Simple question (because the other combat mechanics thread fell off the world) - what's the innate threat reduction for shaman/paladins? Is it the same for both? I do not remember the numbers offhand, but hopefully someone else has them stored away in the canyons of your mind.

Only paladins have the threat reduction. It was actually intended as a nerf, so they couldn't tank by only healing themselves.

:(

Earthshock, heal self is all I do to tank really.

I'm pretty sure Anglakel is the worst tank on mal'ganis so i'm glad i can't heal myself to hold agro because its just bad. I rolled a warrior for that job.

Shaman heals give 0.5 threat per point healed (basic healing threat).
I think paladin heals give 0.375 threat per point healed (25% innate reduction).

The reasoning for this is that paladin is a hybrid tank while shaman is not. Paladins AOE tanking through healing was overpowered in beta, in much the same way that using paladin as an aggro-pole on phase 1 Nef (when BoW gave threat) was very effective.

Paladin heals used to be around 25% threat of all other healing classes.
It was bumped up to 75% in 1.9 riht at the time Caydiem told us we were designed to have low threat heals to make us better healers.

GG no class rep, now where is my untalented BoK, SoComm and repentance please ?

Judia

Whilst Blessing of Kings is a definite need if your an alliance raider, I wouldn't class it like Evocation or Tactical Mastery - you only need 1 paladin with it, after all. And SoCommand is simply another damage talent, its not a make or break ability.
Like Rogues, I don't think Paladins actually have any "must have " talents. Sure, there are plenty of powerful potions, and certain builds are much better at raiding than others, but there are none that are required to simply make the class function.

And no class has a "rep" - this isn't EQ, and if you look you'll find most classes have had various community reps post on their forums over the past 12 months in some form or another.

This says more about the state of paladin talents.

Paladin talents have always been compelte and utter trash. The last reasonable survey showed that less than 10% of all paladins have ANY 31 point talent. Simply put all the paladin talents are either sufficiently bad, or low in the talent tree they made no difference. Further there are only a very very few talents that impact our raiding ability, BoK, Holy power, Illumination. Thats pretty much every raid useful talent available to a paladin. And holy power would never be demanded by any reasonable raid. The running joke about paladins has always been the power of the 0/0/0 talent build because our talents are that unimportant. Paladins dont even have a choice of play style unlike every other class.

The reason paladins werent forced to spec one tree the same way druids were was because we didnt have a talent as good as innervate. Give paladins innervate as 31point protection and see how many guilds start demanding it.

Furhter, Caydiem was through and through a druid. No offence, but she clearly had a biased view of class balance which could be seen time and time again in her forum posts. She was defiantely "pro druid", the question isnt wether you had a CM "onside" but how much influence she had. Now given that she explicitly told the paladins that she couldnt actually answer any of the Dev questions in their meetiing for the paladin patch, nor justify any of the player sugestions because of her lack of experience in playing the class, Id say that the druid review is at least in part due to having Caydiem play a druid. Even if it was only that she could given much clearer and better reasoned feedback to the Devs.

Judia

Link/source ?

Wow, you really like to whine vociferously.

Th numbers were tested and posted in the US forums, however the post itself is pretty much lost. There was a very significant threat increase on paladin healing threat during the 1.9 patch, as a number of paladins reported pulling aggro and aggro issues on a large number of encounters where previous experience had shown none.

Caydiem did post saying paladins were designed to have low threat heals to make them better heals. Again the post is probably lost to the depths of Blizzards forums, but it was posted in blue and upset quite a few paladins who remebered being told the nerf was to stop us heal-tanking.

Im not sure which of the above points warrented being redirected to the official forums. I certainly found it infuriating to not only to see a blue post an untruth, but it was at a time where the increased the threat on our heals without putting it in the patch notes.

Unfortunately, while it was a great post, it is lost somewhere in the bowls of Blizzards archieves.

A US paladin started a forum post in which paladins posted their talent specs and to which around 125 people replied. Of those the most interesting results were:
1) The number of people specing 31 points into any talent tree was incredably low
2) There was an exceptionally large number of different spec (something like 40), indicating a lack of clearly powerful/useful talents which were popular enough to cause people to spec fo them.
3) Holy was the most popular talent tree, then retribution. A very small percentile speced to protection, and almost noone had Holy shield.

If someone could dig this post out Id leove to read it again. Raised some great points.

And the survey was on the official forums and was therefore only replied to by incompetant retards with no concept of raiding or of how to play their class.

Sorry if that sounds a little offensive, but the idea that a survey on blizz forums gives results that mean anything is plain silly.

With all respect, making judgement based on survey held of official boards is not very good idea. How many raiding paladins are there, 1%, less ?

And for the sake of arguing - #2 is also indiciating that talents propose a diversity in specs, which is a good thing, isnt it ?

Edit - oh, hi there Khly :)

Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and yes Im aware of how the official forums are regarded. However I would say that talent specs are not what you might recall "rocket science", infact I would expect most of the people you refer to to fall quickly to "cookie cutter builds", the complete lack of cookie cutter builds for the paladin class, even when surveyed amoungst what you might consdier to be the less able or sensible section of a class population is still intresting.

Almost every class has a number of standard builds that would feature high in any survey of popular builds. Most classess would have a number of highly popular 31 point talents as well, and yet paladins lack either of these.

Yes number have to be taken with a pinch of salt, but that does not make them worthless in themselves provided you apply a bit of common sense.

That all depends on the reason.
If, say, every class had 3 good 31 point talents, 3 good 21 point talents that made people consider taking a 31 point or two 21 point talents, and 3 well balanced trees I would agree with you 100%.

However many paladins feel that the reason for the diversity of specs isnt because there are a number of equally viable and interesting specs, but that all the specs are too similar. No matter how you spec, there really isnt much difference in how the paladin class plays. How many people could tell the difference between a paladin with 31/0/20, 20/0/31 or 0/0/11 ?

Diversity is good when it comes from an excess of viable choices allowing people to pick a set of talents that caters to their playstyle. Diversity is bad when it arises because where you place your talent points has little to no influence on the character, you toon simply lacks individuality.

I'd rape a whore to get all my mana back on a crit heal.

Agree 100%
Blizzard showed a lack of foresight when reducing paladin healing threat. I believe they may be showing a similar lack of forsight with some of their other recent class changes.

However, surely you can forgive me a little ire at being told that we have low threat heals to make us better healers at a time when the threat on heals was being increased, and without it being made clear in patch notes ?

Interestingly AQ has done away with the issue of heal aggro in many fights, many instance fights involve constant deaggro ticks or script events which are outside the classing tank, heal, nuke maxim.

Paladin heals are already mana effiecient, really illumination is just the icing on the cake unless you go the whole hog and stack up on +spellcrit cloth.

:laugh:

"<Random CM> once said Blizzard made this design choice because ______" is never something to put any stock in. If Kalgan posts saying "we made this change because _____" then pay attention to that. But CMs are just conduits who may not understand the information they're tasked to convey, or who may have misunderstood the dev answer to their question, or been unaware that the dev misunderstood their question in the first place.

And I don't really see the raid endgame as an evolution so much as a layering of concepts that will later be reintroduced as the basis for more intricate variations. I doubt AQ heralds a new age of aggro-less fights (sup Ouro) but rather the introduction of encounters that can't be tanked conventionally and which require mobility and adaptability by the raid group as a whole.