◊ Cathela

The difficulty with that is that healing and tanking requirements between encounters tend to rise and fall together. Generally, encounters that require fewer tanks require either the same number of healers, or fewer healers. But you almost never see a situation where you remove tanks from a raid and then add healers.

In Sunwell for example, Kalecgos generall requires 3 tanks and 9 healers, then Brutallus requires 2 tanks and 7 healers, Felmyst 2 tanks and 8-10 healers, etc. In BT the encounter that requires the most tanks (Gurtogg) is also the one that requires the most healers. Archimonde is the only encounter I can think of in T6 or Sunwell that has a low tank requirement and a high healer requirement. By and large, the idea of switching from tanking to healing doesn't really mesh with the requirements of encounters.

Classes that can tank and dps don't have a problem with this, because more dps is always welcome; there's no such thing as too much dps.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Smurrf

While the rest of your post I have no issue with, this part I do, and goes directly against what you said previously. It's all about flavor. I personally like the feel of someone in Plate getting right up in the face of some monster and bashing it down. If I'm not the tank, I still want to be bashing it down. I very specifically feel that a paladin is a Holy warrior...someone who heals when necessary, but should be right in the fray, doing what he can to beat the baddie into dust. Someone who's wearing plate should not be in the back of the fight.

However, that's me, and my opinion. I understand that it's not for everyone, and that people should have options for doing what the want to do. Personally? I feel that if we're not tanking, that our contributions from taking off-spec talents in Ret and going DPS should approximately equal taking an equivalent number of off-spec talents in Holy and healing...and that the direction we take with our off-spec talents should match what our desires for non-tanking duties are.

For you to say that the Prot tree should point to doing just healing when not tanking...it just comes off as incredibly overbearing and pushy, and just rubs me the wrong way. It's very close to the old style of 'You rolled a Paladin, why aren't you healing?' that we faced not very long ago. I LIKE not being forced to heal, just because I want to tank in a somewhat different manner than the other classes, thank you.

 

Worldie

Might also be noted that our main threat skill (ShoR) scales better than Warrior's Shield Slam.
The threat generated is scaling a lot... look at what it scales on:
230% block value as holy damage -> 190% from Righteous Fury -> 20% added threat baseline
And on top of this, you get 15% more strenght, AND 30% more block just from talents.
And as bonus, you get a 13% damage bonus if you got a Unholy DK in the raid.

The scaling of protection paladins at the moment is quite wonderful: any stat you get will increase your threat.
Block value? ShoR.
AP? All the main skills
STR? ShoR, and all the main skills due to added AP
STA? Again, all the main skills due to the Stamina>Spelldamage conversion
Even avoidance... increases threat generated due to power gains from Blessing of Sanctuary

I don't see us having any threat problem to be addressed, even with the removal of Salvation.

What we'd really need is a rework of Hammer of the Righteous, since looks like tanking weapons being still very fast (1.5 - 1.6), and at that point, a spelldamage weapon still outperforms a tank one.

EDIT: Also, "dpsing" with Shield of Righteousness looks like being quite interesting

 

◊ Oggie

Obviously we need something to do while not tanking. They've implied it's probably going to be DPS. Personally I kind of prefer healing but without a better mana regen mechanic that will not be possible (not that DPS looks likely either).

However, until they do give us something (and they will do something), there's not a lot of point to be talking about it.

 

Dippyskoodlez

Infinite mana from BoSanc, because that pesky rogue is on you in Alterac Valley. The ability to effectively heal yourself, with mana effeciency, and powerful heals that are viable enough for a raid. Uh. No. Does anyone else but me see the awesomeness in PVP a prot paladin would suddenly have because we're able to heal, and can stack enough avoidance it takes a full group of 5-10 people to kill you? It would be a druids Natural Perfection talent not only taken to an extreme, but giving us a boat ton of block value to compensate. I honestly don't think an offhealing role would be viable. if anything, it really would make us completely overpowered if we have ANY mob of a sort attacking us. Combine that all with a spec something similar to This and not only do you have a self sustaining, cleansing flag carrier, but you're going to dish out a living crap ton of reflective damage.

