Just a quick post to digest anything pertinent to our beloved spec!
The new talents system
Firstly, when they were gave prot paladins as the example for the new system in the WoW Preview Panel, they gave a quick list of what abilities we’d receive automatically as a result of our spec. No surprises here, except that retribution will have Hammer of the Righteous too.
(Apologies to mmo-champ for stealing their screenshots.)
As for the actual talents they offered for prot paladins later in the talent panel, I played with the wowhead calculator a little bit and settled on this spec. There’s not much reason to go terribly in depth, since these will likely all change before we even reach beta, but to briefly bob and weave through the six tiers …
Tier 1 – Level 15
First of all: HALLELUJAH — a gap closer at last! During the preview panel when they mentioned how the new talents would include a helpful amount of utility enhancements, I immediately thought that this could feasibly lead to the long-deferred dream of a tankadin gap closer to be fulfilled. So imagine my joy when that first screenshot came up on the screen showing an overview of paladin talents and the first tier was the three movement-enhancing talents in our current trees.
But I digress! Speed of Light is the obvious choice here. The fastest speed combined with a short cooldown makes it the most useful of the three choices. You’re not going to be constantly zipping around, so you want that burst of speed to mean the most it can when you choose to use it.
Tier 2 – Level 30
The stun is the only real choice I see here. CC is nice, but it has a cast time, and that’s not the kind of thing you’ll want to be playing with in combat. And, likewise, there are plenty of other CCs available. As for Seal of Justice, total PVP choice.
Tier 3 – Level 45
This is a wonderful tier, but despite the temptations of the first two, hands-down nothing can beat a cheat death.
Tier 4 – Level 60
Don’t make the mistake I first did when I saw this, the wording “friendly target” also includes the player (see Word of Glory, for example; same verbiage) so Holy Shield was be self-usable. It’s the only real survivability choice. Eternal Glory remains lackluster, and Selfless Healer focuses itself on a heal with a cast time, something we won’t be dirtying ourselves with.
Tier 5 – Level 75
Clemency seems like the best choice. The ability to get two BoPs out, for example, feels pretty powerful. Reduced cooldowns are boring, by comparison. Being able to choose the end of the cooldown will always be more powerful. Veneration likewise feels like a PVP talent, but you never know if a PVE fight may require switching to it if there’s some kind of raid-wide slowing debuff, or something of that ilk. You never know.
Tier 6 – Level 90
Holy Avenger gives us a burst of survivability: the ability to cast WoG/Holy Shield 6 times in a row — especially if WoG’s cooldown disappears in 5.0. That’s incredibly powerful, especially when choice of timing is the name of the game.
All in all, I know it’s stupid to dig through these when they are nowhere near final. But I love the new system, I’m very excited about it. For the same reason I enjoy flipping around my major glyphs fight to fight, I love the possibility of customizing my talents depending on the needs of the encounter. I really hope they stick with this to the end. (Not the numbers, mind you, the big picture framework.)
Sidenote: I think it’s cute that Blizzard is aiming for this new system to kill cookie-cutter builds. The truth of the matter is, if numbers are included on a talent, you’ll be able to crunch our its survivability value. We’re going to have a list of proper talents for each encounter, there’s no way around it.
The return of Blinding Shield?
At the class Q&A, Ghostcrawler imparted that Blinding Shield (originally a new spell for Paladins in Cataclysm, but later removed) is penciled in as the level 87 spell. As he went on to disclaim, that could very likely change, so don’t consider it remotely set in stone.
Hope burns eternal
I would love to see an orange shield.
- Ghostcrawler, when the panel was asked about a tanking legendary
Cosmetic librams soon?
When talking about hunter quivers, the panelists also brought up librams as a similar cosmetic option for paladins. I wonder if they’ll turn the soon-to-be deprecated ranged slot into a “cosmetic item slot”. You equip a libram, or a totem, or quiver, or whatever and it appears slung to an appropriate spot on your character. It’s something I’ve wanted to see since Burning Crusade, so here’s hoping we see that in MoP.
What we didn’t hear about
On Thursday, Miri texted me to let me know that she asked Ghostcrawler about active mitigation/tank changes during the charity dinner and he said there was not going to be any news about it during BlizzCon. Likewise, as the convention continued we didn’t get a single inkling of any news about the subject. I’m a little disappointed, but as long as it makes it to 5.0, there’s not much of value in worrying about not getting news about an early design iteration.
