Protection and you! - Page 172

Wrathblood · 10/25/08, 2:07 PM

Cathela,

Swapping consecrate for HoW in a 969 rotation seems like an easy way to pick up a big chunk of threat/dps, and by the numbers (I'm not in beta and can't test) HoR might be worth swapping out as well.

However, you're quite correct that ShoR isn't in my rotation on live, and its kind of a huge thing to be missing (as you note, both from a threat/dps standpoint as well as from a "filling out the rotation" stand point).

I'll start posting on this again once we start hitting 80 and I can play with the numbers for a while.

♦ Oggie · 10/25/08, 2:24 PM

I'm not sure I agree with you there Cathela (re: rage vs mana). I've not raided much at 80 so I will defer to your experience, but while we're both getting 'aggro stuff' from being hit, with the relative cheapness of warrior prot abilities (assuming stuff like FR), I have found that our JoW is simply not always equivilant to autoattack- with of course, the proviso that they choose between higher threat or better rage gen. I don't think BoW makes up the difference, with the secondary issue of needing 3 pally buffs? Our primary is Sanc, our secondary is Kings, and besides hunters as far as I'm aware nobody else needs 3.

Obviously our mana-starved TPS and DPS is considerably higher once we get our 'big gun', and if memory serves shield slam is ranged hit mechanic (which I had thought ShoR was on). Are we 100% sure that it's spell now? I agree it's really stupid that it's spell if its' spell. If they make it scale ever-so-slightly better, and move it to ranged hit I think that might bring us more in line, but I'm honestly not sure. If nobody has test logs or anything I'm going to log over to beta in a while and combatlog mess around with it.

One thing pointed out to me last night was that our tanking rotation, unlike everyone else's tanking rotation/dps rotation/healing rotation, is a hell of a lot less proc based/responsive. This doesn't bug me- though I've not really tanked with the new system nearly enough to know if it will eventually- but does it bother any of the rest of you guys?

edit:
For clarity's sake, I don't feel that SA and rage gen from damage taken are even remotely equivilant, due to the relative cost differential. On the flip side, JoW we can choose to get all the time, as opposed to white hits vs HS/Cleave spam. I think the balance is slightly warrior favored, if not hugely.

Edit 2 for Cath (GO RECURSION):
While I don't disagree, I don't see what else they can really buff without giving us a threat modifier, and frankly I don't want those anymore. We already have a pretty psycho threat modifier on ShoR last I looked at it (overall, including 1.9x + the buff to RF that I cannot for the life of me remember), and I've really prefered most of our threat coming from damage (as warrior threat generally is) with a moderately static modifier. I'm uneasy about our threat modifier on any specific ability coupled with our already-higher 1.9 base (plus whatever modifer is on there for WotLK) increasing our threat dramatically while, as you said, hurting DPS. I get the ShoR (I'm sticking to my acronym!) hitting too hard in pvp, but since it's basically our only hard hitting pvp ability as a full prot spec I'm not sure if that's the biggest deal ever (with 23k+ in decent pvp gear for an average player, 2.9k per hit noncrit, assuming generious gear stacking) isn't exactly as huge as it sounds.

I'm also fairly worried about DPS while OTing (god that sentence hurt to type), as well as of course grinding and farming. It's somewhat balanced by JoL selfheals and that GLORIOUS PW:S ability we get at 80 that I cannot recall the name of, but really I'd like them to tune up damage on a few abilities or seals and lower our threat coefficent enough to keep us in line.

By the way, I'm perfectly aware that warriors are not the other valid tanks. However, I don't feel comfortable enough to do DK comparisions- ignoring the fact they do NOT scale with incoming damage, which is beyond weird- and ferals work with crazy moon logic. So warriors are the only ones I feel seriously well enough versed to compare to.

Cathela · 10/25/08, 2:26 PM

Oh right. I'm not claiming that HoW isn't worth using as a tank. I think right now my HoW does more damage than a single-target HotR, so if you're running SoV you'd want to use HoW over HotR as you suggest. My point was just that you can't add another ability to an already-full rotation without knocking something else out. So in practice, losing HoW is going to be at least partly made up for by casting something else.

Just for example in my gear HotR hits for ~950 and HoW for ~1100. So the actual damage difference due to HW isn't 1100 damage every 6 seconds, it's 150 damage every 6 seconds, which needless to say is a much smaller amount. There may be other ways to jigger the cycle around to fit HoW in more efficiently, but the point is that no matter what you do, you have to give up something to squeeze it in, which is going to reduce the threat gain from HoW pretty substantially.

Incidentally, I hate this change anyway for other reasons, mainly to do with PvP, soloing, and dps'ing when not tanking. Just so you don't think I'm defending this as "it makes no difference".

♦ Oggie · 10/25/08, 2:48 PM

I was going to make this an edit3: but I figured 2 was the limit:

Also I hate, hate, hate having all our threat tied to a single ability because what happens when that ability doesn't hit? If 30% of our overall TPS (or more!) is coming from one thing, and it misses 4 times in a row, thanks for playing. That's not good design and that's not fun. I'm all for having one primary threat move but already this one is far too huge in my opinion.

