WoW: The Meatshield Inn

Zablocki19 wrote:

...where Warriors (particular that one that has 20 Mastery), will have a much bigger chance to reduce damage by 60%. Of that 40%, 25% falls into the double block area, or, 62.5% of all blocks will be Critical Blocks (37.5% normal blocks).

Are you sure of that? If I'm reading your post correctly, you seem to be implying a subtractive method of applying critical blocks to blocks (e.g. 40% chance to block and 25% chance to critical block means 15% of all swings result in a normal block and 25% in a critical block) instead of a multiplicative method (e.g. 40% chance to block and 25% chance to critical block means 30% of all swings result in a normal block and 10% in a critical block). The latter tends to be how Blizzard does these things, and from my research across the web seems to be how people are expecting/seeing it work (it's hard to tell who's talking expectation and who's talking observation, as they're not being very careful in their wording quite often). I unfortunately have only gotten one evening under my belt with 4.0.1 (had to go out of town last week), so I haven't been able to do any log parsing yet. I'm going to be in ICC tonight though, so I should be able to get some more serious numbers. Assuming it's the multiplicative method though, reforging for tons of mastery would seem to be significantly less valuable for warriors than for pallies, aside from using Shield Block to significantly up the number of critical blocks (by upping the number of regular blocks).

It could very well be that the Critical Block is a percentage of all blocks, and not straight off the hit table. If that's the case, which does definitely make alot of sense, critical block is even less valuable (based on our example of 25% CB and 40% Block). That'd be a detail I overlooked in my analysis, since I was focusing on the effects of Mastery on Total Block.

So yeah, if your CB is working out to be a % of all blocks, I'm not sure, it could be either way...likely what you're expecting.

I would imagine that some mastery isn't hurtful, but not something you'd go out of your way to reforge like a Pally would.

On another subject...

I tested out the DK, and Holy Crap is it easy to tank. Hands down, my just over 5k GS DK has an easier time tanking in Heroics over my over 6k GS Pally. Here's what I found:

Paladin (Average to Single Target Spec)
+High Mitigation, especially when Block capped. Can still solo heroic bosses just like before 4.0.1 as WoG takes care of any damage you actually take, and prevents the majority of damage coming in afterwards.
+High Single Target Threat, likely due to having a more focused single target build.
-Low AoE Threat. If you skip ANY of the AoE talents in a pally build, you will have some difficulty keeping AoE aggro. I'll likely be trying a second Tanking Spec for AoE as my offspec to test out the differences. The event in Heroic HoS is great practice for testing this out. Anything over 3 mobs, you're likely to lose something when that first Blizzard/Hurricane/SoC/Volley Hits for a few seconds.

DK
+High AoE Threat. It really isn't any different that AoE Tanking as a Blood Spec before 4.0.1. Assuming you didn't rely on the high AoE threat of Frost, things just got WAY easier to keep.
+High Single Target Threat. Popping out that dancing sword, then hitting DnD on the way in and follow with your two Diseases and you're golden. Anything after that is just adding to your threat lead on any boss.
-Lower Mitigation. The Damage Shield is pretty cool, and I stacked a slight amount of mastery without taking away too much from Hit/Expertise/Dodge/Parry. Basically you really start to lose out to Diminishing returns after 20 - 21% of either, so adding to that damage shield I found really helpful on my lower geared DK. I imagine stacking Mastery at 6k GS is probably awesomeness incarnate for soloing crazy pulls due to extra healing and a massive damage absorption.

I'm gearing up my DK now to try and reach my pally's level so I can really compare the two on equivalent gear, but so far it's looking like DK > Pally with the exception of the consistency of mitigation and choice heals. I imagine one of these will get changed slightly before Cata drops.

I got a chance to run some numbers yesterday. I couldn't find an algorithm and set of constants that would get the dodge right at all levels. When naked, the obvious set of algorithms plus the numbers on elitistjerks.com came out correct, but then they were very, very slightly low (7.68 vs 7.71 if I remember correctly) when I switched to my dps gear (which meant nothing more than slightly more than doubling my agility) and were then slightly high when putting on my tanking gear (by about .2 or .3% if I remember correctly). Since one was low and the other high, I couldn't figure out any variation on the calculation or constants that would make all three match the character screen. Parry worked out fine the first time though, once I realized they literally implemented the STR bit as giving parry rating and not parry (AGI gives dodge directly). The parry rating on the character sheet includes both parry rating from gear and parry rating from STR.

