The Weekly Marmot -- Paladin Preview

[Landarr]

Now that the Paladin class has now been released I have seen that all four tank classes (Blood DK, Protection Warrior and Paladin and Feral Bear Druid) all get the Vengeance ability through the mastery system. Could you explain this ability as I got a little bit confused by it. The ability is:

Vengeance – Every time the Death Knight/Warrior/Paladin/Druid takes damage, he or she will gain (up to) 5% of the damage taken as attack power. This buff will stack to (up to) 10% of the Death Knight's maximum un-buffed health.

This seems a bit insane and I will use the example of my current main character.

My main is a Blood DK Tank and HP unbuffed comes to 40.1k (so lets round it to 40k). Now the way that I read this ability is lets say each time I took 100 damage (I know its not much but its a nice easy figure), 5% of that is obviously 5. And this stacks upto 10% of my unbuffed health which in this case would be a maximum of 4000 times. Now if I did get 5 extra AP for each of those stacks that would come to an extra 20000AP and thats a bit insane. My character doesn't even have all top end gear (its got a mix of 264, 251, 245, 232 and even one 226 and one 200). So if he did have the top end gear that would be even more health thus leading to more stacks. And I know in Cata they are going to reduce the stamina on Tank Plate gear but when we get to lv85 that will just go back up again.

You're misunderstanding it. The AP buff is a maximum benefit equal to 10% of your maximum health. as you got 40k, the buff would always benefit at maximum 4k AP whether you're getting hit for 100 or 10000 until you raise your maximum health. =)

[blindpiggy]

I know most of you have played WC3, but the resurrection spell may not have been something you saw very often, or atleast paid much attention too, 'cause you were busy microing. But here's what they said it's supposed to resemble from WC3.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSZhHLkIfkc

Looks a lot like the Spirit of Redemption for priests, with a bigger sword...I think that'd be ossim .

Further, for prot they said they want us to get away from using the same abilities for aoe tanking and single-target tanking. Which is fine, I just hope they keep our spell book simple. The easiest way imo, is to put in a threat modifier talent to crusader strike, maybe even reduce the damage if it's needed. Since all paladins are going to have it, why not make it a "core" ability.

Anyway, great vid. I was as shocked as you were, and probably the rest of the community that they were early with something .

[Sharona]

We have a shaman that raids with us all of the time. He's rarely top damage, and recently, he hasn't even been top 3, not because his DPS is bad, just because we have well geared people in those top 3 slots. However, I don't care if he didn't have bloodlust at all, he's a great raider, knows what he's doing, listens well, and he's got an offspec of resto if we need it (but that's rare). He would be in my raid regardless because of those factors, not because of bloodlust.

[Strom]

I suspect that Holy Shield will have a longer CD than its duration. Perhaps similar to the current Shield Block for warriors. Also, with the reduced avoidance levels and no defense, I bet we will be lucky to reach 40% chance to avoid a straight hit. So that would be 70% with Holy Shield up.

[Rennadrel]

Not amused by some of the planned Retribution nerfs and not adding a spell to compensate for Crusader Strike being available to all specs. But having Holy Shock will probably be OP in PvP for us anyway, but still a couple of changes at this point are dumb, but we shall see what happens. I don't see how Retribution and Holy are "OP" for defensive capabilities, 50% damage reduction while using Divine Shield, LoH has been nerfed to the ground and can't be used while under Forbearance, Avenging Wrath can't be used till 30 seconds after having used LoH or Divine Shield, so yeah any more nerfs is completely unnecessary.

[Sharona]

Perhaps I'm missing something or I need to work on my reading comprehension... Is the holy shield change a huge issue? It has damn near 100% up time now doesn't it? Isn't it just a "Hey, you don't have to hit this button every 6 seconds" kind of thing?

[berree]

I totally agree with lore about what he said for the gaurdian of ancient kings . I can live with it being short(few seconds) but it needs to be totally spectacular and noticeable i mean its hard to see my lil pally in the aoe storm on bosses lol....oh and whats the bloodlust you speak of? :P

edit: oh and i think there going to have a......improved CS maybe?? u can spec into like shammys and there windfluffly thing or w/e.

