Tank Homogenization

Reply to Macha:

Good pally gear tended to be:

Stam, Defense/Avoid stat, Spell Damage

Now its:

Stam, Defense/Avoid, Strength

For the most part here is what happened to my gear:

Stam stayed the same
Added Strength
Got rid of Spell Damage, if the gear had int then it went away.
My defense went down. sometimes my avoidance stat went down

My pre-Beta defense was at 499. My post Beta defense was at 467. Now. 20 of that was because of talent change. The other 12 defense was due to gear change.

As for me wearing mostly Warrior gear currently... did you look at my armory? Head and Gloves and shield were pretty much the only tanking gear that was not pally itemized. They would be pally gear to if Tankatronics weren't better than the Tier 4 helm I had or If Maidens gloves weren't so much better for EH over my tier 4 gloves. Oh and my bracers. There was no pally bracer available for me in the level of content my guild was in.

Now this could change with new gear but the Naxx 10 tier set for pallys do not look good to me. I'd rather be wearing the Naxx 10 tier set for warriors. Shame I can't. Now, what do the non-set pieces look like? I don't know yet. I also haven't seen any new badge rewards either.
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I signed on to be a Paladin; a divine warrior, empowered by my strength at arms, to hold back beasties and darkness so my friends can pew pew it.

My stats are irrelevant, I don't care if I look like a warrior. I want to look like a tank. I want to obviously be a tank.

The important thing is I don't Sunder, I don't Charge, I don't stance dance.

I infuse myself with the Light, then I bring the pain.

Stats are irrelevant. Spells are what matter. It's style, not system.
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Also, keep in mind that players are not the only things that Blizzard needs to take into consideration. To my knowledge, Patchwerk hasn't been killed in 25 mans in beta yet.

Having 2-3 months gives Blizzard plenty of time to make a lot of changes. Look how far we've come (albeit downhill) in the past month. I have faith in the powers that be... that's what being a paladin is all about.
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Agreed. I'm not going to QQ. Still going to voice my concerns. I know there is nothing that can be done about the itemization changes but I just hope they make it work for pallys at launch instead of fixing it months later in a patch.
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I really could care less where my threat comes from, I don't care about style if it gets in the way of solid mechanics, I like my paladin because they are fun and cast spells and can fight. Now we have mechanics that are coherent, consistent and allow us to use the best tanking items and focus more on tanking and less on balancing mechanics and stats that made paladin tanking cumbersome in the first place.

We still cast spells, we just have under the hood mechanics that generate our spell damage differently, we still rely on Holy Damage for our threat, perhaps overly much, but we still have to do Holy damage to get the maximum threat. Now we can gear for threat and still get mitigation, we have new tools that mirror other abilities but still have a paladin flair I suppose.

Stop being stuck in the past. Look beyond the stats and you will see nothing much has changed, besides making our mechanics coherent and internally consistent.
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Two Konata avatars in a row...





Anyway, I don't really care HOW the job gets done, as long as it gets done. I'm 100% on board with our new strength scaling. It has done wonders for the viability of the class. That said, however, the problem paladin tanks have always had hasn't gone away: We do the same job as warriors, but just not quite as well. The gap has actually widened over the last few builds, and it looks like the devs are only beginning to realize it. GC made this comment recently:

To be fair, we didn't use spell damage initially either. It wasn't until our class review until any plate gear with spell damage even existed. I think it's dumb for a tank to be hitting a boss for 50 damage with his one hand weapon, so using AP coefficients on our skills makes a lot of sense to me.
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