How do you solve a problem like Paladin AOE threat?
Ominously, Ghostcrawler declared last week in a post:
The threat-related goals still remain:
…
2) Paladin — Nerf the threat capacity of HoR and SoC.
Now, I may have played the chicken little several times in the past and yet we still made out pretty well, generally. Despite two or three dire predictions of imminent nerfs, the worst we got was the Sacred Duty retuning. As for threat, well, that’s a horse of a different color.
Is Paladin threat too good? Generally yes, although not for the reasons that GC and others on the tanking forums would describe. For one, in the one case that Ghostcrawler is correct, Seal of Command was poorly designed and executed, and gave us an easily obtained threat boost that really should have been restricted to Ret Pallies.
SoComm has really only been useful since ShoR was perhaps unintentionally moved to being a melee attack in the early days of 3.3. Before then we procced the effect much less, to the point where it was useless for tanking. Post-ShoR change and suddenly the fastest and easiest way to pumped out the AOE teeps (like deeps, but moar threatnin’) was to switch to Seal of Command and go nuts on any clumbs of mobs in your path.
As for Hammer of the Righteous, is it really that overpowered? Really?
I would say no, but perhaps I’m biased. I see little difference between it and the Warrior cleave aside from the fact that ours hits an additional target (but has a cooldown) and automatically pierces armor thanks to the damage being of the Holy school.
Side thought: if HotR was so overpowered (and this is something GC has been hinting that he feels for some time) then why, oh why, does the Paladin t10 2pc bonus increase its damage by 20%?
They tried to tinker with HotR in the past, around the time of the 3.2 ptr, briefly shifting its damage to physical. This made HotR not only hit for less (now being mitigated by armor) but also do less threat thanks to not gaining the Righteous Fury +threat to Holy spells. They played around with changing how much damage the attack did, and then baking in a +threat modfier, but eventually decided to just revert the change and leave it as is. Kicking the ball down the road, I suppose.
I wonder if this change is now on the table again.
In the end what it comes to down is, yes, we are gods of AOE threat, and that must be changed with us being adjusted down. How would I prefer this be done? For starters, make SoComm require a 2H weapon and make it the exclusive domain of Ret Pallies. Otherwise, if the intention is to let Prot keep it, adjust down how much damage the cleave does (though this will disproportionately hurt the Rets).
… Although, I do enjoy the irony of Rets taking a nerf on the chin because of us. Usually it’s the other way around!
Er, but I digress. The other recommendation is: wait and see how our AOE threat is outside of Icecrown. I strongly suspect that our AOE threat is being exaggerated, so to say, but the added damage of the Glyph of Sense Undead, Crusade’s 3% bonus, and the addition of Holy Wrath to our arsenal.
I suppose I could live with Hammer of the Righteous getting pared down, but I’d prefer that be last resort. I love that skill as is. And I’ve finally gotten over that awful CLANG noise it makes.
The only remaining question is this: is the nerf going to come pre-Cataclysm (and if so, why is it not on the PTR yet?) or will they just roll it into 4.0?
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I don’t believe the problem with Hammer of the Righteous is the hammer itself. I believe the problem is when it is combined with Seal of Command. Hammer hits 3 targets, 4 if glyphed and each target hit procs 2 cleaves. I have picked through logs and seen off of one hammer of the righteous 6 seal of command procs. Thats a helluva lot of easy aoe threat. If seal of command is taken away from prot it will be a step in the right direction to curbing aoe threat.
The big picture problem and the one that worries me the most is that paladins are built on AoE threat abilities. Only Shield of the Righteous and direct judgements are single target. Everything else includes some sort of AoE component to it. Ghostcrawler style of to the ground nerfing worries me a lot. There seems to be no in between. It’s either OP, or to the ground, and in my opinion the only way to really truly curb paladin aoe threat is to redesign all protection abilities as a whole.
I also would like to know which tank we will be tied to for this aoe nerf. If it is warriors I call BS that they have a hard time aoe tanking. I have aoe tanked on my warrior and it consists of charge, tclap, back up, shockwave and tab through and spam devastate, and revenge. More involved than paladin tanking yes, but certainly not more difficult.
Tijeras’s last blog ..Protadin: @anafielle I actually need to drop hit :( I am at almost 9%. I chose t10 gloves over Kraken because at the time I needed hit. w2trade now
Is it really a problem? I mean, are warriors/bears/DKs being told by their raid leaders: “the trash in ICC can be tanked really easily by a Paladin due to their amazing AOE threat, so we’re going with the Paladin over you, even though you are all about equal (okay, maybe not the DK) at single boss tanking and your threat output is similar on single bosses, and 90% of ICC is comprised of just single boss tanking.”
The only non-single bosses are: Gunship battle (but that can’t be a problem for anyone), Blood Council (but you don’t need to tank more then 1 prince at a time), Valitrhia Dreamwalker (but you really only need to be concerned with tanking the Aboms) and the Lich King
To me this is just warriors complaining that paladins have a nice shiney and they want a shiney too, and if they can’t have it, the paladin’s shiney should be taken away.
