patch 5.2 ?

[Klaudandus]

I've always been in favor of a longer, if weaker, SotR -- the short duration of SotR was a big influence on the value of Haste in the first place.

[halabar]

Confirmed on the PTR that even though they have loosened the tmog restrictions, items that are blocked by class restrictions may not be used. My spriest is a very sad panda since swords will not be an option... Wanted a light saber bearing spriest...

[Koatanga]

OTOH, anything they *add* to the spec, will have to be paid down the line.
As the saying goes, there are no free lunch tickets. They don't need to buff us right now, just find a way to make avoidance more tasty. Linking it to active mitigation gives us more control over its use.

What would HoW brings anyway? It hits hard, yes, but brings zilch to the table apart from filling up an empty GCD. And the knockdown idea is pretty lackluster as well. Only B-plan would be to link HoPo generation to the proc, but then it just becomes "GC for HoW"

No, if another option was to be considered, I found two of theck's other ideas in his blog post interesting alternatives:
Avoidance can increases ShoR's mitigation (stackable, stack limit) or duration (a bit risky)
Avoidance can reduce the next ShoR's cost by 1 HoPo (looked very interesting, creating a nice dynamic)

But even thse would imply a nerf to our current toolkit, probably to ShoR's baseline mitigation to keep things balanced.

EDIT: I'm also getting the impression that we're at times trying to fish for buffs, and that's a dangerous game to play simply because of the lost credibility these discussions would suffer. AFAIK we're in no way weak, it's just the itemization that's out of whack.

To me it seems like they got what they asked for, but don't really want it now that they have it.

They wanted an active mitigation model. They put one in place, and we embraced it. More haste = more activity = more mitigation. Active mitigation at its finest.

Now they want the passive stats Dodge and Parry to be more meaningful, so that we want to stack them instead of haste. But in order to do so, they have to attach active mitigation to passive sources. The more attractive they make Dodge and Parry, the more passive our "active mitigation" becomes.

Then there are the fundamental problems with dodge and parry:
All tanks do not dodge and parry equally. Balance issues are created.
Many boss attacks are purposefully not avoidable.
Lack of resource generation when boss is channeling or casting.
Lack of resource generation when tank swaps are required.
More mobs = more proc opportunities and potentially unbalancing

Thy don't want all tanks to be the same, but by the same token they have to be similar enough that a certain class isn't sat on some boss fights and used on others. We don't want to get back to the BC days when the pally tanked the trash but not the boss.

[Koatanga]

OTOH, anything they *add* to the spec, will have to be paid down the line.
As the saying goes, there are no free lunch tickets. They don't need to buff us right now, just find a way to make avoidance more tasty. Linking it to active mitigation gives us more control over its use.

What would HoW brings anyway? It hits hard, yes, but brings zilch to the table apart from filling up an empty GCD. And the knockdown idea is pretty lackluster as well. Only B-plan would be to link HoPo generation to the proc, but then it just becomes "GC for HoW"

No, if another option was to be considered, I found two of theck's other ideas in his blog post interesting alternatives:
Avoidance can increases ShoR's mitigation (stackable, stack limit) or duration (a bit risky)
Avoidance can reduce the next ShoR's cost by 1 HoPo (looked very interesting, creating a nice dynamic)

But even thse would imply a nerf to our current toolkit, probably to ShoR's baseline mitigation to keep things balanced.

EDIT: I'm also getting the impression that we're at times trying to fish for buffs, and that's a dangerous game to play simply because of the lost credibility these discussions would suffer. AFAIK we're in no way weak, it's just the itemization that's out of whack.

To me it seems like they got what they asked for, but don't really want it now that they have it.

They wanted an active mitigation model. They put one in place, and we embraced it. More haste = more activity = more mitigation. Active mitigation at its finest.

Now they want the passive stats Dodge and Parry to be more meaningful, so that we want to stack them instead of haste. But in order to do so, they have to attach active mitigation to passive sources. The more attractive they make Dodge and Parry, the more passive our "active mitigation" becomes.

