ShoR, no more?
Sorry, I couldn’t resist using that awful title. A poet and I didn’t even know it.
To the beta outrage of the day, we go:
We have temporarily disabled Shield of Righteousness.
We’re working on the basic Prot rotations right now, and with Shield of Righteousness in addition to Crusader Strike, Hammer of the Righteous, Consecrate, Avenger’s Shield and Holy Wrath, there was just a lot going on. Shield seemed like the least interesting of those abilities — really Shield and Hammer just seem to be single-target and multitarget versions of the same ability, especially without block scaling. Shield also felt like a duplicate of Shield Slam, which doesn’t help in trying to differentiate the two Prot trees. Frankly, we’d rather make Avenger’s Shield and Hammer of the Righteous cooler than they are today.
It’s too early to call this a permanent change. We still have a lot to consider, such as the damage of Hammer vs. Shield, how different we want the AE vs. single-target Prot attacks to be, and how much Holy Power considerations occupy a Prot paladin.
If we keep Shield of Righteousness, we need to figure out its role relative to Hammer. We don’t want it to be just swap one button for another for AE fights, and we don’t want you to have to use both on cooldown since we are giving Prot paladins more things to manage in Cataclysm.
Back at the start of Wrath we were finally given something more than the stable of four or so attacks we had in TBC: Shield of Righteousness and Hammer of the Righteous. ShoR was in essence a carbon copy of a Warrior’s Shield Slam (minus the dispel), and HotR was basically Holy Cleave. in the beginning, ShoR has an amazing scaling curve with Block Value, to the point where it had to be nerfed because it was hitting for too much damage.
Since that snip job (and then the later indignity of being subject to dodges and parries), ShoR just hasn’t been the same. It’s been rather anemic in the last tier of content, no where near the oomph that HotR has had lately.
And frankly, if it was gone, I wouldn’t feel worse off. It had its time in the sun, and it’s time for us to let the old girl go.
In terms of pure flavor I’ve seen a lot of people defending the retention of the ability on the grounds of pure flavor. Granted, the animation of hitting something with your shield is cool, but I don’t really feel that justifies keeping ShoR on life support. If I can take the luxury of hopping in the mud for a second, when I think of a Paladin I see Uther trudging into battle with his hammer at his side. The idea of a Paladin striking with a shield seems anti-thematic, Paladins are about standing ones ground, hunkering down, and raining the wrath of the light down upon their foes through holy power and their trusty mace.
As such, if I had to sophie’s choice between ShoR and HotR, I would always choose the hammer.
But like I said, that’s just me. I wouldn’t expect a design decision to be made upon my pseudo-RP fantasies anymore than I would hope anyone would. You can’t balance around a day dream of what your class should be bashing someone in the face with it. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter which animation delivers the tps, does it? There’s a reason they call it flavor and not, say, nutritional content.
In any case, if they want to do something meaningful with Shield of Righteousness they should make it more than just an instant attack. Maybe turn it into some kind of Holy Power “finishing move” that does damage based on how many stacks of HoPo (ha, Ana, HA) you have. That would make ShoR much more meaningful, and so much more than just another instant melee attack with a more fun animation.
Right now if ShoR goes quietly into that good night, I won’t miss it. It’s not the same attack we all fell in love with at level 75. And, like someone on the tanking forums said, you can’t make hamburger without slaughtering a few sacred cows.
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My concern is after the slaughtering of sacred cows, all we end up with is some hamburger. Is it so wrong to want a nice rib eye or tbone if they insist on slaughtering yet another cow in the name of building complexity for paladins?
@Rhidach
26 July 2010 at 12:54 pm #
And now I’m hungry.
I have to say that I agree to a point. It is just… With all the ways they are making us carbon copies of warriors, taking away a baseline attack seems to be the wrong thing to do. Take something away from us is not the way to make us different from warriors, putting in something or changing the way we tank would do that. As a long time paladin tank, I have to say, I have not been more disappointed in the direction of the prot tree since the start of BC. It just seems we were made an equal, now its being taken away from us again.
@Rhidach
26 July 2010 at 1:19 pm #
To be fair, ShoR is a carbon copy of a warrior ability (an inferior one, to boot). If we’re trying to strike out own path, then getting rid of ShoR is one way to do that. Nonetheless, I don’t think this is the last we’ve seen of Shield of Righteousness.
I know ShoR wasn’t made for holy pallies… but it is part of my holy pally damage when out questing and stuff.
It’s waaaay more important than prot, but they aren’t the only ones who use this ability.
@HanaMoonfire
26 July 2010 at 4:06 pm #
I also use SoR while questing as a holy pally, but honestly it’s more because I have so few other buttons to push and not because I’m amazed by what it does for me. Considering Crusader Strike is going to be baseline now (and I think I heard some about talk making some of its damage holy) we might not miss it.
As a prot paladin, SoR is one of the least exciting buttons to push. HS increased my block and deals reflective damage. HotR hits multiple enemies with my seal and makes them stick to me. Judgement puts a debuff on the enemies. Consecrate hits everything around me with ticks of AoE damage which is nice if I’m tanking more enemies than my HotR can hit.
SoR is just a single target bash attack against one enemy. It’s not bad, but there’s no secondary function to it to make us want to push the button for reasons other than building more threat on that single enemy.
Hana’s last blog ..Druid The Fuzzy Swiss Army Knife
@Rhidach
27 July 2010 at 7:55 am #
*Exactly* my feelings, thanks for saying it more clearly than I, Hana. :)
What if as prot we had a skill to change crusader strike to the ShoR animation with some added effect (hopefully an interrupt). I know it might present problems for cooldowns with so short of an interrupt, but prot really needs an interrupt and this might fix it.
Also I play a dwarf pally and I absolutely hate the spinning crusader strike animation, so I’m looking for any reason to not do it…
Isn’t that photo of a warrior? I don’t think there were any pallies in 300, if there were then the persians would have lost.
@Rhidach
27 July 2010 at 7:54 am #
Ha! We would have just rounded them up and consecrated them down.
You know I used to be a maintankadin. I have a premade on the beta. I recognised a lot of the spells. I had some idea how to spec into prot (choose those which sounded like you’d use them for tanking). A lot easier to spec correctly with 31-pt talents than the live versions!
Gravity’s last blog ..Beta 12644- nothing for DK
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/t/26262867468/discusion-on-holy-power-holy-shield/
“As far as rotations go, something I mentioned in the live forums is we are trying letting Shield of the Righteous (or whatever we decide to call it) consume Holy Power for more damage *and* refresh Holy Shield. So you would need to get Holy Shield up, but then you could just use your shield hits instead. If you were ever in a position where you couldn’t hit the boss, you could always fall back on just casting Holy Shield itself. We’ll see how that feels. ”
Could be interesting =)