Remember that SoV's hit is getting buffed (some weapon damage once the 5 stack is up), so that will make up somewhat for not being able to cast Exo. Also, your AP will be higher than 2700 in a raid.

The loss of exorcism is fine really. HoR's damage raid-buffed will be significant, and although you lose the auto-crit-vs-undead aspect, it should still do a very reasonable amount of damage. From memory, exorcism is ~1080 average base damage and 0.15AP + 0.15SP coefficient. So at 2700 AP it would hit for roughly 1600, assuming about 800ish SP. Raid buffed, those numbers will get even closer, as the extra 35% contribution on HoR's coefficient will outpace exorcism. Using the above numbers, HoR will start to pull ahead of exorcism at around 3.5k AP, assuming 1000 SP. It's not a huge deal, and there's still AS if HS's up and you need something to hit before the mob comes into judgement range.

There is the fact that it gives you one less ranged ability, though. Whether this will be an issue in future raid content, we obviously don't know, but in the case of Thorim's arena, I use the full complement of our ranged abilities - since the actual threat each ability does is less important than just hitting a mob with something, and trusting to Hammer, Cons etc that'll hold them once they get closer.

Pretty sure that's the last thing Blizzard wants to do. It's why they modified exorcism to where they felt it could be made anti-player again in the first place, they don't want to have (many) abilities that work only in PVE.

Exo sometimes would be safe to use in Thorium's area. While mobs are running towards the middle, you would have 1.5 seconds free to cast an Exo (you just wouldn't want to use Exo while something is hitting you, since you lose dodge/parry).

It can also be used as extra pick up tool on something like yogg, ignis adds, XT bots (if you're unlucky on that single add wave), and in general, every place when you can afford to pull a boss/add and let it run to you.

Current Exorcism is on a 15 second CD not a 30. Additionally AS is available and sometime HotR and judgement. The change is pretty much a wash. Sometimes it won't matter, sometimes its a bt better and sometimes it's a bit worse but not by much in either direction.

HoR is still a taunt, it just has a better damage component now. I don't see where you're coming from with the "threat ability" thing because it doesn't do damage until after the mob is taunted, so unless you're targeting a different mob (that doesn't have you targeted by the way) than when you used Exo and AS, it won't do diddly. I'll use it fist thing, then see if I can safely use exo or if AS will be better for being instant instead of 1.5 seconds. We can't do any avoidance or blocking while we're casting after all.

You are right about HoR being worthless for damage if the mob is targeting you, but still it is a usable buff to the ability, and makes HoR stronger when used as a ranged pull. Note when you are casting a spell, you still can miss attacks.


New PTR Build: Ardent Defender now heals you up by 20% of your maximum health and the amount healed is based on defense.

I assume this means 540 Defense = 20% heal, while normal 400 Defense is a lot less (this is likely done to address use of the talent by Prot Healers in Arena). 20% is still nice when you cheat death.

According to world of raids and indeed MMO champion's own talent calculator, AD is actually still 30% at 540 defence (Assuming they use 540 as the 'cap'), I think it's a typo on their front page. They've also updated all of the tank set bonusses to give a damage bonus to some of the "smaller" threat skills, but 5% to HoTR is pretty sweet, especially for trash tanking.

Also the change to [Glyph of Righteous Defense] to make it work on both of our taunts is most welcome, although I probably still won't use it, especially combined with the T9 set bonus.

Does anyone know if the proc mechanics on the PTR are working properly now? I was going to check out blade ward again to see if they've actually made it suck less.

Talent calculators usually take a day or two to update, especially when the PTR isn't even up. How it works is: Paladin with defense equal to only 5 times his or her level will receive no healing from the talent (so 400 Def = no heal), while a paladin who is immune to critical strikes from boss creatures through defense will receive the maximum amount (540 Def = 30% heal).

More changes:
* * Agility: The amount of agility required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This change required recalibrating the amount of dodge a player has with 0 agility by a slight amount as well, so all players will see their dodge percentage vary a small amount.
* * Dodge Rating: The amount of dodge rating required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply.
* * Parry Rating: The amount of parry rating required per percentage of parry has been reduced by 8%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply. Parry still diminishes more quickly than dodge.

Since block is being buffed/not changed and with Cheat Death, Paladins are looking like the best tanks in 3.2.

Just tested new AD on the PTR, at 541 defence it healed for a fraction of a percent under 30% of my total HP.


(The fall damage was just to speed things up before I pulled a mob).

Healed 11,223 hp, whilst my total HP in that test was 37929, only buffs active were righteous fury and crusader aura. I was not spec'ed into divinity. Drat now that I think of it I'd better test without improved devotion aura.



Healed 11,009hp, it would appear that AD is not affected by improved devotion aura, but has some weird rounding bugs at the moment. To double check this, I tried again and it healed for 11350. My total HP had not changed at all, and the creatures have no healing debuff effects, so I can only assume this is some kind of loss of precision somewhere in blizzard's code.

I also really enjoy the new visible absorb that AD has on every hit that its damage reduction procs upon, it makes the talent's effect of saving your ass much mroe noticeable. Oh and for those wondering, when AD procs it looks like the resurrection animation (Fitting I guess). Screenshot here.

