It begins!
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.
Armory Feed
The sanctuary change is LONG overdue. Back when they made it only return mana if it was your active resource, it was apparent they never intended for it to be a shared blessing. It appeared, based on the change, to be a blessing intended only for the tanking paladins. The 3% damage reduction always made me crazy because it implied that other tanks should be capable of tanking without sanctuary, but we were expected to have it on at all times.
If we weren’t present, any other tank was normalized with us, but if we were present to share the sanctuary, well then they received an additional 3% damage reduction that was never designed for them, and could have been borderline OP.
Sanctuary and the druids leader of the pack are, as far as I can tell, the only 2 buffs in the game that are spec exclusive, and yet no one ever points out how advantageous they can be given their exclusivity in the world of bring the player not the class.
@Rhidach
1 July 2010 at 10:52 am #
Well, somewhat, the 3% damage reduction from Sanctuary has (for a while) clashed with the damage reduction that Disc Priests can proc. Still, you’re right, it’s absurd that Sanc for this long has so “external”. I’m glad they’re folding it back in.
DAMNIT! I always forget about those pesky disc priests. Looks like Leader of the Pack is the only buff in the game exempt from BtPntC
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Wahoo!! Personally I thought the “new” parry mechanic sounded clumsy to begin with and made dodge a much bigger priority over parry anyways. It’s nice to see testing revealed what I expected.
We’re also not happy with the new implementation of parry, where you take 50% damage from two swings. It sounded good on paper, but after testing it out we thought the second swing just feels goofy and confusing. Our plan is to revert parry back to 100% avoidance and remove the concept of swing speed increase for any creature (players could still do it). We would change the budget on parry to be exactly the same as dodge. We’d also like to add some more talent hooks that favor say parry over dodge for some classes — stuff like “After a successful parry….” (http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/24702403015/the-tank-thread/)