Ability Theory: "Seal of Protection"

So I got to thinking earlier, what if there was a new seal designed solely for tanking? The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea. It would have to follow these basic rules, I think:

- Having the seal active should give some sort of benefit to the tank, while still causing a competitive amount of threat vs SoR
- The Judgement should give some sort of raid utility, whether it debuffs the mob's damage output, increases the damage the mob takes, or gives some other raid benefit like JoW or JoL
- It should be deep in the prot tree, so raids would HAVE to have a prot paladin in order to get the benefit from the judgement, as opposed to a Holy paladin dropping 11-21 points into Prot to get it. Ideally it would be a 26-point talent or deeper.
- It should keep in balance with other tanks' abilities, and only give us what we need to be *equal*, not *better*.
- It should not be redundant with anything we already have, ie: a % damage reduction on the player (we already have Righteous Fury)

So I thought I'd present the notion to the Maintankadin community and see what we could come up with. There's a lot of very solid theorycrafters here, and I think with the combined efforts of the minds here we could come up with something that would give us a bit of raid utility and a bit more survivability, while keeping us in line with Warrior and Druid tanks. We could then present the idea to Blizzard, and although they typically aren't very receptive to skill ideas that the players present, if it's particularly well-thought-out and presented well, it should at least put the notion in their heads.

So, here's a base idea, let's see what we can come up with

Seal of Protection
210 Mana
Instant Cast
Fills the paladin with a holy light for 30 seconds, increasing <something> by <an amount> and causing all melee attacks to <do something>.

Unleashing this Seal's energy will judge an enemy for 20 sec, causing <something to the judged enemy> and <something that causes threat>. Your melee strikes will refresh the spell's duration. Only one Judgement per Paladin can be active at any one time.

I think maybe the seal could increase block value, probably by a set value as a percentage would be redundant with shield spec. Maybe 4 ranks, 25/50/75/100 block value? It could also do a small amount of damage which does extra threat on top of RF's bonus (like Holy Shield's +35% threat).

For the judgement: An attack speed debuff on the mob would be redundant with Tclap and not really playing to our strengths either. Maybe a -damage dealt, say 5%? Perhaps something a little more original, I'm not sure. Reduced chance to hit maybe. It could also just "cause a large amount of threat", somewhere in the 900-1000 range at 70.

Thoughts?
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Me, LOL!

Seal of Protection
210 Mana
Instant Cast
Fills the paladin with a holy light for 30 seconds, increasing <health> by <10% of total health> and causing all melee attacks to <do holy damage equal to 1% of total health>.

Unleashing this Seal's energy will judge an enemy for 20 sec, causing <something to the judged enemy> and <holy damage equal to 5% of total health>. Your melee strikes will refresh the spell's duration. Only one Judgement per Paladin can be active at any one time.

Something off the top of my head to help deal with the lower stamina on pally tanks. the % are just something i tossed in there for easy math.

Your standard kara pally tank will see ~1500 hp gain with on swing dmg ~150 and judgement dmg ~750. Kind of like an upgraded version of righteousness that will scale our threat output with gear. Threat is never really and issue for pallies but it would also allow for more liberal use of tanking weapons adding additional slots for mitigation/avoidance.

Might be overpowered but i doubt a warrior tank with the same level gear will have a hard time matching or beating the hp totals.

Could also go another direction based off Lore's suggestion

Seal of Protection
210 Mana
Instant Cast
Fills the paladin with a holy light for 30 seconds, increasing <block value> by <25/50/75/100%> and causing all melee attacks to <holy dmage equal to 25/50/75/100% of total block value>.

Unleashing this Seal's energy will judge an enemy for 20 sec, causing <the targets armor value to be reduced by X stacks up to 5 times> and <something that causes threat>. Your melee strikes will refresh the spell's duration. Only one Judgement per Paladin can be active at any one time.

kind of like a pally sunder since you wont have warriors stacking sunders and it saves rogue combo points. it would take longer to build up a full stack (40 secs atleast).

how about something that when judged adds help to a non pali tank, that way more people would want it...

something like, Top threat player gains 1/2/3/4/5% more threat bonus.

I think the BV seal is good too btw.

(trying to put it in the right format)

Seal of Protection
210 Mana
Instant Cast
Fills the paladin with a holy light for 30 seconds, increasing <Block Value> by <10/20/30/40/50%> and causing all melee attacks to <add 10/20/30/40/50% Holy damage>.

Unleashing this Seal's energy will judge an enemy for 20 sec, causing <Healing your party for 125 + BV> and <Threat holder to gain 1/2/3/4/5% more threat>. Your melee strikes will refresh the spell's duration. Only one Judgement per Paladin can be active at any one time.
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Dwarf Pali on Ner'Zhul
"Mostly Harmless"

Interesting...
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Me, LOL!

I like the seals ideas so far. There could be an increase in our spell damage somewhere based on either our intel, current spell damage, block or health.

The judgement could be a reverse Judgement of the crusader. A mob affected by it would have his attack speed increased but his attack power reduced. It would work on one of our strenght ( Holy shield and fast attackers ) and "reduce" the effects of the hp gap since we would receive smaller hits.

I'm not sure how mobs work so it would have to be either Strenght reduced, attack power reduced or just a %.

Unleashing this Seal's energy will judge an enemy for 20 sec, causing him to attack 30% faster but reduces his damage dealt by 10% . Your melee strikes will refresh the spell's duration. Only one Judgement per Paladin can be active at any one time.


Note : All the numbers thrown here are just "filler", they should be ajusted.

Note2 : I think the lack of spell reflect is one of our biggest weakness. I do think it would be better included in a blessing than in a seal. Your next topic should be about that
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I still want something to address the spell reflect and the damage issue.

