Hrm, looks like in the initial 4.1 patch they want prot paladins to stop spamming WoG on themselves
Word of Glory now has a 20 sec cooldown.
Yeah, fortunately holy mastery removes the cooldown.
I'm more upset about them taking ret and sader aura off aura mastery. No more speed boost :-/
This is stupid since its boosted by prot to begin with. If it weren't intended to be used by tanks then get it the hell out of my prot tree and give me something useful. I mean seriously a 20 second CD? really?
Aren't you typically only getting enough holy power to use it once every 9 seconds (if CS/HotR doesn't miss) anyway? So prot can only use it about half as often as it does now. Doesn't seem like the end of the world. How much is it healing for when speced for it?
Eternal glory gives it a 30% chance to not consume holy power when used, so you can use it considerably more than every 9 seconds. Plus Shield of the Templar makes Divine Plea give you 3 holy power so that's even more frequently you can use it.
As far as how much it heals, depending on gear and spec, ~30k crit and 15-20k normal.
The holy shield buff it gives is only 20sec; so if you're specced for WOG and are relying on it to refresh your holy shield, you'll just have to pay more attention and use SotR in between to keep it up.
Either way, it's a PvP nerf that hits PvE terribly hard. WoG self healing, particularly for prot, can make a massive difference on bosses. For Ret it's not as big of a deal in PvE, but on really high group/raid damage fights it certainly won't help having it be such a long cooldown. Particularly how much easier hopo is to get as ret.
Either way, it's a PvP nerf that hits PvE terribly hard. WoG self healing, particularly for prot, can make a massive difference on bosses. For Ret it's not as big of a deal in PvE, but on really high group/raid damage fights it certainly won't help having it be such a long cooldown. Particularly how much easier hopo is to get as ret.
I'm sure that Bliz will consider the PvE implications of the nerf. If paladins are currently balanced around being able to self heal a shitton, then they'll likely make up the survivability elsewhere.
The simplest solution would be to have Eternal Glory also refresh the cooldown if it doesn't use hopo. Or just remove the cooldown entirely after 3 points.
"We want Retribution and Protection paladins to have reasonable healing on themselves or others, but we know paladins sometimes feel like they can’t use their Holy Power on anything but their heals in some situations. We’d rather these two specs spend most of their Holy Power on damage-dealing abilities, with occasional healing."
"We want Retribution and Protection paladins to have reasonable healing on themselves or others, but we know paladins sometimes feel like they can’t use their Holy Power on anything but their heals in some situations. We’d rather these two specs spend most of their Holy Power on damage-dealing abilities, with occasional healing."
All I see when I read that is "instead of trying to retune encounters to not fuck over melee so terribly much in PvE so that paladins don't have to heal themselves so fucking much, we're just going to give a bullshit excuse for nerfing WoG in PvE to hide the fact that it is 100% a PvP nerf.
Aren't you typically only getting enough holy power to use it once every 9 seconds (if CS/HotR doesn't miss) anyway?
No.
As mentioned, I'm speaking mostly from a Ret perspective, but:
1. I get about 1 Holy Power every 4 seconds or so depending on my current Haste rating through CS.
2. I have a 15% chance every time I throw out a Judgement, Exorcism, Templar's Verdict, Divine Storm, Inquisition, Holy Wrath, or Hammer of Wrath to get 3 free Holy Power. I use all of these abilities a lot.
3. Once every 2 minutes for 20 seconds, I can make Crusader Strike generate 3 Holy Power every swing via Zealotry.
4. Every time I throw out a Word of Glory, there's a 30% chance it doesn't actually cost me any Holy Power.
Since I'm spec'd as a Selfless Healer and healing in Cata can be tricky, I cast this spell pretty often. As mentioned previously, I've prevented wipes by keeping the healer or the tank alive long enough for the healer to get back on his feet. I've also done emergency off-healing by popping Zealotry, usually after the healer stands in some fire and dies, and I rock out through the rest of the fight.
Eternal glory gives it a 30% chance to not consume holy power when used, so you can use it considerably more than every 9 seconds. Plus Shield of the Templar makes Divine Plea give you 3 holy power so that's even more frequently you can use it.
I missed the Eternal Glory thing, but I ignored Divine Plea since it gimps the hell out of your WoGs while it's up. I suppose you could just /cancelaura it though, eh?
As far as how much it heals, depending on gear and spec, ~30k crit and 15-20k normal.
