[General, Paladin]Argent Defender is OP!

As a feral tank - and really, as any tank would tell you if they were honest, Argent Defender is ridiculous. It's not just overpowered, it's superpowered. It's a relic from an older age when power just flowed like candy, and really shouldn't exist in this world of more realistic, 5% bonuses and gritty power benefits.


I mean, the guy can fly through space on a surf board. He is the herald of Galactus, who can eat whole worlds and has a weapon that erases you from existence. He uses the power cosmic - and that's like using cheat codes, basically. He's taken on the entire Fantastic Four and whooped them; the only reason they won is that he felt some pity and remorse for his planet.

So totally nerf Argent Defender. He's stupid.

However, if you're talking about the paladin talent Ardent Defender, it's just about right and puts paladins on a similar but not as good level of EH as a druid. The proc is reasonable and is on the same level of power as many other ohshit buttons, with the proviso that it's much better in some cases (ohai, Algalon) and not nearly as good in others.



Sorry for that. Was feeling a bit silly this morning and was annoyed at yet another stupid thread about Argent Defender, and that silly misspelling. Argent means 'silver'. Argent Crusade - Silver Crusade, kinda like that Silver Hand thing. That big burst on the tabard? It's in silver, ya know. Ardent means impassioned or hot, like...zealousness. Ya know, like what paladins are?

Sigh.

[General] The future of block part 3 - long term fixes

The setup for this series is here, and the first (short term) suggestion ideas are here.

What about the long term solution to block? This has some more interesting design constraints, but we'll go with some basic observations first.

For starters, one of the reasons that mitigation is so good right now is because boss damage is so high. The last time that every boss could melee two-shot tanks was Sunwell; and even then, it was only Brutallus. While most bosses can't do that all the time in Ulduar, it's more true than not that a tank can just be pasted if unlucky.

But why is that?

Part of it is because avoidance is simply too high. Pre-Naxx geared tanks started at around 40% avoidance, and by the time they were done with Naxx they were near 60%. By comparison, TBC tanks didn't get to the 60% threshold until they were through with BT. What this means in practice is that if designers want to challenge healing, all the attacks that do go through must hit fairly hard.

This leads to healers being forced to spam heals on the tank regardless of what's going on. Which means mana regen can't be as much of a factor, and caring about whether a 20k hit is blocked for 2k doesn't factor into it. It simply doesn't matter because healers must heal as if you had zero avoidance and zero other mitigation.

Because if they don't, the tank can get unlucky and die.

Now, this has another annoying side effect - healing is really dull. Healers are rewarded not by casting heals as needed but proactively healing, and then they pretty much have to. There aren't rotations possible; they must heal their absolute worst case scenarios. It also means that whether they are casting or not isn't really a decision.

Then you have block coming into it. Block doesn't scale with mob damage, and mob damage is steadily increasing. It becomes less reliable and less relevant. Avoidance continues to increase, health increases, and because of this hits become harder and harder...and healers get more and more bored.

So how do we change block such that it's relevant and fix everything else? GC has a hint, today:

The problem I have with this kind of argument is you're basically saying that avoidance is awesome and mitigation is awesome, but something with aspects of both can never work. I would argue that no tank has a clue of how hard the boss can hit them because they can dodge 30 attacks in a row under a blue moon. However, because you are removing so much damage every time you avoid, we all still use avoidance despite its random nature.

A wise tank said to me recently: imagine the block coming at the expense of avoidance instead of mitigation. Now imagine you block a lot more often than the other guy can dodge. If anything, the block tank is going to be less spiky than the non-block tank.

Let's give an example of what he's talking about here.

The worst case scenario is no avoidance. Let's treat block as avoidance. In the above scenario GC describes, all tanks have exactly the same mitigation. Thus, all tanks have exactly the same worst-case TTL assuming their effective health was similar.

In the average case, however, you get the situation where you have the 'avoidance' tanks and the 'block' tanks. Here's how it works:
1) The avoidance tanks either take no damage (dodge) or fully mitigated damage (not dodge). We'll say that they avoid 40% of the time, so they take a full hit 60% of the time and dodge 40%.
2) the block tanks avoid 30% of the time, but block 30% of the time. So 40% of the time they take a full hit. 30% of the time they avoid everything. 30% of the time they block (say 33% of the damage).

In this situation, both tanks have the same worst case possibility. The blocking tanks will take on average the same damage over time. However, their damage will be much less spiky because of the avoidance issue; they'll take much fewer 'big' hits that aren't blocked, nearly half as many. 10% of the time the avoidance tank will take 0 damage ,or 10% less overall damage. 30% of the time the block tank will take 33% less damage, which is again 10% less overall damage.

Of course, this would require that block actually scaled with incoming attacks AND avoidance was heavily nerfed.

So what would this world look like? What stats would look like what?

Let's take another assumption: that on 'hard' fights the tank's basic time to live on average is around 4 melee attacks without heals. This means you can do nothing and be killed by the boss after four attacks most of the time. That's the baseline for 'hard'. Now, with avoidance at 50%, this means each attack must be (on average) at least 50% of your health - and that's where we are now. But at a 30% avoidance cap, the attacks don't have to be nearly so high, and 3-rounds are fine.

The obvious conclusion is that avoidance would be heavily nerfed and still be subject to diminishing returns. Instead of now, where the 'cap' on avoidance is set around 70% (and it becomes very difficult to get more than 60%), you'd need to set the cap closer to 40%. The goal would be that in the highest tier gear, you'd want to go for 40% at best. And that would be for the non-blocking tanks, remember. For the blocking tanks avoidance would want to cap near 30% in most cases. And admittedly, I'm totally making this up. It could be much, much worse than this. 40% as the high end seems reasonable though, but keep in mind that the primary reason I chose it was because it means bosses should not 2-round you (or can't really be designed to) - since the 'average' case would mean you'd die in two shots (if those two shots connected) more often than not. That's not really reasonable.

Furthermore, you'd want to do the same thing for block. Block rating would need to cap around 20-40% in general. Under no circumstances would you want anyone to be passively uncrushable/unhittable either; if you did that, they'd immediately become the best tank choice by a landslide. However, block rating would still remain as a stat. And more importantly, it'd remain a fairly desirable one; it would be essentially as good as dodge rating is right now.

Next, you want to make sure that no matter what else, block was relatively as good as avoidance against hard-hitting mobs. This means that it must scale with incoming damage. The simplest way to do this (as shown in the short term solution list) is to make it increase armor. This can scale or it can be a flat value; I'd recommend that it scales with block value to some degree, but only some degree. Why? Because the goal is to have your total amount of damage blocked * the chance of block equal or close to the total amount of damage avoided by the 'avoidance' tank. It's hard to do that if you can have wildly fluctuating values depending on gear. Possibly a better solution in the long term is to make block value a second mitigation that multiplies, just like defensive stance/PotP do now. And have that scale with block value.

