[Prot] WoD/Legion Alpha Discussion

[Sidonus]

I was watching Sloot's PTR raid test stream the other night and he said paladins are one of the strongest tanks in 6.2. He didn't exactly point out what makes them strong compared to other tanks, but I suppose his view is far from reality of most tanks - along with him playing optimally, he is backed by incredible healers in a guild that has worked in sync for years.

I know that I felt far from being a strong tank and I follow as many guides and guidelines as possible. Alongside a DK, who can easily solo tank all trash and survive twice as many boss debuffs, all the while focusing on DPS, while I have to play optimally in survivability mode and still hope I make it through rough patches (and usually I don't since I get a 70% hp hit as soon as that ShotR gap opens up for 2 seconds and with healers momentarely preoccupied with raid or moving don't throw me a heal in the next 3 sec I get melee'd to death), I sure feel like paper.

What bothers me the most in this story of a prot paladin in WoD however, is how quickly a series of hotfixes came flying in at the start of HM raiding in 6.0 when we could to a lot of damage on certain fights. HM was open maybe 2 weeks when we got slammed by a nerfbat so hard, it not only made us the worst DPS tank, it also took a chuck out of our already shabby survivability.

On the other hands, DK dps got crazy with 6.1 and you can be sure it'll last until 6.2 or until 7.0 even. I don't know what to think for the future. I got so demotivated to play the game already I think I'm going from frustrated to just not caring. I'll unsub over the summer and see what the hell happens next, but if Blizzard thinks prot paladins are just fine, then I guess I'm just too old for WoW at this point.

With Theck gone, I think there will be even less of a voice from prot paladin community and even more reason for Blizz to balance this class by throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Actually, we got hit with the nerf bat 6 weeks into highmaul, not 2. But yeah we need a buff plz bliz because one of the healers in my raid always mentions externals when I die to auto attacks.

[Deleted]

I was watching Sloot's PTR raid test stream...

Sloot also completely ignores SoI, as he thinks it has too low survivability benefit, and the 5% DPS is more wort it.
I wouldn't really take anything that he says after that seriously.

[celinamuna]

Sloot also completely ignores SoI, as he thinks it has too low survivability benefit, and the 5% DPS is more wort it.
I wouldn't really take anything that he says after that seriously.

mfw same person was saying how he never used harsh words because it wasn't useful

[Deleted]

So, just to clarify about BoS, so everybody understands:

The only thing wrong with BoS is that it does too much damage when it cleaves 2-3 targets, and that it heals off mechanics it shouldn't. It is fundamentally idiotic that Mark of Sindragosa does 200k raw HPS on Hansgar and Franzok because it flags the HP equalization mechanic, and almost equally idiotic that it lets you heal off Impales hitting Siegemakers on Blackhand. This is clearly unintended.

Breath of Sindragosa does not do too much damage in single-target situations. This is a common misconception supported by the fact that literally every single other tank is undertuned. We should be doing 75% of what a DPS does single-target, if Blizzard are to be believed in their statements, and yet everyone but BoS DKs does like 50% when going balls to the wall. BoS DKs is where we should all be right now.

Furthermore, people like to claim Breath of Sindragosa is all about spamming Chains of Ice. These people have either never played Breath of Sindragosa with an appropriate amount of multistrike, or they are simply completely incompetent and do not understand how to do so optimally. In fact, Breath of Sindragosa is an excellent and engaging playstyle with an extremely high skill-cap once a certain baseline level of MS is reached, and one that provides the ability to trade mitigation for RELEVANT DPS when it is safe, which further increases the skillcap of the class played.

Instead of whinging for nerfs to Breath of Sindragosa as many of us are doing (and I myself admittedly have done in the past - in error), we should be defending it and the things it exemplifies to the bitter end. The nerfing and removal of Breath of Sindragosa (rather than simply tuning it properly on multiple targets and not having it flag mechanics it blatantly shouldn't flag) is the death of something that we conceptually want for all tanks - both engaging play that raises the skill-cap and the ability to make a significant trade of mitigation for DPS.

We want Harsh Words back, and everything it implied. That means embracing Breath of Sindragosa as hopefully a tool for change for all tanks.

[Jellospally]

You are a good dude for reading that! and yes I agree every tank should have a mechanic like that.

