Friday, August 31, 2012

Quick Prot Thoughts

Just some quick thoughts on Prot Pallies after the 5.0.4 redesign.

The Good:
--Yey, we have permanent Consecration back!  9 second duration, 9 second cooldown.
--First tier talents: Pursuit of Justice feels really nice for having the permanent speed boost, but the additional boost per point of Holy Power feels weak.  Either make it 10% more per point, or let it stack all the way to 5.  As it is, I could strongly see taking Speed of Light for specific movement-heavy encounters (Blackhorn, I'm looking at you).
--Second-tier talents: Tanks with their own CCs.  Need I say anything more?  In a guild group, I'll swap out for Fist of Justice, but for randoms?  Repentance all the way.
--Third-tier talents: Sacred Shield stacks; if you have a Holydin in your raid with this talent, you get the effects of both!  Which is really awesome.
--Fourth-tier talents: Unbreakable Spirit is really the only choice for tanking here, what with the CD reductions on both Lay On Hands and Divine Protection.  The Divine Shield bit has niche usage, but may see use for fights with stacking debuffs--BoP out of it twice as often!  Extra useful if you take...
--Fifth-tier talents: Holy Avenger!  The ability to "burst survivability" is probably one of my favourite things about the new style of tanking.  Plus, it has amazing synergy with Unbreakable Spirit, as gaining Holy Power faster means you also spend it faster.  Neat trick: pop this off during Bloodlust, or macro it with Lifeblood, though the latter's not quite as effective.  The result is a nearly-3-second CD on Crusader Strike, because of Sanctity of Battle.  This enables you to have only slight gaps in Shield of the Righteous uptime.  Carry a boss swing timer (Quartz has one built in), and you can ensure that it's up for every hit.
--Word of Glory has no CD.   With the Bastion of Glory buff fully stacked (5x), I can heal myself for 85% of my HP off of one Word of Glory.  In other words, I can not-quite-Lay On Hands myself about ...once a minute.  More if I'm willing to use Holy Avenger to speed things up.
--Shield of the Righteous is off the GCD!  This makes timing it around boss swings so much easier.
--Mana management is an absolute non-entity.

The Bad:
--I lost count of how many CDs I now have.  I'm afraid having that many layers of complexity to tanking is going to intimidate newcomers and scare them off, until they find someone willing to mentor them.  PuGs are going to be absolutely vicious to them--and very critical of every tank, as a result.
--It's pretty scary to think that server latency will now play a role in how survivable I am--that's how crucial the timing can be on SotR.
--Sacred Shield is on the GCD, which is very annoying.

The Ugly:
--Threat generation has been nerfed all to hell.  For AoE situations, you have two options:
A) Burn them down before it can matter who tanks what.
B) Mark targets and proceed with extreme caution.
For single-target situations, you have one option: Holy Avenger and no quarter.  In a guild group, you can ask that people hold off blowing their CDs for four or five seconds, and have a reasonable expectation of compliance.  In a PuG...no.  The reason for this is that most of our damage is based off of Vengeance, the amount of which isn't terribly significant before we've taken two or three hits.  As a result, it's really easy to lose aggro to over-zealous DPS in the first few seconds of a boss fight.  Shamans seem to be the worst--one theory is that Ele's so good right now compared to what it was before that they've never had to worry about aggro issues before and have no clue what to do.  Then again, we didn't have our Hunter last night to Misdirect, and that may have made a serious difference.  We shall see.
--My DK still feels more survivable than my Paladin.  I was running a heroic with her yesterday, and the healer dropped group during Thrall's Gauntlet in HoT, the one before Asira.  The new healer didn't join until after Asira, and we had no off-healer--DPS were hunter, warrior, mage.  Nobody even came close to dying.  The scary part is that her iLevel is 20 points below Heraqawa's.  I've no question at all that I couldn't do any such thing with him--at least, not yet.  Maybe in a week or two, when I'm more comfortable with him, I will be able to if needed.  Maybe the issue is that DKs hardly changed at all, and Prot Pallies did, and I'm still adjusting.  We all are.

The Sad:
--They took away most of my ability to heal--I only have Flash of Light and Word of Glory left.  No more emergency Holy Radiance on Blue Platform, after Mutated Corruption dies and Elementium Bolt explodes, leaving us all stacked and low HP and OMG TENTACLES AND BLOODS at the same time.
 --Major glyphs--and many of the talent choices--still don't really feel like there's an actual choice to be made.  Yes, the "right choices" are different per-fight, but there is still a right choice.  So from that sense, it's really no better than the old talent and glyph systems.

More later.

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