Another update to the PTR and still no word of a nerf to block for Paladins. I’m not going to be stupid enough to hope out loud that they’ll just buff DKs and leave it at that, content to kick the can down the road to the next expansion’s beta, so we’ll leave my hopes and aspirations in the dark where they can’t be so easily crushed.

I really want to say more about this, but like Voldemort (or, I guess, Bettlejuice), I fear even saying the word “nerf” in any quantity will summon one. Mum’s the word!

In happier news, it looks like Judgement of Truth was buffed to 20% extra damage per Censure stack, which means another 50% damage with a full stack of the debuff on an enemy. Good stuff — thanks to Ret for needing that buff!

Likewise, this explains why the tier 13 two-piece was nerfed by 5%. Judgement doing more damage required the bonus to be tuned down a tad. In any case, I’m going to have to hop on the PTR soon and see what we’re looking at for damage numbers and try to extrapolate out what the two-piece bubbles will look like.

Lastly, a few PTRers noticed that Shield of the Righteous has a new sound effect (ok, a sound effect — does anyone really hear that “whoosh” it currently makes?). It’s kind of a metal clang noise, but without the echo that Hammer of the Righteous has. Here’s a YouTube video where you can hear it:

I like it.

1. The 2pc is weak, but cool

Protection, 2P — Your Judgement ability now also grants a physical absorb shield equal to 30% of the damage it dealt.

Not a huge amount of mitigation. My average Judgement on Shannox last week, for example, was around 14k damage. So, that’d be a 4200 damage bubble I’d put up. Which would obviously break just about as soon as it came up. Still, it’s free mitigation — nothing to sneeze at.

This is also the first time in as long as I can remember the two-piece bonus for a tier set was an actual survivability bonus. Even if it’s a pittance, that’s still incredible it’s not some boring “x more damage when you do y ability” song and dance.

2. 4pc is pre-nerf DG

Protection, 4P — Reduces the cooldown of Divine Guardian by 60 sec and increases the radius of its effect by 70 yards.

This is just silly. The four-piece bonus changes Divine Guardian to a two-minute cooldown and 100 yards range. If that sounds familiar, it’s because that’s exactly what the ability was before it was nerfed in 4.1 when warriors were given a raid cooldown. So, try not to wallow in the insult that we’re being given a pre-nerf shell of one of our spells as a “bonus”, there’s a lot more that’s wrong with this.

3. 4pc is flagrantly unbalanced with other tanks

Not in a bad way; actually, our four-piece is much, much better than the other three tanking four-piece bonuses. Warriors, druids, and DKs will have to give up one of their personal survivability cooldowns to perform their four-piece raid cooldown. Hell, a warrior now has to give up two cooldowns to do two different raid cooldowns. Meanwhile, our raid cooldown remains that — a raid cooldown — and continues to offer no actual damage reduction to us.

This sucks pretty badly for the other tanks, who I’m expecting we’ll hear about being forced to blow their necessary cooldowns at inopportune times and thus possibly putting themselves at risk for the benefit of the raid. I’m not sure I’d be thrilled hearing the raid leader call for my to blow Guardian of Ancient Kings when a burst of AOE damage was coming up, when I was planning to save it for a big nuke on the tank down the road.

This also fills me with dread with how much raid-wide AOE damage this is going to be in Dragon Soul.

4. No personal benefit to 4pc

This is minor, but it kind of bothers me. Other than for fights where there are major AOE burst events — ie, something like Majordomo Staghelm — what would compel us to wearing four pieces of tier? If we have a situation like Firelands where the offset pieces were better itemized over tier in two out of five cases, what would drive us to put on that fourth piece and activate our ultimate bonus?

There’s no awesome “you are totally amazing with this bonus available and will be that much more unkillable” set bonus. We just had a more frequent, less restrictive raidwall. Feels bad, man.

First 4.0.1 happened, and killed agility converting to armor. While the little guy was wounded, he kept crawling along, still boosting our dodge chance (along with our crit, but that’s neither here nor there).

Now, according to the latest PTR notes, the second benefit of agility for tanking — the 304.5 agility = 1% dodge conversion — is kaput. Someone kick up taps for me please.

Dodge: Death Knights, paladins, and warriors no longer receive any bonus to their chance to dodge from Agility. Their base chance to dodge is now a fixed 5%.

This also, as said, changes our base dodge from 3.6520% to a straight 5%. That’s a 1.375% buff for most at base for most tankadins, outside of any additional agility one might have in your kit.

I can see why they did this, it was surely antithetical to their design to have Paladins, for instance, running around with the Necklace of Strife equipped because it was better combat table coverage than something they actually specifically itemized for them.

Anyway, various consequences that come to mind:

1. Need to nab and bank some strength tank necks/rings/other pieces for 4.2.

2. Kings and Horn of Winter won’t be as nearly as potent for buffing avoidance.

3. When reforging you’ll want to keep dodge and parry at closer percents. Actually–scratch that–dodge probably still a little higher to compensate only for the additional parry you’ll gain from strength raid buffs.