[Accurate]

So, just to clarify about BoS, so everybody understands:

The only thing wrong with BoS is that it does too much damage when it cleaves 2-3 targets, and that it heals off mechanics it shouldn't. It is fundamentally idiotic that Mark of Sindragosa does 200k raw HPS on Hansgar and Franzok because it flags the HP equalization mechanic, and almost equally idiotic that it lets you heal off Impales hitting Siegemakers on Blackhand. This is clearly unintended.

Breath of Sindragosa does not do too much damage in single-target situations. This is a common misconception supported by the fact that literally every single other tank is undertuned. We should be doing 75% of what a DPS does single-target, if Blizzard are to be believed in their statements, and yet everyone but BoS DKs does like 50% when going balls to the wall. BoS DKs is where we should all be right now.

Furthermore, people like to claim Breath of Sindragosa is all about spamming Chains of Ice. These people have either never played Breath of Sindragosa with an appropriate amount of multistrike, or they are simply completely incompetent and do not understand how to do so optimally. In fact, Breath of Sindragosa is an excellent and engaging playstyle with an extremely high skill-cap once a certain baseline level of MS is reached, and one that provides the ability to trade mitigation for RELEVANT DPS when it is safe, which further increases the skillcap of the class played.

Instead of whinging for nerfs to Breath of Sindragosa as many of us are doing (and I myself admittedly have done in the past - in error), we should be defending it and the things it exemplifies to the bitter end. The nerfing and removal of Breath of Sindragosa (rather than simply tuning it properly on multiple targets and not having it flag mechanics it blatantly shouldn't flag) is the death of something that we conceptually want for all tanks - both engaging play that raises the skill-cap and the ability to make a significant trade of mitigation for DPS.

We want Harsh Words back, and everything it implied. That means embracing Breath of Sindragosa as hopefully a tool for change for all tanks.

Even if you support the BoS playstyle and everything it does that's not gonna prevent blizzard from nerfing it instead of buffing all the other tanks to the level of DK's. It's just unfortunately what they tend to do when one class is ahead of the rest, they never seem to bring every other class up to that level but instead that one class down to the others, or just remove gameplay mechanics that were fun so it doesn't work anymore.

Maybe if we were a dps it'd be different potentially? But I feel they just hate something about tanking and keep dumbing it down more and more each raid tier since WoD released, to the point of where it's not even fun to do anymore.

Like for me personally atm I hate raiding to the point of just wanting it to be over each week as quick as it can. Gave up caring about my parses the second we finished progression and just want farm to be over as quick as it can each week, so I can do other stuff as I hate the fights in the tier due to such boring tank mechanics on each fight.

[Deleted]

Even if you support the BoS playstyle and everything it does that's not gonna prevent blizzard from nerfing it instead of buffing all the other tanks to the level of DK's. It's just unfortunately what they tend to do when one class is ahead of the rest, they never seem to bring every other class up to that level but instead that one class down to the others, or just remove gameplay mechanics that were fun so it doesn't work anymore.

Maybe if we were a dps it'd be different potentially? But I feel they just hate something about tanking and keep dumbing it down more and more each raid tier since WoD released, to the point of where it's not even fun to do anymore.

Like for me personally atm I hate raiding to the point of just wanting it to be over each week as quick as it can. Gave up caring about my parses the second we finished progression and just want farm to be over as quick as it can each week, so I can do other stuff as I hate the fights in the tier due to such boring tank mechanics on each fight.

I mean, honestly, this is just such a shitty defeatist attitude to have. Is it likely that the tank community, across all classes and specs, saying "keep BoS in the game and give other tanks the same capabilities" will change anything? No, probably not - especially so because there are too many stubborn, stupid and uninformed tanks out there who will just keep on whinging about BoS because they don't understand it, nor the emergent gameplay provided by CoI.

But at least if we speak out, we've done something. We didn't speak out like we should have when they came for our self-sustainability. We didn't speak out like we should have when they came for our DPS, and we're about to not speak out like we ought to now that they've come for BoS.

When they come for SotR, like they've come for every other part of tanking that's engaging, who will speak for us?

