Shield of Righteousness possibly going away

[Koletha]

Just read the following from Ghostcrawler on MMO Champion

We have temporarily disabled Shield of Righteousness.

We're working on the basic Prot rotations right now, and with Shield of Righteousness in addition to Crusader Strike, Hammer of the Righteous, Consecrate, Avenger's Shield and Holy Wrath, there was just a lot going on. Shield seemed like the least interesting of those abilities -- really Shield and Hammer just seem to be single-target and multitarget versions of the same ability, especially without block scaling. Shield also felt like a duplicate of Shield Slam, which doesn't help in trying to differentiate the two Prot trees. Frankly, we'd rather make Avenger's Shield and Hammer of the Righteous cooler than they are today.

It's too early to call this a permanent change. We still have a lot to consider, such as the damage of Hammer vs. Shield, how different we want the AE vs. single-target Prot attacks to be, and how much Holy Power considerations occupy a Prot paladin.

If we keep Shield of Righteousness, we need to figure out its role relative to Hammer. We don't want it to be just swap one button for another for AE fights, and we don't want you to have to use both on cooldown since we are giving Prot paladins more things to manage in Cataclysm.

What's your thoughts on this? I can see where they're coming from in the comparisons between ShoR and HotR, at least at my own paladins' gear levels their ShoR hits aren't too far ahead ever since the block scaling change was implemented.

However, the visual image of the paladin striding forth and smiting the unjust to the ground with his mighty shield empowered by the Light definately has some strong hooks for me :-p Plus it's a more realistic style of combat with a shield, employing it both defensively and offensively (throwing the shield like a frisbee doesn't count...), rather than just using it as something to hide behind like it was pre-WotLK.

I can understand their fears about differentiating between prot palas and prot warriors, but surely the removal of ShoR isn't going to alleviate most of those concerns?

Thoughts/opinions?

[Rammurg]

An idea someone suggested on the beta forums to fill the gap in the rotation was that blocked attacks while Holy Shield is active have a chance to reset the cooldown of Avenger's Shield. Not too bad in my opinion, with some numbers tuning - and GC said it also (in that quote) that AS could get a more significant role.

At the very least, an often used shield-based active attack is something every shield wearing tank should have imo (I count Holy Shield as a passive ability in this regard).

[Petrus]

Part of the problem I don't think they're mentioning is ShoR's scaling. On live, ShoR's damage kind of caps out right now and it gets rather boring. It's not a high-priority attack (if we prioritize a rotation on a single mob while soloing, for example) because it only does about 3-3.5k damage when all capped out. On Beta, it's the base value (531) plus your attack power, so I regularly get 5-6k ShoR hits and 10k+ crits (like I did early in Wrath until they capped the scaling). If our AP scaling gets way out of hand, and unless they find another way to scale ShoR's damage, its damage will be out of control by the time we reach raid content at 85 and by the end tier I don't think 15-20k crits in a raid environment would be out of the question, which might be higher than blizzard wants.

I really do/did like the ability, though, as it was very fun but the fact that it doesn't make much noise was always bothersome.

[Danth]

With Crusader Strike, Shield becomes redundant since both are otherwise generic single-target attacks. Between the two I like shield better, but I'd rather give up either of them than keep both. I liked Burning Crusade's combat as a Paladin, but the Lich King expansion was far too 'spammy' in terms of my tastes in combat mechanics (partly explaining why I'm on hiatus from Warcraft), so keeping feature creep under control strikes me as prudent design.

Danth

[PsiVen]

I much prefer ShoR in terms of flavor to CS. I don't think at this point that we have too many abilities, unless they really want us using Exorcism as Prot. This is one of more signature moves since LK, so I hope it doesn't end up leaving for good.

[steadypal]

on beta what was the dmg difference between CS and shield slam?


and if they expect exo or holy wrath to replace shield slam are they going to have a 6 sec CD?

or are we basically hotr, and cs spam until exo/hw are off CD.. man i hope they extend the holy shield duration to like 30 seconds.

[Noradin]

I like ShoR, it fits prot paladins and I really despise the mindset that whenever a paladin and a warrior abilitiy seem similar the paladin ability has to be changed. Its never the other way around and thus paladin abilities always are the convoluted ones (like our first taunt - it needed a macro to be of use - or SA which needs us to have aggro, take damage then get healed to use abilities to generate aggro, instead of just starting to hit something) or those which habe a chance for a chance to increase a chance of something (Redoubt).
Maybe they could make it something like revenge and of the GCD. We need another (nonstatic) way to get additional HP anyway (and a longer duration on HS).

[Huon]

I doubt they will make Holy Wrath 6 sec.

Currently it is 15 second cooldown, and there is a talent that makes Crusader strikes have 20% chance to reset the cooldown of Holy Wrath.

Frankly I don't much care if they remove shield of Righteousness, as long as they compensate some other way. I REALLY enjoyed the difference in tanking single target and AoE a few builds ago, I hope they come back to it somehow.

[Dawnseeker]

A simple solution might be to bring it back as a fairly low lvl prot talent that causes CS to also/instead hit with your shield when you have one equipped.

[Phonic]

I messed around on beta a bit this morning. Currently, SoR being taken out is the right move IMO. Even with it gone, we're still GCD locked and all out Holy Power goes to keeping 15 second Holy Shield up. I hope the either increase the duration or we will have a fairly large ramp up time as well as some downtime if we even need to use WOG heal or Inqusition.

In terms of animations, I agree it'd be nice to have an attack that uses our shields. I will say tho, the CS animation is really cool. Jumping an spinning while tanking is just neat to watch!!

[Fridmarr]

I much prefer ShoR in terms of flavor to CS. I don't think at this point that we have too many abilities, unless they really want us using Exorcism as Prot. This is one of more signature moves since LK, so I hope it doesn't end up leaving for good.

That's true, but I think GC makes a decent point with it being a copy of Shield Slam. Perhaps this ability should have been left to warriors only all along from a flavor perspective? Although I think if they went back to day one, us being the slightly more shield oriented tank, may have been a better fit for it.

I'm one though that doesn't care much what the abilities are and how they behave (from a lore mechanic) as long as they are ultimately effective at doing the job. Maybe we'll end up with something interesting out of this, instead of our old GCD locked rotation.

[Lumennon]

In terms of animations, I agree it'd be nice to have an attack that uses our shields. I will say tho, the CS animation is really cool. Jumping an spinning while tanking is just neat to watch!!

I'd like to spin around with my sword AND cave someone's face in with my shield, tyvm. I'm a tank, for all that is holy, I want to break faces with my shield, keep CS out of it if we can't have both!

Need flavor stuff. Angry panda.

[Aedh]

Or give us ShoR baseline for specing prot instead of giving us CS. I lie hitting things with my shield.

[tullock]

If i lose my shield slam, i think i will be done with my paladin, and as fun as my warrior alt is, its not and will never be my main, so i will probably just write off warcraft completely. But im just one person, so i dont expect my opinion to change blizzards decision.

[halabar]

If i lose my shield slam, i think i will be done with my paladin, and as fun as my warrior alt is, its not and will never be my main, so i will probably just write off warcraft completely. But im just one person, so i dont expect my opinion to change blizzards decision.

If the change to one spell is enough to push you over the edge on this, then you were probably past that point already, especially given the other massive changes that are coming. While I'm not tossing in the towel on WoW, I'm looking at these major overhauls and I've already decided I'll be leveling my hunter first, and my pally will be sitting in Dal cutting gems.

But back to the point of the thread...

I don't know how the math works out, but it is annoying that something with a nice prot flavor is getting removed.