@Tijeras,
Are you sure? The SComm tooltip specifically states “when used with attacks or abilities that strike a single target, this additional Holy damage will strike up to 2 additional targets.” If you are correct, the inflated pally threat is actually a bug, and therefore all the uproar is over something not working as intended. If you were to judge, SoR, and melee attack, you would get the 6 procs, and none of them would actually come from the hammer.
On to the post…
I often wonder if the problem with SComm is the coding. All seals would function similarly when casting, and I am beginning to think Blizz doesn’t want to change the coding for one seal to have the 2 handed restriction. I mean what happens when you equip a one hander, does the seal drop? Does it just fail to proc? Would switching SComm with a 21, 31, 41 pointer really make all that much difference? I have noticed, while leveling another pally, that seal of righteousness really hits like a mack truck these days, especially if you are wearing some heirlooms. Maybe switching repentance with SComm so it is out of reach of prot pallies would really be the better choice, or would the CC being within reach for holies and prots be that game breaking?
“… Although, I do enjoy the irony of Rets taking a nerf on the chin because of us. Usually it’s the other way around!”
This made me laugh so hard. Thank you.
@Rhabella – I don’t think they’d want to put another CC in reach of holy/prot, mainly for Arena/PvP reasons. The last thing we need is more QQ about how Healadins are not only speccing prot to heal better, but also using another CC to add to their already ridiculous utility box.
@Rhidach
9 March 2010 at 4:29 pm #
@Rhabella: If they bury SoComm deeper in the tree that will hurt leveling Pallies for whom (coupled with the glyph) SoComm is awesome. I have no idea how they’d have to code it, maybe make it usable with a 1H weapon, but only procs when you have a 2H equipped. Or, even better, the developer’s could revert ShoR to pre-3.3 so it won’t proc parries/dodges/etc along with the cleave effect. And fix the Judgements of the Just effect proccing it while they’re at it. Kind of silly that SoComm is only as good as it is for us because two probable bugs make it proc.
@Tijeras: I’m wondering about that as well–I thought SoComm was only supposed to proc from judgements, ShoR, and melees. I thought everything else wouldn’t count. I may be wrong, I’ll have to check that tonight.
I was looking through logs earlier and as far as I can tell HoTR is proccing seal of command just by looking at the time interval. I am not an expert. Just looking at time intervals between a cast of HoTR and a Seal of command hit. There is no swing in between from the log. I could of course be wrong and this be a wild goose chase.
Here is a quick snippet from last week:
[21:21:03.065] Tijeras casts Hammer of the Righteous on The Damned
[21:21:03.077] Tijeras Seal of Command The Damned 459
[21:21:03.077] Tijeras Seal of Command The Damned *879*
[21:21:03.077] Tijeras Seal of Command The Damned *875*
[21:21:03.077] Tijeras Hammer of the Righteous The Damned 3391
[21:21:03.077] Tijeras Hammer of the Righteous The Damned 3391
[21:21:03.077] Tijeras Hammer of the Righteous The Damned 3391
Tijeras’s last blog ..Protadin: @anafielle I actually need to drop hit :( I am at almost 9%. I chose t10 gloves over Kraken because at the time I needed hit. w2trade now
@Rhidach
9 March 2010 at 5:41 pm #
Whoa, interesting! I wonder if that’s the initial hit proccing a cleave but not the chained hits, or if each hammer hit was proccing the normal SoComm extra holy damage… I’m definitely going to have to check the logs tonight.
HoR isn’t the problem, even glyphed. We need it for snap aggro. SoC is over the top, but how much of a difference would it make if they nerfed it now? You’re just going to piss off guilds that have prot pallies as a tank(s) by sowing them down on ICC trash.
The tooltip says that all melee attacks proc the seal, but only attacks that hit single target will proc the cleave. In the snippet posted above, HoR hit 3 targets so we get 3 SoComm single target procs.
HoR proccing attacks on all targets it hits isn’t new, doesn’t it do the same with SoCorr?
What I don’t get is that they boosted the HotR in both Tier 9 and Tier 10, and now they’re saying it’s too strong.. Feels like the penance cooldown drama over again. I hope that what Tijeras said is what GC meant, that the threat of HotR AND (as in combined) with SoC need a nerf, not the individual components.
Wait a second, could he have meant Hand of Reckoning with HoR? That wouldn’t make any sense, but I’d expect GC to use the correct abbreviations.
Just drop SoC down the ret tree to make it too much of a cost for tanks to get it. That would solve the problems.
Paladins are already one of the fastest leveling classes (the fastest perhaps?), a small nerf with new players only getting SoC later down the road won’t kill anyone.
They’d have to drop it quite a ways down in the Ret tree to make it unattractive. Tankadins already go at least 20 points deep into Ret, and if they did move it far enough down out of our reach, then you have to wonder what would be swapped with it that wouldn’t completely mess with the tree’s structure, not to mention now be in our reach instead.
@Anafielle
10 March 2010 at 11:20 am #
It’s interesting to see your thoughts on these things – your predictions about pally nerfs have been scarily on the mark before.