Perhaps making HotR have a glyph for double damage on the first target? That would neatly give us extra DPS while OTing, higher farming dps, and probably not affect us TOO much for tanking TPS.

Cathela · 10/25/08, 2:57 PM

Originally Posted by Oggie

One thing pointed out to me last night was that our tanking rotation, unlike everyone else's tanking rotation/dps rotation/healing rotation, is a hell of a lot less proc based/responsive. This doesn't bug me- though I've not really tanked with the new system nearly enough to know if it will eventually- but does it bother any of the rest of you guys?

edit:
For clarity's sake, I don't feel that SA and rage gen from damage taken are even remotely equivilant, due to the relative cost differential. On the flip side, JoW we can choose to get all the time, as opposed to white hits vs HS/Cleave spam. I think the balance is slightly warrior favored, if not hugely.

Fair point about JoW (especially post-nerf). On the other hand, one thing I didn't mention that works hugely in our favor is the difference between Bloodrage (~2 shield slams per minute with talents) and Divine Plea (around 10 SotRs per minute when you factor in talents and the difference between base mana and total mana). DP by itself basically pays for your primary threat generator.

Again, I'm not going to claim we're precisely equal, and the balance may very well favor the rage-based tanks. But it seems to me that things are close enough for now, and if we turn out to be a bit mana-starved in raids I think we'll have the tools to do all right until the devs can take care of it.

And about the rotations: Yes, it absolutely bothers me. What I find frustrating is that very early in the development cycle the devs said "We know that the warrior threat rotation is way too static and rigid, and we're going to shake that up" so they added the procs and stuff -- and then when they did prot paladins they built us a static and rigid system. In particular they said they didn't like the way Shield Block worked where you just hit it every time the CD came up, so they changed that -- and yet Holy Shield works exactly the same way. Ostensibly it's a dynamic mitigation that you activate when you need it, but in practice it's just a buff you keep up all the time by hitting a button every 9 seconds.

And aside from that, it's still on the GCD, which Shield Block never was. This ties into the points Wrath and I are talking about: Using HoW on a low-health mob you're tanking doesn't help you, but it should, shouldn't it? Tanking a demon or undead doesn't give you very much more threat, because you can't fit Exo and Holy Wrath into your rigid tanking rotation.

One way I could see to improve this would be to dramatically increase the duration of Holy Shield (30 seconds at least, possibly up to 10 minutes like shaman shields), with the same cooldown and same number of charges. Basically, increase your ability to carry unused Holy shield charges. That way, when the cooldown on HS finishes, you actually have to make a decision: Do you need to refresh HS now because most of the charges got used up? Or do you have enough charges still available that you can leave the current HS up and use the GCD to do something else? It's a reactive choice, and you have to respond to the situation at the moment; it breaks up the rotation in interesting ways.

(This might require an increased mana cost, which would be fine; if you're in a situation where you're burning through all the charges in 8 seconds you're probably getting enough mana back from BoS and/or SA that it doesn't really matter.)

[e]:

None of the above should be taken to mean that I don't like the new changes. I like them -- no, I love them -- a lot. A whole lot. I'm absolutely drooling to level up to 80 on live and start tanking Naxx with all the fun new toys. I'm just saying that a year from now, the rigid rotation is what we're going to be complaining about.

And in response to Oggie's latest, my guess is that the limiting factor on allowable damage for us is going to be PvP considerations. Prot paladins were (correctly) considered a joke in PvP in TBC, but the WotLK stuff gives us a lot more toys to play with, and even if prot isn't optimal for PvP now, it probably wouldn't take a whole lot to make us overpowered.

♦ Oggie · 10/25/08, 3:27 PM

Why would double pene- oh, right, Divine Plea (sorry, in guild meme that's getting a LOT of use). That's a good point, bloodrage is sort of DP's bitch, but not having it on live is more a source of frustration than anything else. The threat gen from that is roughly .5x5500x.25, versus um....75 (in terms of pure power gain threat), regardless of the threat we get -from- the abilities.

Actually that's pretty brilliant about holy shield- you're ALWAYS going to be burning through the charges if you need to refresh early, by definition, and that's trivially more than enough mana to refresh HS. Bump it up to near Cons level of cost, and you have to make a very active decision. It's high TPS, good mitigation, but costs a ton- so do you HS or not?

I still think we need more things to choose to do, but as I said, it doesn't bother me much. But in a year from now...who knows?

Also the insanity of Sanc is glorious in undergeared instances, despite my issues with it comparatively. I wear full SWP gear, and I pull faster than the healer can keep up with, and am easier to heal than his spirit regen. Glorious. Man I'd love a 15 or 20 second CD on Avenger's shield, or again, a glyph for it. It's simply nutty how quickly I can move. I ended up running most of the heroics with a hunter and we traded AS and MD every other pull, eating mobs alive. Untill we ran into the brick wall of Sethekk Hall mobs that silence and had to actually slow down.

