Build 13033 tries to doll up Word of Glory

Ah, but does it fail?

Before I get into that, let’s look at the changes:

Divinity is now a Tier 1 Protection talent.

Yes, perfect! Now I don’t have to divert unnecessary points into Holy. This will really help with leapfrogging the (other than Seals of the Pure) rather lackluster first tier. Also means I can work Divinity into just about every build rather than just a survival-focused one.

Protector of the Innocent is gone, moved to Holy.

I feel like I just dumped my garbage on the neighbor’s lawn.

Guarded by the Light additional effect – In addition, your Word of Glory will also cause Holy Shield.

This is a good step in the right direction for Word of Glory. It’s not the end game–by far–but a good building block. I’ll expand on this a little further down.

Judgements of the Just now also reduces ranged attack speed.

Excellent.

Crusader Strike now causes 120% weapon damage, up from 100%.

Loving it! Crusader Strike needed more oomph. This should firmly ensconce it above HotR for single target, if the last build didn’t already.

Anyway, let’s talk about Word of Glory and the current Holy Power design. Right now the consensus is that we, as Prot, do not have enough Holy Power. We can only generate the good stuff every 4.5 seconds, and ultimately expend it every 13.5 seconds or so. It’s a rigid process, to say the least. Compared to Ret who are nakedly rolling around in massive piles of HoPo, we are the pauper spec of the Paladin class.

A huge side effect of our HoPo drought is that when we have three options for expending the resource–ShoR, Inquisition, or Word of Glory–there emerges a clear winner in an unfortunate triage. Inquisition is ideal for AOE situations, and other than that, the predilection is to dump Holy Power into Shield of the Righteous. Word of Glory isn’t given a second though because it doesn’t make sense to expend 13.5 seconds of resource generation on a self-heal when you could deliver a major hit that is running 25% of our current damage done and put up a damage reduction effect.

With every previous build Blizzard has been putting more an more lipstick on the pig to get us to take her home. First there was allowing overheals from WoG to convert into a shield, then it was slipping Eternal Glory into the first tier of our tree, and now we have Word of Glory also putting up the Holy Shield effect.

Side note to recognize the inanity of this–at this juncture let’s just redesign Holy Shield to go up whenever Holy Power is expended, yes? Seems like it’d be less code and tooltips that way?

Anyway, back to my beef. Word of Glory is getting more attractive, sure, but there is one major problem with the ability that can’t be tinkered away. Fundamentally, it’s a tiny heal that doesn’t scale and costs you as many resources as a giant shield slam. The return on investment is minuscule, to say the least. If they want us to use Word of Glory, they need to make a giant change to it: it needs to be free.

For the moment it’s clear they’re not going to give us more Holy Power, despite this being badly needed. Apparently the fear (according to the crab) is:

If we give Protection ways to generate more Holy Power, then that opens the door for getting both Inquisition and Shield of the Righteous going at the same time. As soon as that’s possible, you’re going to assume you have to do both to be competitive, and whenever you can’t keep both up, you’re going to be frustrated.

I guess this is a valid concern but it’s a damn stupid reason to restrict our Holy Power generation. Why not make ShoR and Inquisition exclusive from each other (much like Inq and HS were back at the beginning of beta)? Is that too hard a solution to implement?

Anyway, back to Word of Glory. Like I said, the fix is to make the spell free. Not directly free, of course, but instead redesign Eternal Glory to something like “when you use [some spec-specific ability] there is a x% chance you will proc the effect Eternal Glory, which will make your next Word of Glory expend no Holy Power and have the effectiveness of a 3HP heal.” Make the effect last 15 seconds so we can find a neat gap in our rotation (because the Light knows we’ll have plenty of those) to pop WoG.

And there we go: problem solved. Word of Glory will now be used, and it won’t severely cramp our rotation, aside form pushing everything back a GCD. Which is a much more reasonable threat loss than a whole ShoR.