The holy shield buff it gives is only 20sec; so if you're specced for WOG and are relying on it to refresh your holy shield, you'll just have to pay more attention and use SotR in between to keep it up.
Either way, it's a PvP nerf that hits PvE terribly hard. WoG self healing, particularly for prot, can make a massive difference on bosses. For Ret it's not as big of a deal in PvE, but on really high group/raid damage fights it certainly won't help having it be such a long cooldown. Particularly how much easier hopo is to get as ret.
Who says it's only a PvP nerf? Maybe Blizzard decided paladin tanks were doing too much healing for the overall design and balance of the spec (well geared ones are already getting somewhat close to pushing unblocked hits off the table).
This isn't final, so maybe they'll fiddle with the cooldown yet.
"We want Retribution and Protection paladins to have reasonable healing on themselves or others, but we know paladins sometimes feel like they can’t use their Holy Power on anything but their heals in some situations. We’d rather these two specs spend most of their Holy Power on damage-dealing abilities, with occasional healing."
All I see when I read that is "instead of trying to retune encounters to not fuck over melee so terribly much in PvE so that paladins don't have to heal themselves so fucking much, we're just going to give a bullshit excuse for nerfing WoG in PvE to hide the fact that it is 100% a PvP nerf.
There's no doubt the balance of melee/ranged in raids is fucked, but I wouldn't say they were designed with ret paladins doing a lot of supplemental healing in mind. What would raids with a bunch of melee with inferior self-healing do?
Meh, I like this change. It makes WoG more of the "heal in a pinch" ability that I think it was intended to be.
I imagine the problem is that non-holy pallies have been using WoG more than Blizz thought they would, and so there's more healing in encounters than was intended.
"We want Retribution and Protection paladins to have reasonable healing on themselves or others, but we know paladins sometimes feel like they can’t use their Holy Power on anything but their heals in some situations. We’d rather these two specs spend most of their Holy Power on damage-dealing abilities, with occasional healing."
I'd break that Blizzard quote down into two parts. I'm away from my authenticator at the moment, but I'll probably formulate this into a better question to present to the official forums. Although EU, so I doubt I'd actually get a response :-)
"We want Retribution and Protection paladins to have reasonable healing on themselves or others, but we know paladins sometimes feel like they can’t use their Holy Power on anything but their heals in some situations.
This suggests to me that they think we think it's necessary to self-WoG to get by (it helps, but I suspect we're not balanced around the expectation that we will). If it *is* actually necessary right now, I'm hoping their intent is to take measures to counter that (i.e. if the "can't" is based on *fact*). If, on the other hand, it's just a perception issue they're trying to counter (i.e. if the "can't" is inherently wrong), I'd expect no such compensation.
In other words, do they believe the issue with WoG heals is that their heals are too necessary, or is it that they take up too many of our 3-hp stacks. The quote could be interpreted either way.
We’d rather these two specs spend most of their Holy Power on damage-dealing abilities, with occasional healing."
The problem with that is this: how do you convince a tank to *want* to spend a critical - and hard-won, particularly with the recent HP-on-miss changes - on damage? Once the threat lead is established, any tank worth their salt is going to want to keep threat generation at the 'enough' level while using abilities that help with their primary role of survival.
I want - indeed, I suspect any paladin wants - my HP spending to directly benefit my role. And damage doesn't (perceptibly) do that. WoG does, but not if it's on cooldown
(There's also some potential issues with Holy Shield thanks to the fact that its duration and WoG's CD match up, and neither of them lie on a GCD boundary. That should be a trivial fix, though)
"We want Retribution and Protection paladins to have reasonable healing on themselves or others, but we know paladins sometimes feel like they can’t use their Holy Power on anything but their heals in some situations. We’d rather these two specs spend most of their Holy Power on damage-dealing abilities, with occasional healing."
If by 'some situations' they mean 'situations where the Paladin really needs to heal themselves' then yeah, sure, true enough. But there's no cooldown on holy power damage dealing abilities, so other than 'when healing is needed' when is this statement true?
The only situations I've been in where I felt like I needed to selfheal instead of doing damage were situations where I was soloing stuff that honestly, should probably not be soloable. I've mentioned this in the chat thread, but right now prot paladins can solo normal cata dungeons like Stonecore (at least, far enough to get the drake >.>), and it's primarily thanks to being able to use WoG every 3 HoPo.
I'm certainly not shocked that WoG is getting nerfed, but the idea that they want Prot to use SotR or Inq more often is silly because thanks to vengeance, we don't need to use either one beyond the first 10 seconds of the fight.
