World of Warcraft®

06/20/2011 05:34 PMPosted by Asmon

what does the holy shield do now?

http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/2723732#paladins

Holy Shield has been redesigned. This talent is now an activated ability off the global cooldown. It grants 20% increased block amount to a paladin's shield blocks for 10 seconds, with a 30-second cooldown.

It gives Paladins more active control over their mitigation.

All of those situations are designed to be handled with cooldowns. You don't tank Anshal with 15 stacks of Zephyr on NORMAL without a cooldown, or else you die.

Yes, I know, even with CD's they can still be dangerous.

Sinestra is the biggest one - phase three involves 80-90k melee swings for the 4 or so minutes that it lasts, but you have a 100% haste buff and infinite mana for 3 minutes of that.

Cho is the other one that hits hard - AA isn't wussy, but him and Nef/Ony are pretty trivial tank damage wise.

After those you have to go all the way down to Magmaw for someone who actually hits decently hard. Atramedes gets some decent swings in - but it's practically impossible for you to lose the tank since there's nothing else to heal for most of your healers.

Yes, I know, even with CD's they can still be dangerous.

You can just leave one healer to actually heal the Anshal tank through Zephyr hits - it's a joke and the only time he actually swings remotely hard.

06/20/2011 05:01 PMPosted by Prinzesa

and what other possible way do you collect data on what changes the player base wants

These aren't the only forums they ever read, and forums are not the only way in which they get to hear from people.

What does it matter any more how Blizz comes to their decisions? If a change works, it works. If not, I go play another character or another game. Trying to figure out GC & co's thought processes will just give you headaches. Life's too short for that rubbish.

06/20/2011 06:09 PMPosted by Mypali

Seriously, just macroing this garbage. If I still bother tanking.

That's your prerogative, just please don't encourage other Paladins to do the same. Thanks.

06/20/2011 06:09 PMPosted by Mypali

Seriously, just macroing this garbage. If I still bother tanking.

Have fun playing badly.

I noticed a trend

Avg people don't like the change
Hard mode raiders do like the change, in fact, the higher they are in the ladder, the more they seem to like it.

I hope that Blizz didn't balance HS use around HM raiders playstyle -- they might have the mental bandwidth for it, but the avg player does not.

06/20/2011 06:35 PMPosted by Mypali

Actually, I will encourage other tanks to do it, just to piss off blizzard. Doubt it would work, since most paladins are going to macro it anyways, and Blizzard already knows most paladins are going to macro it anyways.

So your solution is to encourage sub-optimal play? How very mature.

06/20/2011 04:00 PMPosted by Zarhym

This sort of leaves me with one question. Are you guys okay with Paladins block capping? You guys tend to bounce between the two ideas of "we are okay with it" and "we don't want it."

At the 10,000 foot view, it's not ideal. But it doesn't cause so many problems, balance or otherwise, that it was worth the potential fallout from a change. Even if we make a change that we think is for the better, it's still a change that requires some amount of relearning on the part of the player base, so we try and pick our battles.

Zarhym,

First I'd like to point out that I think the right call was made in not changing our mastery at the same time as Holy Shield. Since the two are interlinked it would have been significantly harder to glean appropriate results from a short period of testing.

I do feel that you will have to revisit this issue however as you are aware that our mastery does not currently scale. That is to say that once we have block capped we effectively will avoid mastery as a stat for it serves no more purpose. Any attempt to seek mitigation at this point is subject to harsher diminishing returns than those who can continue using mastery as an option. I think the Holy Shield change has perhaps given you a way out of this. I think the following changes may be available to you:

1. Allow extra mastery past block cap to increase Holy Shield potency.

2. Alter mastery to alter both block chance and Holy Shield potency (in presumably smaller amounts per point).

3. Allow the extra mastery to create an absorb shield on Holy Shield usage.

4. Allow us to deflect a certain amount of spell damage/effects as well based on mastery. This can be implemented past block cap or beforehand in a tandem manner such as #2 above.

I personally like the idea of spell blocking as it keeps the concept of the smoother, more controlled damage profile and fits a Paladin well I think. I suppose I also like the image of a Holy Defender weathering magical attacks using his shield, but not in the aggressive reflecting manner of the Warrior.

