Protection Paladin – Gear Philosophy

Gear is awesome. I cannot really disassociate that feeling of growing in power and stature from that one of enjoying World of Warcraft. While the progression of power through the acquisition of gear at max level is not as noticeable as what you enjoy while leveling up, on some level it is a lot more goal oriented, self motivated and as such enjoyable, at least for me. Gearing up and learning new spells as you level up comes as a matter of course; when you hit the end game you get to start to plan out your own progression path.

Ambellina in T9

Personally this kind of progression is what I enjoy most in the game. The reason is the responsibility you have to figure out what matters and what does not, what makes you the best you can be. And that is what it is all about.

Gear lets you do two things. It makes you look awesome for one. Or at least it should if the Blizzard art design team are doing their jobs properly. More often than not, as you are gearing up, your armor will start to look more imposing, your weapon looks more dangerous, your shield looks like you should barely be able to lift it off the ground. Your cloak grows longer. Then you start doing tiered raiding and you see your piecemeal armor be replaced by pieces that are parts of a set and go together.

It just makes you happy to go from an unknown entity in a clown’s rags to a faction champion.

Then of course there is the other thing you gain from your gear: Stats.

Now the Protection Paladin has gone through a lot of sweeping changes since the inception of the spec. Anyone who was around in The Burning Crusade will remember Spellpower weapons and the search for the elusive block cap. Since Wrath the Spellpower weapon has become an outdated relic. The block cap still exists and refers to reaching 102.4% avoidance, meaning that a boss will never actually hit you. Each and every attack that lands will either miss, be parried, dodged or blocked. Back in TBC this was paramount as it pushed Crushing Blows off the horizon. With Crushing Blows removed from the game this cap has become more of a nice goal to shoot for rather than something you had to have if you wanted to progression tank.

It is clear that the worth of the different stats to the Paladin has changed. In Cataclysm it will change yet again; by all standards it seems like they will change to a greater extent to what we have ever seen before. However in the meantime there are bosses such as Arthas to kill and loot.

Stats and Gear – Introduction and Overview

Looking at the gear options available to Protection Paladins, it is obvious that what you want is Plate with Defense. You have a few divergent slots: Trinkets will not necessarily have Defense but either Stamina, avoidance or threat stats. There is also your main hand that may not necessarily feature Defense as a stat, you will both find weapons that have good avoidance stats that serve as tanking weapons and you may sometimes even opt for pure dps weapons. More on that issue later however.

With Defense you will find that your gear will have varying degrees of mitigation, avoidance and threat stats. Most Plate you will find have Strength, Stamina and Defense. The two other stats will be either Armor, Hit, Expertise, Block Rating, Block Value, Dodge or Parry.

Ambellina in T6

Usually it will serve you reasonably well to simply go with whatever gear has the highest item level. An in game way to look at how high the item level of a said item will be is to look at the inherent armor value of the item. The higher the armor, the higher the item level. However if you want to excel at your role you need to specialize and prioritize your stats. All stats are not created equal and indeed they serve different functions and excel at different things. There are however a few basic things we should always keep in mind.

Defense makes you uncrittable at 540 against raid bosses. At 535 you will be uncrittable in heroics. Never go below the apprioprite threshold unless you make up the difference by using Resilience. Defense past 540 will still give you avoidance that does not suffer diminishing returns.

Strength and Block Value are the best threat stats for a Paladin. Strength also contribute to Block Value at a two to one ratio.

Parry and Dodge are better than Block Rating, as avoidance beats out mitigation.

Stamina is the only thing that always contribute to all forms of effective health (EH and MEH, effective health and magical effective health), Armor to EH only.

Block Value will start to contribute towards your EH when block capped. Consequently at this point Strength also becomes an EH stat by contributing to Block Value.

Hit and Expertise are secondary threat stats, inferior to Strength and Block. However for actual Taunts you need Hit. Expertise on the other hand reduce the chance of parry-hasting the boss.

Fulfilling Your Role

As a World of Warcraft player, you should always keep in mind what you want to do within the game. For myself, I have run most avenues that the game offers you, excepting perhaps the aspect of role playing and of course PvP. I have played the game from a hardcore perspective, where all I wanted out of it was to raid and to beat end game content. I have played as a casual player, doing progressive content outside of raids. I have played as a five man player only. Throughout The Burning Crusade I played a Rogue, which was quite a different experience from playing a tank.

As a Protection Paladin you need to specialize further. Just as you want different talent specs for different situations, you want different gear sets for different encounters and play modes.

For soloing old world content, be it for achievements, for reputation or for sheer fun, there is little doubt that the Protection Paladin is a solid spec. Protection Paladins with high enough avoidance and block to reach the block cap and a solid amount of block value will hardly be touched. The same kind of setup is also very attractive for running heroics. The way block value scales, or fails to scale, means that you can basically make yourself untouchable for long periods of time. Of course in very large packs you run the risk of having Holy Shield fall off before the cooldown is up again, but the fact of the matter is that high avoidance coupled with a lot of block value will trivialize a lot of non-end game content.

