Right, but that spec doesn't get all of the things he listed, in that it doesn't get Reckoning and AD and Seals of the Pure at the same time.
I mean, there are real tradeoffs for going deeper in ret, but with the current bloated state of the prot tree we don't get to have everything from our main tree at once, in any spec.
That's true, but the large number of talents in Prot isn't really a good argument for spending even more points out of Prot.
If we take 11 points in Ret as a given (9-second Judgement cooldown leads to the cleanest threat rotation), that leaves 60 points.
"Traditional" options would be 0/60/11, or 5/55/11. The Sheath option would be 0/48/23.
Regardless of the specific talent choices you make, going 23 points into Ret is going to cost you 12 points of useful talents in Prot+SotP.
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
That's true, but the large number of talents in Prot isn't really a good argument for spending even more points out of Prot.
If we take 11 points in Ret as a given (9-second Judgement cooldown leads to the cleanest threat rotation), that leaves 60 points.
"Traditional" options would be 0/60/11, or 5/55/11. The Sheath option would be 0/48/23.
Regardless of the specific talent choices you make, going 23 points into Ret is going to cost you 12 points of useful talents in Prot+SotP.
Absolutely true, but many of the talents in early ret are great tanking talents in their own right. Tier One is pretty terrible-- the mana savings from Benediction are not impressive, and while Imp BoM is a very strong talent it isn't one that would make the cut if you didn't have to take it.
But once you get past that, the other ret talents are competitive with the lesser prot talents (1h spec, reckoning, Guarded by the Light, Spell Warding, Redoubt/Shield Spec, and I suspect Shield of the Templar).
Prot paladins are a melee class now more than ever, and ask a rogue or an enhancement shaman how good improved movement speed is for a melee class-- you really don't have to move very much in a given fight for PoJ to be one of your best threat talents.
Someone in your raid needs to have Heart of the Crusader, and in a 10-man, that someone is very likely to be you.
Deflection speaks for itself.
As you said, 1 point in Improved Judgments is pretty much non-negotiable.
Vindication isn't amazing, but it's underrated on trash.
Crusade, well, it's not like you're excited to take crusade, but it's very nearly as good as 1H spec.
Imp Ret Aura, with the new ret aura, is going to be a non-trivial boost to your threat (on the order of 100 threat per hit on you) and if you have the luxury of running ret aura over devo aura it's hard to argue that one point in Sanctified Retribution isn't straight up better than one point in 1H spec.
To be honest, I don't fully understand why people are as in love with 1H spec as they are. Sure, it's (slightly less than) a straight 5% buff to your threat, but a 5% buff to your threat just isn't that amazing for 5 talent points.
Now, my hope is that HotR is going to go live in a form that makes not taking it unthinkable, but if that doesn't happen or if our threat turns out to be fine without HotR I think there is a legitimate case to be made for prot/sheath.
Last edited by JulianMaiev : 08/05/08 at 12:18 AM.
What do you lose over a "normal" prot spec, besides the 51-point strike? Well, you lose Guarded by the Light and Shield of the Templar. However, the extra scaling SoL gives you on JoW more than makes up for the mana these talents provide. Then you lose 2/5 1H Spec. Crusade more than compensates for that. The only important talent lost is Imp Devo Aura, and you can have a Holy Paladin do that one for you.
That means you can directly compare Hammer of the Righteous to the spellpower you get from SoL. IMHO, this is a no-brainer. SoL is better by miles. Not only would Hammer have to give you an incredible amount of threat to beat out SoL's effect on ALL your other abilities on a single target, but it's also limited to three targets itself. If you're tanking more than three things, which is the Paladin niche right now, SoL is clearly superior. Especially when we get STR on our tanking gear like Warriors and can convert 1 STR -> 0.6 SP.
Hammer procs seals too. Ask yourself if rolling a 5 stack of SoV on 3 mobs in addition to the normal damage is worth dumping hammer before you make wild claims.
