Our new cooldown revealed, and other changes in 3.2
This is one happy tankadin. Check these changes out:
Currently, we think paladin tanks are almost there and that they just need slightly better cooldowns to handle some of the tougher boss fights. Rather than add a new ability that felt like a clone of another class’s ability, we decided to buff an existing talent that was no longer cutting it. Ardent Defender has two important changes. The first is that the damage can no longer “skip over” the 35% health level – it will always be reduced.
/cheer
Secondly, it has a new effect that if a blow would kill you, it instead sets you to 30% health. This portion of the ability cannot occur more than once every 2 minutes. Think of it as a Last Stand that you don’t have to push.
I like this, a lot. It’s like a built-in Guardian Spirit. These changes to AD will definitely be a huge improvement over our current weakness to big hits.
A second change to Protection is we want to make sure Blessing of Sanctuary is always the tanking blessing of choice. A likely change here is to have it boost stamina as well.
This is way better than them just talenting the 2% mana gain effect into Kings. Extra stamina is never, ever a bad thing.
We also recognize that block does not provide the mitigation it once did. While we have long-term plans to change the way block works entirely, in the short term we are doubling the effect of bonus block value on items (so jewelry, but not shields).
This is a band-aid that won’t change much. Instead of getting an extra 264 BV in my block set I’ll get 528… woo. Interestingly, I wonder if this will apply to the Librams as well. LoO giving +704 block value sounds pretty awesome.
All in all good changes though. Color me pleased.
Edit: I just saw this in the Ret changes.
We are buffing Seal of Vengeance / Corruption and redesigning Seal of Command with the expectation that these are now the seals of choice for PvP and PvE. Righteousness can remain a tanking seal.
That’s a typo, right? Do they realize that tanks usually only use Corruption for tanking (scary peek into the mind of the developers if not)? In any case, another buff.
Edit 2: Oh, and this also is in Ret changes:
Finally, we are replacing the current effect of Vindication with an attack power debuff that works like Demoralizing Shout. In PvP, Ret paladins can still debuff melee targets, while in PvE they can provide another necessary debuff in the case that the tank is not a warrior or druid. In addition, the talent may be more attractive to Protection paladins.
Indeed.
Edit 3: Ugh, just saw the patch notes. To clarify stuff above (and check out all the new stuff!):
- Libram of Obstruction and other items that have a duration BV increase instead just have the durations doubled. That means LoO will be constantly up with a 10 sec duration, and my preciousss Lavanthor’s Talisman has a 40 second duration.
- Blessing of Sanctuary: This blessing now also increases stamina by 10%. This effect is not cumulative with Blessing of Kings.
- Lay on Hands: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 10/20% instead of increasing the target’s armor. [My threat-heavy spec, noooo! -ed.]
- Righteous Fury: No longer has a duration or mana cost, remaining until cancelled or death. Also cancelled when a Paladin activates a different talent specialization.
- Seal of Vengeance and Seal of Corruption: These seals have been redesigned to deal substantially more damage. Now, once a paladin has 5 copies of the debuff from these seals on his or her target, on each swing the paladin will deal 33% weapon damage as Holy, with critical strikes dealing double damage.
- Shield of Righteousness: Now deals 100% of shield block value as damage instead of 130%.
Armory Feed
I am holding back on my comment of “*cough* OP *cough*” until I hear the Warrior changes. If AD’s non-leapfroggable damage reduction doesn’t have a cooldwon that is almost like having 30% extra health is it not? Not to mention that every two minutes you get a passive Guardian Spirit… So if you get hit by a runed Fusion Punch you will survive without issue.
This is all well and good and I am happy for you… But I gotta see the Warrior changes before I whine about another class pulling far ahead of Warriors in survivability.
The Seal of Corruption change is nice… more than makes up for the SoR nerf.
/NERDGASM
ok, I’m actually pleased, however, I am a bit concerned about Blizz thinking that Seal of Righteousness is a “Tanking seal”, because well, it hasnt been a tanking seal for years…
And, although i love BoSanc giving me the 10% STA increase, Kings also gave me the Agility for some extra armor, dodge and crit, so I wish they can fold it in while they are at it XD
on a ret note, I like where this is going, but I guess we will have to wait to see how it pans out
And, while the new “Cooldown” exists, i would rather have some control over it and not just have to pray the entire fight for it to come out of it’s “hidden auto cooldown” and save me…
This is going to be bad when off-tanking in things where I need to stay second.
