Protection Pala T14 set bonuses

[MerinPally]

I saw that the healers have a thread for this and I assume the rets do or that if they don't, one of the avid ret paladins is already taking a serious look. I've noticed that the Protection side of things is always really quiet on here! Lots of little questions posted by alts or by the raiders who are only going to do normal modes, so I want to try and see if there is anyone else out there who is mainspec protection who is actually on this forum - sure we have other forums that I don't think Rets or Holys have but it'd be nice to see it on here too! Here goes a thread to get things going: Set Bonuses.

Item - Paladin T14 Protection 2P Bonus - Reduces the cooldown of your Ardent Defender ability by 30 sec.
Item - Paladin T14 Protection 4P Bonus - Increases the healing done by your Word of Glory spell by 20%.

So, what do we think people? I'm not on the beta so I can't really get too deep involved, but this is my opinion:

The 2 set looks ok to be honest. Ardent Defender is nice, and sure it saves my life currently in raids, especially for progression or for gimping some fight mechanics to give the healers some ease (eg Flame Scythe on Scorpion form Majordomo solo soaking) but for general purpose tanking I don't see it as all that great. Saving from death is brilliant but in farm content I rarely find myself in that situation - this one is hard to tell thought as the numbers in raids are not tuned yet on the Beta. My thoughts - great for progression, average for farming content.

The 4 set... well... As far as I know, WoG no longer has a cooldown? This could potentially be awesome. If things work out the same way as they did in T11 content where you could use every set of 3holy power on a WoG and still hold threat and do decent dps and then heal for an absolute ton, then an extra 20% is brilliant. No matter what way you look at it, 20% is a huge buff to that heal, the only question as to whether it's good is how often you use WoG - will we end up SHOTR spamming like we do in DS and did mostly in Firelands? Will we end up favouring other spells via talents with our Holy Power?

So in short - first one to me looks pretty good for progression and average for farming, second one looks great IF we use WoG regularly but if not then it's meaningless. I can't comment on the other tank classes as although I play all 4, I don't know them to the extent of the paladin and I obviously know nothing about Monks. DK's look to have some pretty decent ones. Warriors I'm skeptical of whetehr the 4 set is really that great but then I don't know about the new rage generation much, and bears look pretty middle of the pack again.

Thoughts anyone? If I'm horribly wrong then please let me know, I'm interested in how things are going to pan out

[Rivin]

2-set is meh, but that's mostly because I always forget to use Ardent Defender... <_<

Word of Glory won't have a true cooldown, but its usage will be time-limited. Its effectiveness is based on Bastion of Glory stacks, which are added by using Shield of the Righteous. From what I understand, the average time required for a full stack of Bastion of Glory is in the 40-seconds range. That said, we don't necessarily have to have a full stack for WoG to be useful. The set bonus itself could be nice depending on how often we end up using WoG. Since it won't have the overheal shield, though, it may not be useful as often as it is today.

[MerinPally]

2-set is meh, but that's mostly because I always forget to use Ardent Defender... <_<

Word of Glory won't have a true cooldown, but its usage will be time-limited. Its effectiveness is based on Bastion of Glory stacks, which are added by using Shield of the Righteous. From what I understand, the average time required for a full stack of Bastion of Glory is in the 40-seconds range. That said, we don't necessarily have to have a full stack for WoG to be useful. The set bonus itself could be nice depending on how often we end up using WoG. Since it won't have the overheal shield, though, it may not be useful as often as it is today.

I'm completely with you on the bit about forgetting to use Ardent Defender, fortunately I no longer really need to use it as I'm not in that position. Most of the time I just mash AD + GoAK + DP on Ultraxion for Hour of Twilight soaking in an attempt to see how little hp I can lose in 1 go if I press everything.

That's interesting for the stacks of Bastion though, it'd be interesting to see some number on how much of an increase the second stack of Bastion causes on WoG. I only say this because potentially, such a large % increase could mean you can get a similar strength heal from WoG, alternating between SHOTR and WoG rather than 2 SHOTR and then a WoG.

