This could just be my faulty memory, but wasn't Thunderclap always a melee slow? Granted the ability to use it in Defensive stance is a fairly recent change, but just before that were the 40 man raids with the top end requirement of 5+ Warrior tanks, any of whom who wasn't tanking could easily be a debuff bot for the actual tank.

From what I remember, most guilds didn't have to worry about it, as long as they were fortunate enough to get a Thunderfury in the raid, which applied the debuff for them. For those that didn't, the Warrior 2.5 set buffed TC up enough to match the speed reduction that TF would have applied.

And while my comment was mostly in jest, I do think that some of main reasons to bring Warriors to raids are now being severely diminished in the expansion. No more crushes, so Ferals pull ahead there, Sunder is still inferior to EA, and now a TC+Demo redundancy from other classes. I guess we're still dealing with an incomplete picture though, so I'll save my whine until I know the full story.

Yeah, I mainly meant that until recently TC wasn't especially useful in a tanking situation due to it only being allowed in Battle Stance. Ice Armor is the original "all the time slow" (and of course I wasn't being entirely serious either).

I do think its far too early to say who will be viable at what. It is safe to assume that the dev team is working to homogenize roles to make balancing 10-mans easier (I would assume), but I would be surprised if prot warriors became the least desirable tank (for all we know Shield Block Values will be going through the roof now that it will be an actual mitigation rather than a vessel to uncrushable).

Regardless, we are getting off topic.

Well, if there's a Judgement on the mob, that would mean that you already have a paladin in the raid. The paladin can keep her own Judgement up if it's really important.

I didn't think of the impacty of not using Curse of Doom which would certainly change it. Looking back my tone in my last post may not have been the best, so I apologize for that. I wouldn't be surprised if the damage cost for a warrior was fairly close to that, though.

Looks a bit like that is going on in all jobs. 3 ranged hybrid dps speccs got aoe, you mentioned prot tanks already and ferals get a thunderclap like ability, last stand++ and demo roar up to warrior level. Healers so far got abilities that other healers had and they lacked, hot for shamans, raid heal for druids. CC got spread over even more classes and raid/party buffs/debuffs got buffed for speccs that lacked them.

If paladins get some kind of raid heal and a hot it will be interesting to see if they can actually still get enough differences into the classes to make some better for a job than others. I doubt it would be a very good move to switch from the sometimes very annoying point of "only specc x of class y can do this job" to the distinctiveness lacking "any healer/tank/dps can do any job".

I'm guessing this is very good for 10-mans but for 25-mans it might make it boring. Homogenization has its limits.

That really depends on how you look at it. Even if other classes got abilities to make roles more fungible, the actual flavor with which they perform those roles varies.

For example, Druids got a raid heal, but as a HOT-type spell, keeping their HOT healing flavor.

Mind Sear is an AOE, but operates quite differently compared to Seed of Corruption, which itself is different from Arcane Explosion. Hurricane is yet another, but the intense attack speed debuff it provides makes it more feasible to cast as a tank helper even in situations where large scale AOE would not be called for.

It would still be interesting to give Paladins a short range mega heal or some ability that facilitates Paladins being in the thick of it with the melee and healing. Maybe even a self buff. "Combat Healer" which increases spell casting speed by 30% but reduced the range of your heals by 50%

I've always wanted a healing component to Consecration that heals allies in the affected area. That would be HoT.

A HoT that costs 700 mana for 512 base healing over 8 seconds...

Consecration wouldn't work especially well as a heal unless some things were changed. Right now it is coded as a DoT and can not crit (making a fairly large portion of the Holy tree useless to it) and costs an absolute ton of mana for a very small area (8 yard radius is more condensed than most melee groups stand, not even counting trying to hit a tank) and effect (it's HPM would be less than half of Renew's on a single target).

It does bring up an interesting idea of prot pallys providing secondary AoE healing in addition to tanking though, much like Shadow Priests can do. It would be a balance nightmare but interesting nonetheless.

Judgement of Light is pretty much the Pally HoT right now. Actually, making JoL Proc a decent HoT would be a pretty interesting change. Add it to my list of crazy.

If it gets 92% of healing added to the duration I would use it as a heal sometimes. However, that is a pretty high mana cost and low range that isn't viable as a long-term solution to a Pally's lack of HoT.

Actually, I kind of like the 'convert Consecrate into healing' idea. I think it'd have to be a different spell though...or else have an instant that you can manually convert Consecrate to healing mode...else holy paladins wouldn't be able to use it while soloing or whatever. Something like the following should work though:

Holy Ground:
Mana Cost: 1000 mana
2 minute coooldown
Sanctifies the land underneath the paladin in a (10? 12?) yard radius for 8 seconds, healing all party and raid members who enter the area for 500 health per second.

You can even improve it with the following:

Improved Holy Ground:
Every time your melee swing refreshes Judgment of Light on an enemy, it has a 33/66/100% chance of refreshing your Holy Ground. In addition, the cooldown of Holy Ground is reduced by 20/40/60 secs.


The numbers can be played with, obviously, to make it eat up a good chunk of mana up front, and to balance it properly. It's also only going to be truly useful in certain situations...obviously, not every boss or mob is going to stay stationary, for instance, so if the boss moves, the pally will have to cast Holy Ground again to get it lighting up underneath the melee & tanks. It also forces the pally to be swinging at the mob, and be up in the kill area, rather than hanging back and cowering while wearing full plate. But for having the odd pull happen where the tanks are sometimes out in front, having a pally run with them to light off Holy Ground can help smooth out the pull.

