The left hand doesn’t know what the right is doing over at Blizzard. In holy power’s nascent days during beta, we were told by–no greater creature than Ghostcrawler himself–that crusader strike failing to generate HP on dodges/parries/misses would make the prot paladin rotation too dependant on luck to work fluidly.
The way they went about this was utterly deranged. There wasn’t a peep about it throughout the duration of the PTR and it only appeared out of the nether in the last week of testing. No one knew if it was a bug or an intended change, and pleas on the PTR boards went unanswered until patch launch when some random QA blue appeared, confirmed it was an intended (yet, mysteriously undocumented) change and managed to typo in that blocks also prevent HP generation. He’s since corrected himself, but the misstep seems indicative of a more pervasive problem in this whole process.
No one seems to have any idea what’s going on at Blizzard. This “intended change” probably would never have been volunteered as documented had others no spotted it first.
Even more abrasive is when questions about the change arose on the damage dealing forums, Zarhym appeared and declared:
This was a bug. A note for this has been added under the Paladin Bug Fixes section here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2166872
Missing attacks should not generate Holy Power. We generally don’t reward characters for failing to land attacks. Retribution paladins can improve their hit or expertise like other melee DPS specs do. Tanks don’t generally stack a lot of hit or expertise, but we think Protection paladins will still be able to tank just fine. Prot warriors for example miss Shield Slams.
But again, it was declared a bug back in beta by GC for HP to not generate on dodges/parries/misses. So, what changed exactly? All they did was reinstate a bug and call it a fix.
Moreover, is there a statement more asinine than “[w]e generally don’t reward characters for failing to land attacks”? You sure about that champ? As Theck argued on this thread,
A DK that misses with Death Strike does not lose the rune; they can recast immediately to get their shield. The real cost of a miss is a GCD.
A warrior that misses with Shield Slam is not locked out of Devastate for the duration of Shield Slam’s cooldown. Similarly, a Devastate miss does not lock them out of Shield Slam or increase Shield Slam’s current cooldown. And from what I’m told, they still generate rage on missed attacks. The real cost of miss is a GCD.
A rogue that misses with Sinister Strike is not prevented from casting SS again on the next GCD, nor do they stop generating energy during that time. The real cost of a miss is a GCD.
A paladin that misses with Crusader Strike now pushes back their next SotR (or WoG) by 3 seconds. It is entirely possible for an appropriately-geared raiding paladin (i.e. low hit, low expertise) to miss several CS in a row, delaying their hard-hitting attack by 6, 9, 12+ seconds.
It’s obvious Zarhym has no idea what he’s talking about if he thinks there’s an equivalence with Shield Slam.
And of course, his defense above is coming from the same CM team that assured bear tanks (in a different thread) that their armor buff was a tooltip fix. Which, obviously, it wasn’t. Oops. Bad info from the developers, it seems. Fancy that.
Why is the CM teams’ firefighting not reassuring in the slightest?
It doesn’t feel like a stealth nerf, because there doesn’t seem to be any clean reasoning why of all the knobs Blizzard could elect to turn they chose our resource generation. It can’t have been targeted at our threat, which is lower than other classes, and all that’s left for HP to affect is the frequency of which we cast Word of Glory and how often it’s available. I’m not going to defend our self-heals, because they’re over the top. However, if this change was how they decided to go about a nerf, then they could not have done it any more stupidly. Tune down Word of Glory’s scaling, don’t throw a monkey wrench in our resource generation. Hasn’t anyone at Irvine ever heard of Occam’s Razor?
In short: What the hell is going on at Blizzard?
We need to hear from Ghostcrawler on this. He’s the only one with any credibility left to speak on this matter.
Bonus sidenote: Theck crunched some numbers and determined that there still isn’t a compelling reason to stack hit/expertise, even in light of this boondoggle.
Aye. They still don’t have stats right. I watched our two Holy Pallys struggle with the nerfs last night in raid while I logged 12k+ hps on shield absorbs and heals on my disc priest, too OP in my opinion. I shouldn’t be out-healing them by that much. Pendulums seems to swing to such extremes. It’s very disheartening to see these changes overall. It’s like they don’t even think this stuff through, even on the PTRs.
Our Disc Priest was looking damned good last night, but we still had to keep on our toes for those times between shields. Plus it felt just a little odd to hand him both tanks while the two paladins healed the raid with Beacon backup on the tanks. With all the avoidable damage it makes for some oddly quiet moments when Renew and Shield are doing all the work.
