patch 5.2 ?

[Darielle]

I was thinking something... would you guys be ok if Sanctity of Battle was removed, but instead SotR lasts longer even if its weaker?

It seems the value of Haste is because we want to hit SotR as fast as possible because its buff is really short.

Personally? I'd be conflicted.

It's nice that ShoR is AS powerful because being that high amount of pure physical DR that works on everything is incredibly useful when it comes to trivialising mechanics.
It's also not nice that ShoR is that powerful because it makes those mechanics funky in how much they should do (think Qiang on 10-man and the flexibility to solo-MA), how comfortable your healers are, and how your healers react for different classes (For example, our healers have this habit of derping hard when I'm taking Exhale as a Bear over Psiven as a Paladin. There's no logical reason for it, but it definitely happens to healers)

For straight up white hit tanking, I guess I wouldn't care.

[Skye1013]

I know we've somewhat moved past this discussion, but in regards to snap aggro... how "gamebreaking" would it be to just attribute Light's Hammer aggro to the caster instead of it being considered "pet" aggro? And do you think doing so would help fix the snap aggro issue in aoe situations?

[Klaudandus]

not seeing why they shouldnt, considering protection warriors get an aoe taunt with their banners.

[Sagara]

I'd sacrifice a warlock to get LH's aggro. Make that two warlocks and a priest - less people on my tier gear.

Re: SoB - I still believe it's the best approach to solve the whole haste shenanigans. The only trouble is how GC stated he "understood" that haste was fun. I'm hoping they're not building a complicated answer just for that sake, though.

Just sack SoB, get GC to proc off avoidance with a nice ICD, and off we go!

[Skye1013]

Has GC (or any other devs) commented on why LH aggro is separate? Seems like an easy fix that would make a lot of pally tanks happy.

[Sagara]

You get two guesses. Hint: it's the usual answer.

[Winkle]

The gearing is essentially the same. 25s do get 2.5x the drops, but they also have 2.5x the number of players in the raid. Can't tell you the number of times we've seen 2-3 of the same item that no one needs/wants. They don't want 25s to die off, I'm not sure if you've noticed is 100% happening currently. Why raid 25 when you can do less work and raid 10. So they want to give people a reason to do 25s again, otherwise no one will be doing it by the next expac. Chances of a 25 going to 10, decently high. Chances of that same 10 going back to 25... not at all.

I believe it takes an average of 9 weeks to get full gear set in 25man raiding and 20 weeks in a 10man raid.

[Winkle]

Wouldn't that imply that LFR mechanics can't be ignored 90% of the time?

There's mechanics in LFR?

[Worldie]

I believe Elegon's floor counts as mechanic

[Winkle]

I believe Elegon's floor counts as mechanic

True, it is actually pretty hilarious watching half a raid plummet to their death.

[Klaudandus]

i got an idea... kinda like a follow up on the previous one

change sanctity of battle to convert all haste to avoidance (either dodge or parry), gc into a proc based on avoidance like theck had suggested, reduce the buff duration of sotr but reduce its power (like I had said earlier)

that way not all the haste gear is gone to waste...

[theckhd]

Why would you want to convert haste to avoidance? Either you've just buffed haste more, or you're replacing the haste effect with avoidance, at which point it would be easier to just eliminate Sanctity of Battle.

I don't think there's very much leeway on SotR's duration. Reducing the duration would make it much harder to use. Increasing the duration won't happen as long as we have Sanctity of Battle. And if we lose SoB, then the duration doesn't really need to be tweaked anyway.

[Daeva001]

It could be worth flipping on its head, though, and having avoidance rating grant us a % of its value as haste. GC did say that the goal was to be neutral to survival, and that would definitely be a survival buff, but it'd definitely raise avoidance's relative value to haste.

[Zalaria]

If changes were made to make avoidance more desirable than haste, all the current paladins with haste gear are left with less-than-desirable setups, which they want to avoid. If in doing that they made haste convert to avoidance, then the haste gear people have would still be decent. Of course you'd have to make haste not as good as pure avoidance, but 80-90% would allow all but the bleeding edge to keep their current gear and replace it as new 5.2 stuff drops instead of trying to replace it all before 5.2 hits.

[Fetzie]

What I'd think about doing with protection paladins in 5.2:

Change the DR coefficient for paladins (don't they already have separate ones per class) so that avoidance ratings are simply worth more. Makes them automatically more useful.

Then, change SoB to 50% of your haste, but allow spell haste to alter the cooldowns too (10% SoI, 5% raid buff). Would lessen the value of haste on gear, without making us feel like we just got "nerfed".

Let Execution Sentence and Hammer of Light GCD scale with haste.

Make Consecrate's damage ticks scale with haste and not just the cooldown of the spell so that we don't lose ticks when re-casting, or allow more than one Consecrate AoE to be active at any one time. Move the final tick to the "front" of the spell duration, so that it ticks immediately on cast and not 1-2 seconds later.

As for making avoidance more "visceral", perhaps let dodges and parries increase the damage reduction of ShoR by 5%, stacking up to 3 times. Buff has no duration, but expires if we drop combat. Or give avoidance a chance to grant Holy Power.

Numbers might need tuning though.