Svenone: If you think that an ability that always saves you from dying when it's off cooldown is unreliable, I'm not sure what else you want. As long as it procs a buff/graphic when it saves you (Like cheat death does) so you can track the cooldown with addons, everything will be fine. Hopping onto the PTR once its up will quickly solve this mystery.

I find most of the criticism about the new passive guardian spirit-style proc to be a little overdone. In terms of the "feel" of the ability, it matches paladins perfectly. You're supposed to be a bastion of light, and the idea that the light saves you from certain death every now and then works well in that sense.

The passive damage reduction past the threshold is a very welcome change, although at the moment its effects on overall mitigation will need to be tested to make sure it's not crazy overpowered.

Oh don't get me wrong, it's a great new aspect of the class. But what I think I was trying to get at (I meander away from the point sometimes) is that it might be a hard sell on other people to fully convince that paladins are getting one step closer to being accepted more often than not as tanks. Mainly I'm playing the role of the person who because it's not an on-demand ability, it's too much of a risk.

I think you can either view it as, ok, "I'm going to track this as my extra cooldown and work my game around it"

or "this is just a bonus to the mix and if it goes off, it goes off. my gameplay and healers are still going to play the same way."

I just think at time there will be situations for a majority of players (I'm talking about a general player base) where a paladin tank can say "save your GS, let AD proc" and a priest may be leery and think to themselves "I'd rather not chance it, I'm going to blow GS anyway". Which who knows maybe it will lead to a situation where it may be needed down the road.

Just sayin!

edit: the reasoning behind this is because warriors have for so long had last stand as an ability which the playerbase knows exists, it's tangible, it's a clickable ability that healers and your raid can rely on to be there when you need it. When encounters seem and look as though they were developed around CDs and have little room for error, I just see it as a more reliable ability when you can activate it at your discretion.

So the Prot Tier gear has been datamined already (that's the highest ilevel heroic-25 link, the rest are on the front page of MMO-champion).

First off, that helm is about as incredible as we could ever ask. Defense, Dodge, and an absolute ton of SBV. Only downer is the Red socket, but the bonus is good enough to (most likely) warrant using it at the least. The remainder of the set looks to be about what we had with T8 - lots of Dodge and Parry. I personally would have preferred some of the Parry and Expertise to be converted into SBV and maybe hit rating, but all in all it looks like a fairly solid main tanking set. It really is too bad the full set bonuses are so lackluster this time around though.

Some of the preliminary reports I've seen about the redesigned Ardent Defender:

1. It reduces a whole hit that would take you from above 35% to below 35%, even if you would be left above 35% post-reduction

2. It reduces a whole hit that would take you from below 35% to farther below 35%

3. The damage reduction is indeed 30%, as advertised.

4. The amount of damage reduced by AD now shows as 'absorbs' (I believe WOTN's reduction displays similarly)

5. If AD prevents a killing blow, you get a 2 minute debuff called Ardent Defender. While this debuff is active, the entire talent is turned off, including the first clause's damage reduction when low on health. This is rather obvious by the lack of absorbs on the first and subsequent attacks after the killing-blow-to-be.

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I'm still waiting on my own character copy to confirm this, but it would seem that this puts us in an interesting situation of wanting to use Divine Protection to prevent AD's second clause from proccing as much as we can.

EDIT: If you have both Ardent Defender and Guardian Angel when the killing-blow-to-be is landed, Ardent Defender is triggered first, and Guardian Angel will simply expire unless you suffer another killing-blow-to-be.

Certainly an interesting side-effect on the cheat death style proc, but it's nowhere near enough to mitigate how powerful the first part of the talent is.

We're looking at a ~42% increase in effective health versus burst damage, which is utterly ridiculous, not even counting the fact than in any dangerous situation that EH will be in the form of mitigation, not simply stamina, making topping us up even easier. Simply getting the talent to proc at all will in itself be insanely difficult.

Unless I'm missing some key mitigating factor here, then AD in its new form is grossly overpowered, and will need significant tuning before it goes live.

The set is definitely a solid MT set and I think what makes it even better is actually the expertise and hit. Now that they buffed the 'on hit' dmg of SoV, hit and expertise cap will both become more important for our threat gen. What could be better to reach these caps if one piece gives 50 expertise and another 62 hit?

Even if the utility of expertise and hit for a MT can be debated it is nice that there are set pieces for us to use when we want to do different jobs.

Another update: Coliseum 25man Emblem trinket is looking awesome: 1792 armor passive and 512 dodge rating for 20 second use effect.

It's still in the same state as on live, so 272 block value while Holy Shield is active, making it useless compared to the buffed Libram of Obstruction (Which is 352 block value for 10 seconds after using Judgement).

How useful is AD?
Let's get some numbers out of it.

With no heals assumed:
Hits 50% of stable raid buffed health. A 21% EH boost without a CD
Hits 60% of stable raid buffed health. A 16.8% EH boost without a CD
Hits 65% of stable raid buffed health. A 14.7% EH boost without a CD (worse case scenario)
Hits 70% of stable raid buffed health. A 42.3% EH boost without a CD

To put this in perspective, let's look at a druid's bark skin:
Hits 50% of stable raid buffed health. A 25% EH boost with a CD
Hits 60% of stable raid buffed health. A 25% EH boost with a CD
Hits 65% of stable raid buffed health. A 25% EH boost with a CD
Hits 70% of stable raid buffed health. A 25% EH boost with a CD

After writing this out I feel strongly that AD's damage reduction needs a nerf or paladins will rule heavy hitting fights without a single attack burst event that requires a CD to live through (and even then stacking the raid for one extra CD for the paladin would make the fight soooo much easier). I can't see a damage reduction greater than 20% making it through in a CD isn't put on it with 15% being the most likely.

