3.2 Changes

Blizzard has released some new information on the upcoming Patch 3.2. There are a lot of changes we have been asking for and a few surprises. First up is Protection. The biggest problem protection had was cooldowns. Paladins really only had 1 cooldown that they can use once every 2 minutes. Lay on Hands doesn't really count since its just a big heal and on a 20 minute cooldown. With 3.2 Ardent Defender sees a huge buff. Currently it reduces your damage taken by 30% when you are below 35%. When so many bosses hit for around 20k with around 42k health it really doesn't save lives all that often. Not to say its a bad talent but its really not reliable.

They changed the talent to now reduce any attack that would reduce your health to 35% or below by 30%. This is a huge buff since boss attacks are so hard. On top of that every 2 minutes we get a free guardian spirit on us without having to hit any buttons. This went from being an OK talent to probably the most over powered tanking talent out there.

Block is also getting changed a bit for 3.2. Most Paladins and Warriors don't waste much time on block. If it is a good piece and it has some block value or rating (Conqueror's Helm) we'll throw it on. Most of the time we'll just completely pass it up and go for pieces with pure dodge or parry. Ulduar bosses hit pretty hard and dodging an attack mitigates about 20k damage vs block which usually only shaves off 1.5k damage of that 20k hit.

Block was a much more useful stat back during Burning Crusade when block would push crushing blows off the table all together. If you weren't at 102.4% avoidance/block the remaining percentage was converted to a full 150% crushing blow. So effectively every time you block you would reduce a 10k normal hit from being a 15k crushing blow while probably blocking 500 damage. So in essence you blocked 5.5k damage which is a huge chunk of damage.

Since 3.0 started crushing blows have been removed from bosses so blocks don't have the same impact they once had. Block Value still keeps its high item budget that it once did even though its not really contributing much to reducing damage taken while taking away possible Dodge/Parry. Blizzard's answer to this is to double all block value items. This doesn't affect base block value from shield nor the block value we get from strength. Doing some basic theory crafting I notice that this probably won't matter much. In the gear I choose for tanking I have very little block value. Before my libram I block around 1.2k on any blocked attack. On the gear that I have only around 100 block value so that would be doubled. I would basically block for around 1.4k but with libram probably around 1.8k.

If I were to start changing around my gear and adding block value items to it my dodge/parry would drop a descent amount. There would also be a lot of wasted block rating considering you can't get block value without getting block rating to go with it. Without getting to technical I would probably convert abotu 5% avoidance for 5% block but in return I would have the 40% of the blocks I do block for more. If I were to add about 400 block value to my gear bringing me up to 500 value and then double that with the 3.2 changes. I would probably be blocking 2.3k before libram and close to 3k with libram.

Lets say the average ends up being 2.5k. So if a boss hits for about 20k on a normal hit and he hits 100 times. the 5% I lost to avoidance would be 100k damage. Block would be 2.5k x40 hits would also be 100k. So while it looks like this would mean that they both do about the same amount of mitigation I would still be blocking 35% of the time in my avoidance gear for around 1.5k. That would be around 52.5k damage blocked so I would still be up 47k damage mitigated over my block gear.

With all that being said tanking math isn't perfect. Depending on if you take less hits or make every hit for less the thing that matters the most is do you survive through it long enough for the dps to bring the boss down. Do the healers have a hard time keeping you up? Its hard to measure exactly what is the best way to gear for an encounter and that is why most of us have different sets of gear depending on how the fight itself.


Seals are also seeing a major change all around. First is that they are completely removing Seal of Martyr/Blood. They want to take Seal of Vengeance and make it the primary DPS Seal. They want to make Ret burst less substantial and this is one of the ways they are doing it. We are going to have to get 5 stacks of vengeance up before we can do our full 33% of weapon damage as holy damage. This is not a bad change because we'll be doing full damage on bosses, the dot component of the seal and Righteous Vengeance from talents. Also to reduce burst they are reducing our cooldown of Crusader Strike to 4 sec but at 75% damage. Not bad changes for the sake of balance but we'll have to see how it actually affects our position on the damage meters once people can get some tests on it.

Holy seems to have both some significant buffs and nerfs. The biggest buff comes in the form of Beacon of Light. Currently it only affects your affective healing and paladins are the masters of over healing so a lot of the heal would be lost. That is no longer the case with the changes. The entire heal regardless of over healing will transfer over to the beacon target. This allows paladins to help heal the raid without fear of the tank not having enough heals. Also they are changing the way flash of light and sacred shield interact.

If the target has sacred shield and you heal with flash of light it will leave a hot component on that target. This is supposed to help us with raid healing but I see it being a problem just because we can only keep sacred shield on 1 target at a time and it will cost us 2 global cooldowns to get a heal up on that target. In order to offset this blizzard is cutting our illumination talent from 60% to 30%. They want to give paladins more options instead of just dropping holy lights on the tank without worry of mana. Also in the name of balance they are buffing all mp5 gear by 25%. This will give us more of a choice between gear with crit vs mp5.