What you are looking for in this kind of situation is to stack as much avoidance and block value as possible. You will always have the stamina just by what you have on your gear to survive most magical damage and as long as you keep your Holy Shield up you can basically never die. In fact when you start to really outgear heroics, which is really easy with the way the current badge system works, you can basically go to heroics without a dedicated healer. I would not really recommend this as you could just as easily have a healer and pull more packs and not have to worry about taking risks, but the option is still there and your healer will probably spend a fair amount of time dps’ing in most cases.

Running heroics, once you have started raiding and acquired tanking gear from raiding instances does not require any specific gear setup. However the avoidance plus block value equation is a really enjoyable way of doing things. However if you are still in pre-raiding gear, you want to be on the lookout for gear with those stats. Seeing that Naxxramas was the first raiding instance of Wrath of the Lich King and that it was really, really easy we never saw the kind of situation as in The Burning Crusade where heroics were actually really challenging. You could easily acquire just about all epic gear by the end of the first week of hitting max level. Of course the heroics themselves were not nearly as challenging as the Burning Crusade ones either, which basically meant that you did not have to gear up through regular level 80 instances in order to do them. So the advice about what to gear for when doing heroics is not something I expect everyone to listen to and indeed you do not need to in order to run them competently. Then again merely running things competently is not something that I personally shoot for. In my mindset, if I am to do something in World of Warcraft I want to do it to the very best of my ability. This means that I want to be able to do Heroic Azjol-Nerub in ten minutes instead of twenty. If I want all the emblems to gear up my off spec, running a heroic that much faster and that much smoother has a tangible benefit.

The End Game Main Tank

Now going from tanking heroics and tanking normal modes in raids to tanking hard modes changes your priorities significantly. You can no longer merely pick up scraps as it were and do fine. You need to start prioritizing stats in order to even stand much of a chance.

There has long been an image of having a well rounded tank with a good balance between avoidance, mitigation and pure health as the pinnacle of what you want. Intuitively this is fairly compelling. You want a lot of health, this much is obvious. You also want a lot of avoidance in order to help out healers and their mana. You want threat stats in order to not threat cap dps classes. It all sounds very sensible.

I think that this line of reasoning is outdated. The game has changed a lot since raiding started out in vanilla WoW. The tanking role has gone through a lot of changes, a lot of it due to how Blizzard are now making raids challenging. The raiding environment is certainly a lot more dynamic and the challenging end game encounters are a lot more involved. Given how avoidance has scaled the old equation of how a tank functions has become obsolete. For an encounter to challenge healers we will usually see a lot of unavoidable damage; the tank needs to be topped up at all times. The old times of seeing the tank taking slightly more damage than the healers can heal up have passed by. When once you could hear ‘Heal the tank, heal the tank’ being shouted out on Ventrilo, you will now probably only hear ‘Heal’ before it would have been too late to react to the incoming damage.

In largely simplistic terms, we have gone from a situation where there was mostly consistent damage on the tank. In this situation avoidance is great. Then we add non-avoidable environmental damage to the equation. For the tank, avoidance is still great, however you will still probably need to stack more stamina than before because some of the damage cannot be mitigated in any meaningful way. However in its current incarnation, the challenging raid encounter has a lot of unavoidable damage on the tank. While avoidance is still at a premium, you can no longer stack it. You are forced to gear for maximum effective health.

Now something I mentioned in my talent and spec post is that you should always communicate and discuss things with the rest of your raid and perhaps specifically your healers. In the grander scope of things, what I am advocating is to treat your spec and your gear contextually.

Gear up in the way that is optimal for the context in which you are playing.

This has very much been implicit in what I have been saying both about gearing and speccing. And while it does of course mean that you talk with the rest of your raiding team, that you take input from your healers, there is an implication that sometimes is sorely missed. The fact of the matter is that the encounters you will be facing will be dictating your gearing choices.

Gormok the Impaler says: Stack Stamina!

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19717352338&sid=1

This is the environment we are currently in. Until Cataclysm comes and the whole stat system gets revamped I have a hard time seeing that this will change in any meaningful way. Please do note that while Ghostcrawler is indeed correct that bosses do not in fact hit for 40k, what they are doing is pushing tanks even more into stamina stacking than if that had been the case, and that that would have been all the incoming damage.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19820872332&sid=1

These two threads, when you disregard the complaints about class imbalance, showcase what kind of raiding environment tanks are facing if they are looking to get into end game content. They also highlight just how skewed the situation has become in favor of effective health.

Once again, the intuitive reaction to any tank is to make sure that he or she meets the very basic health requirements of an encounter. Say a boss hits for 20k on each hit. If you have 35k you will never survive two hits. Avoidance matters of course, but there is always the chance to see a string of two hits. Buff your hp to 41k and you can eat two hits. You will also give your healers some real heart attacks, seeing that they need to heal you for 20k until the next hit lands. Take that up to 50k and they will need to land 11k on you. All very basic stuff of course. However it is never that easy. Right now the encounters work so that it is not just about pure hits from the boss, there is spill damage going on, unavoidable tank damage from impales and debuffs, raid damage that the tank also has to live through. As such that extra hp has a two fold bonus after you make sure that you meet the minimum requirements: Not only does it give your healers more reaction time and make sure that the healing throughput needed is not as intensive, it also makes you more able to soak the incidental damage. In other words, it both contributes to giving your healers more time to land a heal and it makes you live more easily through any unavoidable damage inherent to the encounter.

