i see it as a net negative on raid boss fights, spells are eating your Holy shield charges, opening up your chances of getting crushed by melee hits even assuming you could reach 102% mitigation from gear (30% from gear alone)
id hate to see some Dot hit a tank, Block the initial hit Then that Eats a charge, then get hit with a crushing before Holy shield comes up again.
I could also see blizzard open up to the idea of Boss spells hitting harder because its getting mitigated, but still not changing WHY pallys are bad tanks.
PSA: Crush cap is hitting 102% dodge/parry/miss/block that prevents a massive hit, 440 defense is crit immune and not the same as crush.
Edit: your only blocking 40-80 damage at level 60 on a 3k spell, spell block does not work the same as it does in retail, nor does it mitigate DR percentage. the block value to damage prevent ratio is extremely low, and would be sacrificing alot of stats other important stats to get it to a level that it would actually matter.
Because it’s a literal niche for paladin tanks. You are now hand down the best caster tank in a raid ever. Any boss that does spell damage paladins will be better then warriors or druids on.
It’s a good role for paladins as a tank. You also get to apply everything you have now without having to get hit to run your highest threat damage. Warrior tanks are bad caster tanks because if they aren’t getting hit they don’t get to push revenge their best threat ability by a large margin.
You have an awesome niche. Take the win.
Also you assume you NEED to be crush capped. I’m not at all convinced you will need to be.
It puts paladins as the spell damage tanks.
Druids as the best hard mitigation tanks against things like a hateful strike for example.
And warriors are in the middle as a more midline tank, that doesn’t particularly excel at anything but also isn’t the best at everything.
No they take really hard strikes better then any other tank. No one takes a hateful style strike like a druid. You mitigate hard hits better then the other tanks. You have better raw damage reduction and effective health.
Worse on something that swings a ton of times for small damage but hands down the best at mitigating large strikes.
Kind of a horrible niche to have given that Block barely does any mitigation to begin with when it comes to raid bosses, being a spell based tank was fine.
a pure caster boss is still extremely rare (Based on era/tbc/wotlk/mop content) and if that were the case, you’d just leave revenge out of the rotation, its not like your loosing threat if you dont use the button, and if you were you just switch to Dual wielding and push Threat that way.
Then you have diamond flask with 2k healing per tick for 5 minutes.
Pallys have always had the niche of spell damage tanks, making spells eat blocks seems like ahorrible change hands down. Great for 5mans sure, but raids? nah.
its on the player character sheet, that uncrushable will be a thing, and warriors get uncrushable passively.
Yea, also easier to gear compared to warriors.
But a warrior still outshines them.
i like your optimism, i want you to keep that with you throughout wow forever, But im pretty sure pally tanks are still bricked as a class.
You actually are now as a warrior if your not hitting revenge on cooldown. Swapping to dual wielding in forever for a warrior is a Threat loss at all levels. All our bonus threat requires us to be wearing a shield. Even if warriors go fury prot they will still be using a shield 100% of the time while tanking. Dual wield tanking will never be a thing again.
Snapshotting is gone from the game. Diamond flask will never be a thing again.
Yes, crushing blows will be a thing at 150% damage. Crits do 200% all tanks will be crit immune via defense.
Druids literally can’t even be crush immune and with the most recent datamine paladins will likely be able to sustain very close to crush immunity. A single crush is unlikely to 1 shot a tank.
I’m not convinced that crush immunity is going to make or break a tank. Warriors will still be crushed on any boss that can attack more then once every 2 seconds. So anything that has an instant pushes our ability to be crush immune off the table most likely as well.
So we’ll mitigate a little better on single target phys. And you’ll mitigate better on spell casters, but I don’t think the difference will be meaningful enough that paladins will not be solid tanks.
They also gave you the ability to keep mana up while off tanking which was a very valid concern before these latest changes.
your not wrong, im just speaking on alternatives if you dont have that ability to push X spell, like at that point pulling out dual wielding to gain a slightly positive outcome over using a shield because you’re able to use other spells more actively, could even swap in sword and board for a shield slam then go back to doing autistic game play with dual wielding, or just grab a druid tank, Because Big health bets spell damage as seen in wows history, or a DK with extreme autism.
it would be Block Value, not block rating since that doesn’t stop the % of damage taken just increases chances of you blocking, and the amount you would need would exceed itemized stat limitations so your eating away at a bunch of other required stats to get to that point of block value being a worth while stat.
Paladins tanks are the worst caster tanks of the three. They rely on blocking for both threat and mana regen. Warriors and Druids don’t. Giving paladins the ability to block spells means:
Caster bosses eat reflective threat, just like a melee boss
Blocks return 4% mana on spell cast, just like a melee attack
This is an activated ability through Holy Strike; you control when it goes off.
