World of Warcraft™

So I just did some thinking after reading an MMO champ post about there being a need for a Tank Legendary.

Paladin Mastery, despite scaling much higher than Warrior, is probably the weakest of the four Masteries in the long run. Once you hit the 102.4% Block+Avoidance cap, any additional points would be like adding +Hit, +Expertise, or +Spell Pen past their hard caps. Prot Warriors still benefit past the cap as they get Crit Block. Blood DKs and Guardian Druids (Yes, Bear Tanks are now GUARDIANS, not FERALS) obviously benefit because they have no hard cap on their absorbs.

So, I came up with a way for Paladin tanks to continue to benefit in SOME way from further Mastery.

Divine Bulwark: Increases your chance to block melee attacks by X%. Each point of Mastery increases block chance by an additional Y% (Currently 2.25%). Any Mastery past the 102.4% Block Cap will decrease all melee damage taken by Y/2%

This way, Paladin Tanks can continue to benefit from their Mastery as the other tanks do. If needed, you could nerf Y a little bit to compensate, but I just feel that Mastery shouldn't have a hard cap since no other specialization has such a thing.

I'd prefer to stack stam tbph

What Reconcile said i like to flex my HP E-Peen.

O.O

Decreases all melee damage taken by 1.125%.
Without DR.
every 1 mastery...?

And hit and expertise have had hard caps forever, without causing much concern.

02/17/2012 07:22 PMPosted by Reconcile

I'd prefer to stack stam tbph

I can't shake the feeling that this entire post was written so you could show off your epic knowledge of the MoP feral changes. Also, no. They're not Guardians yet. They're still ferals.

Funnily enough, the GUARDIAN mastery does have a hard cap :P.
As do prot wars and blood dks. Now, they aren't meaningful because they won't reach them, but they do have caps.

Only ferals have an uncapped mastery :).

02/17/2012 07:43 PMPosted by Ahanss

Only ferals have an uncapped mastery :).

It does have a cap! How much damage per melee swing does the boss do?

Barring specials and other stuff. Grumble grumble Impale.

Decreases all melee damage taken by 1.125%.
Without DR.
every 1 mastery...?

Man I bet you could get mastery in current gear to a point where it is a passive GoAK buff. That would be...perfectly balanced... Yep.

Man I bet you could get mastery in current gear to a point where it is a passive GoAK buff. That would be...perfectly balanced... Yep.

Sad thing is, people would believe that it was perfectly balanced.

It does have a cap! How much damage per melee swing does the boss do?

Barring specials and other stuff. Grumble grumble Impale.

You missed his point. Guardian (Bear) Mastery of increasing Armour has a cap. That cap is when you hit 75% armour.

Feral (Cat) Mastery has no cap.

I'm all for giving prot pally a way to get use out of Mastery past the 102.4% magic number, but this isn't the way I'd like to see it.

One idea on making excess Mastery beneficial that I've had in my head for a couple of weeks now is this:

Increases your chance to block melee attacks by X%. Each point of Mastery increases block chance by an additional 2.25%. In addition, lowers the cooldown of Word of Glory by 0.65% per Mastery, as well as increases the healing/absorption by 1.25% per Mastery.

Edit: Mind you, tweak the numbers. I just put in some absurd numbers that I didn't think would be extremely overpowering, but not absolutely underwhelming, either. For some prot around 395 ilvl, that'd be probably an extra 30% healing on WoG, and reducing it's cooldown by around 4 seconds. Also, this is intended for how Divine Bulwark works this expansion, not next. =3

You missed his point. Guardian (Bear) Mastery of increasing Armour has a cap. That cap is when you hit 75% armour.

Feral (Cat) Mastery has no cap.

Technically I was talking about the current bear mastery, using feral to imply current bear (I can easily see why that causes confusion :D). True, kitties don't have a cap, and while feral bears *technically* do, it's a moving target based on incoming damage.

DKs cap ~229 mastery, where minimum heal=max shield
Wars cap ~66 mastery, where crit block=100%.
Pallies cap at 102.4%. Based purely on block, that's ~42 (obviously less factoring in miss/dodge/parry).
Ferals cap when 1 SD lasts the full 10 seconds, absorbing all potential melee damage in that time. Depending on what I fight, I'm either well past that point... or far away from it.
Guardians cap when armor DR=75%.

Pallies are the only ones with a realistic cap. I do think if that were to change, it would have already happened, no sense fixing it a couple months into the final tier. It's worth considering moving forward into next expac, though (though more along the lines of no block cap for you!).

02/18/2012 09:52 PMPosted by Ahanss

DKs cap ~157 mastery, where minimum heal=max shield

Unless you're going off some new numbers or something, it should be ~229.

1 / .07 / .0625 = 228.57

Doesn't really affect your argument, though--actually supports it even more so.

Ah. Does Imp. DS not increase the minimum heal? I haven't actually looked at that, tbh.

Well, that was easy to check, a pretty clear no, too. Fixed in the earlier post.

02/18/2012 10:02 PMPosted by Ahanss

Ah. Does Imp. DS not increase the minimum heal? I haven't actually looked at that, tbh.

IDS doesn't affect the minimum heal itself, but instead of comparing 20% of the damage you took in the previous 5s, it will compare the minimum with 29%. So, instead of needing to take 35% of your max HP to not get the minimum, you only need to take 24.1%.

I'd much rather it be that all tanks have a realistically achievable cap (at around the same amount), or that none of us do. Makes gear itemization much simpler, and it also helps combat potential egregious scaling issues. I'm pretty sure somewhere, too, that Blizzard said they didn't like the concept of "breakpoints" [edit: rescinded], either, which is basically what 102.4% is.

02/18/2012 10:20 PMPosted by Euliat

I'm pretty sure somewhere, too, that Blizzard said they didn't like the concept of "breakpoints," either, which is basically what 102.4% is.

Orly?

If they did say that, then that was the stupidest statement in ever, because that means they should fix haste breakpoints for sure (unless they meant tank breakpoints only, which makes sense).

But yeah, right now, the tank masteries feel very very unfinished.

Pretty sure they said it, but, obviously, I'll have to find the source, which I'll probably look for tomorrow.

Okay a couple of rough ideas for mastery:

-Mastery provides block chance and also gives a chance to gain a charge of holy power on block. Past 102.4 chance to gain HP doubles.

-Mastery provides block chance. After 102.4 whenever you block an attack you also gain an absorption shield that grows with excess mastery past ctc.

-Mastery provides block chance. Excess mastery places a HoT on the paladin.

Personally I'd like not to have a cap on mastery because dodge/parry are amazingly boring stats. I'd rather have a cooler defensive stat which would probably have to be tied in with mastery. I know the ideas are rough or ripoffs of other classes' abilities but they are things I wouldn't mind seeing.
I personally would love the absorption shield idea because I think that ties in best with the paladin theme and I loved the old sacred shield in wrath (hooray for getting it back in MoP).

02/18/2012 11:25 PMPosted by Hooves

If they did say that, then that was the stupidest statement in ever, because that means they should fix haste breakpoints for sure (unless they meant tank breakpoints only, which makes sense).

Can't find it. Rescinded.

the other cap for DKs is the heal cannot exceed 100% your health. (regardless of temporary hitpoints, etc, its actually capped at 100%)