And actually I take it back; the easiest solution is to have a block always reduce damage by a certain percentage and remove block value entirely. It was already a confusing stat; this might be best. We'll just have block always mitigate a flat 25% damage. If you like, you can put in a static component that does something like 'blocks at least 25% damage or X damage, whichever is higher' so that heroics/trash is a bit more manageable.

The important thing is that the block % * the block rate should equal the extra avoidance that the avoidance tanks have, and it should do so at all tiers. This isn't that hard to balance either. In fact, the block tanks can have different percentages of damage blocked and blocking rates as well, differentiating them even further.

I'd probably have the four tanks look like this:
Tank A: 40% max avoidance, 60% unblocked hits, 0% blocked hits for 0%.
Tank B: 35% max avoidance, 55% unblocked hits, 10% blocked hits for 50% blocks each
Tank C: 30% max avoidance, 40% unblocked hits, 20% blocked hits for 50% block each
Tank D: 30% max avoidance, 30% unblocked hits, 40% blocked hits for 25% block each

So we've dealt with block and avoidance. Next up, health and armor.

Health and armor amongst all of these tanks should be roughly the same or similar. The important thing to note is that effective health should really be the thing that stays the same. Why? Because the worst-case TTL should remain about the same between the tanks. This is a lot easier to balance than it was before, however; instead of having to compare blocking tanks with armor and do static vs. scaling damage, you've got armor for all of them and that's all. Same with health. Some tanks can have higher armor, but will need to trade that for lower HP. Same in reverse. But this is pretty easy to manage overall, and as long as effective health remains pretty much the same (within a few percent) this will be easy to balance. If I were doing this, I would have one of the avoidance tanks be the high armor, one be the high health. Do the same for the block tanks. Each would have marginal advantages on certain fights, none would be advantaged for all.

And of course, the ones with high HP should have less magic mitigation than the ones with lower HP.

So what happens to SD? SD becomes something of the odd man out. I think that for this specific case, you'd just remove it. Because it doesn't deal with the hit table, balancing it against block (which does) is very difficult. It's hard to 'guarantee' a certain uptime given crit, hit, expertise values. And it goes away from having two tanks with shields, two without. That being said, it may stick around as exactly what it is - a way to mitigate static amounts of damage. That still has value, especially in lower level dungeons. It just won't be used as the primary mitigation balancer.

Now, this breaks a lot of things. This breaks the idea of paladins blocking every attack, for instance. It breaks block being so much better on trash...maybe. There are possibilities here. Think, for instance, that while holy shield is active all attacks are reduced by a certain static damage, and as long as holy shield has charges attacks are reduced by a percentage - and the amount of charges is small. That means against bosses, you'll get both static and percentage reduction. Against multiple mobs, you'll get that static reduction and only a couple percentage reductions. That might work, and it'd be similar to what SD would be like in this world.

So how do shields work? They function quite a bit on giving massive block value by themselves. Well, you could simply use that (and that alone) as the way to do the percentage reduction. I don't like that, personally. You could just remove that value entirely. You could make it solely a threat stat for paladins and warriors. I'd be in favor of removing it, but there is some value in keeping two stats around and making percentage reduction something you can scale with. It's still confusing though.

Would this fix or improve healing? Possibly. With a maximum 40% avoidance chance, a number of potential nice things come up. For starters, the real possibility of having ohshit buttons that do avoidance primarily becomes attractive, even if they're not 100%. This is because bosses wouldn't be hitting for half your health every time; they wouldn't need to. So something that doubled your avoidance would massively reduce the incoming damage, but could still be fair and useful. Damage could be cut in basically half and still threaten tanks, since chances are they'd take the same damage most of the time. All tanks would be significantly less spiky due to the loss of avoidance. Some reactionary healing (and less healer-stacking) may be possible. Healing spells could be reduced in size as well, to correspond to this healing. And mana regen might be able to be nerfed too; if the primary problem is just throughput of heals, not bursty scary 2-hit combos, that might work to help things.

At the very least, boss damage would not need to be consistently 50% of a tank's health all the time.

So this would all work. The question remains to me - would this be fun? The four tanks wouldn't be all that different from a healer perspective. The block/nonblock tanks would be especially close to each other by necessity. There wouldn't be a lot of advantages or disadvantages to bringing one over the other, especially if cooldowns were balanced. Sure, paladins would block more on trash, druids would have higher HP (or armor, whatever), but everyone would kind of want the same stuff and be about the same viability at any given tier.

Is that fun? I'm not sure. Honestly, I always felt that there should be niches for tanking (4), and that each of the four tanks should have a primary and secondary 'good' niche. I would like to see a diversity of tanks required in raids. My idea would be that each tank would have one main niche, one secondary niche, and they overlapped so that any two tanks would cover all four niches at at least a secondary level of competence.

Because I think there is definite advantage in feeling like your character is 'best' in something. And I think it's fun to try and min-max and get advantages in fights by using what you have. To me, that's part of the fun. But I admit, that's not absolutely the case everywhere.

This kind of plan I've outlined for the long haul would certainly balance things out, or make things close enough that there wouldn't really be any big deal on the survival side. Threat, cooldowns, special abilities - that's all another side. But this would bring them all pretty close together.

I'd be shocked if this was done in time for Icecrown. But I'd not be too shocked. GC seems like he's been thinking about this for a while and has some very definite ideas on how to get there, and if he needs to radically revamp everything, so it goes. It would be the single biggest change to the game during a release that had happened since..1.8, I guess, and I think they've got bigger fish to fry in the interim. However, I wouldn't have thought that druids would get something like savage defense in a content patch either. Each content patch appears to be doing a lot of rebalancing. 3.1 was very ambitious.

My prediction is that you won't see this for 3.2. 3.2 is going to come out fairly soon and be a quicker patch, I think. And it probably won't have tier 9 gear - it'll be a T8.5 type of thing. Then we'll get Icecrown, and it's quite possible we'll see it there.

[General] The future of block part 2 - short term fixes

Part one is here and establishes some of the rules and goals.

Let's first go with the short term fix for paladins and warriors gaining some traction. This is similar in thinking to Savage Defense; we know that an overhaul is in order and things aren't working right, but we assume they're not going to radically change two specs, multiple stat weighings, gear choices, mechanics, etc all in a content patch. Savage Defense is on the level of the kind of change we can expect: a minor mechanic change combined with an alteration of existing talents and skills to balance it out.