I never really understood the "we don't need to use these abilities once we have a threat lead" argument. I mean yeah, surviving is your first priority, but doesn't putting out extra damage help everyone? Even if the extra SotRs only lead to knocking 10-15 seconds off the total boss fight, that's still 10-15 seconds where the healers don't have to stretch their mana.
The change will allow (force?) protadins to use damage dealing abilities and actually be judicious about use of WoG, making it a survivability CD instead of something you just use because it's up.
I'm certainly not shocked that WoG is getting nerfed, but the idea that they want Prot to use SotR or Inq more often is silly because thanks to vengeance, we don't need to use either one beyond the first 10 seconds of the fight.
It's clumsy and convoluted, but I wonder if the trick would be something along the lines of "Vengeance can only stack if you've cast SotR or Inq in the last 30s". Would certainly be *interesting*, at least.
I never really understood the "we don't need to use these abilities once we have a threat lead" argument. I mean yeah, surviving is your first priority, but doesn't putting out extra damage help everyone? Even if the extra SotRs only lead to knocking 10-15 seconds off the total boss fight, that's still 10-15 seconds where the healers don't have to stretch their mana.
The change will allow (force?) protadins to use damage dealing abilities and actually be judicious about use of WoG, making it a survivability CD instead of something you just use because it's up.
The 20k SotR when I have a threat lead of eleventybillion doesn't help the raid as much as a free 20k heal (or shield on myself right after getting topped off). I can keep the threat lead without the SotR, but that 20k heal or damage shield is going to help my healers retain mana, which means I can survive longer for the DPS who should be making up for the loss of that SotR in a few seconds.
If your raid is falling over because of the lack of DPS and it's not due to being threatcapped, then there's at least 5 people you can chew out before getting to the tank's damage output.
wrote:
I'm certainly not shocked that WoG is getting nerfed, but the idea that they want Prot to use SotR or Inq more often is silly because thanks to vengeance, we don't need to use either one beyond the first 10 seconds of the fight.
It's clumsy and convoluted, but I wonder if the trick would be something along the lines of "Vengeance can only stack if you've cast SotR or Inq in the last 30s". Would certainly be *interesting*, at least.
Blizzard seems really hesitant to do anything with vengeance right now, even with the majority of tanks actively reforging out of normal threat stats (hit/exp) because "vengeance will fix it!"
Now, what would shock me is if they nerf vengeance in 4.1.
I never really understood the "we don't need to use these abilities once we have a threat lead" argument. I mean yeah, surviving is your first priority, but doesn't putting out extra damage help everyone? Even if the extra SotRs only lead to knocking 10-15 seconds off the total boss fight, that's still 10-15 seconds where the healers don't have to stretch their mana.
I said 'perceptibly' deliberately:
Argaloth is a fight where, it'll come as little surprise to hear, I don't have to use WoG. So, looking at a recent parse for it, I did 16 SotR, totalling around 330k damage. I should add that I sometimes have to go light on damage; vengeance rampup can make it easy for a tank to steal the boss back, and that's bad; this isn't a perfect fight to benchmark on.
That said, pressing on with the analysis:
In 25-man, Argaloth has 64.5M health. The kill took 3:39. Knock off 30s for the two Fel Firestorms, where I'm running around too much to deal decent damage, that's a 190 second kill.
If I've done my maths correctly - and I may not have, this is a bit of a rush job - if I had not done any SotR, the fight would have taken *one second* longer.
So if the mechanic we're meant to value, that's meant to be the fundamental foundation of our class, the button we're meant to enjoy pressing - if use *every single one* for damage, and that only ultimately benefits our primary role to the tune of *one second* less to have to survive... there's a flaw in it.
Edit: I assume the relative contributions are a bit different in 10-man, I hadn't thought of that. Anyone got 10-man Argaloth figures to contrast with this?
So I have some figures. Argaloth 10 man has 21.473m hp. My guild recently did it in 3:40 (so pretty close in time, actually.
That's 190 seconds of dps time after you take out the 30 seconds of fel fire. I did 250525 damage over 12 SotRs as a tank (with the same caveats as mattclem regarding full out dps from the non-tanking tank).
This results in a fight duration increase of about 2 seconds. If we use mattclem's damage output (330000) for curiosity's sake, we get a fight duration increase of 3 seconds.
I was curious if anyone tried or has an idea for a Prot Pali PvP spec, gear, and techniques?
I was in the BGs the other day and one handed my arse to me on a plate while dancing around with a full bar of health.
