3.2 Protadin Change Compilation

Belarkan wrote:
I don't really feel like getting around 9% more EH for free is a fair thing.

It's much more fair when you consider we were behind on EH compared to other tanks.

Worldie wrote:It's much more fair when you consider we were behind on EH compared to other tanks.

I've been a bit away from the forum the last few months, but I don't feel like I'm behind on EH against warrior, druids already had their nerf and DKs will get some other while we are buffed.

Are there some pointers in order to compare EH ?

Just compare armor and HP.

Belarkan wrote:

Honorshammer wrote:2. Paladins need a second cooldown. The new AD on the PTR is not Overpowered! At least not in its current form. Yes, the first couple of passes were very strong, but I think they've got it to a point that balanced. Other tanks cooldowns allow them to survive stuff they wouldn't otherwise have survived, and that's precisely what AD does. It's just with AD, you KNOW you would have died otherwise. The other tanks probably would have died as wel IF they didn't pop their second (and sometimes third!) cooldowns.

I don't really feel like getting around 9% more EH for free is a fair thing.

Well we do spend talent points for it, so I don't see how you can say it's 'for free'.

There's 2 parts to AD (making a fantastic value for those talent points). First is the Guardian Spirit Cooldown, which I was discussing above.

The second, and the area you seem to have a concern over, is the damage reduction on hits that take the Paladin below 35%. The ONLY change from they way AD is on Live, right now, is the addition of it not being Leapfrogged.

The real question is 'Are Paladins balanced against all other tanking classes with the additional EH provided by a non leapfroggable AD?' I have not yet seen credible evidence to support that Paladin's are far and away all other tanks from this simple change. If you have seen this evidence, I ask you to present it to be evaluated.


When Warriors like Veneretio of Tanking Tips (Fantastic site, btw) tell me that they feel AD is pretty balanced on the PTR, I put alot of weight behind that.

Honorshammer wrote:There's 2 parts to AD (making a fantastic value for those talent points). First is the Guardian Spirit Cooldown, which I was discussing above.

The second, and the area you seem to have a concern over, is the damage reduction on hits that take the Paladin below 35%. The ONLY change from they way AD is on Live, right now, is the addition of it not being Leapfrogged.

The real question is 'Are Paladins balanced against all other tanking classes with the additional EH provided by a non leapfroggable AD?' I have not yet seen credible evidence to support that Paladin's are far and away all other tanks from this simple change. If you have seen this evidence, I ask you to present it to be evaluated.

Given that the EH boost is far less than it was - since in essence AD just avoids the leapfrog as Honorshammer points out, and not the massive EH increase it was originally, my impression is that this isn't THAT huge of an boost RELATIVE to where other classes stand right now.

Personally, I have to admit that I'm still very disappointed in the Guardian Spirit style "cooldown" though. As a maintank I still feel like this does not put me on par to a lot of other classes for trying to maintank certain fights and hard modes.

I suppose it means I could go back and tank Sarth3D, and count on my GS to save me from a breath attack as one of my cooldowns - of course, my healers still have a very small time window to heal me back up right after it procs, before the next melee swing kills me (again) for real. Seems like counting on this to proc to save you from super-big-hits still puts a HUGE amount of pressure on the healers to time a heal, perfectly, to not overheal you before the proc, and not fail to heal you before the next melee swing.

On fights like Vezax, it doesn't help much at all. As a paladin tank, I'll still have to kite while the DK stands there.

On fights like Thorim, I'm similarly skeptical. I suppose it does get me a chance to survive an off-swing-timer unbalancing strike insta-gib late in the fight - I'll give Blizzard credit for that - but eventually Thorim kills tanks from the sheer volume and damage of his melee swings. Proc'ing AD isn't going to save me - he'll kill me again less than 1 second later. Similarly, this doesn't really help me survive Mimiron's plasma blast, nor does it particularly help me to tank the monstrous hits from phase3 Steelbreaker-last.

The challenge that I have is, in the end, there are cooldowns that mitigate damage (Divine Shield, Shield Wall, Icebound Fortitude, Unbreakable Armor, Barkskin), and cooldowns that boost the available health pool (Last Stand, Vampiric Blood, Survival Instincts... and nothing for paladins). I must admit that I really feel like we're at a loss for not having one of the latter, which seems to be a MUCH more effective cooldown tool for most fights where cooldowns matter, given how Blizzard designs fight mechanics. The fact remains that we seem to have 2 cooldowns to compare to all the other tanks' 1 cooldown (yes, I know the nature of the 2 DK cooldowns depends on the DK spec).

