[WoD] Protection Paladin Megathread

[Wyrden]

It's mainly because of a lack of tank information out currently, all classes/specs. Healers know to a degree what they are expecting (loss of many instants, consolidation of abilities, Cata-like triage style healing though bliz said they will make sure mana isn't too hard to come by). DPS varies but given the pvp blog that was released we know there are going to be a reduction in burst across the board and many CDs are either going away or being consolidated, which can mean that on the pve side of things Ret could see a buff on sustained while taking a hit in burst. Time will tell.

There hasn't been a "Tank" watercooler or document dump. Without that information, even just a direction bliz is going with tanks, all we have to talk about is the lvl 100 talents, one of which is gone, bonus armor on non-armor slots and dodge/parry/hit/exp going away.

From the tank side of the game there is too much that we don't know, so we wait.

Well said. Time for good ol' Blizz to share some news with us

[Rocketsauce]

All I know is that if they make aura dancing a thing, and force slow ass gameplay on us I'm going warrior. I love having tons of cooldowns but too low of haste and it feels like I have downs...and when you achieve the required haste it feels like you've got hyperactive disorder with all the button mashing.

[trystero]

Because holy is probably circlejerking the cast times and ret doing god knows what.
With prot we really don't have much to discuss (outside of blizzard hopefully fixing haste in consecrate and making HotR/HW less poopy on aoe pulls).
Like someone mentioned earlier my main concern is that i enjoy prot playstyle, but i enjoy it at 30%+ haste, anything below feels too slow. With the removal of a large number of gems sockets + reforging,.

Yeah, I'm really debating swapping my main to monk for WoD because I'm too spoiled by a low GCD. Playing with a 1.5/1.4 GCD is horrendous, not to mention the CD on each separate ability. The game's too fast-paced now for that.

i just wish that blizzard would bump up Prot's baseline gcds to say 30% haste value, and let us go from there

Or they could solve the "haste tanking problem" by putting our GCD at 1s as well, weakening the damage of each ability to compensate, and having haste affect something less significant like block chance. As it is now, it's haste or bust...

[Lovestar]

See, in Blizzard's eyes, there's nothing wrong with a 1.5s GCD or not having something to do every single GCD. @Ghostcrawler reiterated this over, and over, and over again. They like melee having 'space to think and time to look around' like casters do while casting and they consider the 1.5s GCD 'normal' and originally, classes at 1.0s were supposed to feel abnormal/twitchy/fast-paced.

When they dropped Blood DK to 1.0s GCD, his first concern was that there would be gaps in the rotation where there was nothing to do while waiting on Runes/RP — and he's like (paraphrasing), "And that's fine, but players tend to freak out if they don't have something to press every GCD".

Unfortunately IMO we've all discovered that 1.0s GCD and not waiting to press buttons just feels better while playing. So every class wants that QoL increase and Blizzard is left with a dilemma: give up and parcel it out to everyone, or stay stubborn on the philosophy and risk some players abandoning their spec or class because it feels too sluggish compared to their alts.

Personally if they just went "All Melee have 1.0s GCD" and were done with it, I'd be perfectly happy. Haste can still reduce Pally rotational CDs or, as you said, just do god-knows-what-else to make it still useful.

IMO it's a bad sign when people crave a stat obsessively not because it's great on paper for damage reduction/smoothing, but because it makes their rotation feel fun, comfortable, and 'playable'. That's probably a clue that something should change baseline, especially in a world where stacking a specific stat is magnitudes more difficult.

[trystero]

For designers that removed Inquisition because it wasn't "fun," they certainly seem inconsistent...

[Jackielope]

One of the things I'm wondering might be possible is if they can make other stats speed up our play like haste does, but in their own way. I say wondering since I realy don't have faith Blizzard will be able to deliver on that, especially since if two stats both speed up play on their own then stacking both of those will just blow things up. Either that or the secondaries themselves won't make such a huge difference like they do in today's game.

As far as the Inquisition stuff goes... Yeah, Blizzard isn't consistent. They certainly weren't back in Wrath, but Wrath did have its own issues where they added the heroic raids and hard modes and item level went way beyond what they had planned on doing because there was such positive feedback with the way they handled Ulduar.

