Tepisor on September 20, 2008 under
Ghostcrawler (Blizzard Poster) made a very interesting post yesterday on the WotLK Beta forums:
Protection — We want more tanks in the game. Main tanks. We think it’s fun to have a diversity of players and see how different spells, abilities and class mechanics get used to solve problems. A Protadin with the right skill and gear should be able to tank any fight in the game. Previously, we tried to push Prot into the offtank and AE tank roles. While your abilities are still really well suited for AE in particular, overall our philosophy has changed and we want you to be able to do anything the other tanks do. Note that this means other tanks will get better at AE tanking though. Prot represents a special challenge when not tanking because you can both heal and do dps and some players want to do either. Or both. One final comment, that you have already seen, is we want you to gear like a warrior: collect Strength and Stam and use tanking weapons instead of caster weapons.
And he saw that it was good!
I think the message is very clear now: we must separate from the old thinking of stacking Spell Damage (or Power as it’s called now) and go towards the new and improved stats. This will raise numerous problems as not many will actually document themselvs about these changes, but it’s up to us, those who know, to educate.
A very interesting debate is going on over that the Maintankadin forums and focuses on the weapon of choice in WotLK: should we stick to caster weapons or switch to true tanking weapons? The Spreadsheet says that caster weapons are still better. However, one needs to remember that we’re still in Beta and many changes will take place until the live version so who knows what will happen.
Personally, my plan as of now is to gear for Strength and Stamina but to stick to a caster weapon until waters are a bit more clear.
Only one thing is certain: there will be fun times ahead for Protection Paladins.
| 2.5 |
Hmm, that is very interesting. I’m planning on re-rolling a Paladin for WotLK and I’m thinking I’ll go either Prot or Ret. It’s good to know that Blizzard wants Pallies to be completely viable as tanks. If I can go Ret and still have enough points in Prot to off-tank, that will be very cool.
I think it’s too bad that they’re pushing Warriors, Paladins and Deathknights towards all using the same gear and stats. It seems to me like they’re homogenizing the game and taking away some of the uniqueness and flavor to each class. I liked Paladins as the plate-spelldamage mostly-passive want-to-be-hit tnks, who worked and geared very differently from warriors.
I agree with Nozeen about the homogenizing of the class to the other tanking classes. Which brings up the other point of gear distribution. Now we pallys need to fight with the warrrior of all tallent tree spec, the ret pally, and the deathknights as well. I use to play Everquest at a pally and it really didnt matter between a warrior, pally, shadowknight. If you had plate on u can tank anything. Which always kicked other tanks out of the group or raid because one could do it all. Playing WOW at this time showed me that the pallys has a much different roll then the warriors and where needed for a specific roll during a raid or group fight. Vice versa for the warriors. This way of thinking created diversity and above all NEED. NEED for specifics. So from what im reading so far which hasnt been much i admit, those specifics are going away and we, pallys are just becoming a plate class that can tank something, anything. Like in Everquest, a game that has long been dead because of the overthinking of there developers and crys of there players who dont know what they where talking about at the time. THe biggest question that I have from all of this to blizzard is WHY?? WHY these huge changes??? What was wrong with the way it was before Lich King?? I always understood that one would fix or change something when that something was either broken or didnt work in the first place. Last time i checked, which was last night, my Prot pally worked just fine tanking and was in no way broken or didnt work at all. So again WHY??
Knarfis
Bladefist
Fires Within
Technically they haven’t changed paladins core stats, they just changed spec’s up a bit.. We recieve spell damage from stamina and our number one (of many) threat building spell relys on weapon DPS which is converted to holy damage therefore affected by righteous fury. So when you become geared with End game stuff, you dont need spell damage on your gear, but inversly if you are undergeared you may need to buff your spellpower to overcome your gear gap with the dps to hold aggro. anyways, Wotlk is here, and i can’t wait to see how our roll as viable main tankadin pans out (We couldn’t main tank illidan as well as a skillful warrior, so I am hoping the fight mechanics were changed so that paladins can succesfully main tank anything a warrior could, with more grace as per usual