Blizzards intentions with prot paladins?

[Talen]

I realy don´t get what you are all complaining about if they screw up Mastery then so be it , I will just go back to the way it was in wotlk and stack up parry / dodge + lots of stam to even out the occasional damage spikes while still getting less overall damage ( as it is anounced till now with just 30% damage reduction block/mastery will be the worst deff stat ) and f... off mastery, yet another spec with absolute useless mastery but playing a Shadow for the most part I´m used to that anyways

Which will work until DR kicks in on the parry/dodge stat and make you a mana sponge. LK style tanking isn't supposed to be viable in Cat; Blizzard have mentioned that once or twice and if it ever is viable, we can expect to see it nerfed so hard and so quickly it'll make what happened to Rets when LK launched look like a love tap.

EJL

[Nyghtfall]

Oh, i agree that its definatly a unorthodox way of balancing potential changes. There are too many things behind the curtain right now that I can't completely wrap my head around this whole....process, hopefully the next build will enlighten us.

[Deleted]

Ok i admit that it isn´t that easy it would be necessary to do quite some math to figure out at what point the dr´s on parry/dodge ,if evenly distributed between both, will make mastery superior again but the way they changed holy shield will make mastery the weakest stat für a long time if they don´t revamp it to some extend.

[Bysu]

The Holy shield change is just on the PTR still, and I honestly doubt it will stay that way, since it's just the same it was months ago and they decided to change it to the current extra damage blocked (which kinda proofs it's previous failure).

IDK why it wasn't just left as it was, there is no issue with something like mastery capping at some point, not like it's the first stat ever with a cap (hit rating, expertise?), people will still need the mastery to get untouchable even at the end of the expansion (where you might hit 40-50% avoidance at most). Even in 4.2 I don't see mastery for paladins being capped without reforging for it, so really, what's the whole issue?, just reforge away from mastery into avoidance whenever (if) the day comes and you have too much mastery and get over the cap. Like I said before, this is no personal take on paladins, all the other tank classes have caps on mastery, either in some explicit way (warriors) or implicit (DKs and Druids); and when has tank survivability scaled in a linear fashion before to really complain now about it? (after years without mastery and having to deal strictly with diminishing returns).

Too much QQ, unnecesary changes from Blizz, and assumptions based on PTR IMO.

---------- Post added 2011-05-17 at 08:33 PM ----------

Ok i admit that it isn´t that easy it would be necessary to do quite some math to figure out at what point the dr´s on parry/dodge ,if evenly distributed between both, will make mastery superior again but the way they changed holy shield will make mastery the weakest stat für a long time if they don´t revamp it to some extend.

The math goes as follow (assuming mastery will still give 2.25% block chance per point and Holy shield change goes live):

2.25 * 0.3 = 0.675% damage negated per point of mastery

So what you want, is the point at which DR reduces effectiveness of either dodge or parry by 32.5%, or said in a different way, when you negate the same amount of damage with 1% dodge/parry before DR. The general DR formula for avoidance is:

1/X' = (1/C) + (K/X)

where K and C are 0.9560 and 0.01523660 respectively (taken from EJ combat ratings thread), and X' is avoidance after DR, and X avoidance before DR. Now what we want is the point where:

X'/X = 0.675 -> X = X'/0.675 Then,

X' = (1-(K*0.675) / C = 23.28% aprox. at which point your dodge/parry would be negating the same damage as if you would've invested all the rating points required to get there into mastery rating (and after which mastery becomes better).

A big difference if you compare to the current state when blocks negate 40% damage, hence:

2.25 * 0.4 = 0.9% damage negated per mastery point. And just switching values in the last formula:

X' = (1-(K*0.9) / C = 9.16% aprox.

[Gallahadd]

Yeah sure give me a raid wide shield wall then, since you apparently don't think it's good.

haha gotta love it, they post about Pallies being miles ahead of everyone else, I say no they're not our mastery is flawed....
they reply 'Yeah... but you have raidwall!!11!11!'

yet Warriors ONCE AGAIN have a better version of the same ability.... SO we'll stick that in the big 'warrior toys pile' along with an interesting almost uncappable mastery, and abilities that play off it to make their better mastery EVEN better than it already is...

and also... point me to where I say Raidwall isn't good? I never said that, cause I actually rather like raid wall (would like it a WHOLE lot better if it affected the casting pally as well, but put DP on CD whenever it was cast... not unlike a certain cry.. used to rally people.. by a certain warrior class.....)

So....next totally pointless and completely offtopic arguement? seriously I can do this all night..

I'm sorry, but Holy Shield hasn't give +5% chance to block for ages now, it increases the amount of damage blocked by 10%.