[Raeph]

Bit of info from Celestion on tanks in WoD, via twitter:

https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...79013720748032 (Multistrike will be tied to a passive to give it defensive value)

https://twitter.com/Celestalon/statu...79300934094848 (Vengeance will buff self heals and dev team wants bonus armor to always be good for physical damage encounters).

[Raeph]

5 days and no new tank information...maybe there will be something to discuss after PAXEast...

[Lovestar]

Not really many things to discuss about tanking if it is going to be like mashing buttons just like it was back in wotlk.

The devs have said nothing like that. Active Mitigation is here to stay and they're designing stats even more aggressively around it.

I mean I guess WoW itself is about mashing buttons, but there's more going on now than just 969 for threat and then /afk between calls for a raid CD.

The bigger reason for lack of discussion is similar to your point though — there's not much to say. Tanks got their hard revamp in MoP and WoD will likely just refine a few rough edges and focus mostly on "fixing" (ha, ha, ha) healers.

[Raeph]

The devs have said nothing like that. Active Mitigation is here to stay and they're designing stats even more aggressively around it.

I mean I guess WoW itself is about mashing buttons, but there's more going on now than just 969 for threat and then /afk between calls for a raid CD.

The bigger reason for lack of discussion is similar to your point though — there's not much to say. Tanks got their hard revamp in MoP and WoD will likely just refine a few rough edges and focus mostly on "fixing" (ha, ha, ha) healers.

Might be interesting to see how that "fix" extends to us though. Most Pally tanks hover around 65-75% overhealing as it is, so there is room to tone it down, and we know that vengeance will continue to buff self heals. It may not matter though, seems like the bulk of the healer changes wont effect Prot anyway. Our self heal will remain instant, and unless they really go after us with the nerf bat we could survive a 50%+ reduction in self healing and not really notice too much.

Our healers would, but maybe they'll enjoy the additional activity.

[Nobleshield]

Personally I hate Active Mitigation, but I'm interested in seeing how they will streamline some of the abilities. I can either stick with my Paladin or go back to my Warrior for Warlords (assuming I don't decide to do something with the free 90), but I'm reserving judgment until I see the changes coming; given that I can't really stand Arms or Fury for DPS, Paladin is leaning more towards the choice, but I'm definitely curious how they are going to address things like haste gearing and the level 100 talents.

Honestly though I can't say I'm too thrilled with them making tanking more into "Defensive DPS".

[Lovestar]

Honestly though I can't say I'm too thrilled with them making tanking more into "Defensive DPS".

It permanently ruined Prot Warrior for me (my tank since TBC), but made Prot Paladin interesting to me & of course I love Monk tanking.

So I'm mostly neutral about it.

[Raeph]

Well with vengeance no longer providing raw AP, just buffing defensive abilities, and blizzards statement that they want tank dps to be about 75% of a DPS, I think we are doing away with the "Defensive DPS" style of tanking.

I'll miss the good numbers on Horridon and Thok though.

Or did you mean by "Defensive DPS" as in tanking using traditional "DPS" stats, like haste and crit?

[Lovestar]

I think they mean your job being to do a "rotation" just like DPS, except it makes you survive instead of making the boss die.

But while that's how I viewed AM at first (and it feels that way on Prot Warrior which — personal bias here — feels like the clunkiest mass of clunk I have ever clunked around with nowadays), it's really not. You still do most of the "tank" tasks, it's just you have something more interesting to manage and focus on during lulls where Threat is under control and you don't need to time a major CD.

[Nobleshield]

Well with vengeance no longer providing raw AP, just buffing defensive abilities, and blizzards statement that they want tank dps to be about 75% of a DPS, I think we are doing away with the "Defensive DPS" style of tanking.

I'll miss the good numbers on Horridon and Thok though.

Or did you mean by "Defensive DPS" as in tanking using traditional "DPS" stats, like haste and crit?

Both. I disliked using DPS stats, but that change at least I find good. I was not a fan of what active mitigation brought to the table, that is doing your priority rotation but spending your resource on defensive abilities versus DPS abilities. It didn't feel right to me, especially on my Warrior (main reason I swapped back to Paladin)

[Vaeladin]

Gearing for DPS stats is definitely not going away. They're moving the other tanks to the same system paladins/monks/druids use, because even though they won't affect our DPS as dramatically as they do now, they'll still affect our active mitigation. With out DPS being a fixed percentage of a damage dealer's DPS, I see tanks mostly focusing on active mitigation, rather than AM being a side-effect of maximizing DPS like it feels currently.

