The time has come Blizz: give us stances
Warrior tanks go into defensive stance. Druids shift into bear form. DKs apply frost presence.
Paladins do not have an equitable ability (Righteous Fury is not, at a nuts and bolts level, the same).
Ghostcrawler, want to differentiate the three Paladin specs and make it so each cannot dabble into the realms of the other two? The only way is by forcing Paladins to choose a stance.
Make Devotion Aura the tank stance. Fold RF’s threat multiplier into it, make certain abilities being exploited by Ret/Prot or Holy/Prot pvpers dependent on Devo Aura, like Avenger’s Shield. Also, take Divine Protection off Forbearance when using Devo Aura.
Retribution Aura becomes the dps stance, with a huge damage multiplier (along with a baseline damage nerf to balance the two out), and attach a threat reduction to it. Concentration Aura becomes the healing stance, with a healing multiplier (and again, a baseline healing nerf). Normal aura buffs given to party/raid members still apply.
I have no idea how to square this with resistance auras, however.
Basically, the idea is, if you want to segregate the specs, then do it like you do with every other class. Make Paladins choose their role, rather than neutering our abilities and watering down our capabilities to make up for imbalances. It’s clear being a “utility” class means little or nothing anymore, so let’s go whole hog and fix this nonsense once and for all.
Trust me, you don’t want stances.
With stances comes ability restriction and with that comes stance dancing. We can’t use MANY abilities, even utility ones like Hamstring, Intercept, Charge, Pummel (interrupt), Thunder Clap, Revenge, Overpower, Shattering Throw, Rend among others.
All of them have stance restrictions and for any spec it may be beneficial to use one of them while performing your role, in fact Blizzard wants us to have to do it. It takes a GCD to go there and back and costs us almost all our Rage. Stances are awful.
The LoH nerf sucks but nothing compared to what stances would do to you. Druids get all their required tools in Bear form with no need to ever shift out except for a Battle Rez and DKs get it the best in that they have NO stance restrictions of any kind as far as ability lock outs.
With Stances comes a LOT of punishment.
Plus what would you do if you had no Prot Paladin in the raid and needed the buff from Devo aura on the tanks?
@honorshammer
Great minds think alike?
http://honorscode.blogspot.com/2009/10/my-stance-on-paladin-ptr-changes.html
@Demogar – I imagine you’d do the same thing you would if you didn’t have a paladin in the raid at all – you’d deal with it.
I don’t care for the idea much as a whole. However, I also don’t know that it would really hurt us that much either. All of the attack/healing spells fit pretty well no matter where they are. LoH is the only exception, and only applies in PvP.
I think the bubbles are where the changes need to be made:
Divine Protection – Prot Only
Hand of Protection – Ret Only
Divine Shield – Holy Only
The tank needs to be able to cut his damage taken in half, so give him DP. Ret giving up their ability to attack in exchange for a few seconds of physical immunity would fix the QQ from PvP. Holy is the only spec that needs to have a full agro dump and total immunity. I don’t see that it needs to have Forbearance applied to it, the cooldown should be enough.
My prot pally uses DS when he’s soloing group quests or instances, but he doesn’t need it in a raiding environment.
@Rhidach
@Honors: Eek, it looks like I cribbed your post, haha. Still, you said it better than I did.
@Demo: I’ll take the punishment of being restricted to a tanking stance over watching my abilities slowly get watered down any day of the week.
To quote XT….
NO, NO, NO, NO
I tanked with a warrior through Vanilla and BC. Like Demo said – stances suck. It’s actually something Blizzard has been looking to move away from IIRC. Plus, this is one of the defining parts of the Paladin. Auras baby. It’s like shaman totems to some extent. Auras are one of the things that set us aprart – I’d hate to see that go.
Don’t get me wrong – LoH is a great “OH *@*$” spell. I generally trigger it right after AD, or when AD is on cool down and I slip again. So I can’t use that – wooo.
Stances – bad. Putting more heal centric talents into Holy – better. Forebearance – clunky.
More on my site later today – I have a lot of thoughts to organize up.
I don’t want stances for pallys. You get in a raid with multiple Paladins and stacking auras becomes problematic. If every Ret pally has to run Retribution aura to get their DPS up to snuff, then none of them will run Fire Resist aura during a fight where that 130 Fire resistance can mean the difference between folks living and dying from raid AoE damage (e.g. – Koralon). Same situation applies to Holy and Prot pallys if Concentration and Devotion auras become mandatory for those specs to perform their roles as healers and tanks.
One of the major reasons why stances wouldn’t be appropriate is because we have a relatively low number of non-passive talents at baseline. Many of those are on long or shared cooldowns, effectively making the former rarely used (LoH) and the latter count as one spell (3 Judgements). Stances would be inevitably linked to talented abilities, effectively creating redundancy in restriction where none need exist.
I’d approach the problem from a different, and more tradition angle – Talents. Currently our major powerful cooldowns are baseline and talents are the everyday run of the mill tools which everyone needs to do their job properly and most other classes (even hybrids) get at baseline. So, why don’t we flip it for Paladins: swap baseline long cooldown skills such as LoH and DS with a low power version of oft-used talents such as Holy Shock and Avengers Shield. Then talents can do what they should have done all along, improve those baseline versions in simple or innovative ways. Weak restrictions on abilities such requiring an equipped shield, linked cooldowns and the like would serve as a check on PvP power.
With LoH, DP and DS deep in talent trees Forbearance would be a non-issue.
