Suggestions for Class Changes

I'm posting this as a Request for Comment on my ideas that I posted for the Class Feedback thread on the WoW Forums. If others would like to post their's for review and comment, please do.

For reference, I'm the raiding tankadin of my guild but am not the main tank. We generally try to use the best tank for the job, instead of simply chosing the warrior (GM) as the sole main tank. We just recently got enough people attuned for MH, and have only entered BT as a group of 14 to try for epic trash drops.

List your primary talent tree(s), i.e. Holy/Disc.
Protection (0/48/13)

List the content you're primarily pursuing or most enjoy, i.e. Raiding, PvP, Solo, etc...
Raiding

Provide a brief description of the areas you feel are most in need of improvement (you may list a maximum of three issues and each issue should be described in one or two sentences).

Itemization: This has been said so many times, but it needs to be: We get our threat from Holy Damage, and we don't heal while tanking, and we can't do any other spell except holy. Please replace our +Damage and Healing with +Holy Damage and then use the free item points for the many other stats that we need, threat related or otherwise.

Boss Mechanics: It is perfectly fine that some bosses are easier to tank with one class versus the other two, but don't make bosses such that one class, given the expected gear level, can't tank it. Specifically, don't require a shield (Kael'thas), spell reflect (Reliquary of Souls), etc., each class should be ABLE to do the job even if they aren't ideal for it.

Spell Interrupt: Protection paladins, alliance especially, simply need a Spell Interrupt ability that is usable against bosses on a somewhat frequent basis. It is a very noticable absence in many fights.

List up to five specific spells/abilities/talents you feel most need change, redesign or improvement in the order you feel each is most in need of attention. (MOST to LESS)

Improved Holy Shield - Take it off the global cooldown, and reduce it's cooldown by 1 second per talent point. Reasoning: Our complicated cooldown/global cooldown management makes it such that we often have to stop our threat rotation to ensure that we can cast Holy Shield as soon as it's available. This can cause two things, lower threat output, or lapses in the ability.

Spiritual Attunement - Two things, could be a upgrades that require talent points to obtain but should be a single talent: 1. Though mana is rarely such a severe problem when actively tanking, we need a way to generate signficant amounts of mana for offtanking (and dpsing) purposes, especially on taunt immune bosses/mobs. We need to be able to maintain second on threat for extended periods of time which is currently impossible once our mana is gone and the potion cooldown is still active.
2. Award avoided damage rather than penalize it. For example - grant X mana per dodge or parry, X/2 mana per block. X would need to be enough such that we could continue our threat rotation even with a string of avoided damage. Currently we simply don't get mana back if the heals don't count.

Improved Divine Shield - Reduces its effectiveness, making us take 1 damage per hit but allow mobs to continue attacking us when we use it. This would allow us to use the ability we invested talents points to get.

Seal of Vengeance/Blood - There is currently too much disparity between alliance and horde paladins making them much less than a flavor difference with slight benefits. The names can change, but each side needs both. Vengeance needs to be more reliable such that it can be used while tanking. It should also scale better.
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Warlocks need to have a more reliable escape method.

Our pet scaling and survivability also needs to be looked at.

Destruction needs to be looked at for some survivability, it has none.





Oh wait wrong forum.
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70 Prot Pally
Muahahaha 70 Warlock
Kalishnakov 54 Hunter

The big one I have: a paladin requires or wants too many different stats to be successful as a tank, and none of these stats work synergistically or do more than one thing.

Stats a paladin needs:
Defense
Dodge/parry/block rating
Block value
Stamina
Spelldamage
Armor

Stats a paladin wants to some degree:
int
expertise
hit rating
spell hit rating

Solution: make these stats pull double duty. For example: make holy shield base trainable (so offspecs can more easily tank), make improved holy shield have 3 talent points and for each point, add 20% of your spelldamage to your block value. Make toughness not only give 10% bonus armor but add 2x your int to your armor per point (or 1x if this is insane). Increase the damage dealt by holy shield by your block value in some way. Make all judgments use +hit. These kinds of changes would be similar to the warrior in how their stats pull double duty yet would be closer to the idea of a mana-using melee defender.

Please do not get rid of damage/healing from gear, however; it is very, very nice to be able to heal with the same gear that one tanks in. Paladins should always be able to do both to some degree. Some +holy damage would be nice on various items (or enchantments/gems) but a paladin should be a hybrid, and their gear should reflect this to some degree.

Increase the coefficients of various abilities. Right now a paladin's gear gets outpaced by DPS compared to a warrior at highest levels, and the TPS is simply not enough. An easy solution is to increase the coefficients significantly, especially on seals/judgments (they are very small here already).

Give paladins a reliable, scalable pulling weapon. Make avenger's shield have 3 ranks, and for each rank allow it to hit 1 target. That would allow a paladin to pull only one target reliably if they downranked the ability.

since you asked for comments on you ideas here is what I think:

In general, I don't agree with any of them. The changes you suggest imo would make us too op. We (meaning my guild) currently have a small, and very effective, team of tanks. I love the fact that we each bring specialities to the table that the others don't. It gives each of us a chance to really shine during fights, and requires us to do some thinking to figure out what works best and when. If you make it so that I can produce monumental threat without any risk of needing to manage my GCD, all while never worring about how to gear myself for the fight.. what is the point? There are very minor tweaks that I could see but 2.3 was a big step up and overall I don't see much need to change at the moment.