As noted above, I find little to suggest that this paradigm of how Blizzard makes healing the tank challenging in this expansion. If anything I would imagine that outside of gimmicks, this is what we can expect to see in Icecrown as well. Certainly the blue responses to queries about this situation seem to indicate that this is something Blizzard is quite pleased about. Now with Cataclysm we might see them move away from this philosophy and it is neither inconceivable that they will indeed try to change it even before that, but for right now, pure encounter design makes it so that stamina is really the kind of the stats.

This information is of course very general. It pertains to all tanks. For Paladins there are other concerns to take into consideration as well. For one we have Ardent Defender. If we disregard the 1UP effect, we can take a look at what stacking Stamina does to your effective health. With 3.2 this talent will make any attack that would reduce the paladin to 35% health or below has its damage reduced. Essentially, each time you gain more health you extend the range in which you will have the damage taken reduced. This alone makes stamina stacking, even when looking at it without the context of taking the amount of damage we are seeing in things like Yogg-Saron plus zero and Trial of the Grand Crusader, a very worthwhile and sensible choice. For the sake of clarity, Ardent Defender as of 3.2 is no longer leapfroggable. This means that whenever a hit would take you below 35% health, the portion of the hit that would put you below that threshold is affected. Thus you do not have to at thirty five or below for the reduction to be effective. It is an amazing talent and you will benefit greatly in terms of effective health the more pure health you have. Finally, until 3.2.2 hits the street Paladins also gain threat off stamina in the form of Touched by the Light. It is not a huge deal and it will be changed; in 3.2 threat is so easy to hold it is almost a non-issue, it just further goes to skew things even more in favor of Stamina.

Effective Health

Everything considered, at this moment in time all tanks must gear up for effective health. This means that really two things matter for the gearing choices we make: Armor and max stamina. First off the encounters call for this. The second reason why this is done is because we can. Just by looking at the gear that is available from end game content we will never truly be short of avoidance anyway. Parry and dodge will be our gear no matter what. And because of how most encounters are designed there is very little reason to actually skew things in the favor of avoidance.

Ultimately there are not many gearing choices we have to make. At this point in the progression we do not see that much badly itemized gear. We still have the odd items with block rating on it, but those are becoming few and far between and are easily discarded. Given that the stamina and armor are the same it is not hard to acquire a lot of avoidance through having gear with the old Str/Sta/Def/Dod/Par setup.

The choices we make will usually come through gemming and enchanting. And right there is where the slant towards effective health shines through. A lot of people will rightly treat all sockets as blue and just use one purple gem to obtain the best possible socket bonus while activating their meta gem. Now this is not necessarily the best plan of action no matter what, there are socket bonuses that will be worthwhile, where you sacrifice perhaps three stamina altogether to gain ten agility or similar. However you will not be looking to obtain these bonuses in a lot of cases. A natural instinct is to try to activate them as often as possible, as to gain more ilevel points and to squeeze out as much theoretical stat budget as possible; while appealing both aesthetically and from an out of context min/maxing exercise it just does not hold up in practice and when looking at the challenges we are facing.

The old paradigm of ‘stack effective health until threshold then go for avoidance’ is dead. What this used to mean was that you would stack stamina until you could take either two or three hits from a boss without dying, then stack avoidance to help out healers and to get more strings of dodge/parry/miss. The philosophy is that if you can go from surviving two to three hits by stacking more effective health you did so; if you could not reach another threshold you would be better off stacking avoidance. As seen above this philosophy has been invalidated mostly through encounter design where spill damage and unavoidable damage play a huge part of the healing difficulty.

Of course this is the mere start of the complexities of stat choices when it comes to Protection Paladins, but it is perhaps the most important part and a subject that should hold a lot of interest to the most of us.

The Protection Paladin: Talents

Horde Paladin Pride

The Protection Paladin – Talents

So…Cataclysm.

Cataclysm seems awesome. Cataclysm has me really, really excited about World of Warcraft. Cataclysm is what I wanted Blizzard to do, even if I did not really know it myself.

However it also means that me writing about the questing content and the development into World of Warcraft into a hybrid game with very strong single player game elements in an MMORPG is becoming slightly out of date. I do mean to flesh out more what I want to see as far as this is concerned, to explain in what ways Blizzard have made great strides and in which areas they have failed or come up lacking.

With BlizzCon having given us such a plethora of information and such exciting news about the expansion I would rather take a small break from this project. Another reason is that I just started listening to ‘Just Plain Better’, a WoW Radio podcast by Natural20 over at www.wcradio.com. I have always taken a great interest and derived a lot of enjoyment from theorycrafting, so the addition of this show to the line up of WoW Radio was exciting. And when the latest show featured Protection Paladin theorycraft I had to give it a go.

Now, my own story is that late in the Burning Crusade I happened to reroll from Undead Rogue to a Blood Elf Paladin. My guild had disbanded and there was no other guild on my server that was progressing in Sunwell. This, coupled with the fact that real life commitments meant that I was not going to server transfer and find another hardcore guild, and as such my Undead Rogue was vastly overgeared for the content that I was going to be able to raid anyway. In The Burning Crusade I raided with Ambellina as Retribution, which was fun and games. I started out doing the same in Wrath of the Lich King as well, but when I decided that 25 mans was no longer for me I decided to take up Protection as my main spec.

