wowPaladin.org

Infusion of Light — now affects Flash of Light or Holy Light. Flash of Light is reduced to 0 cast time with 2 ranks, meaning that if you’re running around and get a Holy Shock crit, you can also Flash without stopping.

Righteous Defense — cooldown lowered to 8 sec. It had been 10 sec recently and is 15 sec on live.

Infusion of Light — now affects Flash of Light or Holy Light. Flash of Light is reduced to 0 cast time with 2 ranks, meaning that if you’re running around and get a Holy Shock crit, you can also Flash without stopping.

Judgements of the Pure — haste benefit now up to 15% with 5 ranks (was 10%).

Enlightened Judgements — range benefit is now 30 yards with 2 ranks (was 20). This means you can judge or heal from the same range without having to run around so much.

Bacon of Light — no change here, but I can never miss an opportunity to call it Bacon.

We test a lot of different ways. We test characters alone, self buffed and raid buffed. We do very controlled tests and we do tests where we just tell a skilled player to go nuts and we do actual raids. We get a lot of information from outside Blizzard as well, but you asked about how we test.

It’s difficult to know exactly when a tank is going to end using their cooldowns. Sometimes it’s probably fine to spam them and other times they need to be saved for a very specific situation. Which abilities you use is also determined by what classes are present in the rest of your group. That’s just another reason to gather a large body of data.

We think the paladin and warrior are pretty close now. I do have some concerns about eventual scaling problems now that block is so good. Critical Block may end up letting warriors bypass paladins eventually, but that will be a few raid tiers from now, so we’ll have plenty of time to evaluate the situation and make adjustments if necessary.

You’re still going to have a hard time convincing me that 2% mitigation difference will determine which class everyone uses for their MT. Consider:

1) You’re going to have a hard time even knowing what that number is. Unless a few really eloquent theorycrafters manage to convince the entire raiding community, most of the time you’re going to have to rely on actual raid data to make decisions, and that kind of variance is going to be really hard to detect.

2) Every boss is different. Mitigation deltas may be miniscule on a slow-hitting boss but noticeable on a fast-hitting boss for instance.

3) A difference likes 2% assumes both tanks have the best gear possible for their slot. Gear can make a very big difference in mitigation, yet you tend to see guilds stick with their MT for a long time. You don’t suddenly drop your guy when someone with a better shield and 10% more mitigation comes along. Why? Because your guy’s loyalty, dependability, knowledge or sense of humor is more important than that 10% difference.

4) Don’t forget player skill has a huge role in here too. I’ve done Archimonde with an MT that couldn’t stance dance to save his life. But despite that er… handicap, the group is on M’uru or something now. Yeah I know, everyone has antecdotes. The moral of my story is that if a tank who can’t use his cooldowns can make it to Sunwell, surely the tank with 2% less mit can. If min-maxing tumped all, they would have dumped him.

5) Paladins and druid tanks are already tanking a lot of content in BC, and that’s in spite of the current design (i.e. the BC version, not the LK one) that warriors are the best single boss tanks. And, in spite of things like crushing blows. And, in spite of the difficulties druids and paladins had getting gear. If they can tank already when they’re supposed to be OTs, then they should probably be great when we are actively trying to make them MTs.

I am aware of the sites you mention and the various threads across the Internet. I am in communication with great tanks all the time. One of the problems we face is that each tank tends to conclude they are the worst — they’re nervous the community will fixate on one as the best, which is totally understandable. The numbers in WoW are very complicated — if they were simple, much of the depth and theorycrafting wouldn’t exist. Unfortunately, that also means it’s easy to look at data and come to different conclusions, or even generate different data. Procs, reactionary abilities and cooldowns can change things dramatically. You can’t assume they’re always up but you can’t ignore them either.

I think the BoSanc argument does hold some water, and that’s something we’re going to look at. I’m specifically refering to the case where the paladin is the eternal OT because he can also buff the warrior MT.

I’m saying the former. We aren’t designing the paladin to be purposely inferior. But because their abilities are so different, I’m also not naive enough to say that their survivability will be the same in all situations. Promising 100% the same stats with the same gear for every fight would be silly. I’m promising it will be close enough that you can use any of the 4 classes as your MT (assuming they’re a good player).

I totally agree with this. But things are rarely “clear” in this game. Is it clear what class did the best dps in BC? Was it clear what class was the best healer? If you change small assumptions in your calculations (maybe a proc isn’t up as much as you think) then you get different numbers. On the other hand, I think the numbers *were* pretty clear that warriors were better tanks than paladins in most of end-game BC, but despite that, there were still a lot of paladin tanks.

I agree the WoW community can be surprisingly conservative in adapting to new paradigms. But that’s not a great reason to give anyone the edge. It didn’t take very long at all for players to realize that Protadins were head and shoulders above other tanks for running 5-mans, especially say Shattered Halls. Shadow Priests went from lol to mandatory in between Naxx and Karazhan. Some guilds will keep a warrior as their MT because they like that player in that role. But not all will. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see a lot of changes in guild structure (it happened in BC) because the raiding landscape is so different now. You can choose to skip 25-player content completely and still go against the Lich King. A lot of players assume that the perception will be the 25s where the big boys play and the 10s are the kiddie pool, but I’m not so sure that’s going to happen.

