Ghostcrawler Hits the Paladin Boards

[Lore]

Ghostcrawler has been busy, lighting up the Paladin boards with more interesting (and awesome) news.

To begin with, an update on the much-argued-about Shield of Righteousness nerf:

Shield of Righteousness was going to scale way too well as a multiplier on block value. We already saw cases where it was 40% or more of paladin dps with very few hits. I'm not sure if you got the entire change in with the hotfix, but it's now 100% of block with a flat component and two ranks. See how it feels in the next beta build.

It's not critical that Shield Slam and Shield of Righteousness hit for equal amounts, so long as overall dps and threat are pretty close. We're trying to keep them as distinct as possible, since there are already concerns about the two classes moving too close together.

So it sounds like ShoR will be seeing a new rank and a flat damage component in the next build. It remains to be seen exactly how much of a damage increase we're going to see here, but it's definitely a step back towards giving Shield of Righteousness a little more "Oomph." The second rank also opens up the possibility of ShoR being made available at a lower level - great news for any Paladins planning to level as Protection in Northrend.

Her second comment I find somewhat interesting. Personally, I still find the classes quite distinct; we've got a couple similar talents, similar gear, and one or two similar abilities, but the flavor is still definitely there. A Warrior tank still "feels" quite different from a Paladin tank, from the viewpoints of both the tank and his or her groupmates.

At the same time, those few days of competition between Warrior and Paladin shield slams were fun. The usual feelings of hesitance and distrust between the two classes were, at least for the time being, replaced with a spirit of friendly competition as the "plucky young Paladin" faced off against the "wise veteran Warrior" to see who could produce the biggest completely irrational numbers. Ghostcrawler herself mentions in another thread:

The one thing paladins are up against is the tradition of having warrior MTs. Some tanks are already established in their roles, and a guild won't swap them out for no reason. A new player rolling a tank may pick a warrior since they feel that's the best chance they have of getting to tank. As experimental as the community can be, it can also be very conservative. But eventually, tradition gets worn down. In Molten Core, paladins were only there to heal.

I'm certainly not suggesting that those MT's who have earned their way into a solid raiding position should lose it, but I think letting Shield Slam and Shield of Righteousness be similar enough to count would go a long way towards reinforcing the notion that Paladins and Warriors are not enemies, but comrades.

But wait, there's more!

GC also had a couple words to say about Fear, Silence, and Mana Drains:

Fear on bosses isn't nearly as scary as it used to be since they don't switch targets. Plus there are lots of ways around it with Tremor Totems, Fear Ward and even PvP trinkets. It's also pretty rare in LK. Bosses who silence or mana drain the tank might not even exist. We still like to silence the healers though. It makes their lives more interesting.

She also made the comment of "We just can't do that in LK content, at least not on the tanks" when asked the question of Silence and Mana Drain specifically. This is excellent news - fights like Gruul, Kaz'rogal, Azgalor, and Mother Shahraz were, at the very least, incredibly annoying for a Tankadin in TBC.

The Fear comment has me somewhat worried, however. All of those mechanics are already in place in TBC content, yet you still see the vast majority of guilds swapping out Paladins and Druids for Warriors on encounters like Archimonde. This is purely because, even with no aggro drop, allowing your tank to get feared for even a moment is a huge risk. While feared, not only is a tank moving things around unnecessarily (which, depending on the encounter, can lead to other feared raid members getting hit with things like Cleave), but they are also incapable of avoiding or blocking hits. This, especially in later progression when avoidance levels are higher, leads to a high burst of incoming damage at the same time all your healers lose control of their characters as well.

You can bring in a couple extra priests and use a Fear Ward rotation, and your tank can break one fear every two minutes very briefly by sacrificing a trinket slot, but that's a lot more work than most raiding guilds - casual or not - are likely to want to put into an encounter. Simply put, the Fear mechanic in TBC put Druid and Paladin tanks at a severe disadvantage, and something needs to be done beyond expecting non-Warrior tanks to farm for a PVP trinket and hope there's a few Priests or Shaman around. It doesn't particularly matter if we are given the ability to break it ourselves, if someone else breaks it for us, or if the mechanic itself is tweaked slightly; something has to change.