Running the numbers for various reforging scenarios off my current gear (with the best version of dodge I had), reforging the higher of dodge/parry on all of my gear resulted in a total damage mitigation loss of around .3% I think. I recalc'd it to show my total damage over the long haul going up about .7%. In exchange though, the number of hits that weren't at least blocked went down around 5% (or a little more maybe, think I traded around 4-5% avoidance for 10% block). Sorry, don't have the exact numbers in front of me right now. Seemed like a good tradeoff to me, in terms of trading a little bit of extra damage in the long term with a smoother damage profile overall, so I went with it.

Went fine with ICC last night, but I haven't tried to check combat logs yet to see about the critical block numbers. Now that I think about it, I may have been relying on a mod to turn on combat logging, so I might not have logs.

I find your comments on the pally AoE threat interesting. Maybe I'm not quite adjusting to things correctly yet, but I and my pally tank have gone from me being able to pull most of the mobs off of him in an AoE scenario if I work at it to him being able to pull most of the mobs off of me in an AoE scenario without really trying. I think being unable to truly spam cleave with rotating targets may be hurting warrior AoE threat more than I had expected at first, since I can't spread the hits around as widely. All we really gained was the ability to spread rend (which doesn't hurt that much with a fast 1-H weapon, probably need to figure out some way to switch), plus a little TC-SW synergy. I realize consecrate is on a long cooldown now (presumably with corresponding damage increase?), plus there's the new talent to replace crusader strike (not 100% certain if he has it, though I think he does), so not sure how all that works out if you take the talents.

Went fine with ICC last night, but I haven't tried to check combat logs yet to see about the critical block numbers. Now that I think about it, I may have been relying on a mod to turn on combat logging, so I might not have logs.

Loggerhead right? Yeah i missed the first boss kill in ICC last night because of that.

Yep, that's the one. Safe to say I'm not going to make that mistake again tonight...

I know that the link posted on the previous page shows 3 different specs for Pally tanking: Overall, Single Target and AoE. I suspect that somewhere there might be a similar one for warriors where you're likely to want AoE for the trash and then switch specs for the boss if you're really planning on being strong in both areas. Otherwise, you can go with an Overall build, but then if your other tank shifts to one way or the other, they're likely to pull off of you quicker either on trash, or on the boss (or just stronger at tanking the boss). Best to communicate with your other tanks and see what they are doing so you can benefit the raid as a whole by working on the proper niche.

Not really. The only talent I lack that would be AoE relevant is War Academy (an additional 15% to cleave damage, among other things), but with cleave being on a 3 sec CD and requiring so much rage, it can't be spammed anymore, so that's of limited benefit. At best I can use it every 5 sec or so in most situations (though maybe I could use it more if I dropped SS, Rev and Dev completely, which I could certainly try). Not sure if I've currently got the cleave glyph up (1 additional target), so that would have some significant benefit. I already have the shockwave glyph (3 sec off the CD) and the TC range glyph. My framerate may have been making it harder to target my SW appropriately, and I'm still fiddling with graphics settings there. A slow 1-hander for Blood and Thunder would probably help quite a bit too. Warriors used to have a bunch of crit-boosting talents, most of which is gone, and we can't reach Deep Wounds anymore (though that will be reachable at 85), so that combination has probably had a significant impact as well.

I'm not overly concerned or even complaining at all really; as long as one of us holds the mobs, it's fine. It's also hard to tell whether mine went down or his went up, since we're still holding the mobs between the two of us. Just seems like there's still some fine tuning there, or else some more stuff that will shift by the time we get to 85. It just leaves me with the feeling that Blizzard's going to be walking a very, very fine line with threat in order to create their intended balance between AoE settings and single-target/CC settings.

Zablocki19 wrote:

-Lower Mitigation. The Damage Shield is pretty cool, and I stacked a slight amount of mastery without taking away too much from Hit/Expertise/Dodge/Parry. Basically you really start to lose out to Diminishing returns after 20 - 21% of either, so adding to that damage shield I found really helpful on my lower geared DK. I imagine stacking Mastery at 6k GS is probably awesomeness incarnate for soloing crazy pulls due to extra healing and a massive damage absorption.

Proper use of death strike and blood tap really helps mitigate a lot of damage. Unfortunately, active mitigation like the mastery or blood tap really isn't that useful right now. Cataclysm should change that, though, with the limited healer mana pools and heavier damage.

Rejoice Paladins, Divine Plea now restores HP by 1/2/3 depending on talents spent. That felt bugged to go a minimum of 2 GCDs before Holy Shield could be applied.
EDIT: I think this will give WoG some real use. Since you're now getting a Mini PW:S along with Holy Shield.

