Agreed. Only been able to play with it recently, but where it really shines is the proccing of various Seals. There really is nothing like it, and for areas where Consecrate is a bad idea, it makes up for the lack of true AoE damage. Bottom line, well worth 51 pts.

I'm not sure what the rules are with regards to linking a post from the BB but this is what he wrote. It seems better to just do this than debate over my interpretation;

That's Patchwerk though, who traditionally had some mechanic that made it nearly impossible to rip aggro. One of the guys in the tankadin channel on Northrend was reporting some obscene threat generation on him as well, possibly due to little more than the fight itself.

As for HotR, it's absolutely worth taking right now, though it only really shines in AoE (it's also responsible for SoR being possibly competitive single-target, but that remains to be seen). I'd like to see it buffed simply for the sake of giving us more scaling from our weapon's damage range. One thing to consider is that the only alternatives to taking HotR are Sheath spec (which drops a ton of mitigation talents) and just putting the point somewhere else despite being 50+ deep... so it's not saying much to be worth taking.

There shouldn't be an issue with copying a post from the BB as long as it isn't incriminating to anyone and credit is given. A few BBers never read non-BB threads.

HotR is a great ability because it does something unique and gives you another meaningful button to push.

So anyone else quite "scared" of how high damages are getting?
ShoR seemb being buffed to 240% BV (according to tooltips, unless it's a silly typo)

I just did some math with the new build and ShoR. My gear is mainly T6/Sunwell gear, so tecnically level 80 gear.
I got ~1300 Block value, which gets to ~1500 with the Use of the Autoblocker. I'll assume exactly 1500 for my calculations:
1500*240% (base) = 3600*130% (redoubt) = 4680*110% (1h spec) = 5148*130% (shield of templar) = 6692,4*120% (AW) = 8030 non crit
Adding now Shahraz Libram for 242 more BV = 1296 extra damage... totalling, well... yes, over nine thousand.
This isn't even counting the possible 2% more damage from a retri paladin, or 13% from a DK.

A critical from ShoR will oneshot a mob even without wings or trinket, and a critical with CDs up will oneshot a clothie.
Not that i dislike slapping people with my shield, but this seembs excessive.
I'd not be surprised, if things stay like that, if Autoblocker and Tome of the Lightbringer gets eventually nerfed to prevent "old world gear from surpassing lvl 80 gear".

The old Shield Spec talent is gone (it's been replaced by the BV bonus on the new Redoubt). So if you're going from your current block value, you can't count the Redoubt bonus again. (Unless you're saying you have 1300 block value without Shield spec?)

But yeah, it's still a shitload of damage and I'm also surprised they buffed it up so high. Fully talented ShR has gone from 242% of block value to 343% (counting 1-h spec).

I don't think they'll nerf the gear, because block value already gets weaker as you level. The issue is really just that ShR scales way too well with block value. Honestly I was surprised they started with it scaling at 200% BV, considering that Shield Slam is a fixed amount of damage plus 100% BV (and is mitigated by armor as well).

Overall the changes are nice but I feel like I was expecting more, or some added talents, instead of compression and re-shuffling. Lets hope this is just a baseline for them to work with for us because it still seems a little awkward that pretty much everything from tier 5 onwards is mandatory.

What's up with the change to Combat Expertise? When I saw some of our T7 gear had expertise on it I felt it'd become a little more useful for us then we lose it from our talent tree and gain crit? A little contradictory I think, though from looking at Worldie's ShoR numbers, if we could somehow up our crit in a realistic fashion, that would be pretty cool.

The Reckoning change is great and synergizes well with us.

Playing around with our revamped talent tree, I came up with something like this. That pretty much picks up everything with 2 or 3 points to play around with from tier 4. The way they've worded past statements made me feel that they'd want us to go down other trees for things. From a "fun" point-of-view I'd hoped we could go down Retribution for a choice of Heart of the Crusader, or Pursuit of Justice, or perhaps even Vindication. I guess hoping for that while taking Seals of the Pure is probably being a little greedy though.

Finally, can anyone explain why BoK is a 1 point talent with a 4 point follow on instead of just being a flat 5 point talent? At least with Sheath of Light being pushed further up the tree and BoK moving down, Holy can pick it up while still taking Conviction while saving us all from those interminable discussions.

