It could only hide for so long! In the 4.1 datamining that mmo-champ performed, they spotted a 20 seconds cooldown being added to Word of Glory.

There are two consequences for this, that I’m a bit worried about:

1. I fear this will probably lead to Holy Power hoarding, once Vengeance has safely ensconced you beyond the point where dps can realistically catch up with you. Consider that this change turns Word of Glory from an “always available” survival ability to an actual cooldown that you’ll want to use at the most optimal point to get the biggest bang for your buck. With full vengeance we’re talking about a ~30,000 hp heal, and banking that for a quick recovery from a big hit will be awfully tempting.

This is especially true for some raid fights where the bigger damage is a Big Hit(tm). In those scenarios you’re going to want to treat WoG like a mini-bubbleskin, rather than a means of keeping Holy Shield up. In these cases the primary danger to your life is that massive burst damage, as opposed to the slow pitter patter of wittle boss melees.

2. Eternal Glory will be neutered somewhat in its current incarnation. I’m hoping they’ll change the talent to have a chance to reset the cooldown on WoG. Otherwise, I can’t see much value in this talent since the prospect of WoGing and then getting a free ShoR is not as amazing as two WoGs in a row is. Not much of a survival talent otherwise.

The other prot-related changes:

• Divine Guardian now has a 3 minute cooldown, which isn’t unreasonable. It’s pretty powerful as is. However, at the same time, warriors are being given their own raid wall called Rallying Cry. I welcome this addition to my brother tanks’ arsenal, but if you’ll allow me some wine with these cheese: why does Rallying Cry get to self-apply to them but DG doesn’t self-apply to us?! Time to revoke that, maybe? (Update: According to official notes, this shares a cooldown with Last Stand. Objection withdrawn!)
• Lastly, Rebuke (along with other non-damaging interrupts) are no longer dependent on hit. So we can help with interrupts now while continuing to ignore hit and expertise.

I briefly went over the 4.0.6 changes in a post last week, though I may have been a bit… sidetracked… by the announcement that Rebuke was going baseline. There were some goodies in there I ignored, and in addition, a lot more changes have been announced since by various blues. Here’s a summary:

• The dwarven racial trait Stoneform now reduces all damage taken by 10%, rather than increasing armor by 10%. It also increases the dwarf’s size when used.

A pretty powerful buff that surely has a fair share of Alliance paladins considering a race change. You can’t beat a free half-Divine Protection.

• Forbearance
  • The duration has been lowered to 1 minute, down from 2.
  • Lay on Hands now causes Forbearance on the target. It used to only cause it when cast on the paladin. This was an old design from when Divine Protection caused Forbearance and the paladin didn’t want to prevent a tank from using their defensive cooldown.
  • Lay on Hands cannot be a critical effect and will not be affected by most abilities which modify healing (such as Beacon of Light).
  • Since only Divine Shield, Lay on Hands and Hand of Protection cause Forbearance, the tooltips have been adjusted to better explain the mechanic.

The only really pertinent portion of this for us is the reduction of Forbearance to a minute duration. Not too shabby! Forbearance has been pretty much neutered this expansion, so this change isn’t as momentous as it might have been a year ago.

• Seal of Truth: All single target attacks (including Judgement, Hammer of Wrath, Exorcism, and Templar’s Verdict) can now trigger this seal.

A nice threat boost. This’ll add a bonus 9% weapon damage to two more of our attacks (in addition to melee swings and Crusader Strike already doing this). Might make Seals of the Pure more attractive, but I’m not sure by how much.

• Vindication no longer allows Hammer of Justice to interrupt stun-immune targets. With Rebuke baseline, this functionality is no longer necessary.

This was expected, so it’s not that big of a deal. I’m still interested in whether Avenger’s Shield interrupt component will similarly survive the patch. Having a ranged interrupt is handy for some fights, but realistically, with it tied to a main rotational ability there are going to be some fights where you’ll find yourself holding on using AS to prevent an accidental interrupt. (I’m primarily thinking of Maloriak and the Release Aberrations cast, but there are other examples.)

