Touched by the Light -- a backwards-looking talent?

[Clericus]

I posted this on my blog, but people might actually read it here

At first glance, the upcoming paladin talent Touched by the Light looks incredible. Increasing health and threat by stacking just one stat? Yes please.

Unfortunately, I think this talent is not doing what it is supposed to do. I think it is meant to just be a healing talent, and that it will be changed to reflect this.

Tanking classes have had their threat talents rolled into basic class abilities. This means that tanking classes are able to tank, regardless of spec, which seems to be what Blizzard wants. So why give paladins another threat talent that only one spec could take?

I think this is just supposed to be a talent that will allow prot paladins to do some healing while in tank gear, and that the threat component is unintended. I expect it to be nerfed - that the talent will be changed to specify healing spellpower, or that paladins will only receive +spelldamage from their spellpower or their attack power (whichever is higher) but not both.

I hope I'm wrong, because I intend to take this talent regardless, and I'd like it to be the best it can be... but I can't shake the feeling that, at 80, it will just give us more threat than intended. It will be interesting to see what lvl 80 gear does for this talent...

[ulushnar]

Tanking classes have had their threat talents rolled into basic class abilities. This means that tanking classes are able to tank, regardless of spec, which seems to be what Blizzard wants. So why give paladins another threat talent that only one spec could take?

Same reason they put any talents in Prot after the 4th Tier: so we can do it better than someone who hasn't gone deep into the tree. That said, I don't know if you noticed, but every Paladin tree has some form of Spellpower talent in it. Holy gets Int > Spellpower and Retribution gets AP > Spellpower.

It's not a healing talent. It's a threat talent that allows some healing hybridization and one that gives us a synergy with the kind of stats they're likely to put on Spellpower Plate for Holydins.

[Clericus]

Hehe, I hope you're right. It's just a bad feeling I got when reading Dorvan's thoughts on the potential balancing nightmare that comes from us having both pure spellpower and attack power contribute to the damage on our spells - the feeling that maybe we were misunderstanding that talent.

What I really want to see are the stats on some level 80 gear, so that we can see just how much of our threat is actually coming from AP, and how much from spellpower. I mean, I assume we'll be wearing mostly 'pure' tank gear... but for threat will we be wearing, or swapping in, 'holy pally' style spelldamage plate? or 'melee dps' style attack power plate?

[crabcrouton]

Personally I'd rather tackle the issues we have currently than worry about the off chance that Bliz will drop the ball further down the line.

Besides, having this talent scale with AP instead of SP will directly improve HotR and regular white damage, which will allow Prot to "double dip" into str/stam gear. White damage might be negligible, but HotR certainly isn't. Doing weapon damage on 3 targets at a time means that whatever benefits TbtL gives would be tripled for an ability we can use every 6 seconds. I surmise this might be beyond what Bliz meant when they said that tanks should contribute more damage.

Don't believe me? Conversion of SP to AP is (12 spdmg vs 20 AP gems) 3:5 meaning that a 30% SP from Stam would now be a 50% AP from Stam. Let's also not forget that 1 ipoint is worth 1.5 stam, which is further synergized through Prot's two Stam increasing talents. So now, tankadins benefit more from the same gear that Warriors and DKs are wearing from a dps standpoint requiring them to balance us differently elsewhere to make the gear equivalently useful to all three classes. If anything, your proposal wouldn't reduce potential problems, it introduces some from the get-go.