Now I've had a closer look at the talents (it's been a while) I don't really see the extra Holy Power spell of Eternal Flame being used all that much to be honest, the HoT effect appears to be rather weak, and maybe it's the rose tinted spectacles but I saw Sacred Shield and just wanted it back. However, the Selfless Healer looks nice in conjunction with Sanctified Wrath, or just the Holy Avenger talent with WoG spam to get us through those bursty bits of damage. The second obviously being the superior due to the regularity of pulling out the heals.

[Rivin]

Bastion stacks to 5, with +10% per stack.

I haven't really bothered to play the beta much, so I don't know how powerful WoG will be without Bastion stacks. It does seem that the set bonus would cut two stacks off of the needed amount for maximum effectiveness (although using it with five stacks and the set bonus could be a massive heal).

[Malthanis]

Bastion stacks to 5, with +10% per stack.

I haven't really bothered to play the beta much, so I don't know how powerful WoG will be without Bastion stacks. It does seem that the set bonus would cut two stacks off of the needed amount for maximum effectiveness (although using it with five stacks and the set bonus could be a massive heal).

I think that bonus per stack is modified by mastery (currently updating my beta to check). The last time I logged in, I was getting ~43% per stack, and a non-crit was healing for ~50k.

[MerinPally]

Hmm, don't know why I assumed it stacks to 2. That's very strange of me.

But yeah I suppose with now getting Holy Power off Judgement too (yet another change I wasn't aware of) things will be able to occur very quickly.

[Rivin]

I think that bonus per stack is modified by mastery (currently updating my beta to check). The last time I logged in, I was getting ~43% per stack, and a non-crit was healing for ~50k.

Oh yeah, I forgot about that. Mastery does affect it. It will be interesting to see how it all maths out when the numbers are finalized.

EDIT: Wow, I actually never realized just how powerful mastery will be for us. It affects Shield of the Righteous's damage reduction buff, Word of Glory's healing via Bastion of Light, and increases our block chance. Depending on how well they scale with mastery, that could make our finishers very powerful. o_O

[MerinPally]

Sounds pretty awesome, can't wait to do some more applied maths. I taught some of my guild how to do the Trapezium Rule and Definite Integration to assess graphs on worldoflogs and recount. That and I'm going to be doing a mathsy subject at university, whilst there's no comparison in the difficulty of the calculus, some applied maths always helps.

I revised for my A level maths, C4 paper, the section on the Trapezium Rule and Definite integration by doing some number crunching for the guild on worldoflogs curves. I was a boss at that by the end, I know I got 100% on that question

[Malthanis]

I think that bonus per stack is modified by mastery (currently updating my beta to check). The last time I logged in, I was getting ~43% per stack, and a non-crit was healing for ~50k.

Okay, definite number time now!

4240 mastery rating puts my bonus percentage to Bastion at 41.65% per stack. At 5 stacks, the buff reads that I have a 208% buff to my next WoG. That WoG healed me for ~54k (and that's without Vengeance, as this is on a test dummy).

So I figure a 20% bump would raise that to ~66k, and all without Vengeance. I'm kind of sad to see the lack of overhealing compensation, though.

Also, the Avenger's Shield animation has been updated so that the shield returns to you after hitting it's final target, and Crusader's Strike has this cool slash of light that accompanies the strike animation.

[MerinPally]

Also, the Avenger's Shield animation has been updated so that the shield returns to you after hitting it's final target, and Crusader's Strike has this cool slash of light that accompanies the strike animation.

I'm more excited about this than most other things about the updates to paladin spells

[UnderworldSoup]

The 2pc bonus is horrid when compared to the bonuses obtained by Monk and DK tanks. i'd prefer 10 - 15 sec knocked off my Divine Protection or Holy Shield, not a move with a 3 minute CD anyway. :/

AD is cool, I agree - but I don't feel the bonus quite keeps up unless we're using it to cheat a dumb mechanic anyway.

[Noradin]

Which will be possible to do less and less often, just like how our bubble is less and less useful for clearing debuffs. (Right now I sometimes feel like we still have it only so other classes have something to use their special dispells on.)