STA = AP = Threat (10% of max health = AP with Vengeance), and thus STA's stat weight seems to be even greater than in the past. I like seeing my huge damage output (SotR w/ Sacred Duty on full Vengeance = 37k :)), be it spiky or not, it is nice to not feel like I'm tickling mobs with a coat hanger anymore. However this seems like even more of a push into STA stacking. That concerns me a bit. I plan on keeping with my current stance, which is that STA stacking is boring as hell. I like that I can twiddle little knobs with dodge and parry, and now Mastery too. Is there any evidence that Blizz is trying to push tanking into a cookie cutter "best"? I know both schools of thought on the tanking front think theirs is "TEH BEZT", but lets face it, we have both been MTing and OTing without nary a hitch, happily skipping down opposite paths. Currently they both just work. What do you guys think? Are we headed towards STA stacking (for more threat) to keep up with DPS at 85, or will gemming/enchanting/reforging avoidance stay viable?

I'm sure color matching your gems will stay viable, or at least close enough to stam stacking that you won't be hindering your healers. The difference between the two isn't much more than a discussion point, after all.

I think the problem is that despite Blizzard best efforts, Stam stacking is not only the simplest, but usually the most effective method for gemming / enchanting a tank. I see vengeance as Blizzard's way of giving up on their pipedream of getting tanks to gem for threat. It's always easier to tell dps to ease up on their "1" button than it is to tell healers to push that button harder, after all.

ELewis17 wrote:

Rejoice Paladins, Divine Plea now restores HP by 1/2/3 depending on talents spent. That felt bugged to go a minimum of 2 GCDs before Holy Shield could be applied.
EDIT: I think this will give WoG some real use. Since you're now getting a Mini PW:S along with Holy Shield.

STA = AP = Threat (10% of max health = AP with Vengeance), and thus STA's stat weight seems to be even greater than in the past. I like seeing my huge damage output (SotR w/ Sacred Duty on full Vengeance = 37k :)), be it spiky or not, it is nice to not feel like I'm tickling mobs with a coat hanger anymore. However this seems like even more of a push into STA stacking. That concerns me a bit. I plan on keeping with my current stance, which is that STA stacking is boring as hell. I like that I can twiddle little knobs with dodge and parry, and now Mastery too. Is there any evidence that Blizz is trying to push tanking into a cookie cutter "best"? I know both schools of thought on the tanking front think theirs is "TEH BEZT", but lets face it, we have both been MTing and OTing without nary a hitch, happily skipping down opposite paths. Currently they both just work. What do you guys think? Are we headed towards STA stacking (for more threat) to keep up with DPS at 85, or will gemming/enchanting/reforging avoidance stay viable?

Depending on where you're at content wise, you've always been able to fiddle around with stuff like that. Hard modes is pretty much the only place where min/maxing(and thus stam stacking) has really been a requirement; otherwise it's a matter of personal preference.

Is it my imagination, or do protection paladins at level 80 have almost no mana issues?

I was cruising around Ashenvale last night doing a two-fer (Explorer and the Halloween candy buckets) and decided to check out the area in far northeast Ashenvale -- you know, the ones with the elite dragons.

I pulled a pack of three of them and started wailing away. I watched my health dropped down to about 10 percent before I started popping health pots, WOG, bubbles, etc.

My mana bar? It barely budged.

The tradeoff seems to be damage -- I know I'm not doing a great job of managing Holy Power (yet), but it seems like my DPS is way down.

Enix wrote:

Is it my imagination, or do protection paladins at level 80 have almost no mana issues?

I was cruising around Ashenvale last night doing a two-fer (Explorer and the Halloween candy buckets) and decided to check out the area in far northeast Ashenvale -- you know, the ones with the elite dragons.

I pulled a pack of three of them and started wailing away. I watched my health dropped down to about 10 percent before I started popping health pots, WOG, bubbles, etc.

My mana bar? It barely budged.

The tradeoff seems to be damage -- I know I'm not doing a great job of managing Holy Power (yet), but it seems like my DPS is way down.

If you've ever played a rogue, you can play a paladin now.

Reaper81 wrote:

If you've ever played a rogue, you can play a paladin now.

Seconded!

3 Combo Points instead of 5, and your choice of getting a quick heal/damage abs., Single Target Big Hit, or (at 81) a boost to all threat for a small duration. It lets you customize a bit more to the fight you're on, but definitely rogue-esk.

As for the push to stamina, it's always going to be a large but immaterial debate. I'm of the mind that your best bet is to Stam Stack after...

The fights we're in right now aren't reflective of what we're going to see at 85. Right now, it almost seems like some fights are much harder to live through if you've gotten accustomed to having your failsafes of Ardent Defender and the 50% Divine Protection (now 20%, or 40% Magic only with glyph). The 15% health AD gives right now is crap as the next shot you take will kill you anyways, and in alot of fights, it doesn't even look like it procs at all. Unfortunatley it's not a bug, it is proccing, it just really sucks.