I have never claimed to be a naturally gifted player, by which I mean that my twitch skills are sorely lacking. I also tend to tunnel vision too easily. My reaction time is not as good as the really good players. However I have always taken some pride in the fact that I know how to play my class. I know the mechanics, I know the theorycraft, I know how to gear, I know how to glyph, I know exactly what my talents should be. As such, I was quite interested to learn what Natural20 had to say about the matter of Protadins.

Now, to start off I want to say that I did enjoy the podcast. However I did feel it was not very accurate at the best of times and gave out a lot of either dated or incorrect information when it came both to gear and to talents.

I am still not quite sure about what kind of target audience this show is aimed at. I think it did a decent enough job at conveying the basics of the spec you should shoot for. In fact the final spec it ended up advocating is just about as cookie cutter as you get when you have twelve free talent points to throw around and I certainly cannot fault anyone for speccing in that way. However there was not much discussion about very relevant alternatives. In fact there was a gaping flaw in the advice given; we never got to know just what we were tanking. Now of course cookie cutter is cookie cutter for a reason, it can be used for anything. But seeing that Protection Paladins do have twelve free points to spend as they wish, it does mean that you should tailor your spec to be optimized for the content and the role you are trying to master and fulfill.

I must add of course that I do realize that when doing a podcast you have to some extent be selective about the information you want to impart. You do not have all the time in the world, you need to review what is essential and what is not. As a blogger I have a lot more time at my disposal and if I were to try to condense this information into a sixty minute slot, I would have to cut a lot of it.

Happily this is my blog and I can be as verbose as I feel like.

The Talents – The Skeleton Spec

Now the skeleton spec is a bit of a misnomer. Before you are able to fill out the Protection tree you already have three talent points that are non-essential. The cookie cutter build looks like this:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sZV0tAbuMusIufdxo

The three floater points are in Divine Sacrifice and in Divine Guardian. These are obviously utility talents and do not directly help your mitigation, avoidance or threat. Some other variations would be:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sZV0tAMuMusIufdxo

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sZA0xA0uMusIufdxo

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sZA0xA0uMusIufdxo

The first one maxing out Improved Hammer of Justice. I would use this for five man content and if you are assigned to mobs that are stunnable or where you need an interrupt and cannot rely on the raid to consistently back you up. It is a very nice spec all around, it is great on trash and having a stun or interrupt on a twenty second cooldown is not to be underestimated, even in a raid setting. There are tons of examples in hard mode content where this really pays off.

The second build incorporates Divinity for your floater points. Basically it means that your incoming heals will be a bit stronger. In most content this is not really needed and a bit of a waste, however there are situations where it is beneficial and in a way you are not giving up anything but utility in order to make you ever so slightly easier to heal. Now most of the time this will in fact only contribute to overhealing, but there will be times where the effect will mean that you may live where you would otherwise die. It is not the best of talents, but it is not useless either.

The last variation of the skeleton Protection spec has Reckoning. Reckoning is interesting. Actually it is not, it is in fact rather boring, but with the advent of Seal of Vengeance as a dps seal it has become a bit more interesting than it was previously. And yeah, I do refer to Seal of Vengeance as a dps seal; it is blatantly a tanking seal as well but the dps aspect of it was buffed and it is now a real way of adding some real dps to the Protadin, and increased dps is increased threat and so forth.

Thus, the alternatives ares having a better shield effect, a better stun/interrupt, slightly more efficient heals on you and finally having slightly better threat.

This means that your spec is situation dependent. It does not mean, as Natural20 seems to think, that these three specs are equal. It is true that how you allocate your filler points does not make or break your spec, it does not mean life or death. However if you name your show ‘Just Plain Better’, I do not expect to only be told that it does not matter much and that any spec as respectable as long as you have the skeleton spec ready and do not waste them on de facto useless talents. The different talents specs do have their own strengths and they do shine in different situations.

If I were to be in five man content, I would never want to give up Improved Hammer of Justice. In heroics it is such a nice tool to have. As a main tank of ten or twenty five man raids, I might want another spec. However it does not mean that I would instantly jump onto the Divine Guardian spec. Whereas most people seem to treat the Divine Guardian spec as the default and the strongest Protection Paladin spec, I would have to disagree and say that depends on the context in which you find yourself. In ten mans I might prefer the Divine Guardian route, it depends on whether you have a Holy Paladin and whom your tanking partner happens to be. A Holydin’s shield will be stronger than yours and if you are maintanking that means that his shield will be on you. You might still want it if you want to throw it on the off tank, but I am not convinced that this will always be the way to go. In one tank situations it is completely wasted and even when you can use it to a good effect on your off-tank, it is at best an annoyance to have to handhold other tanks and at worst something that will negatively influence your own tanking performance through adding non-essential tasks for you to monitor when as a main tank you have enough to worry about in the first place. As such there are too many situations in which your two points in Divine Guardian will be completely wasted in order for anyone to proclaim it as a definite best spec.