Here's the list again of the issues:

1. Block as a static mitigation fails against hard-hitting mobs. We knew that already.
2. Block as a scaling mitigation fails against soft-hitting mobs. Savage Defense was a great tool for upcoming druid tanks in heroics precisely because it mitigates so much more damage against heroic-level attacks. Expect this to stay fairly similar to what it is now, because most tanks don't go to raids right off; they tank in normal and heroic content first.
3. HP on the steady tanks should be lower than HP on the spiky tanks. This right now is a big deal and is very problematic. Druids are arguably the least spiky tank thanks to the higher armor and SD, and they also have the most HP of any tank. Clearly the less spiky tanks should have less HP, which would put paladins and warriors as the high HP tanks and druids as the low HP tank. That may be unacceptable flavor wise for druids.
4. Magic mitigation on the high-HP tanks needs to be less than the low-HP tanks. Because if you can't block at all and armor doesn't help, everyone takes the same damage - which means raw HP is key. We saw this with druids in Sarth3D. I don't think they want this again.
   
5. SD is in an odd state. I don't know what they'll do with SD. It has a high uptime but is similarly ineffective against hard hits as block. I expect two things to happen: SD to be dramatically improved and the HP of a druid to scale dramatically worse. The alternative is a reversion of SD and making druids and DKs the 'nonshield' tanks and paladins and warriors the 'shield' tanks. I'd actually like this, even though I like SD; it would mean that (similar to healers) tanks would have something of niches again. It would necessitate actually having some ability that scaled with DPS gear.
   
6. Avoidance on all tanks should be roughly similar. This is already largely the case (within a few % depending on build) so I don't see it as an issue. And avoidance stacking is not nearly the problem it was in TBC.
   
7. Blocking tanks must not be able to get 100% block uptime. This represents another drastic change to basically every single tank. Now why is this necessary? Because if you balance around the idea that half of the time, another class will take 10% more and half of the time they'll take 10% less, if you can skew that so that 100% of the time they'll take 10% less...that won't be balanced. Paladins mechanics will be completely changed (and likely to something near the warrior model with shield block). This means gear with block rating needs to be carefully looked at. It may mean that block% will have to have diminishing returns like avoidance does.
8. Block value must be completely redone. This seems obvious. At the same time, you can't have this scale too amazingly well. You might not want it at all or want it to be gamed at all; being able to dramatically influence your scaling mitigation is a pretty powerful ability. You run the risk of block value being like a TBC druid's armor stat, where anything without it is essentially pointless. And then there's the scaling BV with strength.
9. Threat stats will have to be looked at as well. Both paladins and warriors scale their threat with strength and block value, and have many mechanics built around these two values and how they interact. If they are changed dramatically, these things will have to be revised as well.

So what could they do? Let's take a look at a current protection warrior - Xav of Premonition. He's on the well-geared side currently, which is why I wanted to look at him since this change will likely affect people going forward from 3.2 at the earliest. He currently has 29k armor but has geared away from block - 12% block chance and 1400 block value after buffs. That's going to be on the low end, but it's not unreasonable anyway. Even if you have a warrior who stacks block, they're going to be on the order of 2000-2500 BV anyway.

By comparison, I personally have 33k armor. And that's all the time. Plus I have savage defense, which (when it goes off) blocks for more on a hit than the warrior, though the warrior has shield block and critical block to play with.

Remember, our goal is to get the warrior to the point where when they block, they take less damage than the DK or in theory a druid (I'll get to that point in a bit). But when they don't block, they take more damage. How to accomplish that?

Well, for starters as it stands now without any modifications they'll take more damage when not blocking anyway. Let's stick with that. That's easy.

So when they block, how about something like this:

Whenever you block an attack the attack's damage is reduced by your block value. In addition, your armor is increased by twice the amount of your block value for that attack.

That's it. Not very difficult, is it?


Now, Xav would have 32k armor, roughly, from any blocks he made. That's not good enough - but he's gone as far away as possible from getting any block rating or value. Plus, he has critical blocks that he can use, and he has shield block which gives him essentially 35k armor and 3k absorbsion for a 10-second duration. It's not quite barkskin, but it's getting much closer; he's increased his armor by almost 25%.

If this didn't prove to be good enough, having a 3x multiplier would likely be fine. Heck, a 4k multiplier might not be too horrible.

Of course, they'd still be the spiky tanks, so a warrior would need to get more HP. Blizzard is fond of giving 10% boosts. We'll go with that.

How does this fare with the 9 rules from before? It fixes 1,2,and 3 outright. 9 isn't an issue since BV isn't changing, nor is 8. 7 isn't that much of a concern since it's effectively impossible to get perfect uptime as it stands now. 4,5,and 6 don't apply.

Okay, that takes care of warriors. What about paladins? Paladins would require something of a nerf and a homogenization, possibly. The easiest solution is to turn holy shield into almost precisely the same thing as shield block.

But that's really inelegant. It also takes away from the very well-established ability of a paladin to deal nicely with many, many mobs via holy shield charges. Let's use one of our guild tanks - Vyre. A bit less geared than Xav, but still pretty decent overall. He has 28k armor and 1600 block value.

What I'd propose is making paladins the other 'steady' tank to complement DKs, and make druids the spiky tank. (again, I'll get to that in a bit). How do we do that? Well, we assume that they're going to have 100% uptime on their shield thanks to holy shield. If we need to, we can guarantee this by giving it even more charges. We only add their BV to their shield once, giving in this case around 30k armor. That sounds a bit low, and it might be - but it's something to balance out in the end. They'd not need any real changing; their armor would stay consistent around 30-32k, and their health is 'balanced'.

To go with the rules again, this is fine with 1,2 and 3, 7, 8, and 9. Magic mitigation might need to be addressed.

So above I said that I'd like to see druids be the other 'spiky' tank. And this isn't that hard to accomplish either, though it might be hard to do with all the other things that we'd like to fix floating around. The reason I'd like them to be spiky is simple: their HP. They already have huge HP multipliers, and HP has traditionally been a druid strength. Armor has as well, but you can't have both huge armor and huge HP in a world without crushing blows to counterbalance; something has to give. And I'm choosing to make it armor for now.

So the way to make a druid 'more' spiky is to reduce their armor yet again. In fact, let's just remove the sotf bonus completely. Insane! But that drops a druid to 26k armor. Yes, that's right - I want super spiky. Now they're the lowest-armor tank of the lot.

Then we supercharge SD. SD will get the following changes:

1. 1. Can stack to 3 charges
2. Increases armor by 100% of AP when active
   

So when SD is up, the armor (say on me) would go from 26k to 33k. And it would be up a fair amount of the time too. And here's the neat thing - polar gear and pvp gear becomes way less useful. With the huge armor multiplier reduced ilvl isn't as special. With the big bonus from AP going to armor, polar gear loses almost 500 armor by itself (and that ignores agility).

