[Prot] WoD/Legion Alpha Discussion

[Deleted]

Does anyone know if the Hot Fix for HS is live yet?

I guess it depends on your realm. Doesn't seem to have gone live on mine yet. Still doing <1% of my overall damage.

[Trep]

I guess it depends on your realm. Doesn't seem to have gone live on mine yet. Still doing <1% of my overall damage.

In that case we may be staying with EmpS for at least another week (until Tues Maint) if we want to attain adequate levels of DPS as well as TMI

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This is a valid point, but the fact of the matter is that Seraphim is perfectly suited to its niche (mitigating physical damage) without any haste at all. Part of the benefits associated with Seraphim is that we can stack the stats that are best for Holy Shield without significant loss of effectiveness when we're using Sera. It simply allows us to be more flexible than talenting EmpS or stacking haste after BA.

While I agree with your point, I thought I should point out that with EmpS you only put Crit ahead of Mastery in the stat prio and with the other two talents it's Mastery > Crit=MS so the gear is roughly the same. You could simply forgo any MS on your gear, find a happy medium in the two stats Mastery and Crit, and be universal in all three talents.

[Enosh]

I actually kinda like ES, was expecting to hate it
mostly like it because with the 15% buff it feels relatively fast again instead of the slow GCD you have otherwise (also bonus extra fancy animation for it, palas get all the good stuff)

silvermoon down atm so i guess holy shield should be fixed when it comes back up will try it out again

oh and self healing is utterly awful, I don't know if pressing that wog button is even worth it anymore...

[Deleted]

I actually kinda like ES, was expecting to hate it
mostly like it because with the 15% buff it feels relatively fast again instead of the slow GCD you have otherwise (also bonus extra fancy animation for it, palas get all the good stuff)

silvermoon down atm so i guess holy shield should be fixed when it comes back up will try it out again

oh and self healing is utterly awful, I don't know if pressing that wog button is even worth it anymore...

WoG is pretty potent during Seraphim with 5 stacks of BoG but literally a waste of HoPo at any other time. I suppose it not being shit during Sera indicates that if we stack enough mastery over the course of the expansion it might just stop sucking ass, so there's hope.

[trystero]

WoG needs fixing. I could get more on board with the tank nerfs IF that granted us a more meaningful decision for SotR vs. WoG. It is true that in MoP there was no real decision-making to use our HP (99% of the time) and we even had a tier bonus do the work for us. But the way it is now, even with BoG boosted WoGs (except for 5), I'm better off just using SotR to give my healer some time to heal me up than wasting HP to heal for like 8% of my health.

[Theck]

It was mentioned in the Sacred Duty post but thrown out as an anomaly, by haste may be the best stat after BA for seraphim. I have not ran any sims but the thinking goes like this: there are haste break points for seraphim. Specifically, the number of gcds during divine protection and the number of global cooldowns during the 15 second down time. For starters you need to hit 6 gcds for 8 seconds or a 1.33 sec gcd. This means that during divine protection you can more than likely get 5 hp with the sanctified wrath talent in the 8 seconds before seraphim that you should cover with divine protection. Since seraphim downtime and divine protection are flat times, reducing the gcd is more important than on HS or EmpS.

The reason I mentioned (and then rejected) that possibility was because haste has a fairly inconsistent value in sims due to those breakpoints. Calculate scale factors in one gear set and you might get a high haste value, but tweak the gear set a little and it suddenly drops dramatically. This is more clearly seen in the scaling plot, where you can see haste's effect zig-zagging around the other stats.

That said, I think in practice this is going to be a very minor effect, and not worth worrying about. Between reaction time and player errors, I think that curve will more or less smooth out to match the other stats.

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You should go mastery if you're going to use holy shield yes. if emps you should go with crit. Seraphim , idk haven't tested it, seems too weak to me for some reason.

Why do you suggest crit for Empowered Seals, out of curiosity?

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I agree with this - the survival boost needs to be developed. Insight's so worthless now, it's not even worth using.

