Shield of Righteousness possibly going away

[Chicken]

Or, don't talent holy shield. Then keep up inquisition and use any extra HP on ShoR with +30% damage!

Will be a bit ridiculous if the only way to do high damage while not tanking is to not talent holy shield...

I fail to see how speccing for HS will effect your ability to do high damage while not tanking. It's not like speccing HS will suddenly cause ShoR to eat up more HP per attack ...

It wouldn't no, but assuming they keep Holy Shield mutually exclusive with Inquisition, speccing Holy Shield would prevent you from using Inquisition and ShoR at the same time.

[Arianne]

Holy shield and Inquisition are currently exclusive. Which means, theoretically, depending on implementation, that if you talent holy shield, you can never use inquisition (because that means that ShoR would automatically put up HS and cancel your Inquisition) and with ShoR being a high damage attack, you'll always want to use ShoR.

[Sabindeus]

I am willing to bet they'll drop that limitation

[KysenMurrin]

Inquisition is a threat balancing nightmare. They have to do something to lock us out from using it while actively tanking difficult mobs. The current exclusivity doesn't quite work with the new ShoR, but they can't just make it freely usable.

[theckhd]

So how about that 969? Still seem boring to you?

[Shoju]

I never had a problem with 969 personally. I know that blizzard did, but IMO 969 was the kind of thing that tanks should have been doing all along. granted, it would have been nice to have a difference between AoE and single target, but really 969 was something that you could learn, master, and then pay more attention to the fight. You could call things, you could move, you weren't glued to watching something. Tanks have to balance threat with cooldowns, and movement, more than any other role IMO. It was nice to be more raid aware, and not be worried about what came off cooldown, or what procc'd, because I knew what was ready, and when it was ready.

[dmok]

Inquisition is a threat balancing nightmare. They have to do something to lock us out from using it while actively tanking difficult mobs. The current exclusivity doesn't quite work with the new ShoR, but they can't just make it freely usable.

I feel that if they get the damage component of ShoR up high enough with 3 stacks of HP, the balancing nightmare might start to dwindle at least a little bit. Since you would be spending your HP on Inquisition OR ShoR but not both, it might be something like a 15% block chance drop for a 5% threat boost or something.

Remember, RF is being changed to increase the threat from all our abilities so the threat boost from inquisition won't be quite as large as it would be today (effecting only our seal and judgement on single-target since crusader strike is physical if I remember right) - still noticable I'm sure though

[theckhd]

I never had a problem with 969 personally. I know that blizzard did, but IMO 969 was the kind of thing that tanks should have been doing all along. granted, it would have been nice to have a difference between AoE and single target, but really 969 was something that you could learn, master, and then pay more attention to the fight. You could call things, you could move, you weren't glued to watching something. Tanks have to balance threat with cooldowns, and movement, more than any other role IMO. It was nice to be more raid aware, and not be worried about what came off cooldown, or what procc'd, because I knew what was ready, and when it was ready.

Who are you and how are you reading my mind?

That said, it would only take a few tweaks to the current implementation to get us back to something that vaguely resembles 969. The Consecration change and removal of SoCleave fixes the AoE threat problem all by itself, so you could imagine getting Hammer back and fitting CS in place of the absent Consecration and Holy Shield casts.

Either way though, I don't expect it to go live looking anything like what people are speculating right now. We'll either get a filler spell like Devastate and shift towards something closer to the warrior rotation (which I absolutely love, by the way) or get some cooldown tweaks that give us something resembling 969. I'm leaning toward the warrior model currently, just because the GC effect (and proc-based stuff in general) works better in a simple priority queue system.

[KysenMurrin]

I tried mapping out a couple minutes of rotation with some pretty bad assumptions and came out with something resembling the live Ret "rotation". Dear god no. At least I know everything I came out with is just crap.

My worst assumption was that it'd be better to cast even the lowest priority spell than wait 0.5 seconds for a cooldown, which is probably very wrong. The alternative was more frequent downtime as you waited for Crusader Strike to come up instead of casting Holy Wrath, for example. In reality it's probably better to wait, because more frequent CS = more frequent ShoR and AS.

Once again, I see the need to stuff at least one higher-priority cast in between Crusader Strike and our two big hitters. The fact that both our biggest spells are dependant on our shortest-cooldown spell for frequency of casting kinda spoils things, IMO.

[Shoju]

I tried mapping out a couple minutes of rotation with some pretty bad assumptions and came out with something resembling the live Ret "rotation". Dear god no. At least I know everything I came out with is just crap.