Majiben could you show how you got your numbers please? Just my (very) napkin math is putting AD as less beneficial than you are getting with the exception of 70% hits.

I was doing some calculations according to Prinsesa's findings and I'd like to share with you guys the results. I'm disregarding the cheat death effect of AD.

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Consider a tank with 47k hp fully buffed (that's where I'm sitting at right now, far from having all BiS) and a boss hitting for 25k (53% of your max hp):

Current HP - Damage Taken

47000 (100%) - 25000
22000 (46%) - 17500 (reduced by 30% since it's taking you below 35% hp)
4500 (9%) - 17500 (reduced by 30% since you're already below 35% hp)
Dead

Effective Health: 25000 + 25000 + 6400 = 56400 (20% increase)

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Now consider a tank with a lot less HP, 38k fully buffed. And the same boss hitting for 25k (now, 66% of your max hp):

Current HP - Damage Taken

38000 (100%) - 17500 (reduced by 30% since it would take you below 35% hp)
20500 (54%) - 17500 (reduced by 30% since it's taking you below 35% hp)
3000 (8%) - 17500 (reduced by 30% since you're already below 35% hp)
Dead

Effective Health: 25000 + 25000 + 4200 = 54200 (42% increase)

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My conclusion is that it's better to gear yourself so that a boss' hit is about 66% of your total health, meaning that EVERY hit is going to be reduced by AD. The resulting effective health is roughly the same, but the amount of budget left to spend on other defensive stats (dodge, parry, block value) is huge.

Are there any flaws in my calculations?

I used the following

X = hit size in terms of your stable raid buffed health pool

If .325 (32.5%) < X <= .65
then your EH is determined by
X + (1-X)/.7

If .65 (65%) < X
then your EH is determined by
1/.7

I could also make fomulas for smaller than 32.5% hits but those are generally not challenging encounters and requires many more piece wise functions.


Fredshino, your numbers are good if the hits are very rapid where heals are unreliable to fll you back up inbetween hits (think mimiron plasma blast) but otherwise it can be silly to lower EH when the danger of taking two hits without moderate healing is low. As a note if you can you should get your EH up to the point where a hit size is 71% or less of your HP as you can survive up to two of thos hits without heals in AD's current PTR itteration without triggering the CD effect. Hits a little larger are also acceptable as you will have HoTs, Shields and other heals on you as well.

What's also interesting and great to see is the lack of shield block rating on the entire set. I think this means the devs and/or the itemization team have realized that we can get plenty of block rating from non-set pieces already.

EDIT: I just noticed that the prot warrior ilevel 258 set and the prot paladin ilevel 258 set are exactly the same except that the warrior set gets more blockvalue. So we should probably take these screenshots with a chaser of salt for now.

Off topic thought but: there's an interesting concept, I know what you're talking about here is itemization points on gear budgets, but what about a prot talent that converts X amount of your other avoidance into +SBV, maybe not a bad idea? this could help with some itemization and maybe not discourage the acquisition of other forms of tanking stats (expertise really needs to be looked at as what blizz is trying to do with it as it applies to paladins).

Hey, I'll say this because I think you've been too distracted with the power of AD... The 4pc for paladins T9, 30 secs less on bubble wall, but like... Forbearance still lasts 2 mins?... They haven't said anything about a change to THAT. Blizzard really doesn't think their things through half the time erh, haha.

The set bonuses currently are the same for almost every class (or extremely similar) or role, I'd expect them to change. (priest t8 2 pc = +10% crit on PoH. t9 4pc = +5% crit on PoH)

They can change Forbearance at will. Back during 3.0 (pre-Wrath), one day they changed Forbearance's cooldown by another minute while the servers were up.

Perhaps the set bonus will affect Forbearance as well.

I have yet only tested the Retri libram on PTR and it has a very high uptime. I will test the dodge libram soon.

Anyone considered testing Ardent Defender with stuff like Pain Suppression on? They may make AD overwrite PS and other damage reduction buffs as well as the already confirmed case of GS. Ideally you'd test it with hits that don't proc AD and with some that do.

Dodge libram looks to have a 50% proc rate at the moment (from my very unscientific testing), giving it, for all intents and purposes, a 100% uptime. Very nice.

With the current uptime on the ret SoV libram (also seeming to be a 50% proc chance) it also makes a very nice threat-based alternative.

I doubt that AD's DR wouldn't stack with other Damage reductions. AD's CD effect does stack with GS but in an inconvient order. The AD effect is used first and the GS effect is not consumed on that killing blow and can still proc on following blows. This is not the ideal ordering but it will hopefully be changed, especially considering the AD CD is weaker.

The only instance of non stacking DR is HoSac and DivSac and multiple copies there of.

That's not quite 100%, though it's certainly a very high uptime. Assuming a 10% rate of failing to hit with Hammer of the Righteous, that's 45% chance on each individual cast, which nets us a 84% chance that one of three Hammers of the Righteous you cast within it's uptime will proc the Libram again. Being hit and expertise capped improves this to a maximum of 87.5% chance to refresh.

Multi-target, assuming the Libram is based simply Hammer of the Righteous hits, our chances improve significantly however. On two targets we're up to 97% chance to refresh within the duration, and three targets giving us a 99.93% chance to refresh.

10% miss rate is an exceedingly high miss rate since it has a base miss rate of 8% with no hit rating and no draenei. I would think a 3-5% miss chance would be more reasonable to use.