Then there are the fundamental problems with dodge and parry:
All tanks do not dodge and parry equally. Balance issues are created.
Many boss attacks are purposefully not avoidable.
Lack of resource generation when boss is channeling or casting.
Lack of resource generation when tank swaps are required.
More mobs = more proc opportunities and potentially unbalancing

Thy don't want all tanks to be the same, but by the same token they have to be similar enough that a certain class isn't sat on some boss fights and used on others. We don't want to get back to the BC days when the pally tanked the trash but not the boss.

[Flex]

To me it seems like they got what they asked for, but don't really want it now that they have it.

Sounds to me like they don't want paladins to be the odd plate tank out in devaluing tanking gear not that they want to go back on active mitigation.

Thy don't want all tanks to be the same, but by the same token they have to be similar enough that a certain class isn't sat on some boss fights and used on others. We don't want to get back to the BC days when the pally tanked the trash but not the boss.

Are warriors being sat now because Revenge doesn't work when not tanking?

[Koatanga]

Are warriors being sat now because Revenge doesn't work when not tanking?

Not sure - I don't do progression raiding with a high-end guild. You may be in more of a position to judge.

It seems logical to me that if you were in a high-end guild pushing progression and one tank did noticeably poorer damage than your other thanks when not the active tank, then you might sit him on fights that require a high raid DPS output in order to beat an enrage timer. Conversely, in situations where a tank performs noticeably better than another tank, say in AoE-intensive fights, you might select the one with higher performance.

Is that wrong?

[Sagara]

Are warriors being sat now because Revenge doesn't work when not tanking?

Not sure - I don't do progression raiding with a high-end guild. You may be in more of a position to judge.

It seems logical to me that if you were in a high-end guild pushing progression and one tank did noticeably poorer damage than your other thanks when not the active tank, then you might sit him on fights that require a high raid DPS output in order to beat an enrage timer. Conversely, in situations where a tank performs noticeably better than another tank, say in AoE-intensive fights, you might select the one with higher performance.

Is that wrong?

Most porbably right, but there are a couple of things to note:

a) Right now, there's no particular tendency to "shelve" one tank class. Or at least not a sweeping wave of one class in particular, which leads to
b) Player quality is currently much more important than class, especially when we have such fine control over our defenses.
c) Don't forget that the actual number pass still hasn't happened. For all we care, we could be doing 50% of the other tank's dps on the PTR, as long as numbers gets fixed by the time they hit live. Numbers are easy to fix, mechanics are not.

Honestly, if there was anything I'd complain about our DPS/threat on PTR right now, it's snap AoE. I'm not too worried about our DPS numbers, honestly.

[honorshammer]

EDIT: I'm also getting the impression that we're at times trying to fish for buffs, and that's a dangerous game to play simply because of the lost credibility these discussions would suffer. AFAIK we're in no way weak, it's just the itemization that's out of whack.

The only place I feel weak is on AoE trash pulls with our BrewMaster. It isn't a huge deal (and maybe the GC on avoidance even helps there a little).

[Sagara]

EDIT: I'm also getting the impression that we're at times trying to fish for buffs, and that's a dangerous game to play simply because of the lost credibility these discussions would suffer. AFAIK we're in no way weak, it's just the itemization that's out of whack.

The only place I feel weak is on AoE trash pulls with our BrewMaster. It isn't a huge deal (and maybe the GC on avoidance even helps there a little).

Yeah, same. Thing is, once Vengeance and Cons kicks in, we're awesome. It's really the low Vengeance pulls that's annoying.

[boneyjellyfish]

Here's an idea: successful parries increase your haste % by dodge % for x seconds. Haste rating no longer has any effect other than on white attacks except that 50% of it becomes parry rating. Numbers can obviously be tweaked.

Our haste gear retains most of its value but it gives us an incentive to stack parry and dodge. The more parry and dodge we have, the more fun our gameplay is and the better we are at tanking.

[KysenMurrin]

We finished looking at Seal of Righteousness and Justice. Righteousness we ended up buffing by 50% so it should be a good choice against 4 targets instead of 6.

