Honor's Code

Well we knew something was coming with Lay on Hands and now we know how it will change. Lay on Hands is now affected by Forbearance and can now be cast on self again - Heals a friendly target for an amount equal to the Paladin's maximum health and restores 1950 of their mana. Once healed, the target cannot be targeted by Divine Shield, Divine Protection, Hand of Protection, or Lay on Hands again for 2 min. So the Developers solution was to add our old friend Forbearance. So my question is, why doesn't it also apply to Shieldwall, Icebound Fortitude, and Barkskin? Basically the tooltip should say : Shield Wall, Icebound Fortitude, and Barkskin can not be used while under Forbearance. I'm not asking for other Tank classes to be nerfed. This is a tank balance issue. I'm attempting to show how this change will impact Paladin tanks. The Paladins 'shield wall' is called Divine Protection. It's our one and only activated cooldown. Our other cooldown, th...

Way to go, Bear! Blogger Big Bear Butt and his guild Sidhe Devils are doing something really cool that I must share with my readership. (It still humbles me greatly thinking I have a 'readership'). One of their guildies has been diagnosed with Breast Cancer. To show their love and support for their member they are organizing an ingame event. So today, I turn over HonorsCode to the BigBear: On their server Kael’thas (US) , they are organizing a united cross-faction walk across Azeroth will be held on Saturday, November 14th, starting at 2:00 PM Central Time (Kael’thas-US server time). Members of both Alliance and Horde factions are invited to attend. Pink Mageweave Shirts will be handed out for all walkers, and all levels of characters will be welcome. If you’d like, bring your own shirt, or even make it a formal affair with your Festive Pink Dress ! The walk across Azeroth will not be a race of individuals , it will be a group march to show Julie our love and support. We d...

I got this idea after reading Blessing of Kings excellent post on Chill of the Throne (aka Icewell Radiance). Basically the best way for Blizzard to address the high avoidance problem is to remove Plate Tank gear in the next expansion, and put all Tanks in the same position of sharing DPS gear that Druids find themselves in today. The first steps towards this have already been taken by Blizzard's announcement at Blizzcon that Defense is going away in Cataclysm. All Tanks will have a Survival of the Fittest type talent that makes you uncrittable. So already we won't see any Plate in Cataclysm with Defense. Defense adds Parry and Dodge so already Cataclysm tanks will have lower avoidance. But it won't be enough. Let me show you why. A naked Level 80 Blood Elf Paladin has nearly 11% avoidance, and that doesn't factor in another percentage or two from the 400 defense you get. (Every character gets 5 defense per level.) So already we're at nearly 13% avoidance....

There are simply some people in the world you listen to on certain matters. When it comes to deep Tankadin theorycraft, the person I listen to the most is Theck of Blackrock. The guy is a math genius, but he also knows how to unpack his findings and make them understandable to meatshields like me. He did a lot of math, made some really cool looking charts, and then he unpacked his findings. I give you now Theck, Bringer of Numbers and Pounding Headaches So to tally it up: * T he value of avoidance is unchanged in terms of raw rating->% conversion * The value of dodge is unchanged relative to parry in all reasonable circumstances * The value of avoidance for reducing total damage intake is weaker, because we're effectively hitting DR earlier than we would be in the absence of IR. * The value of avoidance for reducing spike damage events (i.e. N consecutive hits) is noticeably increased, by more than a factor of 2 for N=2 (0.49% per point at 60% avoida...

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, today we bring you a blast from the past. Put your hands together and give a big Honors Code welcome for the return of Sunwell Radiance! Yes, after talking about how much the Developers hated having to use it and how they would be super careful to not let themselves get into this situation again... For Icecrown Citadel, we are implementing a spell that will affect every enemy creature in the raid. The spell, called Chill of the Throne, will allow creatures to ignore 20% of the dodge chance of their melee targets. So if a raid's main tank had 30% dodge normally, in Icecrown Citadel they will effectively have 10%. Why are we doing this? The high levels of tank avoidance players have obtained is making the incoming damage a tank DOES take more "spiky" than is healthy for raiding. Ideally, tanks would be receiving a relatively constant stream of damage over time. This allows healers to better plan their healing strategy, broaden t...

Part I Part II Part III Part IV These are the final addons I use in my Tankadin UI. Curse you, Perry the Platypus (Decursive) If you don't get the reference, it's from Phineas and Ferb. It's a really fun show that I watch with my daughter. Like all great kid's shows, it throws in some humor for the adults as well. Decursive is a little addon I have to help me, well, decurse. Of course Paladins can't decurse, so it helps me de-magic, de-disease and de-poision, but decurse just sounds better. Basically what happens is that when one of my team mates gets an afflication that I can do something about, their box will light up and a counter will start counting up the number of seconds they have whatever poison, disease or magic debuff. I left click on their box and that will cast Cleanse on them. This is very similar to using a Mouse Over macro, only all the mouse over stuff is built in. I first started using Decursive for tanking Steelbreaker on Iron Coun...

Part I Part II Part III Part IV I love the information I can get out of PowerAuras, but I still need more. What Just Happened? (TJH) When I hit Divine Protection aka Bubble Wall, it would be helpful for my healers to know that. What would be even more helpful is for them to know when it falls off. Now I could announce that over vent, assuming I see it, but instead I use a mod called ThatJustHappened (TJH). I set up ThatJustHappened to announce when I pop Divine Protection, and when it falls off. It also announces whenever I get an AD save. TJH does require a little bit of setup for each event you want it to announce. I recommend you check out the MainTankadin thread for a list of TJH settings. Bosses are Deadly (DBM) Many times you want to pop your cool downs in response to something particularly nasty the boss is doing. Knowing when he's going to do those 'bad things' is generally pretty helpful. I use Deadly Boss Mods to give me the low down on what...