rozetta

This has bothered me from the moment I heard about it. I mean, I know they're trying to get prot specs to solo with a shield, but as it stands, making this useable with a 2-hander would open up better soloing and the possibility of even PvP usage (at the BGs level). Prot still has the problem of being useless for absolutely everything but running instances or levelling up to 58. Now that they've made a conscious effort to improve the prot tree for Warriors, especially on the DPS front, I hope they don't relegate the Paladin prot tree to tanking or off-healing. This would continue to make the tree useless for more than 50% of the game.

As a prot paladin myself (for the duration of TBC), I noticed this problem and started levelling a rogue. Since our guild has very few tanks, I don't want to be stuck in another 2-years of having to spec something that I only log onto for instances. Barring decent changes to prot, my paladin will be shelved purely out of necessity come WotlK.

 

jere

Actually add protection paladins to that list. We would want all four blessings (BoM, BoW, BoK, and BoSanc). We will have to lose out on one blessing if there are only 3 paladins. (Though obviously, if we had either the holy or ret paladin with BoK, then we would be covered if a warrior was in the raid, but I think I read your comment as being related only to paladins providing them.)

 

• Avitus

Buff coverage is not the problem, you can give everyone what they want with 3 paladins.

The problem is, who specs for BoK? Ret and Holy can't get there in an optimal way. If Prot is available they will be buffing BoSanc and be the first on the list of "BoK needers".

 

Exewut

Actually it makes sence for prot to dps with a shield, don't forget holy shieldslam should do acceptable damage. They could even make it scale with spelldamage so holy paladins could use it in their damage rotation as well. Or perhaps add a t1 strenght -> spelldamage talent in a tree somewhere and base the scaling of holy shieldslam on having that ability.

 

mclem

I'm wondering if the problem should be handled the opposite way around. People are talking about removing BoK, but would a better solution be to make BoS accessed in a non-blessing manner? People have made the point that Sanc doesn't fit as a Hand, which is adequate, but what about as an aura?

What I think would work for consistency and appeal would be:
Kings baseline, reduced effect (5%)?
Improved Kings, 1 talent point to up it to 10%
Sanctuary talent adds its effect to Devotion Aura.

The first two points make Kings with the other blessings; each tree takes one of the three baseline blessings whch it goes on to improve with talents in the tree. The last one leaves us with three paladins for three blessings again. Thematically, Sanctuary works as part of the defensive aura, and it adds a small positioning interest from the range limits.

The only real downside with this is that there's already an improved devotion aura, and the concept of "Really very improved devotion aura" comes across as a bit messy.

As a footnote, people are making the point that Battle Shout is now the same effect as Blessing of Might, but is there any BS equivalent to glyphed Blessing of Might? The other advantage of what I suggest is that the three blessings which can be glyphed are now the three baseline blessings.

 

Blutelf

Warrior glyphs are not in yet though.

 

flyingtoastr

To the best of my knowledge Warrior Glyphs haven't been implemented yet.

This does bring up an interesting point about the "glyph minigame". Assuming the glyphs we know about stay in game and we still only have 3 Major Glyph slots we might not have much choice for which ones we pick up.

From a Holy standpoint you will absolutely have to have either Glyph of SoW or Glyph of SoL (reduces mana cost of heals or increases healing done respectively). That leaves you with 2 slots open. Glyph of Holy Light (Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 5 of the initial target) has great potential synergy with the new BoL and Glyph of Lay on Hands 1 (Your Lay on Hands also grants you as much mana as it grants your target) could be useful. The Flash of Light Gyph is problematic but could be nice as well. So Holy has 5 "good" choices without even looking at the blessings glyphs for 3 slots.

Ret and Prot will both assuredly be using the Glyph of Judgement (Your Judgements deal 10% more damage) but outside of that ret has no other PvE glyph to worry about. Prot can make some choices with the Avenger's Shield glyph or the Consecration glyph but it too doesn't require anything else. The problem again is that prot wants to be doing Sanctuary (on the tank classes at least) so there isn't any reason for him to pick up the BoK glyph. Ret has to choose between the BoK or BoM glyph (and spec kings still), he can't be giving out both.

Some people's minds are like cement: all mixed up and permanently set.

 

Kayella

It's surprising to me that the holy tree feedback thread hasn't yet touched upon the downranking change and how that affects healing with a paladin (particularly with respect to Holy Light). I would have thought this was a fairly major point to put across to the developers before they finalise the healing tree - with HS on a cooldown and FoL being very weak, what is our mid-range mana-efficient heal as a holy paladin? I mean, the tree is one thing and obviously needs some work, but healing is as much about the gameplay style as it is the exact talents - are BoL and Infusion of Light the answer to all our problems?

