Back to business in beta

One of the first things I did Friday when I got home was try to log into the beta and get some more leveling done and see if I missed anything. Instead, all the servers were down. A new patch was being applied from the looks of it, which means I got back just in time.

Later that night everything came back up and I caught on WoR some of the incoming changes. Most immediately tantalizing of which is the new Holy Power UI widget. I’m sure you’ve seen a thousand screens of this, but here are mine:

Perdy.

I’ll be talking a little bit about Holy Power, ShoR, and Holy Shield in a bit. But first, a few back-end things–check out the new tooltips for hit and expertise. This is pretty handy (especially for Expertise, which is a tad more complex than Hit). Takes a little of the numerical mystery out of the game, but QSS.

Now with more Block!

And of course, the biggest news of this build isn’t the fluff HoPo (as Anafielle calls it) interface, it’s the introduction of Mastery.

At base, our Mastery (Divine Bulwark) is worth 16% block chance as soon as you train it. As you add more Mastery rating that number goes up (tempered by the level/mastery formula, of course). At level 81, with 75 Mastery rating, my block chance went up to 23% before Holy Shield.

At lvl 82, I had managed to accumulate 492 mastery through various quest rewards, worth 28% block chance. That’s 32% before Holy Shield, 47% after. In fact, before dinging 82 I had about 52% block chance all together. One level dropped it 5% from the ratings/level conversion. I expect that drop will get steeper as my level gets higher.

The other “skill” available at the trainer was Plate Specialization, which boosts a stat if you’re in all plate.

So basically a free 5% stamina.

Revamped talents and spells

I already talked about Ret’s (grumble) gap closer in a post on Saturday, so I’ll avoid repeating myself here in this space. Some changes prot-side included a return to a +damage Consecration talent, a new Sacred Duty that makes ShoR have a chance to crit (I’ll talk about this re: priorities in a sec), and Wrath of the Lightbringer affects Judgements as well now.

Shield of the Righteous (ugh, that name) is now implemented, unlike the week before. You can talent into it and it appears in your spellbook. And unlike the 30/60/90 iteration, it now deals 20/60/120 AP based on how much Holy Power you’re rocking. At lvl 81 I had about 3700 AP with Might up. I was ShoRing for about 4600 damage a hit, which is 120% AP (including some Vengeance). Not too shabby, but also not the BOOMHEADSHOT type-attack I was hoping for. Perhaps at later levels with more massive AP numbers.

ShoR also when cast will put up a 20 second Holy Shield buff. For 15% block chance, regardless of how much Holy Power you had when you used ShoR. 1 HP is 15%, 2 HP is 15%, 3 is… you get it. This is much less onerous than the old prospect of stacking Holy Power to 3 then getting the max block buff up at the start of a boss fight. Now your first moves in melee can be CS+ShoR and you’ll be good to go.

Hammer of the Righteous has been redesigned. Rather than cleave and swinging flying, glowing hammers about with a mellifluous CLANG, you now just let loose a holy burst of light and hit everything around you. Rather than being a copy of Cleave, HotR is now a copy of Thunderclap. I haven’t tested the damage yet to see how much it does single target, on two, three, etc. and WoL ate the log I did Saturday. Nonetheless, I’m curious why this spell was redesigned, especially when Holy Wrath still works.

Speaking of HotR, it is, as we knew was coming, now on the same cooldown as Crusader Strike. And both have a 4.5 second cooldown, lining up nicely with GCDs.

Hand of Reckoning no longer does damage on taunt. Disappointing, but it was always a band-aid to the removal of Exorcism from our toolboxes. To fill in the gap we have Avenger’s Shield with a–talented–15 second cooldown (which gives me tingles) and the new Improved Judgements talent which allows us to have 30 yard Judgements. Something I can see myself getting.

The new priority

So, like I’ve been teasing, here’s the new priority rotation I’m monkeying around with: (1) Avenger’s Shield, (2) Judgement+3HP ShoR, (3) CS/HotR, (4) Hammer of Wrath, (5) Judgement, (6) Holy Wrath, (7) Consecrate.

The reason I have Judgement twice is because you definitely want to make sure to cast it before ShoR, since it gives ShoR a 50% chance to crit. It doesn’t have to be immediately before, the proc has a 15 second duration, so you can ride that for a bit, or jam another Judgement in right before ShoR for another chance of it.