Lets see what this adds up to-
*Touched by the light for 30% larger critical heals, 30% stam to spell power.
*Sheath of light for 30% AP to spell power, and a 60% HoT for your critical heals
*Improved retribution aura which now scales with your DOUBLE spell power talents
*Eye for an eye reflecting 20% of ALL critical strikes
*Improved BoM for extra AP AND spell power, combined with Sheath.
*Reckoning for stacking SoV because of the improved proc rate now
*Ardent defender for a MASSIVE amount of virtually unleapfroggable damage reduction in PVP.
*Divine guardian so when you need to bubble for your universal cleanse, you also reduce party/raid damage for 30%


Not overpowered at all IMO. /sarcasm

 

Fiola

The focus fire of a few casters should be more than enough to take down a Prot paladin by shutting down his healing or out-DPSing his mana pool.

The spec you listed has no spiritual focus, and has no instant healing. Do you honestly think a paladin with that spec can pull off a 2.5 second heal under the focus fire of 3+ characters? (there's no avoidance when casting; no pushback resistance means those are 3.5 second heals) And what sort of healing efficiency/throughput would that paladin actually have? Healing gear means it doesn't have avoidance. Avoidance gear means it doesn't have good healing stats.


I'm not seeing the overpowered-ness of a tank/heal hybrid, given TBC PvP.

 

Dippyskoodlez

Currently, you're right, theres no overpoweredness at all. My point is that if they were to ADD healing talents to fix the gaping holes in a prot paladins ability to heal, that previously listed, already dangerous porcupine spec only becomes absolutely, utterly overpowered broken. I run around in battlegrounds in my full T6 currently, and it still takes massive amounts of damage to actually bring me down, especially if I have a healer. That porcupine spec currently even at 70, while somewhat limited, is still having a dangerous amount of reflective damage being done.

 

◊ Cathela

But what do you actually do while you're being hard to kill?

A prot paladin trying to heal in PvP has all the "shutdownability" problems of a holy paladin, except without Light's Grace and strong FoLs to mitigate it. The spec you gave there doesn't even have SF, meaning one hunter pet can put a serious crimp in your healing throughput and reaction time, especially if you're running Ret Aura like you seem to want to. You'll be able do some amount of burst damage with ShR, but outside of that you'll largely be limited to autoattack and seal against anything that isn't actually attacking you.

Now obviously whether this would be OP with an extra healing talent thrown in depends on how strong this hypothetical talent actually is. But IMO it'd have to be pretty damn powerful to make Prot overpowered for PvP.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Dippyskoodlez

It isn't directed as an offensive pvp build, its more of a defensive, offensive build. Currently in WSG, carrying the flag, i can spam cleanse myself, I can freedom myself, and I can mitigate a rediculus amount of melee damage through block value. WIth the new spell pushback change, a hunters pet will only add a second to your FOL, regardless to having ret aura on. Ret aura scaling with >600 spell power will be hitting for like 100+, assuming my math is correct? Add in holy shield, and eye for an eye reflecting 20% of all crits, and you have one crazy flag carrier. If you end up in the corner, your healer died, you manage to break away from the zerg on you, and you toss yourself a few flashes of light, they're now going to heal for 30% more PLUS 60% HoT from sheath(On crit). So now you're running around with a nice little self HoT, while being a pretty crazy tank. Not to mention if its -only- a hunter or warrior or two on you, chances on you being able to get a heal off, are quite high, because so many people don't understand how to interrupt in pvp it seems.

Adding any effective throughput talents, pushback resistance, or mana effeciency, will only add to what it already is. (Which is what my point is, as to why we can't be an off healing tank)

 

Nobbynob Littlun

Yes. They've made it so that a spellcast will only experience pushback twice, and then continue through. Effects that reduce chance to receive pushback will instead reduce the amount of pushback in those two hits (although for some reason this hasn't been applied to Spiritual Focus yet?). O' course, you could also spec for both Infusion of Light and BoSanctuary...

 

◊ Cathela

Losing a second on FoL is reducing throughput by 40% for a heal that isn't strong enough to stand up to focused damage to begin with. I also don't see where these crits you're counting on are going to come from -- you can't even fit Conviction into this build, for crying out loud. Basically you seem to be grabbing every synergy and stat-conversion talent you can and assuming you can gear to have high avoidance and high block value and high ap and high crit and high stamina all at the same time. And you still haven't provided a rationale as to why anyone would need to attack you outside of WSG.