I realize they are trying hard not to homogenize tanks, their abilities, and the nature of their cooldowns, but I'm still not impressed with the Guardian Spirit effect of AD. It's a nice way to recover from "oops, I made a mistake and let the tank 'die' on Kologarn while the healer was moving for eyebeams", but it doesn't seem to do much for validating us as maintanks for many hard modes (or even some "regular" modes).

Worldie wrote:Just compare armor and HP.

I don't feel it's that easy. Unless I'm wrong, AD also applies to magical damages.
I rather see AD damage reduction as a permanent 1/3 of last stand.
Maybe it's just a point of view. Anyway, I'll have a look at my co tanks to have facts about it.

Honorshammer wrote:Well we do spend talent points for it, so I don't see how you can say it's 'for free'.

Well, sure you spend talent point for it. I was saying that for the reasons that GC gave when they removed the stamina enchant on the weapon.

You mentioned the "new" AD which is the guardian spirit but - to me - it also includes the reliable damage reduction effect which we have been asking for something like 2 years

On fights like Vezax, it doesn't help much at all. As a paladin tank, I'll still have to kite while the DK stands there.

Well, Although we haven't killed Vezax yet (9% at our best try) you can tank&spank him already as a paladin. I did it with 2 Disc. priest but guardian spirit or divine sacrifice also did the job.

Belarkan wrote:Well, Although we haven't killed Vezax yet (9% at our best try) you can tank&spank him already as a paladin. I did it with 2 Disc. priest but guardian spirit or divine sacrifice also did the job.

You provide compelling evidence here that Paladins do in fact need the buff. You require EXTERNAL cooldowns, other tanks (specifically DKs) do not.

Belarkan wrote:

Honorshammer wrote:2. Paladins need a second cooldown. The new AD on the PTR is not Overpowered! At least not in its current form. Yes, the first couple of passes were very strong, but I think they've got it to a point that balanced. Other tanks cooldowns allow them to survive stuff they wouldn't otherwise have survived, and that's precisely what AD does. It's just with AD, you KNOW you would have died otherwise. The other tanks probably would have died as wel IF they didn't pop their second (and sometimes third!) cooldowns.

I don't really feel like getting around 9% more EH for free is a fair thing.

Even with 15% "free" EH, we're still behind Druids (about 5.7% less than PVE geared, and 8.5% less than PVP geared) when passive physical mitigation and armor are taken into account. We're getting raised to second place "OP" status. I still agree it's unfair to Death Knights and Warriors, but I don't really feel sympathetic to the former given that they were allowed to trivialize two full tiers of content.

Honorshammer wrote:

Belarkan wrote:Well, Although we haven't killed Vezax yet (9% at our best try) you can tank&spank him already as a paladin. I did it with 2 Disc. priest but guardian spirit or divine sacrifice also did the job.

You provide compelling evidence here that Paladins do in fact need the buff. You require EXTERNAL cooldowns, other tanks (specifically DKs) do not.

I don't see evidence we need the buff in that Vezax' case. I'm not sure at all the new AD will help you for that fight on shadow waves or whatever the english name is.
You would still require external cooldown because you need either a constant DR (divine sacrifice, bubble wall...) or increased heal (guardian spirit) to stay alive.
AD will just give you a constant EH increase and a one shot omg-healer-laged effect.

I will assume we needed the EH boost, we're still one CD short.

Edit:
Thinking about it I would have welcomed something like the heal effet plus a bigger damage reduction - say 30% without health restriction - both on a 2 minute CD for example.

Honorshammer wrote:

Belarkan wrote:Well, Although we haven't killed Vezax yet (9% at our best try) you can tank&spank him already as a paladin. I did it with 2 Disc. priest but guardian spirit or divine sacrifice also did the job.

You provide compelling evidence here that Paladins do in fact need the buff. You require EXTERNAL cooldowns, other tanks (specifically DKs) do not.

Well in 3.2 the Dk will ask for a second cd because IBF is now on a 2 min cd and I am not sure that a druid would just stand there.