One of the simplest and most elegant solutions I've seen is to change the Fear mechanic to function more like Intimidating Shout, causing the feared tank to stand still instead of running around with the boss slashing them across the back. It doesn't really help the extra damage intake problem any, but it does help keep the boss under control a lot better, which might be all it takes to make raiding guilds lean more towards the Tremor Totem/Fear Ward solution than the "Kick out the MT so we can bring in a Warrior" solution.

The last comment I'll bring up is one of reassurance that yes, they do in fact want Paladins main tanking raids:

We want paladins to be *competitive* MTs if that makes you feel better. If your block is worse than warriors, we'll get that fixed. It's possible to make a lot of progress with theorycrafting, but at some point everyone just needs to get out there and see what happens in a "real world" environment.

To reiterate, we're not that crazy about trying to strongly reinforce niches or special abilities for fear that those lead to certain tanks being more desired than others. That design strategy probably works okay for dps and healing roles, because you tend to have more of them and they tend to be slightly more interchangable from raid to raid. For better or worse, groups tend to stick with their main tank.

Even after LK goes live, you have my assurance that we'll try to keep parity. If something unforseen (the weird interaction of a glyph and new set bonus perhaps) causes one tank to get far ahead, we'll get it taken care of.

Keep up the good work, GC. I can't wait to put the next batch of updates to the test.

[Kurgen]

I am not sure about the last column about Paladin's block being much lower? I am a prot war and a tankadin and with Holy Shield keeping a high block % it seems damage will be reduced by a Pally just the same as a warrior. While a paladins will be constant the bulk of the warriors will be spiky in the amount absorbed by the shield.

I am still waiting on teh sidelines on what they will do with the tanks second jobs. Wars not tanking are now light dps. Pallies were relegated to joining the healing corps. Now I just am not sure how they are going to let pallies dps as a secondary, I think that will create a ton of balance issues.

Now the trick is, if your not tanking what do you want to do.

Reinforce dps, be a war tank.
Reinforce healers be a pally (or you like being a "Glowy" tank .

Its a real dilema for me as I love shield slam so much and now pallies get that too.

[MonkH]

it sounds like hes saying "hey ur still lesser of of the tanks but ppl will still take u cus tanks are needed" which i was hoping situation wasnt going to be for wotlk:s

can somone ask quest on us fourms what they intend prot pallys to be doing when their not tanking, prot warriors got their dps but prot pallys seem to meant to heal but atm dont feel like sufficient healer just feel like im wasting a raid spot

[Lore]

I am not sure about the last column about Paladin's block being much lower? I am a prot war and a tankadin and with Holy Shield keeping a high block % it seems damage will be reduced by a Pally just the same as a warrior. While a paladins will be constant the bulk of the warriors will be spiky in the amount absorbed by the shield.

There's been quite a bit of theory tossed around on Maintankadin (which was reposted to the Beta forums). As it stands currently, at least on paper, Warriors with Shield Block will end up mitigating more damage via Blocking than Paladins will.

That of course requires that the Warrior hit Shield Block every cooldown, and may not work out in practice, but I think it was what she was referencing.

[Lore]

Regarding the Prot Paladin when not tanking - the little bit of extra healing capabilities we get out of Touched by the Light are pretty well offset by the fact that we still have no mana in tanking gear (and unable to replenish it easily with no damage intake and Divine Plea's healing reduction). Personally, I anticipate we'll find ourselves in a similar situation to Druids, where we're technically capable of some light healing when not tanking, but we're significantly better used adding some extra DPS.

I consider the extra spellpower from Stamina to be a bit of a threat boost with the side effect of adding some solo/grinding function.

[Tenraiel]

I'm very happy with the changes and the direction GC is taking the tanking classes.

[Kazeyonoma]

Just taking this moment to say that Lore is a fruitcake!

-This has been brought to you by your neighborhood Community Manager

[Fayre]

Is he plucky, too?

Nice summary Lore, thanks.

[Horacio]

I heard he likes chicken fingers.

I like the way GC framed the "who should be MT?" argument. There are alot of us who have been MTs, off and on in some cases, for three years but that tradition is certainly breaking down. I want to step into the MT role because I am prepared, I troll the crap out of Tankspot and people trust me to do my job.....not because my talent trees are better. There are hiccups along the way but they by all accounts are busting their asses to make it so.

[Slobash]

Well said mate, and I believe GC said early on that tanks should be given a spot because they're good at their jobs not because their class is better at it (referring to balancing all tanking classes). Too much bitching on the wow forums as usual, wish there'd been some stringent screening on who got beta keys....

