This is sort of a continuation of my reply to the ideas being thrown out in the thread “Ability Theory: Seal of Protection” started by Lore in the Advanced Training section of the maintankadin.com forum, located here:
Maintankadin :: View topic - Ability Theory: "Seal of Protection"
Just wanted to share some thoughts I’ve been sitting on for a few days, originally stemming from my reaction to this post by Alixander:
Kaziel's thoughts on my (mis?)adventures in MMOs: Potential for change...
The main thrust of the concept, in how it relates to itemization, was also recently echoed by Coriel on the June 29th post on
Blessing of Kings
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A major criticism I have of the Paladin tanking mechanics in their current incarnation is that they are significantly unintuitive compared to all the other classes’ mechanics, specifically those of the other two tanks.
Thinking back, I know that I personally have written and read more pages upon pages of information, math, and discussion regarding Paladin tanking than I can begin to count. My laptop is filled with files and files of word documents, data parsing, spreadsheets, image files, graphs, and charts of all kinds full of the stuff.
I know that there are those of you who have written and read more and longer than I have.
So I asked myself...”Why is the level of mechanics knowledge required to simply FUNCTION as a viable (viable…I hate that word…it’s so overused) paladin tank NECESSARY?” Such detail, such complicated concepts, pervasiveness of math, checking and rechecking, and understanding of things it took massive amounts of data collection, statistics, and extrapolation to even determine in the first place by the original theorycrafters isn’t needed by any other class, or even role within a class.
It was mentioned recently by somebody on this forum that they were surprised to observe a lack of such detailed knowledge of the underlying clockwork behind how their character functions among players of other classes, and specifically among warrior tanks. It is also often found surprising and mentioned with despair how such players remain fully effective in their role despite their ignorance of the underlying complexities.
I wanted to figure out why this is.
The answer I came up with was the fact that tanking Paladins, when played to their strengths to the greatest effectiveness, lack intuitiveness in their functionality.
Think about it.
Players have to search through ravenous and hostile class forums to research the way the complex mechanics of the automated attack roll calculations work. They have to sit down with a fancy mod, or more often a calculator, and actually add up their crushing blow elimination stats.
How is it that there are amazingly skilled warriors, sometimes long-term raiding guild Main Tanks, who don’t even really know what causes Crushing Blows at all, let alone the math behind them?
The reason is that they already know to do everything they are supposed to do to play their class at it’s most effective, and were taught it intuitively, logically, progressively in orderly, easy steps by the game.
The habits they are taught, or simply pick up naturally without even thinking, simultaneously are functioning behind the scenes on a whole higher level, and form the cogs and wheels that make their class work in a very fundamental way.
Paladins have to penetrate that behind-the-scenes functionality, grasp it, understand it, and then try to fit themselves into the spinning gears without getting….well….crushed.
To understand what exactly I mean, here’s a more specific example.
Enter with me into the mind of a Neewb…
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Imagine yourself as a newly 70 Warrior who has never seen the forums, happily playing his first ever mmo.
As a warrior, reading the tooltips of your abilities you see Shield Block. You've vaguely got a notion that someone some where told you that stacking defense is good.
You don't really know how much you need, or what exactly it's doing precisely, but you've noticed that you take a lot less damage wearing it, and you see on your character screen that it's reducing your chance of taking critical hits.
You like that, since you know critical hits are bad.
You also know vaguely from somewhere that you want to be causing as much threat as you can when you're tanking, and while you hear alot about Shield Slam, you never seem to be able to get as much aggro as you've been led to expect from it. Sunders aren't working all that well either since you passed level 60, and while Heroic Strike does better, your one-hander is a sucky green right now and you cant seem to find anything good to replace it.
Revenge catches your eye.
It's got in the tooltip, right there in all it's bluntness, "causes a high amount of threat".
It also says "requires a blocked attack".
You have a moment of genius. Enlightenment. Something in your neewbie brain clicks.
"If Revenge requires following a blocked attack....", you think to yourself, "...and Shield Block increases my chance to block by a whole bunch.....that fits right together! I can use those two constantly, and alternate in other stuff in between! Hey! Heroic Strikes arent on the same cooldown either! This can work!"
In your innocence, you don't even notice that that defense you stacked cause it seemed to help has pushed your avoidance totals to an amount to equal complete elimination of Crushing Blows and Critical Hits when you have your Shield Block up.
You counldn't to save your life tell someone the ratios of different ratings to the avoidance they provide.
You have never heard of the Combat Table or One-Roll Theory.
The incredible amounts of data parsing, statistical analysis, theorycraft, testing, and calculations done by others to determine the inner workings of the game's hidden clockwork remain completely unknown to your oblivious mind.
And yet, your system works.
One intuitive step to the next, you naturally are led by the mechanics of your class to making the right choices without even understanding why they are right. Each one just seems logical.
Step by gradual step, the game teaches you effectiveness.
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Now, imagine yourself instead as a Paladin, newly having reached the level cap of her first online game.
The abilities you have are many, varied, and quite often do not build upon each other much.
Retribution aura? It sits there and does it's thing. Hard to tell whether Devotion would be better. Devotion doesnt seem to make much difference on your percent reduction from armor on your character sheet, but on the other hand, Retribution barely hits for anything. Either way, the numbers seem small. You make a stab in the dark and use Devotion anyway.
The whole Seal/Judgement thing you have figured out, but what do I go with? You figure since you run outof mana alot, you'll judge Wisdom and use Seal of the Crusader to attack faster, though you're not sure about that seal, since it says something about reducing the damage of your attacks at the same time. How much? No idea. Seems to still work OK though.