You're also missing out on Divine Strength, which is a non trivial amount of mitigation and threat boost, and losing out on 15% to holy shield, avenger shield, and shield of righteousness. Crusade is also not directly comparable to 1h spec, as it is limited to certain mob types. How much that matters depends on what we're fighting. Basically that spec seems like someone trying to hold on to tanking BC style.
It also seems as if holding on to this mode, pouring most of your hopes for threat into consecrate could leave you far more mana deprived than a paladin using HoF and SotR.
Based on what we know of the new downranking penalties, how will Holy Shield and Consecration fare? I usually use rank 1 Holy Shield just to get the block, and alternate between rank 3 and max rank Consecration, watching Omen like a hawk to ride the edge of threat output vs. mana consumption.
Hammer procs seals too. Ask yourself if rolling a 5 stack of SoV on 3 mobs in addition to the normal damage is worth dumping hammer before you make wild claims.
Better than 300-400 extra spellpower on Consecration and Ret Aura, and 50% extra damage from ret aura? I'm not so sure.
Qalor You're also missing out on Divine Strength, which is a non trivial amount of mitigation and threat boost, and losing out on 15% to holy shield, avenger shield, and shield of righteousness. Crusade is also not directly comparable to 1h spec, as it is limited to certain mob types. How much that matters depends on what we're fighting. Basically that spec seems like someone trying to hold on to tanking BC style.
It also seems as if holding on to this mode, pouring most of your hopes for threat into consecrate could leave you far more mana deprived than a paladin using HoF and SotR.
Number of 10 AND 25-man TBC raid instance bosses not affected by Crusade: 1. (Void Reaver) Well, actually it's two, but RoS is conveniently not tankable by a Paladin anyway. Ok, I don't know if that's also going to be the case in Wrath, but from what we know how Crusade affects basically everything.
Remember that Judgment of Wisdom scales with spellpower, and Sheath of Light means you get more mana back from it. That could make up for the loss of mana reduction talents.
Hammer procs seals too. Ask yourself if rolling a 5 stack of SoV on 3 mobs in addition to the normal damage is worth dumping hammer before you make wild claims.
I have hard time believing that it'll make it to live. As Ghostcrawler puts it, it is "so useful, that you could just about put a brick on the key you use for [it]". He was talking about shield block, but effortlessly building and rolling 3 SoV stacks is just the same.
Sheath is an attractive talent. I merely wanted to point out that it competes with more than merely Hammer, and protadins are already having to make choices within prot even going only 11 into ret.
Moral of the story: bloat. A protadin does not have enough talent points to get everything s/he would want, and must make some tricky choices.
I have hard time believing that it'll make it to live. As Ghostcrawler puts it, it is "so useful, that you could just about put a brick on the key you use for [it]". He was talking about shield block, but effortlessly building and rolling 3 SoV stacks is just the same.
And I highly doubt Sheath will make it live so heavily exploited by specs that it is not meant for. But honestly, we don't live in the land of bunnies and wishes. Right now Hammer procs seals on every target and we shall treat it as such until it is changed.
Let's put it this way; with a paltry 600 spell power (2000 stamina) and 2000 attack power your SoV will tic for 802 every 3 seconds on each target. That's a good 510 TPS on each target from SoV alone, not even counting the additional amount from smacking that hammer.
Now going with that same 2000 attack power (600 spell damage) your ret aura will increase by about 40, roughly 38 TPS assuming the mobs have a typical 2.0 swing timer. Consecration damage will be increased by 24 each tic, or an extra 46 TPS. So sheath is giving you a total of about 84 extra TPS on each mob. Scroll back up, SoV alone is 510 TPS.
So yeah, I win by a factor of almost 6.
Originally Posted by Xequecal
Number of 10 AND 25-man TBC raid instance bosses not affected by Crusade: 1. (Void Reaver) Ok, I don't know if that's also going to be the case in Wrath, but from what we know how Crusade affects basically everything.