Make it so.

Great success

On Tuesday night, I donned my armor set, chugged my flasks, and got ready to see if I could finally reach for the firmament and touch the face of the raid boss armor cap. I am happy to report I managed to do it, getting exactly 6 over the cap (a very efficient record breaking) and without depending on procs to boot.

The only caveat is I did this under the effect of an Indestructible Potion. While that obviously was what pushed me over the finish line, I don’t consider it “cheating” because you can just about keep the effect up for the duration of a 4 minute fight with pre-potting.

Though again, most fights are at least 5 minutes. Hrm.

In any case, I also picked up the heroic Bile-Encrusted Medallion later that night. Which means I can actually shed 84 armor from that set. That’s new.

Two interesting facts about ShoR in Cata

I was perusing this thread over at Maintankadin, attempting to contain my excitement that Theck is beginning to start up his theorycrafting apparatus for Cataclysm, and noticed two pretty interesting asides about Shield of the Righteous that are worth sharing.

The first is that when the Sacred Duty proc is active, ShoR will apparently not be missed, dodged, or parried. This may change in future builds, but something to keep in mind when making judgements about what buttons to press when. Do remember that if ShoR misses, you lose the three HoPo stacks that you patiently built up.

The second is that, to maximize threat, there are certain circumstances where hitting a 2HP ShoR is better than waiting for a third stack of Holy Power. Specifically, if you have a Sacred Duty buff that will expire before you can accumulate a third Holy Power, you should hit ShoR. The reasoning behind this is a 2HP ShoR+Sacred Duty does the same damage as a non-Sacred Duty 3HP ShoR. And, by waiting for Sacred Duty to fall off and for you collect that third stack of Holy Power, you’re pushing a future ShoR back by 4.5 seconds, thus a threat loss in the long-term.

Very interesting stuff. I can’t wait for the number crunching to begin over there so we can start to get a better picture of our rotation and threat talents, as we move closer to Cataclysm’s launch and patch 4.0.

Build 12984 ups the numbers a bit

The latest build in Beta fixed one of the big problems we had, that HotR was doing more single target damage Crusader Strike, but buffing through talents the damage of CS. It’s a pretty textbook change, but they just modified a talent to buff CS. Keeps it out of the hands of those greedy Rets, so that’s a plus.

Here are the changes to our spec this build:

• Wrath of the Lightbringer slightly revamped – now increases the damage of your Crusader Strike and Judgement by 30/60% and increases the critical strike chance of your Holy Wrath and Hammer of Wrath by 15/30%.
• Guardian’s Favor is now a Tier 2 Retribution talent.
• Improved Hammer of Justice is now a Tier 2 talent, up from Tier 1.
• Eternal Glory is now a Tier 1 Protection talent.
• Reckoning is also now only 2 points (instead of 3) and maxes out at a 20% proc chance, instead of 30%.

The Eternal Glory <> Guardian’s Favor swap and knocking Imp HoJ up the tree a level changes how we spec a bit. Before Improved Hand of Justice was a no-brainer, because Protector of the Innocent sucks, but now Eternal Glory fills that roll. And, with Imp HoJ on the same tier as Toughness and Judgements of the Just, we basically skip it on our trip to the top. It might have a use in certain situations, but there is more ROI from later talents than spending points on knocking 20 seconds off of a stun/on-GCD interrupt.

Reckoning also got stealth nerfed for what it’s worth. I’m still holding a skeptical eye towards this talent until we see a Theck crunch on talent TPS, so I’ll hold off any concern for now.

I’m pretty happy with the Wrath of the Lightbringer buff, because it was a much-needed damage boost to CS. It also makes Holy Wrath and Hammer of Wrath possibly heavier hitters as well, which is a bonus.

Ultimately, I specced like this in Beta while screwing around yesterday. I pulled both of the Word of Glory talents because I wanted to give the spell a shot, at least while leveling. Color me underwhelmed.

