Just wondering.

Patch 3.1 is shaping up to be a very interesting overhaul of the classes.  Eyonix listed some of the changes coming and they are at least on paper, amazing.

Paladin

· Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.

· Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.

· Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger’s Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.

· Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.

· Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.

· Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.

The Blessing of Kings change will be awesome and free up five points for both Protection and Retribution; hopefully we will see an 11 point talent in the Protection Tree. The Exorcism change is interesting and should paladin DPS/TPS from dipping after we move into Ulduar.  Should also help with leveling as well and give Retribution an additional pulling ability besides Hand of Reckoning.  The Shield of the Templar change gives us a much needed low cooldown silence and allows us to pull casters from range.  This is a huge change, and I can’t wait to make use of it; might actually make Less-Rabi easier to do for those that have not done it yet. I like how they are consolidating the tree down, maybe we will get some new toys in the near future. I can only assume that we will have some fun talents to work with hopefully for Protection.

The Guarded by the Light change was hinted at in the Mana Changes post and should hopefully help to ease our mana consumption but it has an interesting side of effect of making us want to use Judgement of Wisdom instead of Light since Divine Plea will have a larger Healing reduction post patch, from 20% to 50%. The Judgement of the Justchange gives Protection more PvP utility and another interrupt silence on a low cooldown as well.  I am not sure if these will all stick but these all serve to make Protection very difficult to deal with for casters.  I might actually get some PvP achievements done now.

I really like the changes I can’t wait to see the rest and the overall Ulduar patch, this poses to be a very exciting update for the game.

Oh and Happy Birthday to me.

]]> http://www.vanifae.com/2009/02/06/patch-31-goodies/feed/ 0 http://www.vanifae.com/2008/09/19/gospel-on-paladin-changes/ http://www.vanifae.com/2008/09/19/gospel-on-paladin-changes/#comments Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:16:20 +0000 Vanifae http://www.vanifae.com/?p=277 Ghostcrawler Post:

Protection — We want more tanks in the game. Main tanks. We think it’s fun to have a diversity of players and see how different spells, abilities and class mechanics get used to solve problems. A Protadin with the right skill and gear should be able to tank any fight in the game. Previously, we tried to push Prot into the offtank and AE tank roles. While your abilities are still really well suited for AE in particular, overall our philosophy has changed and we want you to be able to do anything the other tanks do. Note that this means other tanks will get better at AE tanking though. Prot represents a special challenge when not tanking because you can both heal and do dps and some players want to do either. Or both. One final comment, that you have already seen, is we want you to gear like a warrior: collect Strength and Stamina and use tanking weapons instead of caster weapons.

Emphasis is mine, something I have been professing for some time now ever since I got my hands on Hammer of the Righteous which got a change in the last patch before the current one.   The tooltip caught up to the change which tied the damage of the ability with the DPS of the weapon and not the speed making it desirable for fast tank weapons.  That are plentiful in Wrath of the Lich King and current content come 3.0.2 when it launches.

Currently based on the spreadsheet created by the Mainktankadin theory craft poster, Psi-Ven, found here; there is still an edge with spell power weapons but that edge is actually fairly small when you look at the data.  Small enough then I will probably hedge my bets with physical damage weapons and gain defense through my mainhand for the first time in a long while and have it be a gimmick.  Looking at the chart we can see that the difference between the top end TPS weapon and the lower end is less then 200 TPS less then 10% of the total theoretical TPS and that data does not even take into account the base 1.49% bonus that all tanks recieve since they baked the bonus from Blessing of Salvation into our threat stances.

This does not change the data in favor of physical weapons since the ratio should remain fairly close to what it is now, but we are generating much more threat then previously beleived; a basic assumption would be multiplying the totals by 1.49 netting a range of 5006.4 to 4768 TPS a difference of about 5% at level 80 in tank gear.  So overall I type all this to say that the difference is minimal and that to ensure making the critical cap you sacrifice very little going with a solid tank weapon instead of a spell power one.

I love these changes.

After much debate, thought and, theory craft I have decided to propose a radical if crazy idea based on our mechanics changes for the protection paladin. Currently they are moving us to be much more attack power based and physical based, giving all our threat building spells attack power coefficients which are usually superior to the spell damage coefficients. I like these changes but something still bothers me and I thought it was Hammer of the Righteous at the time but now I come to see that perhaps the problem is our core mechanic Righteous Fury.

Righteous Fury is awesome it allows us to tank effectively but comes at a steep price; it pretty much reduces our reliance on white damage by a wide margin. White damage becomes an afterthought and for a melee based class this is terrible because white damage will always be a significant portion of our actual damage; even more so as our attack power rises from tank gear. Thus we have the issue where spell damage weapons still out perform physical weapons in threat because the white damage that is a significant portion of our damage has no threat multiplier.

