The Light and How to Swing It: Holy Shield and the future of active mitigation
by Matt Walsh 
Sep 2nd 2011 at 2:00PM
It's been a little more than two months now since patch 4.2 brought us the redesigned Holy Shield. Since then, we've had ample time to see its true power, to see what an amazing addition to our toolbox it is. And that's only the beginning.
Blizzard is gearing up in either patch 4.3 (or, more likely, 5.0) to introduce a new facet of tanking for all classes -- what it's deemed "active mitigation". Coupled with the (in my opinion, misguided) neutering of threat, the profession of tanking is going to change dramatically. In this column, I'm going to talk about the ramifications of the Holy Shield change in regards to active mitigation -- specifically, what it's meant for paladin tanking in the Firelands and how it points the way to a future of more control over our survivability.
Holy Shield in Firelands
In the lead-up to patch 4.2, there was a huge outcry over the imminent Holy Shield change. The assumption in many quarters was that the coupled loss of 10% constant block chance would make us a weaker tank. However, since the new Holy Shield's debut, I think it's safe to say that it has become exceedingly apparent how powerful it has made us.
Consider Baleroc, whose Inferno Blades can be defanged with the effective use of Holy Shield (along with being block-capped). Every fiery strike within 10 seconds of the 15-second duration of the boss's buff is trimmed by 50%. Use the Mirror of Broken Images on top of that, or perhaps a glyphed Divine Protection, and what would pose a horrible threat otherwise is reduced to a tickle -- so to speak.
Another example: On Alysrazor, when tanking hatchlings, the most dangerous point is when a hatchling goes into a Tantrum. This can happen fairly frequently if you have bad luck with the bird's Hungry debuff. While most cooldowns are far too long (a minute can be an eternity!) to cover your posterior, Holy Shield's 30-second cooldown is perfect for lining up with the Tantrums and gives us far greater control over our lives that we would have without it.
There are other examples I won't go into, but the conclusion here is clear. The new active Holy Shield has made us far stronger tanks.
Nonetheless, the point of all this is that Holy Shield -- and to a degree, Word of Glory and even the Mirror of Broken Images proc -- are a new breed of tank cooldowns. The shape of things to come: short cooldowns that reward intelligent use rather than just popping as soon they become available, and that encourage proactive use rather than reactive flailing.
Hints of what active mitigation will be
In Lead Systems Designer Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street's Dev Watercooler, Threat Level Midnight, he described in his long-term changes section a vision of what could become of our abilities. The operative phrase here seems to be that tanks will "use the DK model of managing resources to maximize survivability."
He goes further to say that Blizzard "toyed at one point with the paladin Holy Shield being a Holy Power consumer and we think we could do so again [and that they] could make Word of Glory the thing you're supposed to do with Holy Power."
The idea, it seems, is resources for survivability, not for threat -- which since the start of Cataclysm, makes perfect sense. Consider how many times you've been faced with a choice between threat and survivability -- casting Shield of the Righteous or Word of Glory, for example. What choice did you make? Obviously (outside of the first 30 seconds of a fight), you chose survivability. And why not? There is no better choice!
What good is a Shield Slam when you can throw yourself a quick 35k heal while a boss is knocking out your teeth? The truth is that survivability wins every time. That's why Blizzard nerfed Word of Glory and gave it a 20-second cooldown, because people would endlessly spam that as soon as they reached 3 holy power.
The fruits of Vengeance -- when threat doesn't matter, no ones cares about it. And rather than doubling down, I think Blizzard has decided it makes more sense at this juncture just to fold and try something else. If we won't use our resources on threat, then the developers will make it more meaningful for us to use them on survivability.
Moreover, in Ghostcrawler's latest Dev Watercooler, Bloody Mitigation, he laid out three different possibilities for how active mitigation could take form. Personally, I feel like he's leaning toward model three, just based on how many words (and thus extra thought) he's contributed to the choice. There's not much else to chew on in that post, though, just hand waving.
So what does this all mean?
We're on the cusp of the biggest change to paladin tanking since Wrath gave us attacks other than drop Consecration and reflect damage back on the enemy. Assuming Blizzard follows through with its stated intent of what active mitigation could mean, and we could be looking at a vastly different experience when it comes to tanking.