[DnQuxiti]

I could be wrong, but I think I remember Blizzard saying something along the lines of armor being less effective (or at least more flattened out) than it is now when Cataclysm comes out. If that is the case, it makes sense that they would have Prot tree abilities for all tanking classes make up some of the difference.

[Spaniard2004]

Paladin since 2004. Canceled account in 2009. These changes are underwhelming, and not enough to being me back to Cata. We have interrupt issues. We have kiting issues. Get rid of our divine shield...I could care less, it's useless anyway (see priest comment)...and I would know as well...I have a lvl 80 priest. So we get a pet...yay. Who cares? Can the pet drain mana...snare...CC...or do something unique like blind people or knock them 20 feet back?? Other classes have similar abilities. Please stop fixing obvious things like Crusader strike and our asinine rotation (lack of), and actually come out with improvements AND fixes. Crit will increase amount healed...really?? That's our special?? Oh and nice vid QQing about people QQing about their class...people care about paladins, which is why you have people commenting on bloodlust and hero. Bring the player, not the class...and a shaman. amirite?

written with a smile,

Former Paladin
Former Priest
Former Player

[Rennadrel]

Well I can't vouch for other healing classes but when it comes to Holy as a paladin, tank healing is what we excel at, any changes to holy and a reduction in healing better mean more raid healing viability so that raids don't get screwed out of not having enough raid heals and zero classes that can cover big hit mechanics on bosses. Priests can't tank heal as well since they lack the big healing crits that paladin's have, shaman's and druids make the best raid healers while priests can cover raid healing and tank healing decently. Streamlining all healers so that there isn't much that sets them apart is going to annoy a lot of people.

Paladin's are the most balanced class in the game in terms of raid performance for each utility, maybe Holy is a bit overpowered but considering it's tank healing that is our specialty, should that be an issue? Retribution is far from the best DPS spec, but we can compete with most classes no problem. Protection is great for AoE threat generation, I prefer Paladin tanks the most though because they have the fastest threat generation of any other tanking class. I have ran with a lot of tanks in all specs and only paladin's and bears can hold aggro off me when I am going full tilt DPS. They say bring the player, not the class but I think in the case of paladin's, it doesn't take much to be good at any of our specs but our class is still also the most reliable for a lot of situations.

[Biernot]

I don't want to comment on the actual covered content, but i want to give Lore a big *thumbs up* for this episode. In previous episodes you always used a lot of micro-cuts to piece them together, and that makes it annoying/irritating to watch, because the breaks between the words were often too short to sound like a natural speech.
In this episodes you actually talked for minutes without a cut, and it was way better to watch and listen to. It doesn't matter if there are some mistakes (like swallowing half a word or misspeaking), it is only natural.

[Strom]

Perhaps I'm missing something or I need to work on my reading comprehension... Is the holy shield change a huge issue? It has damn near 100% up time now doesn't it? Isn't it just a "Hey, you don't have to hit this button every 6 seconds" kind of thing?

Once they change block to reduce damage by 30%, if you block every hit, like the current design, that would be a tad OP.

So I suspect that we will see Holy Shield get an uptime similar to Shield Block. Shield Block increases a Warrior's block amount while Holy Shield will increase our chance to block.

[Bashal]

I'm a little confused at some of the assumptions being made about what paladin's won't be getting. Unless there was a follow-up post I missed, Blizz admitted their paladin review would be sketchier than the rest. They only mentioned a few things they were reasonably sure about, and made some statements about their general intentions with the class. They didn't state flatly that they wouldn't add another ret ability to "make up" for CS being made a core ability, they didn't say they weren't thinking about giving rets an interrupt and so on. It looks like people are just assuming because nothing was said one way or the other.

And those folks who are saying this could be right -- because nothing was said one way or the other. But to state it like a fact, like Blizz came out and said no, is wrong.

[Lore]

My main is a Blood DK Tank and HP unbuffed comes to 40.1k (so lets round it to 40k). Now the way that I read this ability is lets say each time I took 100 damage (I know its not much but its a nice easy figure), 5% of that is obviously 5. And this stacks upto 10% of my unbuffed health which in this case would be a maximum of 4000 times. Now if I did get 5 extra AP for each of those stacks that would come to an extra 20000AP and thats a bit insane. My character doesn't even have all top end gear (its got a mix of 264, 251, 245, 232 and even one 226 and one 200). So if he did have the top end gear that would be even more health thus leading to more stacks. And I know in Cata they are going to reduce the stamina on Tank Plate gear but when we get to lv85 that will just go back up again.