Justice is much more complicated. It was intended as a PvP seal, but the damage loss is so significant and the snare just not that valuable (which is ironic when you consider Ret's history of not being able to catch things), and Burden of Guilt is there if you really do want to snare. Furthermore, just buffing Justice's damage risks Seal twisting in PvE becoming a thing, where you stack up Censure and then swap to Justice. It could be cool if designed right, but would probably just be annoying. We just don't have much room to buff Justice, and players might still forsake it in PvP.

So, we're going to redesign it and attempt to solve another problem, which is Ret's damage outside of cooldowns (which are quite potent). Justice will now proc (and Judgment will count for the proc) a stacking debuff on the target that increases the damage of your next Templar's Verdict. With 5 stacks, this will be a big hit (but not an insta-gib) and opens up some interesting decisions about how to use Holy Power, such as Inquisition or WoG, if you're trying to hold TV. While Truth + Censure will still do more sustained damage overall, there is a chance Justice will see some situational use in PvE, and we're okay with that. Justice is a Ret-only thing, so it should be a Seal they actually use. It won't snare at all, which I expect some will call a devastating nerf, but again, there's Burden of Guilt if you really need a snare.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... age=28#543

[Worldie]

I like this:

We haven't adjusted Shadow's PvE damage yet in any case.

While not specifically saying they are going to buff us, it at least should mean they recognize damage isn't where it's supposed to be.

A bit of faith has been restored.

Well, I'm a priest, I'm supposed to have Faith I guess.

Here's an idea: successful parries increase your haste % by dodge % for x seconds. Haste rating no longer has any effect other than on white attacks except that 50% of it becomes parry rating. Numbers can obviously be tweaked.

Our haste gear retains most of its value but it gives us an incentive to stack parry and dodge. The more parry and dodge we have, the more fun our gameplay is and the better we are at tanking.

No offence but that sounds extremely complicate and unintuitive. Blizzard hates complicate things.

[Flex]

Numbers passes are always the last thing they do after the finalize changes and rotations.

[Fenris]

We finished looking at Seal of Righteousness and Justice. Righteousness we ended up buffing by 50% so it should be a good choice against 4 targets instead of 6.

Justice is much more complicated. It was intended as a PvP seal, but the damage loss is so significant and the snare just not that valuable (which is ironic when you consider Ret's history of not being able to catch things), and Burden of Guilt is there if you really do want to snare. Furthermore, just buffing Justice's damage risks Seal twisting in PvE becoming a thing, where you stack up Censure and then swap to Justice. It could be cool if designed right, but would probably just be annoying. We just don't have much room to buff Justice, and players might still forsake it in PvP.

So, we're going to redesign it and attempt to solve another problem, which is Ret's damage outside of cooldowns (which are quite potent). Justice will now proc (and Judgment will count for the proc) a stacking debuff on the target that increases the damage of your next Templar's Verdict. With 5 stacks, this will be a big hit (but not an insta-gib) and opens up some interesting decisions about how to use Holy Power, such as Inquisition or WoG, if you're trying to hold TV. While Truth + Censure will still do more sustained damage overall, there is a chance Justice will see some situational use in PvE, and we're okay with that. Justice is a Ret-only thing, so it should be a Seal they actually use. It won't snare at all, which I expect some will call a devastating nerf, but again, there's Burden of Guilt if you really need a snare.

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic ... age=28#543

As i tried to post 4 hours ago before the forum went KABLOOOOM on me

SoR:a buff is a buff,nothing to say
SoJ:i'd facepalm hard,but i stopped caring about pvp a long,long time ago...

[boneyjellyfish]

Here's an idea: successful parries increase your haste % by dodge % for x seconds. Haste rating no longer has any effect other than on white attacks except that 50% of it becomes parry rating. Numbers can obviously be tweaked.

Our haste gear retains most of its value but it gives us an incentive to stack parry and dodge. The more parry and dodge we have, the more fun our gameplay is and the better we are at tanking.

No offence but that sounds extremely complicate and unintuitive. Blizzard hates complicate things.

The seed of my idea was to turn the concept of "parry haste" into parry actually providing haste. I didn't think it was too complicated.