Shield of Righteousness possibly going away

[Jefferson]

This is driving me a bit nuts. It feels like there was widespread disappointment at SoR getting removed, so bliz is trying to shoehorn it back into use by merging it with an actual signature prot ability. There are *so* many options for interesting holy shield, but instead of branching out with it, they're just iterating it back into being passive. Further, they've implemented this combo point system for us, but instead of making it something flexible and choice-granting, they've just forced a bunch of our abilities into the new system.

There's no compelling reason not to give HS a 30s duration, but have it add affects per holy power point spent in casting it. Heck, 15% block for 30s as baseline, with 1 combo point adding the vind affect to all enemies, 2 combo points adding vind + jotj, and 3 combo points adding our 2 debuffs + this mini-bubble they're pushing us towards with WoG would make it more interesting and make us actually think about how we use it. If 30s is too long, finagle the duration so that it's impossible to keep up with 3 combo points and we have to make a decision on whether to let HS drop and replace it with a dmg shield, or keep it rolling with 2 (or 1 if someone else is bringing the vind/jotj affects). Give us a threat or utility holy combo point dump on top of this, and we really start to get into interesting territory.

At present, all of our abilities (with the exception of our AS version of sword and board) just feel bland to me. None of the abilities have much flavor or do anything particularly interesting. I just don't see where blizzard is going with this, or why they seem to want to drop so much of what made tankadins feel like tankadins.

[Flex]

There are *so* many options for interesting holy shield

No there isn't.

Your proposed options turns Holy Shield into 4 different abilities.

[Klaudandus]

Holy Shield -- Now a passive ability that causes your Shield of the Righteous to provide 5% block per stack of Holy Power consumed. In other words, you never click Holy Shield. You just click Shield of the Righteous and buff yourself.

I wonder if after the initial cast - every application of ShoR thereafter will refresh the buff -- also, what happens if you originally have the 3HoPow buff then you do a ShoR with just 1 HoPow, will it then the buff be replaced by the weaker one.

I would imagine this will be the case. Which means we'll likely never want to use SotR w/o 3 stacks, at least when we care about reducing damage as much as possible.

Heh, I can imagine trying to bash a boss with your shield and getting the message "a more powerful spell is already active" (though that's going away too isn't it?)

Best case scenario is ShoR buffing HS for the previous highest amount rather than rewriting the previous buff -- not to mention refreshing HS in the first place

[Flex]

Grand Crusader and however ShoR damage scaling with Holy Power stacks could completely fill your GCDs.

The Sword and Board talent is just so-so for increasing Shield Slam usage because of 1) Devastate's low priority and 2) Shield Slam's short cooldown.

[Chicken]

There are *so* many options for interesting holy shield

No there isn't.

That's my feeling as well, I'm happy enough with this option. It's not a brilliant or imaginative use of Holy Power, but this way it at least feels like a bit less of a liability since we're getting something visible out of it, rather than the largely invisible contributions of both the self-heal option and the older version of Holy Shield.

--[Separator to indicate this is no longer a direct response to anyone]--

This is all just going to be personal opinion, even if I mess up the language a bit. I haven't really thought through the consequences, and I'm aware that what I'm proposing is likely something someone else would heavily dislike.

In general I'd say something in this direction is actually closer to what I think they should be achieving with Holy Power than the current Ret implementation. Not exactly as this is, but the basic idea of "Direct effect + buff" this achieves. We'd be getting closer to an actual effect on our ability usage if the abilities that Holy Power allows us to use also give a short term buff: Short enough that it's not something you can ever keep up permanently, but powerful enough that it'll affect your ability choices while it's active.

So remove Inquisition. Instead, imagine if you will if Ret's Templar's Verdict in addition to just dealing a good bunch of damage, also gave you a buff that significantly increased your Seal damage for 5 seconds. This would lead to encouraging the player to ensure that abilities that can proc Seals are ready to use after Templar's Verdict, as that's the way to get the most damage out of it. In that way, we achieve a person putting some extra thought into using their abilities based on what they used their Holy Power on. Much more so than the current system they're going for with Ret.

[Minarva]

The chance of AS filling those GCDs is very minimal, we can expect about 2 AS procs a minute roughly (its something like 2.5) without including miss chance etc (which is too much for me to do in my head). For AS to fill 13 GCDs that we lack a minute (not using consecrate), it would need to proc everytime, the chances of which are minute. Tanks shouldn't have deadtime, infact no class should have (currently no class I know of in beta has deadtime). Devastate is the protection filler to stop just that, and I think we could do with something just along those lines (or a quicker CS).

The current implentation of ShoR -seems- to indicate that using lower stacks will lower their block % (as weaker spells can now overwrite), so I don't think it will be viable (just like TV downpowering is not viable).

[Flex]

The chance of AS filling those GCDs is very minimal, we can expect about 2 AS procs a minute roughly (its something like 2.5) without including miss chance etc (which is too much for me to do in my head). For AS to fill 13 GCDs that we lack a minute (not using consecrate), it would need to proc everytime, the chances of which are minute. Tanks shouldn't have deadtime, infact no class should have (currently no class I know of in beta has deadtime). Devastate is the protection filler to stop just that, and I think we could do with something just along those lines (or a quicker CS).

The current implentation of ShoR -seems- to indicate that using lower stacks will lower their block % (as weaker spells can now overwrite), so I don't think it will be viable (just like TV downpowering is not viable).

