Beta post regarding reckoning

[Chunes]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa ... 8&sid=2000

Basically my thoughts on reckoning at present.

what do you guys think?

*Please see the first response to this post for a TL;DR summary and keep your responses civil please <3*

In light of Prot's relatively comfortable position at present (relative to holy and especially ret), it is easy to overlook the non-gamebreaking shortcomings of one talent in our tree. Nevertheless, the previously "marginal at best" talent of Reckoning has graduated into full blown obsolescence for several reasons.

1) Reckoning and it's benefits in conjunction with our Seals/Judgements

With the crossfactional baselining of Seal of Vengance, reckoning provides little "yellow damage" buff when said seal is active. Previously it was advantageous as a horde paladin to have at least a couple points in reckoning because the extra swings were a guaranteed (albeit minor) white damage boost, but more importantly a decent threatboost via the doubled damage per reckoning uptime of SoR swing damages. Now that we do not ever use SoR, this prior benefit of reckoning is lost when our primary tanking seal is active.

Another previous advantage to reckoning in a solo setting was it's effect on SoL/SoW + JoL/JoW. With no internal cooldown previously (please correct me if i am mistaken on this, there certainly did not feel like there was any cooldown when leveling my paladin once upon a time), reckoning was able to proc many and frequent health or mana returns when it was up. At present, internal cooldowns on said spells (again, please correct me if i am mistaken on this) limit the amount of Seal/judge mana/health return procs, thus making it roughly the same as if reckoning was not even present.

2) Reckoning uptime vs. points invested (Please visit the link below to the maintankadin forum post detailing the methodology and research behind this point)
http://www.failsafedesign.com/maintanka ... e6c29c1e2b

As explained by the post linked above, 5/5 points in reckoning is wholly unnecessary when statistically tested. While the difference in uptime between 1/5 and 2/5 or 2/5 and 3/5 is pretty large, the gap tightens after any points invested after 3/5 to the point that it is really not worth investing those last two points because the uptime gained is so small in comparison.

At a fundamental level, this suggests something is wonky from a design point of view with the talent. Why spend 5/5 in a talent when i can spend 3/5 and get roughly the same benefit?

Prior to 3.0 I was one of the few paladins that would rarely not take 3/5 reckoning simply because it eased my solo play quite a bit. The miniscule damage increase was not really the selling point for me, rather the benefit of being able to proc seals more when AoE grinding. Now with BoSanct in our arsenal, along with more damage from AP gain via strength, HotR, instacast avengers shield, etc. etc. there is little need for reckoning as the functions it performed previously are all encapsulated in the new face of our abilities.

3) Reckoning's diminishing value as avoidance increases

The shear nature of the ability is one that relies on being damaged to activate. This conflicts with our core philosophy as tanks because we are going to be doing as much as we can to avoid taking damage all together. The better the gear we acquire, the less effective our points spent in reckoning become. Even assuming one was to invest 5/5 in reckoning at present, that would still be the case. Talents that scale inversely to our gear are never very appetizing and from my point of view indicate the need for revision.

4) The controversial "parrygib" phenomenon

I want to address this simply because someone responding might. Parrygibs were largely not a concern to any paladin past KZ although there is plenty of misinformation circulating to the contrary. the tl;dr of it though is that with crushes out of the picture for raid bosses and the devs' disclosure that they are shifting away from the boss design philosophy that leads to Brutallus and his "roflstomps", the parrygib is more or less a thing of the past (although it was more of a warrior concern than a paladin concern even then).

_____________________________________

Solutions? Proposals?

I have none. At a core level i would like to see changes implemented to reckoning that address the first three concerns above (since concern 4 is more or less a non-issue). I have no ideas on how to make the talent more synergistic with our seal/judge system across the board. There are many ways it could be changed that benefit one seal or another, or rather, one family of seals vs. another. Changes to reckoning that benefit guaranteed on hit damage seals (SoR and SoB/M) might not benefit our Dot on Hit seal, or our Chance Proc on Hit seals (light and wisdom).

To alleviate the uptime vs points invested as well as the diminishing value problem, a different method of triggering reckoning would likely have to be devised. Would an activate on demand + cooldown be appropriate (ala wings?) or would a proc on crit be better? I personally would lean towards the latter. Having a proc on crit (or even chance proc on crit) ability could be nice depending on what it buffed (i.e. if it only buffed white damage, i'd probably still not take it).


What i really am curious about is this:

Ghost, is reckoning on the devs' radar and can the prot community expect a change to this extremely lackluster talent in the near future?

