looks like some changes are coming

taken from the new PTR build patch notes...

Agility: The amount of agility required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This change required recalibrating the amount of dodge a player has with 0 agility by a slight amount as well, so all players will see their dodge percentage vary a small amount.

Dodge Rating: The amount of dodge rating required per percentage of dodge has been increased by 15%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply.

Parry Rating: The amount of parry rating required per percentage of parry has been reduced by 8%. This is before diminishing returns. Combined with other changes, this makes dodge rating and parry rating equally potent before diminishing returns apply. Parry still diminishes more quickly than dodge.

Protection

Ardent Defender: Redesigned. Any damage that takes the paladin below 35% health is reduced. This reduction applies only to the portion that pushes the paladin below 35% health (example: a paladin at 50% health takes a 40% hit; the first 15% hits as normal while the next 25% is reduced). In addition, once every 2 minutes an attack that would have killed the paladin will fail to kill, and instead heal the paladin for up to 10/20/30% of maximum health depending on the paladin's defense rating (example: a paladin with defense equal to only 5 times his or her level will receive no healing from the talent, while a paladin who is immune to critical strikes from boss creatures through defense will receive the maximum amount).
Guarded by the Light: This talent will no longer cause Divine Plea's duration to be refreshed by using Judgement of Wisdom, Judgement of Justice, or Judgement of Light.

Retribution

Art of War: Now only applies to melee critical hits, but will make your next Flash of Light or Exorcism instant. In addition, this talent now provides notification in the floating combat text when it activates.

Guarded by the Light: This talent will no longer cause Divine Plea's duration to be refreshed by using Judgement of Wisdom, Judgement of Justice, or Judgement of Light.

WOW... -3% DR?!?!

Reading Comprehension Fail. Just means only melee range attacks will refresh it.

I'm wondering if this will make Parry/Stam gems more attractive. After DRs are taken into effect, that is.

I'm glad to see them fix AD so that holy pallys who are spec'd prot can't live forever.

So just to clarify, does this mean we no longer get the reduction if we are already under 35%?

Grehn|Skipjack wrote:Reading Comprehension Fail. Just means only melee range attacks will refresh it.

Funny, never knew till now judgements refreshed divine plea

Figured they'd do something to Dodge. It seems that DR didn't really do enough to reduce the high-avoidance tank problem. Ulu certainly has as much avoidance in T8 gear as he/she did in T5 gear.

vegardhv wrote:

Grehn|Skipjack wrote:Reading Comprehension Fail. Just means only melee range attacks will refresh it.

Funny, never knew till now judgements refreshed divine plea

Some do, some don't.

Dorianias wrote:So just to clarify, does this mean we no longer get the reduction if we are already under 35%?

Uhm, no?

All damage below 35% is reduced.

If you are above 35% and take a hit that keeps you above 35%, then no damage is mitigated.

If you are below 35% and take a hit, all damage is mitigated.

If you are above 35% and take a hit that pushes you below 35%, all the damage past 35% is mitigated.

So it's like it was always intended, but it's no longer leapfroggable.

Well, gotta say the avoidance change sucks very hard. Are they trying to enforce all tanks to become stam-whores or something? I mean, i expect this to increase my damage intake by some 10% at the very least, sounds like a huge nerf, mostly if I'll go say 5% down on avoidance, I'll be 50% more likely to take 3 hits in a row. Sounds like a lot.

Oh well that'd be the QQ, now, anyone up for calculating at what rate will parry become competitive with dodge?

This could also possibly make agi competitive to dodge when one gets near the 30% dodge mark.

EDIT: oh hi viewtopic.php?f=6&t=24554

MrDuck wrote:Well, gotta say the avoidance change sucks very hard. Are they trying to enforce all tanks to become stam-whores or something?

This has been an issue since Sunwell, one Blizz evidently hoped they'd fixed by implementing DR on avoidance. Basically, after a certain point, it becomes impossible to balance boss fights around a high avoidance tank. You either have to boost boss damage to the point where two unavoided hits will kill a tank, implement some kind of bullshit debuff (oh hai, Sunwell Radience) or just accept that high avoidance will trivialise the fight.

Ulushnar wrote:

MrDuck wrote:Well, gotta say the avoidance change sucks very hard. Are they trying to enforce all tanks to become stam-whores or something?

This has been an issue since Sunwell, one Blizz evidently hoped they'd fixed by implementing DR on avoidance. Basically, after a certain point, it becomes impossible to balance boss fights around a high avoidance tank. You either have to boost boss damage to the point where two unavoided hits will kill a tank, implement some kind of bullshit debuff (oh hai, Sunwell Radience) or just accept that high avoidance will trivialise the fight.

Well yea,that's kinda understandable, and I haven't seen what my stats will look like in T9 yet. However, in T8 it doesn't look all that bad imo. I'm in pretty much BiS gear pre-hard25 (slacking on the boots only,will get 'em today!) and my avoidance is only slightly higher than in my BC gear, which included pre-kara, some T4, few T5 and two T6 pieces (gemming still pretty much the same way,had epic gems back then tho).

Well I had to moan about it, I love avoidance a lot, so inevitably losing it will hurt me more than an usual stam-whore :p

So much for the 3:3:1 ratio.

It will be interesting to see what my percentages are when all of this is said and done. I wonder if this will help balance out DK's some.

Thels wrote:

Dorianias wrote:So just to clarify, does this mean we no longer get the reduction if we are already under 35%?

Uhm, no?

All damage below 35% is reduced.

If you are above 35% and take a hit that keeps you above 35%, then no damage is mitigated.

If you are below 35% and take a hit, all damage is mitigated.

If you are above 35% and take a hit that pushes you below 35%, all the damage past 35% is mitigated.

So it's like it was always intended, but it's no longer leapfroggable.

This is correct. The most recent change was to make the heal provided by the "Guardian Spirit" proc to scale from 0 to 30% of your maximum hp based off of your defense rating. So a regular level 80 with 400 defense rating will get no health and will still die (a pally wearing holy gear spec'd deep into prot) and anyone wearing 540 defense will get the full benefit of the heal (30% if you've put 3 points into the talent).

It was just a nerf to holy pallys with a prot build so that they couldn't live forever.

Ulushnar wrote:

MrDuck wrote:Well, gotta say the avoidance change sucks very hard. Are they trying to enforce all tanks to become stam-whores or something?

This has been an issue since Sunwell, one Blizz evidently hoped they'd fixed by implementing DR on avoidance. Basically, after a certain point, it becomes impossible to balance boss fights around a high avoidance tank. You either have to boost boss damage to the point where two unavoided hits will kill a tank, implement some kind of bullshit debuff (oh hai, Sunwell Radience) or just accept that high avoidance will trivialise the fight.

You would've thought they had learned enough about that than to give so much avoidance on early gear in this expansion. They kind of shot themselves in the foot and needed this change to balance things out a little.