And if that's not enough, make it even mightier - 200% of AP. 39k armor when it's active! Suck on that! That's probably a bit high, but it's adjustable. It's another level to move. And with SD's relatively high uptime on single boss fights, it might be fine at 100% AP simply because it should be working so often.

This might require that druids get a health boost, but I doubt it. They're already doing pretty well on that end. It also might require something of an avoidance boost. Nothing drastic, but something close to a 5% improvement overall.

How does this meet the rules? 1,2, and 3 are still okay. 4 isn't addressed. 5 is the dramatic improvement. 6 might need to be improved. 7 through nine are fine.

Finally, DKs. DKs are the baseline model to work off of, since they have no shield mechanic. The only thing they would need to be balanced, I think, is a slight nerf to their HP. Since they're taking the least spiky damage of any of the tanks, they need less HP to counterbalance that.

I'll answer folks questions and comments here shortly.

[General] The future of block part 1

This comes from a very long thread about the weakness of block in the current game, and how warriors and paladins are decently behind druids and especially DKs in content.

Think about it this way.

Avoidance is good because it removes a lot of damage. Avoidance is bad because it is unpredictable. If you stack too much avoidance, you are likely to give your healers coronaries.

Mitigation (armor and straight damage reduction) is good because it's consistent. As you all point out, you can start to learn how much a blow will actually do to you. Mitigation is bad, from a player's perspective, because it can't save you. If you have 10 health and dodge, you might live. If you have 10 health and hope your armor will save you... well, it won't. You become the dreaded mana sponge because you are never avoiding damage completely.

Mitigation also has a risk from a design-perspective that when fights get too predictable they become too easy and unexciting. Imagine a tank with 75% damage reduction and no avoidance. You could calculate from the moment of the first attack whether you will survive the encounter. Heck, you might be able to not even heal the tank and know you'll survive depending on the specific abilities used by the boss.

Block as a mechanic is somewhere between avoidance and mitigation. Ideally it removes a fair amount of damage (vs. all damage) reasonably often (vs. rarely). If block is up 100% of the time it just becomes armor that you improve through a different stat. We have let block chances creep up frankly because the amount blocked is pretty trivial when bosses are hitting for 40% of your health pool every swing. If this still strikes you as too RNG, imagine abilities like Shield Block and Holy Shield that could guarantee 100% chance to block for a short period of time.

We don't think block is cutting it as a mechanic, but the direction we are likely to take it is probably more of a change than you are considering.

We also don't think it's necessary that every tank rely on avoidance, block and mitigation in equal amounts. They can't get too far apart or someone will come to dominate for certain encounters, but we don't think the tanks need to be completely homogenized to get what we want either.

If (to make up numbers) the DK and druid get hit for 20K every swing that hits, but the warrior and paladin get hit for 24K half the time and 16K half the time, then that seems like it would work. When the boss emoted that his big hit was coming, you could make sure you had your cooldown ready to guarantee a block.

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Take my examples with a grain of salt. I think some of you are trying to plug them in to today's encounters without changing anything else.

I agree that nobody wants to be the tank that avoids, avoids, avoids and then gets hit for 4X normal damage. (Then again, part of the problem we had with DKs last patch was their avoidance was just too high.) In my example, the shield-using tanks get hit for 4K more damage 50% of the time. If you're calling that "spike damage" and saying it's unacceptable, then I'm afraid nothing can be done to salvage differences among the tank classes.
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Yes, this is why I said not to assume everything else stays the same. We are in a world where almost any healer can heal a tank to full health in just a few GCDs. When healers can heal half your health pool, then bosses have to hit very hard. The test of survival for a tank is whether they can survive two hits or so without a heal landing. Health pools probably just need to be higher. Currently being the mana sponge tank isn't very scary because healers don't realistically run out of mana on most fights and the only real threat is whether you can get the tank back up to 100% before the next hit lands. Mitigating damage isn't seen as something that preserves healer mana. It is seen as something that might let you live through one more hit.

In a world where taking a little less on some hits and a little more on others doesn't translate into scary spike damage, then we think the block mechanic described above world work in some form, especially if you could force a block for those times when you did get a string of unblocked hits.
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Crushing blows hit for 150% of normal damage. So a 20K hit normal hit would be an unpredictable 30K crushing blow. If crushing blows were 120% of normal, but you also had an equal chance for an 80% of normal hit, then it would even out in the end... provided that the spikes were not too big.

It may also be that the blockers would need to take even less damage when blocking because there is some merit to the argument that the tank with the lower variance on damage is easier (or at least more attractive) to heal even if the averages came out the same.

However, we are still just going to reject the notion that anything with an RNG component is unacceptable (provided you have the tools to occasionally get by when you get unlucky). I can totally understand as a player why it's in your best interest to minimize the RNG when tanking. You can also understand, I hope, why it is not in our best interest.

As I said above, once you can totally math out how much damage you're going to predictably take at the start of the fight, it will absolutely be an easier fight to tank... probably to the point of boredom. Imagine the 0% avoidance, 90% mitigation tank in a land in which bosses can never crit or crush. Is that going to be an effective tank? Yes. It it going to be fun to play? I doubt it.

Sorry for the long wall of text, but I wanted everyone to be on the same page.

First off, what's the actual state of affairs right now? Well, right now the example is more like this:

Druids & DKs take around 18k a hit, and sometimes (if a druid is lucky) 16k.
Paladins and warriors take around 24k a hit, and sometimes they'll take 22k.

Clearly that's not reasonable. And yes, this is with all the relevant factors of mitigation thrown in. The fact is, with things hitting as hard as they do block at a static component is not useful compared to armor. I showed this in the SD math post a while back; SD is great against small hits and weak against big ones.

So the situation is that warriors and paladins take both more incoming damage overall and more spiky damage. Some of this is offset relative to druids with slightly superior avoidance, but even that's more spiky. The big worry about block being too good is clearly wrong. Block isn't too good. In a world where blocking isn't required because crushing blows don't exist, armor is king.

The thing is - we already knew this from BC. We knew that on any fight where the boss couldn't crush and where there wasn't some inane 'must block' mechanic, a druid was going to be better due to armor. Well, druids have less armor than ever before but they still have more than any other tank, and most everything else is equal. Is it a surprise that this rules the roost? Same goes with DKs - it shouldn't be surprising that they're better off in pure mitigation on the boss fights in Ulduar.

And I'm not alone in saying this; it's been talked about on the forums, at TankSpot, in a really good overall article by Allison Robert at WoWInsider, etc.

So. Block is broken. GC recognizes it. It's pretty clear when there are a lot of comments by GC that changes are upcoming, even if they've not been finalized. We have seen this before with things like druids being able to use all weapons and get FAP no matter what, or with the trinket armor being a problem, or with savage defense. This is the first stage - sounding ideas off the community to let them know that something is coming down the pipe.

