Stacking Threat Modifiers

[Joanadark]

thats.....potentially powerful.

[jere]

Yeah. My guess is if that is true, then that is why holy shield has such a low spell dmg coefficient...to keep its damage down. the high threat coefficient gives it good threat inspite of low damage..but that is just a guess

[Fridmarr]

Yeah. My guess is if that is true, then that is why holy shield has such a low spell dmg coefficient...to keep its damage down. the high threat coefficient gives it good threat inspite of low damage..but that is just a guess

There's no need to guess why its coefficient is low, when 1.9 was on the PTR, Holy Shield still had it's 20% coefficient or whatever it was. On the last tweak of 1.9 and the pally class review, Holy Shield had its coefficient removed completely, was moved to 31 talent points (from 21) and had the amount of damage and mana cost lowered as well. The justficiation was as follows...

I asked about Holy Shield as well, and why +holy or +spell damage didn't apply to it while applying to other abilities. The response I received is that, under certain easily achieveable conditions and combinations, Holy Shield was devastating with + spell damage applied. Rather than decrease the effectiveness of the base ability and still have the problem later on, they changed it so + spell damage no longer applies to it. I'm aware this is unpopular -- as is any reduction in power -- but please understand that we don't make such calls unless they're absolutely necessary. They tested these changes time and again and the results with Holy Shield were unbalanced. I realize this sort of change is particularly unpopular with Holy Shield's move to a 31-point talent, but I do want to stress that the talent trees are primarily about giving players more options as they go deeper into a tree rather than becoming more powerful.

Now, I'm a bit biassed here because I think this particular set of changes, which also included moving repentence to 31 ret and Kings to protection, were spectacularly stupid, so take my comments with a grain of salt.

I had done a good bit of testing Holy Shield before that change and for what it's worth, there was some truth to the comment about it being devastating, at least against melee, but it wasn't holy shield. For some reason, Blessing of Sanctuary had some absurdly high coefficient on it. That combination was really too much against melee classes, but would have been easily solved by removing the coefficient from Sanctuary (which they did do as well). With the spell damage I had at the time, coming from Bloodcaller and 3 pieces of judgement and the spell dmg neck from Ragnaros, I could get Sanctuary to do around 80 dmg per block.

Later they did add the 5% coefficient back and of course now we have it being effected by 1hand spec and imp holy shield. It seems to be a skill that they have a difficult time balancing.