I'm also not sure where this comes from. Insight is a pretty significant survivability effect, doubly so with Empowered Seals chosen. In fact, the only way to match Holy Shield's survivability with Empowered Seals is to sacrifice a lot of DPS and sit in Insight.

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Regarding my thoughts on the talents: As I said in the blog post, they're all usable. I think they've done a pretty good job of balancing them relative to one another. I'm not a fan of Empowered Seals because I don't care for seal twisting, but that's obviously a personal preference. If you like the JFMadden rotation it gives us, go nuts with it. Likewise, if you really like Seraphim, it's a solid choice as well.

Holy Shield just makes a good default because it's passive, and thus easy. Learning to master Seraphim and Empowered Seals will take time, so if you just jump into either without a little practice you're probably going to underperform compared to just taking the passive option.

And note that all of my advice on the blog was based off of the corrected version of Holy Shield, since I was aware that it not proccing from melee attacks was a bug. I didn't see much point in re-coding it in SimC to account for a bug that I knew was getting fixed. I think that once the bugfix is applied, Holy Shield is going to be the strongest choice in heroics and challenge modes just because it scales very well with multiple targets, both in survivability and damage.

[Deleted]

I'm also not sure where this comes from. Insight is a pretty significant survivability effect, doubly so with Empowered Seals chosen. In fact, the only way to match Holy Shield's survivability with Empowered Seals is to sacrifice a lot of DPS and sit in Insight.

Seal of Insight is fine. Uther's Insight is what feels underpowered, imo. The problem is really what you pointed out; to match HS, a passive, you need to sit in SoI and lose the DPS. Using Uther's Insight but not sitting in SoI so that you can still maintain some DPS benefit puts it below HS, right? While HS gets to enjoy both the survival aspect and the damage aspect (when it's fixed) completely passively.

[Helkor]

Anybody else who still experience the Holy Shield bug in dungeons? I just ran HC UBS, and it didn't really do any damage at all. I'm sure it works outside dungeons, as I was testing it while doing the Shattrath Daily Quest.

[Theck]

Seal of Insight is fine. Uther's Insight is what feels underpowered, imo. The problem is really what you pointed out; to match HS, a passive, you need to sit in SoI and lose the DPS. Using Uther's Insight but not sitting in SoI so that you can still maintain some DPS benefit puts it below HS, right? While HS gets to enjoy both the survival aspect and the damage aspect (when it's fixed) completely passively.

Yeah, on that I agree. Buffing Uther's Insight would make Empowered Seals a much more interesting decision because there would be a survival benefit to balance the DPS loss of sitting in Insight.

[Jackielope]

Yeah, on that I agree. Buffing Uther's Insight would make Empowered Seals a much more interesting decision because there would be a survival benefit to balance the DPS loss of sitting in Insight.

Isn't Uther's Insight supposed to benefit from Resolve? If so, they might be balancing more with raids in mind than 5 mans. But based on Val's numbers it seems it isn't benefiting from Resolve.

[Deleted]

https://twitter.com/WarcraftDevs/sta...57560593727490

Protection Paladins are performing well overall. However, their attuned stat, Haste, is underperforming. Considering some solutions.

Interested to see what changes come from this; if they improve how our Haste functions, will they leave Empowered Seal of Righteousness as it is? Considering how that was making up for our lack of Haste anyway.

[trystero]

I'm also not sure where this comes from. Insight is a pretty significant survivability effect, doubly so with Empowered Seals chosen. In fact, the only way to match Holy Shield's survivability with Empowered Seals is to sacrifice a lot of DPS and sit in Insight.

It comes from chain running heroics; I'm discussing Empowered, which does hardly anything. Insight also feels underwhelming to me, but it's admittedly better than nothing when the damage coming in is more than the healer can handle.

[Deleted]

Well, if they think we're fine, maybe they should just suck it up and attune us to mastery instead. The last thing we need right now is some half-assed attempt to make Haste king that ends up fucking us completely for progression

[Deleted]

Agreed. I don't want any crazy changes to make Haste more worthwhile. Just change our attunement.