• A socket has been added to all crafted epic armor pieces that did not already have one.

This is a pretty nice change, and it makes sense to boot. The crafted tank pieces are currently subpar compared to other pieces of the same item level. Hell, both are generally inferior to pieces from heroics. With this change in mind I’ll be picking up the crafted belt pronto and stowing it away.

I mean, do I really need to say more than that?

Here are all the pertinent changes for us on the PTR:

• The mana costs of Blessing of Might and Blessing of Kings have been increased by approximately 217%, making them roughly equal to the cost of Mark of the Wild.
• Crusader Strike weapon damage percent has been increased to 135%, up from 115%.
• Inquisition is no longer dispellable.
• Rebuke can now be trained by all paladins at level 54. Existing characters will need to visit their trainer, even if they had talented Rebuke before.

Some are pretty inconsequential, except for our precious need for in-combat rebuffing. That change is clearly a slap in the face. And non-dispellable Inquisition is really more of a Ret pvp buff.

But let’s talking about the meat. To start: Crusader Strike is getting a buff, thanks to Ret, which means our single target dps (and threat, obviously) is going up. Very exciting. Hopefully Wrath of the Lightbringer won’t be tuned down to compensate.

The biggest change is, of course, Rebuke. An honest-to-goodness, off the GCD interrupt. Finally. This is the single biggest change to Paladin tanking since, well, 4.0.

Definitely a smart move since it removes a major inequity between Paladins and other tanks on the many, many interrupt requiring fights in Cataclysm.

I am one happy tankadin this morning.

The Seal of Truth tooltip changed in a recent beta build. It appeared to be heavily nerfed – about 25% less damage – which sparked some worry in our community. Not like we are a volatile, passionate bunch or anything.

Good news, everyone:

The most recent Seal of Truth change was just a tooltip correction. The numbers did not go down.

We did nerf Censure and raise Exorcism in a previous build, but that should not be new information.

Source: Ghostcrawler, yesterday in this hilarious thread.

We can all breathe a sigh of relief.

The NDA was lifted, Beta has opened, and two Prot Pally changes have already slipped through the net.

First, Blessing of Sanctuary is just “Sanctuary” now. We no longer have a cast a separate blessing on ourselves, the actions of Sanc are now baseline. This is in-tune with blessings in general being streamlined–ie, might and wisdom combining to just Blessing of Might.

The other big thing you might have noticed is the change to the Holy Shield talent. At the moment, it’s poorly worded, because the description easily misconstrues itself as saying that our 6% crit reduction is only active when Holy Shield is active.

Thankfully, as Ghostcrawler has illuminated, this is not the case.

The crit immunity is a permanent passive for spec’ing that deep into the tree.

Also, I think the Wowhead tooltip is wrong. What I’ve seen is Holy Shield only increases chance to block by 5% now, rather than 30%. For what it’s worth.

Of course, the Prot tree is no where near finalized. This is all very much subject to changing. Including what talent gives us the crit reduction.

Hold onto your hats.

Edit: Suicidal Zebra has a great roundup of changes thus far.

(Hippogryphs touch the ground now. /joy)

Here it is! Patch 3.3 is upon us. I’m happy to say that the trial I was serving as a juror in ended today (look for a stealth update to the previous post with an epic recounting of the entire thing), so I can devote my full energies to this patch and this post. Hopefully this will give you an idea of what affects us, as tanks, in 3.3.

How we should spec

Well, still 53/18, but with a change. Those three bridge points that could go in Reckoning, Divine Sacrifice/Guardian, or Improved HoJ? Put them in Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian.

Why Divine Guardian?

According to the patchnotes, DG is redesign to now be:

This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active. In addition, the duration has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration.

