Words of Replicant Jesus

Hammer of the Righteous

Hammer of the Righteous is awesome.

I tanked Utgarde Keep again last night much more assured of how to handle the dungeon. I started off using my Hammer of Judgment but I decided to experiment and use Coldstone Cutlass instead just after the first boss.

Now these numbers are rough but with the hammer I was doing about 200ish holy damage per hit with Hammer of the Righteous. When I switched to the cutlass my damage per hit jumped to about 540ish holy damage per hit. Keep in mind this is hitting up to three targets every three seconds for about 140ish mana.

I will get exact numbers tonight, along with a Combat Log for better documentation.

Now you may think my overall spell damage suffered but my attack power increased, not enough to be commensurate with the loss but not so much that I would be gimped. What I noticed is that I could change my cycles up; I did not have to use Consecrate much, beyond maybe initial contact with the pull or to pick up incoming adds. Once I had them established and on me, I could tab target Hammer of the Righteous and hold threat very easy while keeping a modest mana pull only resorting to Consecrate when I needed a threat boost on several mobs at once.

This ability is ridiculously cheap at this point, usable every six seconds, and it deals really nice damage when you have a proper weapon to take advantage of it. I know it may be hard to do, but I am inclined to say that the days of us hunting down spell damage weapons may be coming to an end; or it will be reserved solely for AoE damage and even then that may be questionable.

Personally I enjoyed it, it made paladin tanking seem much more active; Hammer of the Righteous is a step in the right direction. Cheap high threat ability that hits multiple enemies so it plays to our strengths as a tank, and yet allows us much greater flexibility in and out of tanking role.

I still have to verify if it can crit, I have not seen it crit, but then again I need to look through my combat logs to see for sure.

More to come as I play with this ability more.

Edit: Revising my numbers, the numbers seem high so I think I may have been seeing critical hits instead of normal damage.