And I think it will be change for the better.
I've been tanking on my paladin for a long time now, since the beginning of The Burning Crusade, and I think right now is the most interesting that tanking has ever been as a paladin. I'm sure this will be an unpopular opinion, so go ahead and start lighting those torches and sharpening those pitchforks -- but if active mitigation provides more of this direction, I am totally on board.
Paladin tanking since the start of this expansion has rewarded good and conscientious tanking like never before. We have this huge toolbox at our disposal with varied cooldowns that are ideal for differing situations. Your survivability has never been as tangible as it is now; you control it, and in many cases, the difference between life and death is whether you use the proper cooldown.
More than any other tank, paladins are masters of their own destinies. If I may so bold as to engage in flagrant hyperbole, the only thing that can kill a paladin tank with all his or her cooldowns up is a dead router (or Baleroc, with twitchy healers...).
Assuming active mitigation is not completely botched (and I know sometimes that is a mighty assumption to make), it will make tanking much more interesting and much more rewarding. I also think it will make it much more fun -- but that might just be me and my preternatural masochism. I'm very much looking forward to the direction 4.3 is taking us, and I encourage you to not fear the future.
The Light and How to Swing It shows paladin tanks how to take on the dark times brought by Cataclysm. Try out our 4 tips for upping your combat table coverage, find out how to increase threat without sacrificing survivability, and learn how to manage the latest version of Holy Shield.
Filed under: (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It, Paladin
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
WeWhoEat Sep 2nd 2011 2:38PM
Would you expand on why you feel the threat changes were misguided? Or was there another article where you went into that more? I have nothing but good feelings about the threat change because threat at best was something that way mildly interesting, and at worst a reason that made the game not fun to play at all (threat mechanics really were more dominated by the actions your teammates took rather than the encounter itself, and in many cases you felt like you were playing against your party).
Changing that gameplay mechanic to something that looks to be a lot more fun in most aspects of the game and doesn't go against the grain of player behavior seems like a win/win decision on blizz's part. Obviously we'll have to see how it all pans out when the details are in place.
Matt Walsh Sep 2nd 2011 2:45PM
Sure, I'd be glad to. Essentially I felt that threat was a compelling part of the tank gameplay "package" that gave me a tangible benchmark to achieve outside of just staying alive. I found it enjoyable to provide a decent threat ceiling for the raid and it made me feel like I was contributing more to the raid than just being punched in the face.
I also feel like there could have been better changes made to threat outside of jacking modifiers up to 500% and leaving it at that. For example, the proffered early boost to Vengeance generation that we'll be seeing soon would have been a more than adequate fix in my opinion, just by itself.
It'd allow you to not have to struggle to get that early lead -- or fight against RNG in that regard -- and then make holding threat then on out not as difficult if you have a rough first thirty seconds. It would still require you to pay attention to threat so that if you slack in your rotation your teammates would catch up, but take out the frustration usually baked into the first thirty seconds when things can go so wrong.
Vitos Sep 2nd 2011 3:01PM
Well, the change was in a hotfix, and it may not have been possible to do the vengeance thing without a fullscale patch. I like the change, as it lets me not worry about it at all (before I had to worry if our mage goes all out in the first 10s). But other than that, it doesn't change anything- at least, for me.
WeWhoEat Sep 2nd 2011 3:11PM
You have to always think of the two things married, they're replacing the threat ceiling gameplay with active mitigation gameplay. Taken by itself, yeah the threat change has made tanking more boring, but it can't be analysed simply like that, they needed to take something out to replace it with something better. I wouldn't want to have to still worry about multi target threat while managing more complex active mitigation mechanics.
Threat has become passe, especially in light of such ingrained player behavior fighting against it (both from a tank side and a DPS side). Its time to replace it with something more compelling.
Randy Sep 2nd 2011 3:52PM
I respectfully disagree with Matt on the threat changes....because now I don't get kicked out of troll heroics because of my gear (hello we have to run them to get better gear) compared to decked out FL gear folks just farming VP.
However I feel this definitely more due to bad and too fast inflated scaling on gear.
