Prot PVP @ 85

[Kelaan]

then ran across another prot pally that was mostly gemming Parry and dodge, and mastery.. As I understand it mastery is good in that it will block melee attacks against us but not much for those spell ranged attacks. Does Parry and dodge work against PVP the same way it works in PVE? If it did why would we need resilience?

I'm no expert, certainly not highly rated, but here's my thoughts on it.

Parry/Dodge are great versus melee teams, but don't do much versus spells, whereas Resilience affects all damage equally. Casters (and snares) are very much the bane of my existence, compared to melee.

In full resilience gear, you will have ~4k resilience, which is basically an always-on 40% damage reduction. You have an additional 10% from Sanctuary in prot spec, so you can look at that either as "I get to wear non-resilience trinkets" or as "I have 50% damage reduction". Without resilience, you'll be taking FAR more damage than you can heal/mitigate from any team with a caster. Note that MANY "melee" classes have things that can prevent you from dodging/parrying, also -- such as stuns, hitting you from behind, spell damage procs, diseases, or poisons. You want resilience.

You will also usually NOT be the focus target until your partner is dead, which means that dishing out enough damage to pressure a healer is important. As it is, in full ret gear (aside from sword/shield), I have a very hard time killing anyone that has a healer if I'm by myself, and losing out on Str/hit/exp would cut that significantly.

I definitely agree with Taugrim that we should stack hit/exp. You need every bit of holy power you can to be able to make a healer take enough damage to more than HoT themself.

[KysenMurrin]

R.I.P. Prot PvP.

Vengeance is no longer triggered by receiving damage from other players.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/4270421

[Worldie]

With Blood DKs being so overpowered, we should have seen that coming long ago.

[KysenMurrin]

Nerf four specs because one of them is OP?

[Fenrìr]

Nerf four specs because one of them is OP?

I see you and raise you:

"Nerf ret because it's double dipping from an ICC change implemented by Blizzard and not were it's where Blizzard wants them on the DPS charts?"



XD

[Worldie]

Nerf four specs because one of them is OP?

Tanks were never intended to be viable in PvP anyway, they stated it multiple times.

[KysenMurrin]

And they weren't, at least not Prot Paladins. They were subpar, but still usable if you weren't concerned about getting high ratings. With this change they won't even be worth the effort.

[Worldie]

I believe the intended "niche" in PvP for tanks is base holding / flag carrying in (rated) bgs. Which they still excell at. They have no place in arena.
Remember they moving in that direction also in MoP with druid feral being separated from guardian spec (aka not having anymore high damage in a tank spec, nor high survivability in a dps spec)

[KysenMurrin]

Part of our survivability right now comes from the fact that our Word of Glory scales with Vengeance.

[Fenrìr]

While I do agree this is going to hurt Tankadins in the FC'ing role, I do agree with Blizzard in this nerf. Blood DKs and well played Prot Warrs are just stupid...I generally just go the other way.

[Skye1013]

Anecdote is anecdote, but a Blood DK was holding the DMF arena against 4 other people (one of them a healer.) This will also help against easily achieved OP "tanks" in low level BGs, since it'll be far more difficult to 1-shot someone with Avenger's Shield...

[Kelaan]

Time to learn to play Ret, I guess. Damn. It was certainly fun while it lasted.