Off the top of my head I can think of a dragon and a big angry set of windchimes in Sunwell that aren't affected either, so I'm gonna have to call bullshit there bro. Have a great day.
I have hard time believing that it'll make it to live. As Ghostcrawler puts it, it is "so useful, that you could just about put a brick on the key you use for [it]". He was talking about shield block, but effortlessly building and rolling 3 SoV stacks is just the same.
Straight from the Paladin patch notes:
All Seals have been reduced to 1 rank and now cost 14% of base mana. The duration has been increased to 2 minutes and are no longer consumed when a Judgement spell is cast. The effects can be triggered from all weapon based special abilities.
Hammer of the Righteous, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm all proccing Seal effects is working as intended.
Entropius is a demon, isn't he? You don't "tank" M'uru.
What about Maiden of Virtue, Netherspite, a few of the random mobs in Opera, Curator, Doomwalker, The Lurker Below, Tidewalker, Al'ar, Void Reaver, RoS and Kalecgos?
In every one of those cases (I might have even missed a few) Crusade is flat out worse than 1-handed weapon spec.
And I highly doubt Sheath will make it live so heavily exploited by specs that it is not meant for.
The problem isn't sheath itself or it's position in the tree*, it's that it is clearly more attractive/powerful than the other 2 tree's 51 ptrs, which is the real problem. Beacon as it is right now is barely worth casting, HotR is underwhelming vs bosses (why do you want to roll sov/corruption stacks on things that die in under 30 seconds?) because vs a single boss, it is basically a 200% threat melee swing that happens to proc a seal... very underwhelming indeed compared to sheath.
*Mental quickness(shamans) is a tier 6 talent; it would not surprise me to see the devs move sheath to t6 or even t7 deep in ret.
And I highly doubt Sheath will make it live so heavily exploited by specs that it is not meant for. But honestly, we don't live in the land of bunnies and wishes.
Why all the Sheath hate? Speccing into something besides the traditional BC Holy/Prot or Prot/Ret builds isn't exploitation, it's simply a different choice. The fact that it might be better than the traditional cookie-cutter indicates at least one of two things:
The developers are fully aware of all the ramifications and intend to create new and different builds, and/or
The 51-point talents suck.
The careful placement of Sheath in Tier 5 leads me to believe in number 1, since you can't have both Sheath and 51 in Holy or Prot. And much of the theorycraft here and *shudder* on the official boards also alludes to number 2. So where does the problem really lie, and how to fix it? If you just dump Sheath or move it down to Tier 8 or so, does that make Holy or Prot any better off? Yeah, it restores the traditional cookie-cutters by dint of making anything else stupid, but does that help the class as a whole?
Fix up BoL and HotR first so that they're suitably appealing, then make an informed judgement on alternate builds.
I think people are seriously underestimating what a tanking build will lose by stretching for Sheath.
Dropping Redoubt + Shield Spec costs you, at a minimum, a 30% bonus to your Shield of Righteousness threat. At, say 300 pre-ShieldSpec block value (easily achievable with level 70 raid gear), Shield Spec is accounting for an extra 57 tps even without Shield of the Templar, and even if we assume there is no extra threat multiplier. (And actually, I agree that this is probably the most efficient place to trim points out of Prot if you want to go for Sheath.)
Dropping HotR costs you, at a minimum, the innate damage of your weapon. A 100-dps 2.4-speed weapon will do 40 dps with hammer, or 76 tps before any damage multiplier like one-hand spec, and even if we assume no extra threat multiplier. This is ignoring the actual str->threat scaling of HotR, and ignoring any seal damage that comes with it.
Right off the bat, just by dropping Redoubt/ShieldSpec and HotR, you're starting off 133tps in the hole, even under the most favorable assumptions about the threat properties of ShR and HotR. How much faster are you expecting SoL to scale your threat? Because it's going to have to scale a lot faster to come out on top.