I disagree. Barring a massive shift in boss design philosophy (to be fair I suppose this is, as you mentioned, a possibility), to the point where tanks are in almost no danger of being bursted down, then Paladin tanks, by virtue of the new AD, will be in a league of their own. The talent represents a 15% increase in effective health versus potentially lethal damage. The only difference between this, and 15% more stamina, is that this doesn't increase the amount of healing required from healers to top the tank up. It's a very significant difference, and one which gives Paladins a very definitive edge in most situations. Even if they move away from massive boss hits, EH still needs to remain a relevant factor for tanks to consider, and with an inbuilt advantage of this magnitude, it simply leaves Paladins free to focus on avoidance / other stats. I'm really struggling to understand the logic behind this change, and why it isn't seen as a more serious concern for tank balance. I don't want to see Prot get the Ret treatment, where wildly inappropriate buffs are dished out for 2 weeks then hurriedly hotfixed. I think this is something which needs to be addressed now, while it's still on the PTRs.

On another note though, the avoidance changes are very interesting. Assuming that the stats are absolutely equal in value / DR, then we'll be left trying to get them as equal as possible (ie gemming for whichever one's lower). Still, it seems strange that they wouldn't just go all out and merge them. There are so few differences left between them these days with elemental attacks being parriable. I suppose the major distinguishing factor is still the inability of certain classes to parry, which would presumably be used as a means of balancing them versus melee attackers? Apart from that, the only functional difference between the two that I'm aware of is parry-haste. Are there others which I'm missing?

edit -- regarding AD's heal, the discrepencies in the values of the heal seemed to roughly coincide with the amount that the seers were hitting you for, ~300-400ish. It could simply be subtracting the 'overkill' portion of the damage from the heal, something which would make it somewhat less useful versus heavy-hitting bosses.

Something to test, but might be slightly hard: What's the interaction between the new Ardent Defender and Unbalancing Strike?

I don't think it will make a difference in the long run, but it would be interesting is Unbalancing Strike "turned off" AD.

I beg to disagree. Current patterns of tank healing and boss damage are not being caused by high avoidance, but rather by really powerful healing.

If you're getting blasted by heals whether or not you're getting hit, what does it matter how high your avoidance is? It doesn't. So why are you getting blasted by heals whether or not you're getting hit? Because you could die within one or two GCDs, far too fast for reactive healing. Why are bosses dealing so much damage? Because healing can bring you from the brink to full health in one or two GCDs.

Boss damage is so powerful because healing is so powerful. If we were never in danger of being bursted down from the moment the fight starts, it's not so much of a stretch to claim that we'd never be in danger dying, period.

Two things, actually:

1. If Parry is still being diminished faster than Dodge, then we're probably still going to prefer Dodge, assuming you ever want to stack avoidance at all, seeing as how EH is the current king-of-the-hill.

2. Keeping them as two separate stats with (relatively) equal value is better than a single unified stat, even if that single stat had double the conversion rate, because of how the itemization formulas work. Spreading the same value over two stats yields more.

Mex: Just tested this on Thrym and it only healed for 10458 on a 2205 "killing blow" absorb. This seems to tally with the idea that its subtracting the overkill from the heal (i.e. Its healing me from say -500hp and thus losing part of the effect). I'll make a bug ticket asap .

Would it be possible to test what happens if you get killing-blowed for more than 30% of your HP? I'm thinking this may be intended just like AMS' damage cap, as a way to prevent Paladins from soaking something like a Sapphiron Deep Breath

I don't disagree, but I don't fully agree either. Heal bombing is a symptom of the avoidance problem rather than the cause, in my opinion.

GC has flat out stated that avoidance was too high in Naxx level gear, and I tend to agree. This has only increased through Ulduar, where the mandatory ilevel upgrades have pushed certain tanking classes to levels of avoidance where they are completely negating a large majority of the damage that would be done to them. In this world bosses have to hit very hard in order to threaten a tank's life - if a boss is only hitting for 15% of a tank's life with each blow and you avoid 75% of the attacks... well you're not in much real danger of ever dying. On the other hand if you avoid 75% of attacks but each hit that lands from the boss takes out 80% of your health you're going to be in trouble if your RNG doesn't hold and the boss gets through your avoidance twice in a row.

This has had the effect of spam heal bombing becoming the only method for tank healing. In the world where more than 1 boss hit in a row means death healers have been forced to pump out massive HPS with little thought to overhealing simply to protect themselves from the offchance that a tank might get 2-shot. As long as healers can maintain stupidly high HPS numbers tanks won't be in real danger of dying, yes. However, on the opposite side, as long as tanks are avoiding enough so that bosses are forced to hit very hard to threaten the tank's life healers will be forced into this spam method simply to hedge against RNG.

What I feel we're seeing here is the first steps of a paradigm shift from the developers. They've attempted to prevent the heal bombing of Holy Paladins by cutting Illumination (though with the new SoW antics this has been less than successful, I'm pretty sure we're going to see something change there soon though) and now it seems like they're starting to curb avoidance to work on the other end. I honestly hope this marks a transition from avoidance being king to mitigation as such - which in the long run is probably something much easier to balance as well.

A quick trip to Thrym with no gear on other than [Repelling Charge] (To make sure I had some defense skill above normal) shows this:



AD does zero healing when the hit does more than 30% of your HP as damage (my HP in the above picture was 8374, naked) but it does still save you.

Well it says AD scales with our defense rating. Doesn't US only affect defense skill? I know it sounds like semantics, but if AD is scaled on the rating portion, that won't change with US if I remember how it works correctly.

Just to make sure people are aware of this:
At least for me this makes a semi useless glyph very powerful, if not mandatory.
It'll depend on how much hit you got on your gear but given in the current expansion I was anywhere from 40ish to 200ish hit rating it sure has potential.

We've discussed the value of hit vis-a-vis taunts before. If you're absolutely that concerned about your taunt not connecting, then obviously, this glyph change is a very welcome one. However, considering the worst-case scenario for both taunts missing on a raid boss is 2.89% (17% * 17%), and considering also that the vast majority of taunts are not carried out on raid bosses, I'd say that the glyph is far from mandatory.