I suspect that we'll see an actual mechanic change here in the next couple of weeks. The question is, what will it be?

A lot of people on that thread are saying that it's unfair that the 'spiky' tank has less HP than the other tanks, and are upset that GC isn't commenting on this. I think that this is just because Blizzard hasn't solidified a design for all the tanks in this 'block is good' world. Why not? Because there are a LOT of things to consider. Let's go through some of them and see if we can figure something out.

1. Block as a static mitigation fails against hard-hitting mobs. We knew that already.
2. Block as a scaling mitigation fails against soft-hitting mobs. Savage Defense was a great tool for upcoming druid tanks in heroics precisely because it mitigates so much more damage against heroic-level attacks. Expect this to stay fairly similar to what it is now, because most tanks don't go to raids right off; they tank in normal and heroic content first.
3. HP on the steady tanks should be lower than HP on the spiky tanks. This right now is a big deal and is very problematic. Druids are arguably the least spiky tank thanks to the higher armor and SD, and they also have the most HP of any tank. Clearly the less spiky tanks should have less HP, which would put paladins and warriors as the high HP tanks and druids as the low HP tank. That may be unacceptable flavor wise for druids.
4. Magic mitigation on the high-HP tanks needs to be less than the low-HP tanks. Because if you can't block at all and armor doesn't help, everyone takes the same damage - which means raw HP is key. We saw this with druids in Sarth3D. I don't think they want this again.
   
5. SD is in an odd state. I don't know what they'll do with SD. It has a high uptime but is similarly ineffective against hard hits as block. I expect two things to happen: SD to be dramatically improved and the HP of a druid to scale dramatically worse. The alternative is a reversion of SD and making druids and DKs the 'nonshield' tanks and paladins and warriors the 'shield' tanks. I'd actually like this, even though I like SD; it would mean that (similar to healers) tanks would have something of niches again. It would necessitate actually having some ability that scaled with DPS gear.
   
6. Avoidance on all tanks should be roughly similar. This is already largely the case (within a few % depending on build) so I don't see it as an issue. And avoidance stacking is not nearly the problem it was in TBC.
   
7. Blocking tanks must not be able to get 100% block uptime. This represents another drastic change to basically every single tank. Now why is this necessary? Because if you balance around the idea that half of the time, another class will take 10% more and half of the time they'll take 10% less, if you can skew that so that 100% of the time they'll take 10% less...that won't be balanced. Paladins mechanics will be completely changed (and likely to something near the warrior model with shield block). This means gear with block rating needs to be carefully looked at. It may mean that block% will have to have diminishing returns like avoidance does.
8. Block value must be completely redone. This seems obvious. At the same time, you can't have this scale too amazingly well. You might not want it at all or want it to be gamed at all; being able to dramatically influence your scaling mitigation is a pretty powerful ability. You run the risk of block value being like a TBC druid's armor stat, where anything without it is essentially pointless. And then there's the scaling BV with strength.
9. Threat stats will have to be looked at as well. Both paladins and warriors scale their threat with strength and block value, and have many mechanics built around these two values and how they interact. If they are changed dramatically, these things will have to be revised as well.
   

That's a lot of juggling to do and a lot of problems to solve. Tomorrow I'll post some of my thoughts on how to actually balance some of this in the long term, and what will likely be done in the short term. If you'd like another opinion, Honor has written up a piece too. I think he's on the same track as me, but you should read it and see what is basically an opinion with a bit more paladin focus.

[Paladin] what would you like to see?

My wife recently noted that despite this blog being about, well, ya know, tanking, there are more posts about cats than there are non-druid tanks.

And "ThinkCat" doesn't really have a good ring to it.

Looking into this, I found out that one of the most popular articles I've wrote happens to be the post on a paladin getting uncrittable. So I'm neglecting a fair amount of people who read this and want info on plate tank wearers. Sorry, guys.

In the future I'll be writing more about Death Knight tanking, I'm sure. Death Knights look to me like the odd bastard child of a paladin and a druid; they have the ability to do good dps and good tanking with one build while sacrificing very little (and in every single talent tree, no less), they can do good AoE tanking, and they have to do weird juggling with their gear including wanting armor aplenty. Plus they're damn cool. I'm not making a death knight my main right now; I don't have the time to get a DK to raiding-level in time for Wrath. But I'll be making one and hopefully using it as a nice alt in the near future.

For now, though, I'm at a loss. I was thinking about doing a gear guide similar to the bear and cat posts I made for Pre-naxx...but this has already been done. At Maintankadin, Zamach has put out a great list of pre and post-naxx gear. One thing it doesn't do is compare BC with WotLK gear, but fortunately honorshammer has done that as well, in an easy to use spreadsheet. There's no need to do a FAQ for paladins, as that's what mine was modeled after. While paladin mechanics were tweaked early on, and they're still getting nerfed thanks to ret fallout, in general they've been very stable and solid - so no 'OMG the sky is falling' posts similar to druids. And unlike druids, their gear is basically the same as a warrior in terms of what they want so their gear is pretty solid too. Their rotation hasn't changed since early beta, and the 969 rotation is still the best. There are plenty of arguments on how poor paladin mitigation is relative to warriors and druids - and that may see some value - but right now they're very close to warriors and have significant enough advantages that I don't believe it'll be an issue. The biggest issue right now is the amount of damage a paladin does relative to a warrior, but that's still a bit silly; it doesn't matter how much threat you do so long as you're doing enough, and right now it's definitely enough. There's even cool addons that show things like AD avoidances and values of your gear as a paladin.

In short, the paladin basic stuff is well covered. Whereas the druid stuff...hasn't been.

So I ask you guys - what paladin or warrior or DK information would you like to see? Or heck, what druid information would you like to see?

[Paladin] WotLK - getting uncrittable

My RL was talking to me last night about bears being broken. I launched into my crusade of how I'm trying desperately to get bears nerfed before WotLK (no joke, I actually am right now - but that's because we're broken), but he wasn't interested in that.

No, bears were broken because they could get uncrittable via talents. And how it was impossible for warriors to get uncrittable before Naxx.

Naturally my first statement was to tell him 'welcome to druid tanking in TBC' and sent him off after some resilience gear. :) But seriously - Blizzard couldn't design a whole expansion and force all non-druids to use PvP gear to tank in, could they? Turns out they didn't, and they even gave tanks pretty easy ways to get there.

I kept thinking that there's got to be something like a list for gear for warriors and paladins to use...but so far there's nothing. It turns out that it's pretty easy to get to uncrittable, though it's not trivial like it was in TBC. The magic number to hit is 689 defense rating, in order to get to 540 defense skill. And here's how you get there and then some without relying on a single rare drop, enchant or gem.