Honorshammer wrote:1. HoSalv glyph is NOT a Tanking cooldown. If you are really using HoSalv on Vezzax and not killing your mages, well I'm not sure I know what to say. Mine would be dead, along with my Warlock and Elemental Shaman. HoSalv Glyph was intended for PVP (and I love it there) and we are using it for a second cooldown because

2. Paladins need a second cooldown. The new AD on the PTR is not Overpowered! At least not in its current form. Yes, the first couple of passes were very strong, but I think they've got it to a point that balanced. Other tanks cooldowns allow them to survive stuff they wouldn't otherwise have survived, and that's precisely what AD does. It's just with AD, you KNOW you would have died otherwise. The other tanks probably would have died as wel IF they didn't pop their second (and sometimes third!) cooldowns.

The glyph actually works pretty well and we only use this for normal mode anyway where the DPS requirements aren't an issue, and again this is only used when we don't have other cooldowns available to tank through the enrage (usually two retadins with guradian spirit and bubble plus my own shield wall usually do the trick nicely). For hard mode we use the kiting strat as it's simply not viable on healer mana to tank through the enrages, unless you're using a Blood DK ofc

It''s not the effective health i'm worried about, although tbh it's nice and although I don't feel it's overpowered on it's own - i'd still prefer to not have our own cheat death - granted it's fantastic for progression where the RNG fails, the tank goes down and it's an instant wipe, but i'd much prefer another cooldown that we have to push in order to prevent our own death, short CD (2-3 mins) with like a 15-20% reduction to compliment our new AD and scrap the get out of jail free effect. Not to mention that we currently have to lose our AD for 2 minutes because the guardian spirit part is so good - I don't recall other tanks loosing a part of their main mitigation or effective health after using their cooldowns.

Dantriges wrote:

Honorshammer wrote:

Belarkan wrote:Well, Although we haven't killed Vezax yet (9% at our best try) you can tank&spank him already as a paladin. I did it with 2 Disc. priest but guardian spirit or divine sacrifice also did the job.

You provide compelling evidence here that Paladins do in fact need the buff. You require EXTERNAL cooldowns, other tanks (specifically DKs) do not.

Well in 3.2 the Dk will ask for a second cd because IBF is now on a 2 min cd and I am not sure that a druid would just stand there.

Indeed we tried with our Druid doing it and although they were able to survive every single enrage using Barkskin and their Monarch Crab trinket, the healers did feel the pressure towards the end of the fight and were ooming on 25 normal mode usually leading to the Druids death on one of the last enrages as they simply didn't have the reserves to heal through it.

Essentially speaking you can do Vezax both ways, kiting way being suitable to all tanks and the tanking enrage way should require another CD from another class, if not it should be a tight race that will put a strain on the overall raid to bring enough healing, DPS and TPS from the tank to get the job done without ooming the healers.

Nadir wrote:Even with 15% "free" EH, we're still behind Druids (about 5.7% less than PVE geared, and 8.5% less than PVP geared) when passive physical mitigation and armor are taken into account. We're getting raised to second place "OP" status. I still agree it's unfair to Death Knights and Warriors, but I don't really feel sympathetic to the former given that they were allowed to trivialize two full tiers of content.

I personally feel fine in terms of effective health if you look at our position, I currently have far far more health than our Warrior tanks and thanks to Devo Aura I have more armor too - I take this as a fairly good comparison as we're the closest in terms of tanking mechanics, the only thing they have over us is two cooldowns instead of our one - something that we all agree needs addressing.

DKs however are a different matter, our DK has about 500 more health than me in blood/unholy presence, in frost presence fully buffed our DK is breaking 50k health and jumps even higher with cooldowns - its widely known they're overpowered and will be getting rebalanced in 3.2 to address this, so again a bad comparison.

Druids are a whole different kettle of fish, their last stand is like the warriors version on steroids simply because their average health is so much higher and most are almost at armor cap in some of the best gear kicking around. But if you look at their cooldowns they only have a 20% reduction every 1 minute with barkskin which isn't bad but 20% on itself would be pretty poor if they had the health of a Warrior or a Paladin so I see their effective health as necessary as it simply gives the healers the extra time to get them topped off.

