I’m confused by the direction that Blizzard is taking Prot Pallys; is the goal to simply make them not viable or something? Or since they are doing all this cross-game nonsense between Diablo 4 and COD, maybe they will replace WoW Paladins with Spiritborn? Stupid conspiracy theories, I know… but what else makes sense… I refuse to believe it’s just incompetence, as other classes seem fine.
From my understanding going into War Within they were/are the worst tanks - according to every raider or mythic+ professional, and just about anyone and their grandmother who speaks about them online.
With the .05 patch notes, there seems to be the illusion of significant changes - but the reality appears to be that most of the changes are worthless, and instead actually mask significant nerfs (losing haste from seal of alacrity, losing 10% armor/holy power/cdr etc… from seal of order).
So - is all the info online just inaccurate, and they are fine? are the .05 changes actually good and people are misunderstanding some nuanced complexity that results in a net positive boost to prot pally performance?
They had a problem with the gameplay of having SotR up all the time.
They tried to solve it by kneecapping the HP generation (AS change).
The idea being to distribute the defensive power to AS to make it still worthwhile to press.
It failed.
People kept playing it the same way because… well they could. They had an idea but didn’t put any time into actually supporting it
Seemingly ran out of time on Prot development…
And here are the problems it created and why people kept playing it the same way
This change wasn’t supported with talents that took consideration of SotR active mitigation dropping except for Inner Light.
All the talents that encouraged spamming SotR were kept and even added on.
It disconnected AS from the core mechanical resource of the spec (HP), which didn’t create problem in DF but that now has consequences on the Hero specs of TWW that base some of their mechanics specifically on the builder/spender dynamic.
So what happened?
Well in DF, by some miracle, the spec still worked on the back of shear powerful defensive CDS.
What changed?
Well as DF went on, they had to nerf all the talents that had to do with spamming SotR because the haste we got meant we could just maintain high uptime of our CD’s.
What should they do?
If they wanted to curb SotR uptime through HP economy, they could have started by adding another spender to Prot.
One that would have taken away from SotR damage role effectively making us choose between damage and defensive power, without totally removing either from each spell.
Now they probably need to rework it all together.
The first step for that was reworking the class tree which created problem for all 3 specs.
They are doing that in 11.0.5.
Maybe we’ll get something in 11.1?
Or similar to Ret in a 11.0.7 ?
Thanks for the in depth response and explanation. So - basically, it sounds like Prot Pally’s are going to suck for most of, if not all of, the War Within expansion - but it’s intentional, as they were considered too OP in the previous expansion? I did not realize this, I played them for the first part of last expansion - but didn’t realize they were closet OP… again, thanks for the insight, truly appreciated sir.
For this patch maybe, I wouldn’t bet on further patches.
It’s important to say that they will probably “band-aid” it so it can fonction on a similar level to other tanks but it does have some design issue that aren’t just solved with tuning.
I wouldn’t say intentional.
They took some short-sighted decision in DF that are blowing up in their face now.
Then priorities are made and a spec that somewhat works doesn’t get the attention it should have had because the deadlines are very tight.
And they weren’t OP in DF, they were “working” and the way you made them work was by rotating various defensive CD’s as to always have something up to mitigate the damage.
Since we have mechanics that reduces the CD of those from using our abilities, you had to manage your rotation to try and make those come up earlier or extend their duration as much as possible.
Again, it “worked” but it didn’t feel particularly good.
And for what it’s worth they did make some worthwhile change for TWW such as scaling back the necessity of standing in consecration at all times.
Im no prot main but ive leveled most my paladins as prot in DF and the state of the spec doesnt make me wanna do real content as prot.
AS generating hp felt good but I didnt recognize it back then until it was gone and it really felt incomplete imo.
Prot paladin will get buffed into a spec to clear most content you can be sure of that, but so far right now they are not fun to me and many others feel the same. Specially those who arent really paladin mains but play all tanks.
Funny enough holy has been changed to the point I dont enjoy it even as a spec to get the dungeon gold satchels anymore. So as a ret main ret is literally all I have right now
I don’t think the 0.5 changes are neccesarily intended as a buff or a nerf… It’s an update to talents and hopefully improving or adding more gameplay options and choices…
If it ends up as a buff or a nerf or where the spec stands after the changes heavily deppends on tunning… Even now, Prot Pally is considered “weak” simply because it’s worse at surviving than the other tanks so with only numerical buffs the spec could easily go from “bottom” to average or even top-tier.
Ive seen forum posts claiming that Prot Pally damage with the Templar Tree is good. I’ve seen 1 Prot Paladin so far in a BG, and his damage was maybe good enough for a tank, more than some healers, but his healing somehow was 2nd in the match, only below one healer. So somehow Prot can heal.
The magic with some tanks specs in pvp is you’re not attacked, and a bit more durable than a dps spec on the off chance you are attacked.