Judgement otherwise still hits like a wet noodle and isn’t worth prioritizing over other, hard-hitting spells.

Also, don’t forget: the first rule of Grand Crusader is it will always proc if you use CS/HotR when Avenger’s Shield is not on cooldown! Also, we don’t talk about Grand Crusader.

Now, one of the more disconcerting things about beta right now is how many free GCDs we have. I’m so used to rotating through my 9s and 6s that I find myself stopping dead in my tracks with no idea what to do next as all my abilities are on cooldown. In a raid I could toss out some Hands/utility. While soloing I just block Holy Wrath as a filler.

Oh good, more morality quests

And the last thing I want to talk about in this post is I had a very interesting questing experience in Hyjal this weekend.

What’s this? A moral choice?! I had the option of letting the NPC kill the quest target who we were interrogating, or let her go. Being a blood-thirsty Alliance I opted for the throat slitting, though outside of that quest there didn’t seem to be any recourse to my actions. I’ll be miffed if it turns out she comes back to you a week later and gives you a free epic for sparing her life.

Expect this to generate blog posts at the advent of Cataclysm much in the same way that Borean Tundra torture quest did two years ago. Money on the table!

ShoR is such a tease

I finally managed to re-download enough of the beta (we all had to delete the old beta program and reinstall for the new launcher) to get in, and the thought of testing out the new Shield of the Righteous (new name or they forgot what it was called–you decide!) had me salivating. Once I got in–after many abortive attempts–I caught a taxi to the closest Paladin trainer in Darnassus to train the new ShoR, per the instructions in my spellbook.

So I get there, head into the Temple of the Moon, and hit up the trainer. “One ShoR please,” I politely requested. She just stared at me, dumbfounded.

… That ain’t right. I check the spellbook again, and it definitely says “See your trainer.” I then opened my talent window and spotted what I spotted was the culprit: you have to talent into ShoR. Ok, no biggie. I put the point in, hit Learn, and nothing happens. I close the talent window and reopen it, and half my talents are reset. I try again to no avail, it was not meant to be.

Apparently it’s for the best I couldn’t test ShoR as-is on beta, it’s changing very shortly. Right now the tooltip reads damage is 3250 plus 100% of your attack power per Holy Power stack. So unless there’s some trickery in that tooltip description, with an unbuffed AP of 3073, I could have been shield slamming for 12469, assuming the formula is 3250+(AP*HP) and not (3250+AP)*HP. The latter would be 18969, which is ridiculous.

Sidenote: the 3250 modifier there is because I’m level 81, I believe. MMO-Champ has it at 3198, which is probably the level 80 version.

Anyway, here’s the new tooltip from what I assume is an internal build we haven’t seen yet:

Slam the target with your shield, causing Holy damage. Consumes all applications of Holy Power to determine damage dealt:

1 Holy Power: 30% Attack Power
2 Holy Power: 60% Attack Power
3 Holy Power: 90% Attack Power

So much for the quickly expired statement that ShoR would be our “highest damage ability”. At three stacks and 90% attack power, I seriously doubt it’ll hit harder then Avenger’s Shield right off the bat. Maybe with buffs and enough Vengeance and some raid gear. Obviously I won’t know til I test it, so take that concern with a grain of salt.

On a different note, I think they need to graduate the AP contributions a little more steeply. With an equal AP contribution per stack of Holy Power, I can forsee a future where (assuming we still have free GCDs) it’ll be more threat to hit ShoR at 2 HP, rather than waiting for the accumulation of a max HP stack. Though my crystal ball can’t yet see how much value there’d be to sacrificing 5% block for some more damage and threat. Perhaps if they changed it to something like 20/50/90, where you’d definitely want to wait for that 3rd stack.

Anyway, it’s all conjecture! Can you sense how much I’m itching to shield slam something?

Ascending the roller coaster track once more

Ready for another drop on the roller coaster? More big changes coming in the next beta patch of two, apparently. After getting in to beta this past weekend, I felt like I reached a point of comfort with our attacks, and was planning to write a particularly detailed post about the “rotation”, but obviously I nearly spoke too soon. Ghostcrawler has come out with a raft of future changes to our abilities, so instead I’m going to go through each and add some insight from how these currently work on beta.

Shield of the Righteous — Now consumes Holy Power to cause damage.