Ghostcrawler and the CM team being inconsistent?
WELL I NEVER.
Try to hold onto your monocle, good sir!
My guess is that they want protections pushing the Divine Plea more often in case of misses. After all, protection doesn’t have any issues with mana and they went aaaallll the way to change a talent to give 3 Holy Power instantly and people were not using it. How rude!
(Last part should be sarcastic, btw).
I figured I would chime in to correct Theck’s assessment. Not to say he’s wrong about the change being wrong or to say that his mistake takes away the credibility of what he is saying but just to make sure that it is known. Warriors do not in fact generate rage on missed attacks.
Again, not saying that his opinion is discredited (don’t want to poke the angry hornet’s nest) but I just figure I would point it out.
In my opinion as layman as it is if they wanted to nerf your self healing there were better ways to do it.
What a crazy day.
You know, the devs would set themselves up for so much less QQ if they’d just be clear about these things from the beginning. We’d still QQ, but not like this. This change was handled all wrong by blues and the PR team.
I’ll look forward to the response. I’m sure there will be one.
I’m so sorry they ruined Rebuke Day for you guys, Rhidach! :/
While I don’t get whats going on at Blizz I have taken to being Hit capped not just to prevent the new HP ‘issue’ but to prevent Rebuke misses.
I have definably lost some stats but being able to reliably interrupt is sooo nice(probably just still basking in that moment).
we raided 10 man BWD last night, and like others said, threat still wasn’t an issue for me. I actually had a dps INCREASE over last week thanks to all the other changes, (most notably pretty much everything proc’ing seals) you can get a full censure stack on the pull in about 2-3 seconds!
The misses are annoying, and I hit a 2 HP SotR a few times out of muscle memory expecting a full powered one, but nothing to cause any threat/dps issues. This was with 1% hit and 16 exp.
I just agree that the whole situation was handled poorly. In 2 weeks, I imagine most of us will be done complaining about it and go on with our lives…. something that we could have done already had they announced this change on the PTR when it was first brought up!
Nails. A head of sorts. You know the rest.
I really wish Theck hadn’t brought up warriors, because he gets them all wrong and actually undermines his point.
Officially, the cooldown on Shield Slam is 6 seconds. However, each time a warrior hits Devastate or Revenge, it has a 30% chance to reset the cooldown of Shield Slam (as well as making it cost 0 rage). Missing Devastates or Revenges therefore effectively increases the average cooldown and rage cost of Shield Slam over the course of a fight.
Also, warriors do not generate rage on missed white attacks – in fact fury warrors have to stack hit to a few percent above the yellow cap to get enough white hits to generate enough rage to effectively use their rotation. (In 4.0.1-4.0.3, fury warriors would actually stack up to 20%+, because heroic strike was OP and cost a lot.)
I haven’t confirmed this since Cataclysm, but pre-4.0 warriors also lost the rage cost of their abilities when their yellow attacks were dodged or missed (but not when they were parried).
I don’t have strong feelings one way or the other about which way this should go, but I do find this whole outcry kind of surreal. Theck’s post seems to be reposted to everywhere that this debate is going on. From all sides I’m seeing (from my self-centered, warrior PoV), “It would be absurd to give the equivalent of this to warriors, so why are you giving it to us?!” while they point at features we’ve been comfortable with literally for years.
Clarification: I know that they’re not the same thing, that holy power generates much slower and that it’s a much higher average cooldown increase than Shield Slam. I’m not saying that it isn’t a concern for paladins because I know it is.
I’m just saying that the analogy was poor, both in scale and in being a “wouldn’t it be terrible if” analogy to something that is technically already there. I feel kind of like a happy Frenchman being pointed at by a US politician while he talks about how much worse my life would be if France had anything approaching socialized healthcare.
While there is a problem with inherently picking on the better of the two when the gap isn’t as large as perceived, there’s still a big problem.
(That and Theck compares more than just Warriors with Paladins (Death Knights, Rogues, etc))
Fact is, HoPo generation will be much more difficult for all three specs, effective making HoPo usage arbitrarily harder. And Unlike Rage, Combo Points, Runes or Soul Shards it’s an ‘all purpose’ resource with ab ‘all purpose’ way of being generated.
I agree that the warrior analogy is weak. Rage mechanics are just too different from Holy Power / Rune mechanics to make a straight comparison, unfortunately.
However, I think I’ve successfully reflected the spirit of the argument. The choice of SS/Devastate seemed natural given that it was the same analogy used by Zarhym to “convince” us that this was a bug.