TL:DR version - Paladins are in a fairly good position regarding effective health right now I certainly feel comfortable with 25 mans and the new AD will compliment this perfectly giving us that little bit more edge. I do however still maintain that the guardian spirit part is too much and they should remove it and find a way to give us another minor cooldown like the Druids Barkskin - my Glyph suggestion may seem a bit crap as we'd have to glyph for this but this is no different to Warriors having to Glyph for Last Stand and Shield Wall currently.

Wardari wrote:The glyph actually works pretty well and we only use this for normal mode anyway where the DPS requirements aren't an issue, and again this is only used when we don't have other cooldowns available to tank through the enrage (usually two retadins with guradian spirit and bubble plus my own shield wall usually do the trick nicely). For hard mode we use the kiting strat as it's simply not viable on healer mana to tank through the enrages, unless you're using a Blood DK ofc

On hard mode, the DPS requirements are such that kiting is not an option. Our DK tank MUST be the MT here because none of our other available classes can cut it. Even though external cooldowns COULD get me through it, IBF tivializes the encounter because it's available for every Surge. The external cooldowns that I would need to enable the fight can then be used on the DK at any other time in order to reduce incoming damage and increase the longevity of our healer's mana.

Wardari wrote:Not to mention that we currently have to lose our AD for 2 minutes because the guardian spirit part is so good - I don't recall other tanks loosing a part of their main mitigation or effective health after using their cooldowns.

I believe this is incorrect. The current AD doesn't do this. It was only the original (and super powerful) version that had this effect. AD will still mitigate even after it saves you.

Wardari wrote:I personally feel fine in terms of effective health if you look at our position, I currently have far far more health than our Warrior tanks and thanks to Devo Aura I have more armor too...

Devotion Aura is not exclusive to you and the Warrior can and usually will have access to it as well.

Wardari wrote:TL:DR version - Paladins are in a fairly good position regarding effective health right now I certainly feel comfortable with 25 mans and the new AD will compliment this perfectly giving us that little bit more edge. I do however still maintain that the guardian spirit part is too much and they should remove it and find a way to give us another minor cooldown like the Druids Barkskin - my Glyph suggestion may seem a bit crap as we'd have to glyph for this but this is no different to Warriors having to Glyph for Last Stand and Shield Wall currently.

Warriors do not HAVE to Glyph for Shield Wall. Glyphing it allows it's use as an emergency tool more often, and may be key when first learning an encounter. However, on the hard mode fights that are built around the expectation of a cooldown, it is a far stronger tool to use unglyphed. Keep in mind that there is a distinction between emergency tools and cooldowns used to respond to a fight mechanic. For example, a premature healer death or DC would warrant the use of an emergency tool, but such a situation can never be predicted. Fusion Punch expects the use of such a tool and so you can prepare and time it accordingly each and every time.

The new AD will provide exactly what Is needed for both cases. I want to be able to use a second cooldown to eat an Unbalancing Strike. I want to be able to sit through two Fusion Punches without having to stack the raid. I want to be able to rely on something else when the shit hits the fan. What strikes me as unique about AD is truly only apparent when you consider the package as a whole. The passive damage mitigation will specifially reduce those hits and those situations so dangerous that you'd want to pop an emergency button. In this way it works as a sort of anti-cooldown by passively reducing the moments where we'd need to pop an emergency button while providing the survivability tool we need to compete through fights that expect and are designed around their use.

Wardari wrote:The glyph actually works pretty well and we only use this for normal mode anyway where the DPS requirements aren't an issue, and again this is only used when we don't have other cooldowns available to tank through the enrage (usually two retadins with guradian spirit and bubble plus my own shield wall usually do the trick nicely). For hard mode we use the kiting strat as it's simply not viable on healer mana to tank through the enrages, unless you're using a Blood DK ofc

toothdecaykills wrote:On hard mode, the DPS requirements are such that kiting is not an option. Our DK tank MUST be the MT here because none of our other available classes can cut it. Even though external cooldowns COULD get me through it, IBF tivializes the encounter because it's available for every Surge. The external cooldowns that I would need to enable the fight can then be used on the DK at any other time in order to reduce incoming damage and increase the longevity of our healer's mana.

Fair enough, we've not yet downed Vezax Hard mode on 25 man, so I'll happily take this as a fair point until I find otherwise myself.