Edit: Whatever happens, I want some method of having the holy paladin healing through combat mechanics, not holy/flash of light. The healing mechanic for paladins has *always* seemed too far off from what would be intuitive for me. Why wear plate if you're going to be at the back of the pack?

Why not just make it Ret-only. That would fit in with the hybrid nature of the class, and turn you into a mini resto shaman that also dps'es and keeps up judgements.

Because why on earth would you give added *healing* utility to a non-healing spec? Oh, and by the way, NOT to the actual healing spec?

Improved Leader of the Pack - Spell - World of Warcraft

Adding a consecrate-like healing ability would make more sense in holy. Adding a healing effect to consecrate could work for either one, depending on whether it's strong enough to count as an AOE heal or considered more of a utility function. As a funny note, adding the healing effect base would be a bad thing for prot pallies because it would lower the mana they recieve from Spiritual Attunement. As such it should either be deep in one of the other trees or, if they up the tanking abilities of non-prot pallies*, make sure it's a separate spell instead of a modification to normal consecrate.

*on that note, I hope that Holy Shield becomes a base ability.

Hmm. I was forgetting about Imp'd LotP. But then, it's not really something that can be targeted, or controlled by the druid in any way. After all, he can't push the other group member's buttons for them, and he has no control over whether they crit or not. I also wouldn't say that BoSanc is useless...perhaps it should scale better, but for AoE tanking, every little bit helps. It's kind of like Thorns in that aspect, and there's usually enough pallies in 25 man raids that for the tanks, it doesn't take away from anything to throw it up there.

As far as what I'd suggested, maybe you can tell me what I'm missing here? Basically what I see is one of three options for use of it:

A) Use in melee group. Make the radius big enough to encompass most of the people who'll be in range, but small enough that ranged attackers will have to worry about getting in the 10% overthreat zone instead of being in the 30%. Refreshed constantly through the paladin's attacks, yet should tick long enough that if a targeted heal is needed, he can be johnny-on-the-spot for it.

B) Use for (as mentioned above) AoE incoming damage. It's only good for 8 secs, and like CoH, is useful within only a small zone. It'll be good enough to get people back up somewhat from raidwide damage, but if people are spread out, then it's less useful. Only as good as people's situational awareness is, but has an added benefit of being able to replace a priest or shammie's group heals in 10 mans...which would mean they could tune various encounters, especially T8/9, a bit more tightly.

C) Use to make an ongoing version of Lightwell. (Only one that worries me in any way.) Set up a Holy Ground some 20 yards off the boss, put ranged in there, let the pally go to town on the boss to refresh that spot. This could be either designed for (in 25 mans especially) or designed against (by the simple expedient of requiring people to move.) Except in a few cases, though, perhaps some gimmick fight, I doubt most groups would use this as a primary use.

Something else...and something that I've never seen tested. I know you can't get the benefits from having more than one Judgment of the same type up. If it's not even possible to have the same Judgment up more than once (in this case, JoL), then you're only going to have one being refreshed...and that should be melee zone if at all possible. You'll be able to have multiple one-shots, but only one area with a constant heal zone. Put up a cast time with the initial spell, and that should finish balance concerns. (Like I said above, the actual numbers for the spells are there just as a basic idea. I don't spend any serious amount of time messing with numbers, so I know the balance from the numbers themselves would be way off as it stands.)

If I'm missing something that would make it way off-balance, I'm not sure what it is. I'm just trying to toss out something that would fit the Paladin class, and be an alternative to hiding in the shadows, with only two choices: big heal, little heal.

Edit: Oh yeah, something else I forgot. Only Consecrate or Holy Ground can be applied from a single pally...not both at once.

Sorry if this has been posted (couldn't find anything using search), but I saw this post from a blue listed on the WotLK Alpha Wiki - Alpha Leaks page:

So Blizzard is looking at making certain abilities raid wide.

Make windfury totem ability a debuff applied by windfury weapon.

Make Avenging Wrath and Heroism raid wide buffs which all apply a 'drained' debuff lasting 2-3 min, preventing you from being affected by another one of these spells.

And...done.

Avenging Wrath raidwide? That's a paladin-only buff. I guess a little more group buffing would be nice to make sure Ret paladins don't get stuck into the "leftovers" group, but randomly saying it should be raidwide makes as much sense as saying Blade Flurry should be raidwide on a cooldown.

It would make paladins more interchangeable with shaman (both have bloodlust now, except they're stylistically different and share a debuff-based CD), meaning 10-man groups would be more flexible with group comps and still have that "POP BLOODLUST FOR BURST" factor available.

At the very least it's posted here, maybe something blizzard designers haven't thought of and will give them yet another way of possibly consolidating raid utility (kind of like curse of elements ^^).

Oh, good point. However, if they're on the same cooldown, you only want one or the other, and the paladin essentially gets a DPS nerf because AW is unusable. If they're on different cooldowns, then you end up still wanting both, defeating the purpose, no?

Me, I'd like to see Paladin fear taken off of cooldown so that we could be reliable CC in an undead/demon heavy instance.