Honor's Code

We have news from the PTR about Patch 5.2 and storm clouds of worry and concern are gathering over the land of the Tankadins. Paladin - For Protection, we do have plans to try and lower the value of haste relative to dodge and parry. We don't want to make haste terrible for paladins, but we agree that it's odd for it to be better than more traditional tank stats. It might require a nerf to Shield of the Righteous to do this, but our goal is not to nerf survivability overall. We just wanted to provide you some context if you see odd changes to tanking abilities. http://us.battle.net/wow/en/forum/topic/7593740975?page=45#884 Yes, my friends, that is none other than GC uttering the N word. A little further on in the thread, GC is asked to explain his reasoning. Again in the words of the Crab. The game just isn't currently designed to support it.  It creates potential problems such as:   - A Prot paladin competing with a Frost DK or Ret paladin over gear, meanin...

If you’ve read my blog for any length of time, I hope you’ve come to understand that I’m not type to post a ‘sky is falling’ kind of post. I’d like to think I’ve taken the good with the bad over the years I’ve played Honorshammer. But even I get uneasy sometimes when I read stuff from Greg Street aka Ghostcrawler, the Lead Developer of World of Warcraft. When this guy talks, people listen. Recently, the Crab gave an interview to Eurogamer about the upcoming Expansion for World of Warcraft, Cataclysm. The question and answer that got my Paladin Sense tingling was this one. Eurogamer: Is there a particular class that you thought needed an overhaul more than the others? Greg Street: I think the Paladin is one I'd say probably needs some of the most work, it got a lot of work in Lich King but it's still not quite there. Each individual role, the damage, healing and tanking all have problems, in some cases they're over-powered but a little simplistic in other cases, so we d...

I put my thoughts in an article on Paladin Schmaladin . Here's the net-net. In the end, I don't think this will have much effect on us. Some of us won't have 40k unbuffed HP anymore, but that's more an 'epeen' thing than anything else. Paladins have tanked successfully with the deck stacked far more against us than it is now, even with this small nerf. Generally, Tanks have not been the bottleneck to any of the fights so far. Maybe that will change in hard modes, but raids are wiping more to execution and learning errors, than class mechanics. For me personally, Boston (my co-Tank) seems to prefer Blood so the buff will be very nice for him. It's not like we told him to lol go DPS when DKs got nerfed hard in whichever patch it was, maybe 3.1. I have every confidence I'll be tanking on Monday night. Well except for Dreamwalker who I've been lobbying to be Holy for because dropping huge Holy Light bombs on her sounds like fun. Once the emotion wears of...

Ghostcrawler has posted on the Official Forums again about Paladin AE threat. I don't think it's Consecrate, actually. It was definitely Consecrate in Burning Crusade. I think it's HoR and possibly SoC . Again the masses have locked into Consecreate as the issue. I think that's because its the most visible spell in our arsenal. It's what non-Paladins see. Ghostcrawler is right that Consecrate isn't the issue. I disagree that Hammer of the Righteous (HotR) is part of the problem. HotR is basically Paladin's version of the Warrior's cleave. Warriors have the option to use Talent points to increase Cleaves damage, while Paladin's can Glyph Hammer of the Righteous to hit a fourth target. No, I think the real culprit is Seal of Command. Seal of Command was intended as Retribution's DPS Seal for trash and quick fights, but when the change was made to turn Seal of Command into Seal of Cleave, Prot Paladins started to evaluate if it had a place in tanki...

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 ha...

Today, Honor's Code looks at the most recent change on the PTR to Retribution Paladins. Sorry for the drama of the title, but it got you to click to read the post didn't it? So yesterday, talking about the SoV/C change for Retribution I said "But I don’t think it’s going Live as is." Well I was wrong. There is a long thread on the WoW General Forums in which GC is having a pretty nice discussion with the players on this issue. I don't agree with everything he says, but I am very impressed with the level of feedback he is providing. That shouldn't be taken for granted and he needs to be thanked for it. Now he posted several times in what is becoming by now a very long thread. I'd like to highlight one of his responses on Page 11. He was replying to some of the comparisions of other classes with ramp up times to do DPS, like Ferals and Rogues. Now, stepping back, I think it's easy to take examples like this and argue which are apples and which ar...