3.2 Commentary
Seen these yet? Good.
Protection
Uh, lol? Ardent Defender is overpowered. My only concern is that they’ll “fix” it by adding an internal cooldown to the damage reduction effect (they did the exact same thing with DK’s), thereby making it unreliable for surviving the “hit a cooldown when this happens” boss mechanics that were the whole point of giving us a new cooldown anyway. I’d much rather see AD keep the mechanics exactly how they’re listed in the notes, but make it a 2-minute cooldown ability with a 10-15 second duration. Hit the button, and for 15 seconds I take less damage from hits that would drop me below 35% with the Guardian Spirit effect as a backup. That seems pretty solid. Having it up all the time is pretty overpowered though.
Block value buff is kind of surprising and should put us in a really good place as far as physical mitigation goes (assuming you like block value gear, which I do). The ShoR nerf doesn’t come close to offsetting it — even if only half our block value is effected by the buff, that’s still a 50% increase.
SoV/C change is kind of puzzling too. I wonder if they’ll try to find a way to keep Prot from using it, since it’s pretty much just a ridiculous buff to Prot threat which we were already more than fine on.
At any rate, Prot is looking really good in 3.2.
Retribution
Pretty disappointed here. They were supposed to give Ret a new playstyle that wasn’t just “push whatever your tastiest button happens to be at the moment.” As it stands right now, here is what will change for me as a Ret Paladin in 3.2:
- I’ll cast SoV every 30 minutes instead of SoB
- I’ll Crusader Strike every 4 seconds instead of every 6
That’s about it. I’ll probably swap out the Exo glyph for SoV for 10 free Expertise, and I’ll have to drop a bunch of the Prot tree (farewell, Divine Sacrifice) to put 5 points in Seals of the Pure. I’ll continue to not spec Seal of Command (SoV will do far more damage assuming you can keep a 5-stack up), and I might shift some points into Vindication to save our Warriors some rage.
The Art of War/Exorcism thing means almost nothing, assuming Exo keeps its 15 second cooldown. If Art of War isn’t up by the time Exorcism is, I’m doing something very, very wrong. We won’t be able to use AoW on FoL’s as reliably anymore, but we’re also losing all the self-damage from SoB, so that’s not really a big deal.
All in all, pretty disappointing for Ret, and I hope they have more on the way. I’m really not even seeing much in the way of burst reduction, so I don’t know what they hope to accomplish with these changes.
Oh and: /boggle Replenishment
I agree that Protection threat will still be in a good place, but the ShoR nerf will be a threat loss (made up for the buff to SoV, I’m presuming). I currently run with one or two pieces of block value gear at most; I have around 1400 or so block value when raid-buffed in a 25-man.
Looking at WoWHead, if I got the best-in-slot block value gear from this list:
http://www.wowhead.com/?items=4&filter=qu=4;minrl=80;cr=43;crs=1;crv=0;wt=43;wtv=1#50-14+1
I’d gain about 750 block value now with that setup; and 1500 after the change. That would be a lot of threat gain with a block-value preferred set, but I’d lose 10%+ avoidance, and I’d block a total of 2800 or so, which isn’t that much when you’re looking at Hodir or Kologarn.
Also Prot won’t get to use Exorcism on anything other than a pull in 3.2, so the SoV buff could make up for that.
It’ll also be the final nail in the coffin of those last few obstinate bastards still using spellpower weapons.
[...] refined AD mechanics quite a bit as of the latest PTR build (10072), since my initial observations a couple posts ago. I like where it’s ended up, I [...]