Seriously?
Get the fuck out and NEVER COME BACK. You've clearly not read this thread, or the changes that it's made to discuss, so please do yourself and us a favour and just go away before you make yourself look stupider than you already have, although to be quite honest, that would be such a feat, I think I'd sorta like to see it.

[Bysu]

haha gotta love it, they post about Pallies being miles ahead of everyone else, I say no they're not our mastery is flawed....
they reply 'Yeah... but you have raidwall!!11!11!'

yet Warriors ONCE AGAIN have a better version of the same ability.... SO we'll stick that in the big 'warrior toys pile' along with an interesting almost uncappable mastery, and abilities that play off it to make their better mastery EVEN better than it already is...

and also... point me to where I say Raidwall isn't good? I never said that, cause I actually rather like raid wall (would like it a WHOLE lot better if it affected the casting pally as well, but put DP on CD whenever it was cast... not unlike a certain cry.. used to rally people.. by a certain warrior class.....)

So....next totally pointless and completely offtopic arguement? seriously I can do this all night..



Seriously?
Get the fuck out and NEVER COME BACK. You've clearly not read this thread, or the changes that it's made to discuss, so please do yourself and us a favour and just go away before you make yourself look stupider than you already have, although to be quite honest, that would be such a feat, I think I'd sorta like to see it.

Useless post is useless post, but thanks for trying...

[Gallahadd]

how is the post useless.....
you said 'I'm sorry, but Holy Shield hasn't give +5% chance to block for ages now, it increases the amount of damage blocked by 10%.'
the point is the reason we're all here is because on the PTR that has been changed, and is a massive frakking nerf.

but please continue to use recycled meme's to try and make yourself sound smarter, while totally missing the point, it help my anger to vent it on people being annoying

[Bysu]

how is the post useless.....
you said 'I'm sorry, but Holy Shield hasn't give +5% chance to block for ages now, it increases the amount of damage blocked by 10%.'
the point is the reason we're all here is because on the PTR that has been changed, and is a massive frakking nerf.

but please continue to use recycled meme's to try and make yourself sound smarter, while totally missing the point, it help my anger to vent it on people being annoying

You are too busy trying to flame. That's why you are taking that line out of my post out of context. I'm not talking about PTR changes in that post at all, I'm discussing the mastery cap "issue" across different tank classes based on LIVE and not PTR crap (which like I said already is hardly gonna stay like that given how Holy Shield worked in the same way months ago and they just changed it because it failed and had no synergy at all with prot paladin mastery).

Actually if you would've bother to read my other posts you would see that my point is that nothing had to be changed, because all masteries (for tanks at least) have a cap or diminishing point, so the "OMG we can no longer stack mastery cuz it's useless!" really isn't that much of a big deal (under LIVE scenario).

But yeh go ahead, vent your thing, and keep fishing flames if that's what makes you happy. Too sad the prot warriors have to come here and do your math because all you've got brains for is for this kind of stuff.

[Gallahadd]

Okay I'll admit I was just trying to vent, I can man up and admit when I'm being a douche, hell I wasn't even really mad at you the other guy I was posting too had pissed me off, I just happened to see your post, and latched onto it as something else to rage about...

But as for all tanks masteries having a cap, or deminish point... That's not really true.. as far as I can see, Prot Pallies mastery is the ONLY one with a cap, whereas the other three all have deminish points, to use Prot Warriors as an example, yes no sane prot warrior is going to continue to blindly reforge all their gear to mastery once they hit passive 102.4%, BUT should an upgrade have mastery on, they're hardly going to reforge it away are they? As it WILL still grant them an increase to mitigation, through increased Critical Block chance, whereas a Paladin in the same situation is wasting any point of excess mastery, as once they hit the magic 102.4% (a number which is verging on attainable now, even in average gear ((this guy is sitting around 90% avoidance raid buffed and his gear is decidedly average))) all further mastery will do is.... well nothing, it'll take up ilvl points. As for DK/Druid mastery... does that even have a deminish point? as far as I can see it doesn't matter if you have 1 mastery or 100, it'll still be just as useful, as their mastery directly relates to the Death Strike heal/Savage Defense Shield, which is a fairly major part of their tanking skillsets, as is not effected by any kind of CTC cap.

I'm just gunna ignore the last comment, as we're clearly both venting our anger here

[Bysu]

Okay I'll admit I was just trying to vent, I can man up and admit when I'm being a douche, hell I wasn't even really mad at you the other guy I was posting too had pissed me off, I just happened to see your post, and latched onto it as something else to rage about...