EDIT:

On a completely unrelated note, apparently during this year's Brewfest (Sept 20 - Oct 4) Coren Direbrew will be reappearing in BRD, and dropping four epic trinkets which are clones of the 41-badge trinkets. It sounds like there's a daily quest for him and he can be done five times by the same group, a la Ahune.

Specifically, [Coren's Lucky Coin] is a clone of [Gnomeregan Auto-Blocker 600]. Apparently you can equip both, but they share a cooldown so the "Use" effect on the second one is useless. Basically, get it for WotLK leveling (post-75) if you don't want to spend badges on an Autoblocker, or get both if you want to stack the Equip bonuses. (With Shield Spec it's 77 block value, or +176 damage on ShR if you have the Shield of the Templar talent.)

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

ZulazeeluIcecrown

There is one simple fact that completely invalidates your argument. Makes it total nonsense. It's already been mentioned, but you haven't acknowledge it:

You cannot block, dodge, or parry while casting a heal.

You will take more damage while casting the heal than it will land for, even if healing capability were buffed considerably.

 

PsiVen

The argument about AD being amazing in PvP and tank gear keeping you alive has been mentioned before. It's still ridiculous. Casters eat prot paladins for dinner, and so do rogues. You can kill warriors, and only if you catch them one on one. The addition of powerful heals wouldn't change this at all, because you still can't get them off in PvP.

 

• Chicken

I'd say the biggest cause of this issue is the fact that Hammer of the Righteous (As well as Divine Storm and Crusader Strike) effectively double dip on the benefits of using a slow weapon. You not only get a higher part of the weapon's damage applied to the ability, but you also get an extra proc of your Seal at the speed of your currently equipped weapon.

Because of that, we basically get the following results with a 100 DPS weapon with 100 Seal DPS for HotR (Imaginary numbers obviously, typically your seal DPS will be higher than your weapon DPS):

1.5 speed: 570 threat, 95 TPS
2.5 speed: 950 threat, 158.33 TPS

That's a jump of 380 threat for 1.0 speed slower, or a difference of 63.33 threat per second. The difference only gets larger with higher DPS numbers. If we up the total weapon + seal DPS to 300, we get 855 threat for the 1.5 speed weapon, versus 1425 threat for the 2.5 speed weapon. A different of 570 threat, or 95 threat per second.

Normalization should most likely apply to the ability, but in two ways, it needs to affect the weapon speed your Seal uses for it's damage as well. If I take my first example again of when we apply this, with the standard 2.4 speed normalization the one-handed weapons we can use have. This time I'll split it up so 70 DPS comes from your weapon, 30 DPS comes from your attack power.

1.5 speed: 199.5 threat from weapon's base damage, 136.8 threat from attack power, 456 threat from your Seal. 792.3 threat total, or 132.05 TPS.
2.5 speed: 332.5 threat from weapon's base damage, 136.8 threat from attack power, 456 threat from your Seal. 925.3 threat total, 154.22 TPS.

That still makes HotR favor slower weapons, but the difference in total threat is a lot smaller. If you'd have a choice between two equal item level weapons in which one is slow and the other is fast you'd still go for the slow one, but the difference in TPS would remain minute enough to make it so you wouldn't hang on to a slower weapon for much longer because it really is so much better for your HotR threat.

buff /bÊŒf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

◊ Cathela

I don't really want to see seals+HotR speed-normalized. I like the idea that there's some art to weapon selection beyond "highest dps" and I like the fact that we want different weapons than prot warriors.

What's more, this also affects DKs. Unless I'm very misinformed about DK tanking, you almost always want to do it with a two-hander, since that minimizes the target's parries and maximizes the extra threat from your own parries. So are they planning to create two-handed weapons with tanking stats as well?

And is it really so critical for all of us to be getting mitigation stats from 17 slots instead of 16?