[Accurate]

I mean, honestly, this is just such a shitty defeatist attitude to have. Is it likely that the tank community, across all classes and specs, saying "keep BoS in the game and give other tanks the same capabilities" will change anything? No, probably not - especially so because there are too many stubborn, stupid and uninformed tanks out there who will just keep on whinging about BoS because they don't understand it, nor the emergent gameplay of CoS.

But at least if we speak out, we've done something. We didn't speak out like we should have when they came for our self-sustainability. We didn't speak out like we should have when they came for our DPS, and we're about to not speak out like we ought to now that they've come for BoS.

When they come for SotR, like they've come for every other part of tanking that's engaging, who will speak for us?

The thing is we did speak out during beta. Or at least quite a few people did and provided sims to show exactly how things would play out for many classes and it was just flat out ignored till live happened and they went "oh they were right quick nerf it". It's just tiring to deal with at this point as it feels like they don't care till they actually see it on live.

I hope this changes for next tier as there's so much they can do overall to make tanking more enjoyable and have a higher skill cap but I just doubt it'll happen honestly. But who knows maybe they'll prove me wrong and listen to feedback.

[Kazuchika]

Speaking out is fucking pointless when your input is completely disregarded by a team who only values the input of those who shamelessly agree with their asinine design decisions.

[trystero]

'Speaking out' can have value. Remember when they wanted to do something about haste in MoP? Everyone complained, and they went back on it.

However they seem convinced that tanking has to be shit now, and nothing will sway them from that. Maybe people have more fun in WoD tanking than they did in MoP, I don't know. I'd like to meet them.

[Snakaso]

To be honest, I don't want them to remove the BoS playstyle. I want (just like you, Solaire (and like Troxism so eloquently put it in this thread)) for BoS to stay, and for us other tanks to be brought up to BoS DK levels - both DPS and survivability.

Unfortunately, that's not going to happen. What's going to happen is that Blizzard is going to "handle" BoS in the same knee-jerk manner they "handled" Sera in HM. So, to be quite honest, the reason I say I want them to just nerf BoS is because they're Blizzard; they're not subtle, they're not nuanced, they throw mechanics at the wall to see what sticks, and if they can't devote that much dev time to fixing BoS, I'd rather they just nerf it down to our level, than do nothing and allow Blood and BrM to lord above us measly peasants like they do now.

[Blizzhoof]

BoS does need a bigger change than what you're advocating Praisethesun. I think it offers engaging gameplay as well, but even if they fix the bugs with it healing off of things it shouldn't, it still heals for way too much off of raid wide magic damage. There is a ton of magic damage in HFC and it will still be too strong. Jello talking about how he doesn't need external healing is a BAD thing.

Furthermore, it's too high a percentage of Blood DK overall damage. If played perfectly, it should be like a 10-15% damage increase. It shouldn't ever be 50-60% of a BDK's damage on a fight. It needs a severe damage nerf and the other abilities need to be brought up to compensate, but BDKs still shouldn't be where they are. DK's are capable of competing with DPS in their guilds when both are playing at or near skill cap. That's ludicrous. BoS BDKs are well above 75% of a DPS right now.

[celinamuna]

'Speaking out' can have value. Remember when they wanted to do something about haste in MoP? Everyone complained, and they went back on it.

Because just like you said, it was before the "No Fun Allowed" policy, generated by massive waves of tears from subpar/butthurt dps who were losing to tanks.

[Deleted]

Also why did you link a heroic log :?

Because its HC im interested in DMG whoring in, my guild isnt good enough for me to do it on all mythic bosses yet

[Deleted]

BoS does need a bigger change than what you're advocating Praisethesun. I think it offers engaging gameplay as well, but even if they fix the bugs with it healing off of things it shouldn't, it still heals for way too much off of raid wide magic damage. There is a ton of magic damage in HFC and it will still be too strong. Jello talking about how he doesn't need external healing is a BAD thing.

Furthermore, it's too high a percentage of Blood DK overall damage. If played perfectly, it should be like a 10-15% damage increase. It shouldn't ever be 50-60% of a BDK's damage on a fight. It needs a severe damage nerf and the other abilities need to be brought up to compensate, but BDKs still shouldn't be where they are. DK's are capable of competing with DPS in their guilds when both are playing at or near skill cap. That's ludicrous. BoS BDKs are well above 75% of a DPS right now.

