Tuesday, September 16, 2008

[Paladin] WotLK testing: the lack of int and you

I asked earlier what people wanted tested in Wrath. It might be a bit before I get to test everything (in particular, I doubt seriously I'll be able to test anything to do with DKs) but here's the first installment.

CKTucker asked:
For a prot pali How will I get intellect? I have seen the Nax raid gear on MMO-Champion. Have not noticed anything in the talent trees either, although I am known to miss the obviouse according to my wife.
As I alluded to in the comments, this isn't really caring about intellect; this is caring about whether or not a prot pally's mana is going to be a concern when there is no int on the armor. And from what I've seen and played with, the answer is a resounding no.

For starters, there is the awesome Divine Plea:
Divine Plea
Instant 1 min cooldown
You gain 25% of your total mana over 10 sec, but the amount healed by your spells is reduced by 50%.
This takes care of so much of the problem in tanking 5-mans, it's ridiculous. A one-minute cooldown allows it to work seamlessly, and the gain in mana allows for early use after AS/Holy/Conc and then a minute later, if you need.

The changes to how seals/judgments work also helps this quite a bit. In 5-mans, judgment of wisdom ensures that you're doing maximum damage with a tanking seal while still getting back mana from mobs you're tanking. Gone are the days where you have to juggle judgments and seals back and forth.

Another great boon is how cheap hammer of the righteous is. 6% of base mana for a spell that holds aggro well on 3 mobs AND can apply seal of vengeance is really, really efficient. For more than 3 mobs consecrate is still the spell of choice - and it's still very expensive - but this helps a lot on 3 and 4 pulls to keep aggro cheaply.

Yet more awesomeness: the new Blessing of Sanctuary. While 2% of base mana doesn't sound like a lot, this is triggering all the time for a paladin since so many of their attacks are blocked. Basically every single holy shield charge is 2% of your base mana.

Finally, there is the premier single target threat ability: Shield of Righteousness. This only costs 6% of your base mana and does a huge amount of threat at the block values currently seen. This combined with the reduction from Guarded by the Light make this easily spammable.

Anyway, on to actual testing. I found that with my lvl 80 paladin that I could tank multiple mobs easily simply by putting out one consecrate, having hammer of the righteous + seal of wisdom + judgment of wisdom, and doing divine plea. I could do this on 5-6 mobs without going below half mana. If I cut to not using seal of wisdom and just judging I found I would run out of mana around 2 minutes in. This was using some kind of threat move every time I could, usually either shield of righteousness and hammer, with the occasional consecrate and avenger's shield thrown in, along with judging. This was also not using any heals on me that would restore mana at all.

It was a real trip. :)

Anyway, more questions please!

8 comments:

runycat said...

Is it terrible that I'm hugely more excited about tanking on my Warrior/Paladin than I am about my Druid? I haven't gotten to mess around much with my Paladin in beta, but our protadin was saying that you seriously never run out of mana anymore.

Good to hear the confirmation.

Kalon said...

Are you kidding? I'm really excited about the direction of prot paladins, and I don't even have one right now.

Prot paladin tanking is downright amazing. The new abilities are great, scale with mitigation and are fun to use. The seal/judgment system isn't nearly as kludgy. Being able to use avenger's shield while tanking on a regular basis is just fun. Being able to do all of this without having to drink every other pull? And you can actually kill mobs by yourself. Gone are the days where you'd have to pull 20 mobs or nothing. It's stellar.

There's lots of things to do, lots of options when tanking, a real niche and a real sense of overall design. It's fun without being too many buttons (warriors) or too few (paladins before).

And yeah, it makes me sad to play with the paladin and then go back to doing anything with the druid.

Unknown said...

Thank you so much for putting my fears at ease. Like runycat I have to drink about every other pull right now, but to have the abilities you describe dungeon runs will be faster and better.

Convert to Reef said...

What about druid tanking? I know that they are removing the armor bonus from leather pieces now, even the tier peices dont have any bonus armor. I have read the new talents that are supposed to make up for this, but how are bear tanks looking in beta, I have heard rumors, that they may loose our valuable raid spots come LK.

Kalon said...

Hey, Tank. Thanks for coming by. :)

Right now, druids are actually looking pretty decent tanking wise. Even with the loss of all additional armor on leather druids are fairly good in traditional tanking stats - they have the highest HP of all the tanking classes by a fair amount, and they have the highest physical mitigation by a fair amount thanks to new talents and higher armor. There are some concerns as to how well they scale relative to the other tanking classes, but until we see that gear it's hard to gauge what levels we'll be at.

The big detraction is the very big lack of avoidance relative to other tanking classes. Druids are the worst tanking class for avoidance, and it only looks like this will get worse from here on out as the itemization issues rear their ugly head.

The big problem I have is with the gear. Right now, about half of the best 10-man level gear items you can get don't come from 10-mans, they come from PvP. That means that you don't even need to raid to get raiding-level gear. That's frustrating. The best trinket you can get is still Badge of Tenacity. Tier gear is still itemized for rogues and is frustratingly meh for bears, and the tanking rings/amulets/trinkets/cloaks are frustratingly badly itemized.

And yet with gear being so bad, it's still very good being a bear.

I'll try and do some tanking at lvl 70 and at lvl 80 here soon as a bear and report back. I'm very curious too to see how the experience is.

Chris said...

Protection Paladins have never cared about mana, in situations we are progression tanking we get enough from SA, for OTing we will never get enough (and 1200mana/10s = 7.2k/min = 72k in a 10 min fight... ), and in lower end content we have to strip off, or go oom in 30-40s anyway (less if we use our shield).

Our mana / int has never been a development plan (and its bad), regen is what we have to consider rather than the buffer, if we have a continual flow in it doesn't matter how big the bucket is.

Anonymous said...

protadins are pro when its a few mobs. but theyre for the suck in single target fights when it comes to mana. and with no intel on anything tank related im gonna end up getting a few pieces of holy plate. need a little SP anyway.

Anonymous said...

As a Tankadin in the end game content so far of WotLK, ie. heroics and raids, I never run out of mana. I do tank different than most Tankadins do nowadays tho. I guess im still in to the old way of doing things. What I use is basically a healing mace to some ppl but to me, a weapon with high SP and high stam is a beautiful weapon. I cause so much aggro that I have no need to use as many moves to hold aggro. Even if I do spam all the moves I have, between my judgement of wisdom, divine plea and the sexy passive trait of gettin mana back when I am healed, I never go OOM inless I am running an instance to help out lower lvls and I am just not taking enough damage to get healed to get my mana back.

So ladies and gents mana as a tank is retarded to invest in.