Prot Paladins shortcomings are highlighted in PVE more.
I have been playing the hell out of my Prot Pally but I have also been teaching myself how to play Holy a lot more.
My Prot Pally “feels” better than my equally geared bear but it is Heroic Dungeon content. I don’t think that the scaling will be there when the incoming damage is significant.
Rezzing an older post but my prot paly is terrible in Delves, doesnt seem tanky at all, and has very low survivability. I go into delves solo so haven’t subjected anyone else to my terrible tanking. I dont know what they did to this spec since DF but it’s completely off and she can barely heal herself enough to survive in even world content.
I also did their recommended reset of talents at the end of DF and took me a while to realize that my Consecration wasn’t healing me. Who even does that in a prot paly tank tree.
My paly isn’t my main but does blacksmithing and mining which takes a ton of mats to max out skill, so have been playing it a lot in War within until that prof maxed. But if this was my only character would be sad. Prot paly needs fixing badly.
I tried it a bit and its a bit forced to play from cooldown to cooldown. In between it feels terrible, sotr uptime is so low with one cast and then I’m panicking to generate enough holy power to either sotr a second time or usually try to word of glory the big chunk of health I’m missing now because the class is tissue paper in between mitigations.
Messing with Guardian Druid these problems don’t really come up as I just stack more Ironfur if I’m feeling bad about whats happening. Having abundant resource generation just feels good and is fun. War and Druid are lots of fun because they don’t really have many gaps in mitigation unless you cause them.
Prot Pal has them no matter what you do and if its a haste issue, nobody wants to play a class for 3 seasons until the haste issue resolves itself with enough gear. Why would anyone balance a spec around that.
I guess I was indeed a bit surprised when I did my first T8 on the Pally that I was actually taking a fair amout of damage and had to properly tank and rotate CDs… Which was pretty different feeling to the lower level Delves I had done before which felt more like open world content (i.e. pull everything in sight without any worries)… But I mean I think that’s intended.
I guess I don’t actively play other tanks at the moment to have a fair point of refference and I do agree Prot Pallys need buffs, I’m just not sure I agree on being “Terrible” in Delves since it’s still a Tank after all.
For whatever is worth, T8 Delves felt signifficanly easier on my 575 Prot Pally than for example my Shaman who was around 590 at the time (did em as Ele)… I’m pretty sure I even completed them faster on the Pally since I was able to handle bigger pulls by playing around CDs.
This is so true for me. I play 4 different tanks throughout an expansion and pally currently feels so clunky. I really, really want to play Paladin as it was my first tank ever and I love support playstyle on a tank, but it’s so GCD capped without high haste. I wish they would put AS and WoG off GCD, that would immediately alleviate a lot of the clunk since both of those abilities currently feel bad to play as they both eat up so many GCDs. AGHHH!
i was holding onto a little bit of hopium but i’m really not enjoying playing my prot pally in TWW content so far. Templar is a blast but it’s soo much harder to keep SoTR uptime. Lightsmith is boring and only slightly better because of the shield. Baseline i don’t feel like a tank, i’m taking too much damage if im standing inside consecration, with SoTR and Sentinel I’m still getting shredded by melee’s.
I know it’s early gearing but early gearing in DF i felt a lot more stable and then mobs became dangerous as key levels got higher even with my gear. Now im scared of how mobs are gonna scale compared to our defensive capability as prot pal. I wish they would rever the Sentinel, eye of tyr and cdr nerf. Even with that i doubt we’d be much better than middle of the pack.
It’s always hilarious watching the Paladin forums devolve every expansion with hyperbolic “omg prot pally is dead” memes. I just ran a +6 Mist in 605 gear and it felt perfectly fine. Face tanked the entire time and pulled 2-3 packs of bugs on the final stretch. Missed the timer by a bit cause our group wiped on the boss, but prot paladin tanking in itself is not bad. That’s with 30+ more ilvls to go, tier set bonus, and embellishments still needed. Most of you complaining won’t even get to the break points of where class balancing even matters. Hilarious.
The only problem i can see with prot right now is the mana usage I really only pvp and tanks need to build up some steam slowly work people down , By the time you pick up that momentum the mana pool is just gone and you can’t do anything .
other then that damage / healing and all round survivability make it good fun
You say you really only PvP. Do you PvP on Prot? If so I’d be interested to hear more about your experience playing Prot in PvP. I kind of want to try it but I hear a lot of negatives about Prot in PvP.
^ that’s the problem, don’t follow blindly the meta. the problem with pal tank they can run with 4 dps, and still viable. there + u can be a pure unbreakable turtle build. it sucks that today’s player never theory craft nor test multiple builds anymore. they should just remove all the talent tree and choices completely if u want that 100% meta mindset with no free will. that way u can easily tell what’s wrong with your class