The Tclap/Demo shout is also a serious issue. Some kind of similar effect is seriously necessary for the "Maintankadin" concept to be real.

I won't even go into the last stand/shield wall debate right now because it has been beaten to a pulp.

1) Mitigation effects
2) Spell Reflect
3) HP issues

Highlighting my issues here, I like the idea of a tanking seal/judgement. It would deal with issue numero uno for paladin tanking. Ideally replace Weapon Expertise with this talent. It would be so deep in the tree, only "main tankadins" would be able to touch it. I disagree with you so much that it shouldn't be similar to tclap or redundant to it. It needs to replace it imo.

Remember your comments in my Gruul kill thread Lore? I was wondering Why the hell I took 20% more damage then the warrior tank in my guild and you pointed out Tclap. Second time around when I tanked him, I had a warrior maintain it for the entire fight. I ended up taking 12K more damage overall then the warrior in a similar fight a couple weeks before in the same amount of growths.
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I think it would be pretty interesting to have a Spell that doubled or possible even more than doubled are white dmg. I know it would effect our threat so that would have to be worked in also but this would allow us to take full advantage of many great tanking weaps that for me just fall short on the threat meter.
The Suneater for example is a great tank weapon but we usually have to add plus 40 spell dmg to it rather than a mongoose enchant and even then we are sacrifing a large amount of threat. This all depends on what your total spell dmg is of course but I would think the majority of us get most of our spell dmg from our weap and the others add plus 40 to theirs.
If its deep enough into the tree you would not have to worry about Ret palis using it to be overpowered either with a 2h weap.

If judged it could lower your targets armor/spell resistances by X percent

Unleasing it would slow the target by X% like Thunder claps for X amount of time

Just a thought
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http://armory.worldofwarcraft.com/character-sheet.xml?r=Feathermoon&n=Hamerhead

what we need is a seal that we can use that prevents fears... now this seal would be the only paladin seal on a timer (20 seconds) and when judged it would apply an attack speed debuff.


Seal of the fearless

Holy Light fills the paladin and he is made fearless. During the duration of this seal all attacks deal holy damage (like SoR but less of an amount)

Judgement of the fearless- saps the courage from targeted enemy reducing his attack speed by 10% lasts for 30 seconds requires melee strikes to refresh, will not stack with other attack speed debuffs.
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While it's not entirely on topic the way Lore started it... what about a Judgment that worked based on our strengths? What are our current strengths? We can survive a lot of hits remaining uncrushable. So for mobs that are fast attackers we have the advantage vs. warriors. What if there was a judgment that increased attack speeds (made the mob swing faster) while drastically lowering attack power? Say... 20% increased attack speed while giving a 25% decreased AP. No matter how you swing it, it would be a decrease in damage received, but for paladins with their high amount of blocks from Holy Shield it would give us a unique advantage and work towards our strengths.

And to reply to Mortehl, this is one of the ones that bothers me the most. Yes we are not as powerful at fighting casters as warriors are... but in the same vein, as I mentioned above, warriors are not as powerful at fighting fast attackers as we are. It is and has always seemed to me that it was an intentional design to create situations where each class of tanks has a portion where they excel at. Can a warrior tank a fast attacker? Yes. Can a paladin tank a caster? Yes. But each one excels where it does, and that's what I think the long term intent is.

Right now we are in the midst of a transferral from only warriors tanking to warriors, bears and paladins tanking. The last ones to adapt will be the raid encounter designers since as they were designing the content most of us are getting to just now (Gruul, Mags, SSC, and TK) the devs in class design were just working on the changes to the classes they were going to make. I expect new instances like BT, ZA, and the next expansion will be built with some a respectable amount of the bosses able to and preferably tanked by a paladin. Will that make us feel better now? No. But wanting to transform us into little warriors with a mana bar instead of a rage bar is the wrong answer to me. If I wanted to use all those handy warrior abilities, I'll level and tank as my warrior. I'd rather have unique abilities that make me valuable not as a replacement for a warrior, but as a paladin.
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My Blog: http://kazielmmo.blogspot.com/

oooh nice ideas all.

I thought about it a little and heres what I came up with.

Divine Judgement - Trainable up to 5 ranks, replaces weapon expertise

All the paladin's seal are now capable of dealing holy damage equivalent to 5% of their total spell damage.
In addition all the paladins judgement causes the target to deal 5% less damage from all sources.

Reasoning:

This ability is very deep into the protection tree. Imagine a judgement of light/wisdom constantly being refreshed by a paladin and in addition to this the raid boss is also dealing 5% less total damage to the entire raid. Not only that the seal also grants an additional holy damage component, a paladin can run seal of light/wisdom depending on the situation or continue running seal of righteousness to boost his/her dps.

What this does is to give a deep prot spec paladin more raid viability even if Main Tank position has already been taken up The idea of boss mob dealing 5% less damage can seem somewhat attractive to some raid leaders who are keen on ensuring their raid survives. Alternatively raid leaders may also decide to use LESS HEALERS and bring in more DPS to ensure the encounter goes even faster.


In regards to countering fears...

Perhaps we could have a talent that does this.
For simplicity sake I just call it..Divine Will

Divine Will
Self Cast
Duration 5 minutes
Cooldown 5 minutes
Mana: 1200
5 Charges

The paladin is imbued with the will of the light and thus cannot be swayed or affected by certain negative effects such as stun, fear and silence.
Fear, stun, silence has no effect on the paladin the moment it is casted, however each time these abilities are casted on the paladin, it consumes one charge. In addition each time the charge is expended the paladin gains 100 health and mana.
This ability will expire when all 5 charges are used up.
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