role than they do today. Between Dodge and Parry, it's entirely possible that we'll cut one or another and embrace the idea of active mitigation even further. Those changes are just way too big for 5.4. We'd have to re-itemize hundreds of items, rebalance boss damage, change class mechanics, and so on.

So to summarize: we love active mitigation, and we love that you love active mitigation. We want to push harder in that direction, but we can't fit that in for 5.4.