I am so going to blow the pants off the other tanks with the SoV change. I go 8 pts of damage when I connect and SoV is full. That’s going to jump a ton.
AD having a 2 minute CD is nice, I’d love it to be something we can see.
And yea, I pretty much went insane when I read that SoR comment. They say they know the class better than the players because they made the class, but then spout that comment about SoR being a tanking seal?!?!
Scares the snot out of me, because it becomes open to nerfing. If they think Ret wants to use it, it might get hotfixed to be unworkable.
@PinkRaidFrames
18 June 2009 at 8:09 pm #
I’m pretty happy with these changes. They look fantastic and am willing to settle for the passive CD since it is 100% effective. Another button to push would be nice but.. meh. I can live without that.
The QQ on the official forums can be heard in Turkey.
@PinkRaidFrames
18 June 2009 at 8:12 pm #
Oh.. and I may actually be more excited about the Vindication change than anything. Now I don’t have to count on my action-bar-tunneled-vision warriors for a necessary debuff on the boss. My experience has shown that they can’t keep a shout up to save their (or their tank’s) life.
@doxa: as a former tunnelvision warrior, i agree, most of them cant keep up anything that helps other people kills faster o not get killed faster, so sunder armor / demo shout are quite scarse… stupid dps wars….
Call me lazy, but I like that the divine guardian part of ardent defender will be passive. It must be very frustrating for a warrior to hold off using last stand (anticipating a greater need for it later) only to die while it’s still off cooldown.
I’m VERY disappointed with how they’re handling blessing of sanctuary. It’s a nice bonus for 5 player content or 10 player raids where you can’t assume you’ll have both kings and sanc. But it changes nothing for 25 player raids. There are just so many better and more elegant solutions to this, it’s really irritating. Maybe it’s just me though, the whole clunky blessing system is a big pet peeve of mine.
HUmm about the ShoR changes… I think its gonna be a buff actually, since we are getting around 40% more block value overall (relics and shields dont count since the values will remain the same), so our TPS from this skill will remain roughly the same, if not a bit higher.
The upfront buff to Seal of Corruption/Vengeance, well, this is gonna be a HUGE TPS boost, UNLESS they somehow manage to make it “Improved” only through a Deep Ret talent, which would suck. BIG TIME. T_T (And if they don´t change seals of the pure on the first tier of Holy, it might be worth taking those talents again and heading for Imp LoH)
On a second thought, the passive Last stand will be nice… If we dont end up needing it more often than once every 2 minutes.
Lay on Hands is gonna be a LOVELY cooldown for healing pallies with stuff like plasma blasts from mimiron, and even for ourselves if we somehow manage so sacrifice some talents on the ret tree to spend on Imp LoH from holy.
@Rhidach
19 June 2009 at 10:03 am #
@Logan: I’m actually preparing a post on what the changes mean for possible specs, so I’ll have more to say on LoH and the rest soon. For Seal of Corruption/Vengeance though, one thing that worries me is the extra damage caused once a five stack is up will probably mean that Expertise is a viable threat stat for us again. Gah.
@Rhidach: please enlighten me, but I think that Expertise eould still be crap for tankadin TPS duty, why? because if I’m not wrong, it would benefit a LOT more from Hit Rating than Expertise, but I will leave that to you or dome of the number crushers…
Note: I really hope Expertise keeps on Sucking for tank duty…
@Rhidach
19 June 2009 at 12:17 pm #
Agreed, I hate Expertise too! I’m just worried that if SoV is changed so that you get more mileage only if those post-five-stack hits connect, then white damage is going to be a bigger deal for us. Which means so will Expertise. Not to mention the change to ShoR and the probability of us dropping 2% crit for the pseudo-Demoralizing Shout will probably mean a drop in our tps. I probably don’t have enough BV in my survival set to make up for the loss of the 30%, even with them doubling BV.
and no, I’m not trying to Troll.
I just dont want to have to stack Expertise…