Chest: Breastplate of the Solemn Council - requires revered with Wyrmrest Accord. If that's not to your liking, you can do a quest to get the Silver-Plated Battlechest.
Defense rating total: 76

Feet: Sabatons of Draconic Vigor - requires revered with wyrmrest accord.
Defense total: 134

Hands: Tempered Saronite Gauntlets - Blacksmithing BoE.
Defense total: 200

Head: Tempered Saronite Helm - Blacksmithing BoE. If you want something a bit tastier but lower on defense, go for Armored Titanium Goggles or Helm of the Ley-Guardian, which drops in the Oculus.
Defense total: 283
Legs: Daunting Legplates - Blacksmithing BoE.
Defense total: 371

Shoulders: Pauldrons of Reconnaissance. Quest reward from Halls of Stone.
Defense total: 417

Belt: Tempered Saronite Belt - Blacksmithing BoE.
Defense total: 474

Bracers: Tempered Saronite Bracers - Blacksmithing BoE.
Defense total: 522

Cloak: Cloak of Peaceful Resolutions - Honored with Wyrmrest accord.
Defense total: 565

Shield: Titansteel Shield Wall - Blacksmithing BoE.
Defense total: 629

Neck: Titanium Earthguard Chain - Jewelcrafting BoE.
Defense total: 663

Ring: Titanium Earthguard Ring and Gal'darah's Signet. The first is a JC BoE, the second drops from Gundrak normal. There's also a lot of other 25 def rings out there. We're just counting the first one, since this is a no rare drop zone.
Defense total: 688

CURSE YOU! Almost there, but not quite.

Weapon: Crescent of Brooding Fury - quest reward from Zul'Drak. If you want to grind a bit more and get something better, you can go for the Cloudstrider's Waraxe, a drop from Heroic Oculus, but that's not necessary.
Defense total: 714

If you're a warrior, you get this beauty too:
Gun: Armor-Plated Shotgun - Engineering BoE (and doesn't require engineering to use).

Trinket: Seal of the Pantheon, a normal drop from Halls of Lightning (ETA - thanks, anon). It's not required to make the def value though, but I figured I'd include it for completeness.

Not a single drop in the bunch that's required (and point of fact, most of the drops actually have less defense than the crafted stuff), only a couple require any dungeons at all, and most can be found at the AH or from your friendly neighborhood crafters. And this doesn't factor in the head enchants, shoulder enchants, cloak enchants, chest enchants, wrist enchants or anything else; with those, you should be able to be fairly flexible with a few of these slots until you get some better gear. Or, if you like, shave off some of that defense requirement with some of the PvP gear/enchants out there.

Definitely a far cry from the pains of getting uncrittable/uncrushable as a paladin in TBC before Kara.

[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!

[General] What makes tanking fun?

Ranty goodness ahead. Be warned.

Raiding can be damn satisfying, but a lot of the times it's frustrating as all hell. For me, that's especially true when I screw up. Causing the raid to wipe happens, and if you're not willing to accept you will do that, raiding as a tank is probably not for you. Nevertheless, I hate it every time I do it.

Last night I was fire tank on Illidan, and caused a wipe by getting too far from the other flame and causing an enrage. I know why I did it. I even know that I was pushing my luck on it. And it didn't happen again. I still hate that our first attempt was done because I failed to do my part. Yeah, we did great later that night, but it still bugs me when I personally let everyone down.

Then I almost died on Azgalor and honestly probably should have; at one point I had 37 health. That's insanely lucky. That means in the last 4 tries we've had on him, I've wiped twice and barely avoided a third time. This is a boss that is not at all hard and is tailor-made for druid tanking (no crushes, no magic attacks). Yet I'm sucking on it.

And I don't entirely know why.

After Azgalor I got to DPS for the first time on Archimonde, which meant I could see the WWS from the paladin tank. And...again, I don't see anything special here. The paladin tank takes more damage both in general and in max hits, sometimes by quite a big margin. The fight took less time for him, and that helps survivability a lot, but I just...I don't know. I don't see why it's so different. Quantitatively it doesn't look like it should be that different, yet our raid performance with others as tanks is better.

The prior raid I tanked Mother, where we wiped over and over. And every time it was because I died. Before this we regularly were killing her on the first or second try, so...argh. I can't even see what I'm doing wrong, other than taking tons of damage from spells. It may not be the best thing for a druid to tank. But I should still be better at it.

So I'm starting to really question me as a tank. I do this occasionally, especially when I do poorly. The fact of the matter is that we don't need a druid tank right now, and we only really need one for Brutallus and possibly M'uru. The DPS side despite my best attempts still isn't competitive, especially without other good buffs.

But damnit, I still have fun with it. I like tanking 5-mans. I have a blast tanking Magisters' terrace most of the time, assuming the DPS isn't idiotic. I love tanking ZA as a feral, where being able to switch from tank to DPS depending on the boss and trash is a huge bonus, where I can take a saber lash from Halazzi without another tank actually being around and expect that I'll live. I love the rush of tanking the flames of azzinoth and hoping the laser doesn't hit my side so the DPS can finish him off that much faster, and one of my favorite memories was tanking my flame, watching the other flame die and picking up their flame as well, delaying our wipe until later in the phases.

There is an absolute rush when you know you're in control. When you have that boss by the short and curlies and you know that no one is going to catch you on threat and your healers are bored enough that they start casting DoTs. When you pull off that amazing save that would have otherwise wiped the raid. When you blow your trinkets, pot, healthstone, do the idiotic frenzied regeneration and are praying that your dodge saves you that one time. When you plan it so that you don't have to stop tanking Bloodboil because your 90% dodge rate will make the debuff fall off. These things are exhilarating and awesome.

For me, a lot of the fun is knowing that I did well on my assigned task. Whatever it might be. And it's especially great knowing that I was a big part of us succeeding. It's not so much about the control or being the boss; a lot of times that drags me down. But doing good and knowing that because you did good, things went well and folks are happy? That's the big one for me.

Those moments aren't happening as much for me in raiding any more. I think a lot of that is dealing with people that don't care or aren't doing so well or are just unpleasant to deal with, but honestly that's been the case all along and it doesn't matter. It's the sinking feeling that I'm bringing the raid down, that I'm the reason we're not progressing as quickly or as well as others would like. And I'm not sure how to get that fun back.

Tonight we're going to hopefully look at Kalecgos for the first time. Kal is a fight that doesn't favor druids at all - lots and lots of spelldamage, plenty of places where having ohshit buttons would be very helpful. I may be sitting for it after dealing with the amazingly annoying trash. It looks like a really interesting fight from a mechanic perspective - lots of communication and organization is needed, lots of awareness. I hope I get to go.

And I hope I don't fuck up too much. Like I did here, where I got blown up in Solarian's room and was stuck in the ceiling for 10 minutes. Oops.