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"We want Retribution and Protection paladins to have reasonable healing on themselves or others, but we know paladins sometimes feel like they can’t use their Holy Power on anything but their heals in some situations. We’d rather these two specs spend most of their Holy Power on damage-dealing abilities, with occasional healing."
I'd break that Blizzard quote down into two parts. I'm away from my authenticator at the moment, but I'll probably formulate this into a better question to present to the official forums. Although EU, so I doubt I'd actually get a response :-)
"We want Retribution and Protection paladins to have reasonable healing on themselves or others, but we know paladins sometimes feel like they can’t use their Holy Power on anything but their heals in some situations.
This suggests to me that they think we think it's necessary to self-WoG to get by (it helps, but I suspect we're not balanced around the expectation that we will). If it *is* actually necessary right now, I'm hoping their intent is to take measures to counter that (i.e. if the "can't" is based on *fact*). If, on the other hand, it's just a perception issue they're trying to counter (i.e. if the "can't" is inherently wrong), I'd expect no such compensation.
In other words, do they believe the issue with WoG heals is that their heals are too necessary, or is it that they take up too many of our 3-hp stacks. The quote could be interpreted either way.
We’d rather these two specs spend most of their Holy Power on damage-dealing abilities, with occasional healing."
The problem with that is this: how do you convince a tank to *want* to spend a critical - and hard-won, particularly with the recent HP-on-miss changes - on damage? Once the threat lead is established, any tank worth their salt is going to want to keep threat generation at the 'enough' level while using abilities that help with their primary role of survival.
I want - indeed, I suspect any paladin wants - my HP spending to directly benefit my role. And damage doesn't (perceptibly) do that. WoG does, but not if it's on cooldown
(There's also some potential issues with Holy Shield thanks to the fact that its duration and WoG's CD match up, and neither of them lie on a GCD boundary. That should be a trivial fix, though)
You're looking at it from the perspective of a paladin tank player, though. Of course maximizing your self-healing is what you want to do. As I posited above, maybe Blizzard decided paladin tanks were doing too much healing for the overall design and balance of the spec (well geared ones are already getting somewhat close to pushing unblocked hits off the table).
Considering the change to make WoG proc holy shield was fairly late in the game as far as Cata design went, I think it's somewhat safe to assume that Blizzard really didn't tune paladin tanks around healing for 20k+ every few seconds.
I'm pretty sure I see druids destroying me in healing done when tanking, they have some kinda % based heal on crits still that turns into a lot of healing in the end.
Warriors I'm not as sure, but victory rush in 5 mans makes them barely need healing at all if they need killing blows, so they can heal a bloody ton as well.
I tend to spam WoG a lot in raids after the first 10 seconds, as much on others as on myself since I don't need the threat. A 20 second cooldown with talents like eternal glory and whatever the other WoG boosting talent is just stupid, they aren't worth it at all any more. Guess PoJ is a nobrainer instead of a choice now.
I'm pretty sure I see druids destroying me in healing done when tanking, they have some kinda % based heal on crits still that turns into a lot of healing in the end.
Warriors I'm not as sure, but victory rush in 5 mans makes them barely need healing at all if they need killing blows, so they can heal a bloody ton as well.
I tend to spam WoG a lot in raids after the first 10 seconds, as much on others as on myself since I don't need the threat. A 20 second cooldown with talents like eternal glory and whatever the other WoG boosting talent is just stupid, they aren't worth it at all any more. Guess PoJ is a nobrainer instead of a choice now.
Are you really comparing victory rush and imp lotp heals to WoG?
I'm pretty sure I see druids destroying me in healing done when tanking, they have some kinda % based heal on crits still that turns into a lot of healing in the end.
Warriors I'm not as sure, but victory rush in 5 mans makes them barely need healing at all if they need killing blows, so they can heal a bloody ton as well.
I tend to spam WoG a lot in raids after the first 10 seconds, as much on others as on myself since I don't need the threat. A 20 second cooldown with talents like eternal glory and whatever the other WoG boosting talent is just stupid, they aren't worth it at all any more. Guess PoJ is a nobrainer instead of a choice now.
It's quite possible all healing from Leader of the Pack gets attributed to the druid. If true, you're seeing the result of 25 people or whatever healing themselves. Regardless, Leader of the Pack has a 6 second cooldown and it's not controllable so there isn't a way to save yourself by using it.
