Divine Sac Change I Can Understand

Divine Sacrifice has been redesigned - Damage which reduces the Paladin below 20% health will break the effect.

So that solves the question of when it will break. All the raid needs to do is keep their Paladin above 20% for the 10 seconds it's active and you get a 20% damage reduction to the entire raid.

Personally, I don't tend to use Divine Sacrifice very often as I'm usually main tanking and it's more of an offtank skill. I'm spec'ed into it to get to Divine Guardian for longer and more powerful Sacred Shields since we don't run with any Holy Paladins anymore in my Raid group.

However, Raid Leaders have found Divine Sacrifice to be a very powerful tool for certain parts of certain encounters like Anub'arak Heroic when he's in Phase 3. Matticus of World of Matticus told us on Friday night that all his Rets and Holys are speced into it.

Now I had meant to get this into my Monday Shoutout post, but I forgot.

I also neglected to add this.

Recently, Paladin Schmaladin talked about a rather controversial issue on her blog. I'd link it, but the picture is NSFW. I thought it was well done. I had wanted to comment, but couldn't get my thoughts out in way that I felt communicated how I felt well enough.

Then I heard this talk on a similiar subject. I thought it was well done as well, and expressed my feelings much better than I could.

Comments

Argon said…
I have 1 point in DSacc as it is useful occasionally. Phase 2 Mimiron, the explodey flower phase in Freya, and on 25 Northrend beasts hard we use a strat where you bubble off the bleed, so I just throw on a sacc at the same time.
Westin said…
It's not quite right that you can just keep your paladin above 20% to maintain the raid shield for the full 10 seconds. The party damage redirection effect still caps after 200% hp worth of damage from the party is redirected (totaling 100% hp damage to the paladin), and when the party redirection is capped the raid shield and the party redirection effect both end. The addendum they just added is a safety to keep the paladin from killing himself if he doesn't get enough healing to survive normal damage + redirected damage.

Basically, the shield/redirection ends if:
a) You transfer more than 200% HP worth of damage from your party, or
b) You fall below 20% HP, or
c) 10 seconds elapses.

PlusHeal.com has a very good thread exploring the implications and interpretations of the DS changes here:
http://plusheal.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=4437
Honors Code said…
Thanks Westin. I'll get this talent figured out eventually!
Westin said…
Too many talents have paragraph-long tooltips and require logicians to apply optimally. Pally prot tree seems to have it worse than most, though.
Westin said…
Finally a Divine Sac Change we can all understand:

"In addition, the duration [of the 20% raid shield] has been changed to 6 seconds, however the effect does not terminate when Divine Sacrifice is removed before its full duration."

So the duration of the two effects are no longer intermingled. This means you get the most bang for your buck if you can absorb enough damage to break your DS early, and you don't risk losing your raid wall early if you front load the damage redirection (maybe because you're in the tank's group).

Also worth noting: SS has been nerfed to proc only once every 30 seconds unless you're deep holy. Infusion of Light reduces the proc back down to 6 seconds.

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