[majiben]

I think Blizzard has much larger issues than 1 optional talent that is less than ideal. We really should be content to know we are strong enough that most of our concerns were already addressed.

[Kellann]

We really should be content...

We should never be content. This is one of the rare cases that we visibly have the ear of the designers, and we need to take advantage of that opportunity.

Granted this 'problem' is of lesser importance to others, but why the hell should we be afraid to ask for a fix for every problem. At this point it's a pretty darn unique talent, with marginally less allure than one which says "for 5 talent points, you have an infrequent chance to make your weapon light up blue for 3 seconds"...

[majiben]

We really should be content to know we are strong enough that most of our concerns were already addressed.

Please use entire sentences when quoting as to not purposely setup strawmen agruements.

The point is the Prot tree had it's bloat removed for the most part, We only need to go 5 points into ret now, our defensive stats provide offensive synergy and vice versa.

Complaining or changing about a relic from the past which may yet provide some benifit in the far future is a waste of our time and blizzard's. Look at other classes talent trees and you'll find them riddled with undesirable talents. Just look at the huge balancing issues they are having right now and think about how silly it is to go on a crusade to fix reckoning is right now.

[Lore]

There's nothing wrong with wanting a bad/suboptimal talent to get some love.

[majiben]

There's nothing wrong with wanting a bad/suboptimal talent to get some love.

I suppose not if you think in an unlimited time/resource sort of way. Looking at it from a limited time/resource point of view and you can see where i'm coming form.

He's what I feel in sumary:
It's bit below okay as far as talents go.
It's optional.
There are better alternatives.
It would take a lot of effort to actually fix.
Putting it in reach of ret would aggravate brust issues.
Still scales inversely with gear.
Wouldn't be an issue if it suddenly disappeared.

[Lore]

I don't see any reason listed there that indicates that Chunes cannot or should not voice his concerns for the talent.

Blizzard does not have limited time or resources. WotLK release is not the last time they will ever modify the game.

[Chunes]

I don't see any reason listed there that indicates that Chunes cannot or should not voice his concerns for the talent.

Blizzard does not have limited time or resources. WotLK release is not the last time they will ever modify the game.

Yep thats basically the position i took. If Majiben would be kind enough to read the last line of my post.

"in the near future" is in no way demanding that reckoning get fixed tomorrow. I was actually curious if it was even on their radar right now.

[Garath.Gorefiend]

I don't see any reason listed there that indicates that Chunes cannot or should not voice his concerns for the talent.

Blizzard does not have limited time or resources. WotLK release is not the last time they will ever modify the game.

Have to agree.

Even though they have lowered the bloat in our trees, we still have 1.5 talents that distinctly get worse as our gear gets better...

Reckoning is one that given current design, I just cant see wasting points in.

If we didn't get a 30% BV increase with redoubt, I highly doubt any prot paladin would choose it either, as the 10% chance for 30% more chance to block for 10 seconds also gets more useless as our gear gets better.

[Bobness]

Just make it double proc seals..

[majiben]

Just make it double proc seals..

That has little use unless they wish to push us into SoB. Provides negiable benifit to SoV.

I was hoping this thread could die down since there is little left to discuss not already covered (imo).

[Bobness]

Yes..your right i should have paused to think instead of being Blasé

not much use for SOV

[Dantriges]

An interesting talent alternative at this tier would be a good idea. I am not really fond of some talents I had to spec into just to get farther down the tree.

[caboom]

Not a bad idea, it's always bad to see these kind of talents(wich were good before) remain unchanged to something more apealing, and atm reckoning looks like a bad coffee stain on our talent tree.

[Magnusharkov]

In my opinion this talent if adjusted the right way could solve our low dps issues. For now I don't know if we are genuinely in that bad a position for single target DPS until I've seen multiple WWS parses on the subject. However I do think there's a design issue with having a ridiculously high threat modifier on holy damage and a low one on white damage. By my basic maths it seems like we will only achieve damage parity to warriors with our current threat modifiers if white damage makes up 50% of our damage output rather than the 20-25% it currently does. Though obviously if our RF threat modifier was lowered then this issue might become easier to solve.

Anyway, short version: In my opinion reckoning should be a talent that drastically increases our white damage, it should have a much higher uptime than it does now and shouldn't be reliant on being hit to proc. Something like

'Gives a 3/6/9/12/15% chance for your melee swings to proc reckoning. Under reckoning the next 4 melee swings within 8 seconds will generate an extra attack. These additional attacks cannot be parried, do not trigger seals and cannot proc reckoning.'