What the devs and itemization team should do is just discard the notion of "tanking weapons" altogether. Let warriors tank with fast 1-h dps weapons, let paladins tank with slow 1-h dps weapons (warriors steal rogue offhands, paladins steal rogue mainhands, as someone put it in this thread earlier), and then of course have DKs tank with slow 2-h dps weapons (stealing from arms/ret, as it were).

Frankly, I'm amazed that they haven't figured this out already. They've been talking for a year now about maximizing the utility of items for multiple classes to reduce "wasted" loot. Why then are we seeing them continue to produce items that are only really useful for one spec of one class?

EDIT: It's been pretty obvious in the past that the communication between the class-dev team and the itemizaton team is poor to nonexistent ("Hmmm... paladin tanking gear... better put some mp5 on it!") So maybe this is just a case where Ghostcrawler or whoever needs to send an email to the item devs saying "Stop it with the tanking weapons."

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Lunkhedd

I can think of at least two reasons why a protection paladin might be healing in healing gear rather than tank gear: it might be infeasible to respec (eg. Rage Winterchill or Akil'zon) or the protection paladin might offer healing utility that the holy paladin doesn't. For the second case, I gave an Inspiration clone as an example, but there are many other options as well, partly because Holy is so limited. It's certainly true that a priest or shaman could cover the "chain cast fast, efficient heals on the tank" role to proc Inspiration, but I can easily imagine both of them being better used for raid healing, and a prot paladin having cheaper fast heals.

For cases where a prot paladin might be expected to heal in tanking gear, I imagine the paladin's main utility would be to help the real healers deal with bursts, which should leave plenty of time for regeneration. I'd assume the paladin would be maintaining a judgement anyway in most cases, so some amount of downtime between heals would be expected. The melee dps nature of tanking gear is a good argument in favor of a secondary dps role, but your dps is going to be pretty bad in tanking gear as well, so I don't think it's really that strong a point relative to going healing.

 

Rasczak

God I hope they don't shoehorn us into healing when we aren't tanking anymore. There are a ton of fights where I end up offtanking for part of it and then standing around like an ass and not really contributing more than auto attacks and keeping a seal up and thats boring as fuck. Druids and warriors can both do reasonable dps in their tank gear if their mob goes down first while we mostly stand around with our thumbs up our ass and wait for shit to die.

If we get the talents to heal in prot gear we will still mostly be a waste since the raid would have to have enough healers to start with so we won't really contribute. Last healing as a paladin is boring as fuck which is why I stopped doing it, and we won't have more of the interesting healing abilities since we will be speced as tanks so it will stay just as boring.

My big concern is that we will still end up OOM. Healing without illumination means we go OOM as soon as we start casting big heals. If we are dpsing with just HotR and SotR means we go OOM in about 2 minutes with replenishment (from the theorycraft I have seen). I can't think of any solution to this that wouldn't wildly unbalance other situations.

 

Myrdin

There is an easy solution. Convince your guild that you are better off main tanking as you can't do anything else effectively, while warriors/druids/death knights can do reasonable DPS.

But then maybe I am a bit biased :P

 

Russta

There really isn't a whole lot for us to do outside of tanking. I absolutely despise healing as Prot and they'd have to add something fun as well as effective to make me wanna do it without respeccing. I'm also someone who doesn't really want to DPS when I'm not tanking and would rather heal. Again, if they want us to DPS, something fun would be nice. I don't care if I'm not the best healer, I don't care if my DPS is poor, I only care that it's involving. Spamming Flash of Light till my mana runs dry or sticking up Seal of Wisdom and tabbing out as Vengeance stacks up is just crap.

 

Worldie

Tecnically with a proper set we can do some relatively fun DPS by just spamming ShoR, HotR and Judgement.
High block value / STR / AP...

It's probably superior to the DPS a Prot paladin would do with retribution gear on and SoB/M. You can normally tank with a specific high BV set, but if you don't have to tank you can get some retarded amount of damage from it... expecially if you grab the Gnomeregan Autoblocker, Shahraz Libram, and the trinket with BV from the brewfest.

 

Rasczak

Well I try but there are some fights where having the paladin on adds is obviously better or where our lack of an interrupt/spell reflect make main tanking much harder. Dragonhawk in ZA for example is much much easier with a paladin that can grab all the adds on a side in one go and have them aoed down. Thats about 1 minute of the fight before you judge wisdom and afk.

