Ardent Defender, our new cooldown

Our long national nightmare is now over, we finally have a second cooldown! And a real one at that, not some slap-dash, Mickey Mouse cooldown.

So sum up all the changes to the talent: AD has finally been fixed so that it is no longer leapfroggable (ie, any damage that applies under 35% of your health is mitigated), and it has a new effect that, if you are reduced to 0 hp, you receive an immediate heal to 30% of your max health (assuming you have 3/3 in the talent and 540 defense skill).

Once you receive that heal you get a debuff from preventing that save from occurring again for two minutes. Originally on the PTR that debuff also removed AD’s damage reduction, but that is a bug that has been fixed.

Dodge couldn’t avoid this nerf

Our avoidance is taking a nerf that will reduce our dodge across the board while presumably increasing parry. Overall this will amount to a reduction of our total avoidance. Rather than rehash the numbers, as I’ve done previously, just know the three take-aways on this are: (a) agility/stam gems are now junk for pure avoidance, (b) parry gems are not an immediate red flag for bad tanks, (c) defense is now, oddly, our best avoidance stat. There’s a lot more nuance in this, mind you, thanks to diminishing returns.

Sacred Shield is less awesome, but still great

Not as awful as I originally supposed in my post on Friday. I mistakenly assumed that the Holy Pally hot would only apply if their shield was on you, but any old SS will do. So, despite my earlier ruminations, still get Divine Guardian instead of 2/5 Reckoning. But anyway you slice it, only one Sacred Shield is disappointing.

Sweet, sweet Vindication

This is perhaps my second-most favorite change in 3.2, an attack power debuff to a boss that’s automatically applied. We don’t have to burn rage or gimp our dps/threat to get this up–nope, it comes just from us meleeing. This will be a great mitigation buff to us overall.

You’ll probably want to shift two points from Conviction into this talent, assuming you’re running the 53/18 spec (and you better be! /shakingoffist).

BV is better, but still not better than avoidance

Block value as you know is getting a huge boost. Does this mean you want to start wearing your block set and slapping the Titanium Plating on your shield for tanking Ignis25? Er, no. You’ll still want a heavy EH/avoidance set. Considering most BV pieces also have block rating, you’ll want to continue keeping most of these pieces out of your heavy tanking set, but by all means, use them for trash.

Change is a blessing

Blessing of Sanctuary has been given a +10% stamina modifier (that doesn’t stack with Kings) in order to make it more attractive to Paladins. But is it? Sure, if you can have Kings as well. Kings gives avoidance (through agility) and mitigation (through strength) which between the two makes it the superior blessing for raid situations if you have to choose between the two (which hopefully you won’t). At least now you won’t have to bemoan the loss of Kings’ health while in heroics where the mana return of Sanc is critical.

Exorcism is not for tanking anymore

Exorcism has been retooled to make it a situational move for Ret Paladins. That is, Art of War procs and they fire off an instant-cast Exorcism, and the rest of us shlubs are stuck with a 1.5 second cast time. This change of course makes Exorcism unusable while tanking, because time spent casting is time you can’t avoidance any attacks (and pushback, oh the pushback).

They changed Hand of Reckoning so that it does a lot more damage if the mob is currently not targeting you, which is supposed to make up for losing the Reck/Ex pickup combo for a run away mob. It’s an annoying change overall, but one we can work around.

Expertise isn’t terrible anymore

With the change to Seal of Corruption/Vengeance to do an additional 33% of weapon damage with melee hits after a five stack is up, expertise becomes a valuable stat again. For example, this change makes the SoV glyph the second-best TPS glyph in the game now (and one I’ll happily swap into my spellbook after the patch now that I don’t need said Mickey Mouse cooldown anymore). You’ll probably not want to gem expertise or purposefully gear for it, but don’t shun any gear anymore because it has expertise on it. A junk stat no longer.

Other cool little things

Lastly, two dopey little changes I’m happy about are Auras reapply after your death automatically, and Righteous Fury lost its duration and mana cost.

Only cost 300g and had to get a guildee to buy it off the Alliance AH, but 3% damage reduction is worth it dammit.

Just bought Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous for 99g on the AH. Score.