I think we just need an itemization fix/coefficient fix to fix our threat at end-game. My threat is doing ok now, but I notice, even when I put on heavy spell damage gear, my threat output does not jump significantly. Also, there's no end-game weapon to use with SoV.

Also Holy Shield off the GCD and/or extending it's duration by 1 second would definitely help. Hell I was tanking on my friend's warrior the other day, and he's like "you gotta HS and devastate and revenge and shield slam while fitting in shield block" and I'm like man that's cake, your shield block isn't on the GCD, you can hit it whenever the fuck you want, and HS is a next-swing. Throwing in thunderclap and demo shout makes it tougher but still. It should at LEAST have an overlapping duration.

I do not agree with making all bosses Paladin tankable etc. Your examples, Kael'thas, RoS...yes a druid can't tank Kael'thas, but they are excellent add and/or weapon tanks, which are still VERY much needed, RoS I hear phase 3 is good for us to tank...there are plenty of opportunities to TANK on most every boss fight; it might not be the actual BOSS you're tanking, but whatever add you happen to be controlling is probably just as pivotal to the success of the raid as the boss tank.

Also think if you COULD tank anything with a druid tank; then that's all you'd bring to a raid. Why bring a prot warrior? For the extra 1100 HP? If a druid can do it, and while not tanking go kitty and put out A LOT better DPS than a prot warrior, why would you bring warriors/paladins? I believe Blizzard balances bosses and raid dps around the assumption that you have at least two prot spec players in your raid; if suddenly you don't NEED these players, then you gain a lot of DPS and suddenly their careful balancing is thrown off. I'm not sure if they actually do that, but it just occurred to me and it makes sense; I remember reading something along those lines from a Blizzard poster awhile back (possibly about how they like to add enrage timers to bosses so you can't stack your raid with healers for them, etc).
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I agree with all your suggestions, but I would like to add a few ideas I think would improve upon the concepts you've suggested.

Firstly, I think that Improved Holy Shield should also make Holy Shield mitigate spell damage to some extent. Perhaps it could be based on Block Value? Holy Shield could also proc on spell damage, while consuming a charge. This would be a downside in some cases, but also a significant threat boost in others.

Your Divine Shield changes would help for short fights that employ magical burst gimmicks, but for elemental bosses and such having a consistent way to mitigate spell damage and continue to generate threat with Holy Shield doesn't seem unreasonable.

You also touched on my other concern, which is related to mana management. My largest concerns are also why we are penalized for avoidance and blocks, and our ability to sustain while not taking hits.

Warriors and Druids also get penalized for avoiding hits. However, Warriors do gain rage when they block. I've often times thought we should at least get mana for blocking. Though, we also regenerate our power source naturally, so I am not sure if giving us mana through blocks or avoided hits is a good idea, but it is somewhat of a hindrance to not be able to sustain mana on mobs that do not hit very hard. At least we can work around this by sitting.

The other huge and more pressing concern, is being able to maintain mana while not taking damage or very little/AE.

One thing that I think needs to happen is either some way for Seal of Wisdom to be able to generate significant threat, or make it so Righteousness/Blood/Vengeance has some sort of innate Wisdom effect. Another way would be to make a clause in a talent that affects Judgement so that it gives us some sort of +mana effect. Either an instant surge, or a mana regen buff that could be maintained.

The final thing I would like to add is in context of itemization. Instead of simply giving items +holy damage, I think there could be a way for items to not need spell damage at all. If one of the deep Protection talents allowed us to convert Stamina into spell damage, we would be able to fully itemize with pure tanking plate. For example, if the same value for Holy Guidance is used (35% INT=>damage/healing) @1500 STA you would gain 525 +spell damage. This would allow Paladins to gear as effectively as Warriors, and also allow for the creation of more solid tanking gear. By allowing pure tanking plate to fill the place of less effective, Paladin tanking plate.

Another concern I've had placed by others, is the lack of Sunder Armor. Ironically from a DPS Warrior, but also a Hunter. I think it's just one of those things that is Warrior specific. Paladins gaining a way to lower armor on a target would really be stepping on Warriors' toes.

Thanks for sharing your suggestions with us. I hope you enjoy my thoughts.

Just three from me:

• Improved Holy shield should reduce cooldown by 0.5 seconds per point, so you can get reliable overlap.

• Block Value should convert to spell-damage on Holy Shield procs to increase threat in deep Tier-6 (not there yet, but I want my threat advantage in Tier-5 to remain in Tier-6)

• Prot tree is too fat. Clean up Precision, Imp. RF, Spell Warding, Sacred Duty, Combat Expertise. That's 15 points of talents, in five separate pools, covering a whole pile of nearly mandatory stuff for MT specced paladins. Clean up and merge that down to 10-12 points, and the cookie-cutter "deep prot" tree will go from 49 points to 44-46.
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I didn't say all of the things that have been listed wouldn't be improvments, they most certainly would be. I said I don't want (or need for that matter) any of them.

I'll talk specifically about the points then.

Oh I missed two things I wanted just comment on for edification purposes

My tanking team is the same makeup as you Zaephod, 1 warrior, me, and 2 feral druids. With another fury warrior who picks up tanking gear if needed.

Also, we are currently 3/4 tk and 5/6 ssc and just about to start Vashj if that helps place where we are at in terms of boss fights.