Obviously I have not tossed any numbers around. All these ideas would need a fair amount of testing on various fights to yield appropriate number values.

06/20/2011 06:55 PMPosted by Urudhûm

At the 10,000 foot view, it's not ideal. But it doesn't cause so many problems, balance or otherwise, that it was worth the potential fallout from a change. Even if we make a change that we think is for the better, it's still a change that requires some amount of relearning on the part of the player base, so we try and pick our battles.

Zarhym,

First I'd like to point out that I think the right call was made in not changing our mastery at the same time as Holy Shield. Since the two are interlinked it would have been significantly harder to glean appropriate results from a short period of testing.

I do feel that you will have to revisit this issue however as you are aware that our mastery does not currently scale. That is to say that once we have block capped we effectively will avoid mastery as a stat for it serves no more purpose. Any attempt to seek mitigation at this point is subject to harsher diminishing returns than those who can continue using mastery as an option. I think the Holy Shield change has perhaps given you a way out of this. I think the following changes may be available to you:

1. Allow extra mastery past block cap to increase Holy Shield potency.

2. Alter mastery to alter both block chance and Holy Shield potency (in presumably smaller amounts per point).

3. Allow the extra mastery to create an absorb shield on Holy Shield usage.

4. Allow us to deflect a certain amount of spell damage/effects as well based on mastery. This can be implemented past block cap or beforehand in a tandem manner such as #2 above.

I personally like the idea of spell blocking as it keeps the concept of the smoother, more controlled damage profile and fits a Paladin well I think. I suppose I also like the image of a Holy Defender weathering magical attacks using his shield, but not in the aggressive reflecting manner of the Warrior.

Obviously I have not tossed any numbers around. All these ideas would need a fair amount of testing on various fights to yield appropriate number values.

I like ideas 1 and 2 in particular.

06/20/2011 06:35 PMPosted by Mypali

Blizzard already knows most paladins are going to macro it anyways.

You know you're going to macro it, but you don't know that a significant portion of the populace will, and neither does Blizzard. That's what it means to throw a change out into the wilderness where a couple million people will play with it.

06/20/2011 07:07 PMPosted by Prinzesa

Blizzard already knows most paladins are going to macro it anyways.

You know you're going to macro it, but you don't know that a significant portion of the populace will, and neither does Blizzard. That's what it means to throw a change out into the wilderness where a couple million people will play with it.

I'd imagine that for heroics and maybe raid trash some paladins would macro it to something like HotR but keep it un-macroed for raid bosses.

06/20/2011 06:55 PMPosted by Mypali

Can you *PROVE* to me that I will without a doubt do worse by macroing it than you will by using it "intelligently"? Probably not

Courtesy of Xayton:

I will use Nef as an example. Electrocute is a ton of damage and you are supposed to use a CD to reduce the damage. A lot of the time Nef/Ony will end up using a Shadowbreath right after an Electrocute and even with a CD you are going to be taking a lot of damage, follow that up with a melee and the damage gets even worse. What you should be doing in that instance is use a CD for Electrocute + Shadowbreath follow it up with a Holy Shield so you can try to reduce the melee attack that will follow.

Another example on Nef follows the exact same path. Shadowbreath is on a timer, this allows you to use a HS right at the end of Shadowbreath for a chance to reduce the following melee damage.

Now let's say you've macro'ed in Holy Shield and you've used it before this sequence of events, you haven't done your healers any favors. Intelligent use will create a (albeit small) distinction between the skillset of Paladin players.

06/20/2011 06:55 PMPosted by Mypali

a "maybe" damage reduction.

63.34% (and going up in 4.2) is an acceptable "maybe", and that's without an Elixir or Food.

I noticed a trend

Avg people don't like the change
Hard mode raiders do like the change, in fact, the higher they are in the ladder, the more they seem to like it.

I hope that Blizz didn't balance HS use around HM raiders playstyle -- they might have the mental bandwidth for it, but the avg player does not.

<-----Trend breaker

I like this change!