[Alent]

I want to know why if we're supposed to be competitive, we have inferior dodge out the door on the tier gear.

I always got the idea paladins were avoidance tanks to druid EH, with warrior being the semi balanced spot in the middle.

[Rothguard]

if you tanking about pally dodge, i personaly dont like dodge. i dont get mana, dont cause threat. id rather block and take some damge, get mana, and cause theat with HS. dont get me wrong, dodge is good, but id rather have SB.

[Ardebaran]

So it sounds like ShoR will be seeing a new rank and a flat damage component in the next build. It remains to be seen exactly how much of a damage increase we're going to see here, but it's definitely a step back towards giving Shield of Righteousness a little more "Oomph."

Hmm? A damage increase?

It sounded to me like ShoR was doing TOO much damage currently, and that it is going to be doing significantly less of the paladin's overall DPS following the change. Hence the "scale too well" and "already over 40% of a paladin's dps" snips.

Creating two ranks but nerfing the DPS on both relative to the current doesn't sound so much like "giving Shield of Righteousness a little more 'Oomph'", to me.

[Alrinea]

Hmm? A damage increase?

It sounded to me like ShoR was doing TOO much damage currently, and that it is going to be doing significantly less of the paladin's overall DPS following the change. Hence the "scale too well" and "already over 40% of a paladin's dps" snips.

Creating two ranks but nerfing the DPS on both relative to the current doesn't sound so much like "giving Shield of Righteousness a little more 'Oomph'", to me.

it was too strong, then it was too weak, now its on the way to being strong again - so its a step towards more "oomph". increasing it to two ranks is also great, as we may get one at lvl70. having some base dmg on it is better on early stages of raiding than 0 base dmg and higher scaling, too - so it all depends on how you look at it
btw: nice work @ lore

[protonly]

The removal of the fear/silence/mana drain mechanics gives me mixed feelings. I'm glad in TBC that very few bosses had those abilities because it gave one class an unfair advantage over the others (outside of stacking the raid with dwarf priests and later just priests or relying on gimmiks). However I always thought those fights had a little "something extra" that made them more enjoyable for a warrior (ony/nightbane for example). Rather than remove them entirely (I can't imagine ony/nb w/o fear) I'd rather see the other classes get abilities to counter them so they can enjoy those fights on the same level.

[jere]

Hmm? A damage increase?

It sounded to me like ShoR was doing TOO much damage currently, and that it is going to be doing significantly less of the paladin's overall DPS following the change. Hence the "scale too well" and "already over 40% of a paladin's dps" snips.

Creating two ranks but nerfing the DPS on both relative to the current doesn't sound so much like "giving Shield of Righteousness a little more 'Oomph'", to me.

The recently lowered the coefficient from 240% down to 100% (with no base damage). What lore is referring to is boosting the oomph of the 100% version by adding base damage, not the 240% version.

[bludwork]

I thought warrior high block value was compensate for shield block being changed.. and now it's not even unique anymore. "We want all tanks to be the same", "we want all tanks to be different". Make up your mind GC.

Without fear, silience and other interesting boss abilities will tanking be dumbed down to just spanking it without pictures?

[Meeks]

As a paladin tank the news on the boards was not very good. If anything it confirmed to me that blizzard has no intention of truly allowing paladins to be a cutting edge tank. The metric they are using is that a paladin should be a just good enough tank that people are not shocked to see a video of one on youtube. That is a direct statement by GC.

On several of her posts on the paladin forum she replied to posts that that talked about how paladins are last place in every single tanking stat right now...mitigation, avoidance, blocking, hp and she basically replied that they did not see a problem with that so long as it was only small. On top of that paladins have the fewest emergency tanking tools of all 4 classes. We have the worst shield wall...which also adds a 3 min forbearance to us, we do not have a last stand, our interrupt is on a 1 min cooldown, no fear break and bring 0 tools that the other tanks do not have to make up for it. Sure we are still the best aoe threat but how far will that take us this time around? Especially with Dk aoe tanking and whatever buffs druids and warriors are getting in this regard.

So basically what I got out of it was that they are saying paladin tanks should be just good enough that a normal guild might take one but a cutting edge guild would still never take one and they see no problem with that. I would be happy if things changed but yesterdays blues were rather alarming to me.