[Yazidguile]

And there's also Sanctity of Battle that's going to falloff a lot since we're not gearing towards Haste

[Deleted]

Well, if they think we're fine, maybe they should just suck it up and attune us to mastery instead. The last thing we need right now is some half-assed attempt to make Haste king that ends up fucking us completely for progression

Agreed; they give us three talents that essentially make haste pretty unneeded, and then complain that it's not strong enough.

[Trep]

I for one would love to see Haste king again because the fast and furious tanking style is one of the things I have come to love about Pally Tanking. Also, with the low 3 second timer on SotR, we need the haste to match warriors in the 6 second SB. Especially considering that our WoG (atleast in Heroic 5mans #nogoodCMgroups) heals for nothing and warriors have an absorb that scales comparatively better due to it being scaled off of their AP AND a 40 additional rage as well as Resolve. At least I believe it scales with Resolve as well. Someone correct me if I am wrong.

With all of that being said, I also agree that I would hate to see them do crazy things just to make Haste king again.

Also, am I the only one that thinks EmpS would be a lot smoother game play if they removed the GCD on Seals? What would be the downside? What would be the upside? Discuss.

[Deleted]

I for one would love to see Haste king again because the fast and furious tanking style is one of the things I have come to love about Pally Tanking. Also, with the low 3 second timer on SotR, we need the haste to match warriors in the 6 second SB. Especially considering that our WoG (atleast in Heroic 5mans #nogoodCMgroups) heals for nothing and warriors have an absorb that scales comparatively better due to it being scaled off of their AP AND a 40 additional rage as well as Resolve. At least I believe it scales with Resolve as well. Someone correct me if I am wrong.

With all of that being said, I also agree that I would hate to see them do crazy things just to make Haste king again.

Also, am I the only one that thinks EmpS would be a lot smoother game play if they removed the GCD on Seals? What would be the downside? What would be the upside? Discuss.

We don't actually need Haste now that we have Seraphim and HS. Both work perfectly well at 0 haste rating. While Haste is definitely more fun, and I would very much like to see them give us a 1-second GCD baseline, I am very worried that any attempts to make Haste our best stat right now will simply fuck us for Highmaul progression, and I'd rather not spend a tier or two as a broken spec while they try to un-fuck us. I simply don't trust them to get a Haste hotfix right in one go.

I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that EmpS would be less clunky with no GCD on Seals, but the fact of the matter is that Blizzard is adamant on not changing this as off-GCD Seals would simply allow us to macro it and thus go against their philosophy of having macros not be "mandatory". To me the real issue with EmpS, though - something Slootbag also says often on his stream - is that the skill floor on EmpS is too punishing. If they make EmpS in its current form actually usable by the Average Joe xxxBubbleBabexxx by buffing the individual Seals (say taking Truth to 25% AP and Righteousness to something similar, so staying in one Seal is "viable" and competes with the other talents), then EmpS becomes completely OP in the hands of a skilled player. It simply cannot be balanced properly.

[LuisKA]

Having tried Holy Shield after the hot-fix I found it not being that good in the dps department. For me it was a dps loss in every situation except when I'm massively swarmed, particularly in single target encounters where boss casts, animations etc. just make its effect go to waste.

[Reghame]

on a side note, having scabbard up + seraphim + all buffs on a execute target while specced into sanct wrath and using the holy wrath glyph. getting 200k crits is hilarious. then having said crit multistrike 2 more times to kill the boss in one GCD makes any heroic/CM very fun. (killed archmage sol in CM the other day this way from like 10% to 0 shits funny.)

I am thinking once holy shield gets 100% fixed, it will begin to out preform EmpS but seraphim is way too good right now simply because the 2k attack power you gain from the spell on it's own makes up for a big increase in survival and damage. Not to mention what others have said to where you can have a cooldown up ALL the time with seraphim makes it a very potent anti physical talent.


And btw, just because we dont out heal the healer anymore does NOT mean our healing is bad. in fact, doing anything close to a fourth of a healer in sustain is possibly subject to a nerf ( looking at you DKs being able to already solo heroics!) i actually enjoy having insight not be anywhere close to our #1 heal because then it gives us the choice to actually do damage if we think we dont need the healing.