Leader of the pack tends to be a much more consistent, steady amount of healing as well. WoG can be very burstey right now with Eternal Glory and the ways to generate a lot of instant holy power like divine plea.
You're looking at it from the perspective of a paladin tank player, though. Of course maximizing your self-healing is what you want to do. As I posited above, maybe Blizzard decided paladin tanks were doing too much healing for the overall design and balance of the spec (well geared ones are already getting somewhat close to pushing unblocked hits off the table).
I'm aware that, it's more that if we've got this Big Resource that's the New and Exciting Part of the Class, and sometimes you press a button to use this resource, I want it to noticeably help my role!
I recognise that we probably did too much healing; and that even *without* healing we're in pretty good shape as tanks go; that's fine. But in gameplay terms, independent of any balancing issues, using a 3HP ability ought to *mean* something. And it doesn't, really.
I just killed Lord Walden in Shadowfang on heroic from ~24% after the rest of the group died because they neglected to mention they had no idea how his mechanics worked.
So..... Yeah.. if I'm soloing heroic bosses because of WoG, I can't bring myself to be too upset when they nerf that ability.
It's a stupid cludgy solution to prot spamming WoG too often. Maybe they could, I dunno, fucking nerf Vengeance. At that point we'd have an interesting choice between trying to eek out some self- (or raid-) healing when we can manage it while still needing to work to maintain threat past the first thirty seconds or so. As an added bonus, it makes all thanks favor some level of threat stats again.
Wouldn't solve the issue where you can self heal as a tank well enough to solo heroic bosses though. In any case where threat wasn't an issue, you'd have the luxury to do a pretty obscene amount of healing, even as someone specced for tanking or dps. Changing vengeance doesn't solve that issue.
To clarify the discussion a few posts ago, you see bears with a shitload of healing done (at least as Recount displays it) because the damage shields from their mastery procs count as absorbs, which Recount adds into heals now. But that's their mastery reducing damage taken, which the spec is designed around. It would be like if all a paladin's/warrior's blocked damage showed up as heals. That would be huge.
ILotP healing is something, but it's a relatively small portion of the healing received by bears. A well geared bear right now would see about 8k health every 6 seconds from ILotP at best. Realistically, it's probably going to proc probably about every 8 or 9 seconds on average. Compared to the 20k+ heals WoGs are giving prot paladins with about the same frequency, that's pretty small.
Wouldn't solve the issue where you can self heal as a tank well enough to solo heroic bosses though. In any case where threat wasn't an issue, you'd have the luxury to do a pretty obscene amount of healing, even as someone specced for tanking or dps. Changing vengeance doesn't solve that issue.
The heal scales with AP, I believe, so it could do.
The AP I get from vengence adds about 2.5k per WoG. That's not a real drastic change to WoG HPS. Instead of 16k it heals for 13.5k. You can still do significant healing with no cooldown involved.
Nerfing Vengeance has rather serious implications for everyone in the game, though (or at least everyone involved in group PvE), whereas adjusting WoG because of issues with WoG affects just the issue at hand. Generally you want to focus changes when possible rather than make sweeping ones if they're not necessary.
Designer 1: "So we decided to nerf Vengeance."
Designer 2: "Why's that?"
Designer 1: "Prot paladins were healing for too much."
Designer 2: O_o
Also, if there's a concern with ret healing, which there seems to be since ret doesn't get the no cooldown passive, nerfing Vengeance does nothing for that.
I recognise that we probably did too much healing; and that even *without* healing we're in pretty good shape as tanks go; that's fine. But in gameplay terms, independent of any balancing issues, using a 3HP ability ought to *mean* something. And it doesn't, really.
And a warrior's big hitter, Shield Slam, is supposed to *mean* something as well, but does it really when he has an established threat lead? Presumably not for just the same reason.
Are you really comparing victory rush and imp lotp heals to WoG?
imp. lotp, sure. Seems like druids heal a fair bit more than me overall. Victory rush is tricky in that it's pretty pointless in raids, but gives hilarious amounts of healing in 5 mans.
And DKs have been soloing heroic bosses for a while now, so don't see the problem with paladins being able to do it when they overgear the content. I'm rather happy to be able to help out on raidhealing a fair bit when needed, and this change feels so silly. If they want me to use ShoR, give me a reason to use ShoR. It doesn't really hit all that hard any more, and my threat lead is rtidiculous after a small while even without any expertise or hit.
Are you really comparing victory rush and imp lotp heals to WoG?
imp. lotp, sure. Seems like druids heal a fair bit more than me overall. Victory rush is tricky in that it's pretty pointless in raids, but gives hilarious amounts of healing in 5 mans.
