Normally, I avoid delving too deeply into Blizzard’s official forums, and I certainly lack the armor and patience to go wading into the flamefests on a regular basis. Were I a Blizzard developer, I would likely feel tempted to design an invisible debuff that I could toss on to the worst of the QQ’ers and flat-out name-callers. Said debuff would doom them to pug with the least hardcore Dungeon Finder groups imaginable. Except that it’s really not right to inflict that sort of pain on those poor suckers they’d end up grouping with.
Nevertheless, I do enjoy picking through MMO-Champion’s blue tracker now and again. Usually. Until I run across forum posts titled like this gem: So, whats [sic] being done about the ‘OP’ tanks? These tend to be great examples of “class bigotry.” Now, I will engage upon occasion in poking a bit of fun at Rogues or DKs. I even appreciate the like-minded humorists who tease Paladins. This thread is neither of those. It is instead pure, unadulterated bull.
Let me give you a taste, to see for yourself. The OP starts in with some very dry kindling. The kind that doesn’t even take a stray spark to burst into a full-on flamefest.
Okay, so things like warrior AE threat aren’t getting any attention because Blizz doesn’t like the LOLAOE zergfest that most heroics and even some raids have become. Alright, np. Apparently the challenge in playing a warrior seems to be a good metric of where they want the tanks to be. I can accept that.
However GC himself admitted that paladins in particular are too good considering their ease of play.. so whats being done to being them down to something resembling where the other tanks are? I don’t mean to sound like OMG NERF THEM (I have a paladin tank too) but the reality is that they bring too much to the table and for far too little effort (comparitively speaking).
Now, I don’t have a great basis for comparison as to how difficult it actually is to tank a raid as a Prot Warrior, Bear, or DK tank. But that’s the key here. How difficult it is to tank a raid. Blizzard most emphatically do not balance gameplay around the concept that five-mans are the peak of the PVE game. They balance around raids. Failing some sort of mass affliction of stupidity over in Irvine, Blizzard will continue to balance PVE around endgame raid content.
Having said that, I can tell you right off the bat where this poster is dead wrong. Ghostcrawler (GC) never said Paladins were too easy to play. He specifically said this about the matter:
Honestly, I feel sorry for GC at times like these. He constantly has to deal with people who misread, misunderstand, or blatantly twist his words into some meaning that he clearly did not intend. Just because one aspect of our tanking (generating AoE threat) is simple does not make pallies easy mode. If all I had to do to ensure success in a raid was spam the 969 rotation then this criticism would be valid.
Yes, Tankadin AoE dps and threat gen will likely see some changes for Cataclysm. GC has said as much. No, that does not mean you can casually toss out there that Paladin tanking requires “far too little effort.” Yes our rotation looks deceptively simple and not proc-dependent. No, that does not mean effective tanking is easy-mode for Paladins.
However, Paladins have their own challenges to deal with when raiding, and several important abilities to juggle beyond their elegant 96969 rotation. In addition to the tanking standards common across one or more classes, paladins also have some more unique cooldowns to handle.
A good tankadin should know when to use Divine Sacrifice. A good tankadin does not macro his rotation, so that he can adjust the priority as necessary and be flexible when the situation requires. A good tankadin needs to know when, how, and on whom to use Cleanse, Sacred Shield, Hand of Protection, Hand of Sacrifice, Hand of Freedom, and Divine Intervention. A good tankadin has to reposition just as often as other tanking classes have to, and sometimes more. A good tankadin knows to never uses Righteous Defense when Hand of Reckoning is available to accomplish what he wants. A good tankadin knows how to hold aggro on those two separated casters and that group of three melee that the clumsy DPS just accidentally pulled.
What one-button tanking really looks like.
None of the above allow for one-button tanking. All of the above repudiate the concept that Paladin tanking as a whole is easy-mode. On top of that, even in 5-mans, the important and challenging fights are not at all about AoE. Trash fights are meant to be easy. If you’re having trouble with threat on those fights, it’s not because pallies are “OP.” It’s because either you, your DPS, or both are doing something wrong.
Personally, I think threads like these just exemplify an unwillingness to study one’s own class and improve one’s own performance. When this laziness starts to impact player performance, often as not it generates feelings of inadequacy on the part of the QQing player. Instead of evaluating ones own performance, the QQ spews forth in a lame attempt to find some external target for these bad feeligns. This leads to arguments that essentially boil down to, “I’m not having fun! It must be because Paladins are having too much fun!”
People then look to the strengths of the class/spec that is the target of their ire, and conveniently ignore the weaknesses. (They also tend to forget that where Paladins are weaker, another tanking class is stronger.)
Consider this:
- Tankadins have no instant range-closing ability like Bears and Warriors nor do we have a COMEHERENAO! button like DKs do. These abilities, when used right, should help to jump the gun on any trigger-happy DPS.
- Tankadins are dependent on mana, which is currently a more management-intensive resource system. Also, Warriors, Bears, and DKs don’t ever have to stop and drink up before battle. Battle itself provides all the resource generation they need for their abilities. Chain-pulling heroics tends to be easier for those classes.
- Tankadins instantly lose a lot of AoE threat-efficiency the moment we enter most boss fights. HoR, HS, SoC, and Consecration generate far less threat and dps when used on one-target boss fights as opposed to the three to five targets in most trash pulls.
I’m sure there are several other points, some that are fairly specific to the class, that I could use to illustrate some of the comparative weaknesses of Paladins vs. other classes. (For example, 96969 might seem simple, but isn’t Swipe + glyphed Maul just a bit further into the realm of effortless rotations?) That would be laboring an already worn argument, I’m sure.
Now, despite the incredible lengths to which the OP and various thread contributors have gone to prove their ignorance, the slight imbalance in AoE threat/dps right now should be addressed. Before too much more time passes. Why? Because I don’t want all these misguided fools rerolling as incompetent tankadins because they were convinced that this is the new DK.
The solution to this tankadin threat/dps on trash and in 5-mans? It’s not nerfing the low-damage mana hog. It’s not even, as GC says, to look at adjusting Hammer of the Righteous. It’s adjusting Seal of Command, the Ret cleave seal, so that it is impractical for or out of reach of the standard Prot builds. This seal procs off of more than half of our rotation and simultaneously cements Prot builds further into the formulaic and thus further from the philosophy of giving the player meaningful talent choices to make.
Make it require a two-hander. Or switch its talent tree position with Crusader Strike and make that ability require a two-hander. Seal of Command is the issue. Fix that and you fix the trash/5-man imbalance.