Heals for 9076 with 3HP, which is… ok. It’d do 9621 with Divinity, but that hardly helps. At the moment I’m just not seeing the pay off for Word of Glory and 3 Holy Power. HoPo is too precious and rare a resource to blow on a non-scaling heal. I can see situations where it could be useful, but those are limited. I’m crossing my fingers that the nigh-mythical numbers pass might make Word of Glory more attractive, but who knows? At the very, very least we need some kind of additional Holy Power source. Be it a proc, or another ability… something.

Yesterday was also the first time I got on Beta since they fixed Sacred Duty. Hoo-boy, now that is a fun proc. It can be ill-timed, refusing to proc when you have a 3HP ShoR loaded in the chamber. On the bright side, a 15 second buff lasts a long time and more often than not you’ll have that delightful little red judgement icon waiting for you when you’re ready to shield slam something.

There is nothing more satisfying than a 15k ShoR. And this is at level 83 while soloing. I can only imagine in level 85, with raid gear, and fully buffed.

One last heartache: the Seal of Truth glyph is gone. Farewell, free Expertise. (Correction: It was switched from a Major glyph to a Prime. Sorry for any confusion, I regret the error!)

Pimped my UI, part 4

When I was putting together this post, I noticed something funny. The first time I majorly changed up my UI and posted about it was April 2009. The second time was October 2009. The third, April 2010. It’s now mid-September 2010 and I realize there seems to be about a six month life span to each iteration of my user interface. Coming April 2011: Pimped my UI, part 5!

Anyway, I’m really proud of what I’ve come up with this time. I originally set out to make the most minimalistic UI yet, and I think I’ve succeeded. And there’s still a lot of tweaks I can make, especially to the in-combat “version”. Shrinking DXE’s bars, scaling down TipTac’s tooltips (they do not need to be wider than grid, imo), and shrinking Omen to show maybe half an many rows.

A huge part of what makes the UI so uncluttered is the sharp reduction of how many buttons are on-screen. I went from my full rotation and various ancillary abilities being completely on screen–44 buttons worth of precious real estate. Now I have 13, 8 for cooldowns, and 5 for buffs. Everything else is keybound and invisible. (Well, except for auras and the micromenu, which are visible on mouse over.)

The only problem this presents is that hiding my full rotation and all these buttons requires a lot of faith in my own muscle memory. The other major problem: not being able to see when abilities are on cooldown. Right now I’m not finding it hard to watch when an attack is used based on my cooldown bar reacting to GCDs being expended, but sometimes I’ll lose track and have to restart at the beginning of the rotation. It’s a pain, but something I think practice can allow me to work around.

If worse comes to worse I’ll make the primary rotation bar visible on mouse over so I can quickly eyeball cooldowns if needed. I expect to be be fine though.

I also set up click for my various Hand abilities. Shift+right click is Hand of Sacrifice. Alt+right click is Hand of Protection. Ctrl+right click is Hand of Salvation.

Probably one of the less drastic changes, but one of the most effective, was what I did to my unit frames. The way it is now, I have my player frame on the bottom, with health being the driver of how full or empty the bar is. I removed the separate mana bar, and instead just have my % of mana remaining on the left. The little spark under the mana number indicates if Divine Plea is active (that’s Power Auras).

Above the player frame is the target. Buffs and debuffs show just above the target (which are a bit too small right now, at least for ones I’m applying), and on the top right is the target of target. Just the name though, because that’s ultimately all I really need. I don’t show any indicator of target mana, which I really need to fix, if only to check healer mana levels before pulls.

And lastly, on the right is the focus frame. Pretty simplistic, just name and health. I need to put focus target in there somewhere.

One other big change I wanted to mention was I completely dumped the whole “have a bar with various sub-addons at the top of your screen” model. Instead I have nice, clean, minimalistic SLDataText under my unit frames. It’s not not have this line of crap bordering the top of my window.