That said, anticipating the new style of fight at 85 being more of a marathon than a heal-spamming, and 15% health actually meaning you stay alive longer than 1.0 seconds, there's 2 caps that will remain important to hit:

Hit/Expertise Cap - Making sure if you are using that GCD, your hit is going to connect. Mostly to make sure that when you build threat, it's consistent throughout the fight, and no accidental "oops I missed and now a dps is dead" moments in the fight 5 seconds of the pull.

Block Cap - Reachable right now at 80, very likely reachable at 85 in first tier of raid gear, or possibly in heroic blue gear. Basically using the block rate increase from mastery to make sure that any attack that isn't dodged, parried or misses you will end up being blocked, resulting in all physical attacks being reduced by 30%. A total of 102.4%, which looks like will be 5% Miss, 21% Dodge, 21% Parry, and 55.4% Block to prevent major losses due to diminishing returns, as an optimal mitigation mix.

After the Block and Hit Caps, Stamina appears to be the best stat against all others for threat, mitigation and just overall survival.

As for a lower tier of upgrading, remember that you don't necessarily need to aim for 102.4%, as that's really only raid bosses. For level 85 mobs, it's simply 100.0%, and each level above you is an additional 0.8%. You'll also be able to include the boost you get to avoidance (parry from strength, dodge from agility) from kings at any point, as you'll always have that at your disposal.

Until we actually hit 85 though, anything anyone says it's going to just be best guess. Expect Blizz to patch whatever they don't like, which may even include reaching Block Cap...

AD is an on-use ability now Zab, no longer a proc. Its a MFer to remember to use though. I'm usually too busy frantically mashing other CDs to remember that my "easy button" CD is actually a button now.

Mastery scales horrifically terribly from what I'm hearing at 85, so getting block capped may simply not be possible, even with the reforging.

What am I doing wrong with my pally.

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-s...

I am doing ok with threat, but my survivability doesn't seem to be where it should. I have not tanked any raids yet, only heroics and even with that I seem to drop occasionally and I don' think it is because of a fail healer but me. Am I being to hard on myself or is it really a fail healer?

First of all you're Horde.

2nd trinket must be from your Ret set. Get the Corroded Skeleton Key from the Frost vendor ASAP. I bound its on-use ability to my 'V' key for easy access.

IMO anything over ilvl 232 should be gemmed with epics and enchanted with 'BiS' chants.

There is too large a disparity between Dodge and Parry. They should be kept closer in line with each other. Looks like you are getting diminishing returns on Dodge. Zab can likely confirm that; or really this statement in its entirety. The disparity is likely coming from the Rotting Thumb trinket, which rules! I was sad when I out-geared it. And also from the inscription chant you have on our shoulders.

I always gem with avoidance stat + 15 STA. (purple and green gems I believe) Never just purely avoidance. Best of both worlds. Ditch the STR gems. They aren't doing you enough good to warrant.

Your meta-gem should be the +32 STA and 2% increased armor.

IMO the rep shoulder chant would serve you better for the time being.

The Frost belt is awesome. Verdigris Chain Belt I believe it is called.

Get the crafted Saronite Swordbreakers wrists. Enchant them with the +40 STA = WIN!

Make sure you are using your CDs with regularity. There are 2 min CDs in there for a reason.

Hold the phone!

Originally Posted by Nethaera (Source)
As the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm draws near, we continue to fine-tune various class abilities. Based on feedback and our own testing, we're in the process of assessing and amending tanking cooldowns -- at level 85 in particular. Some of these abilities, like druid Savage Defense and death knight self healing, are particularly difficult to model, so further testing will be necessary before there is sufficient information to base adjustments on.

In the case of paladins and warriors, we have recognized that it is possible for block chance to get too high too quickly and cause a situation where stacked mastery and the warrior Shield Block ability behave strangely. Since that's a scenario we want to avoid, we're making some changes regarding how block chance is handled for each of these classes:

Paladins - Holy Shield will be changed to increase block value by 10% (40% total) instead of increasing block chance by 15%. Since this will cause Mastery to become more valuable, the amount of block granted by Mastery will be reduced to 2.25% block chance per point of Mastery, down from 3%.

Warriors - At level 85, the value of Shield Block decreases as block value generated by Mastery increases. To remedy this, we will convert overflow of block + avoidance that exceeds 100% into critical block chance instead. Along with that change, Shield Block will be reduced to +25% block chance (down from +100%), but this will still yield a net buff for most warriors. Also in response to this change, the amount of block and critical block provided by Mastery will be equalized. Finally, Mastery will now grant 1.5% block chance per point.