In a ten man I am also liking Divinity as you may have a single healer on you, meaning that the overhealing will be more limited than in a twenty five man. Besides, Divinity may not be the best of talents but it is far from useless as I will be explaining more in depth later. On the other hand I might want Reckoning just for extra threat and for extra dps. If you are somewhat lucky it will trigger while building up Seal of Vengeance stacks the threat lead you take will be immense. It is also a bit of an obsession of mine to squeeze out as much dps and tps as possible when tanking without sacrificing survivability.

Concerning the three floating points and concerning what you want to do in general when in a raiding guild I will give you this advice. Instead of accepting by default that a given variation is the de facto best spec, you want to do this: Talk with your fellow players. Talk with your healers. Find out what weaknesses there are, what holes you should be plugging in. Talk with your dps. Do you need Divine Guardian or will it be mostly be provided by your Holydins? Will you want Reckoning to make your threat lead more comfortable? Tailor your spec to the encounters and to the strengths and weaknesses of your raid. It might not seem like much, and in a way it is not a huge deal. But if you want to be the best there is, it means squeezing out each and every single little drop of awesomeness out of your spec. Dispensable talents means just that.

The Power of the Paladins Saved

The Talents – The Final Spec

Now of course you need to fill out the rest. I would very much agree with Natural20 and go for a threat oriented spec:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sZV0xA0uGusIufdxfMzbc

The extra point in Improved Judgements can be put in Benediction. The reason to take Heart of the Crusader is for when you are the only one providing it, which will happen occasionally either due to Retribution Paladins not being on the same target: you may have to split up your raid, they may be on add duty, you may not have them at all and so forth. Pursuit of Justice is one of the nicest talents available to you, increased run speed is amazing for whenever you have to reposition yourself or for adds. Vindication is now a Demoralizing Shout you do not have to expend any resources on keeping up. On single target mobs it is just pure sense for you to be applying it and it also follows the same reasoning as that of Heart of the Crusader, due to raid split ups or unavailability of classes or specs you may have to keep it up on the mob you are tanking by yourself. Finally, Crusade is an incredible tps/dps increase.

You may want to diverge into the Holy tree. Keep in mind that speccing into Seals of the Pure will not be as much of a tps boost as going into Retribution, so the real reason may well be to reach Improved Lay on Hands. However this brings you out of reach of Vindication, which means that the extra cooldown as it were provided by Lay on Hands is mostly invalidated as far as boosting your own survivability goes. If you are a dedicated off tank you may want to consider this in order to use the cooldown on the main tank. As always, spec to your strengths and to bolster your raid. A Lay on Hands spec will look something like this; as always the three points in Protection can be moved and you can max out Divine Intellect instead of going for Unyielding Faith although in the case of the latter, I do not see why you would necessarily want to:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sVcbMZV0tAbuMusIufdxo

Consider this however. Instead of focusing on whether to go for Crusade or Improved Lay on Hands, you may want to go into some of the filler talents of the Protection tree. Forgoing Crusade and the one point in Conviction frees up three more points, letting you do things like max out either Reckoning or Divinity while picking up Divine Sacrifice.and having a floating point leftover:

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sZV0tA0ugusIufdxfM0b

http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#sZE0tA0uMusIufdxfM0b

The first spec being a pure Reckoning build, the second a pure Divinity one.

These are the main choices you make as far as speccing goes. You have a lot of options given that you have relatively few must have talents, at least when compared to other tanking classes. As long as you take the must haves and make sensible choices for the three floating talents in the Protection tree and allocate the final twelve points in a reasonable manner you have a solid spec. Do keep in mind that you will always excel if you do this based on your raid’s needs and your tanking role and that making these choices in tandem with your healers will not only make you more effective as a tank but also make for a more cohesive raiding team.

This concludes what I want to talk about concerning the actual specs. However I must talk about some of the comments Natural20 made about the talent choices and the rationale behind taking them.

The Filler Talents – Spec to Your Strength, Spec to Your Role

First off we have Divinity. It is a tier one talent and it looks reasonably good. It is not as good as Divine Strength of course, so it is not needed to reach the second tier. A lot of debate has been and is still going on regarding this talent. Most Protadins do not take it, for good reasons. In the podcast, the talent is described as something that only serves to save the healers mana. I take objection to this. In a raiding situation, I would argue that it is highly unlikely that a healer will save any mana at all due to the tank having this talent. The reason is this; on most hard encounters, where this would be a factor, the tank is being hit so hard that he needs to be topped up no matter what. Intuitively this suggests that Divinity would be a stellar talent, if the tank is in such a need of strong heals then making each heal stronger is surely a great boon. Yes, in a vacuum it is. However the truth is that you will not have that kind of precision of heals; if you need to be topped up then in almost all cases the extra healing added will only result in overhealing. Five per cent more healing is not going to let your Holydin cast a Flash of Light instead of a Holy Light, it is not going to allow your Priest to only cast one Flash Heal instead of two or to forego casting a Greater Heal if on tank duty. If this had been in The Burning Crusade, the mana saving argument would have been valid and the talent would have been quite exciting due to one thing: downranking. Downranking meant that healers could choose their mana expenditure based on the incoming tank damage to a much greater degree than now. Before the removal of downranking of spells you actually had healing precision. Now this is gone to a great extent, and Divinity suffers greatly from this.