See post 1833. And VR is close to useless in raid encounters, and doesn't do anything for 5-man bosses without adds. I don't think 5-man trash and bosses with adds are really Blizzard's main balancing concern.
Edit: They could try going back to WoG not procing Holy Shield, but your other HoPo moves do. That way you could WoG as much as your HoPo allows, but it comes at the cost of HS falling off. Then you'd definitely want to use SotR some of the time.
Nerfing Vengeance has rather serious implications for everyone in the game, though (or at least everyone involved in group PvE), whereas adjusting WoG because of issues with WoG affects just the issue at hand. Generally you want to focus changes when possible rather than make sweeping ones if they're not necessary.
Actually, I *think* all classes versions of Vengeance are slightly different so they have the ability to tune them individually.
And a warrior's big hitter, Shield Slam, is supposed to *mean* something as well, but does it really when he has an established threat lead? Presumably not for just the same reason.
A fair point, although one's an ability and the other's a resource. Rage would be a slightly more direct parallel. Not that I'm disagreeing with the base implication.
Edit: They could try going back to WoG not procing Holy Shield, but your other HoPo moves do. That way you could WoG as much as your HoPo allows, but it comes at the cost of HS falling off. Then you'd definitely want to use SotR some of the time.
That strikes me as being a bit risky, assuming they won't budge on the "Crusader Strikes misses not generating HP" thing. It becomes a game of judging how much WoG you think you can afford while still being able to throw a SotR out there in time to keep the Holy Shield buff up. So much of tanking is about reducing the influence of RNG on your survival that people would probably assume HS > all and WoG just isn't worth risking at all.
Having said all that, we're talking about what amounts to a 10% damage reduction (relative to the full hits), so maybe it's not the end of the world if it does fall off.
Like you said in your last sentence, HS isn't really a "falls off and you die" mechanic. Generally it's just an aggregate damage reducer over time. Considering right now there's no judgement whatsoever on HoPo usage (glance at Omen about once a minute, see it's safe to continue using WoG every time), it probably wouldn't be crushing for prot paladin players to need to become vaguely aware of one buff/debuff timer.
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This is stupid since its boosted by prot to begin with. If it weren't intended to be used by tanks then get it the hell out of my prot tree and give me something useful. I mean seriously a 20 second CD? really?
Eternal glory gives it a 30% chance to not consume holy power when used, so you can use it considerably more than every 9 seconds. Plus Shield of the Templar makes Divine Plea give you 3 holy power so that's even more frequently you can use it.
As far as how much it heals, depending on gear and spec, ~30k crit and 15-20k normal.
The holy shield buff it gives is only 20sec; so if you're specced for WOG and are relying on it to refresh your holy shield, you'll just have to pay more attention and use SotR in between to keep it up.
Either way, it's a PvP nerf that hits PvE terribly hard. WoG self healing, particularly for prot, can make a massive difference on bosses. For Ret it's not as big of a deal in PvE, but on really high group/raid damage fights it certainly won't help having it be such a long cooldown. Particularly how much easier hopo is to get as ret.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
I'm sure that Bliz will consider the PvE implications of the nerf. If paladins are currently balanced around being able to self heal a shitton, then they'll likely make up the survivability elsewhere.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
"We want Retribution and Protection paladins to have reasonable healing on themselves or others, but we know paladins sometimes feel like they can’t use their Holy Power on anything but their heals in some situations. We’d rather these two specs spend most of their Holy Power on damage-dealing abilities, with occasional healing."
All I see when I read that is "instead of trying to retune encounters to not fuck over melee so terribly much in PvE so that paladins don't have to heal themselves so fucking much, we're just going to give a bullshit excuse for nerfing WoG in PvE to hide the fact that it is 100% a PvP nerf.
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
No.
As mentioned, I'm speaking mostly from a Ret perspective, but:
1. I get about 1 Holy Power every 4 seconds or so depending on my current Haste rating through CS.
2. I have a 15% chance every time I throw out a Judgement, Exorcism, Templar's Verdict, Divine Storm, Inquisition, Holy Wrath, or Hammer of Wrath to get 3 free Holy Power. I use all of these abilities a lot.