Update - Here are some additional details based on the questions and feedback we're seeing:

* The new warrior Mastery is 1.5% block and 1.5% critical block per point of mastery.
* Shield Block will spill over into critical block if any portion of the 25% would have been wasted because your block + dodge + parry is so high already. If you are somehow always over 100% (which will be pretty hard now), you only get the critical block when Shield Block is up. The intent is to make sure Shield Block isn't wasted, not to make sure you have mastery coming out your ears (or any other orifice in the facial region).
* Shield Block is not intended to be a magic damage cooldown (neither is Blood Shield, which also is physical damage only). We don’t want to duplicate the exact same ability on every tank when we can avoid it. Bosses generally don’t spam out a lot of magic damage on short cooldowns. On the other hand, Shield Block has a much higher up-time than Barkskin. We still believe the Cataclysm raiding environment is going to be a lot less centered around tanks dying to spike damage than players currently experience at level 80. Mitigating a lot of damage to save healer mana can be very valuable in Cataclysm.
* Savage Defense is massively overpowered on beta and has been dealt with accordingly. Many of the reports of beta raid bosses two-shotting tanks were because that was how much damage the bosses needed to do in order to challenge Feral tanks. With less damage absorbed, the boss damage can be adjusted downwards. We've reduced the multiplier for attack power on the absorption effect (from 65% to 35%, still modified by mastery) and it no longer procs from periodic critical hits.
* Paladin tanks are not intended to go cap block as fast as they can. It’s fine if you want to do that, but we don’t treat it as “the new defense cap” and we don’t balance paladins assuming they have a 100% block chance. That is something the community identified as being not only possible, but likely, and one of the reasons we changed the way block works for paladins.
* These changes are all slated for patch 4.0.3a when the shattering of Azeroth takes place, and are not currently implemented on live realms. Some of them may be active in the beta test – the Savage Defense change for example was applied via a hotfix to the beta realms recently.

Sometimes I just have to stand back in awe of Blizzard's complete inability to do simple, easily imagined tests themselves. Given that it was so easy for Paladins to block-cap, I (and many people who are probably far more rational than me) just assumed this was intended. For the game designers to say "Wait you can what right out of the gate?" at this point reeks of some serious short sightedness.

As to the other stuff, somewhere in that thread, a player made a particularly interesting insight - Vengeance is this expansion's "new mechanic that Blizzard will break their backs pretending is fine despite all the balance issues it causes". The threat/damage of a raid-buffed tank's Shield Slam / Shield of the Righteous is hilariously huge, even at 85, due to Vengeance. Savage Defense was such a problem (as cited above) because of Vengeance. I have a feeling we're going to see many AP-scaled abilities for tanks get their AP scaling gutted down to the point where Vengeance is no longer considered a "bonus" but rather the thing that brings tanks up to "reasonable".

Bloo Driver wrote:

Sometimes I just have to stand back in awe of Blizzard's complete inability to do simple, easily imagined tests themselves. Given that it was so easy for Paladins to block-cap, I (and many people who are probably far more rational than me) just assumed this was intended. For the game designers to say "Wait you can what right out of the gate?" at this point reeks of some serious short sightedness.

As to the other stuff, somewhere in that thread, a player made a particularly interesting insight - Vengeance is this expansion's "new mechanic that Blizzard will break their backs pretending is fine despite all the balance issues it causes". The threat/damage of a raid-buffed tank's Shield Slam / Shield of the Righteous is hilariously huge, even at 85, due to Vengeance. Savage Defense was such a problem (as cited above) because of Vengeance. I have a feeling we're going to see many AP-scaled abilities for tanks get their AP scaling gutted down to the point where Vengeance is no longer considered a "bonus" but rather the thing that brings tanks up to "reasonable".

This is really unfair to Blizzard, IMO. They have a sound philosophy when it comes to design. The problem is that players do strange(to a designer) things, which in all honesty are intended to break the system with the rules set forth. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's really, really hard from a design perspective, to approach it from the direction of "What's the most crazy, insane thing our players could possibly do?". And honestly, reforging every stat on your armor into mastery straight out of the gate, when the sound design philosophy is 'make all stats of roughly equal value from a math standpoint' is pretty far out in left field. The reasoning behind it to us as players, Paladins especially who have leaned on block for two full expansions now, makes perfect sense in reality. But that's not what design was about.