My worst assumption was that it'd be better to cast even the lowest priority spell than wait 0.5 seconds for a cooldown, which is probably very wrong. The alternative was more frequent downtime as you waited for Crusader Strike to come up instead of casting Holy Wrath, for example. In reality it's probably better to wait, because more frequent CS = more frequent ShoR and AS.

Once again, I see the need to stuff at least one higher-priority cast in between Crusader Strike and our two big hitters. The fact that both our biggest spells are dependant on our shortest-cooldown spell for frequency of casting kinda spoils things, IMO.

Keep in mind that they did say that they were toying with sending CS to a 3 seconds cooldown for prot as well to try it out. At 4 seconds it is too clunky.

[KysenMurrin]

That would solve a lot of the downtime, but we'd be stuck casting CS every second ability quite rigidly, only breaking it when AS and 3-stack ShoR are up at the same time. Again, I think we need some way to discourage us from just casting CS on cooldown every time.

Perhaps they should put Grand Crusader's proc onto Judgement instead of Crusader Strike. That way we'd be delaying the occasional CS to cast Judgement on cooldown, rather than delaying almost every Judgement for CS.

[Shoju]

That would solve a lot of the downtime, but we'd be stuck casting CS every second ability quite rigidly, only breaking it when AS and 3-stack ShoR are up at the same time. Again, I think we need some way to discourage us from just casting CS on cooldown every time.

Perhaps they should put Grand Crusader's proc onto Judgement instead of Crusader Strike. That way we'd be delaying the occasional CS to cast Judgement on cooldown, rather than delaying almost every Judgement for CS.

The problem isn't Grand Crusader. I would still delay Judgement for CS because CS gives me holy power, and holy power gives me mitigation, <]--AND--[> my hardest hitting ability at the same time. With Crusader Strike being the only key to unlocking SotR you will NEVER EVER EVER not use it, wait to use it, or delay it in anyway shape or form.

[Arianne]

They want us to choose between Inquisition, Holy Shield, and WoG. Why? Because the choice between threat, defenses, and healing is pretty interesting. But once you've made the choice, you shouldn't have to keep making it every X seconds unless you want to change your choice.

Having ShoR refresh the choice you've made automatically is definitely the way to go. But the only way to have that choice remain is to still have a button for that choice and then have ShoR refresh whichever one you chose.

So, you have a HS button and you have an Inquisition button. Each one is on a 15s cooldown (random number, but chosen because usually 'tank swap' fights have around that long between tank swaps) and using it puts up the buff at its maximum strength.

I went through a whole set of scenarios talking about whether ShoR increased the duration or refreshed the buff at the strength of the number of HoPo you used with ShoR. What I concluded is that increasing the duration just leads to us juggling HS and Inquisition and feels like tedious buff maintenance (aside from the fact that we'd have to be balanced around having both up at the same time, which would be annoying to begin the fight).

So, the more compelling gameplay to me would be that ShoR refreshes the buff at the strength of however many HoPo you dumped into it and HS and Inquisition remained exclusive, then you could use the Inquisition button to cancel HS and the HS button to cancel Inquisition. It'd give an immediate 3 stack effect and then you'd be able to use any HoPo built up to either WoG or ShoR (depending on if you wanted healing or DPS). In addition, every 15s, you could use the HS key to put up a full HS, which would be really helpful if you missed on CS, or you had to go pick up an add somewhere else, or something weird happened (you died, etc). With a button that essentially gives us a full 3 stack of HoPo, we may not even need any more additional HoPo generation other than CS/HotR.

[KysenMurrin]

The problem isn't Grand Crusader. I would still delay Judgement for CS because CS gives me holy power, and holy power gives me mitigation, <]--AND--[> my hardest hitting ability at the same time. With Crusader Strike being the only key to unlocking SotR you will NEVER EVER EVER not use it, wait to use it, or delay it in anyway shape or form.

If you have enough HS duration to keep it up even with a few GCD delays, Avenger's Shield hits a fair bit harder than ShoR, and maybe Judgement hits harder than Crusader Strike, then it would be better to maximise Judgements to get the most Avenger's Shield casts.

It's all in the final numbers. I'd say it'd be worth putting the numbers into such a state to make the rotation less spammy.

[Sabindeus]

You know what, Ariane makes a good point there. Inquisition does need to be exclusive with Holy Shield to make there be an actual choice given the durations of those buffs.