4. We won’t be able to stack additional mastery through dps agi/mastery gear any longer. Which I’m sure the rogues, hunters, and feral druids out there will welcome.

5. Great point from Shathus: Charscale Leg Armor‘s agility is now dead weight. I’m guessing they’ll have to fix this, as great as the bonus crit would be.

Farewell, old friend. For good this time.

Oh this is just stupid. On the official Tanking forums, a blue posts:

We are in the process of trying some different numbers for various talents and mechanics on the PTR, with the goal of making it harder (or impossible) to cap mastery. What we want to avoid is making mastery worthless or causing other undesirable effects.

If we are successful, we will adjust the other tanks to be relatively balanced with paladins again.

If we aren’t successful, we know what the fall back position is (basically what we have now).

And furthermore,

There are several changes we are trying, and the current PTR only reflects a fraction of them. Keep in mind that while we have a lot of changes we want to get in to every major patch, we also want to try and get builds on the PTR as frequently as possible so that we can test other things (like Firelands encounters). We tend to grab builds often, not necessarily when every single change is in place.

So much for my fervent hope yesterday that blockcapping was going to be accepted. Instead, they’re taking steps to make it “harder (or impossible)” to do so. Despondent sigh.

Here’s the thing Blizzard: maybe, just maybe, the problem isn’t that blockcapping is possible, it’s that we have a mastery that provides a benefit that — by its very structural existence vis-a-vis the combat table — has a built-in hard cap.

Ridiculousness. Are we going to nerf mastery for paladin tanks every patch, with ever increasing iLevels, because the specter of a legion of blockcapping tanks makes Ghostcrawler reach for the smelling salts?

Are they going to retool mastery to provide some block chance and some block value, in much smaller amounts than previously available? I guess that’d fix the problem in the short term. But, in the long run, as long as there is a component involving block chance we’re going to just have this crisis again down the road. This is the WoW equivalent of raising the debt ceiling without doing anything about the rising tide of debt. The outcome is already preordained.

That’s the upside of the Holy Shield nerf (well, one of them) — the systemic acceptance of Paladin tanks blockcapping. The widespread fear going into 4.2 was that Blizzard would, in light of higher iLevels providing oodles more mastery, nerf something to keep us from reaching 102.4%. Instead, it seems that they’ve made amends with the possibility, but with a price. As of the latest PTR build, Holy Shield has been nerfed to providing a 5% block chance bonus, and the 10% block value bonus has been removed.

This means that it’ll be that much easier to blockcap. Between 378 gear and the free 5%, I’d be floored if we’re not reforging away from mastery in 4.2.

Likewise, the 5% block chance bonus means that the Holy Shield proc also frees up 398.4 mastery rating for us to allocate into other stats. Of which, the likely culprit to step in to the vacuum will be stamina. And because 398.4 mastery is basically 10 gems of straight mastery, the equivalent in stamina gems gives 630 stamina after Kings, which converts to 10,143 hitpoints.

So, theoretically, there are some health gains to be made with the itemization the nerf frees up. Of course, the hypothetical in the previous paragraph assumes you’d be only regemming mastery (and specifically to one other stat) and that’s before considering any reforging-to-mastery that could be undone. Ultimately: I’m just hand-waving.

In any case, my point is that I don’t think the nerf is as dire as the usual quarters are playing up. There are some major silver-linings to this cloud. Namely, that blockcapping will continue to be the operating goal into the next patch, and that we’ll be able to free up itemization to mitigate the loss of that 10% block value (well, 8% block value when you take into account the Eternal meta‘s buff).

Not the end of the world.

It really isn’t.

First, the change from the latest PTR build is as follows:

Sacred Duty now also procs from Avenger’s Shield. Now lasts 10 sec, down from 15 sec.

On its face, it looks like an awesome change. Avenger’s Shield is sorta a holy power generator now, Grand Crusader becomes a much more useful talent, we get more Holy Power–all together, a great package deal!

So Theck runs the numbers over at Maintankadin and from his various simulations it seems like going from a priority of ShoR>CS>J>AS (our current priority system) to ShoR>CS>AS>J is worth an additional 119 dps at 2% hit/10 expertise, after this change. Basically, that means prioritizing AS over J.

Likewise, moving to a priority where you use AS from a Grand Crusader proc to generate an HP before using CS is worth 160 more dps than ShoR>CS>J>AS. (With 8% hit and 26 expertise, though, putting CS before AS comes ahead, again.)

If you haven’t noticed yet, we’re talking about ludicrously small numbers here. Blizzard obviously intended this change to make Grand Crusader much more attractive as a talent, to needle the legions of tankadins who have forsaken what was assumed to be a great talent by the designers (hell, they designed an official power aura for it). And the best they can do is add another 160 dps to the rotation–a rotation that sims for 14406 dps (using that latter priority system example)–when we use the abilities and talents they cajole us into using.