A simple analysis may be in order: http://www.failsafedesign.com/maintankadin/viewtopic.php?p=227930#227930

Melee Damage: 9251

Avenger’s Shield: 2178 (4138.2 Threat)

Blood Corruption: 9640 (18316 Threat)

Holy Shield: 6024 (11445.6 Threat)

Consecration: 5596 (10632.4 Threat)

Seal of Corruption: 557 (1058.3 Threat)

Hammer of the Righteous 3929 (7465.1 Threat)

Judgement of Corruption 4908 (9325.2 Threat)

Hammer of Wrath 3378 (6418.2 Threat)

Total: 45641 (78050 Threat)

White Damage is 20% of the damage but only about 12% of the total threat due to Righteous Fury. Using DPS weapons will increase our DPS but our threat will not see an overall increase and Psi-Ven’s spreadsheet shows that to be true. Now what if our white damage was affected by the threat multiplier? That 9251 damage turns into 17576.9 threat, now obviously this may make our threat too good and the multiplier from Righteous Fury may have to be reduced but I think this would go a long way to making current tank weapons in Wrath and Burning Crusade a much better choice for threat and mitigation.

The idea is controversial yes, but given the direction they are moving the class I think it is warranted.

For protection specifically the class is facing a gear change as our gear shifts to Strength and Stamina with no spell damage, except for the odd piece, in sight. This understandably has many people upset and I am sure when the change goes live we will have even more paladins who do not visit message boards or follow news sights even more alarmed. But these changes are coming and I think a healthy amount of skepticism is good irrational fear that we are either being dumbed down or will be “warriors” are unfounded. 

But some basic tenets of what we hold true today will be changing: 

Anticipation no longer grants 20 Defense: This is will be a huge change for gearing concerns but we must understand that this affects warriors as much as it affects paladins after the patch. Health levels may drop as we have to regem gear for Defense rating to meet the requirement to be uncrittable. I think this is a good thing overall exceeding the critical cap is not hard once you accumulate the gear and yes I know for some that isn’t easy but this is the truth in the long run. 5% to dodge will always be good, 20 Defense not so much if you have gear that compensates for the loss. I think it will diversify gemming and enchanting of gear; but if I am wrong then healthy debate is always warranted. 

Warriors Lite: This means that we will look and play like warriors; I beg to differ but again this is more opinion then hard facts. The crux of this argument is usually the gear homogenization and the fact that we won’t have spell damage on our gear but we still do in the form of stamina and since we benefit from both spell power and attack power we still play differently and have different concerns then warriors. Thematically I don’t see a difference in Beta, I still use all the same spells and abilities just the mechanics and theory behind them have changed. But again this is all personal taste anyway. 

Change is Inevitable: This class is changing and we can either rail against it or look at the changes understand why they are changing and then play it to our advantage. I don’t think life will be terrible for us, if anything after we tuned the way we should be, this class will be stronger than ever and we won’t face the uphill battle e had before. I know some enjoyed the underdog role, but it is old for me; I gain no sense of satisfaction any more from playing that game and I quite enjoy being on hopefully equal footing everywhere else. 

P.S: Warriors, Death Knights, and Druids are not our enemies.

Naxx both 10 man and 25 man came out with this patch, gear for plate wearing tanks in live was changed to include strength and stamina dns dropped all spellpower from paladin tanking plate.  A good change netting me quite abit of attack power and block value.

This is going to be a fun expansion.  Also Paladin Naxx 10-Man Gear.

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.

Long Answer: Quite honestly one of the reasons we saved paladins for last is because there is a lot we wanted to change with them. Paladins are changing probably more than any other class. The tiny little bit you heard at the WWI is just the beginning.

The discussion about a new healing spell was just to say yes, we think paladins need another healing mechanic. It isn’t finished yet. We don’t want to just hand them a thinly disguised druid or priest spell. We also want paladins to tank more actively and want retribution paladins to have a little better control over their damage without the bursts feeling quite so random. (And no, that’s not all we’re looking at).

It’s all coming. It’s just a lot of work. Try to stay positive. Everyone in the alpha was invited because they have a close connection to someone at Blizzard. You’re here because we value your feedback.

SOURCE

Emphasis mine; I am not sure what they intend to do here but I am all for a little more interactivity for the Paladin, we don’t need the level of a warrior tank I suppose but something a little more active then hitting my Judgment Macro, Holy Shield and Consecrate would be nice; and Exorcism depending on the encounter.  It should fit into how we tank and not just be another cooldown but a genuine threat tool perhaps in reaction to a block akin to Revenge but we shall see.

The current dearth of news and the fact that we shall see significant paladin changes soon has my interest piqued; hopefully Blizzard delivers on the goods.

I have no doubt that both trees can do substantial damage in a PvE situation but I find it curious that at the bottom of the trees in the highest tiers there are feats that increase hate versus enemies, I guess as an off-tank or backup tank role. I couldn’t see myself picking these up unless I had to especially if I am trying to fulfill a pure DPS damage dealer role, a hybrid build most likely.

But looking at other feats like Improved Furious Inspiration, Heroic Call, Legendary Heroic Call, and War Lord one can see that the Conqueror is a definite asset to any raid or group as a melee buffer and damage dealer. Of course I still don’t know a lot of particulars of Age of Conan raids, do abilities affect the whole raid or are they limited to your party; that decision will determine the role and often location of the Conqueror in a given raid. If her abilities affect the raid as a whole, then the issue comes in, do they stack; because if they do then raid buffing could get out of hand quite quickly. I am going to make the assumption at this time that they won’t stack and that the most powerful buff effect will supersede the others but I will need more info on that.

This is all conjecture at this point, but I think the Conqueror is going to be a fun and tactical class to play in PvE and PvP and will definitely be wanted in any group for the buffs they bring to damage dealers and passive healing.

Goonheim – Age of Conan Conqueror Feat Calculator