Oh definitely, I love the talent.
Ha! I had to tell people to call me just “Fasc” since no one could say the name properly, and then with name change in TBC I made it official. I only went back to Fasciae for nostalgia purposes but everyone still just calls me “Fasc”
Plus my namesake is for Fasc, not Fasciae, so I probably should change back.
We’ll get Expertise and all the fun talents at start instead of late, so however Paladins performed in T4/T5 content, they’ll be that much better this time around.
Avengers shield isn’t needed for raids, or even dungeons for that matter if you are good at pulling. Sanc aura helps with threat and allows your big dps to pump more.
Man, don’t even joke about that. It was horrendous enough in Classic, but doing that crap in TBC will kill it, and I definitely won’t play if they do.
I don’t expect them to not do that. Protection and Retribution as specs were very underpowered until the Sunwell balancing patch, and by then so many folks had written them off that you didn’t really see many well geared Protadins available to do Sunwell stuff.
I don’t expect Sunwell era balancing regarding bosses and raids, because they had repeatedly nerfed both attunements and encounters for accessibility reasons by then, but stats and classes? I suspect that will follow the “most completed version of TBC” mantra they used for Vanilla.
And to be sure, it won’t be as extreme as Vanilla was. Early Vanilla had minimal Spell Power options and talent trees were just horrid messes on top of raiding content that was so woefully undertuned that even those early bad talents and crappy gear allowed people to progress. Tweaking Protadins into their Sunwell talent state isn’t going to make them trivialize Karazhan the way Mages getting Winter’s Chill and 6% Hit gained so much in Molten Core.
Ahhh, yeah I guess I should have clarified…you’d want block for multi-target tanking. Good information though.
They were considered required to clear raids like zul aman. However they do suffer some mana issues. Bear tanks are BiS in TBC
I don’t disagree with the Avenger’s Shield bit, but you can just put your Ret into the Prot Paladin’s group and spend those points elsewhere.
My horde side BE was Ret and we had a Prot…we had no holy Paladins. It was hard to find them at that time. That’s exactly what we did.
However with that being said Greylight’s post is accurate. There is a TPS gain if you don’t have a Ret. There is some EH loss and some talent choices to make.
On the plus side though that same Prot Paladin will bring Imp Crusader for raid utility if you don’t have a Ret.
Initially it was worse than that.
Scaling on subsequent stacks after 3 could occur if your +spell power was too high, limiting you to 210 spell power scaling.
Also SoV was supposed to be 20 PPM, however when I tested it prior to 2.2, it had bugs in how it was applied…as a result it was NOT 20 PPM prior to avoidance and resists.
As a level 70 vs a level 70 I should have faced 5% Parry, 5% Dodge, 5% Miss, 5% block, and 5% resists prior to talents, resulting in 15 PPM. I was getting sub 10 PPM.
It was indeed a hot mess.
However when they patched it in 2.2 to add the DD component at five stacks, the issues had gone away without mention of it in a patch…and it was fantastic.
Prot warrior are preferred MT for bosses. Prot paladin shine in AoE threat… the problem is being geared enough to survive all that AoE threat.
while not as faceroll as classic content, I doubt TBC raiding content will pause a lot of issues (even if we start in patch 2.0)
They literally become the best tank in the game in the right hands. The only reason you’d ever need or want a warrior tank is for one fight, Reliquary of Souls in Black Temple. Otherwise, the paladin can MT the rest of the raids with ease.
I feel like no one understands what “viable” means.
They’re gonna be pretty baller thanks to all the theorycrafting that’s happened. I suspect several of the “you need to have” talents will be abandoned in favor of other’s that are more beneficial.
Or, more accurately, viable has an inherently subjective definition.
What is “success?” What is “adequate?” These depend on your personal standards. To some, less than optimal is inadequate, and consequently means not viable.
And some people consider viable to mean theoretically possible under even the most extreme conditions.
Most people would consider viable to be reasonably doable under normal circumstances without major hurdles compared to optimal. And by that measure pally tanks are more than viable in TBC and definitely more viable than they are in classic.
It’s perfectly viable to use a wrench to pound in nails therefore its perfectly viable to frame a house with a wrench. Who’s got the time and money to purchase a hammer nowadays.
And those people should be told politely, but firmly, to leave.
I agree with this in part, but viable typically falls under the “can succeed” threshold and isn’t much more than that, unless you start adding other caveats to the mix like “socially viable” or “viable within the meta” which would narrow the field in a specific way.
To the point of viability:
Paladin tanks are the most desired tanks for just about anything in TBC , even holy paladins and rets. Blessing of Salvation is huge, especially if people want to do speed runs.
You can, a prot paladin in a friend’s guild did it. I think his name was frostmage on Fenris
Offtank doesn’t mean “lesser tank”, it means a tank with a different role than “main tank”
Usually there will be around 3 tanks for a 25-man group in TBC, two of which will be “main” tanks and mostly swap boss/super hard hitting mob duty between them and one of which will be an “off” tank for everything else.