10% of 40,000 is 4000. You would get a maximum of 4000 AP from Vengeance.

[Nicki]

Completely agree on ret glad they finally realised they enabled everyone to play ret at high-end raiding level! I remember 3.0 hitting and suddenly ret paladins who were doing 400-500 less dps were doing the same dps as me...So who knows maybe back to ret for cataclysm if things keep going that way!!!

[Hammerfists]

Paladin since 2004. Canceled account in 2009. These changes are underwhelming, and not enough to being me back to Cata. We have interrupt issues. We have kiting issues. Get rid of our divine shield...I could care less, it's useless anyway (see priest comment)...and I would know as well...I have a lvl 80 priest. So we get a pet...yay. Who cares? Can the pet drain mana...snare...CC...or do something unique like blind people or knock them 20 feet back?? Other classes have similar abilities. Please stop fixing obvious things like Crusader strike and our asinine rotation (lack of), and actually come out with improvements AND fixes. Crit will increase amount healed...really?? That's our special?? Oh and nice vid QQing about people QQing about their class...people care about paladins, which is why you have people commenting on bloodlust and hero. Bring the player, not the class...and a shaman. amirite?

written with a smile,

Former Paladin
Former Priest
Former Player

Paladin's arent gimped in what you are talking about:

1) Pursuit of Justice allows us to be the fastest walking tank making us actually the best kiters
2) We can interupt with hammer of wrath and avenger's shield
3) Summoned pets in WoW arent like FF summons where something comes out and vastly changes the playing field, they are a bonus to your gameplay. I dont know about you but having a guardian angel absorb some damage doesnt seem like a bad innovation

Blizzard stated that they havent started working on Paladins before this post so consider this all as a brainstorm session. There will no doubt be more spells added than they have mentioned and some that they have that wont see the light of day. But if you're done with the game im not sure why squabble over whats going to happen.

[assilley]

one thing to remember is they are removing defense rating, its as simple as turning on RF or Frost Presence (most likely blood in cata) and you can call yourself a tank. I cant say i took much notice in what the other classes are receiving but i guess it may also come down to what stats they are releasing on gear.

Not sure I'f I'm keen on mages with hero either, could make for very very interesting PVP scenarios when one of the top DPS in the game can go and pop a major CD

I guess we will wait and see...

Still.. I want my magic mushroom!!

[Rblt21]

i keep rofling whenever i watch this first 10 seconds the paladin preview...its early?!?.......doi!

[Arencey]

Interesting stuff I actually plan to pick my paladin back up in cataclysm because I'm not happy with the direction dk tanking is going in. Having holy shock as prot sounds like it could add a whole new mechanic, when you think of a combat paladin you think of a warrior with back up heals, but with prot pallys taking dmg constantly and the fact that they can't afford to stop putting out threat for long periods of time they don't have much room to throw heals, holy shock could change that but I agree completely it could wind up being really overpowered or really useless if they're not carefull with it, maybe put it in a position where it doesn't heal the paladin himself for all that much but it's moderately potent when cast on say...someone else in the raid?

[Arianne]

The reason why people want unique buffs is because there are always people who can't do the things that are required for an encounter. They can't move and DPS. They can't stay out of the fire and heal. They can't avoid the ghosts and decurse. There are a LOT of those people out there. They're nice people and they want to see the content too.

When there are unique buffs, they can join a guild that can actually do the content and the only thing they have to do is keep themselves alive (which if they focus on that they're usually ok at). When there aren't unique buffs, they can't get into a good raid guild, so they get stuck in a casual raid guild. A guild full of those people isn't going to be able to do most of the encounters that are out there (think Mimiron, General Vezax, Twin Valks, Rotface, Blood Princes, Sindragosa).

So what's going to happen next? The fights are going to be dumbed down even further so that guilds full of those people can 'see the content'. Maybe we'll see the interesting content in heroic modes, but given the fact that they keep saying it's difficult to totally change mechanics from normal modes to heroic modes, I don't know what they'll do. More 'optional' bosses?