The thread http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=19717561946&sid=1 on the Tanking Class Roles forums on the official site explores the issues, the benefits and downsides of this talent to some extent. There is some obvious trolling going on in the thread, but there are also a lot of valid discussion as to whether this talent should be considered as filler, as needed, as beneficial or indeed viable at all for the Paladin tank.

This is not to say that I see the talent as being useless. It will not always be overhealing. It will in some very specific situations save you. It is also worth to note that the talent is perceptibly better in ten mans than in twenty five mans. With less healers on tank duty each heal becomes more important and each tick of a HoT becomes more noticeable. It is still not a great talent at that, but at least you will see more of an effect from it. In fact it is noticeably better for some healing classes than others; hence your healing core make up does matter when choosing whether Divinity is worth it for you or not. Resto Druids will spend their time chain casting HoTs outside of their raid healing duties and if you are in a Resto Druid heavy raiding environment you should keep this in mind. Finally if you are going through heroics in poor gear or with a poor healer the talent gains effectiveness. Just some things to consider. Really, this is a filler talent and that is mostly what there is to it. It might make your healers happy to see, it might just save you at some point, though this can also be said about the alternatives. However if your healers are struggling on mana, do not take this talent in order to help them out; there are most certainly other issues at hand and other solutions that will actually prove to be effective as to remedy this specific malaise.

Finally concerning the filler Protection talents. Between Improved Hammer of Justice, Divinity and Divine Guardian you have three talents that all grant you varying degrees and forms of survivability. Up front it is obvious that Divinity is going to increase the healing you receive. However you may find that Divine Guardian will be superior if you do not have other Paladins to give you Sacred Shield. On the other hand stunning adds will help offset a lot more damage than either of the other talents in more specialized situations.

Spec for your raid, spec for your role and spec to your own strengths.

Awesomeness and Epicness

The Evolution of the Single Player Experience

Most MMORPGs set out to be very different from single player RPGs, there is a chasm between the two and there is a good reason why they are coined differently. Fundamentally, the reason is of course that one is an online game featuring however many people co-existing whereas the other is just what it says, a single player game. However there are a lot of differences that do not stem from the actual basics of the game, but rather due to how developers have operated and how mechanics and features have become a tradition.

Most MMORPGs have very little to offer the single player; indeed quite a few of them such as the first incarnation of DDO and Final Fantasy Online make it nigh impossible to operate as a solo player. The need to be in a party becomes not only the most efficient way to play, it becomes a paradigm of sorts. If the choice is between leveling up in a group, doing dungeons or even just non-instanced stuff where you can kill a variety of things efficiently and for good loot or soloing the same two mobs over and over for little reward for yourself, the single player option is pretty much non-existent.

In some ways, World of Warcraft changed this even in its vanilla incarnation. Questing was something quite new to the MMORPG scene and made it possible to reach the endgame without having to interact much with other players. In fact questing can be a lot more enjoyable and efficient when playing solo; instead of having to wait around for another person who may or may not have the same goals and priorities as yourself, you are left to your own devices and can plan your time and your travels within the game as you please.

Now as stated in my introduction to this blog, I do not believe that World of Warcraft offered anything near the best of single player experiences up on launch. However, it was a huge step in the direction of integrating what is good and enjoyable about regular RPGs into the MMORPG experience. When you are playing a single player game, you want to be challenged but a lot of the things that are challenging in MMORPGs while leveling are things that generally you would never want to see elsewhere. A single player game can only have so many time sinks, and if they exist they are usually camouflaged by role playing features or combat systems that are exciting to play and to master. You might be able to deal with the fact that you need to grind for several weeks in order to reach maximum level in an MMORPG; the goal of reaching endgame may well be worth that investment. If you introduced that concept in a regular RPG the game would simply be awful.

So to some extent I think it is fair to say that World of Warcraft bridged that gap. If we look back and actually take in what was said about the game when it was first launched, one of the main selling points was its accessability, its rebalancing of the carrot and stick approach and how you could actually enjoy the game while leveling up instead of simply having to go through a very extended grind.

With Wrath of the Lich King, it is my firm belief that Blizzard has refined and ultimately made huge progress on bridging that gap even further. They have taken one of the main features of a well developed and successful RPG and made that a centerpiece of the expansion: I am of course talking about cohesive and compelling story driven content.

Whereas both vanilla and The Burning Crusade featured a lot of quests, a lot of storylines and plots, Blizzard never succeeded in truly integrating these features into a cohesive whole. Granted you get some questlines that span different zones and build up to you entering a dungeon or a raid, but very rarely do you see the story of the game really unfolding. You are basically being told by complete strangers that there is a very evil entity lurking in some lair somewhere and that it needs killing. Sometimes they offer you some items to do this, sometimes they do not.