And yes it looks like we will be getting pretty good dps from SotR, especially since when add tanking you generally want to gear for as much BV as possible. But from the numbers I've seen it looks like we can be expected to go OOM in about two minutes unless there is pretty heavy AOE damage going out. Which means when soloing we have even worse mana problems since we won't have raid buffs, and stopping to drink every few mobs is a pain in the ass.

I would love to see something added that let prot/ret stay mana neutral with a decent rotation. Maybe something that returned mana based on damage done,ala warriors and rage. I know that the argument is that seal of wisdom does exactly that, but it means giving up a large portion of our damage to use it.

 

Myrdin

I know it might be a gear issue, but what I do normally is have a feral druid//fury warrior offtank for the bear boss and lynx boss and solo tank the rest of the instance. It is perfectly doable to pick up the adds at Dragonhawk while tanking the boss himself also, it can even make healing easier as there is only one target to spam.

As for the OOM argument judgement of wisdom gives decent mana returns every 4 seconds, replenishment is constantly ticking, any avoided hits give 2% total mana from sanctuary plus any damage you do take gives spiritual attunement mana. I have yet to see an off tanking fight where the off tank is not hit by anything.

I think the soloing mana problems will go away with Sanctuary, just pull 3 or more mobs and you should get enough mana return from sanctuary to keep a decent DPS rotation going, plus stacking ridiculous amounts of block value will mean the mobs rarely if ever touch you plus it can mean some hefty damage from SotR. On live right now I can stack over 1000 passive block, which gets boosted to nearly 1600 with trinkets and libram proc which would mean over 3200 damage on SotR (not counting any damage boosting talents such as shield of the templar and one hand spec).

Overall I think ret will still be a better grinding / leveling spec, but prot is far from as bad as you are making out.

 

Worldie

Soloing as protection requires you to pull 3+ mobs per time. You have literally endless mana with 3 mobs already.

My current strategy on the beta (well, whenever it doesn't crash in 10 seconds) is pulling 5-6 mobs, spam ShoR-HotR-Judgement(of Corruption/Wisdom)-Holy Shield, loot, pop a Holy Light, repeat.
The mana cost for all the abilities is countered by Sanctuary, and you are constantly full mana. With 6 mobs on you it's possible to also spam consecration and still regen the mana in time.

It's not much different from how already prot paladins do grind, just quicker due to bigger damage output (did i already mention i love ShoR crits? )
The killing speed is comparable to retribution, if not quicker.

 

Ivriniel

I was wondering, with pretty much all abilities being % of base mana now, and us having 0 int on gear, how fast do we empty our mana pool, assuming you're an OT that doesn't take damage or only gets hit by a mob every 10sec?

I know it's a very rare situation but i am still a bit worried that we could possibly waste an entire mana pool in 6-10 GCDs.

(Guess we could use JoW as workaround but still)

Anyone else see any other issues such a small mana pool can have?

 

Worldie

First an assumption, if you are a "offtank", you are there because you will at some point get hit.

That said, currently if you offtank, your "rotation" is pretty much rotating only Judgement, ShoR and HotR. Their mana cost is very low, 5%, 6% and 6% of base mana. So you consume 12% base mana every 6 seconds due to ShoR+HotR, and 5% every 10 (or 8) for Judgement. Let's simplify the numbers and assume you use 14% mana every 6 seconds. You also keep regenerating mana through JoW, in it's current form, you regen 2% mana every 4 seconds, so in 6 seconds you regenerated ~3% mana. We are at 11% mana used. Replenishment will also grant the paladin 0.5% mana per second so, assuming you have no buffs (false, but let's keep it simple), you also regenerate 3% mana from replenishment, so down to 8% mana used every 6 seconds.
It will then take something less than 1 minute and half to go from full mana to 0, with exactly 0 damage taken, assuming you aren't buffed (thus increasing mana pool and the % regenerated through JoW/Replenishment), and you don't use a potion nor use Divine Plea.

It's just a approximated case (can't be arsed doing the exact math, it's just a example ), but not being hit for 1 minute and half looks like not really realistic for a offtank.