Of course, that’s a lot of work. Which is why they’ll keep sticking in Forbearance and change very little in Cataclysm.
@Rhidach
@SZ: My only issue with relying on talents to separate the specs is what we’re seeing in pvp right now (and let’s be honest, every one of these proposed Paladin changes tumbles down from pvp complaints) is that Paladins are speccing one way and gearing another. I agree that stances are probably an inelegant solution, but Blizzard wants there to be a hard wall between the heal/dps/tank roles, and I don’t think they’re going to find it by tinkering around with base numbers or talents.
@Suicide – I think we’ll see a huge revamp in Cataclysm. I agree Forbearance is clunky, but for a patch it’s a better fix than trying to move talents and baseline spells. Especially with the intended release a step or two around the corner. Just like AW, they eventually moved it away from Forbearance, and I think LoH will do the same before this goes live.
@Rhidach
@adgamorix: Yeah, I agree. I doubt the Forbearance+LoH change will be long-lived (hence my failure to freak out over it).
I would actually welcome the differences in stances changed to differences in spec instead.
If I am specced Prot and switch to Berserker or Battle stance I don’t gain anything and actually lose DPS because I can’t use Revenge. Meaning I have ZERO reason to switch to those stances while tanking or PvPing as Prot.
if I am specced Arms and switch to Berserker or Defensive Stance I lose access to Overpower and Execute (if in D stance) or Rend (If in Berserker) making me 100% incapable of doing any real damage as Execute, Overpower and Rend are 90% of my damage. In return I mitigate a yawn inducing 10% additional damage, which in nothing when you aren’t geared to tank or are in PvP. 10% off a 30k hit isn’t going to save my life in DPS gear.
My point is they aren’t giving us a tradeoff for switching stances, if we go to an offspec stance then we are completely incapable.
Essentially they may as well just remove stances and make the abilities gained in those stances spec restricted. There really is no difference.
my only complaint with folding RF into Devotion Aura is that I won’t be able to use Devo Aura as an armor buff in raids with multiple ret paladins without over-threating everything, and it won’t work as a fake buff to eat a dispell in PvP. (and it wouldn’t give me a free flat 6% damage reduction for putting points into it anymore XD)
but yeah, everyone here has already said all the good ideas, so I’ll just throw in my moral support with a /agree
@Rhidach
It’s definitely an inelegant solution, if a solution at all. Good point though, RF is fun for a free buff/6% damage reduction in pvp.
One of the reasons I stopped playing my warrior in TBC was stances. I hated being in one stance, needing ability X… and knowing that by the time I used a GCD to get there it would be too late. Usually this was when trying to interrupt casters.
“Righteous Fury: Increases threat generated from Holy spells by 40%.” Baseline spell.
“Improved Righteous Fury: Decreases all damage taken by 6% and while Devotion Aura is active, Righteous Fury will generate an additional 40% threat.”
and this is one of the most ill-thought of changes made to Paladins in recent times. If the LoH change goes through as is then I will just be asking my paladin healer to never use it on me.
the change is already marking us out as a butt of more jokes concerning the class and some “pro” players who think this change is good for class balance or w/e.
the dev’s definitely threw the ball on this one.
and as for stances… i would love “stances”. we already have a “stance-sharing” system in place such as the healing effect from devo aura, or the damage effect from ret aura which apply regardless of what aura we run.
let’s say ret paladins get the retribution aura stance. let’s say that this stance gives us 10% more damage and they take out +damage talents from the tree and nerf damage to compensate. in that case, we can get a new talent that says “you retain 8% damage from ret aura while under the effect of any other aura. increases damage of ret aura by 100% and all damage done by any of your party/raid members is increased by 3% while under the effect of any aura.”
let’s say prot pallies get the devotion aura stance. let’s say the stance gives us 1800 armor and we have the RF bonus i mentioned above. This would effect improved devo aura since that gives us some more armor but you would compensate the removal of that by saying that you retain 22/33/67% armor bonus from devo aura while under the effect of any other aura and the amount healed on friendly targets while under the effect of any aura is increased by 2/4/6%
and stuff like that is how the stances should work for paladins. So we retain some of our group utility through auras as it stands now and we have a warrior/DK like system of stances. just my $50
I’d hate to see any of our threat or tanking abilities tied to our aura. This would mean sacrificing those abilities if we needed a resistance aura.
GC has already identified the real core of the problem, and I think we’ll see it fixed in Cat. Paladin base healing is just too good. A lot would be fixed if they say, made a 50 point talent restore the coefficient on healing spells – and the coefficient was reduced for all other specs.
Of course this would bone the prot/ret guy who didn’t have a holy offspec, but needed to off heal on a boss. Then again, IIRC spriests have pretty limited healing, same for feral/boomkin.
give holy pallies a fear/aoe stun. get rid of bubble. pvp balancing issues solved.
Bite your tongue!
All the holy/disc priests cry for their “holyform” but changing in and out of Shadowform sucks. It sucks.
I can’t imagine changing stances on a Warrior is much fun either.
Whatever needs to be done to specialise or limit the 3 roles that a Paladin can take, this, hopefully, isn’t it.
If they did go for a stance system the simple solution to current Auras is to have magor and minor Auras. Have it so we can have one of each active at once, so we can pick one Stance Aura and one Resist/Mount Aura a\to run with at once.
DK’s frost presence isn’t really a stance, is it? It’s similar to an aura in that every DK ability is still useable in any presence unlike for warrior or druid.