Wardari wrote:Not to mention that we currently have to lose our AD for 2 minutes because the guardian spirit part is so good - I don't recall other tanks loosing a part of their main mitigation or effective health after using their cooldowns.

toothdecaykills wrote:I believe this is incorrect. The current AD doesn't do this. It was only the original (and super powerful) version that had this effect. AD will still mitigate even after it saves you.

I appear to have misunderstood something then, as I thought that the 2 minute of AD effect was lost even with the recent revise where the healing scales with defense etc.

Wardari wrote:I personally feel fine in terms of effective health if you look at our position, I currently have far far more health than our Warrior tanks and thanks to Devo Aura I have more armor too...

toothdecaykills wrote:Devotion Aura is not exclusive to you and the Warrior can and usually will have access to it as well.

If you're comparing tanks you'll need to compare them on a base to base value otherwise I can say well I get an additional 2.5k health from commanding shout.

*edit* As for what Jere said below - we'd have to take both tanks minus all buffs - I've still got higher effective health as I'm a way out in front on health to our Warriors, but armor would be identical in the same gear.

Wardari wrote:TL:DR version - Paladins are in a fairly good position regarding effective health right now I certainly feel comfortable with 25 mans and the new AD will compliment this perfectly giving us that little bit more edge. I do however still maintain that the guardian spirit part is too much and they should remove it and find a way to give us another minor cooldown like the Druids Barkskin - my Glyph suggestion may seem a bit crap as we'd have to glyph for this but this is no different to Warriors having to Glyph for Last Stand and Shield Wall currently.

toothdecaykills wrote:Warriors do not HAVE to Glyph for Shield Wall. Glyphing it allows it's use as an emergency tool more often, and may be key when first learning an encounter. However, on the hard mode fights that are built around the expectation of a cooldown, it is a far stronger tool to use unglyphed. Keep in mind that there is a distinction between emergency tools and cooldowns used to respond to a fight mechanic. For example, a premature healer death or DC would warrant the use of an emergency tool, but such a situation can never be predicted. Fusion Punch expects the use of such a tool and so you can prepare and time it accordingly each and every time.

The new AD will provide exactly what Is needed for both cases. I want to be able to use a second cooldown to eat an Unbalancing Strike. I want to be able to sit through two Fusion Punches without having to stack the raid. I want to be able to rely on something else when the shit hits the fan. What strikes me as unique about AD is truly only apparent when you consider the package as a whole. The passive damage mitigation will specifially reduce those hits and those situations so dangerous that you'd want to pop an emergency button. In this way it works as a sort of anti-cooldown by passively reducing the moments where we'd need to pop an emergency button while providing the survivability tool we need to compete through fights that expect and are designed around their use.

I disagree, Warriors do have to Glyph for Shield wall to compete with the other tanks in reality, if we're using Vezax enrage as the benchmark for cooldown usage seeing as it's the make or break fight for this type of thing where you can really tell the tanks apart.

In fact almost every Warrior tank I know right now is glyphing for this on Vezax and if doing hard modes are glyphed for it always.

They changed AD a few PTR patches ago. The DR still exists after the GS effect goes off.

Also, I think his point was (if I read it right) if you are going to include Devo Aura only for pallies, you can't say we have more health. Warriors will have more health with CS up. Either you need to include them separately, meaning warriors have more health and pallies have more armor, or you need to include them for both, where pallies have more health sometimes and both have about the same armor.

jere wrote:They changed AD a few PTR patches ago. The DR still exists after the GS effect goes off.

Also, I think his point was (if I read it right) if you are going to include Devo Aura only for pallies, you can't say we have more health. Warriors will have more health with CS up. Either you need to include them separately, meaning warriors have more health and pallies have more armor, or you need to include them for both, where pallies have more health sometimes and both have about the same armor.

I actually have more health than our Warriors when they buff themselves with Commanding shout, around 1k more in fact but I am going faily stamina heavy but who isn't right now - I think our 10% stamina from talents serves us really well due to its scalability. You could also factor in our 10% stamina from BoK as our equivalent of commanding shout I guess if you wanted to be really picky in which case i'm miles out in front of our Warriors - but again this is rather a moot point as we're throwing buffs all around now.

But I understand your point Jere.

I guess the best way to make the comparison is totally unbuffed, i'm still a good way out in front of our Warriors on health and armor is almost identical ofcourse.