3. Once every 2 minutes for 20 seconds, I can make Crusader Strike generate 3 Holy Power every swing via Zealotry.
4. Every time I throw out a Word of Glory, there's a 30% chance it doesn't actually cost me any Holy Power.
Since I'm spec'd as a Selfless Healer and healing in Cata can be tricky, I cast this spell pretty often. As mentioned previously, I've prevented wipes by keeping the healer or the tank alive long enough for the healer to get back on his feet. I've also done emergency off-healing by popping Zealotry, usually after the healer stands in some fire and dies, and I rock out through the rest of the fight.
Basically, this change fuckin' sucks.
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Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
Who says it's only a PvP nerf? Maybe Blizzard decided paladin tanks were doing too much healing for the overall design and balance of the spec (well geared ones are already getting somewhat close to pushing unblocked hits off the table).
This isn't final, so maybe they'll fiddle with the cooldown yet.
I was replying to someone talking about prot spec.
I imagine the problem is that non-holy pallies have been using WoG more than Blizz thought they would, and so there's more healing in encounters than was intended.
I'd break that Blizzard quote down into two parts. I'm away from my authenticator at the moment, but I'll probably formulate this into a better question to present to the official forums. Although EU, so I doubt I'd actually get a response :-)
This suggests to me that they think we think it's necessary to self-WoG to get by (it helps, but I suspect we're not balanced around the expectation that we will). If it *is* actually necessary right now, I'm hoping their intent is to take measures to counter that (i.e. if the "can't" is based on *fact*). If, on the other hand, it's just a perception issue they're trying to counter (i.e. if the "can't" is inherently wrong), I'd expect no such compensation.
In other words, do they believe the issue with WoG heals is that their heals are too necessary, or is it that they take up too many of our 3-hp stacks. The quote could be interpreted either way.
The problem with that is this: how do you convince a tank to *want* to spend a critical - and hard-won, particularly with the recent HP-on-miss changes - on damage? Once the threat lead is established, any tank worth their salt is going to want to keep threat generation at the 'enough' level while using abilities that help with their primary role of survival.
I want - indeed, I suspect any paladin wants - my HP spending to directly benefit my role. And damage doesn't (perceptibly) do that. WoG does, but not if it's on cooldown
(There's also some potential issues with Holy Shield thanks to the fact that its duration and WoG's CD match up, and neither of them lie on a GCD boundary. That should be a trivial fix, though)
If by 'some situations' they mean 'situations where the Paladin really needs to heal themselves' then yeah, sure, true enough. But there's no cooldown on holy power damage dealing abilities, so other than 'when healing is needed' when is this statement true?
I'm certainly not shocked that WoG is getting nerfed, but the idea that they want Prot to use SotR or Inq more often is silly because thanks to vengeance, we don't need to use either one beyond the first 10 seconds of the fight.
The change will allow (force?) protadins to use damage dealing abilities and actually be judicious about use of WoG, making it a survivability CD instead of something you just use because it's up.
It's clumsy and convoluted, but I wonder if the trick would be something along the lines of "Vengeance can only stack if you've cast SotR or Inq in the last 30s". Would certainly be *interesting*, at least.
The 20k SotR when I have a threat lead of eleventybillion doesn't help the raid as much as a free 20k heal (or shield on myself right after getting topped off). I can keep the threat lead without the SotR, but that 20k heal or damage shield is going to help my healers retain mana, which means I can survive longer for the DPS who should be making up for the loss of that SotR in a few seconds.
If your raid is falling over because of the lack of DPS and it's not due to being threatcapped, then there's at least 5 people you can chew out before getting to the tank's damage output.
Blizzard seems really hesitant to do anything with vengeance right now, even with the majority of tanks actively reforging out of normal threat stats (hit/exp) because "vengeance will fix it!"
Now, what would shock me is if they nerf vengeance in 4.1.
I said 'perceptibly' deliberately:
Argaloth is a fight where, it'll come as little surprise to hear, I don't have to use WoG. So, looking at a recent parse for it, I did 16 SotR, totalling around 330k damage. I should add that I sometimes have to go light on damage; vengeance rampup can make it easy for a tank to steal the boss back, and that's bad; this isn't a perfect fight to benchmark on.
That said, pressing on with the analysis:
In 25-man, Argaloth has 64.5M health. The kill took 3:39. Knock off 30s for the two Fel Firestorms, where I'm running around too much to deal decent damage, that's a 190 second kill.
If I've done my maths correctly - and I may not have, this is a bit of a rush job - if I had not done any SotR, the fight would have taken *one second* longer.
So if the mechanic we're meant to value, that's meant to be the fundamental foundation of our class, the button we're meant to enjoy pressing - if use *every single one* for damage, and that only ultimately benefits our primary role to the tune of *one second* less to have to survive... there's a flaw in it.