And more importantly, never ever do you really see the influence of these entitites in the world. Ragnaros never really hurt you. Neither did Nefarion. They tried to do something with the Silithid, with Silithus as a zone and the opening of the gates of Ahn’Qiraj, but they failed to make it truly compelling; we all know about the infamous ‘We must repel the Silithid…we will do so with over nine thousand Peacebloom and half a metric ton of Red Snappah!’. Some of the same issues were found with the opening of the Sunwell. It was a token effort, but it lacked both elegance and story immersion when it came to the execution.

I think Blizzard learned important lessons from both their successes and failures in vanilla and TBC. They must know that their more casual approach to MMORPGs is fundamental to their success. Many people like to complain about Blizzard catering to casuals, and while the full discussion of this is rather beyond the scope of this post I will point out that the whole idea with World of Warcraft was to cater to the more casual player; to offer him or her the chance to play an MMORPG without having to deal with all the hardcore elements that put them off the alternatives.

And in some ways I think that even the ones that complain about this catering, real or imagined, have a lot to be thankful for when it comes to Blizzard evolving their own game. Leaving aside raiding for a moment, I do not think that there is anyone who will honestly say that they thought vanilla was a superior product to Wrath when it comes to most facets of the game.

Given that questing was one of the most applauded features of the game when it was released, it makes sense that Blizzard are striving to make that feature stronger, to refine it and to make it worth to play the game on those terms alone. Of course, if you do so you lose out a lot of what the game has to offer; the question however must be whether World of Warcraft now would be strong enough as a single player title?

My conviction is that, with Wrath, yes it is. It would not be the best single player game ever created, however it would be strong enough. And why is that? Again we must return to storyline and immersion, the main features aside from the combat system of an RPG.

What Wrath did to the telling of the storyline is impressive. One of Blizzard’s strong points has always been to see what is good in other games and to adapt that to their own. In this case they spotted just what makes the story good in a lot of RPGs; having a proactive antagonist that actually molds the world of the adventurers. Some famous examples would be Sephiroth in Final Fantasy VII, Jon Irenicus in Baldur’s Gate II. Prior to Wrath, World of Warcraft had no such antagonist, all the villains had somehow decided to stop actually perpetrating their evil out in the open, opting to stay behind closed doors, preferably so out of the way that they posed no threat to anyone.

Enter Arthas.

In Wrath you have Arthas. Arthas is the whole reason for the expansion, much more so than what Illidan was to TBC. Arthas is in fact everywhere, the heroes of Azeroth, that is you and me and a few million more level 70s at the time, are going into his continent. Into his land, his territory where he has a huge amount of control over the events that unfold. Not only do we clearly see his influence and his machinations just about everywhere we go, we get to see him take an active hand in foiling our plans and in general making our lives that much more miserable.

In Wrath you feel that there is a compelling reason to quest. In short you start to care about the questlines, you start to care about the NPCs and you become genuinely interested in the story that Blizzard is telling you. Yes, Blizzard are still telling you a story, the world is still static, the content is not player created.

But now it is a good story.

For the first time in World of Warcraft they have managed to make million of players actually care about the world. Not only about going out to kill the Liches and the Dragons in their instances, but they have managed to create a story where you want to find out what happens next. You may in fact find yourself forgetting to stare at your experience bar because you are actually enjoying being told this story about the corruption of a human prince, how the Alliance and Horde met up on his very gates and were betrayed by a rogue faction of the Forsaken.

A good RPG makes you care about two things: Your character and the world in which it lives. This is the kind of threshold an MMORPG has failed to reach. With Wrath we are getting there. No, it is not perfect and yes, due to how World of Warcraft operates on a fundamental level there is still real issues with the suspension of disbelief. In a static world, you will not ever truly be able to avoid that pitfall. The question is whether you are able to treat it as a single player experience and deem it good enough.

As such, I think Blizzard is on the right track. If I am right in this, it has some interesting implications for the kind of players the game both will attract and in some ways indeed fashion. A game will always endear itself and attract a certain kind of player. However it would be a fallacy to believe that a player remains unchanged when playing the game, at least if the game is worth a damn. On a basic level a game will make the player change with it, to evolve qua player with it. And making World of Warcraft a hybrid game between an MMORPG and an RPG will indeed result in the player base evolving, you will see new playstyles that the other two types will not really hold or at least not actively cater to.

Given that this has been one of the most compelling changes to the game, I assume that this is a facet of the game Blizzard are actively looking at to improve and to polish. What I want to continue to explore are the consequences of these design decisions. There is a very interesting dichotomy of sorts that come to life here; when Blizzard are bridging the gap between the MMORPG and RPG experience, they are in fact creating a new gap between the MMORPG and RPG player. What this means is that if you cater to both sorts, you will end up with players who will not really know how to deal with the other side. Of course for the players who are playing WoW for the MMORPG experience, getting a better solo game is but a net bonus. The questing got better, the storyline got more involved and more enjoyable, the game feels more polished outside the dungeon crawling and farming for consumables. However the player who get into the game, enjoyed the solo experience now that it has become very much an enjoyable aspect of the game may feel overwhelmed and out of touch when the solo parts of the game has been completed. Historically that was bridged in part by default because the game was not good enough to play through in a solo fashion, the group dynamics of the game were so much better that you would be forced into the MMO part of the RPG in order to enjoying the road to the endgame.

