Topic: Paladin: Shield of the Righteous

We have temporarily disabled Shield of Righteousness.

We're working on the basic Prot rotations right now, and with Shield of Righteousness in addition to Crusader Strike, Hammer of the Righteous, Consecrate, Avenger's Shield and Holy Wrath, there was just a lot going on. Shield seemed like the least interesting of those abilities -- really Shield and Hammer just seem to be single-target and multitarget versions of the same ability, especially without block scaling. Shield also felt like a duplicate of Shield Slam, which doesn't help in trying to differentiate the two Prot trees. Frankly, we'd rather make Avenger's Shield and Hammer of the Righteous cooler than they are today.

It's too early to call this a permanent change. We still have a lot to consider, such as the damage of Hammer vs. Shield, how different we want the AE vs. single-target Prot attacks to be, and how much Holy Power considerations occupy a Prot paladin.

If we keep Shield of Righteousness, we need to figure out its role relative to Hammer. We don't want it to be just swap one button for another for AE fights, and we don't want you to have to use both on cooldown since we are giving Prot paladins more things to manage in Cataclysm.

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Q u o t e:
This Holy Power mechanic, and the loss of Shield of the Righteous is just plain stupid. I'm not really sure what you're thinking, because the way things are now, it's still going to be a static rotation, and could still be one button macro'ed, considering how weak Holy Wrath is. These new rotations are not fun, and are clunky as hell, and there isn't any choices to be made in the new system than in the old. PLEASE reconsider the changes that you've done.

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This is a beta, so we like to keep the discussions a little higher quality. If you want to call our design decisions stupid, you'd be better off doing that in the live forums. I'm telling you that on behalf of the other beta participants because I know one of the things they enjoy about participating in the beta is having more intelligent discussions that you usually get in the live forums. Please respect that.

As far as the paladin changes go, we have made no secret that we haven't happy with the paladin gameplay on live, of all three trees, and the class was headed for a pretty radical redesign. There can be very few sacred cows as part of that process or we're not going to have the design space we need to fix the problems.

The current Cataclysm rotation is far from static and was in fact so frenetic that we had to scale back on some of the random procs and Holy Power generation or paladins were never going to have the bandwidth to do things like position the boss. It was far away the most complex tank rotation, and that's not what we were going for.

We're trying a lot of new ideas and it's going to take some iteration before we're happy with them. The current snapshot you are getting in beta is just a snapshot -- it's whatever the data happened to look like at the time when we made a build.

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Q u o t e:
Basically everyone was pulling off of me. I thought it was my fault or some change with paladin threat gen. I guess the lack of SoR really hurts that much?

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We recently made a change, that I suspect you don't have yet, to make Righteous Fury improve all threat and not just Holy threat. It's also possible attacks like Judgement, Crusader Strike and Hammer of the Righteous just don't hit hard enough yet. You lost a lot of passive Strength and damage in the talent trees and we haven't baked all of that back in yet.

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Q u o t e:
Is this a bad thing that one feels like an aoe version of the other? I thought we were trying to get away from using aoe abilities on single target mobs. The abilities would both just have to be made so you would only want to shield on single and hammer on multiple. So you just swap which you use in your rotation depending on what you are fighting. Something as simple as them sharing a cooldown could make this work even though it seems a bit clunky.

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We'd like for AE tanking to feel different from single-target tanking, but we don't think that swapping ability A for an ability B that is almost an exact duplicate of A really satisfies that.

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Q u o t e:
I'm really just getting enough holy power to keep HS up, which is fine if that's all I'm meant to use it on, but at least from a high end raiding perspective it doesn't provide depth of choice, it's mandatory. To me it seems a better design to have a HP dump and have an ability that is more situational, like your HS also reduces magic damage by 20%, because as it is you can really just focus on your rotation and HP manages itself.

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It's entirely possible there isn't enough Holy Power to go around for Prot yet. We want you to be able to consider things like Inquisition and Word of Glory. Remember too that it's only 15% block. If it falls down from time to time, you're unlikely to drop dead.