EDIT: And honestly, it beats the hell out of me why people are so down on HotR. If a cleaving, holy-damage weapon strike that generates bonus threat and triggers seals isn't good enough to be a 51-point talent, what is?
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
EDIT: And honestly, it beats the hell out of me why people are so down on HotR. If a cleaving, holy-damage weapon strike that generates bonus threat and triggers seals isn't good enough to be a 51-point talent, what is?
It seems like sheath-o-mania is just a trend at the moment. Prot tree was always demanding, if one likes to perform efficiently, but with this new scaling conversion everywhere it's just natural for people to want to try something new. HoTR is perfect for 51-pointer, even without proccing seals; with it it's just insane. Furthermore, no sane tank is going to give up 2/2 Judgement of the Just, and Shield of The Templar.
In this light, I'd suggest to limit sheath-builds to main holy tree, untill new Bacon of Light is revealed, at least.
The problem isn't sheath itself or it's position in the tree*, it's that it is clearly more attractive/powerful than the other 2 tree's 51 ptrs, which is the real problem. Beacon as it is right now is barely worth casting, HotR is underwhelming vs bosses (why do you want to roll sov/corruption stacks on things that die in under 30 seconds?) because vs a single boss, it is basically a 200% threat melee swing that happens to proc a seal... very underwhelming indeed compared to sheath.
*Mental quickness(shamans) is a tier 6 talent; it would not surprise me to see the devs move sheath to t6 or even t7 deep in ret.
So the problem isn't it's position, but you wouldn't be surprised if they moved it as a fix? I suppose the above statement is a testament to how much sense we all expect from Blizzard developers... The 51 pointer in holy I wholeheartedly agree... give us something equivalent to flourish (more flexible/usable in a variety of situations, cheaper) by boosting its range/tick rate and lowering mana cost. The prot 51 pointer however is amazing. End of story.
It took me a while to put this spec together, mostly due to frustration about the bloat. Here are some notes:
- I've personally never seen Spell Warding as a talent useful enough to get on it's own. I pretty much never pick it up in any of my prot builds. In fact it's puzzled me to see it in a lot of recently posted builds.
- One Handed Weapon Spec is a talent I used to have points for, but with the suspected lessening on need for Consecrate Spam, I can't honestly justify the point expenditure anymore. It seems some of the new talents provide a better bang-for-the-buck in terms of threat generation. Anecdotally, I run with some pretty well geared DPS and I found that these points in the past were the difference between being able to hold aggro or not. But again, this was mostly picked up for it's boost to Consecrate. One Handed Weapon Spec needs improvement to be worth it. It's simply not worth 5 points in tier 6.
- Guarded by the Light is really bad. A tier 9 talent to marginally reduce the mana cost of 3 niche spells was a no-brainer to exclude from any and every build. Nice to see we're already getting useless new talents.
- HotR just seems too good to miss. It has a lot of synergy with our other talents now that we know for definite that it will proc seals on targets. This is the reason I also saved points to pick up Seals of the Pure.
- It goes without saying that Blessing of Sanctuary was a point I spend _only_ to get Holy Shield. This is plain wrong.
- It also goes without saying that Improved Holy Shield is something I really don't feel like we should have to spend points on.
- If DKs and Warriors can get Parry from a Tier 1 talent, why can't we? It would vastly change the way I spec if I didn't have to spend 5 additional points to get it.
- Redoubt is something I can honestly say I'd like to have the choice of leaving out. I hate the fact that it's linked with Shield Spec.
- The Reckoning talent is simply dead in the position it's in. Tanks don't want to take it due to the fact that it scales inversely with their gear and can also cause problems if you're not stacking enough expertise to prevent boss parries. It's still not a whole lot of threat. I'm still going to stand out and say this needs to be moved to an early tier talent so ret spec can pick it up. If not they might as well just get rid of it completely.