If a boss is just a straight caster (for example, Leotheras the Blind Demon phase), you can just use it at will and generate even more threat.
If there’s an encounter where a spell that can be blocked would eat through a charge that might allow a crush (say, we count the marks on 4 horsemen as blockable) you just don’t cast Holy Strike until after the mark (or whatever cast) goes out.
This is a nice bonus and keeps you from having to dump as much mana into consecrate as you otherwise would. In a situation with multiple mobs and more than one tank, that’s a strategy issue on your raid’s part if you let the crush happen.
Elementals melee attacks count as a caster boss since they ignore armor.
Baron Geddon for example.
I wouldn’t be surprised if we had more elemental bosses to incentivize skyborne sales.
You be quiet!! Prot Pal was the worst spec in the game and had no identity. The recent changes make them finally competitive and give them the ability to Off tank. Spell Block is something that has always been a really cool niche for Prot Pal and a reason to play them.
It’s Great to see Spell Block being added.!!
Some other good changes
Righteous fury was buffed to 9% mitigation
Conviction is now 6% crit for all spells/attack (huge for Prot)
Sacred arbiter 20% holy strike damage (now becomes interesting for Prot with Shieldsworn)
Iron Creed 3/3 instead of 5/5 (full uptime on dmg reduction with holy strike with new talent)
Is Prot Pal perfect? No but at least they took a giant step in the right direction design wise. They need some damage buttons especially at the 31 point capstone. The tree looks a lot better.
Paladin’s do get an effective 14.55% DR build in now + 10% Armor. They lack the Stamina of a Bear, but let’s not kid ourselves that Shamans don’t sit and spam heals on tanks to raise Armor by 25% which doesn’t benefit bears.
Overall, Paladin is poised to be the most defensive of the bunch and the one that does the most damage and excels in AoE, however, they won’t have the raw single target threat that warriors and druids have, they have worse defensives and bring less debuff utility to a raid.
Druids will still be the best tank for damage to hp ratio, that’s not going to change.
Hmmm I can’t say this is true at all. Prot Pal still the worst AOE tank and it’s probably closer now defensive wise but still the worst Tank. Warriors are the cleave specialist you aren’t doing more AOE then them. Bears also great AOE. Prot Pal doesn’t have the EHP of War or Bear and they certainly don’t have AOE (that was taken away from Prot Pal)
They are at least better now, with Shieldsworn it’s goal is to function like a Shield Slam. Taking Conviction and Sacredarbiter in Ret tree will buff it’s snap threat and damage a good bit. It also hits with your Holy Shield. Should hopefully be the hard hitting attack Prot Pal needs.
I think Prot Pals biggest concern is damage and it couldn’t Off tank. It needed damage buttons. Well it just got one but is it enough? IDK. They probably need to buff Cons and a few other things.
At least Prot Pal can now Off Tank and has new ways to do damage. It’s getting there.
Incorrect as heck, in order to reach Paladins threat and damage on AoE, a warrior would have to cleave every auto attack. That’s not happening in any scenario. They sit roughly 17% behind a Paladin in terms of damage and threat when using cleave when rage allows and about 2% behind a paladin if they go full cleave if it would be possible (but it’s not).
Druids is a similar case now as Berserk was removed, Swipe was stronger than Paladin’s AoE, because Druid got access to a lot of crit early, but Paladins now get a 6% spell crit, so consecration is now no longer lagging as much behind, with the addition of Holy Shield at lvl 30, Paladins equalize much faster than before.
Sacred Arbiter is trash, it’s 10-15% behind just taking Improved Seals and that’s assuming it has been fixed so it also scales the +holy damage part.
The only reason you should take that as a Prot is because you don’t have a Ret paladin to refresh seals for Holy Paladins.
I agree with people saying this brings prot closer in line with the other tanks, but I wish bliz would address paladins and uncrushable. Its nice and all saying it “may” not matter but yea that imo is not something to back burner till it becomes a problem…
If it becomes probem, it’s a weekly fix away from adding some avoidance to talents. However, I don’t think it’s a problem if we have to have some gear that adds avoidance. We shouldn’t be a warrior that’s uncrushable straight out the gate.
That’d be boring.
In the Beta Prot Pal had the worst AOE damage and threat though. Then they nerfed Cons coefficient by 50%. Prot Pal was thee AOE tank for it’s identity TBC onward but it’s hardly that anymore.
Prot Pal had thee worst threat on Beta. It was easy to rip from them. You are the first person to even say Prot Pal AOE and threat is fine lol.
I did say it could be. Obviously tuning needs to happen still. I just like the idea that Prot Pal can have a button to press that actually does some damage finally.