Regarding Combat Expertise, I believe Blizzard took a cue from Cathela's idea of "crits are fun" and gave us something fun to play with. On top of that, Prot is so thin that I could actually go 18 points into Prot for another 8% from Conviction and Sanctified Seals.

Look better, Shield Spec has been folded into redoubt. I got 1300 block value with Redoubt (the passive part, which is the old Shield Spec)

The reckoning change... it's useless. We will still use SoV (possibly with the new Glyph) to tank, and Reckoning is close to useless for that purpose. It's still a leveling talent.

No. Taurens didn't teach you anything? 16% stamina scaling was excessive. However, now they need to increase our base stamina.

It still is 6%, warriors have +6%, paladins +12%. I'm not sure how it holds up exactly, but I think 6% is probably enough for the difference.

They could always add librams with stam, increase base health and reduce the bonus (making it scale the same), though, I guess.

Not really. In addition to being a leveling talent like you just stated, it's an outstanding AoE farming talent, especially if you're using Light to keep your health up. It's also more damage each time you hit, regardless of the Seal/Judgement you're using; specifically with SoV, every time you hit and it's maxed, there's white damage (which is boosted from being able to use higher DPS weaponry) as well as a proc for more damage from SoV itself...which is all more threat.

In addition, it now does NOT inversely scale with gear, which was the biggest gripe about the original form. In fact, with it being able to proc from blocked hits, it actually scales up with your gear and the amount of BV you have. So, not useless, and I'll be taking it.

I just posted this line over in the lock thread, but I think it bears repeating here.

"Also, remember that not every single bit of every talent or spell is designed for full raiding efficiency."

Remember, dev's have gone and said that they want to give us fun stuff to use. Not all the time are we going to be in groups with all kinds of support thrown in; this helps the old 'porcupine' style of farming. Besides, the change does eliminate the old argument that past a certain point, it's not worth taking. Also, it encourage players to make a shift to Prot at a much lower level than they might otherwise, which of course, allows them to start figuring out their tools at an earlier point in time.

It was a good talent to begin with, and it's only been made better. I fail to see how it's not useful.

I didn't say it's not useful, i said it's not useful for tanking at 80, actually it's not useful for tanking past level 64/66 depending on faction.

Oh really, I didn't realize that they reduced the Warrior stam bonus as well. Guess I'm still happy then

On the contrary, they increased.

Our stamina bonus in BC is 5%. Vitality used to be, 5/5, 5% stam and 10% str. Now it is 3/3 6% str, stam and 6 expertise.

But with this nerf I think things become a bit more balanced, at least on upper tiers. If someone had the base stats for paladins and warriors we could calc lower-tier health, I guess.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but the Reckoning change seems fairly trivial to me, since blocked attacks do damage anyway as long as they're not fully blocked. I suppose this makes it easier to farm/tank trivial content where your block value is greater than the incoming damage, and that might happen a bit more often with the overall buffs to block value, but it still seems to me like an edge case.

I've never really had an issue with it myself, but my understanding is that the complaints about Reckoning anti-scaling with gear were about full avoidance (m/d/p), which this change really doesn't do anything about (although I think the various avoidance nerfs will.)

Sorry, I'm not understanding you. How is that different from what I said?

EDIT:

Yeah, before we try to make a big deal out the scaling change it'd be nice to have some actual numbers for hp and stam and such at level 80.

Keep in mind also that back when we were hurting from the hp-gap (i.e., pre-Combat Expertise), most of us were also at the point where we were having to wear all kinds of weird gear to become uncrushable, whereas warriors could prance around with double stamina-trinkets if they felt like it. That's not going to be a concern this time around.

EDIT AGAIN: It also appears that we'll be blocking a good deal more often than warriors, and our anti-magic damage talent is both stronger and much easier to get now.

Well, looks like I won't be taking Blessing of Kings anymore. Spending five points on a blessing when there's already a perfectly good one I have to take later in the tree? That doesn't make sense to me at all. I really wish they'd kept Blessing of Kings as the Protection tree blessing and moved the new Blessing of Sanctuary effect over to Improved Devotion Aura... but oh well.

As an aside, have Blizzard finally fixed (de)buff tooltips to reflect talent points spent? Not knowing at a glance if we've been buffed with full Improved Blessing of Kings or not will be annoying, though I suppose no worse than Improved Divine Spirit or Improved Power Word: Fortitude.