[anaxie]

Wow Prots 4set is trash

[ayashi]

I'm completely with you on the bit about forgetting to use Ardent Defender, fortunately I no longer really need to use it as I'm not in that position. Most of the time I just mash AD + GoAK + DP on Ultraxion for Hour of Twilight soaking in an attempt to see how little hp I can lose in 1 go if I press everything.

It amused me too, up until i realised i could pre-Wrath+WoG hope for a crit and get a 100k+ shield.
It's a real shame we lose that in MoP...

Okay, definite number time now!

4240 mastery rating puts my bonus percentage to Bastion at 41.65% per stack. At 5 stacks, the buff reads that I have a 208% buff to my next WoG. That WoG healed me for ~54k (and that's without Vengeance, as this is on a test dummy).

So I figure a 20% bump would raise that to ~66k, and all without Vengeance. I'm kind of sad to see the lack of overhealing compensation, though.

Also, the Avenger's Shield animation has been updated so that the shield returns to you after hitting it's final target, and Crusader's Strike has this cool slash of light that accompanies the strike animation.

I belive you can use the mob from the bombarment quest in hellfire peninsula if you want to test it out with vengence. Not sure if you'll get enough damage on you to get capped on a 90 MoP toon.

[Malthanis]

I belive you can use the mob from the bombarment quest in hellfire peninsula if you want to test it out with vengence. Not sure if you'll get enough damage on you to get capped on a 90 MoP toon.

Oh, this is at level 85 actually. Haven't had the time to level on beta, and I really don't want to. I'd rather save that for live when everything is completed. But thanks for the suggestion, I'll have to fly out there to see what numbers I can pull up.

[Hexa]

The problem is we already have an increase of the wog power due to bastion of glory. With the 4p it will go up to 70% more heal. But without a shielding effect on it, it will be completely wasted most of the time.

Now the "cool" thing is that glyph of ascetic crusader has been reworked and now gives us the ability to also use the wog as a source of dps on an ennemy, for the amount it would have healed if it had been used this way.

Is it possible the healing bonus will apply to this "offensive wog" (let's call it this way) if it is used against an ennemy?

For the tanks who won't feel anymore the need to keep their stacked up wog to use it as an emergency heal, could it be a dps increase over a stacked or not stacked SotR?

We don't have the shielding effect from the Wog anymore. Is it that clever to keep it indefinitely up for an hypothetic peak of damage? Especially considering we now have a 5 min LoH and a 150sec DSh (due to unbreakable spirit) plus holy avenger wich will allow us to spam 5 wogs during its 15 seconds uptime.

Anyway, I really don't like what they're doing with protection paladin right now.

[Falcula]

2-pc looks pretty average. I use AD all the time, but only as a secondary minor cooldown like DP because the lifesaver effect never works on anything really threatening anymore anyway. Hour of Twilight and Impale just ignore it. It's rare for me to get a kill shot from one white damage, or other small attack, but not a second. Either I get healed up long before the hit that would have killed me, or I get hit 86 times in half a second by several mobs and the lifesaver removes the 85th hit, which wouldn't really matter anyway, like bloods on Spine. I'm assuming this will be kind of like the way the T13 4-pc with DG aligned perfectly with the end of each limb on Madness so it would be ready to use on each platform; there will be one mechanic on a wing boss or something where it really shines to cover a recurring hit that you can't get every time without the set bonus on the normal cooldown length.

The 4-set sounds like it will make me a pretty decent raid healer while I'm tanking again like I was in 4.1 before the WoG cooldown nerf when I would use almost every set of three Holy Power to toss an instant heal at whichever raid frame had the lowest health since it wasn't needed to hold threat in Cataclysm. Other than that I'll probably get more use out of it soloing old content again.

Only a general observation until I've spent enough time on the beta to learn how differently these abilities will really be.

[Viglante]

it sounds like it will depend whether it stacks aditiveley or mutliplicatively ( crap spelling) with the mastery stacking buff as adding another 20 to an already 208% is well barely anything.
but adding 20% to the Overall would be a lot more awsome.
also remember in mop we will stack more dodge/parry due to new 2 roll block mechanic ( lame) since "ctc" is imposibbly as that would mean insane ammounts of mastery as you would need to get block itself to 100.6% or posibbly only during proc effects or on use trinkets