I still think you guys are putting too much faith in your theorycrafting. There is just no way to produce precise and accurate numbers down to fractions of a percent. You have to make assumptions about e.g. how often Shield Block is up, and effects of things like Ardent Defender, and rate of incoming damage (which varies hugely from boss to boss). Change any of those assumptions and the results change.

Good math is essential in theorycrafting, but so are good statistics. When you are coming up with estimates like this, what you are really coming up with is a number plus or minus some amount of variance. In this case (and in most theorycrafting experiments) the variance is very large. Imagine your result is actually something like “Our calculations suggest that paladin mitigation is 3% lower than warrior mitigation, plus or minus 10%.” In other words, it could be anywhere from 13% low to 7% high. I’m not doubting your math here. I’m just saying don’t be so convinced that your calculations reflect reality. That’s why we call it theorycrafting and not fact. Make sense?

(By the way, all of this applies to us too. We have the resources to do some very extensive testing, but sometimes the results turn out different when the changes go live. Players figure out a different rotation that changes everything. Or some obscure trinket or set bonus we forgot about makes a mediocre ability crazy good.)

We do test with and without Blessing of Sanctuary, and with and without lots of other raid buffs. It is a big puzzle with a lot of variables. :)

We like Blessing of Sanctuary as a buff you can put on anyone. However, we might do something like let it benefit the paladin more than other targets. (Self buffing gives a better result than buffing someone else.) Or we might just add more paladin mitigation somewhere else in the tree. That all assumes you are deficient. If 2-5% makes a big difference for you (I don’t think it will make that much of a difference, but for sake of argument), then buffing paladins 2-5% when they didn’t need it could also make the other tanks non-starters. We’ll keep testing it.

Okay, here is one change you don’t have.

Shield of the Templar now also reduces all damage taken by 1/2/3%.

Critical Block is something we’re still keeping our eye on. I’m not going to promise a paladin version, but it’s totally something we’ll consider if paladin blocking starts to fall behind.

Whoever said it, yes it’s absolutely going to be a challenge trying to get parity among 4 classes with totally different mechanics, and in some sense the warrior to paladin comparison is the easy one. :) But we don’t like having only one MT class, and we don’t like giving everyone very similar gear, talents and abilities to tank, and we don’t like the situation where you need a different tank for every fight because they all excell at certain types of encounters and suck at others. So the option we’re left with is to have 4 who are different but relatively equal.

Holy

• Divine Plea - You gain 25% of your total mana over 15 sec, but the amount healed by your spells is reduced by 20%. (Down from 100%)

Glyphs

• Glyph of Flash of Light - Your Flash of Light heals for 50% less initially, but also heals for 140% of its initial effect over 12 sec. (Down from 15 seconds)
• Glyph of Holy Light - Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 10 yds (up from 5 yds) of the initial target.

We are still showing good healing from Holy paladins. However, we are getting feedback that they may be struggling with mana and perhaps even with boredom. To help with both of these potential problems, We are going to change Divine Plea to only reduce your healing by 20% (up from 100%). However, the original nerf to the spell was partially because of it being difficult to stop a paladin in PvP, so we are going to make the effect dispellable.

We’re still taking a look at some of Holy’s deep talents and I do want to acknowledge that there have been many great suggestions to change some of those.

We understand that some Holy paladins still feel that their movement and group healing mechanics aren’t sufficient yet. However, we still like Bacon of Light , Holy Shock and talents like Infusion of Light to help with these problems. We want to get a few of the kinks out and see them in action more before making further changes here.

We also want to reiterate that measuring healing is much tougher than estimating dps or tank mitigation. While healing throughput and efficiency are important, so is knowing who to heal when and with what spell. We’re going to keep a close eye on this through the rest of beta, in the Burning Crusade patch and when Lich King goes live.

We’re currently planning to end the fourth Arena season on October 14, 2008, and as always — this date could easily change. This Arena Season is only ending in respect to the ladder, meaning we’ll be taking a snapshot of the season’s ladder and then go through our normal process to determine who is eligible for the end-of-season rewards. This process should take approximately one week. It’s very important for players who feel that they may be eligible for the arena-specific title and/or Armored Nether Drake to refrain from transferring their character to another realm between the date outlined above, and when the end-of-season rewards are physically awarded.

Upon the end of this Arena Season, teams and ratings will not be wiped, and will carry forward allowing players to earn points each week and purchase gear until the launch of the expansion (November 13, 2008).

We had hoped that the introduction of some new Honor rewards in the upcoming patch would give players a great opportunity to spend any of their remaining Honor. However, many players would still be surprised by an Honor and token reset as it isn’t something we’ve done in the past. As such, we’ve decided to not reset Honor or tokens upon the release of Wrath of the Lich King. Players who save their Honor will be able to spend it on level 80 rewards, although those rewards will be significantly more expensive than their level 70 counterparts.