But as for all tanks masteries having a cap, or deminish point... That's not really true.. as far as I can see, Prot Pallies mastery is the ONLY one with a cap, whereas the other three all have deminish points, to use Prot Warriors as an example, yes no sane prot warrior is going to continue to blindly reforge all their gear to mastery once they hit passive 102.4%, BUT should an upgrade have mastery on, they're hardly going to reforge it away are they? As it WILL still grant them an increase to mitigation, through increased Critical Block chance, whereas a Paladin in the same situation is wasting any point of excess mastery, as once they hit the magic 102.4% (a number which is verging on attainable now, even in average gear ((this guy is sitting around 90% avoidance raid buffed and his gear is decidedly average))) all further mastery will do is.... well nothing, it'll take up ilvl points. As for DK/Druid mastery... does that even have a deminish point? as far as I can see it doesn't matter if you have 1 mastery or 100, it'll still be just as useful, as their mastery directly relates to the Death Strike heal/Savage Defense Shield, which is a fairly major part of their tanking skillsets, as is not effected by any kind of CTC cap.

I'm just gunna ignore the last comment, as we're clearly both venting our anger here

A sane warrior will indeed reforge any extra mastery because the gain from reforging to any avoidance stat (dodge/parry) would be more of a gain. Yes I understand that mastery over the cap is not useless, but still warriors won't stack mastery over the cap, and like I said through math before, the better the gear gets (more avoidance in gear), the smaller the gap becomes as to how much mastery paladins and warriors need to cap their block.

Also there is diminishing returns on DK and Druid mastery if you look at it in a logical analysis (not even gonna try doing the math because will either take too long or I'll fail at trying), but it makes sense to think that if you have damage absorb mechanics that work like those you're gonna hit a wall at some point. For the druids, Savage Defense shields are based on a % of attack power (this % is increased by mastery), so yes, the more mastery you get the bigger the shield, BUT bears attack power (as with most tanks) depends highly on Vengeance (about 60-70% of the max. AP comes from it), so if you absorb too much damage, you don't get hit, and in consequence, your SD shields start to shrink (low vengeance), is just a vicious circle. Same applies to DKs, this time tho because their Death Strike Heal is based on damage taken, the more damage you take, the more you can heal yourself (hence bigger Blood Shields), so again, mastery does have it's benefit, but is limited by itself since damage absorbed is damage that will not count towards bigger DS heals.

It would probably take a lot of time to model the scaling and true diminishing points of those masteries, but by logic they exist, and in general is something that is shared among all tank classes, being either because they get actually capped, or because their own mechanics hinders their returns.

Anyways, yes the current PTR change is a nerf, there is no way to deny that; I even did the math in this page just to show what would be the new "break-point", when mastery would yield better mitigation than dodge/parry, IF the changes stay as they are, and the result is staggering. But trust me, it either stays this way and they also nerf all other tank classes, or they have some other change under the sleeve for paladins, most probably a mastery redesign since it just doesn't make sense going back to the "block+block" Holy Shield/Mastery model from before.

[Lucavian]

Also there is diminishing returns on DK and Druid mastery if you look at it in a logical analysis (not even gonna try doing the math because will either take too long or I'll fail at trying), but it makes sense to think that if you have damage absorb mechanics that work like those you're gonna hit a wall at some point. For the druids, Savage Defense shields are based on a % of attack power (this % is increased by mastery), so yes, the more mastery you get the bigger the shield, BUT bears attack power (as with most tanks) depends highly on Vengeance (about 60-70% of the max. AP comes from it), so if you absorb too much damage, you don't get hit, and in consequence, your SD shields start to shrink (low vengeance), is just a vicious circle. Same applies to DKs, this time tho because their Death Strike Heal is based on damage taken, the more damage you take, the more you can heal yourself (hence bigger Blood Shields), so again, mastery does have it's benefit, but is limited by itself since damage absorbed is damage that will not count towards bigger DS heals.

Your logic is flawed. If their SD is so high that they're not taking damage fast enough to keep vengeance from falling cause it has a few seconds between hits before it's gone, then the bear is taking next to no damage anyway so why would it care? If the bear drops from capped vengeance to 95% but that 5% means the SD he creates is not large enough to block all the damage then he's going to take some minute amount of damage and bring his SD back up to fulling blocking the damage so you're talking some small % of damage (their % master * 1 tick of vengeance loss) which is going to be less than a 20k hit on a tank with 200k health.

With the DK the heal is again based on the damage taken but it also has a minimum of 7% of their health. So since the heal is going to be at least 7% of their health times their shield there is no reachable cap for them (there is a cap however as they cannot create a shield larger than their own health pool so anything doing more than full health per swing would still do damage).

So the value of 1 more % of shield versus say increased threat(damage) or just avoiding the attack all together (for tanking more than 1 mob at a time) might come into question, but for boss tanking they have no true cap that can reached, but paladins definately do have a point where another point of mastery has 0 value. I hope they intend on changing this but I wouldn't be surprised if their method of changing this is making Holy Shield add 5% block chance and then just reducing our % block chance per mastery i.e. 1.25% block chance per point of mastery. Suddenly 60% block chance becomes 38% block chance, making it harder to cap mastery and blizz calls it a fix.

