Well well, anyone of you guys had un-explainable crushing blows? Random Hits that were not blocked and should have been?

It appears you can be crushed any time your shield touches your back, even on instant casts ( cleanse, consecration, exorcism, etc ). Seems to be a bug related to the animation your character is doing since Holy shield doesn't do it, but if you are hit while your hand is in the air for consecrate, for example, the 15% crushing chance returns.



According to this screen shot, no charges of holy shield were yet consumed, but a non blocked hit still got through.

If this is intended, we will have to time Consecration, Cleanse and Exorsism to be casted in between mob's swings, while not busting the GCD to not have Holy shield up. Wich will be impossible to do while AoE tanking Mobs.

Anyone else has had those observation?

I am not certain which other thread (this forum?) Cathela is referring to, but this was reported on the WOW bug forum and is being investigated according to Hortus.

Well Cathela against stockade mobs you're probably pretty close to 100% avoidance even without block, if you were in defense gear.

The video linked in the first page of the thread is very telling; right around 11:00 in, he takes a crushing blow right after Consecrate, and there's still charges of Holy Shield up visible on his buff list. He actually takes another crush with HS up around 13:30 when he drinks a potion and casts consecrate at the same time.

Edit: http://files.filefront.com/nightbane.../fileinfo.html This one.

I don't really remember where i have read it, but i've heard that during spellcasting a character's avoidance is essentially set to zero, i.e. it is not possible to dodge/parry when you are spellcasting. Am i seeing things, or there is strong evidences about that ?

It appears that that's exactly what's happening. The theory seems to be that when you cast a spell, you lose the ability to block until your next autoattack swing.

This is something that could easily have been part of the game all along, but nobody ever paid much attention to, since there were no classes that were intended to mix heavy-duty tanking along with spellcasting animations.

The same happens when you drink a potion, as I recall. Apparently the act of putting away your shield still allows you to dodge and parry, but blocking no longer is possible.

I never thought about that till today, but after testing it for more than 3 hours, I'd say this is indeed true. Didn't capture any data, but it's quite simple to find out yourselves if you're not sure. I had a Fury-Warrior beating on me for some high attackspeed and in maybe 70% of the tries he managed to hit me while I still had 3-4 charges of HS up, everytime I consecrated or used a (cheap lvl2) pot.
Having in mind that I'll tank Malchezzar tomorrow I really don't feel very well anymore.

I'm still not quite sure, if it will work, but as only the animation, not any CD seems to be triggered, it might be possible to reduce this issue to maybe 0,001 seconds as some kind of workaround. Putting every related spell into a macro and closing it with
/startattack (same as rightclick to reset the animation, but faster)
might work.
I'm not sure bout that, guess we'll just have to find out...

Well I can at least solve your Prince problem. Essentially paladins have the advantage of not only have very high threat but being able to dump it quickly. Use your wings and every trick in your books in phase 1, the idea is to build your threat to a point where you could just stand there for the rest of the time and it wouldn't matter(and it's possible with paladin threat). When phase 2 comes along stick to holy shield and your melee+SoR, he will eat through 4 HS charges in less than 10 seconds, watch for it and consecrate when HS drops that way your not loosing anything, you should have more than enough threat to keep aggro solid and when phase 3 comes you can go back to normal threat generation.

Tested it for a while and found some kind of little workaround...

2 macros should work for now:

Bind it to a key and hit it as fast as possible while casting one of the spells or while using a pot.
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1 macro for every related spell, but you'll have to hit it at least twice as /cast and /startattack are two seperated actions.
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Using /stopattack instead of /cleartarget + /targetlasttarget will work too, but I dont like it, as it can stop AA if you don't count the clicks exactly.

Both will reset the animation as soon as you reach /startattack so there is still maybe 0,1 seconds to be hit, but I guess that better than nothing. Gonna give this a try on Malchezaar in some hours, lets hope it reduces the risk....