In short....Im fine with the change....but Blizzard created the problem (as well as DPSers who just can't wait 2-4 seconds before nuking the hell out of everything).
fufu Sep 2nd 2011 5:20PM
I'm not a fan of the threat change. Before you could usually tell a good tank from a bad tank based on threat to some extent. Do tehy know the rotation? Are they using the right seal ( Which half the time they are not), are they spec'd correct?
Now, nothing distinguishes a good tank with 50 to 60k threat before the nerf to a tank doing 30k since it doesn't matter.
Aside from gear levels, threat hasn't been a problem in all of cata, but I have run into some not stellar tanks with good gear doing horrible threat and generally bad play.
Ret Paladins, Frost DKs, and mages for me are always the worst offenders in pulling agro at the beginning of a fight, but popping divine plea, judging/shielding on the way in usually was enough to manage once vengeance kicks in.
WeWhoEat Sep 2nd 2011 6:47PM
@fufu are you reading this thread at all??? You can't look at simply the threat removal and say "I'm not a fan of the threat change", the threat removal was to make way for the active mitigation changes that are yet to come you can't have both because then it would be too busy. Could the devs have waited till they'd finish their active mitigations changes first before neutering threat? Sure, but obviously they felt it was something important to get in sooner rather than later and the pros of making PUGs with bad or apathetic DPS (or just plain out geared DPS as the example randy made) more tolerable were more important than the con of temporarily losing the joy of providing a great threat ceiling for your raid.
Ghostcrawler is essentially saying "Threat has problems, and we feel that its not a compelling mechanic anymore, we're replacing it with something else". Threat was fun (where it was fun) because it was our only significant mechanic. They're replacing that with something they feel will be more fun, more of the time, and be more compelling along the lines we choose to be tanks for. I for sure chose to tank for the thrill of staying alive against the odds of massive foes, not for the thrill of allowing DPS to start earlier or sustain throughput longer. I took pride in the later, but only because it was the only things to truly take pride in as a tank in this game.
You will be able to tell a good tank from a bad tank when they put in the active mitigation mechanics. The good tanks will still be alive, be able to pull more and have their healers sustain mana for longer.
Vitos Sep 2nd 2011 2:58PM
I agree with the general opinion. Just the other night I realized how much more fun it is to see that an ability is coming up and blow a short CD before it happens instead of getting knocked down to 5% and blowing everything I have ala Wrath.
Baek Sep 2nd 2011 3:23PM
I'm a bit on the fence about this. It seems that making Holy Shield require holy power makes sense, but I'm not a big fan of having my tanking cooldowns require a charge up period. It also means that if you miss with Crusader Strike and Avenger's Shield (when Grand Crusader Procs) you can't rely on a fully charged Holy Shield to protect you for at least another CS cooldown. Do I think that Holy Power and Holy Shield could be tied in together in a useful way? Yes. To be honest I think it could be something like Inquisition where the duration is altered by the amount of holy power, not the strength of the shield. If you only need protection from a short burst of a single attack, one or two holy power would be all you need. If you need to survive a longer chain of attacks then you can save up a full three holy power.
This also leads me to another point, holy power in general needs a bit of tweaking. You have to generate a full three holy power to make anything that uses holy power worth using at all. But why not make it logical in certain situations to use it at one or two holy power. A thought that just came to me would be to make the amount of holy power adjust the various strengths/duration of Holy Shield. At one Holy Power, the shield would be it's strongest, but only last a few seconds. At three Holy Power it's a bit weaker in terms of damage reduction, but it lasts much much longer, lending to softening sustained damage. It would be the ultimate tool in my opinion giving you flexibility in the way the ability is used. The only issue would be predicting and building the holy power and conserving it. Though if you need the sustained reductions, three CD's probably won't kill you and you could wait a second to use the ability. But if you were at two or three and needed to only have one and needed it fast, a few GCD's might be disastrous. Something that could use various quantities of Holy Power might work. Expend a charge and gain something in return.
Anywho, just thinking out loud.
PodPeople Sep 2nd 2011 5:12PM
Baek,
I think that is a really great idea. Possibly the best one I've heard in a long time. Might I suggest you post it on an official forum so that it has a chance of happening in game.