Holy Shield — Now a passive ability that causes your Shield of the Righteous to provide 5% block per stack of Holy Power consumed. In other words, you never click Holy Shield. You just click Shield of the Righteous and buff yourself.

ShoR currently does not exist on beta, and I’m glad that it’ll soon be back. I was excited about this reintroduction when it was hinted at a few days ago, and I’m moreso now that they’re going to give it a whirl on beta. Right now HP is incredibly boring–you stack it to three then hit Holy Shield for a buggy block chance increase (sometimes it was doing 1.5%, sometimes 180%!) or give yourself a quick, boring heal. ShoR using Holy Power for an impressive single-target attack with add some much-needed flair to the system.

My biggest worry is whether we’ll expend the Holy Power if ShoR misses. That’d be pretty killer in a tight spot when previously we never had to worry about Holy Shield missing.

Also, not to try to reinvent the wheel here or anything, but… wouldn’t it more sense to–instead of making Holy Shield passive and bring back ShoR–but make Holy Shield an attack? Wouldn’t that be less work?

Hammer of the Righteous — Now generates Holy Power but shares a cooldown with Crusader Strike. Almost all talents that affect one or the other will affect both. The intention is you use Crusader Strike -> Shield of the Righteous for single target and Hammer of the Righteous -> Shield of the Righteous for multitarget.

I’m assuming this means Hammer’s cooldown is going to get reduced to 4 seconds, or the two abilities will meet somewhere in the middle. Likewise, I’m curious if HotR will retain its 100%-50%-25% damage spread in this new iteration. Hammer was hitting for about 3000 damage this weekend on its primary target, while Crusader was hitting for less. They’ll have to redesign Hammer (probably an equal damage spread among all three targets) to make it attractive for multi-target pulls and unattractive for single/bosses.

Avenger’s Shield — No real change, but it still hits pretty hard. Both CS and HotR can proc Grand Crusader to lower the Avenger’s Shield cooldown.

Let me just take a moment and proclaim my undying love for Avenger’s Shield as it is on beta now. When that ability comes off cooldown, you want to use it immediately (pronto!) because it’ll hit for around 7500 damage on each target it hits. No spread, 7500×3. Not only that, but I’ve seen it crit for 15,000, which is just breathtaking. I don’t think I usually crit for more than 10k in ICC 25 while fully buffed, and this ability can crit for 15k while soloing! More like Avenger’s Freight Train, eh?

They absolutely hit the nail on the head with this one. AS is fun to push, and when you see that Grand Crusader proc, you want to immediately indulge in some Captain America’ing. Probably the most tragic thing that has happened to me on beta so far is pushing back using Avenger’s Shield to get another CS off, and therefore generate some more HP, only to have that CS proc Grand Crusader, robbing me of an Avenger’s Shield. I’m man enough to admit I weeped.

Vindication — can be caused only by Crusader Strike or Hammer of the Righteous.

Not very consequential, considering Vindication was bugged on beta to basically apply from anything. I’ll miss the brief shining moment that we had Holy Demo Shout, though. It’s going to be a pain to be the only tank class that can’t debuff an entire massive pull.

Holy Wrath — With the above changes, we think Prot paladins have enough rotational buttons to hit, so we are downplaying Holy Wrath. Holy Wrath is really intended as a Ret filler spell (for when other attacks are on cooldown). Prot could technically use Holy Wrath, but we aren’t providing any talent hooks.

This is probably a good idea. Right now our “rotation” (I keep using quote marks because it’s not a rotation, as I’ll explain shortly, and I can’t think of a better catch-all word) has a lot to keep track of. Holy Wrath is good for massive pulls to immediately build threat on a mob of tiny murlocs charging at your healer, or on a single target where it’ll hit for more than half of our abilities.

Once you get to three or more enemies though, it’s lightweight, and unless you can’t be arsed to tab around and build threat equally with more powerful attacks, there was no real incentive to using HW. Phasing this out for general purpose is a good idea, it should remain situational.

Consecration — Now on a 10 sec duration with a 30 sec cooldown. The Hallowed Ground talent makes it cheaper and hit harder — it does not affect duration. Use Consecration when you need it, but you can’t spam it. This is consistent with the AE changes we are making to all tanks.

There goes the UI element, I suspect!