So tell me - what do you like about tanking? Why do you do it? What gets you down?

[Paladin] What paladins can and can't tank, and why

I get a bit tired of seeing various ill-informed arguments about what tanks are good for what fights, and why they would or wouldn't be. I see it from people who know nothing about the class and from people who should know better. This is more of a rant than an in-depth math evaluation, but it's my damn blog.

Paladins:

Paladins are great at dealing with multiple mobs simultaneously. They're also excellent whenever you must remain uncrushable and you may take multiple hits in a short time. They excel against fast-hitting mobs. They excel on anything that has an aggro dump, as they have great snap threat abilities. Any fights with debuffs are usually good for a paladin as well. They work well against demons & undead. Anything that is sensitive to parry issues is also good for a paladin, as they do not have a particularly high chance of being parried due to not making a lot of melee attacks relative to a warrior or druid.

What they are not great at is dealing massive amounts of sustained high threat, at least compared to warriors or druids in their normal sets. (Paladins can do well if they know ahead of time they can go all-out on threat, but it requires consumable changes and some gear changes) They are not as good in high-mobility fights where a boss must be moved often thanks to consecrate. They are not great against caster mobs; they do less reactive threat and they take more damage. They are not good against mobs that fear. And they are horrible against mobs that silence.

Some bosses in T5 and T6 content that paladins excel at:
Hydross: great pickup on the phase change thanks to very fast aggro. They can also deal with the adds fairly well. Being uncrushable doesn't matter in this fight, and holy shield is useless, but avenger's shield is great.
Morogrim: Morogrim eats shield block charges up quickly, but a holy shield has a lot more charges than are likely to be eaten. Also, paladins tend to have more avoidance than a warrior does. Druids are still king here, mind you, but paladins are great. Of course, if you have a prot paladin here chances are you'll be tanking the murlocs.
Leotheras: Either the demon or normal form. Alliance paladins are especially good for this thanks to the SoV mechanics; having a DoT as your threat generator means phase changes are much easier. On the demon form a paladin gets extra threat (demon) plus easy ranged pickup and a nice phase transition, and combines this with innate fire protection and usually high HP.
Fathom-Lord Karathress: aside from cool videos of dealing with all the adds, dealing with the shaman is a good option given how quickly he can hit. Another is the hunter and his pet; using consecrate here makes this cake on both the pickup and the keeping aggro on both targets.
Void Reaver: VR's tough. If a paladin can get aggro, it's hard to lose it; consecrate helps a lot with knockbacks, a paladin can go all-out on threat boosts, and VR doesn't hit all that hard. If they can't get aggro though, it's often a lot of mana starvation. It's very much a feast or famine kind of fight.
Anetheron: Rage doesn't hit all that hard and has a lot of spelldamage, but Anetheron is more physical based. He's not a hard tanking fight at all, but having exorcism can be very nice here for added threat and damage. Tanking infernals is a good option too given the distance aggro a paladin can do.
Supremus: Ranged, quick aggro are great on this fight. Exorcism and Avenger's shield are excellent for reestablishing a position.
Gurtogg Bloodboil: being able to immediately remove all debuffs makes a paladin a great choice here; it makes the healers have a much easier time of it. Having two ways to get out of trouble in case the stacks get too high is another benefit. He also hits quickly, so more reactive damage is likely to happen.
Reliquary of Souls:Phase 1 is a wash. Phase 2 is almost certainly best with a warrior. Phase 3 is where a paladin can really shine. While a druid can dump all their rage most of the time (assuming decent GCD management) a paladin never has to worry about this and has the added benefit of having their actual threat scale almost exactly with the DPS's threat. And a paladin takes a lot less damage from the mana drain than the rage drain.
Illidan:Illidan's a demon, attacks quickly with a dual wield, and requires uncrushability (actually unshearability, which is slightly different). And there are phase changes galore. Paladins are great for this, though it's debatable whether they're better than warriors.

And honestly, I don't know enough about the fights in Sunwell to say intelligently what a paladin is best at there. I've seen reports that a paladin is very good at dealing with Brutallus (can't crush, but hits fast) and of course one is necessary for dealing with Mu'ru and with Felmyst. I understand that Kalecgos works well for prot paladins for the same reason that Gurtogg does; a prot paladin can cleanse himself of the debuffs via DS and tank him in the normal world for basically the entire time.

As to what bosses Paladins shouldn't tank:
Lurker: Consecrate tends to not hit lurker, so threat is low.
Vashj: the taunt mechanics often fail because of how they work (having to target the friendly usually means that you're out of range), so Phase 2 is often tough. P1 and P3 are great thanks to Blessing of Freedom however.
Al'ar: a lot of spelldamage is bad news here for tanking Al'ar directly.
Kazrogal: mana drain makes this a lot harder for a paladin. It's also a threat race, so more threat is really necessary here.
Azgalor: frequent silences make this a lot harder for a paladin.
Archimonde: frequent fears and lack of oh-shit buttons make this really annoying. He also doesn't crush but hits very hard.
Mother Sharaz: frequent silences.

It's a real shame that so many bosses in Hyjal are designed around screwing over a prot paladin, given that a prot paladin is so instrumental to getting to those bosses.

But let's go over some misconceptions:
-a paladin is fine on Hydross. While they don't normally have as good single-target threat on a boss, Hydross has short transitions that wipe threat, so sustained threat is not such an issue. A paladin has much better frontloaded threat than a warrior does. Furthermore, a lot of a paladin's threat is from base abilities, so having resistance gear does not gimp their threat the way it can a warrior.

-a paladin is fine tanking Al'ar. They can taunt off other tanks just fine on melt armor. The reason you'd likely not see a paladin tanking Al'ar is because they're so good at dealing with the adds, but there's no mechanical reason they can't do it.

-Kael: a pally does lack last stand/shield wall for sucking up a second pyroblast. They do, however, have Divine Shield, and Kael won't change his target during the pyroblast casting. This is easily better than last stand/shield wall for dealing with emergencies.

[General] Using WWS to calculate TPS

From MainTankadin comes this little gem - a WWS parsing tool that will output threat per second based on the logs.

This isn't useful for e-peenery. I'll say that right now, in case anyone cares. What it is useful for is gauging how actual changes in gear affect your threat from week to week and what the actual source of threat is in fights, especially as your role changes.

For example: this is the WWS of a recent Morogrim fight that I tanked. And from that report, I apparently did 803 TPS. That's not so bad; that means melee can put out 900 or so TPS, and ranged can do 1050 TPS without going over - and of course, they're salved and have other threat reduction caps. From this parse you can see that Maul is a huge part of the threat, more than any other single source. In this fight it is 37% of all threat generated.

