Protection Paladins in Mists of Pandaria

[Fetzie]

This thread is for discussion of all issues concerning Protection Paladins in the new expansion. Whether PvE, PvP, Raiding, gear aesthetics, Talents, Glyphs. You name it, it comes in here.

You can find a Talent Calculator here.

If you guys find a useful resource, I'll edit a link to it into this post.

[Sharku]

Cheers for starting the thread, Fetzie.
I am seriously sceptical about Paladin (and Warrior) viability in MoP as tanks. I play both and it should be no surprise to anyone that they are currently CTC capped. The issue I have is that it is already hard to compete with DK and Druid tanks in terms of survivability on harder fights, typically the paladin will switch to Ret or the warrior will switch to Arms for those 1 tank fights and that is without the proposed changes to block. Unless we are up to our eyeballs in holy power/rage respectively, how on earth are we supposed to use all of our survival abilities in our rotation without being spikey in terms of our damage taken? I dont want to revert to the ICC days where i just cared about stamina and did the minimum i needed to in order to keep threat whilst surfing the net on my other screen, drinking tea and using a CD every now and then.
An interesting rotation without compromising our viability would be nice, but wont be achieved by making block not matter any more.
I just think they will steer people towards Brewmaster in order to justify including Pandaren as a playable race, which will obviously be OP in order to achieve that.

[Jericho]

Unless we are up to our eyeballs in holy power/rage respectively, how on earth are we supposed to use all of our survival abilities in our rotation without being spikey in terms of our damage taken?

Well, considering they have already made it clear that we will have multiple Holy Power generators. By changing Judgment of the Wise to give us Holy Power on use. Combine this with Boundless Conviction which gives us the ability to stockpile 2HP for situational use, we should be good with resource use. Yet, talents give us the ability to create quick HP if needed with the changes to the Sanctified Wrath talent as well.

Our ability to remove the "spiky-ness" is still not there though. Its the biggest thing we have to learn. They WANT us to be spiky. Well at least spikier than we have been for the last two expansions. By going to a two roll system they have all but said, they want us to not see that 30% damage reduction at all times. They want us to take unblocked hits and we are going to do just that. There is nothing we can do to stop it.

With changes to our existing cooldowns, as well as the "tacked on" buff to Shield of the Righteous our spiky-ness becomes even worse. As our shield will block 55% of incoming physical damage a good portion of the time. We do now however have a 40% Magic DP by default so I guess thats our consolation prize so to speak (even though most paladins glyph and unglyph DP on a fight by fight basis anyway).

I dont want to revert to the ICC days where i just cared about stamina and did the minimum i needed to in order to keep threat whilst surfing the net on my other screen, drinking tea and using a CD every now and then.

An interesting rotation without compromising our viability would be nice, but wont be achieved by making block not matter any more.

Lol, they have said that this won't be the case ever again. They want us all to be vastly more active. They want us to be timing that ShotR to maintain that buff to proactively mitigate. Yet they want you to start being reactive as well and using WoG again. Our ICC days are no more. As much as I still believe there is a real place for a wide range of "easy" to "hard" mode tanking classes. It is nice to see that they are trying here. If the cooldown numbers are to be believed in the talent calc, Paladin may well be their attempt at that "easy" mode tanking class. Most of what we have seen from the other 3 current tanking classes are a bit more complicated than the proactive versus reactive choices Paladins will have in MoP.

As for the rotation being interesting... well, thats the rub isn't it? They are trying to make the rotation interesting with that choice. We need HP for only 2 things (unless you talent Eternal Flame) this makes our choice between 1 damage/threat and 2 healing choices. Not tremendously interesting but its more interesting than our current "choices" with our resource.

I just think they will steer people towards Brewmaster in order to justify including Pandaren as a playable race, which will obviously be OP in order to achieve that.

Of course they are going to try and steer people to the Monk class. Although I believe that Monk will play much differently than we expect in terms of tanking. They just designed an entirely new class. If Death Knight is any preview, we are going to see the class being quite overpowered in all three of its specs. Do you not remember how OP DKs were when they were new? At least in the beginning. So yes, everyone will have at least 1 Monk in their 10man come tier 14.

[Fetzie]

Thinking about rotations...

Something like CS J AS CS Shor/WoG Cons CS J AS CS ShoR/WoG with Grand Crusader procs to make it a bit more involved. Finisher every 9 second with the blocking buff from ShoR up for 6 out of those 9 seconds

[Jericho]

Also note, that if you are the one bringing the new version of the "demo shout" debuff, you are going to be working in a HotR every 30 seconds or so.

I would love to see Consecration back into our normal toolkit but am still not sold that it will be.

[Fetzie]

Yeah I'm not too happy about the only way for me to apply "demo shout" is to use a damaging AoE ability, especially with the possibility of CC'ing for challenge mode runs. I think it should at least also be on CS.

[Lore]

GC seemed pretty firm in my interview that at least the goal was to have Prot using consecrate as a main, rotational ability. I imagine that if current mechanics don't put it there, that'd be something they'd try to get to.

[Fetzie]

I have always had the hope that they could make consecrate have a double effect, that it could increase healing taken for friendlies standing in it aswell as dealing damage to enemies or something like that.

[Lore]

There was a talent that did that when they first showed off the trees at Blizzcon, but since Cons is now prot-only, that gives it limited effectiveness. Maybe an interesting idea for a glyph.

