Saturday, February 28, 2009

Divine Protection Cooldown Reduced.

It seems that tank oh-**** buttons are being buffed beyond all measure in 3.1. Warriors Shield Wall can now be reduced down to 1 minute cooldown and Last Stand to 3. This brings them largely in line with Deathknights, who have a significant number of panic buttons to push on relatively short cooldowns. Well, it now seems that Paladins aren't above a little love here and there in this vein:

Official Patch Notes:

..
* Divine Protection: Cooldown reduced to 3 min.
..

Glyphs:

Paladin
* Glyph of Beacon of Light: Increases the duration of Beacon of Light by 30 sec.
* Glyph of Divine Plea: While Divine Plea is active, you take 3% reduced damage from all sources.
* Glyph of Divine Storm: Your Divine Storm now heals for an additional 15% of the damage it causes.
* Glyph of Hammer of the Righteous: Your Hammer of the Righteous hits 1 additional target.
* Glyph of Hand of Salvation: When you cast Hand of Salvation on yourself, it also reduces damage taken by 20%.
* Glyph of Holy Shock: Reduces the cooldown of Holy Shock by 1 sec.
* Glyph of Last Stand: Now reduces the cooldown of Last Stand by 90 sec.
* Glyph of Shield of Righteousness: Reduces the mana cost of Shield of Righteousness by 80%.
Source


These changes were posted on the EU Official Forums, but aren't as yet reflected in the current PTR build. So, why are they interesting?

Isn't it obvious?

Divine Protection currently has a 5 minute base cooldown. The talent Sacred Duty reduces this cooldown to 4 minutes. With a base cooldown of 3 minutes Sacred Duty would reduce the cooldown to 2 minutes. Cool beans, eh? Well, the plot thickens. Forbearance is currently 3 minutes, preventing you from popping HoP, DS and DP within 3 minutes of each other. Obviously it would be impossible to take advantage of a 2 minute cooldown DP without some changes to Forbearance.

With any luck they are getting rid of the idiotic thing, especially with the current 30s shared lockout. Another option would be the talent also reducing the duration of Forbearance, or even not affecting DP at all (so the new baseline cooldown of 3min could not be lowered).

I'll pause for a minute whilst you consider the idiocy of a Protection talent affecting Divine Shield alone.

Back? Good.

So anyway, Forbearance may be gone, or at least diminished in impact. Secondly we have the two notes in the glyph portion. Lets take the second one first: Mana cost of Shield of Righteousness reduced by 80%. Veeery nice. This, coupled with rolling Divine Plea's, means that Protection Paladins will have self-sustainable mana for secondary tanking, DPS and PvP. Just how important this will be in the future is anyone's guess but I'm not one to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Finally, we come to the most curious note: "Glyph of Last Stand: Now reduces the cooldown of Last Stand by 90 sec." There is a 99% changes that this patch note has been miss-filed under Paladins, given that Last Stand is a Warrior ability (which has been buffed ofc). Why not 100%?

Because we still don't have an 11pt Prot Talent! ;).

4 comments:

Amin 28/02/2009, 16:31  

What are you thoughts on hit rating and protection paladins?

Dann Smith 01/03/2009, 15:17  

My guess is that it's just in the wrong place. Blizz do have a history of messing up patch notes. :p

BigFire 01/03/2009, 16:28  

The reason why shield wall abilities are getting shorten is the bosses in Uldur have strikes that will kill any tank without using those abilities. These strikes hits for 40k, mitigated. That means the tank HAVE to use their shield-wall capability.

Alex - aka Firelight 02/03/2009, 12:11  

I heard it was a blizz-cockup. That was supposed to be in the Warrior section apparently!

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