When gear drops, you see all kinds of stats on it. Some of it seems like its designed for Paladins, with lots of Intellect and Strength and stuff, so you grab that, and you spec into that strength talent thingie.
You get confused by the plate gear that seems like its supposed to be for Mages. You know mages can't wear Plate. Weird. You grab some of that gear too anyway, just in case. Chance are, there must be a good reason that there's gear like that.
You can easily recognize the warrior gear though. You pass all of it. You're not a warrior.
You know vaguely from somewhere that Paladins have great threat.
Your Holy Shield ability says something about higher threat, so you use that alot, though sometimes you forget to.
You used Consecration alot for a while, but you kept running out of mana too fast, and that sucks, so you stopped using it unless there's alot of enemies.
Some guy in one of your groups suggested you downrank, but that doesnt make any sense, cause then your spells wouldnt hit for as much.
You know that taunting is important, but can't quite make it work fast enough. It takes too long to see who the enemy is attacking and click them and then find the spell. Most of the time people die first. Sometimes taunt just doesnt work, you can't figure out why.
Your friend made a macro or something like that for you, but its only on your other computer and the friend doesnt play anymore. Even on that computer, the macro-thingie stopped working a couple weeks ago.
Stupid Pallies.
You like the shield-throw thing though. It's fun. You start using Concentration Aura because you always get interrupted alot when you use it every time it's up. That was pretty clever. You'd almost forgotten about Concentration Aura.
You don't do very well in groups though. People complain about you not having very much health. You can't figure out what you're doing wrong. You specced into the health-increase talent and you always give yourself Kings. You see lots of warlocks and mages that have more health than you alot. "I just need better gear", you figure.
Telling people you group with that you have lots of armor from wearing plate doesnt convice them. You try to get as much armor as you can so that it works and you stop dying as easy, but it never seems to make much difference and the number on your character sheet increases so slowly.
You die alot, and its hard to keep aggro on stuff, even though you use your shield-throw every time you can.
You start using Consecration again, but run into the same problems running out of mana.
Using Seal of Wisdom on top of Judgement of Wisdom doesnt seem to even help, and using Blessing of Wisdom instead of Blessing of Kings makes you die even easier.
People you group with get mad at you, and getting yelled at alot sucks. You stop doing five-mans much except with your real life friends. You stopped getting invited to groups very often anyway.
One day you see the nice Warrior on your friends list that you quested with a whole lot of times when you were both leveling.
Now he's in a really cool guild and has a whole bunch of really nice items!
He waves at you, and you ask him if you can join his guild.
The warrior asks you what talent spec you are, and you tell him
"Mostly Protection with a little in Retribution".
"So you're a tankadin?"
"Yup! =)"
"Sorry, we don't need any tanking paladins."
Little by little, you start to fade. You get frustrated at being unable to accomplish anything, and more frustrated and being unable to fathom the complicated maelstrom of unintelligible information when you try.
Finally, reluctantly, our little neewbie surrenders the fight.
She rerolls.
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There was a quote that was commonly cited on the Paladin Class Forums a long long time ago that I really liked and have remembered ever since.
It said that playing a Paladin is like playing Chess. Anybody can play Chess. Its just really damned hard to learn how to play Chess skillfully. To play it like a master. When you find one though, a master, it’s really something amazing to behold.
There’s a misconception commonly held about Paladins by other players. Especially when talking about PvP, it’s often said that there is a disproportional number of bad Paladins running around in Azeroth’s many parallel universes.
I don’t find that credible.
Instead, I’d say that a bad Paladin is simply more visible than a bad player of another class. A bad Rogue isn’t noticed by anybody, except as evidence of your own skill for doing better on them on the DPS chart. An inept Paladin sticks out like a sore thumb.
Priests, Shamans, and Druids may heal people, but Paladins save lives. And this is because of the massive amount of tools at their disposal. I love my Paladin. I love her because she is bloody complicated. And one of the biggest in her arsenal of tools is tanking.
In my view, paladin tanking suffers due to its artificiality, its tardiness. It bears all the earmarks of being added later in the game as a real actor than all other class roles.
Because of this, some of the ways we fit into the rest of the game world seem a little…forced. There are kinks we need to work out, and most importantly an end destination we need to recognize and pursue.
I am of the same mind as Alixander in his post here (
Kaziel's thoughts on my (mis?)adventures in MMOs: I've already said my bit over at MainTankadin...) that Paladin tanking does have a direction it is being intentionally guided towards by the class developers and that we have also just gone through several phases of major growth or, as he put it, REBIRTH in the very recent past.
The primary obstacle we face in my analysis is not balance with other classes, not itemization, not the encounter mechanics or the opposition from other players or the nature of our abilities or talents, it is how unintuitive our mechanics are as a whole picture. The big picture. How everything fits together as one.
This is a significant design flaw.
It is not a fatal one.
In the thread “the path we follow” (
WoW Forums -> "The path we follow..." - The Value of Block) I advocated tweaking of the Attack Table and the particular way crushing blows accomplished spike damage as the best option to level the playing field for Paladin tanks while retaining everyone’s class identity and uniqueness.
Now, I think that perhaps a different, more effective course of action is available, which would have the potential to not only level the playing field, but bring all the warring elements of the tankadins class design together in an intuitive, and therefore successful and profoundly more effective, way.
I view a block value multiplier based on incoming hit size as that tool.
I still maintain that the paladin class is not, and never has been, broken.
We just have a couple pieces put in the wrong way, and a simply change or two has the ability to make everything finally fit.
I play my Paladin because she is a hybrid and, like any complicated machine, if you put it all together right, the end result truly is far greater...than the sum of its parts.
For more detail on my Block Value multiplier idea, it’s described in:
Maintankadin :: View topic - Ability Theory: "Seal of Protection" 
