Context: On the paladin discord there has been some discussion regarding Holy Shield, Retribution Aura, and Blessing of Sanctuary. Currently on the beta/classic the reflective damage from these 3 abilities seem to be subject to spell miss chance, yielding an ~17% miss rate on mobs of +3 levels.
Objection: We suspect that this may be incorrect and that these abilities should not have a chance to miss, but should have a chance to resist, similar to glancing blows for Crest of Retribution.
We asked a former dev about this issue and while this is on the spot and based on a memory of 14-18 years ago, it at least provides some context for the intent and points to that may be our apprehension is correct: https://clips.twitch.tv/DaintyDifferentTitanOMGScoots
Lastly, I will include an impassioned plea from user Apollexis, in which he pleads for this issue to be examined. While I do not agree with many of his suggestions as some of them would strictly be changes, I find his write up provides more discussion:
Blizzard please fix Holy Shield/Retribution Aura/Blessing of Sanctuary
Protection paladins already have a ton of stigma against them, but there is a vibrant protection pally community that does a ton of theory crafting in hopes of being able to make it work in some shape or form in raids.
The way righteous fury operates is you only gain good threat gains from your holy damage done. It is the only modifier that you actually have to your threat. This system replaced a much stronger threat system paladins had in 1.9 that operated off of Seal/Judgement of Fury.
As of current on the Classic Client, the spells Holy Shield/Retribution Aura/Blessing of Sanctuary these abilities are using spell hit in order to land, which is a total catastrophe. The reason it's so bad is because even if you geared every single off piece item you had, you could not get more than 5% Spell hit on a Paladin, and if you want to include Nat Pagle's trinket, you can hit 15% for 15 seconds every 1 minutes and 15 seconds. You would still be 2% off the spell hit needed for cap.
This actually becomes even worse. Mobs that are higher level than you, somehow still have holy resistance. So you wil need one item in your off pieces to reduce the amount of resists on the boss for holy. (Despite Kevin Jordan claiming that there is no holy resistance in the game, there clearly is.) You need to get 15 spell pen because your 2 other threat generators, Consecrate and Seal of Righteousness are constantly getting 25%-50% Partials vs +3 level targets.
Okay that's really bad right? Well don't worry it becomes worse. Holy Shield/Retribution Aura/Blessing of Sanctuary are considered Binary Spells. Binary spells have different calculations for landing. Binary spells do not ever partial how ever when you cast a binary spell, you take your spell hit, and the resistance of the boss, and add them up, then the game does a RNG roll from 0-1 and if it's not higher than those combined numbers then your spell literally misses.
Here's the actual formula from a blue post that was archived:
Quote: "For binary spells only, there is an additional modifier for the resistance of the victim to your particular spell school: fire, frost, shadow, nature, arcane. That modifier is multiplied by your hit chance to get your actual chance to land. This is done with binary spells only, because they never do partial damage.
Example: Eyonix the Mage (level 60) fires a frost bolt at Yeti of Doom (level 63). Eyonix is also wearing a total of +6% spell hit gear. Yeti of Doom has frost resistance such that he takes 50% from level 60 frost attacks. So, heres the hit calculation:
0.83 (83% for +3 levels mob) + 0.06 (+6% spell hit) = 0.89
0.89*0.5 (50% damage from frost) = 0.445.
The game will roll a number between 0 and 1, and if its less than 0.445, the frost bolt will hit for full damage. Otherwise, a resist message will appear."
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20060529065634/http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?fn=blizzard-archive&t=37&p=1&tmp=1#post37
Here's some proof:
Level 38 Bat Resisting Ret Aura: https://imgur.com/a/HrVXEi7 Source clip: https://clips.twitch.tv/FunnyFunAlpacaRiPepperonis
Level +3 level Target Resisting Ret Aura: https://imgur.com/a/hSJyuJ2
Clip of AoE Pull vs +3 level targets: https://clips.twitch.tv/FragileLovelyNuggetsDansGame
Thorns is Operating the same way: https://imgur.com/a/LmltkYZ
SoR Partial Resist Results: https://imgur.com/a/lrhYZ18
What this means is on top of the fact that Holy Shield has 4 charges, and you will generally at best only get 2-3 of them to ever get triggered on a boss, of those 2-3, you will miss 17% of them. I don't know why these reflective spells are operating under spell hit modifiers and not using melee hit modifiers when they require melee damage to be dealt in order to even work.
I humbly request one of these 4 options be done please blizzard.
1. If you're going to treat all of our protection abilities as spells, then please have them act like spells in every regard. Have Holy Shield/Blessing of Sanctuary trigger Judgement of Wisdom and other spell trigger effects like Darkmoon Card: Blue Dragon/ Wrath of Cenarius. (This way we at least get benefits from them acting like spells that can potentially offset the disadvantage given from them.) [P.S] This is actually how these spells used to operate pre 1.9. Sources: https://imgur.com/a/8ZjWNVh From Thread: http://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/thread-5200-page-4.html
2. Have all the Reflective/Protection abilities operate off of Melee Hit, or Turn them in to Non Binary spells so we only have to deal with the resistance issues and just have the spells not miss. (The same way SoR and Consecrate operate)
3. Increase the total threat generated from Righteous Aura by an additional 50%-75%. This will at least allow us to maintain threat despite the huge disadvantages of lacking spell hit.
4. Just give us Seal Of Fury/Judgement of Fury Back. All of these issues go away if we can get that ability back.
It's rough enough for us that Judgement of Righteousness will also use spell hit and therefore 17% of our judgements will be missing on any given boss, this kind of disadvantage is punitive and illogical given other abilities like Thorium Shield Spike do not operate like this.
``` Apollexis