Seal of Righteousness

For those of you that don't know, there was a time on test before 3.1 when the Seal of Righteousness glyph actually increased its damage by 30%. Unfortunately, they changed it back, and I'd like to make a point here about why it is unfortunate. Having Seal of Righteousness do more damage made it actually the best dps and threat seal when used with Broken Promise and about tied it with Seal of Corruption in other cases. This had a lot of interesting effects:

• It gave us a seal that wouldn't break CC
• It made Reckoning not useless again
• It made Expertise a good threat stat for us
• It gave us options
  

Having a seal that doesn't break CC can actually be quite useful in many cases. CC's been pretty obsolute since Wrath, when they turned us into AoE ministers of death, however, it's starting to show its power again in Ulduar. The adds in Razorscale's fight can be CC'd and the bolts from the Watchers can eat a healer. When I do adds on that fight, I use Righteousness, even without the glyph, to give the casters the option of CCing them.

Reckoning, on the other hand, is not our strongest talent, far from it. However, it is on all accounts our most awesome talent. A lot of us became very disappointed when the rise of Corruption in the horde basically became the death of the fun talent that got us to 80 (for those of us who levelled as prot). It makes me smile every time I hear those double-swings. With Righteousness, 5/5 Reckoning was great, even necessary. Now, it's useless again.

Being able to use Expertise, on the other hand, is nice, if only so that we have more gear options. Right now, it's virtually a useless stat. Plus, it's even on our t7 helm and its only competitor, Helm of Vital Protection. It's on the Legplates of Sovereignty, the only 226 leggings pre-3.1. Being able to look at an Expertise item and not say "ugh" was a really nice thing. Now, that won't be the case. Expertise is still "ugh".

Finally, it gave us options. Different paladins might pick different seals, depending on their play style. Some paladins like the steady drip of a Corruption debuff. Other paladins like to do more damage. Some situations would call for one over the other: for example anything with an aggrowipe would require Corruption, while anything that needed more snap aggro would use Righteousness.

Unfortunately, all of that is gone. Despite having the 30% buff on test and despite overwhelming approval from the paladin community, the change didn't go through. Again, we're finding ourselves put in a box, rather than having the kind of options that make being a paladin tank fun and interesting. Plus, I really wanted to use Reckoning. It always makes me smile.

Divine Plea Changes

I have mixed feelings about the new Guarded by the Light effect on Divine Plea, which causes it to refresh on every melee hit. On the one hand, it's very nice to never have to worry about mana again. So long as I remember to click the button, my mana regenerates at a rate fast enough that if anything is beating on me, I can't run out of mana. I haven't tried it on heroic bosses, but I'm guessing I could even use consecrate on heroic bosses without running out of mana now. I know that I can dps using consecration for a few minutes, so I'm assuming Blessing of Sanctuary would make up the difference. Plus, the 3% damage reduction from the glyph makes us the most durable tanks in the game, which I suppose we already were, but now we're even more durable.

However, there are two downsides to it. The first is that it's a return to the thirty second seal. For those of you too young to remember, we used to need to refresh our seal every thirty seconds or it would fall off. We would also need to refresh it after every judgement, though most of us used a macro for that. This meant that, before every fight, we would need to put up our seal, using a GCD. It's not like it was a big deal. It was just kind of annoying, and none of us were unhappy to see the situation change in 3.0.

The second downside is that it removes a lot of the skill from paladin tanking. I know the main thing that new paladin tanks ask me is, "How do you not run out of mana?". My usual response is something like, "Practice. And rarely consecrate". The main thing that separated a great pally tank from a good one was mana efficiency. Being a great pally tank was about managing the resource efficiently and effectively. Now that's just...gone. It's like having one of the main challenges of our class stripped away.

It strikes me that this is an example of Blizzard not understanding what "challenge" means, which has alienated so many raiders since 3.0. Holy paladin healing now includes keeping up four or five one minute buffs. That's not a challenge. That's annoying. All one needs is a buff bar mod (and the game is way too dependant on mods as it is) and it's easy. When dual specs came out, I was all happy to go holy and then I remembered: I've hated healing since 3.0. It's annoying. Stuff like this is why I not have a ret offspec.

On the other hand, maintaining mana efficiency was a genuine challenge. It took skill and foresight and separated the great tanks from the merely good ones. By changing Divine Plea as they have, this challenge goes away. They've taken away one of the most challenging aspects of the class and replaced it with an annoyance. Despite all the benefit to us from a purely power-level perspective, from a fun and challenge perspective the Divine Plea change is a sad day for protection paladins.

Ulduar and Avoidance

Well, Ulduar's out and the 25-man is quite an experience. For one thing, everything hits like trucks - big trucks, with arms. In some ways I worry a little bit. Our big strength as a tank is our ability to convert block value into effective health by blocking every hit. No other tank can do this. However, the harder stuff hits, the less value block value actually has.

In Naxx, stuff hit for seven or eight thousand, which hurt, but couldn't come close to killing me unless the healer was asleep or dead. Last night, I was tanking Runemaster Molgeim, and he was hitting me for 11-16k. Coupled with the damage aura that Brundir was dishing out, I died for the first time in quite a while. My healer, a holy paladin, said "what happened", and I had to check my logs. Sure enough, I took two big hits and coupled with the damage aura and some damage I had already taken, I went splat.

The other ability affected by the huge hits is Ardent Defender. The more hits it takes to kill us, the more likely Ardent Defender is to kick in and the sooner. I don't think I'd actually seen AD leapfrogged since Black Temple, but it happened last night. Ow.

So, two of our big strengths have been greatly weakened. Our blocks are worth less and our AD is less reliable. This is where avoidance comes in: stuff needs to hit me in order to kill me, and a truck can't kill me if I can dodge it.

So, I'm regemming all of my gear and making some different gear choices. Basically, I'm going back to the strategy I used back in Black Temple, which is to dodge as many things as I possibly can, so that the healers rarely have to heal, and the chances of my taking two big hits in a row go down.

After swapping out my rare gems for the new dodge gems, I was put around 30.3k health. The question now is: do I bite the bullet and drop under 30k in order to bring my dodge up? I'm sitting at about 26.4% dodge, 19.9% parry now. I'm going to do my usual strategy when I have a tough decision: do it incrementally, and see when I become uncomfortable. So, next Ulduar raid, I'm going to walk in there with my newly minted gear and see how many times I am reduced to just a couple thousand health. If it never happens, I'll add more avoidance. If it does, then I'll stick with a mixed set. Time will tell.

Welcome

Welcome to the Argent Champion, my protection paladin blog. In this blog, I will discuss many different topics about protection paladins, including gear, strategies, tanking philosophies and even making gold! With Ulduar just coming out, it's an exciting time to be a tank and especially a paladin tank. I look forward to your continued enjoyment.