The root of all evil, of course, is that our rotation is so stupidly simplistic and rigid that we’re really only ever talking about changing what goes in that filler spot. Rather than rant more on the subject though, I’d like to point you to Theck’s comments on the matter. He says it much better than I could.

RIP Block Rating

One last build 13793 change that’ll affect us is Enchant Shield – Blocking is being changed from giving 40 block rating to 50 mastery rating. The enchant is currently worth .45% block chance, while 50 mastery rating is worth .63% block chance. So the change is a minor buff of .18% block chance.

More importantly, this marks the last vestige of block rating being removed from the game. Much like Tarkin announcing that the last remnants of the Old Republic being swept away, so too this shall pass. Farewell, old friend.

The gear that has been datamined from the PTR by mmo-champion is a bit all over the map. Some pieces are good and will be a great entry piece for people as they work their way into raids, others are entering the field as downgrades to already existing JP or crafted pieces. Of everything seen so far there are no amazingly itemized gems that would be a step above anything from raids of VP purchases (which is to be expected).

Here’s the complete list of tank gear from 4.1:

• Amulet of Protection
• Battleplate of the Amani Empire
• Boneplate Handguards
• Spiritshield Mask
• Pauldrons of Sacrifice
• Coils of Hate
• Shield of the Blood God
• Bloodlord’s Protector

Looking over those items, the biggest thing that tankadins in the position to need that gear are going to be looking for is Mastery and, concurrently, pieces that offer more total survivability. Based on those metrics I’m seeing on a few pieces that would actually be really desirable pieces if you’re already in full 346 gear from farming the existing heroics.

For example, the Bloodlord’s Protector is pretty weak compared to the Elementium Fang, in terms of combat table coverage. Likewise, I’m a bit baffled by the speed of the weapon. considering I thought the speed of tank one-handers as being standardized to 2.6. I suspect that that is subject to change.

A case where one of these new pieces is being introduced as obsolete, the Coils of Hate is decidedly a downgrade from the crafted Hardened Elementium Girdle.

Conversely, though, you’ll find the new Shield of the Blood God is an upgrade over the crafted Elementium Earthguard, and probably to the relief of tankadin wallets everywhere. (Though how long until you hear stories of the shield being ninja’d in pugs by dps and tanks dropping in disgust after downing the boss that drops the shield and not finding one waiting for them in the loot pile? It’s Halls of Reflection and the Splintered Door all over again!)

The piece that gets the biggest disappointment award for me goes to the Amulet of Protection neck. When I first saw it, I thought “hot damn, upgrade to one of my last blues!” (epic necks have thus far been unkind to me and refused to drop). I think crunched the various avoidance/mitigation numbers and determined that my Lustrous Eye provides 2.27% CTC, and the Amulet provides a whopping 2.24% CTC. Such an upgrade! (Grumble.)

I guess for raiding tanks, you’ll find this gear to be uniformly a bust. However, it should be a useful source of upgrades for folks who primarily travel in heroic 5man circles or aren’t actively min-maxing their survivability.

From the latest PTR build comes the news that:

Grand Crusader will now generate a charge of Holy Power if the Avenger Shield it procs is used within 6 seconds.

I’m not surprised they made the change. I remember at Blizzcon last year at the Class Q&A, someone asked  the panel how they felt about the Grand Crusader talent being skipped by so many tanks because the rotation was so rigid and there wasn’t much room for an AS proc in single-target. The panelists responded that if they felt that was the case, they’d change the talent to make it more desirable. I guess this is their solution.

Now, as for the change itself–this is great from a quality of life standpoint, but in certain situations I’m not sure how much effect it’s going to have. Especially considering Word of Glory is still getting nerfed, come 4.1, into having a 20 second cooldown.

So, from a survivability standpoint the extra Holy Power that we can generate is still bottlenecked 20 seconds at a time. Which means this change isn’t going to be a gigantic help in that arena, aside from making it easier to guarantee you definitely have 3 holy power when WoG comes off cooldown.

And in a single-target raid environment, threat is not going to be an issue outside of the initial pull when a tank needs to establish their threat lead, so the extra ShoRs are going to be inconsequential, aside from extra dps put on the boss to avoid an enrage. Though, it’ll be interesting to see if the extra holy power generation can be parlayed into weaving Inq and ShoR, with a much greater overlap between the two.

In terms of a quality of life standpoint, the extra holy power generation will be very welcome in our current low hit/low expertise world. Right now we’re often tortured to watch holy power creep up as Crusader Strike continues to miss or be avoided. Having the holy power pour in at a faster rate is definitely a good thing.

Theck did some initial number crunching on the change, and he concluded that GC procs giving holy power “is more or less DPS-neutral; if anything it’s a very minor improvement.” I’ll restrain myself from copy-pasting his reasoning, so check out that link to see what he came up with and his speculation about the effect the change has on our priorities.

All in all: great change for quality of life, not much of an effect on survivability, and threat neutral from the looks of it.