Key words here are “the effect does not terminate … before [DS's] full duration.” Therefore my friends, please immediately put this macro (from Theck) on your bars:

/cast Divine Sacrifice
/in 0.5 /script CancelUnitBuff(“player”,”Divine Sacrifice”)

We now have a free, new mitigation “raid wall” and we don’t have to take any damage for it! Just activate the macro and Divine Guardian will go up and you’ll remove 20% of raid damage from the raid. Very powerful spell. Definitely a must have.

Divine Sacrifice is generally useless now for Prot because of the party-shuffling requirements. Leave that for Holy and Ret to screw around with. Remember, if you do use it, bubbling will not remove the damage intake portion of the spell.

The Lay on Hands nerf

Lay on Hands: This ability will place Forbearance on the paladin if used on his or herself. It will not place Forbearance on others.

This is unfortunate, but not much can be done (it could be much worse). Do as much as you can to avoid LoHing yourself out of habit, because you’ll lock yourself out of bubblewalling.

Taunt diminishing returns nerfed

We’ve revised the system for diminishing returns on Taunt so that creatures do not become immune to Taunt until after 5 Taunts have landed. The duration of the Taunt effect will be reduced by 35% instead of 50% for each taunt landed. In addition, most creatures in the world will not be affected by Taunt diminishing returns at all. Creatures will only have Taunt diminishing returns if they have been specifically flagged for that behavior based on the design of a given encounter.

This is interesting! A nice change that’ll save us from having to deal with possible raid wipes wrought by taunt-happy, glory hogging tanks.

What should I buy first with my Emblems of Frost?

Corroded Skeleton Key. 60 Emblems of Frost. Make it so.

Le sigh.

We don’t feel there is a need for [a tanking QD.] We aimed to make sure that every class had something to gain from the Quel’Delar series, but that doesn’t mean every spec of every class. Could a tank use the one handed dps version of Quel’Delar? Yes, it may give them more threat. Is this ideal for surviving while tanking? No, but there are other items available for that.

Does there need to be a tanking QD? No. Would it be nice if there was one for our spec when there’s one for just about every other spec? Yes.

For starters, the base Ashen Verdict ring is iLevel 251 which is an encouraging sign of its progression. The exalted version will probably be iLevel 277 if the rings follow the same formula as the Hyjal ones. And I’m very excited it has hit on it. Will be a staple of my gear set for sure.

Actually, overall I really like the itemization of the ICC gear I’ve seen. Some pieces with hit, nice chunks of stam, no accursed expertise.

And can we talk about this trinket? 228 stamina and a pretty nice Use effect to boot! Commence /drooling, friends.

Despite having a totally badass name, this Libram is garbage. Maybe as a purchase later on, but it’s ultimately worth 19 more dodge rating than the Libram of Defiance, so it’d be silly to waste Emblems of Frost on it.

This chest is the only badly itemized piece I’ve seen so far. Totally for the threat set. (Correction! Yours truly is a dope–the bonus armor actually more than makes up for the odd stats, making this a very awesome chest piece.)

Most annoying thing I’ve seen thus far: either Blizzard hasn’t finished designing a tanking Quel’Delar or they don’t intend to include one. I’m leaning toward it being the latter. Sigh.

But, let’s focus on the positive! So far lots of well itemized gear and no deluge of expertise like what we had to suffer on ToC pieces. Hopefully Blizz keeps that pace going as they fill out all the loot tables in Icecrown.

Divine Intervention: This ability now also removes Exhaustion and Sated from the target. In addition, the cooldown on this ability has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Definitely a good fix to an annoying oversight.

The updated patch notes also just say that LoH gives Forbearance when self-cast but not when cast on others. Looks like they’re skipping the Infusion of Light change and just making LoH baseline able to cast on others with no threat of Forbearance. A welcome change.

A welcome clarification.

The change we’re thinking about now is that LoH only causes Forbearance if you cast it on yourself. A paladin healing a paladin tank wouldn’t run into the Forbearance problem.

We don’t think the paladin tank needs to be able to stack both tools at once. If you know big damage is coming you can use Divine Protection. If you managed to take the big damage, you can use Lay on Hands.

Fair enough.