I am 100% with you on that Holy power needs tweaking. The ramp-up time to 3 stacks is retardedly slow (in truth I find the whole holy power system to be literally retarded), that is barring the good favor of the RNG gods. 18sec to get to 3 holy power has got to be the slowest ramp-up to a special attack/ability of any class. My main idea for lowering the time was to make it so that more things have a chance to activate the Avg Shield proc, and the proc would allow you to gain holy power off of your next use, which would be far nicer than 'you must use it in the next 10sec or it's useless to you' that it is right now. Often I find it procs right at the worst time to try to use it, but maybe it's just my bad luck. The way it sits now they might as well scrap the Holy Power put WoG and SotR on a shared 18sec CD that has a proced refresh, it wouldn't really change much. In fact, I might find that to be more 'compelling game play' than the annoyance we have in the current system.
Angus Sep 3rd 2011 12:01AM
AS will always give a holy power when GC procs.
Personally I think they could have fixed things with 2 changes.
1: remove diminishing returns on tanking stats. Sorry, but a single role having to do advanced calculus to know what they are getting is stupid.
2: add threat stats to every piece of tanking gear. Lower the tanking stats and use the points for threat stats.
#1 allows #2 to happen with little loss to survivability. #2 means we could work on our DPS. That makes more threat and that means we could raise that ceiling.
A tank should make something so mad it tries to kill them and survive the attempt. It used to be one could be good at both and the mark of skill was being goo at both.
Thanks to the castration of healers, giving up the survivability is a danger. Sorry, but I have been healing a lot. The current model with tanks is close enough to Wrath that it is horrible. I fail to heal a tank back up to full and the next few seconds he will be dead.
As a tank this sucks a lot. I would much rather there were 3 stats on every piece of gear and one was hit or expertise. I am getting sick of sitting on my hands for 3-4 rotations thanks to a 9% chance to miss is somehow 5 of 6 crusader strikes.
Ell Dez Sep 2nd 2011 3:38PM
This is a nice article. I'm not a pally, but I like hearing opinions regarding the active mitigation model.
I don't agree that minimizing the impact of threat was misguided. Even if you sidestep the debate on whether or not threat management was fun, a group of players that all have exactly ilvl 346 are TECHNICALLY capable of completing a troll heroic (though not quickly or well) and a group of exactly i392 is certainly capable of doing the same. Both extremes and everything in between have to be able to play well together. If a DPS is not working out, they can fix their rotation, be replaced, or just be carried with few ill effects. If a tank can't keep up with the DPS, no matter who's fault that is, that's a significant and visible problem. If it's strictly a problem of gear (and it isn't always), then the DPS will have to throttle or risk upsetting the flow of battle.
Could they have done something other than obviating threat? Probably, but I understand the reasoning.
matticus Sep 2nd 2011 4:09PM
Right now, when I tank on my Paladin in 10m Normal instances, I feel like I am in greater danger of death than ever before, because my healers get so damn bored they forget to pay attention to me.
steve Sep 2nd 2011 5:47PM
I read ghostcrawler's latest post to be suggesting a model by which holy shield and word of glory both use holy power and have no meaningful cool down. That could be an interesting model if implemented well.
raine13 Sep 2nd 2011 9:32PM
grumpy old man says: "i don't want any more buttons to press, no matter how powerful they might be!"
i rarely use holy shield now, cause i really can't be bothered to fit another button into my um "rotation". i want like 5 buttons. that's it. its not fun to have to A) relearn my darn class every few months, and B) have to figure out which of like 15 buttons i need to press next.
gimme 6 or even 8 things to work with, fine. but really, i'm just not going to use any more spells than i already have. too many buttons. maybe i'll replace one? i don't need crusader strike do i? i'll just hammer everything. it has a cooler sound anyway. and really, do we need 5 different spells for "hitting it with my sword"? or more bubbles? why not just give me 1 bubble with a 10 second cooldown? rather than 5 different bubbles that all have "blah blah blah" for a description?
on that thought.... can't wait for Diablo3... then i can get by with 2 buttons again, right?
PS, i probably tanked your random heroic last week. you know, the one where that pally tank just handled everything like it was on easymode. all jokes aside, i know what i'm doing, and i don't want or need more buttons. game's too complex already- just let us play!