And I'm not sure I like being forced to put points in Reckoning, unless I take Improved Blessing of Kings or one of the PvP talents. I'll be taking 5/5 anyway because I adore the talent, but it does cause more parries and it does kind of suck when you use it with Seal of Vengeance. Since we won't be using Seal of Righteousness anymore when raid boss tanking, Judgement of Wisdom firing more often is really left as the only benefit.


It's just like similar talents that grant new spells - Holy Shield, Divine Spirit, Vampiric Embrace, Leader of the Pack, the old Nature's Grasp and a lot more I can't think of right now. Either it's a conscious design decision, or the limitations of Blizzard's tech means that an ability can only be placed in the player's spellbook via a single point talent.

Aww, now i see the error, yes you are right.

Well, i'm not 80 yet and there's more STR and BV on level 80 gear, and Naxx tanks have anyway 1300ish BV, so i'd guess the math still works

If I remember correctly, SoR wasn't that far behind SoV before. With the nerfs to seal damage, and the upgrade to Reckoning, has anyone taken a serious look at how close the 2 are now? We might want to tank with SoR again. (No I'm not volunteering...way too much math for my tastes).

And this is what I've been thinking: I don't entirely trust MMO-Champion's interpretations. As Cathela points out, Reckoning procs off partially blocked hits on live, right now. Given past misunderstandings by MMO-C, I think it's highly likely Reckoning hasn't been changed in any way, shape, or form and still only procs off attacks that actually do damage (as the tooltip still says, even on MMO-C).

Has anyone on beta actually confirmed it will proc on fully-blocked attacks? And even if so, it's still just as useless for tanking instances as it ever was. Heroic/raid trash on live hit for more than your block value, and thus blocks can proc Reckoning right now on live. But Reckoning is still considered useless. So I fail to see how anything changes even if it does proc off full blocks, outside of being even better for farming.

Yeah, it's still pretty clearly overpowered even if it's ~20% less than the numbers you were using.

Even 200% still has the potential to get out of hand given high-level WotLK gear -- we're definitely going to see block values in excess of 2k at some point, which would give 4k base ShR damage in the old version. I wouldn't be surprised to see ShR changed to something more like Shield Slam: A decent static base damage plus 100% of blockvalue, or something like that.

To my knowledge, the tooltips are still the way they've always been, and since they've been that way for four years I don't think we can expect it to change. I think we can assume though that any reasonably clueful person who picks up BoK will be filling up Imp. BoK.

As for Reckoning, there's still some seal-twisting potential with SoR and SoV that I wouldn't rule out. In a standard 6/9 rotation, you can replace consecration with a seal switch every 9 seconds, to keep SoV going full time and SoR going half the time. It probably won't be as much threat as Cons, but it'll be cheaper. And I still want to look into the possibilities of using haste to open up some space in the rotation through GCD reduction. (Yeah, Qalor: it's an interesting question and I'll probably get around to the math at some point if nobody else does.)

The parry effects don't bother me too much; for one thing, warriors do just fine even though they're spamming a parryable special attack every GCD. Expertise mitigates the risk, and it's something you'll want for threat anyway. And the devs have a habit of turning off parry-hasting on bosses where it could really hurt (dual-tank boses such as Shahraz/Naloraak/Halazzi, and Brutallus who was destroying tanks when Sunwell was on the PTR.)

The in-game tooltip actually has changed (strange that the MMOC one hasn't, since I thought that was based on data-mining, but whatever.) I haven't tested full-block Reckoning procs yet. I think it's probably a real change, but you're right, it certainly could be just a cosmetic change with no actual functional difference at all.

The Kings change concerns me. As many have already noticed, prot pallies will be buffing BoSanc 99% of the time anyway, so there's no reason to pick up the talent. Holy builds are now going to be using the ret tree to flesh out their talent picks since they can get another 8% spellcrit, so it's not exactly likely they'll want to dump another 5 in prot to pick up this talent. That pretty much leaves ret builds to pick it up, but they already want 5/5 Divine Strength to begin with, which again makes it that much harder to find another 5 points for Kings. I fear that one of the greatest buffs in the game might get lost if something doesn't change before 3.0 goes live.

I know that the trees still aren't finished, so I have my fingers crossed.