Just to review, here are the addons I used:

• Satrina’s Buff Bars for buffs/debuffs
• basicMiniMap for map
• Pitbull for unit frames
• Grid for raid frames
• Chatter for the chat window
• TipTac for tooltips
• Deus Vox Encounters for bossmods

I still have a few things I want to change or streamline (as I mentioned above), Once I do that, I’ll finagle a way to offer this UI as a packaged download. Once I figure out which folders I would need to include.

Feel free to ask any questions about it in the comments! I’m sure I left tons of small details out.

Better news, everyone

Back in March… or April, whenever it was… when we were working on Putricide for the first time and wiping endlessly on him, I would drive home from work at the end of the day and say to myself “this night can only end two ways–one is with Putricide dead, the other is with him alive for another week.” It was initially a mental exercise meant to brace myself for the inevitable disappointment that characterized those interregnum days.

Then, of course, one day I posed that question to myself and the former outcome was the one fate handed to us. Putricide was dead, and the renaissance of ES began.

I revived the exercise for our weeks of learning the Lich King. It was hard fought, but after about 4 nights of solid attempts spread out over a month (so it goes with a 2 day raid schedule) we finally nailed the guy to the way. The exercise metastasized a bit from devouring my attention on that long car ride home up 95 to on a bike ride I would take after work in the local cemetery.

I know that sounds creepy, but paved roads and no cars. Win-win my friends. And it’s quiet. (Ba-dum-bum.)

But I digress. I dwelled a lot on the fight and the viability of victory, and eventually inevitability won out. Like it usually does. And as we started working through hardmodes I didn’t really need to spend a lot of time agonizing on possibilities, because we usually downed new hardmode fights the first week we tried them.

Things changed of course with Heroic Sindragosa, which took us about four weeks to eventually down. A pretty epic ride, and you can bet that old saw came back in full force. And then after Sindragosa, I revived it for Putricide, but prematurely. It took us 57 attempts to kill Heroic Sindragosa. It took us only 16 to kill Putricide. And that’s with 11 of them being done with a suboptimal strategy.

An amazing turn around between the two fights, I think.

When we stood there in front of Putricide last night, I articulated a new strategy and some tweaks I wanted everyone to operate under. This is in addition to a commandment to download and install an addon called Plagued that tracks through /yells about someone’s head if they have the plague and counts down until they need it taken away from them. Last week, we were making people with the plague go to a safe spot.

This week, I told everyone to spread out, stay put, and put on their raid awareness hats. People were to call out in vent when they were taking it from the plagued person. Everyone needed to be cognizant of where those massive red yell bubbles were.

Other tweaks: pets had to be on green slime whenever up, and the DKs were taking turns popping armies onto the green slimes during transitions, for extra damage soaking.

The first attempt with this new strategy, we got Putricide to 50% before wiping, beating our previous record of 51% by inches.

Our second attempt we got him 12%.

Suddenly everyone was energized. We hadn’t even seen phase 3 before on heroic, and suddenly we just coasted right in to it. The raid was infused with equal doses of terror and excitement.

We proceeded to do a few more attempts, each time hitting phase 3 with ease and wiping due to the soft enrage. Something had to change. On the last attempt, I made a risky decision: when the orange slime comes down in the second transition, rather than hanging back and waiting for it to pick a target, melee go in and start wailing on it. In the attempts thus far, orange was up with at least 20% when Put activated, and we needed that dps time on the big guy.

Luck shined her golden countenance upon us, the first target orange picked was at range. My gambit succeeded. Orange died right as Put activated. Everyone was alive. It was go time.

We started rounding the outside of the room, and Put’s health was steadily dropping. We lost a few people here and there, but everyone was focused. We were going to make this happen. Suddenly I heard that a healer had died, and I popped a cooldown, and then my assigned raidwall.