And honestly, this isn't even the first time it's happened to Blizzard. Things like the old Combat Hemo builds, Frost/Fire Mages, all of these things broke, for lack of a better term, the intended design. Did they work? Hell yes! But what we've seen, and is cemented by this change, is that Blizzard is trying to homogenize how classes work, as we're seeing with changes to stats and talent trees.

ELewis17 wrote:

First of all you're Horde.

2nd trinket must be from your Ret set. Get the Corroded Skeleton Key from the Frost vendor ASAP. I bound its on-use ability to my 'V' key for easy access.

IMO anything over ilvl 232 should be gemmed with epics and enchanted with 'BiS' chants.

There is too large a disparity between Dodge and Parry. They should be kept closer in line with each other. Looks like you are getting diminishing returns on Dodge. Zab can likely confirm that; or really this statement in its entirety. The disparity is likely coming from the Rotting Thumb trinket, which rules! I was sad when I out-geared it. And also from the inscription chant you have on our shoulders.

I always gem with avoidance stat + 15 STA. (purple and green gems I believe) Never just purely avoidance. Best of both worlds. Ditch the STR gems. They aren't doing you enough good to warrant.

Your meta-gem should be the +32 STA and 2% increased armor.

IMO the rep shoulder chant would serve you better for the time being.

The Frost belt is awesome. Verdigris Chain Belt I believe it is called.

Get the crafted Saronite Swordbreakers wrists. Enchant them with the +40 STA = WIN!

Make sure you are using your CDs with regularity. There are 2 min CDs in there for a reason.

Ok to your first point I am horde because the guild I joined up in Alaska is all horde, I used to be Alliance and I moved/faction changed my 80s. I like the avoidance stat + STAM gem change that sounds good. I am Inscription so the shoulder enchant should be better than the rep or at least that I how I always thought it since that is how it is for LW with the bracer chants. But I will look into that. I can change around the meta. I have my shopping list that includes the frost trinket and belt plus the other 2 tier items (chest and legs). Those bracers aren't hard to make so that seems easy to change around.

Now with the dodge and parry being more in sync I guess I need to do some reforging to get that to work a little better. But I will work on maybe working in the regemming with this as well.

Thanks for the tips and I will work on that along with doing some more research on rotations and such. I don't mean to say I am a bad tank, but I feel that I do need to do a little more to prepare myself to tank. I have always been DPS, first a Hunter than a Warlock. So this is so much of a change but I think for the better, because when playing DPS I was never one of those that would be a button looker I was always situational aware and I think that helped me be a good tank. I have been complimented many times on my tanking by a lot of people and only once was I cussed out and I dropped group.

The inscription shoulders will be better once you are better geared, but for now, IMO, you need the STA. The rep chant is +265 STA and 0.27% chance to dodge. I'm too lazy to do the math, but if you regem with the purples and greens and add the rep chant you should see a pretty significant boost in your HP.

As for rotation, Avenger's Shield on the pull, as always, then:
CS > WoG/SotR (for Holy Shield) > CS > Judge > CS > HW > CS > WoG/SotR
For multiple mobs replace CS with HotR, and mix in Consecrate, as needed.

How I decide if I'm going to use WoG or SotR depends entirely on the fight. Though nearly every time Sacred Duty procs (off Judge) I'm SotRing (love those crits). You shouldn't need to WoG too much in heroics though.

ELewis17 wrote:

AD is an on-use ability now Zab, no longer a proc. Its a MFer to remember to use though. I'm usually too busy frantically mashing other CDs to remember that my "easy button" CD is actually a button now.

You misread what i wrote

Zablocki19 wrote:

Right now, it almost seems like some fights are much harder to live through if you've gotten accustomed to having your failsafes of Ardent Defender and the 50% Divine Protection (now 20%, or 40% Magic only with glyph). The 15% health AD gives right now is crap as the next shot you take will kill you anyways, and in alot of fights, it doesn't even look like it procs at all. Unfortunatley it's not a bug, it is proccing, it just really sucks.

Yes, AD is an on use, the proc I refer to is getting the crappy 15% heal instead of dying. On raid bosses right now, you don't notice the 15% heal because you typically die within the next 1.0 seconds after it does heal you (aka 'procs'). I refer to it as a proc, because frankly, if you don't take that hit to kill you when you use it, it does close to nothing having it up.