If you'd read Troxism's post (and much of my opinion on the matter is based on extensive conversation with Troxism, as well as playing BoS myself) you'd understand that we fully advocate for nerfing BoS in those fringe situations like Maidens where atm it is currently far too strong, AND advocate for tuning down the healing it does by a whole lot. BoS is very, very far from, overpowered on in single-target situations - the only way a Blood DK will keep up with a true DPS in a purely single-target situation is if said DPS is bad AND the Blood DK has completely absurd RNG. Characterizing it as overpowered in single-target situations is grossly misrepresenting the relative strength of Breath of Sindragosa to real DPS specs - fueled solely by the misconception that BoS DKs being ahead other tanks by 5-10k DPS implies issues with BoS rather than a generally egregious undertuning of every other tank spec, and comparing BoS DKs with shitty DPS specs like Retribution paladin rather than with actual useful DPS specs that are fully capable of parses in the 55-60k range.

The fact of the matter is that there are dead talents in every tier, for every spec. Look at Runic Empowerment for Blood - who the fuck would ever play RE in content that matters? Likewise, it's fine if Breath of Sindragosa is the only viable choice for Blood DKs that actually care about playing optimally - and for the record the only reason it makes up such a large portion of damage on logs is because it's a more efficient RP-AP conversion than Death Coil so Death Coil, which is easily 15-20% of single-target damage without BoS, is simply never cast. Could the other talents use buffs/reworks (NP needs a full rework for Blood, to be very blunt) to make them more viable? Absolutely. Is them being in a shitty state a cogent argument for BoS also needing to be in a shitty state..?

I'd say that last line of thinking is the sort of shitty-ass thinking practiced by the developers that got tanks into a whole lot of mess in the first place.

[Khiyone]

I didn't follow the thread back in Highmaul but how much of a DPS gain did Harsh Words give?

[Deleted]

I didn't follow the thread back in Highmaul but how much of a DPS gain did Harsh Words give?

A significant one, but there was some absurd notion that it could simply be spammed whenever the fuck you wanted, rather than actually having to be used with some thought. Could you spam it when you weren't tanking, or during major CDs? Yes, and doing so was a valuable tool on progression. Could you do it when you were actually tanking something and not under the effect of a major DR? Not in a million fucking years.

Never mind the fact that properly using Seraphim (which hilariously remains beyond even the average Mythic paladin, if logs are to be believed) was a much larger DPS gain than spamming Harsh Words.

[Blizzhoof]

If you'd read Troxism's post (and much of my opinion on the matter is based on extensive conversation with Troxism, as well as playing BoS myself) you'd understand that we fully advocate for nerfing BoS in those fringe situations like Maidens where atm it is currently far too strong, AND advocate for tuning down the healing it does by a whole lot. BoS is very, very far from, overpowered on in single-target situations - the only way a Blood DK will keep up with a true DPS in a purely single-target situation is if said DPS is bad AND the Blood DK has completely absurd RNG. Characterizing it as overpowered in single-target situations is grossly misrepresenting the relative strength of Breath of Sindragosa to real DPS specs - fueled solely by the misconception that BoS DKs being ahead other tanks by 5-10k DPS implies issues with BoS rather than a generally egregious undertuning of every other tank spec, and comparing BoS DKs with shitty DPS specs like Retribution paladin rather than with actual useful DPS specs that are fully capable of parses in the 55-60k range.

The fact of the matter is that there are dead talents in every tier, for every spec. Look at Runic Empowerment for Blood - who the fuck would ever play RE in content that matters? Likewise, it's fine if Breath of Sindragosa is the only viable choice for Blood DKs that actually care about playing optimally - and for the record the only reason it makes up such a large portion of damage on logs is because it's a more efficient RP-AP conversion than Death Coil so Death Coil, which is easily 15-20% of single-target damage without BoS, is simply never cast. Could the other talents use buffs/reworks (NP needs a full rework for Blood, to be very blunt) to make them more viable? Absolutely. Is them being in a shitty state a cogent argument for BoS also needing to be in a shitty state..?

I'd say that last line of thinking is the sort of shitty-ass thinking practiced by the developers that got tanks into a whole lot of mess in the first place.

Again, I agree about the engaging gameplay, but you need to get this 75% bullshit (that they backtracked on multiple times already) out of your head. 75% of a DPS doesn't seem to be the goal currently, but we should probably get clarification on that.