We held it together as the numbers. Tank swaps continued until I believe Nordic drew the last tanking turn with 3 stacks at around the 2% mark. We held it together–along with our breath–and finally push the fight over the finish line. Putricide keeled over and coughed up his purples.

No Last Word, unfortunately.

After the exhilaration wore off, we trucked over and up to Arthas and did the Been Waiting a Long Time for This achievement to begin the long march for getting everyone their 25man drakes. A necessary, if not annoying, first step.

Oh, and duty and tankadin camaraderie compels me to congratulate Ana on ranking #57 on the Festergut 25H dps ranks for prot pallies. She’s been working really hard, and I’m sure in the next few weeks she can place even higher!

Ultimately, I think my favorite part of the night was right before LK when one of the dps said “I totally called this last week when I said Rhidach was going to come up with an amazing strat and we’d kill him easily.” That was a much needed confidence boost after the stomping my RLing ego took the other night.

Apparently some of them have faith in me, haha.

Highs, lows, and creamy middles

Well, despite my initial fears that the RNG gods had smitten me for my hubris, I was rewarded with another drop of the heroic Icecrown Glacial Wall. It’s exciting to have the BiS shield in the game, though for some reason it doesn’t carry the same level of excitement that the first one did for me.

Perhaps this is because I’ve seen upgrades to this shield at level 82 on beta. Ah well, dust in the wind, my friends!

On the plus side, the new shield gives me a huge chunk of armor to add to my pile, which makes hitting the raid boss cap all but inevitable. And speaking of, during Saurfang last night somehow I failed to beat my previous record…

I had a Mongoose proc when screenshotting last week, so I think that number was abnormally high. Maybe I’m fine, but I have this lingering doubt that I had the 251 version of the Unidentifiable Organ equipped still after having scored the heroic one on Sunday night (I apologize for not bombarding you with six links for this item, heh). In any case, I’ll need to double check that when I get home.

Tonight I’ll finally re-enchant my Ardent Guard for Major Agility, make sure my armor set is correctly set up, and then prepare for glory.

As for the raid as a whole last night, it was another pretty great night. We knocked out Halion, then everything in ICC as heroic for the first wing, plus Blood Wing, and Dreamwalker. Sindragosa we had to do on normal to get our third Shadowmourner-in-waiting his frost infusion, so he can start accumulating shards as early as next week. The second Shadowmourner, Morvain, is already at 42 shards after five weeks.

We have Heroic Put on deck for this evening. I’m hoping for some major progress to be made, so cross those fingers!

Lingering worries in beta are worrying

I’ve been generally upbeat about Protection Paladins in beta. Perhaps to a fault, but I truly, honestly believe the foundations of the class are solid heading into the final stretch of beta. It’s the numbers that need tweaking here and there, sure, but like I said–generally solid. Now, things aren’t all cupcakes and gumdrops, there are some big issues that could have a negative effect on our “solidity” going forward. These are things that I feel confident will be resolved by launch or in the future, but for purposes of awareness, Justice herself compels me to bitch about them.

1. Word of Glory will fall behind

The amount of healing WoG does is based on two things: how much HoPo (as Ana calls it) you have, and talents. Spellpower doesn’t modify it, so that free spellpower we get from Touched by the Light only goes towards holy damage/threat. And we can’t generate more than 3 Holy Power, so while initially WoG will be okay at first for the ratio of healing done vs. total hp we have, only the second number will go up. Eventually the disparity will make WoG not worth even feeling guilty about not hitting.

This is coupled with the fact that Blizzard wants us to use Word of Glory. Guarded by the Light cements it, but the talents has the most unwieldy mechanics of anything else in our tree. Never mind that they want us to expend precious HoPo on that button, they want us to time it to maximize self-overheals? It defies explanation.

There is a major rework needed on Prot and WoG, which hopefully will come in our next pass. We need some kind scaling, and we need some kind of incentive to use this spell. Why do only overheals put up that damage absorb effect? Why not any self-WoG heals? What’s the downside? It’d be an Interesting Choice^™, eh?