Again, I reiterate that creating this spec was not a fun experience. Having to choose between a variety of ways to gimp myself is not something I really enjoy doing. Besides, didn't Blizzard promise to make prot specs slightly more viable for soloing and PvP? I don't see a single hint of that change to the prot Paladin's spec choices to be frank.
Just a quick note on 1he spec, it's not 5% flat threat, it's prolly more due to RF holy dmg threat multiplier?
I don't have any wws at hand atm with a prot pallie tank, but a rough guess for myself tanking stuff like heroics most dmg I do as tank is holy. So 1he spec is more like a 7-9% threat tps boost? Unless i got it's mechanics totally wrong.
I agree with Aenae too that some seems a bit wrong with Judgment and seal scaling atm, a retadin getting so much better values than either a prot or holy seems wrong. I'd prefer it if prot and retri values would be about the same, but prot getting it from spelldmg and retri getting it from AP. (Buffing Touched by the Light could help with that).
Prot paladins being spelldmg based is part of their flavour imo, and it kinda makes me sad to see us depending so much on AP.
And I see i am not the only one who'd like it if they'd cut down some 5 pointers to 2-3 pointers.
Examples are Reckoning, Ardent Defender, Redoubt, 1He spec
Buffing some of the seemingly weaker talents like Spell Warding
And a request for the lucky ones with a beta key. How exactly is Divine Guardian working out?
That talent kinda scares me as i can see a paladin pop'ing Divine Protection in a emergency (ala shield wall) and then getting owned because all the raid dmg is redirected to him. Basically that talent has the potential to remove our "shield wall" in heavy aoe fights, which seems bit silly.
I fully agree! I've been suggesting this on Maintankadin, but didn't exactly get the best comments.
The usefulness of this spec depends highly on how good HotR is, since that is the main point your will be missing with this spec. In WotLK I will definately try it at least for leveling, since the spelldamage will be really mad (30% of sta + 30% of AP)
I really don't see it as a 25 man progresssion main tank build, but more of a leveling and 5man instance tank with the ability to solo a bit as well.
The gear focus will be on strength and stamina, without HotR there is really no need for a big slow 1H weapon and the trend with spell damage weapons can actually continue. HotR and ShoR are both on a 6 sec timer so it doesn't leave much room for Judgement, Excorsism, Holy Wrath, Consecrate, panicking, Righteous Defense, Holy shield etc. So in the end I think I can live without the HotR.
Any actual Beta testers tested Prot+Sheath? It would be interesting to get some non-theoretical feedback.
Prot paladins being spelldmg based is part of their flavour imo, and it kinda makes me sad to see us depending so much on AP.
Even if we had enough spell damage from TBTL to provide all our threat needs, they NEED to make STR (and by extension AP) useful for us because they're not going to make a second set of tank gear just for Paladins, and we obviously don't want to be dragged down by a useless stat that's going to eat potentially a third of our item points.
Just a quick note on 1he spec, it's not 5% flat threat, it's prolly more due to RF holy dmg threat multiplier?
I don't have any wws at hand atm with a prot pallie tank, but a rough guess for myself tanking stuff like heroics most dmg I do as tank is holy. So 1he spec is more like a 7-9% threat tps boost? Unless i got it's mechanics totally wrong.
Even if we had enough spell damage from TBTL to provide all our threat needs, they NEED to make STR (and by extension AP) useful for us because they're not going to make a second set of tank gear just for Paladins, and we obviously don't want to be dragged down by a useless stat that's going to eat potentially a third of our item points.
I can agree with that to some point, but it's also why i don't understand why prot got a seemingly weak stam -> spellpower talent, while retri got such a strong one alot lower in the tree. (and yes comparing prot pala stam to retri ap values, makes it clear we'll gain alot less than retris).
Basically retri seems to scale so much better than prot atm?
All the numbers that i've seen in this threat indicate that AP > spelldmg for pretty much everything.
Maybe i am to much focused on the theme of the class and not the playability tough.
08/04/08, 9:51 PM
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