Also, it isn't "grossly misrepresenting the relative strength of Breath of Sindragosa." Hell, just look at Encore's Gruul logs. Here's the one from this past week: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done

They have amazing DPS players in the guild. Jello is doing 80%-90% of some of the best DPS players in the world. I'd say he pretty much plays at the skill cap, but so does Hanno for example. It does also need a single target nerf. Sure, it's much more overpowered in multi-target situations, but it's still too good in single-target situations. And yea, the talent system for DKs is fucking awful. I hate it on mine.

[Deleted]

Again, I agree about the engaging gameplay, but you need to get this 75% bullshit (that they backtracked on multiple times already) out of your head. 75% of a DPS doesn't seem to be the goal currently, but we should probably get clarification on that.

Also, it isn't "grossly misrepresenting the relative strength of Breath of Sindragosa." Hell, just look at Encore's Gruul logs. Here's the one from this past week: https://www.warcraftlogs.com/reports...pe=damage-done

They have amazing DPS players in the guild. Jello is doing 80%-90% of some of the best DPS players in the world. I'd say he pretty much plays at the skill cap, but so does Hanno for example. It does also need a single target nerf. Sure, it's much more overpowered in multi-target situations, but it's still too good in single-target situations. And yea, the talent system for DKs is fucking awful. I hate it on mine.

Considering that Jellos has the current absolute top public parse on Gruul for tanks at 46.8k, and just getting in the top 200 for all classes currently takes 54,490.7 DPS, I'd be loathe to characterize what he's doing as "90% of a real DPS' DPS". That'd take somewhere in the realm of 4-5k more DPS than he's already doing with excellent trinket and ring RNG. Like, sure, he's keeping up somewhat with a rogue that's 4-5k off a respectable sub rogue parse, a warlock that's similarly far off a respectable lock parse, and he's 5k (which is 10%, for the record) behind a spec that just isn't very good at single-target at all.

I mean, I seriously don't get what this obsession everyone has about wanting tanks to be absolutely rock-fucking-bottom of the meter by a country mile is. Do I want us anywhere near the top? No. But tanks NEED to be able to trade mitigation for MEANINGFUL DPS for any sort of compelling gameplay to exist, especially so during progression (where believe it or not survival is already trivial if you're good at what you do and understand how to design a strat around your class' limitations and strengths), and that ability to trade mitigation for meaningful DPS requires that tanks do remotely meaningful DPS in the first place. Nobody outside of Blood DKs currently do, and the fact that tank DPS is so irrelevant in the first place is just a fucking cop-out for the devs to not give a shit about tuning it properly as a whole. Not a single fucking hotfix this tier to tank DPS despite Blood DK being miles ahead of everybody else and Prot Paladins looking like a morbidly obese kid trying to play WR on a varsity football team - not even a fucking mention.

Shit, a tank going balls to the fucking wall SHOULD do 90% of what a competent DPS does, and perhaps even be able to just keep up with superior RNG. Anything else results in gameplay where tanks do so little fucking DPS in the first place that they might as well not bother and the best way for a tank to help their raid becomes re-rolling to a DPS like so many top-tier tanks have done and continue to do. It's the only way to create healthy gameplay for tanks, because the alternative in terms of actually challenging good players is tuning Mythic bosses so tightly in terms of survival that they'll simply cockblock guilds that don't have top-notch tanks completely. Furthermore, if tank DPS is actually tuned to be remotely relevant, they have to fucking care if we're balanced properly or not - right now they just don't give a fuck.

[Kanadei]

Shit, a Tank going balls to the fucking wall SHOULD do 90% of what a competent DPS does, and perhaps even be able to just keep up with superior RNG. Anything else results in gameplay where tanks do so little fucking DPS in the first place that they might as well not bother and the best way for a tank to help their raid becomes re-rolling to a DPS like so many top-tier tanks have done and continue to do. It's the only way to create healthy gameplay for tanks, because the alternative in terms of actually challenging good players is tuning Mythic bosses so tightly in terms of survival that they'll simply cockblock guilds that don't have top-notch tanks completely. Furthermore, if tank DPS is actually tuned to be remotely relevant, they have to fucking care if we're balanced properly or not - right now they just don't give a fuck.

small correction there.

otherwise, QFT, oh captain my captain