Also note that while missing Devastate increases the effective cooldown on Shield Slam, it’s a very different effect in both magnitude and limit. You are *guaranteed* to cast a SS at least once every 6 seconds, because it has its own cooldown. Devastate can reduce that cooldown down to as little as 3 seconds, but it can never increase it.
Shield of the Righteous, on the other hand, has an effective *minimum* cooldown of 9 seconds, and every missed CS increases it by 3 seconds, with no upper bound. For a closer analogy, pretend that a Sword & Board caused a successful Devastate to reduce the cooldown on SS, but that a missed Devastate reset the cooldown of SS back to 6 seconds. That’s the sort of effect this change has on paladins.
I’ve said elsewhere that I think the mechanics of warriors are very elegant, and they show the fruits of several expansions worth of careful tuning. Paladins are a long way from that goal, given that we’ve had pretty significant overhauls the in the past two.
I think the worst part about all of this, now that’s it here, is that it completely messes with the rotation.
Barring all the mentions of quality of life and threat, prot paladins were told before 4.0 even came out that our rotation would center heavily around Holy Power generation. Before 4.0 launched, we were all curious if we would be given more abilities to throw in between each Crusader Strike, only to find out that by talenting into Protection, that our cooldown is reduced, thereby negating any need for additional abilities because of a rather strict cooldown use.
Now, outside of Consecration, there is no fall back. If you miss a Crusader Strike in a section of the rotation, you either have a choice to Consecrate to fill the next GCD, or use a majorly gimped SotR/WoG. There are no other options, outside of a lucky Grand Crusader, if anyone is even has that talent anymore after the introduction of Rebuke.
That, more than anything, is the most unnerving part of all this for me. We are left with empty GCD’s. It feels more like punishment for something tanks can realistically do nothing about, outside of gearing high enough for hard expertise cap.
So what the entire Protection paladin community was used to at the introduction of 4.0 till now was just bugged mechanics? I don’t buy it. We were told one thing for months and have it abruptly shifted, without patch notes.
I don’t know about everyone else, but I absolutely hate sitting with open GCD’s and waiting for my CS to come back up when I miss ><
I’m not really sure why you think you end up with an empty GCD. This does nothing to your rotation other than push WoL / ShoR back further in the 939 cycle. In fact, you’ll still be pushing the exact same buttons in the exact same order you did before, with the rare exception of hitting ShoR or WoG w/ 2 HP to keep HS up.
The problem is that you use Judge and AS then if HW is still on CD from the previous rotation and your CS misses, the spot that you would have put a SoR or WoG in now needs to be filled and the only spell available, Consecration. Should bad luck shine on you again and you end up in the same place 2 rotations later you will not have Conc to fill that spot and you just have to sit and wait.
Granted this wont happen often but we should have enough tools to not have it happen at all.
Yeah, that makes sense. I guess I’m just not feeling the pain of it (yet maybe).
Is not using every single CD that a bad thing? I remember a blue post at the introduction of 4.0 that they do not want any tanks to feel pressured into using every single GCD in a set rotation. Since nothing had really changed from 969 to 939 maybe that’s their way of sneaking it in.
I know for me, having a set rotation helps me get into a groove – I can let my muscle memory take care of my attacks, which lets me pay better attention to getting out of fire, making sure the boss is pointed the right way, hitting cooldowns at the right moment, etc.
It’s incredibly jarring to have the previously smooth rotation suddenly full of holes. It hasn’t done much to affect my threat output, or my survivability for good or for bad – it’s just made it frustrating.
Now, doesn’t Rebuke require hit cap to be reliable? And weren’t you super happy about Rebuke?
So, in order to have a reliable rebuke, you won’t miss any Holy Power generating abilities?
What’s the problem? Is it just that if Paladins don’t whine enough they’ll take our color pink away?
Cheer up!
That is true and its a goal I have reforged to hit mainly because I only run 10mans and getting a DPS off interrupts helps a lot. However doing this has had me drop quite a large amount of mastery.
Hi, Rhidach. I’m not a prot pally, however there are two prot pallies that tank for me in my 10man. They were discussing the changes and noticed that they were missing quite a lot with Crusader Strike, too.
One of them noticed that Hammer of Righteousness was working much better. He wrote a blog post about his observations and I thought you might like to read it. :)
http://avatarispixelated.blogspot.com/2011/02/throw-crusader-strike-out-for.html