This last part has in some ways been removed. And that makes the new gap, not only for new players but also for people who were very casual to begin with, both in approach and in game time. And while it is possible to bridge that gap successfully, it will now require player interaction and creativity, something that has been left out of the game to a large extent due to the popularity of the single player mode.

World of Warcraft through Obsidia-tinted Spectacles

As mentioned on Obsidia’s main pages, I will be starting my World of Warcraft blog. The idea is to publish my own thoughts about the game highlighting my experiences. The perspective will be from a player who has experienced most playstyles in regards to PvE; I will try to explain just how I ended up raiding end game  content when I started out thinking that my Shaman was the best tank Scarlet Monastery had ever seen, how I ended up making 100k without gathering professions when my first character was so broke getting a normal mount seemed like an unsurmountable challenge.

However, just reading about what an unknown Warcraft player has achieved in the game would perhaps not be the most exciting of leisures. Indeed, that is not the focus of my writings, although I will admit that what I write will be heavily influenced by my own experiences and my own preferences will shine through. Thus I feel that some things should be known about my background. I started playing WoW not having played an MMORPG, indeed no MMO at all previously. I have played RPGs, both single player games and pen and paper. I adored games like Planescape: Torment and Baldur’s Gate on the PC, and they were indeed my transition from a pen and paper world into the world of computer games. As such, I still have a strong sense of wanting to play single player games and an affinity for what makes these games enjoyable and successful.

World of Warcraft was in this sense an easy jump to make into the realm of MMOs and MMORPGs. As many others I was introduced to the game through a friend; however I started out playing the game by myself. No guild, just one person on my friends list. And unlike a lot of other MMORPGs, WoW actually worked like that for me. Granted, I was very much blue eyed and bushy tailed, at the time I had not played a computer game that I truly enjoyed for a long time, and WoW made me realize how much I had missed the PC gaming experience. It was not perfect, but it was enough to drag me in. Later on of course I realized that the best parts of the game, at least at that time, for me was to raid, raid and then hopefully raid some more before chilling out in Orgrimmar or Shattrath with my online friends, joking about silly wipes and talking about just when we would be able to finally down the elusive Ildina Stromage who possibly was amassing a huge army of…something or other in Heroic Ragefire Chasm. (This is an in-guild joke and may not make sense to you. Sorry.)

Well that is all nice and dandy. It really sets me apart from just about the two and a half million WoW players who have basically experienced the exact same thing. Except for the last joke, that narrows it down a lot of course but it is also completely irrelevant, unless I intend to turn this blog into ‘Ambellina’s almost amusing jokes and stream of consciousness type ramblings’. I do not intend to follow that route.

So what is it that makes this the time to start writing about World of Warcraft for me? There are some changes to the game that I think means that new playstyles are not only endorsed by Blizzard but makes for a change of pace when comparing to the raid or die/arena or die mentalities that were prevalent in The Burning Crusade.

While I loved the experiences I had in TBC, Wrath of the Lich King has offered some major improvements to the game play. I found myself actually liking the leveling from 70 to 80. I found myself caring about the quests, the storylines and the NPCs I met. I think this was a common theme for a lot of players. Initially what I wanted to do was to level as fast as possible, only taking the most efficient quests and blazing through to the end game where I could start raiding again. As it turned out, yeah I hit 80 relatively quickly but what had transpired was that instead of having gone through it and feeling just relieved that it was all over, I had enjoyed myself. I hit 80 while doing Sholazar Basin; I had completed all the questlines in all the previous zones. It was not an efficient way of leveling, but I could not force myself to not see what was going to happen next just to level faster. And lo and behold, when I hit 80 there was no question in my mind as to whether I would or would not complete all of Sholazar, then complete both Storm Peaks and Icecrown. True, I did that in part to gain reputation with the factions therein, but at that point my main interest was actually to see what happened next and to understand the storyline of the expansion.

For someone who in TBC was raiding full time and for whom raiding and instancing was the only truly enjoyable content, that was a huge change.

The point is that Blizzard has evolved their game. I am not going to say that World of Warcraft is the best single player experience ever. It is not a single player game. However they have improved that aspect of the game sufficiently so that it is a worthwhile playstyle. Vanilla WoW was nowhere near story driven enough so that single player mode was comparable to a fully fletched and good single player game. TBC offered some improvements, but it was still hugely fragmented and the zones did not really offer a cohesive storyline. With Wrath this has changed, and while it is not perfect, it is very good.

As always however, at some point single player mode (and no, I am not talking about some elusive in game mode that you have simply not noticed but rather the act of treating the game as a single player game, enjoying it as such) becomes obsolete. It becomes obsolete when you have finished all your quests. It also becomes flawed when you need to complete dungeons in order to further progress your own questlines. Simply put, it only goes so far. While you could say that this is fine, you have finished the game at that point, you have to consider that of course the vast majority of players will want to see what comes next. What does come next is usually finding groups, then finding a guild that both fits you and where you fit in.

Starting out this blog, I want to explore just how you evolve your single player experience. How do you go from the person who enjoyed the single player experience to the person who wants to see more? Because while Blizzard has done a stunning job at making their game more enjoyable to the single player person, they have not done enough to make the transition from single player to group player neither easy nor indeed intuitive.