From the limited time I had this past weekend I found myself just about never using Consecration. It hits for a piddling amount and often (thanks to Hallowed Ground) outlived it’s target by a wide margin. As such it was pretty deprioritized in my rotation. In Throne of the Tides, on the other hand, it was very hand for boss fights (fire and forget!) or for what few AOE pulls I could live through. All in all, I think a better design direction is a short-lived, harder hitting Consecration, over a long-lived, weaker version. The short duration and longer cooldown will make dropping the spell a much more meaningful action as well.

One last worry: with Holy Shield gone, ShoR’s return, and the combined cooldown of CS/HotR, that’s one less button to push. I wonder if we’re going to have some free GCDs now. On beta there’s always something to hit, so that’s not a worry but we’ll see with these changes if that remains the case.

Don’t call it a rotation

The version first I did (after the other first thing) in beta was I found some target dummies and tried all of our abilities to see how much they hit for. I had a legal pad in front of me, scribbling down numbers, and taking notes. I then plotted out a timeline of GCDs to try to figure out the smoothest rotation possible. Basically, some kind of analogue for 969. I quickly realized this was impossible, because there are so many intersecting tracks and cooldowns, and even a proc, that the only way to approach our rotation is to recognize what it truly is: a priority system.

Here is, based on what GC just proposed and what non-changing abilities are like on beta, what I suspect the priority system will soon be:

1. 3HP Shield of Righteousness
2. Avenger’s Shield — hits like a truck, and you don’t want to miss a Grand Crusader proc
3. Crusader Strike/Hammer of the Righteous — depending on size of pull
4. Holy Wrath — for single targets, assuming it still hits for around 2700
5. Judgement — only hits for around 1300, very weak. Moreover you really on need to use it once every 15 seconds or so, to make sure you keep the attack speed debuff up. If mana retains being a non-issue, then Judgements of the Wise is not a good enough reason to prioritize this.

Not sure where Consecration will fit there (I’ll have to see how damage it does). I suspect it’ll be under Hammer of the Righteous for large pulls.

I have to honestly say that I am loving Paladin tanking in beta. It’s reactive, there are choices you have to make on the fly to be a more effective tank. Furthermore, you have to make the right choices to put out the most threat and thus be the most effective tank. It rewards you for playing smart.

Please make this change!

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.

That would be an amazing change, it would make Holy Power less of a limitation and more of a bonus, remove the maintenance-y feel of Holy Shield, and bring back our old friend ShoR all at the same time. I sincerely hope they make this change and are happy with it.

Bonus: a hint of something else they really should do.

We’d like to give Prot paladins (Ret too) passive spell hit somewhere.

That’d be pretty necessary if our attack power reduction debuff (Holy Wrath+Vindication) is on the spell hit table.

Build 12644: a few interesting changes

Build 12644. Some changes make sense, some seem like steps towards a different direction, like their reaching for something in the distance but don’t quite have it yet. Beta, and all. Ultimately just another step towards in the inevitable–though the question is: step forward, or step back?

1. Avenger’s Shield is getting all proc-y

So Avenger’s Shield has a base cooldown of 30 seconds. The talent Shield of the Templar reduces that down to 20 seconds. On top of that, Grand Crusader has been redesigned to give us a 20% chance to proc a reset on AS’s cooldown. This is great, but what’s the deal exactly?

Is AS supposed to be some sort of ghetto interrupt, on the global cooldown and suffering from the usual half-second delay in the application of the silence? I hope that’s not even half the intention of this change because that’s a depressing thought if they thing this makes a remotely plausible replacement for Rebuke.

My other thought is, how is Avenger’s Shield hitting on the beta? Is a powerhouse hit that would be worth using whenever the cooldown is up, or would it take a back seat to something doing a little more damage, like perhaps the new Hammer of the Righteous iteration? If Avenger’s Shield somehow becomes our heaviest hitting attack–a mighty big if–then that Grand Crusader proc will be something fun to watch for and immediately react to. Otherwise, it’ll just be a moment where we’ll have to stop and reassess our priorities midfight–”HotR is next, then Judgement… but AS just procced, so AS then judgement”–or something similarly annoying.

I really wish I was in the beta and could run some logs and work this out.

2. Holy Shield gets a little better

Up now to 20 seconds, which is good because we’re not as much in “one CS miss and you’re boned” mode anymore. However, two CS misses!

