Paladins and Stances - Some Ideas

From a purely pragmatic point of view, there's very little point in suggesting a class rewrite at this point in an expansion cycle....you're better of saving such suggesting until the next expansion is on the horizon and they're actually in a position to make more significant changes.
_________________


WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Moonlight Sonata Techno Remix

You can suggest all you want, they'll just wont implement it any time soon :=)
_________________

I think you severely underestimate the time complexity involved in completely retuning a class: the initial coding time is the easy part, it's the balancing, the bug fixes, all the unintended consequences (good or bad) that pop up, etc...

Making and balancing class isn't easy, and as fun as it is to play armchair class designer, when you're running a multi-billion dollar business there's a lot to be said toward conservatism in one's approach to fixing problems.

If you're going to make a major mechanic shift, you'd better be sure that the issues you want to address can't be solved without such a shift, and you'd better make the change at a time when you've got some slack to work on things if all doesn't go as planned.

I don't think you've made your case that such a shift is necessary ("I don't think mana works with melee" and "I like the idea of stances" are much too subjective, you need specific examples of what's broken), and there's not a chance that 3.2 is the right timing for such a change.
_________________


WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Moonlight Sonata Techno Remix

I have another problem with it then.

If you do make said change would it effectively become a new spell / stance button on our bar?

If it does then look at our talent tree. This change would tear it to shreds because you would no longer need stuff like devotion aura imp and other such talents.
In essence your talents would become second to this one stance, and Blizz would then feel obligated to add new ones to make the class *interesting and fun to play*.

I am not saying I don't like the idea - I am just saying that the impacts of it would go beyond what your implying just with your *its not much work statement*

Instead how about looking at having a single stance like unholy blood and frost and then having the talent tooltips modified so that when you spec prot each of the talents in the tree increase the modifiers on the stance. Ie the stance is basically worthless while your not in the right spec - but when you get the synergy between spec + stance going the two combine to form a role.
_________________


http://eu.wowarmory.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Emeriss&n=Tieran

...but you still haven't offered a compelling reason to package the change as a stance aside from "I like the idea of stances". I don't think that's reason in and of itself to institute such a shift. Fundamentally, it falls into the trap of being more focused on a specific solution approach than on the problems it seeks to address, and in the process it's very hard to tell exactly what you feel isn't working about Paladins at the moment (HP of Pally tanks is too low, healing while Ret or Prot is OP? I'm still not clear on your main points in this regard).

While solution ideas are fun to dream up, the most helpful feedback is problem oriented. Ideally, the bulk of a suggestion to Blizzard should consist of an outline of problems that exist with evidence to support the existence of such problems (e.g. testing, theorycraft, outline of scenarios where the problem arises, etc.). It's nice to throw in a couple solution ideas at the end, but it's really the problems we want Blizzard to address that it the issue, not our pet ideas for fixing them.
_________________


WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Moonlight Sonata Techno Remix

The compelling reason is to streamline things and avoid kludgey mechanics, aka bandaid fixes. The Divine Plea / ShoR thing kicked around on test right now is such an example. This isn't simply a matter of "I like stances." In fact, I never even wrote such words.

It's easy to point at a specific spec at any given point and say "It works right now, leave it alone." It's easy to point at a sine wave at a specific point and say "Hey look, it's 0." The issue is having a stable mechanic so that you don't have to introduce tweaks at various points.

Think of it as n-dimension equation which you have to balance. Well, the smaller that n is, the easier it is to balance it. Paladins fit this model, and there's a really high level of covariance in some of our tweaking. What I'm suggesting here doesn't really affect roles or relative power differences, but it reduces the dimensionality of the equation.

Basically, it's far easier to tweak a single spec than it is to tweak a base ability and have them interact with each spec in a different way. Consider this a foolproofing measure. You consider this to be complex or needless, but the benefit here is that it makes all future changes easier and the class as a whole can be more easily tweaked without unexpected changes occurring.

This might make more sense to me since I'm an engineer and code developer - I work with optimizations and complexity reduction methods all the time. I also know how difficult/easy this is from a coding perspective, and I may have communicated a few things poorly. But the advantage here isn't subjective in nature - it's very objective actually - it's reducing the degrees of freedom and covariance in the big equation of class balance.

EDIT: Replying to your edit here Dorvan, mayhaps you should go back and check the original post again. There's nothing OP about healing as ret or prot. The point of the healing modifiers in the stances is so that a Holy Paladin cannot use them as buffs.

If the conditions are met (Prot paladin in Defensive Stance in tank gear), there is no healing penalty. The penalty already exists in the form of lower spellpower and mana pool, relative to a Holy Paladin.

A Ret paladin has to spec deep enough into the Ret tree to remove the penalty. That's it. No change from live.

The point is that Holy shouldn't benefit from a highly defensive stance, as this would make them OP in PvP. Of course, you don't want to nerf tanks who are actually in tank gear. Same with Ret. Ret should be able to heal, but Holy shouldn't be able to enter the offensive stance and gain unilateral bonuses.

I've worked in the software world too. However, generally in a code development cycle there are times to do lots of re-factoring and clean up and times to patch something in that'll hold over for a while. In WoW, the time for patch and clean up in on expansion releases...you've got new spells, new talents, all sorts of things be changed and balanced around anyway.

So really, even if the idea really is better (it may or may not be), it's not the time to implement it. Furthermore, as I elaborated on, structuring their code is Blizzard's job: ours is to tell them what's working well and what isn't from a gameplay perspective.
_________________


WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Moonlight Sonata Techno Remix

I don't entirely agree, but I'll drop that point because it wasn't the main thrust of my argument and seems to be distracting from it.
_________________


WHAT WOULD BEST DESCRIBE YOUR PERSONALITY?
Moonlight Sonata Techno Remix