[Lore]

I thought warrior high block value was compensate for shield block being changed.. and now it's not even unique anymore. "We want all tanks to be the same", "we want all tanks to be different". Make up your mind GC.

Without fear, silience and other interesting boss abilities will tanking be dumbed down to just spanking it without pictures?

Ghostcrawler has, at least a couple of times, referred to Block as how Paladins make up the 4% difference between Defensive Stance (10%) and Improved Righteous Fury (6%) as well as the reduced avoidance on our gear. As it stands currently, a Warrior hitting Shield Block every cooldown will mitigate more overall damage through Blocking than the Paladin with 100% Holy Shield uptime.

Granted, that may not be the most effective use of Shield Block, but when using an ability inefficiently results in greater damage reduction there's definitely a problem :P

Fear, Silence, Mana Burns, etc. are not being removed. Silence and Mana Burn will not be on the tank, but can still happen on the rest of the raid. Fear is "pretty rare in LK" but it was also pretty rare in TBC - it only appeared in three 25-man encounters. The thing is, even if it's only one encounter, if the Paladin, Druid, and Death Knight's ability to break fears is not equal or at least close to the Warrior's ability, then it becomes "The fight you need a Warrior for" regardless of what combination of raid stacking and trinket farming you can go through to try and control it a little better.

I don't think Paladins necessarily have to be given a Fear break to make it work, although I'd certainly like at least something. I also don't think the Druid and Death Knight 3-minute cooldowns are going to be adequate if Fear is cast as frequently as it was in the encounters that used it in TBC. There's several options. One would be the Intimidating Shout method I mentioned in the post; there's still a reason to stance dance and break the fear, but if you don't break it you're not running the boss through the raid. Alternatively, perhaps the cooldown on Fear Ward could be lowered to the point that one Priest would be able to break every fear (perhaps give a 30-second Forbearance-style effect so that you can't have multiple Priests spamming it in PVP). Really, there's lots of tweaks that could be made, I just think they have to make at least one of them if they're going to put Fear in an encounter.

[Lore]

As a paladin tank the news on the boards was not very good. If anything it confirmed to me that blizzard has no intention of truly allowing paladins to be a cutting edge tank. The metric they are using is that a paladin should be a just good enough tank that people are not shocked to see a video of one on youtube. That is a direct statement by GC.

On several of her posts on the paladin forum she replied to posts that that talked about how paladins are last place in every single tanking stat right now...mitigation, avoidance, blocking, hp and she basically replied that they did not see a problem with that so long as it was only small. On top of that paladins have the fewest emergency tanking tools of all 4 classes. We have the worst shield wall...which also adds a 3 min forbearance to us, we do not have a last stand, our interrupt is on a 1 min cooldown, no fear break and bring 0 tools that the other tanks do not have to make up for it. Sure we are still the best aoe threat but how far will that take us this time around? Especially with Dk aoe tanking and whatever buffs druids and warriors are getting in this regard.

So basically what I got out of it was that they are saying paladin tanks should be just good enough that a normal guild might take one but a cutting edge guild would still never take one and they see no problem with that. I would be happy if things changed but yesterdays blues were rather alarming to me.

You are reading way too far into her words trying to find something that isn't there. Seriously, how many ways does she need to phrase "We want all tanks to be cutting edge MT's" before we start just believing it instead of trying to rip apart every sentence to find THE REAL TRUTH OMG?

You're twisting her Youtube comment. No one is surprised to see "Paladin Tanks Boss" videos on Youtube now. What she said was she would like it to be so unsurprising that they don't show up at all. Essentially, Paladins should not feel the need to prove with video evidence that they are good tanks for a boss.

She never said that Paladins taking any significant amount more damage over time was "fine." The statement that I'm sure you're thinking of was simply showing at what point they would consider it "fine", and the number she used was 1%. Not even the Ultra Mega Hardcore Endgame Progression Guild of the Future is going to care about 1%. It's completely indistinguishable.

Three minute forbearance on our Shield Wall is completely meaningless, it's a 4-minute cooldown anyway and there's nothing else worth using while tanking that causes it.

Seriously, I have no idea how you can look at "We're buffing Shield of Righteousness, we aren't going to Silence or Mana Burn you anymore, and we want you to be competitive endgame tanks" and see that as bad news.