Russta · 10/25/08, 3:59 PM

Pick up Glyph of the Wise and when you get low on mana, pop Seal of Wisdom and HotR it all back. That's been working wonders for me in five mans.

Cathela · 10/25/08, 3:59 PM

Originally Posted by Oggie

Actually that's pretty brilliant about holy shield- you're ALWAYS going to be burning through the charges if you need to refresh early, by definition, and that's trivially more than enough mana to refresh HS. Bump it up to near Cons level of cost, and you have to make a very active decision. It's high TPS, good mitigation, but costs a ton- so do you HS or not?

Thanks. Earlier I was thinking that HS should be a long buff that just regenerated its own charges passively at a small cost per charge, but this version leads to this need to make decisions, which I think the devs would like, and it would be a very easy change to make.

I agree with you about liking more DPS better than more threat, and it seems like generally the devs want to do it that way whenever possible. I'm just saying that if I were a dev I'd be worried about PvP damage scaling on SotR (and Shield Slam for that matter) and would be real hesitant to buff their damage.

As far as non-tanking dps, I'm finding it pretty easy as an offtank to maintain a little more than 50% of the MT's threat with RF up, which keeps me a bit ahead of the dps. If I didn't have RF up, my threat would be down around 20% of the MT's threat; when I get SotR maybe that'll go up to about 30%? Compared to dps classes doing 45% of the MT's threat, that doesn't sound too shabby to me, but we'll have to see.

And I'm using the acronym "SotR" even though it's plainly wrong, because I believe the name of the spell should be "Shield of the Righteous". This is my quixotic attempt to get other people using the same acronym in hopes of forcing the devs to change the name through popular pressure.

Russta · 10/25/08, 5:42 PM

So I threw Avengers Shield at the two mobs in front of Selin Fireheart today and it bounced up and pulled him.

That was interesting.

♦ Oggie · 10/25/08, 6:46 PM

Avenger's shield has had it's bounce range -highly significantly- increased.

Also, turns out that when you're attempting to hold aggro, use the highest rank of cons and not be a goddamn moron (been using rank 3 for the past, um, 3 weeks?)

Smurrf · 10/25/08, 7:09 PM

Supposedly, they're reducing the bounce range in an upcoming patch...which will be highly welcome. I do NOT need to pull additional packs in a tight area.

Yenadar · 10/25/08, 8:32 PM

Originally Posted by Tilted

You're definitely right about getting the most out of a single application, but since he's the only person we need to worry about we just chain cast it on him at the start. Typically our sustained threat is enough to allow him to go nuts for the long run, and it's the spikey damage at the beginning that causes problems. Plus, the cooldown is short enough that if someone starts riding threat later on we can use it again if needed.

And yeah, telling DPS to wait anymore just doesn't mean as much as it used to.

Hell, half our pulls see ranged attacking the first target before a tank is even there, and thanks to the charge-in-defensive-stance change they can pretty much unload without worry.

I tested Hand of Salvation with a friend yesterday. It apparently works exactly like the Mage Invisibility buff prior to actually becoming invisible. It reduces their threat by a percentage as intended, if the player receiving the buff does nothing. If they take damage or take an action, the threat drop ends, although the buff remains.

I.E, casting it on someone doing a DPS rotation, you will be lucky to even get that first 2% drop. This is likely not intended, and probably just a cut-and-paste of code from the invisibility spell without enough changes.

santipants · 10/25/08, 9:39 PM

Originally Posted by Smurrf

Supposedly, they're reducing the bounce range in an upcoming patch...which will be highly welcome. I do NOT need to pull additional packs in a tight area.

This has been the most annoying thing while tanking. I have resorted to body pulls when I'm not sure if shield is going to end up aggroing 1 or 2 extra groups. It's been happening often. Reducing the bounce range will make me a happy panda.

Denogran · 10/25/08, 11:49 PM

Originally Posted by santipants

This has been the most annoying thing while tanking. I have resorted to body pulls when I'm not sure if shield is going to end up aggroing 1 or 2 extra groups. It's been happening often. Reducing the bounce range will make me a happy panda.

Haha, I've had the exact opposite sentiment actually. With the nerfs, all I've wanted to do is grab as many mobs as I can get a hold of, and the shield's been awesome for doing that. But I'd imagine that when I get back to challenging content in the expansion I'll be glad to have a non-mega-bouncy shield.

Merovengian · 10/26/08, 3:16 AM

Originally Posted by Denogran

Haha, I've had the exact opposite sentiment actually. With the nerfs, all I've wanted to do is grab as many mobs as I can get a hold of, and the shield's been awesome for doing that. But I'd imagine that when I get back to challenging content in the expansion I'll be glad to have a non-mega-bouncy shield.

I agree with loving to masspull now, but the shield does seem over-zealous in tight spaces. Its almost enough to make me glyph for solo target shield.... almost.

I suspect it was intentionally made that way so we would be tempted to waste a slot.