[Lirron]

The only glyph available for Cons is increased duration and CD I believe, or an increase to damage, either one, I'm inclined to see how the glyph for it might change in MoP

[Lore]

The only glyph available for Cons is increased duration and CD I believe, or an increase to damage, either one, I'm inclined to see how the glyph for it might change in MoP

You may want to read our Ghostcrawler interview

[Oint]

Since they are giving that ability to target a Consecration(awesome by the way), I'm going to be very interested on the raiding side of things on fight design. Obviously you want mobs to say in the spell, but it's a threat spell, you also want to be in it yourself, but if you're far away from it....yeah. I see so many interesting movement related talents in all classes, so this one to me needs to have a good reason behind it other than being cool. It seems very useful...if the mobs stay there.

[Airowird]

Just a question for the beta people as I am also keeping tabs on Paladins with the new Block 2-roll system: Is the DR on Block in and if so, any numbers you can throw out? Because I am very sceptic about the viability of such a system but need more dataz!

[Fetzie]

I'll be posting here as soon as I get in

[Lore]

Had a chance to play around with it a bit tonight. Initial impressions:

-At the moment, you don't generate enough HP to keep SotR active (6 second duration is BALLS) while also weaving in WoG. With Divine Purpose procs you can throw in WoG's sometimes, but hopefully that's something that gets addressed at some point because it's pretty much just all SotR all the time right now.
-The rotation is slllloooowwwwww. Lots of empty space, even with Cons in the mix.
-Seems like we may want to hit/exp cap.

[Fetzie]

What rotation were you using?

This is what I came up with (disregarding procs like Grand Crusader and Divine Purpose). I mapped out the first minute, by marking how many GCDs each cooldown was long in excel so I could move them around easily.



As you can see I have every gcd filled, although I couldn't get judgement on cooldown. Any comments?

Edit: shor is off the global cooldown, forgot that

[oddjobhat]

I'd like to know how sacred shield is working. What kind of numbers is it showing for absorbs at 85 and would it be worth putting up every 30 seconds instead of a shor or just use it when I have excess HoPo? Also is it on GCD? And does it stack with the one that my Holy paladin buddy cast on me?

[Lore]

The problem with that layout, Fetzie (aside from SotR off GCD), is a single miss or dodge ruins the whole thing :P

Like I said, it seems like we might want to hit/exp cap, just so we can be sure to keep uptime on SotR (and hopefully weave in more WoG's)

[Sludgehamer]

For the new talents for Mop I picked "Long arm of the law" because we use judgement a lot unless that changes that's what I would choose. Then I picked "Fists of Justice" because I personally like being able to beat the crap out of someone without them moving or anyting. Then I decided on "Sacred Shield" because that just seems like the better one over the others imo. I like "unbreakable spirt" because we use holy power a lot and unless that changes I see that being the better one. "Holy Avenger" looks pretty awesome, I mean I get to destroy them when I'm taking less damage thank you. "Light's Hammer" just seems like a consecration on steroids so I really like it. Some are better then other imo but I have a feeling they are going to make boss fights around these new talents. I also made a video over them http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2U3sbQ2lDP8

Tell me what you guys think about the new talents, you don't have to be protection. Do you like the whole situational talents vs the best in slot talent tree?

[Xequecal]

Cheers for starting the thread, Fetzie.
I am seriously sceptical about Paladin (and Warrior) viability in MoP as tanks. I play both and it should be no surprise to anyone that they are currently CTC capped. The issue I have is that it is already hard to compete with DK and Druid tanks in terms of survivability on harder fights, typically the paladin will switch to Ret or the warrior will switch to Arms for those 1 tank fights and that is without the proposed changes to block. Unless we are up to our eyeballs in holy power/rage respectively, how on earth are we supposed to use all of our survival abilities in our rotation without being spikey in terms of our damage taken? I dont want to revert to the ICC days where i just cared about stamina and did the minimum i needed to in order to keep threat whilst surfing the net on my other screen, drinking tea and using a CD every now and then.
An interesting rotation without compromising our viability would be nice, but wont be achieved by making block not matter any more.
I just think they will steer people towards Brewmaster in order to justify including Pandaren as a playable race, which will obviously be OP in order to achieve that.

With Druids getting 40% damage reduction for 6 sec as their 60 rage "spammable" tank ability, I just don't see other tanks competing with that. At beast, average mitigation will be equal, but Druids will be less spiky and thus much better, and at worst they'll have better mitigation and be less spiky on top of it.

There's also the question, when comparing Druid tanks to other tanks, do you count the Symbiosis-granted abilities for the other tanks as innate? PAL/WAR/DK all get strong cooldowns from Symbiosis, but the Druid doesn't get much. You can get IBF on your Druid by Symbiosising a DK, but since you don't have their talents it will only be 20%. Paladins can get full-power Last Stand from Symbiosis, DKs can get full-power Shield Wall.

Beyond that, my main beef with Paladin tanks is the current design means that if you're tanking a lot of mobs, Mastery is the best stat, but if you're only tanking one mob, Mastery is the worst stat. (near worthless) The SHoR free block effect is going to have a very high uptime as the Holy Power generation of Paladins is very high. (0.7 HP/sec if you hit everything on cooldown, then Divine Purpose on top of that) The problem is that Mastery gives block chance, and when you're getting a free block from SHoR, it doesn't do ANYTHING. Against a 2.4 speed boss mob it will only be relevant against 1/5th of the boss' swings or less. At the same time, since SHoR only gives one free blocked hit, if you're tanking 10 mobs, suddenly Mastery becomes by far the best stat. So you need an entirely different gear set for AE tanking than you need for single-target tanking.