2. HotR > CS on single targets

This I cannot imagine not being resolved when they do their final numbers passes, but at the moment Hammer of the Righteous does more damage against a single target than Crusader Strike. The solution can’t be to nerf HotR (it seems pretty perilously balanced right now to interact properly with Inquisition), instead it must be to buff Crusader Strike.

If this doesn’t change, this will seriously damage the stated goal of separate aoe/single target rotations. As always my boundless optimism assumes this will change, however.

3. ShoR is a huge liability if and when avoided

On beta right now, when you hit the ShoR button, you expend three Holy Power and strike out with your shield. As on live, ShoR can be dodged/parried/missed, and if it does the Holy Power you expended disappears into the ether.

We’ve been playing tennis with concerns over ShoR, and Holy Shield, and Holy Power since the inception of the HoPo apparatus. Then we finally hit a plateau where the 15% block was the only degree of Holy Shield available, no matter how much Holy Power you expended. And that’s great. But, considering ShoR is designed to be a huge portion of our single target threat, the fact that it can miss and then you lose 13 seconds of HoPo accumulation… that’s a huge deal.

Conversely, if a Ret Paladin misses with Templar’s Verdict or Divine Storm they only lose one Holy Power. Much better design. Needs to apply to ShoR as well.

ShoR being avoided should carry some sort of penalty, if only to give a reason to carry hit or expertise, eh? ShoR first becoming avoidable in 3.3 was what began to make Paladins start favoring expertise. I suspect this will carry on into the future.

I’ll play the optimism card here as well: I think this will change, and the penalty will be one Holy Power like Ret currently “suffers”.

4. Quality of life things that will never be fixed

This is the point where I approach the closest thing I can muster to despair. I don’t think, especially at this juncture, we’ll ever get an off-GCD, short cooldown interrupt or any kind of gap closer. Cataclysm was the perfect chance for these niceties to be implemented for Prot, and I suspect that the opportunity will pass untaken. It’s not upsetting, but it is disappointing.

Build 12942 roundup

A few changes to our spec in the latest build. Nothing particularly worth writing home about.

Glyphs

The Glyph of Seal of Truth survives for now, which is pretty exciting in face of recent threats it has received.

Nonetheless, the only actual glyph change I could see was a new Glyph of the Ascetic Crusader that reduces mana cost of Crusader Strike by 30%. Yawn.

Talents

Vindication now has a new effect, making Hand of Justice able to interrupt spells if a mob is not stunnable. If you’re scratching your head, that’s because Blizzard quietly removed that capability from HoJ a few builds ago. I guess it’s good we can now interrupt again, albeit poorly. Rebuke would be nicer. But that goes without saying.

Eternal Glory was nerfed again as well to 15%/30%. I keep eyeing this talent, thinking it might be useful in a spec combined with Guarded by the Light. But that feeling diminishes every new build.

I guess we can feel lucky they didn’t put this effect on a talent we’d normally avoid.

T11 Bonuses

The bonuses for the eventual first Cataclysm raid tier sets have been datamined. For Prot Paladins, they are:

2pc — Increases damage done by Crusader Strike by 10%.

4pc — Increases duration of Guardian of Ancient Kings by 50%.

The 2pc bonus is ok. Not amazing, just ok. The 4pc bonus is interesting. We’d have an 18 second 60% damage reduction cooldown with this bonus. That’s a bit long, but I’m not going to complain I suppose.

Milquetoast changes, all in all.

Reach just short of my grasp

I made some changes to my armor set and managed to pull a much, much better number: 49,421. Only 484 away from the raid boss cap.

Not too shabby! I should note that I didn’t replace Mongoose, and I had a Lightning Speed proc when this screenshot was taken. Though that’s only worth 240 armor, before buffs.

Apparently capping won’t be as hard as I thought.