Posted on October 6th, 2008 by admin
Stepping away from +threat
Threat is at the heart of tanking. However, it’s totally hidden from the player, and many players don’t understand it well or at all. A thumbnail sketch: every point of damage you do causes 1 threat. Every point of healing you do causes 0.5 threat (unless you’re a paladin, in which case it’s 0.25 for reasons I’ve never fully understood). This is base threat; many classes have threat modifiers. Rogues, for instance, have an innate 30% reduction to threat. Warriors and Druids get 30% improved threat in their tanking modes (Defensive Stance/Dire Bear Form); this will be raised to 45% in LK, I believe. Paladins get 90% extra threat for their Holy damage from Righteous Fury.
Then there are various tanking skills which have special threat modifiers. Sunder Armor is one that has been around forever; it wouldn’t cause much threat inherently, but it’s got extra threat built in. Lacerate and Revenge are other examples.
In short, the way Blizzard has traditionally made tanking work – made sure the tanks are causing more threat
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Posted on October 6th, 2008 by admin
Koraa chats about Priests
We’re a little miffed about recent priest changes here at WoW Insider. Both Holy and Shadow were worked over pretty well with the nerf bat in build 8926. Fortunately, Koraa (class designer) has announced some upcoming changes that are, for the most part, buffs, and that show that they’re definitely thinking about the class. Let’s see what’s behind the curtain.
· Holy:
· Holy Concentration will “scale with spell crit instead of just a flat %.” I read this as meaning that instead of being a 6% chance to gain HC, the chance will be some fraction of your Holy crit chance. But why not just make it a 50% (or whatever) chance on heal crit?
· Divine Hymn now has an HoT in addition to the CC. This makes it more obviously a clutch spell, and I think it will be handy.
· Blessed Recovery is getting buffed to “roll” like Ignites do used to: each new crit will add to the HoT and refresh the duration.
· Lightwell is gaining the ability to show
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Posted on October 6th, 2008 by admin
[EDITED] Paladin changes in Beta build 8962
Unlike last build, where Paladins got so many important changes it took me two posts to cover them all, we get just a little love this Beta build. So little, in fact, that I didn’t bother writing it up until now. For those curious Paladins, however, here are the goodies (and baddies) that popped up in Beta build 8962.
Protection
Hammer of the Righteous was changed from a triple-target Crusader Strike — which was kind of silly, really — into a weapon strike that works off DPS as base damage. The spell now reads: “Hammer the current target and up to 2 additional nearby targets, causing 3 times your main hand damage per second as Holy damage.” Which means that even fast one-handed weapons work well with the spell because it calculates from DPS. It makes perfect sense and is a definitive step away spell damage weapons, which traditionally have low DPS. Meanwhile, Improved Devotion Aura’s healing effect was also buffed to a maximum of 6%, up from 3%, and Toughness was nerfed to a 30% duration reduction for
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