[Lovestar]

I'd say it's more that maximizing DPS is a side-effect of AM design.

That is, tanks exploit the AM stat that most-usefully contributes DPS. For example, Warrior could go Mastery but why? You have less Rage gen meaning your damage intake is spikier, and you get no DPS from it. Or you could go Parry and get a combination of strong average "reduction" + intensified Rage gain to spend on AM and compensate the spiky mit of avoidance into actually being smoother than the Mastery path, and on top of all that your DPS explodes from the nonstop Riposte bonus.

Similar logic to Pally. Mastery gives you bigger AM less often, while Haste gives you smaller AM near-constantly and the best DPS boost.

DK is a good example of the opposite — Mastery does jack all DPS but is clearly the best AM stat (up to a certain point), and choosing it over the DPS stat (Haste) is a clear survival advantage. However, in this case DKs (in my experience) will choose the AM stat when survival matters and only switch to the DPS-cheese stat when it no longer really "matters". In that case it's just a side-effect of having content on farm.

I think Tanks still value their survival (AM) above all, but it's so easy to maximize both survival and DPS at the same time with the new AM design that we're seeing the effect of those loopholes more than anything.

[Jackielope]

A clarification on DKs that is relevant to this discussion: Haste is only useful up to a certain small percentage, especially with the Vial of Living Corruption. The reason being is that on fights where Anti-Magic Shell is used a lot, it effectively floods the DK with Runic Power and basically GCD caps them if they're playing well around that ability. Once haste is done parry and crit vie for the next spot after getting a nice amount of mastery to feel like surviving isn't an issue.

That's relevant to us because it's something that Blizz still has to contend with: Capping the GCD through haste and other effects. In WoD where each of the five stats is going to be useful for tanking in some way, we might end up swamped with resources by the end due to two or more stats plus various other abilities activating to give us more than we can expect to use in a given amount of time. We might even end up in situations with 100% uptime on a tank ability we weren't supposed to have 100% uptime on.

It's a pain just waiting for them to release information so we can tear it apart. Hopefully they'll be able to actually make each stat interesting but still not have it blow up, or have such interactions with abilities that a stat basically has a cap on it.

[Raeph]

That brings up an interesting potential issue.

We know that stats like multistrike are going to have passives attached to them to give them tanking benefits. If the passives in anyway increase holy power generation or add in their own mitigation effect then we would go from stacking one stat to the moon to hitting one more multiple *soft-caps* on stats, depending on tier and effect.

Just throwing these out there, but passives like:

"On a critical strike you heal/cast an absorb on yourself for XYZ."
"On a critical strike your cooldowns on Judgement, Crusader strike and Hammer of the Righteous are reduced by X% for Y seconds"
"On a successful mutlistrike, your next holy power generator gives two holy power."
"On a successful multistrike the damage of the next attack made against you is reduced by an amount equal to the potential damage effect. Multistrike effects now causes no additional damage."

Any one of those, granted just concepts and not real passives, have the potential to lead to "soft-caps". This may or may not be a good thing. Adding a flurry effect to crits will make reaching good haste levels easier, while the first multistrike example could lead to it being the preferred stat, over haste.

They really need to release more information.

[Lovestar]

Monks provide a sort-of example of what you're wondering.

Crit is a mild-to-meaningful survival boost (due to EM generation and, to a lesser degree, self-heal crits) up to a certain number (40% has been quoted roughly, 60% sometimes, etc). After that point, Crit is still the best DPS stat but its survival contribution becomes steadily more negligible.

What happens generally right now is, any time content hits hard enough to require more AM (for example, 25 Heroic bosses), excess Crit is sacrificed for Mastery since losing DPS is less of a problem than a tank dying.

Any time content doesn't hit hard enough to need a pure-AM stat (10 Normal, for example), Monks just keep stacking Crit because it still adds some survival and the DPS is considered worth it (especially in smaller groups where tank DPS can be a relatively larger % of the whole).

In this example, hitting a survival "soft cap" leads to a split in attitude — tanks evaluate their odds of survival and either brazenly push DPS or pull out and switch to a different stat, as needed.

So a potential future is that all tanks behave in that "DPS vs. AM" attitude where you either push your best DPS stat or fan out to get your best survival configuration depending on your exact needs. It's actually a pretty interesting place to end up in terms of gearing philosophy.