As for what Nethaera posted about changes for Pally and Warrior Block, that's complete BS. I've had to rewrite this following part 4 times now because this idea that changing Holy Shield "Makes Mastery more valuable!" is one of the dumber things I've seen posted. 10% additional block value is nice, sure. But removing the ability to take normal hits off the table essentially makes it useless. Yes, useless. The fact will remain that you're still taking full shots a decent amount of time. Something in their testing is definitely off if they are just going by 'what can be done'. The idea that you could block cap I considered keeping Pallies on par with druids and DKs (warriors I think still needed a bit more). But what Nethaera's written is just assanine. If you want to calculate the numbers, it's effectively more worthwhile with this change to ignore Mastery completely and just accept the DR for parry and dodge, giving more to agility and strength even over getting Mastery, and stam stacking a great deal more. Even if you stack Mastery, you're most likely going to end up taking normal full shots 20% of the time even into raid gear. To me, that's not worth the 40% chance to block 40% of damage. I'd much rather give myself a 60% chance to avoid all damage, 20% chance to block 40% damage, and take full hits 40% of the time, but have a high health pool to take 3 - 4 shots in a row without a heal if needed.

I'm desperately holding back from tossing a load of numbers on the page to show what kind of damage intake this would cause, and the pros and cons of survival based on currently 85 beta tests versus blizzard's new model, but I'll hold back.

It's a stupid change, hopefully one they'll fix in the next month. The End.

Zablocki19 wrote:

You misread what i wrote
...
Yes, AD is an on use, the proc I refer to is getting the crappy 15% heal instead of dying.

Indeed I did.

At first glance that wall of blue text broke my heart. However, when taking into consideration all the recent talk of trying to eliminate RNG deaths it may work out pretty nice. Though I don't care for seeing my class nerfed, natch. If Blizz makes fights around tanks not needing to be block-capped, and we get block capped, seems to me we'll be nearly un-killable. If the spiky damage from the gap in normal hits could've killed us before, and we eliminate that spiky (unblocked) damage, with a few HoTs we should be golden :). Then they'll have to change everything up again to keep some semblance of difficulty.

I think I'd rather see some completely artificial tier-based diminishing return system implemented. Sure, it is a lot of stupid math and research, but wouldn't that fix everything?

AnimeJ wrote:

This is really unfair to Blizzard, IMO. They have a sound philosophy when it comes to design. The problem is that players do strange(to a designer) things, which in all honesty are intended to break the system with the rules set forth. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's really, really hard from a design perspective, to approach it from the direction of "What's the most crazy, insane thing our players could possibly do?". And honestly, reforging every stat on your armor into mastery straight out of the gate, when the sound design philosophy is 'make all stats of roughly equal value from a math standpoint' is pretty far out in left field. The reasoning behind it to us as players, Paladins especially who have leaned on block for two full expansions now, makes perfect sense in reality. But that's not what design was about.

Actually, "Find what stat is best and then stack it to the roof" is not weird or crazy at all. It's the most common problem in the game, and one Blizzard constantly mentions they're keeping an eye on. If Blizzard's design was "Paladins can block cap eventually, but not easily or quickly", then it's an exceptionally simple thing to look at - how easily or quickly can it be done, given the rules we've set forth? That's like saying "I'm going to make a game where people have to accumulate bricks and build a wall," and then getting surprised when it turns out that it only takes three bricks and five seconds to make the wall, after you have designed the size of bricks and the specifications the wall should meet.

I agree with you that when you have an army of millions trying to break the game, things will slip by. But this wasn't anything out of left field or weird. I also agree with you that things like this do happen all the time, which would lead me to believe that Blizzard would at least be a little better at catching the simple, straightforward stuff.

But that's not to say I disagree with it...

Zablocki19 wrote:

As for what Nethaera posted about changes for Pally and Warrior Block, that's complete BS. I've had to rewrite this following part 4 times now because this idea that changing Holy Shield "Makes Mastery more valuable!" is one of the dumber things I've seen posted. 10% additional block value is nice, sure. But removing the ability to take normal hits off the table essentially makes it useless. Yes, useless. The fact will remain that you're still taking full shots a decent amount of time. Something in their testing is definitely off if they are just going by 'what can be done'. The idea that you could block cap I considered keeping Pallies on par with druids and DKs (warriors I think still needed a bit more). But what Nethaera's written is just assanine. If you want to calculate the numbers, it's effectively more worthwhile with this change to ignore Mastery completely and just accept the DR for parry and dodge, giving more to agility and strength even over getting Mastery, and stam stacking a great deal more. Even if you stack Mastery, you're most likely going to end up taking normal full shots 20% of the time even into raid gear. To me, that's not worth the 40% chance to block 40% of damage. I'd much rather give myself a 60% chance to avoid all damage, 20% chance to block 40% damage, and take full hits 40% of the time, but have a high health pool to take 3 - 4 shots in a row without a heal if needed.