Still haven’t set foot in the titanic prison/city yet. Grrr. I think this patch picked the worst possible week to drop, and by worst possible, I mean most inconvenient to me. Clearly none of you matter in this calculus. So there.

Last night I logged on around 7 server just to start playing around with all the new doodads that the patch hast wrought. I bought my fancy dual spec and started putting points into Ret, but then realized I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, and put the whole matter on the back burner. I’ll do some research and come back to it.

Naughty secret: I’d like to make my second spec a dps sword and board hybrid. Dare I dream? Yes, I know it’d be awful.

In any case, after that I hearthed back to Dal and flew off to try the new fishing daily. I have a love-hate relationship with fishing dailies right now, the Outland one being completely unwilling to give me the Captain Rumsey’s Lager recipe after a solid year of attempts.

Supposedly this new daily can also give the recipe, so at least that ups my chances.

Following that it was finally time to check out the Argent Tournament. I picked up the dailies and collected a chunk of Aspirant’s Seals. I’m itching to start collecting Champion’s Seals so I can save up for the Argent Hippogryph (so help me god if there’s no walking animation…).

Argent Tournament looked like a lot of fun, but it was getting old being challenged to a duel every 7 seconds as I was running around looking for the training guys.

Also checked the AH last night, and surprise surprise no Glyph of Divine Plea or Glyph of Hammer 0f Righteousness. Thanks to the RNG it’ll probably be some time before those two make it into the general economy. I don’t care about pricing, but I’m also not going to pay more than a few hundred gold for those.

And lastly, once again, I wasn’t able to hang around long enough for the Ulduar raid. My time will come tonight though, I have the whole evening dedicated to raiding and all the bugged-out Ignis attempts I can stomach. Plus 25man this weekend, for good or ill.

I’ll report back tomorrow on how my first night in there went.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to jump into Patch 3.1 last night, but apparently I didn’t miss much. The server itself didn’t come back online until like 7:30 eastern, and by the time my guild got its 10-man expedition into Ulduar, the raid server collapsed like a wet cake, stranding the GL’s toon in the nether between instances.

I’ll be able to hop on tonight to finally play with my new spec, buy dual speccing, and start hunting down the enchant/glyphs I need. I heard from a few people, Logan in the comments on another post among them, that Glyph of Divine Plea is impossible to find right now? If so, grrrr.

I hope Ulduar went well for anyone that managed to get in there.

I’ll report back tomorrow on what, if anything, I accomplish tonight!

3.1 is bringing some welcome changes to our glyphs, finally making more than a few actually useful for tanking. Here’s how I’ll navigate this brave new world of glyphing when the next patch drops:

Major

• Glyph of Divine Plea — Pretty much mandatory at this juncture. 3% DR is nothing to sneeze at.
• Glyph of Seal of Vengeance –  SoV is our primary tanking seal, so the extra threat/mitigation of the 10 expertise skill is something we’ll just about always have up.
• Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous — This one I’m dropping Glyph of the Righteous Defense for, because after some hefty soul-searching I decided that I’d rather have extra threat in situations with four or more mobs over an addition 8% chance to hit on a taunt that I now have a backup for.

Minor

• Glyph of Blessing of Kings — A helpful mana saver, and considering how generally bad our minor glyphs are this’ll at least get some use.
• Glyph of Lay on Hands — Definitely looking forward to this one. Remember the days when LoH had an hour cooldown? Now it can be as low as 11 minutes. Signs and wonders, my friends, signs and wonders.
• Glyph of Sense Undead — Eh, like I’m never setting foot in Naxx ever again. And Northrend is still crawling with undead.

My mage alt is a scribe, and I’ve been selling the glyphs that I’ve been making as I level Inscription. One of the glyphs I put on the AH was the Glyph of Consecration, which, as we all know, is a terrible glyph.

So I’m greedily pawing through various “Auction Sold” letters on this alt yesterday and I got the gold from selling said godawful glyph. From the name of the character that bought it, I could tell the unlucky purchaser was a tank.

Even though she’s only lvl 37 (as I discovered via the Armory), I feel compelled to send her a tell to implore her not to use the glyph and perhaps offer to sell her a better fitting one. Anything to alleviate my guilt over enabling this budding tank to trod the dark path.

Anything except a refund… I have a business to run after all.