Aren't the specifically building deadtime into DKs now with new Rune mechanics?

[Shoju]

The chance of AS filling those GCDs is very minimal, we can expect about 2 AS procs a minute roughly (its something like 2.5) without including miss chance etc (which is too much for me to do in my head). For AS to fill 13 GCDs that we lack a minute (not using consecrate), it would need to proc everytime, the chances of which are minute. Tanks shouldn't have deadtime, infact no class should have (currently no class I know of in beta has deadtime). Devastate is the protection filler to stop just that, and I think we could do with something just along those lines (or a quicker CS).

The current implentation of ShoR -seems- to indicate that using lower stacks will lower their block % (as weaker spells can now overwrite), so I don't think it will be viable (just like TV downpowering is not viable).

Aren't the specifically building deadtime into DKs now with new Rune mechanics?

I'm not sure about tank DK's, but LTICd Frost DK's had enough RP that they didn't notice the rune mechanics. This was a week or so ago when i was watching a video though, and I'm not sure that the video was 'brand new' when I watched it. You also have to remember that a good bit of DK abilities have had their costs adjusted to compensate for the fact that they now have half the runes that they had before.

[Marblehead]

I can verify that Frost DKs don't have any downtime with the new rune mechanic. I don't think blizz is trying to create downtime for DKs. They just want to free up some GCDs for runic power abilities.

[Ryyu]

A few issues with this idea,

1) If inquisition and HS are still Exclusive, this means that SoR wont be able to be used with inquisition making it quite pointless as a level 82(3?) ability
2) if there not, then the heal/HP system still feels very weak, PVP/Filler talent.
3) As much as a combo point system works for rogues. one with such a tight gap (12 seconds to build etc) added to a mob being hit and dodge/Parry able, Means we'll have to stack us some Expertice to have not only our offensive ability's to work but also our avoidance ones, meaning a CS/Hotr parry/dodge/Miss will hurt us a HELL of a lot more than the other classes.
4) still kinda feels like were getting Rets new toy.

PS is anyone else droping GbtL?

[KysenMurrin]

For some reason with the new change to Holy Shield I suddenly feel like the name isn't good enough. The talent buffing ShoR should have a more interesting name, even if the buff it procs is still called Holy Shield.

I'm not sure about the whole using HotR only for multiple targets part. I probably won't talent Consecration in the new form, whereas I would have in the previous, mainly because it's becoming a rarely used situational tool.


We possibly need one more spell in our rotation. I think we might also need one of the existing spells without a ramp-up (ShoR) or long cooldown (AS) to have a higher priority than Crusader Strike (probably Judgement?), which isn't possible with current HP generation and the desire to cast ShoR as often as possible.

What if they rework Sacred Duty? Make it that your Judgement crits do something that effects Crusader Strike, Holy Power, or Grand Crusader procs.

Our shortest cooldown spell being such high priority is almost as much of a problem as the dead time.

[Shoju]

Grand Crusader and however ShoR damage scaling with Holy Power stacks could completely fill your GCDs.

The Sword and Board talent is just so-so for increasing Shield Slam usage because of 1) Devastate's low priority and 2) Shield Slam's short cooldown.

The short flow chart that I put together on the previous page included using ShoR at 3 stacks, and showed very intermittent cooldowns on a non linear setup. You might be able to get Grand Crusader to fill these holes, but we are talking about a 60+% proc change on Grand Crusader then, which would further ingrain Crusader strike as a 'must hit' ability whenever it is up, leaving less room for you to sub out CS's for something else.

The more I think about it, the more it 'works', it just doesn't seem to be as 'interesting' or as 'fun' as they were billing it to be. Holy Power still seems to be very rigid, and I still don't see us ever using Holy Power for a Word of Glory or Inquisition, which IMO, is a big fail to the system, as it makes a talent deep in the prot tree worthless.

[Candiru]

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...

[Arianne]

It seems that a lot of the 'theme' in Cataclysm with ability changes is to reduce the keypresses per minute needed to do well at a class, not to introduce dead space or empty GCDs in a rotation. DKs, for example, my friend used to complain that if he didn't hit the right ability every second then he would screw up his rotation. Warriors are similar with the need to convert white hits to yellows with heroic strike. Healers are similar in that in some fights each GCD matters and you only have a second to figure it out. That's what they're trying relax.

I like this iteration of the paladin talents/design a lot better than the previous one. Having something active to hit always feels better than just having to maintain a passive buff. I still think that we need more holy power generation and dumps somewhere though.

I like the idea of divine plea generating 3 holy power. I like the idea of having a talent like Divine Purpose, but I think they've currently built themselves into a corner on that one because we don't have any additional attacks for them to buff (ie: Divine Purpose uses 3 attacks that we don't have but we currently only have ShoR that Rets don't have [or well, wouldn't use]). So in order to fill those 13 GCDs that we can't use any of our current abilities on, we need some sort of an additional attack to use as filler that has a chance of generating holy power but doesn't always.

edit: I was just reading the official forums and was reminded of Blinding Shield. If that was a frontal 180, interrupted, and generated holy power then that would at least partially solve some of the issues I think. Some people are advocating that it is like shockwave, but I'd rather not make the classes more similar, so my suggestion would be something like it applied judgement damage to everyone in melee range (that way it'd have some sort of synergy with Sacred Duty, where you could use the buff from CS to increase the damage of BS before spending the buff on judgement).

[dmok]

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 ...