I don't know about useless. Getting block capped won't be impossible down the line, and really it's going to be okay when you take full hits about 25% of the time - other tanks are having to deal with it as well. This is going to keep Blizzard in line with their philosophy that Raid Bosses aren't going to be able to just potentially two-shot a tank because they have to overcome ridiculous amounts of avoidance and mitigation. If Protection Paladins and Feral Druids (through SD) are soaking a weirdly huge amount of damage more consistently than the other tanks, then Raid Boss damage has to be inflated. If Raid Boss damage has to be inflated, we're back at WotLK and most of TBC where "I HIT YOU FOR 40,000 OLOLOLOLOL" is the standard and spam healing is the standard.

If bosses are going to hit at the rate Blizzard wants, in order to discourage spam healing and rollercoaster tank health, these are the things they're going to have to work out. Personally, I wish they would have sat down and spent five minutes on a piece of scrap paper answering the question "okay so how fast and how easily will relevant stats such as block and AP scale" so this would have been fixed in Beta, but eh.

I'm desperately holding back from tossing a load of numbers on the page to show what kind of damage intake this would cause, and the pros and cons of survival based on currently 85 beta tests versus blizzard's new model, but I'll hold back.

Don't hold back for our sakes. It's the Friday before Halloween. I'm sure plenty of people could stand for something to read during the inevitable slow work day.

Typically, I would argue on the side of Blizzard, but it's been half a decade, countless class and stat refreshes, and three "game changing" updates to the code, and they are still stumped by the exact same problem -- balancing stats. They just can't figure out how to do it. Now, I don't really know how to balance them either, but my name isn't Greg Street and I don't make the big bucks.

If bosses are going to hit at the rate Blizzard wants, in order to discourage spam healing and rollercoaster tank health, these are the things they're going to have to work out. Personally, I wish they would have sat down and spent five minutes on a piece of scrap paper answering the question "okay so how fast and how easily will relevant stats such as block and AP scale" so this would have been fixed in Beta, but eh.

Unless Beta is their Alpha, which I'm pretty convinced it is. It should take all of one excel database program to realize that reforging stat A into stat B will cause questionable lopsidedness. And with five years of experience watching 12 million people do it, you'd think they would've prepared.

IMAGE(http://dungeonrun.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/wow_motivation_poster_prepared.jpg)

As much as I like Blizzard and WoW, the one thing you can never accuse them of is being proactive.

You guys are missing the point. Blizzard's goal is to make all stats equally valuable. That's what they design to. Players have come in with this idea of 'This stat is best!' and break that system. That's why stats will never be perfectly balanced, and it's also why they don't *have* to be perfectly balanced. Look at DPS classes; there will never be a boss, even if you make all things equal, where they'll all have the same DPS on the boss. But you bring a variety even so, because that's how it is. Treat stats like classes and things like this will stop being such a big issue.

With that said, are there points on the curve where min/maxing is needed? Yes, and it's generally when you're Paragon or some other top .01% guild pushing content without the gear you'd normally expect. Those folks very rarely have the expected level of gear to beat a certain encounter, but by min-maxing in the extreme combined with exceptionally skilled play, they do.

AnimeJ wrote:

You guys are missing the point. Blizzard's goal is to make all stats equally valuable. That's what they design to. Players have come in with this idea of 'This stat is best!' and break that system. That's why stats will never be perfectly balanced, and it's also why they don't *have* to be perfectly balanced. Look at DPS classes; there will never be a boss, even if you make all things equal, where they'll all have the same DPS on the boss. But you bring a variety even so, because that's how it is. Treat stats like classes and things like this will stop being such a big issue.

If that's your point I don't know why you responded to me, then, since it really has no bearing on my complaint. I never really asserted everything should or would be perfectly balanced. I just pointed out that if Blizzard's goal is "We don't want Paladins easily block capping", they made a pretty basic error, since apparently the question they didn't answer to themselves is "how easy is it to block cap once we release these mechanics?"

AnimeJ wrote:

You guys are missing the point. Blizzard's goal is to make all stats equally valuable. That's what they design to. Players have come in with this idea of 'This stat is best!' and break that system. That's why stats will never be perfectly balanced, and it's also why they don't *have* to be perfectly balanced.

Sorry, no. Just no. If Blizzard designs the game so the red cars go faster, then it doesn't matter if the intent is that all colors of cars go the same speed. The players aren't making red the fastest color, Blizzard did. So, yes, the stats have to be balanced, and only Blizzard can make that so. And damn, just damn, having done software testing, I can tell you that's one of the first things I would have done, crammed each stat to the max individually, and analyzed the results. That Blizzard didn't is pretty embarrassing. Its really basic.

Also, I'd Looooooove to hear you explain those two sentences I emphasized in the quote.