Paladin (
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Patch 5.4 Prot Paladin Changes
The Seal of Insight change is not intended as a Protection nerf, or to make haste less attractive. In fact, the change is being made because of a Holy concern. Although Seal of Insight does benefit from haste, the stat’s real value for Protection comes from Sanctity of Battle. Regardless, we will be making adjustments to make sure Protection doesn’t start having mana issues. Current thinking is to increase the mana gain from Guarded by the Light to 10%.
Glyph of the Battle Healer was something we had originally intended to allow Holy to adopt a “melee healer” playstyle, but as class design changes shifted Protection towards using Seal of Insight primarily, it has become both mandatory and overpowered. It’s just significantly stronger than a glyph should be. We think that the redesign will still allow it to be useful for Protection, but much more situationally, which is fine.
The Grand Crusader changes are indeed intended to make avoidance more attractive. The goal isn’t to nerf haste; as I mentioned, Sanctity of Battle is where the majority of haste’s value lies (along with other secondary benefits such as its interaction with Sacred Shield). However, we’ve seen overwhelming feedback that dodge and parry feel like wasted stats to Paladin tanks. It’s fine if you still prefer haste over avoidance, but we still intend to put avoidance on plate tanking gear, and we don’t want you to feel like those stats don’t benefit you when you get them.
We are paying careful attention to your feedback while we work through these changes. Please keep in mind that specific feedback regarding what exactly your concerns are about the changes is significantly more useful to us than sweeping generalizations. Thanks
Please just stop it with Grand Crusader. I don't say useless, but Parry and Dodge are surely the least useful things to get. Why do you acknowledge we like Haste and it works well, then emphasize poorer (or at least 'lumpy' damage intake) gearing setups? Smoothness is key.
The goal is not to get you to prefer one over the other. We want you to like haste AND avoidance.
We know you guys like active mitigation. We like it too. We totally agree -- it feels a lot better (and a lot more fun) than passive mitigation.
However, in the short term, dodge and parry still exist. We want them to serve at least some value to tanks. They don't have to be your best stats, we just want them to feel like they're at least accomplishing something.
Looking to the future, we want to keep the idea of "tank" stats around, but they may end up playing less of a role than they do today. Between Dodge and Parry, it's entirely possible that we'll cut one or another and embrace the idea of active mitigation even further. Those changes are just way too big for 5.4. We'd have to re-itemize hundreds of items, rebalance boss damage, change class mechanics, and so on.
So to summarize: we love active mitigation, and we love that you love active mitigation. We want to push harder in that direction, but we can't fit that in for 5.4. (
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Patch 5.4 Holy Paladin Changes
I just posted some info for Protection in another thread (link) but wanted to make sure we got the message across to Holy as well.
We’ve gotten a lot of feedback from the Holy community that there’s too much of a difference between fights where you’re allowed to stand in melee and fights where you cannot. Seal of Insight is a large part of that problem. By removing the mana gains from SoI, we can balance Holy’s mana appropriately. We don’t think the overall impact will be too large, but just to be sure, we’re planning to buff Divine Plea up to 15% for slightly stronger mana-on-demand.
As I mentioned in the other thread, the Glyph of the Battle Healer changes are largely due to how exceedingly powerful the glyph has become for Protection tanks. We do think it will still be useful in some situations, but we also recognize that many Paladins simply like the idea of healing through melee attacks, and that’s something we may explore more fully in the future. If we do, however, it will most likely not be through a glyph.
In regards to the more general concerns about Holy throughput, we do still plan to buff Holy elsewhere to make up for the changes to Eternal Flame. We’re still discussing exactly what those changes will be (which is why you haven’t seen them yet), but to give a bit of insight, we’re not very likely to buff spells like Beacon of Light or Holy Radiance. When we do make changes, they’ll probably be to spells like Flash of Light, Divine Light, Light of Dawn, and Guardian of Ancient Kings.
Again, please keep in mind that the PTR is a development environment, which quite often means you’ll see incomplete parts of overall changes as work continues. We really appreciate constructive and precise feedback about your concerns – letting us know exactly what is or isn’t working is a lot more effective than hyperbole. Thanks!
For clarification: as I said, we're still discussing exactly how to compensate for the Eternal Flame change. The handful of spells I listed were just possibilities. (
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Patch 5.4 Warlock Changes
Archimonde's Vengeance has been further adjusted, as you'll see in a forthcoming PTR build. We agree with the general concern about incentivizing a pure DPS class to seek out sources of damage and make healers' lives harder in exchange for a damage boost. Even though we can filter out "standing in the fire," so to speak, and plan to do so for tank Vengeance as well, there are plenty of cases that can't be easily handled (e.g. Lei Shen's Thunderstruck, which isn't really avoidable damage, but where a warlock with the current PTR Archimonde's might find it optimal to stand just close enough that they barely survive it, rather than properly trying to get far away).
The current plan is a replacement that will make Demon Soul significantly more potent, though, of course, that is subject to change, it being PTR and all. (
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