Edit: I assume the relative contributions are a bit different in 10-man, I hadn't thought of that. Anyone got 10-man Argaloth figures to contrast with this?
That's 190 seconds of dps time after you take out the 30 seconds of fel fire. I did 250525 damage over 12 SotRs as a tank (with the same caveats as mattclem regarding full out dps from the non-tanking tank).
This results in a fight duration increase of about 2 seconds. If we use mattclem's damage output (330000) for curiosity's sake, we get a fight duration increase of 3 seconds.
I was in the BGs the other day and one handed my arse to me on a plate while dancing around with a full bar of health.
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Considering the change to make WoG proc holy shield was fairly late in the game as far as Cata design went, I think it's somewhat safe to assume that Blizzard really didn't tune paladin tanks around healing for 20k+ every few seconds.
Warriors I'm not as sure, but victory rush in 5 mans makes them barely need healing at all if they need killing blows, so they can heal a bloody ton as well.
I tend to spam WoG a lot in raids after the first 10 seconds, as much on others as on myself since I don't need the threat. A 20 second cooldown with talents like eternal glory and whatever the other WoG boosting talent is just stupid, they aren't worth it at all any more. Guess PoJ is a nobrainer instead of a choice now.
Are you really comparing victory rush and imp lotp heals to WoG?
It's quite possible all healing from Leader of the Pack gets attributed to the druid. If true, you're seeing the result of 25 people or whatever healing themselves. Regardless, Leader of the Pack has a 6 second cooldown and it's not controllable so there isn't a way to save yourself by using it.
I'm aware that, it's more that if we've got this Big Resource that's the New and Exciting Part of the Class, and sometimes you press a button to use this resource, I want it to noticeably help my role!
I recognise that we probably did too much healing; and that even *without* healing we're in pretty good shape as tanks go; that's fine. But in gameplay terms, independent of any balancing issues, using a 3HP ability ought to *mean* something. And it doesn't, really.
So..... Yeah.. if I'm soloing heroic bosses because of WoG, I can't bring myself to be too upset when they nerf that ability.
ILotP healing is something, but it's a relatively small portion of the healing received by bears. A well geared bear right now would see about 8k health every 6 seconds from ILotP at best. Realistically, it's probably going to proc probably about every 8 or 9 seconds on average. Compared to the 20k+ heals WoGs are giving prot paladins with about the same frequency, that's pretty small.
The heal scales with AP, I believe, so it could do.
Designer 1: "So we decided to nerf Vengeance."
Designer 2: "Why's that?"
Designer 1: "Prot paladins were healing for too much."
Designer 2: O_o
Also, if there's a concern with ret healing, which there seems to be since ret doesn't get the no cooldown passive, nerfing Vengeance does nothing for that.
And a warrior's big hitter, Shield Slam, is supposed to *mean* something as well, but does it really when he has an established threat lead? Presumably not for just the same reason.
imp. lotp, sure. Seems like druids heal a fair bit more than me overall. Victory rush is tricky in that it's pretty pointless in raids, but gives hilarious amounts of healing in 5 mans.
And DKs have been soloing heroic bosses for a while now, so don't see the problem with paladins being able to do it when they overgear the content. I'm rather happy to be able to help out on raidhealing a fair bit when needed, and this change feels so silly. If they want me to use ShoR, give me a reason to use ShoR. It doesn't really hit all that hard any more, and my threat lead is rtidiculous after a small while even without any expertise or hit.
Edit: They could try going back to WoG not procing Holy Shield, but your other HoPo moves do. That way you could WoG as much as your HoPo allows, but it comes at the cost of HS falling off. Then you'd definitely want to use SotR some of the time.
Actually, I *think* all classes versions of Vengeance are slightly different so they have the ability to tune them individually.
A fair point, although one's an ability and the other's a resource. Rage would be a slightly more direct parallel. Not that I'm disagreeing with the base implication.
That strikes me as being a bit risky, assuming they won't budge on the "Crusader Strikes misses not generating HP" thing. It becomes a game of judging how much WoG you think you can afford while still being able to throw a SotR out there in time to keep the Holy Shield buff up. So much of tanking is about reducing the influence of RNG on your survival that people would probably assume HS > all and WoG just isn't worth risking at all.
Having said all that, we're talking about what amounts to a 10% damage reduction (relative to the full hits), so maybe it's not the end of the world if it does fall off.