Tankadins Hit Again

Ardent Defender: This talent now reduces damage taken below 35% health by 7/13/20% instead of 10/20/30%.

Ardent Defender finally got the hit that many had been expecting. It was slipped into the patch notes on Sunday.

On Wednesday, Ghostcrawler had posted:

I understand that a lot of players who post here think that paladin tanks are in that situation now and DK tanks are in the reverse situation where they struggle with a lot of fights. But they are not in that situation, at least not yet, because we don't see the widespread swapping. That suggests that perhaps the advantages concluded from theorycrafting aren't so massive that tank swapping conveys a huge advantage. It could very well change over time to get that way, but it hasn't happened yet. We've been talking about potential DK buffs for 3.2.2 and we even know how we would nerf Ardent Defender when and if we think* it has gotten out of control.

So between Wednesday and Sunday, Ardent Defender got out of hand?

Then on Friday, GC posted this: EH is very important. But it is not the all there is to tank balance. I suspect even the players that first came up with that way of describing survivability would admit that it gets focused on too much these days.
This is important to the discussion because it is the EH increase of Ardent Defender that was nerfed. In its current incarnation, AD can be theorycrafted out to be a 15% increase in EH. By reducing the damage reduction from 30% to 20%, will make it only an 8.75% increase in EH.

So on Wednesday, the Developers didn’t feel AD was out of hand, and on Friday, they thought the community was making too big a deal out of the EH increase.

Then suddenly on Sunday, AD was out of hand and the EH increase was so important it had to be nerfed. I've seen politicians flip flop less.

Ghostcrawler also posted that: We want the paladin currently at level 74 to feel like she's going to be able to fill a tanking role by the time she's geared out

Well, if I was that Level 74 Paladin, I would be concerned

The Developers get accused sometimes of caving into the whiners on the forums, and making changes simply to placate them. When they make such sudden and seemingly capricious changes in direction, even reasonable players, which I’d like to think I am, start to wonder.

I’m amazed by the number of people; Paladins included who accepted this nerf with a ‘had to see that coming’ type of attitude.

Ardent Defender is our second cooldown, similar to Last Stand, which by the strictest definitions is a 30% EH increase, twice that of the current AD, and three times the nerfed AD. Of course Last Stand is temporary and AD also has the guardian spirit effect added.

Maintankadin.com is down right now, so I can’t see what the reaction has been there. I’d really love to see what Lore, Theck, Modus, and the crew have to say. Many times those guys help me understand things better.

I tend to think that this is largely just a theorycrafting nerf. Due to the way Ardent Defender works, you aren’t going to really see the difference unless you are parsing logs and seeing a reduction in the amount of damage absorbed by AD. For most players, it will be a feel thing. Paladin tanks will feel a little squishier and a little harder to heal, but it will be difficult to pin the exact cause on the AD nerf.

But Paladins, after being behind for all of Burning Crusade and the first two tiers of Wrath, were finally competitive. Now, we’re being hit in both EH and Threat. The roller coaster ride I feared seems to be coming to fruition.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Say what you will about DKs, but they sure can cry on the forums with a unified voice. Half our community thought that AD was OP without even seeing it tested on hard mode ToC 25-man. I'll say one thing, if we're the worst tank at ToC 25-man hard modes, we won't be getting buffed.
Draigon said…
They did roll back the changes to Hammer of Righteousness, so I'm thinking they're playing with numbers to see what happens at this point.
Anonymous said…
The thing I hate for all specs of Paladins is the fact that there are big chnges every patch, subpatch and even hotfixes. I'm at the point where I don't care if I'm the weakest character class, just give me a character that will behave the same way every time I login
I know on our 10 man heroic ToC that our paladin tank was a lot less squishy then our warrior. Our warrior would get gibbed by a melee/impale/impale dot tick combo where our paladin would live through it without proccing AD.

It was much harder keeping the warrior alive then it was keeping the paladin.

I'm a little confused though because you started talking about last stand vs ardent defender... did this nerf change the health gained after negating death? It seemed like that part was untouched so it doesn't change EH in that regard.

I still think paladins have the better cds considering to get last stand on a 2 min cd it has to be glyphed and to get shield wall on a 2 min cd you have to glyph and talent SW and it still is 40% vs DP 50%.
Honors Code said…
The developers did not change the AD heal in any way. It's hard to give a direct comparision to AD because it's so different from the other tank cooldowns. I really wasn't trying to compare AD to Last Stand. It's difficult without some objective measure to know what is OP and what's not anymore.
apokteino said…
As far as the EH nerf from the change in AD, it's ends up being a decrease of roughly 5.98% of your max health.

Basically this is the way it works:

AD Pre-nerf:
* Pally has 30k health
* AD is up for the last 10k health
* With 30% damage reduction that means he will take 14,286 damage before he dies (even though he only has 10k health)
* 4,286 is about 14.287% of his total health (30k) so you could argue AD has increased his EH by that %


AD Post-nerf:
* Pally has 30k health
* AD is up for the last 10k health
* With 20% damage reduction that means he will take 12,500 damage before he dies (even though he only has 10k health)
* 2,500 is about 8.33% of his total health (30k) so you could argue AD has increased his EH by that %

The difference between the the EH AD provides between current and post-nerf is roughly 5.99%. The pally tank we use is our 3rd string tank so he doesn't amazing gear or anything. Still he has about 48k fully raid buffed. 5.98% of 48k about 2,875 health. On fights where my drood tank who has 56k raid buffed is getting 2 shot, an extra 2,875 is a big deal.

Just my thoughts as a holy pally.

*** Disclaimer: I just through this math together here at work. May be off by a little bit. ***
Honors Code said…
48k is pretty nice. Best I can do is about 44k, but most of the time its around 40k depending on who we have in the raid.

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