How do you solve a problem like Paladin AOE threat?

Ominously, Ghostcrawler declared last week in a post:

The threat-related goals still remain:

…

2) Paladin — Nerf the threat capacity of HoR and SoC.

Now, I may have played the chicken little several times in the past and yet we still made out pretty well, generally. Despite two or three dire predictions of imminent nerfs, the worst we got was the Sacred Duty retuning. As for threat, well, that’s a horse of a different color.

Is Paladin threat too good? Generally yes, although not for the reasons that GC and others on the tanking forums would describe. For one, in the one case that Ghostcrawler is correct, Seal of Command was poorly designed and executed, and gave us an easily obtained threat boost that really should have been restricted to Ret Pallies.

SoComm has really only been useful since ShoR was perhaps unintentionally moved to being a melee attack in the early days of 3.3. Before then we procced the effect much less, to the point where it was useless for tanking. Post-ShoR change and suddenly the fastest and easiest way to pumped out the AOE teeps (like deeps, but moar threatnin’) was to switch to Seal of Command and go nuts on any clumbs of mobs in your path.

As for Hammer of the Righteous, is it really that overpowered? Really?

I would say no, but perhaps I’m biased. I see little difference between it and the Warrior cleave aside from the fact that ours hits an additional target (but has a cooldown) and automatically pierces armor thanks to the damage being of the Holy school.

Side thought: if HotR was so overpowered (and this is something GC has been hinting that he feels for some time) then why, oh why, does the Paladin t10 2pc bonus increase its damage by 20%?

They tried to tinker with HotR in the past, around the time of the 3.2 ptr, briefly shifting its damage to physical. This made HotR not only hit for less (now being mitigated by armor) but also do less threat thanks to not gaining the Righteous Fury +threat to Holy spells. They played around with changing how much damage the attack did, and then baking in a +threat modfier, but eventually decided to just revert the change and leave it as is. Kicking the ball down the road, I suppose.

I wonder if this change is now on the table again.

In the end what it comes to down is, yes, we are gods of AOE threat, and that must be changed with us being adjusted down. How would I prefer this be done? For starters, make SoComm require a 2H weapon and make it the exclusive domain of Ret Pallies. Otherwise, if the intention is to let Prot keep it, adjust down how much damage the cleave does (though this will disproportionately hurt the Rets).

… Although, I do enjoy the irony of Rets taking a nerf on the chin because of us. Usually it’s the other way around!

Er, but I digress. The other recommendation is: wait and see how our AOE threat is outside of Icecrown. I strongly suspect that our AOE threat is being exaggerated, so to say, but the added damage of the Glyph of Sense Undead, Crusade’s 3% bonus, and the addition of Holy Wrath to our arsenal.

I suppose I could live with Hammer of the Righteous getting pared down, but I’d prefer that be last resort. I love that skill as is. And I’ve finally gotten over that awful CLANG noise it makes.

The only remaining question is this: is the nerf going to come pre-Cataclysm (and if so, why is it not on the PTR yet?) or will they just roll it into 4.0?

Tankadin HP hotfix nerfed

No details yet, other than:

It’s an intentional change. Sorry that the fix went in before the announcement. The announcement should be up soon with more details.

And yes folks, this is justified, please don’t freak out. Probably a needed reduction in our superior stamina scaling. It sucks how they sprung this on us, but in the end it was justified. They were never going to buff other tanks to our level, this nerf was inevitable.

Last request: please don’t go forth and QQ, let’s be the bigger tank about this.

Update: Looks like Sacred Duty went from 8% stamina increase to 4%.

I fear for LoH’s safety

We may have dodged the bullet last week, but there’s no denying that Lay on Hands is clearly in Blizz’s crosshairs. Hell, Pallies in general are. Damocles’ nerfbat is dangling precipitously above our heads.

Ghostcrawler recently asserted in a thread on the forums that “for most of the other hybrids, picking a role in a fight is much more of a commitment.” And approvingly quoted a poster who said that Paladins differ from other hybrids in that our healing capabilities are much more baseline.

Fair enough, but this peek into GC’s thought process bodes ill for our future situation. It appears that the developers intend to differentiate Paladins a lot more based on what spec they are. That is,

if you are up against a Holy paladin, you should know that one of your greatest challenges should be dealing with their capacity to heal. If you are up against a Prot paladin, you should be concerned with their capacity to take hits. If you are up against a Ret paladin, you should be concerned with how much damage they should deal. You should not, generally, be nearly as concerend [sic] about the Prot’s ability to self-heal or the Ret’s ability to tank you.

What does this mean for us? For starters: LoH doesn’t have a very bright future ahead of it. Because it is such a massive heal, it’ll probably be dumped deep into the Holy tree, much like Spiritual Attunement was back in 3.1. Our spellpower might be further nerfed so our off-healing capabilities can’t even begin to compare with Holy’s, and our damage dealing will surely be dealt a body blow for a nice double whammy of neutering Prot pvp and pve tps in one fell swoop.

Concerning my first assumption, to drop another quote bomb, GC went on to explain that they don’t consider the long cooldown on the ability (or the inability for it to be used in Arena is a balancing factor). Rather,

We don’t think “Sure I can heal myself for 25,000+ health as a dps spec or 50,000+ health as a tank, but not very often,” is balanced. Abilities can be unbalanced even if overall a character is not.

Gulp. Notice he specifically invalidated LoH for Ret and Prot in that example? Nice knowing you, old friend. Tell the Holy Tree we said hi.

The future of Paladins is probably this: Holy will have access to impressive self-heals (including LoH) but have little damage output, Prot will be a damage sponge but unable to kill anything or heal itself (basically, just slowly die in pvp), and Ret will be a paper tiger (good luck getting them to reverse the burst nerfs once you guys are mortal).

Normally, I wouldn’t mind this “recalibration” of the specs, but like most balancing matters, Blizzard will fail at the follow through. They have a bad habit of nerfing or buffing X to make up for Y, and then when they finally remove Y as a balancing factor, they don’t put X back to where it used to be. When Prot doesn’t have a third “cooldown” anymore, once LoH is gone, what is going to be the balancing factor to remove disparities?

Side question: does Blizzard even consider LoH a tanking cooldown? Admittedly, the reason I keep putting the word “cooldown” in scare quotes is because the classification is scurrilous at best, considering LoH is used more as a panicky free-heal and usually contributes to overhealing more than anything concrete. Still, the question is, do they factor its existence into the equation at all for us?

It’d be nice to get an answer on that.

To return to my previous point, another example: Blizz decided Ret was too bursty, which rubbed up against their survivability, and made it so their damage ramped up (expecting that they were going to live that much longer, so a ramp-up was justifiable). If Ret’s survivability craters, are they going to shift back to a bursty dps model? Of course not.

If I seem overly pessimistic, it’s because I am (pessimism is a bad habit of mine). Blizzard has a knack for going overboard, and I can just see them “recalibrating” our class and badly handicapping us as a result.

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.

The Leviathan’s Coil nerfed

The Leviathan’s Coil ring has had its armor reduced from 882 to 448 to properly reflect the item level.

Eff.