Personally, I think duration needs to get a little higher so that we can use Holy Power for something more than maintaining Holy Shield. Blizz wants the new resource system to be more interesting than stacking it to three and gaining a buff that other classes (I speak of our eternal enemies, the Warriors) get for free. I’ll return to this gripe shortly. In any case (or, as Anafielle would say, “irregardless”) Holy Shield is getting better but it’s not quite there yet. Need just a little more breathing room to make up for CS misses in early raid tiers and to give us a little more choice with Holy Power.

3. They want us to use Word of Glory, but I’m not buying it

Speaking of choice with Holy Power, the newest iteration of Guarded by the Light gives us a reason to use Word of Glory, giving us a protective shield worth however much we overheal ourselves with the ability. Doing on average 1367 per stack of Holy Power, and boosted by 20% by GbtL, it’s theoretically possible we’d get a shield worth 1640 per HP. At a max stack of 3 Holy Power, that’s a shield worth 4920 damage. Theoretically.

While that sounds interesting, I have two concerns: (1) who realistically is going to have more than one Holy Power to spend on a Word of Glory per Holy Shield cycle? And (2) how ridiculously hard is it going to be to time Word of Glory to maximize overhealing and thus getting as much shield as possible? I’d say close to impossible. Maybe at the start of the pull as a Holy Power dump, but I think I’d much rather have more block than a piddly 5k shield. A piddly 5k shield that doesn’t scale, and will still be 5k at the last raid tier.

Needs more work, send it back.

4. New Hammer of the Righteous, ShoR probably dead

The bell tolls for ShoR. Hammer of the Righteous now hits for 300% weapon damage on a single target, 150% damage on a second target, and 75% on a third. It’s not a single and multi-attack all in one. Good change–less clutter, makes HotR (presumably) our biggest gun.

5. Hallowed Ground not mandatory anymore

With the removal of the +damage component of this talent, it’s purely optional at this point. Also like if the Glyph of Consecration was made into a talent and given steroids. There’ll be no direct tps improvement for taking it, other than perhaps an indirect benefit by freeing up GCDs that would otherwise be spent maintaining Consecrate. I can’t see myself taking this talent in a hypothetical boss-only talent spec unless it really smooths out the rotation for us.

And, speaking of Consecration, a pertinent GC quote:

Currently we are looking really hard at AE damage abilities by all tanks. We tried Thunder Clap with no cooldown and didn’t like it. We also tried Thunder Clap with a Consecrate-like talent, but I’m not sure we like that either. At the moment we are thinking of nerfing any of the really passive AEs, including Swipe, Death and Decay, Damage Shield and Consecrate. All of those abilities (well, maybe not Damage Shield) would still be usable, but they would be more situational.

The bottom line is that we think all tanks need to be able to trivially handle the massive adds or straggling adds situations easily, or none of them should be able to.

Personally, I think it’d probably be easiest for the devs to move to a model where you can AOE tank, but until you severely overgear the instance, it’d be a fool’s errand to attempt to do so. It’s going to be impossible close Pandora’s Box at this point. Just let AOE tanking exist, balance it across the classes, and then make it deadly to do so right off the bat. People don’t want to CC in heroics when at the last raid tier, as much as they say they do.

6. Holy Demo Shout is go

I keep confusing Thunderclap and Demo Shout, which would be unfortunate, but this is warriors we’re talking about here. Anyway, Vindication is no longer an auto-debuff (which I cheer) and now an effect of Holy Wrath (which makes Wrath of the Lightbringer mandatory). I’m ok with this change. Less auto is good.

7. What the heck is our rotation becoming?

Someone observed we’re going from the easiest rotation in the game to the most difficult. In some respects, I think they’re right. Gone is the elegant simplicity of 969, and here comes a choppy priority system. We’re looking at a toolbox of HotR, Judgement, Crusader Strike, Holy Wrath, Holy Shield, Consecrate, Avenger’s Shield, and maybe Word of Glory. You’d want to Hammer before Judging, in case Sacred Duty procs, and you want to always get at least the three Crusader Strikes in every 20 seconds (though this basically being used every time off cooldown, since Holy Power is the foundation of our rotation), and you want to shield toss when proc’d (maybe), and you need to Holy Wrath every thirty seconds, and Consecrate at least every 15.

I deliberately made that paragraph as wall of text as I could stand, if only to underline how bizarre the rotation feels. And yet, the best part is: next build there’ll be something fundamentally different in there.

Roller coaster!

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.