Edit: Also, it would be useful to touch on the supposed intention to make all paladins / warriors / druids / death-knights be able to tank. As it currently stands, the holy paladin seems to have lost a lot of utility in this area compared to TBC. Perhaps dual-purpose talents could help.

 

Khaelarys

I guess I just assumed that there's no reason for overlapping raid utility if you still differentiate them by Glyph additions.

Maybe it'll come down to min/max certain classes into certain raid buffs by what glyphs they have to give up to get the raid utility glyphs, but then - if that's the case, they haven't fixed much - they've just made everything more complicated.

Clearly, if I can give some portion of my BoM as spell damage and warriors cannot - that's not a perk, that's a purely better buff. I don't see that flying.

EDIT: GC just said that they've started the numbers pass for all classes. How can that be when they haven't even done the paladin class basic focus yet?

 

• Chicken

In regards to the "Kings issue", it wouldn't surprise me if Blizzard's solution to it would be that another class also gets a buff that increases your stats by a percentage. It's currently one of the few buff types that's still completely unique, which seems to be the opposite of their design intent (Which is buff redundancy). The most likely candidate for receiving this would be Shamans, most likely in the form of an Earth totem. Other classes are certainly possible as well, I'm just expecting Shamans as they basically lack a second Earth totem at the moment which is always useful to have.

I'd prefer personally if the Blessing of Sanctuary effect were to become the effect of Improved Devotion Aura though: Remove the extra healing and armor, change it to the 1/2/3% damage reduction and the mana/rage/runic power restoration on avoiding an attack. Buff redundancy is nice and all, but I think in the current design having four potential blessings a person can benefit from doesn't work. With ten classes, I'd say two blessings should give the most powerful effect, with a third blessing being nice but not required. That works best if there's one blessing which is desirable for everyone (Kings), and two other blessings of which the desirability depend mostly on your class and spec, but can be nice to have both if your class is designed that way (Might, Wisdom).

More in the "Unlikely to happen but it'd be neat if..." realm would be if Kings were made baseline, and each spec basically has it's "own" blessing. That is, every Paladin can provide Might, Wisdom and Kings, but if you have a Paladin of the appropriate spec, you get a slightly more powerful version of each Blessing. That'd probably require improved Might to be moved slightly deeper in the Retribution tree. I'd say it'd be neater design anyway if it was a 2 point talent on about the same depth in the tree as improved Wisdom.

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

 

GSH

I was thinking about Retribution's mana issues, and it occurs to me that Protection still has the same problem when not getting hit. For example, if you're off-tanking an add, what do you do when the add dies? You're in all strength gear with no int, so your mana pool is pathetic, and you can't really heal. If you try and do damage, you'll run out of mana really fast as BoSanc or Spiritual Attunement won't return anything. Prot warriors, feral druids, and death knights can at least sustain their damage for the rest of the fight, even if the damage is lower than a DPS character.

To me, that says that whatever the solution to Ret's mana issue is, Protection must be able to share it. But if it's a talent within reach of Protection, then it is within reach of Holy.

I think that Judgement should return a significant percentage of base mana when judged. Fold this into the base Judgement rather than making it a required talent. Make the mana return high enough to sustain a Judgement + Crusader Strike/Hammer of the Righteous cycle indefinitely.

It would also be another incentive for Holy to judge, along with the Haste. A bit of mana return which is not tied to Illumination.

You know, this is a spectacular idea. The extra armor from Devo Aura, while nice, has never been exciting. If the baseline Devo Aura had the new BoSanctuary effect, that would work really well. 3% damage reduction is pretty much the same thing as the extra armor while leveling.

That would also get rid of the extra Blessing issue as well. Now I'm not sure if Imp Devo Aura should tack on the extra healing as well, as that would be one buff covering two categories, but it's not that different from one character providing two buffs.

 

zenos

It takes roughly 1.5 points of talents in the pally protection tree and 5 points in the warrior protection tree to emulate the given effect. At this point without knowing the details of the raid content and whether all tanks will live in the "infinite rage/mana" territory while tanking progression, it's easy to over estimate or down play the blessing.

It could be a more dependable alternative to grace, or it could be a required mechanic for at least all of tanks on cleaving bosses, etc.. The raid content will largely determine its effectiveness. Looking back at BC raid bosses however, this blessing would be present in most every min/max guild.

 

Jessie

Blessing of Kings: Personally, I'd just change MotW into a BoK copy. Maybe 8% stats baseline increased to 9/10 with talents. You could either remove the armor component or add it into Kings.

Also, here's my post in the suggestion thread explaining my thoughts about Light's Grace and Beacon:

When we look at you we don't even see the testicles on your chin. We see the testicles in your heart.