The perfect fix imo is exactly what you suggested – restricting socomm to 2h weapons. And, hopefully, leaving HotR untouched.
I agree totally in that I think this is a problem that has been vastly exaggerated by how suited we are to Undead AOE trash. Holy Wrath, Sense Undead, Crusade… coupled with the SoComm bug (yes, I consider it a bug, I am pretty sure its tanking utility was a totally unintended side effect) have blown the whole Pallies Are Gods At AOE Tanking thing vastly our of proportion.
As someone pointed out further up in the comments, our ability to glue ICC trash to us has very, very little effect on what TRULY matters – boss fight tanking!
OK, there are boss fights where SoComm is great. Gunship defense. Deathwhisper phase 1. Saurfang to nab all those blood beasts! :3 Just kidding…
Anyways.. I hope they make a change to SoComm without touching Hammer of the Righteous. ><
Anafielle's last blog ..Blood Queen Lanathel (10) Zerg Strategy
@hazmacewillraid
10 March 2010 at 3:52 pm #
My Seal o’ Cleave is JUST fine, thanks. 13k DPS on the trash to Marrowgar is what I live for.
In all honesty though, yes, SoC is good for leveling early on, but only because:
a) It allows you to semi-AoE things down, and if you judge Light, then its happy-fun-heal-yourself-while-you-kill-shit time, and
b) The glyph allows you to regen 8% of your base mana per Judgement.
Seal of Righteousness, while only single-target, hits harder every time, especially glyphed. That being said, I wouldn’t be against Blizz putting SoC down farther in the Ret tree, but then they’d have to give us something else so leveling Rets don’t go on a murderous, one-button rampage because they are stuck with the same seals for God knows how long.
But hey, I haven’t leveled a paladin to 80 in almost a year, so perhaps times have changed.
Why not fix it the easy way?
Righteous Fury: Your holy damage does X% more threat.
Adjust down.
This allows tankadins to retain their DPS (oh look, I went from being 50% the damage of a DPS in Naxx to 20% by ICC and Ghostcrawler even admited tank DPS didn’t scale) while dropping our AoE threat substantially.
Is it really that hard to drop RF 10% and see how that scales Consecration/HoR threat?
Uninspired, that is simple to answer. SoC is used in one situation only, trash. If you are at a boss you will most likely use Seal of Corruption/Vengeance (maybe Seal of Wisdom if you are in a heroic and being healed by a Disc Priest). Seal of Command has few uses in bosses except for specific cases.
By nerfing Right. Fury you would be nerfing all aspects of paladin tanking, including boss tanking, where even if we are the best (pure speculation here), we are far from being OP.
The best option is to nerf something that affects ONLY trash threat and the only ability I can think of that we use only in trash and rearely on bosses is SoCommand.
Lanaka, partially answering your question, I’d say 2 tiers should do it. About Retribution tree structure, got to admit I didn’t gave it much thought, but I don’t think it would be that hurtful. If someone has the time to check it, it could enlight things a little.
@Rhidach
12 March 2010 at 9:17 am #
Yep, exactly, it’s our AOE tanking that’s too good. Single-target threat is right where it should be. You hit it right on the nose David.
My single target threat is still leagues ahead of an equally or better geared Prot warrior, and our DK only recently got anywhere near close to me. He now outgears me. I’m pushing close to twice the DPS the warrior is against a single target and against trash it is on par with our lowest DPS (Hey, they are trying…)
GC was specifically saying our AoE threat is too high and he stated that tank DPS was a problem. If we can get boosts to our damage to get us back to being half a DPS instead of 20% (I am regularly doing around 2.5-3k vs DPS doing 8-11K in the same fights) our threat boost can get drop. Make the increase in DPS come from the single target components of our damage and we are golden.
It may mean having HoR do more damage to the initial target than the cleaves, and ShoR do more (put in a PVP damage cap and leave PVE alone)
As for SoC: Don’t bother moving it. Just add: “When using a 2-handed weapon” to the seal somewhere. It still does its job at low levels and that fixes the issue with the 9 person cleaves. (Great, now I gotta check this to see how insane my damage is, I am guessing this is going to make heroics even more brainless…)
I’m not sure what is happening with you Uninspired but I also run with a roughly equally geared Warrior tank and I don’t see the “leagues ahead” difference you are talking about. My DPS is typically higher (maybe 500-600) but since I usually smoke him on the little trash in ICC that isn’t surprising. On single targets (bosses) I am also higher but I’m certainly not pushing and DPSers for Recount ranking! As far as the threat comparison between my Warrior buddy and me I would say it is just about right. We are typically with a few% of each other depending on who has the boss and swaps go pretty cleanly. Why is such a big deal being made of “LOLgatherthemupandAOEthemdown” packs? I don’t cry about my pull slowing down incoming mobs compared to charging in….if they really want to make it all the same why not change the game to include only the following classes: Tank, Heals, Ranged DPS w/ pet, Ranged DPS w/o pet and Melee DPS?