[Bysu]

Your logic is flawed. If their SD is so high that they're not taking damage fast enough to keep vengeance from falling cause it has a few seconds between hits before it's gone, then the bear is taking next to no damage anyway so why would it care? If the bear drops from capped vengeance to 95% but that 5% means the SD he creates is not large enough to block all the damage then he's going to take some minute amount of damage and bring his SD back up to fulling blocking the damage so you're talking some small % of damage (their % master * 1 tick of vengeance loss) which is going to be less than a 20k hit on a tank with 200k health.

With the DK the heal is again based on the damage taken but it also has a minimum of 7% of their health. So since the heal is going to be at least 7% of their health times their shield there is no reachable cap for them (there is a cap however as they cannot create a shield larger than their own health pool so anything doing more than full health per swing would still do damage).

So the value of 1 more % of shield versus say increased threat(damage) or just avoiding the attack all together (for tanking more than 1 mob at a time) might come into question, but for boss tanking they have no true cap that can reached, but paladins definately do have a point where another point of mastery has 0 value. I hope they intend on changing this but I wouldn't be surprised if their method of changing this is making Holy Shield add 5% block chance and then just reducing our % block chance per mastery i.e. 1.25% block chance per point of mastery. Suddenly 60% block chance becomes 38% block chance, making it harder to cap mastery and blizz calls it a fix.

I'm not using any real figures, but I do admit that for bears is hard to come up with Vengeance problems or decay because of SD absorbs (this is mainly because bear mastery is just crap atm), although I'm gonna hold on my opinion regarding DKs since there is no "soft fading" involved, and all you get is 5 seconds to eat a big load of damage and use it in your favor, so you'd be probably surprised about how hard it is to have the Blood shield tracker addon to flash for an empowered Death Strike window once you start getting high amounts of mastery.

Anyways, my point was just referring to the general view, and even if it takes absurd amounts of mastery to demonstrate (at least for druids) the fact is still there, just as you admit it. So idk why would my logic be flawed, theory is just theory, it doesn't need circumstances to make it true.

Adding to the last of your comments, like I said already, I doubt it'll stay that way. When they don't know how to fix something they just toss you a cookie like they did with druids: "lulz SD maths sux, 2 hard 2 balance, but hei we can beef up their fur and call it a day"... +15k armor will do.

[Gallahadd]

I can kinda see your point about SD/BS, but the thing is that is totally subjective, so yeah, there may come a point when for instance a DK isn't taking enough damage because of his shield to get his Death Strike high enough, but then he switches the fight to Hard Mode, or a new Tier of Raiding comes out, or shit he just goes to a harder hitting boss, or pulls more mobs, and suddenly BAM, he's got much higher damage intake, and what do you know, they're getting the most our of their Mastery Shield again.

but tbh this is all rather pointless, there's no point mathing out how much of a nerf this is, or if/when the other tanks are going to get buffed/nerfed to bring them on to our level, as Blizz have already said that this is the first in a long list of changes, so I think we all just need to pull the claws in, chill the frak out, have a cup of tea and see what the next build brings...

of course it is goes live like this.....

[zealous]

I can kinda see your point about SD/BS, but the thing is that is totally subjective, so yeah, there may come a point when for instance a DK isn't taking enough damage because of his shield to get his Death Strike high enough, but then he switches the fight to Hard Mode, or a new Tier of Raiding comes out, or shit he just goes to a harder hitting boss, or pulls more mobs, and suddenly BAM, he's got much higher damage intake, and what do you know, they're getting the most our of their Mastery Shield again.

Their shield is based on the health lost, and it's already mostly capped at normal boss hits, so nope. It's the mark of a good DK tank to DS after big boss hits to get the most hp back and the biggest shield possible.

It's the bad ones that will just spam DS all day long even if they are missing 2% hp.

They might see some slight increase at hard mode level, but not much, since DS isn't really that spammable.

Overall, I don't see a problem with DK mastery scaling, and I've played Blood, albeit not very long.

[spongemike]

It's rather likely that mastery will scale both chance and percentage while doing less per point and higher block chance being in from the start. Fine imo. The idea is even after you reach 102.4% you don't mind more mastery as it continues to drop the incoming damage by increasing the amount blocked (probably back up to a bit more than now). This of course assumes they know what they are doing which is generally becoming less of a certainty as time goes on.

You do realize if blizzard only lowers the per point mastery give for block it will hurt the freshly ding lvl 85 port pally since they are constantly taking more damage than the other tanks. Remember back in the beginning of cata where Bear druids are nerf to the ground. The result is that tons of Bear Druid drop and change spec or quit.