What's more interesting is to see the miss numbers. 30% of all mauls were missed! That's a huge chunk of potential threat, right there. I believe for Morogrim I was wearing my max avoidance gear, so that explains that.

This should demonstrate how good the brooch of deftness and other hit/expertise items really can be. For instance, just from maul, if I were using the brooch of deftness I would have reduced that miss percentage from 30% to 25%, roughly. And just from mauls, that would have increased my threat by 2.6%. Just from mauls.

It should also tell you how huge maul is for threat generation. Morogrim is an interesting fight in that you want to max avoidance and you will also often be rage-starved, because he will get big strings of misses or just choose to not swing for a while. Survivability is the big key for Morogrim, not threat. For a threat race you can look at something like Void Reaver. VR also wants as much avoidance as you can muster (so you can avoid the knockbacks) but also as much threat as you can muster (so you can hold onto him after them). In this fight I went for more of a threat-centric build, and it showed - my mauls missed much less (18%) and my threat was at 923 TPS. In that fight, maul actually made up even more of my overall threat - simply because I used fewer normal swings.

Up until recently I hadn't quite realized how large a threat value maul really is. This should show both the value of damage to your threat and the value of hit. It also shows how badly threat scales for bears; Maul only adds 176 damage per hit, no matter what, so as you increase in gear the relative threat that this produces becomes lower and lower.

[Paladin] The myth of improved judgment

I've written on this in several places on the net (most notably in EJ and Maintankadin, so it's going to be something of a rehash of previous ideas. If you've already done that reading, the one thing to take from this is simple: Improved Judgment is not as good a threat talent as precision, 1hws or reckoning.

Now, on to the long-winded explanations!

Improved Judgement (2 ranks) reduces the cooldown of Judgement by 1 second per talent point, up to 2 points. The normal cooldown is 10 seconds, so you can reduce this to an 8 second cooldown. For a protection paladin, this means that you should be able to do 25% more Judgement of righteousness, and that's a big deal; Judgement of righteousness is approximately 15% of your total threat. So it's great, it's 25%*15% = 3.75% more overall threat, and it's a great value per point, right?

The problem is that this doesn't take into account the tanking rotation. If you're tanking a main boss, you must keep holy shield up at all costs. Every 10 seconds it must be recast. It is the highest priority to cast. The next highest priority is consecrate; consecrate is the best source of threat and the best scaling threat a paladin has. What these things end up doing is creating an infinite cycle that most prot paladins call the standard ten-second cycle:

Cast Holy Shield
Cast Consecrate
Judgement
Seal of Righteousness (these last two steps are done together)

Because Judgement is on a 10-second cooldown and you can reseal immediately, there's never a conflict in times. Sure, consecrate comes up when holy shield does, but that's unavoidable. You never have an unsealed melee swing, you never have to worry about casting holy shield or casting Judgement . You even have another 5 seconds and another 3 GCDs to do something else, like exorcism or avenger's shield.

However, with an 8-second cooldown on Judgement , that all changes. Judgement can never directly conflict with holy shield - Judgement doesn't take a GCD. But resealing does, and that's what conflicts. At that point, you have one of two choices: judge whenever you can and reseal at the next best opportunity or wait to judge and lose the benefits of Improved Judgement . Based on that, here is a 40-second cycle keeping in mind these issues that is optimal for the situation (taken from Lore)

0.0 HS
0.0 Judge
1.5 Consecration
3.0 SoR <- lost 3 seconds of SoR
8.0 Judge
10.0 HS
11.5 Consecration
16.0 Judge
16.0 SoR
20.0 HS
21.5 Consecration
24.0 Judge
24.0 SoR
30.0 HS
31.5 Consecration
32.0 Judge
33.0 SoR <- lost 1 second of SoR
40.0 HS
40.0 Judge <- back to where we started

Based on this, we lose out on 4 seconds of sealed swings in a 40 second period. That doesn't account for lag either and it requires perfect timing and reflexes as well as odd things like a holy shield/Judgement macro. This is the absolute best case scenario. Let's assume some more things, like 100 damage per SoR hit, and 400 damage per Judgement . This is the value, roughly, when you're around 200 spelldamage. It scales upwards, but SoR scales more with spelldamage than JoR does over an 8 or 10 second period. At that level of damage, and with a standard 1.8 speed tanking weapon, we're looking at 55 DPS for SoR - or those 4 seconds are equivalent to about 210 Damage.

That means that in a 40 second cycle, you're gaining about 190 total holy damage. Even with improved righteous fury this is a net gain of only 9 TPS - which at the above spelldamage levels is about 1.8% more total threat. And again, this is the best case situation, with the perfect cycle and with odd things like judging when you cast holy shield and no lag. When you factor in lag, it becomes worse. When you factor in that spell hit (which isn't particularly good for paladins) controls JoR but hit and expertise controls SoR, it becomes worse. And none of that factors in the very complicated cycle to maximize the effectiveness here; if you find that you missed a judgment when you could've judged, you've basically wasted that extra threat.

1 point in Improved Judgement makes this much better by comparison; you don't conflict much at all (once every 80 seconds) but you can still judge more often. Still, it results in a complicated threat cycle that must be optimized. I may talk about the 1-point cycle in the future if there's interest.

At this point I should mention that Improved Judgement has its uses. It is stellar when for whatever reason you do not need to optimize for having holy shield up at all costs or cannot consecrate. (an example of not having holy shield up against a boss might be something like Illidan, where you only need holy shield up on shears and know exactly when those will happen) If you need to judge against multiple mobs separately, it's great there too. But this is more of a utility argument than anything else; it is not as good as reckoning or precision for threat.

What should you take instead? Well, Reckoning is roughly equivalent to 1% more threat per point against single target bosses over time, has the advantage of triggering other procs, and requires no messy cycles. It also helps more for grinding and triggers often. The disadvantage of reckoning is the parry gib, but this turns out to be not so special for paladins compared to warriors thanks to the mechanics of paladins and the advantages of holy shield over shield block. Precision, if it's not maxed out, is also better; it ends up being close to 1% extra threat (consecrate is not affected much by spell hit) and has an advantage of increasing your chances of taunting. 1hws is simply an increase to all threat by 1%. My recommendation in general would be to take all of them if you can. 3 points in precision, 5 in 1hws, and 2 in reckoning. 2 points in reckoning will keep it up most of the time against trash while keeping it up a reasonable amount of time against bosses, especially ones that hit with dots.

And clearly, a lot of this is up to personal preference. Reckoning and Improved Judgement and precision and 1hws are all very close to each other in value, and none of them will make or break you as a paladin tank. But the notion that improved judgment is ideal and far better than any other threat talent a prot paladin has is...a myth.

Next up: the effects of expertise on mitigation and avoiding parry gib.