 

Kigale

do damage reduction talents/abilities scale multiplicatively? If so, (correct me if I'm wrong), BoSanc isn't a 3% reduction for a tank.

My Math could be wrong:

with 6% reduction from imp RF a paladin will be taking 94% of damage. 3% of 94% is 2.82%
This value will drop with any other % reduction.

 

Modal

So this hasn't been discussed in this thread in a few days, but I want to bring it up again because I haven't really seen anything but rumors. I've been doing some investigation into how dodge rating affects character sheet dodge %. It does seem to me that there is evidence of the diminishing returns people have been talking about. Btw, these numbers are for a level 70 paladin.

I won't reproduce the data I derived these numbers from here, in the interest of saving space. If you want to see it, check out my maintankadin thread:

Maintankadin :: View topic - Diminishing returns on dodge rating?

I have also noticed that defense skill is giving more parry and dodge % than .04 per point (only slightly more), if you believe the numbers on the character sheet. This set of numbers depends on the assumption that defense is contributing the same amount to dodge % as parry % on my character sheet. But the numbers aren't much different if you instead assume that defense skill is contributing .04 per point to dodge %.

Definitely looks like diminishing returns to me. I've tried to bring it up on the beta forums for blue confirmation, but no luck (just people telling me the character sheet is bugged so I should shut up).

 

Pitbuller

No it won't!

0.9118 of 0.94 is 0.97. It's allways 3% more damage migited.

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

◊ s4dfish

I think having all judgments restore some percentage of mana rather than damage would go along way towards fixing mana issues of all three specs. Having Blessing of Sactuary turn into Aura of Sanctuary would simply be gravy. Keep it up.

[e] I"m referring to the base Judgement damage, not the Judgement damage stemming from your current seal.

And on the Seventh Day, Tank Time rested.

 

Fiola

Unless you're asking for it to scale with damage/stats, isn't that completely equivalent to a mana cost reduction?

(Make Judgement cost 3% base mana instead of 5%, for example)

 

Kigale

you are right of course, but 3% of 94 is less than 3% of 100.

 

◊ s4dfish

Bah, good point, hadn't thought of that.

And on the Seventh Day, Tank Time rested.

 

Pitbuller

Do it matter what is absolute value. You could allways say that if you gain more armor then Blessing of Sanctuary is worser that it was before becouse of absolute damage reduction value dropped. But still it 3% more damage reduction. You take 100% damage without it and 97% with it.

Slow, slower, shaman weapon.

 

bv728

Generally, you start a numbers pass once you have enough comparable classes in satisfactory condition. It doesn't require you be done with everyone, just that you've got, say, 2-3 classes done on an internal build. Especially if the rogue changes are expected to put them into shape, balancing Rogues vs DKs for DPS would be easy; once you have two classes calibrated, you can move on and calibrate other classes against your already-tuned classes once you're done with them.

So, I'd expect that there are... 2, maybe 3 classes which are internally considered 'done' as far as new abilities and tree shape, and they're starting their passes using those to establish baseline DPS.

 

Tilted

Moving the existing BoSanc implementation into Improved Devotion Aura causes two issues. For one, it is a direct nerf in that it takes away from the -damage/+heal synergy that the two talents have now, as they combine to roughly 6.2% power boost to healing effectiveness across the board compared to the 3.1% it would be with this change. And two, it leaves an empty slot for what should be a powerful 21 point talent. I don't think that's a valid option.

By that logic the 6% reduction from Improved Righteous Fury is useless because armor already negates ~60% of incoming damage anyway, so Imp. RF is closer to 2.4% reduction instead. What really matters is damage taken, and a 3% reduction will always be relative to what would be taken without the blessing active.

 

Suicidal Zebra

The Devs. appear to have changed their mind with respect to the Aspect of the Viper skill.

WoW Forums -> Aspect of the Viper change, yea or nay?

This comment doesn't bode well for Ret, or the role you describe for Prot. If this philosophy is extended into Paladin melee mana regen mechanics then scaling mana regeneration through damage is out of the question. In all likelihood Seal of Wisdom will be modified and scaled to be similar to Aspect of the Viper by restoring a portion of base mana upon hit. I believe it may be workable so long as the mana cost of active skills for Prot and Ret are significantly reduced, but it's an immensely uninspiring way of returning mana.

 

CKaz

Hmm I like the idea of this move for a few reasons -
They've made the Retribution Aura the Retri's aura, where frankly it was the [Aoe] Prot Pally Aura
I've never gotten into Devotion Aura, rolling this into it and/or its improved form might make it a choice levelling Prot.
I'm still concerned the mana gain is weak/may get mana starved, but should help our [horribly lame] seal of wisdom

On another note I also agree the extra heal on crit is silly and right - a flat % cheaper heal or somesuch would be better