Damocles’ nerf hammer danglin’ over our heads
Ironically, I had in the can a post I was going to write called “Are we going to get nerfed?” and here’s our answer: yes, but slightly. And not where you’d expect.
The 3.2.2 patch notes came down this morning with the following pertinent pieces:
- Righteous Fury: The bonus threat from Holy spells caused by this talent has been reduced from 90% to 80%.
- Judgements of the Just: The reduction in cooldown to Hammer of Justice provided by this talent has been reduced to 5/10 seconds instead of 10/20 seconds.
- Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin’s strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin’s stamina.
- Seal of Command: This ability now chains to strike up to 2 additional targets when it is triggered by an attack.
This is an all around threat nerf (obviously), though curiously they haven’t tackled Ardent Defender… er, yet. They might be content to leave it as is due to “class population balance” concerns, but who knows?
In case you’re maybe thinking, as I did originally, they tuned down RF to make up for a spell power gain from the new TbtL, that’s not the case. With the old TbtL I have 904 spell power. If the new one was in effect today, I’d have 800. 100 spell power isn’t a lot of threat lost in the great scheme of things, but a 10% threat modifier is, alas.
Even with these changes I suspect we’ll still be the best threat tanks, but less so than before.
The Seal of Command change is kind of exciting, and I wonder if they’re intending to turn it into the tanking seal with the AOE damage? Or if it’s to give Ret an option on trash?
Lastly, mmo-champion is busy ripping all the items from the patch files. They already have some new pets up as well as some of the loot from Onyxia. The Priest T2 helm for example is listed, and looks pretty nice (it’s iLevel 232, which makes me think the 10/25 versions will drop gear with item budgets similar to Coliseum non-heroic modes). The only concern is it kept resistance stats, which is … sad. Might mean we won’t be seeing a new Judgement Crown that’s viable for tanking. Wait and see, I guess.
There’s only one thing I was for 3.2.2mas: an iLevel 245 Quel’Serrar. My dream may yet some true.
Armory Feed
Ok… now I’m sad.
I feel that the Threat modifier going down, coupled with the reduction on the SP we gain from “Touched by the Light”, our Threat output will go down, and if we add the “Nerf” to Block Value as a Threat stat “since the bonus to ShoR now caps at 30 times the players level. At level 80(x30)=2400, suffering diminishing returns as well, so I guess we better start getting our STR up, since we either put that lame “+2% threat and 10 parry rating”, or start stacking Hit and Expertise like crazy.
Personally, i don’t see this as an issue for “regular” instance groups, why? I’m usually ahead of the 2nd in Threat by a nice margin, usually 10-20% of my total Threat. But for Hard mode runs this might be putting a good chunk of stress on the tank when it comes to threat generation, specially for DPS races with a good ammount of Boss movement/kiting (Think Hodir HM when you run around for the haste light buff), and then when you see that pesky Lock doing 8-9k TPS who keeps closing the gap even after you slapped his face with BoSalv and spent Avenging Wrath, you will sweat.
Humm, just checked, and I will lose around 70 Sp from the “touched by the light” change. Not much…
About the “Judgements of the Just” change, I just dont care, not at all… Bosses are immune to stuns, and thrash usually dies too fast to even waste the hammer on them, not to mention the fact that the last raid doesnt even have thrash…
SoCasino on the other hand….sounds very nice for quick fights, for both ret and prot, BUT, I’m pretty sure the Seal of Command effect wont be triggered for anything but autoattacks, which limits its usefulness since Corruption is stacked by both autoattacks AND HotR. but I will leave that to theorycrafters, I hate Math.
@Rhidach
14 August 2009 at 2:23 pm #
Good points Logan. The number everyone seems to be agreeing on is these nerfs are around a 5% threat loss. Not the end of the world, just… annoying.
And, well unjustified… I dont see “THAT” much difference compared against other tanks with similar gear… but well….
The only thing right now is our snap aggro, since on the “long run” we are pretty much in line with them.