I can’t possibly imagine that most bosses would be susceptible to Blinding Shield, so I suspect it will end up being marginally useful for trash.
I’ve seen people talking about the abilities as an “ABC” for each slot, so your build would end up being referred to in shorthand as an AABBCA build. I’m really hoping that the mage talents shift around so that the most optimal build is the BAABAA build.
I see blinding shield as more of a shockwave analog for prot AoE. Possibly an AoE HP finisher that isn’t terrible. Prot AoE isn’t in a bad place, it’s just in an annoying place. We’re pretty much systematically inferior to every other tank when it comes to AoE situations thanks to Zharym’s idea of “flavor”. Hammer of the righteous tastes like clunk. it’s the only primary tanking AoE that has a facing requirement, it’s useless for cleaving on bosses such as rag, conclave, or magmaw, where the AoE orginates from the center of the hitbox and never makes it out of the hitbox. It’s also the only tank AoE that can outright misfire.
Exacerbating the situation is the lack of a strong supplemental AoE ability. Warriors have rend, TC, and shockwave. Druids have swipe, thrash, the thrash dot. DKs have D&D, diseases, and Blood Boil. Paladins really wind up banking solely on Hammer becaue Consecrate not only does less damage than any of the other tanking AoE dots, it also lacks the high threat component of D&D. Holy Wrath doesn’t scale with Vengeance, or with AoE, it’s always a mediocre 7k damage when you hit that button, and it’s only useful for the stun, or filling otherwise empty GCDs. I really get the feeling that they wanted to tone down our AoE output after wrath, and instead of making a unified design, they simply had a dev break each of our abilities individually, and as such, break the whole.
If blizzard implements Blinding Shield as a hard hitting AoE finisher, akin to shockwave for warriors, it would go a long way towards improving the QoL of prot palladins in cleave and AoE situations. It’s not an issue that comes up on Baleroc, but it’s one that comes up on rag.
Yeah, I agree, some extra AOE options would be nice. I miss our AOE dominance in Wrath.
It’s interesting to see another look into the talents that were put on display. I’d have to say I was extremely excited about Long Arm of the Law -> Selfless Healer -> Sanctified Wrath. I always love being able to heal the raid, and constant flash heals (one every two cooldowns potentially), infinite 45% speed bonus seems like a good ticket to me. Loved the synergy there, but overall I’m rather pleased to see the general expansion of what paladin’s can do.
Flash heal is still a cast time though, which you really can’t pull off while tanking. For that reason, I’m not sure Selfless Healer could be viable.
Let’s just say that with our luck? That orange shield is going to be just that…the color orange :| And then they’ll say “but we delivered!” and I’ll just sob in a corner…
Should be interesting with the talent changes though–it seems that our minds are pretty much a mirror (but yours is WAAAAY beyond mine in smarts) when it comes to looking at the talent breakout.
Can’t wait to go mess around with them in beta–now to also look at everything from a healer perspective too! O.O
That would be so evil!
Thank you for a very useful post–much appreciated, sir.
My pleasure, thanks for reading :)
Hmm I was looking at Long Arm of the Law rather than Speed of Light – I find it’s current incantation in ret enough of a speed increase – and they’ve removed the annoying 15 yard limit. 1 minute cooldown is kind of long for a gap closer I think – I tend to charge, grab aggro, charge back on my other tanks so it’d feel strange having such a long cooldown.
I guess typing it to part of the regular rotation in the form of Judgement might mean it isn’t up when you need it however (although you’ll have the speed boost 50% of the time – assuming cooldowns remain the same). However it is moving into the ‘no idea what else is going to change’ category – I’ve just been getting a feeling from the previews that judgement is going to be gaining more importance in MoP.
@The Renaissance Man – HoR is one of the reasons I’m not tanking on my paladin at present – add into that equation playing with latency and HoR is just terrible in comparison – you can’t hit adds because your target is out of range (a local check) and then when you actually try and use it the mobs are already behind (a server check).
@Rhidach I believe if I’m not mistaken but I was under the impression that the talent was going to reduce the cast time alongside mana cost because Greg Street explained it that way on stage. (I’ll have to rewatch with my DirectTV)
It wasn’t until this post I really looked at the wording and realized otherwise.