Argent Sep 5th 2011 3:00PM
I'm personally in the opinion that 1) Inquisition is a lame Holy Power dump for tanks and 2) Holy Power should have always been about survivability for Protection. In the case of #1, you barely need Inquisition anymore after the first 10 - 30 seconds of using the AoE threat rotation, and unlike Shield of the Righteous, Inquisition's effects are not noticeable; Shield of the Righteous does a big chunk of damage while Inquisition improves everything else slightly. For #2, our DPS spec uses Holy Power to DPS, our healing spec uses Holy Power to heal, so why doesn't our tank spec us Holy Power to mitigate / survive? As we all know, not dying is a tank's REAL job ;-P.
Personally, the first think I would like to see for Protection Paladins is a model similar to what Greg Street proposed. Inquisition is left to Retribution, Shield of the Righteous no longer requires Holy Power (but therefore doesn't hit anywhere near as hard as it used to), and Word of Glory, Holy Shield, and MAYBE a third ability are the primary outlet for Holy Power (to be frank, Holy Shield and World of Glory would probably be fine on their own).
For Word of Glory, first the ability would need to have no Cooldown. If we're going to be expected to actively use it to mitigate, then the ability needs to actively be active in the first place. In such a word, it might need a tune-down in how much it can heal. I also think that Guarded by the Light could use a tweak or two, but I suppose we'll see. Now, for Holy Shield, it should probably stay similar to what it is now, except drop the base damage blocked down to 30%, maybe add a small bit of the damage reflection back from the TBC glory days. Then use Holy Power charges to determine how long it lasts. And yes, I am aware that 30% is the base number of what a Paladin blocks right now. The reason I suggest 30% as a base is so that Paladins can essentially be backwards Death Knights.
Added either to our Mastery or to Holy Shield itself, I think the amount of damage blocked by Holy Shield should scale with Expertise. It makes more sense than Hit; someone with more Expertise in using a shield is going to be better at blocking attacks. They'd be an expert at it, as a matter of fact. I don't like the idea of tying Hit rating to Holy Shield. I shouldn't have to "hit" an oncoming attack. I think tying the mechanic to expertise is not only fair (Paladins now view Expertise as a mitigation stat instead of a threat stat), but themeatically makes more sense than Hit rating.
That isn't to say that I'm against Paladin tanks ever needing Hit Rating either. If Blizzard finds a way to do it, cool. Just don't tie it to Holy Shield. I think wanting Crusader Strike and perhaps Shield of the Righteous to hit is a good start. I like the idea of turning Shield of the Righteous into a cooldown (12 - 18 seconds) that generates Holy Power and does something else is a cool one. A short cooldowned attack that makes a charge of Holy Power could be the thing we need to shaken up the 69 Rotation a little bit; perhaps add a cool chance Proc on Shield of the Righteous that immediately copies the last Holy Power attack the Paladin used at the same Holy Power strength; that would make it a button you want to press.
In terms of making tanks want more Stats, I think Blizzard did it best with Death Knights and Druids. Neither one of those classes looks at Hit, Expertise (DK) or Crit (Druid) and says "these stats will help me keep threat!" They look at those stats and say "I need these stats to survive." Ultimately, if Blizzard wants Warriors and Paladins to care about stats other than Mastery, then they need to give reasons why we should, and one of the obvious answers, as I showed with my own opinions above, is to tie the effectiveness of Mastery to another stat, in my case, Holy Shield gets more effective as you gain Mastery and Expertise; it will actually work more often and with more Expertise you mitigate more damage.
That's my $20 on the topic.
Izzy Sep 3rd 2011 5:01PM
I welcome it, I also welcome the removal of full CTC. Full CTC has been an issue in the game since BC - and it continues to be an issue for non-block tanks. It'd be nice to have a world where you could tell tank skill by damage taken not by class played or threat meters. I miss threat, and I found it a compelling part of the game, but in all honesty threat hasn't mattered since Vengeance, so why not just remove it.
Deisyan Sep 4th 2011 8:52AM
They should turn Shield of the Righteous into a Holy power point generator. 3-6second CD.
World of Glory and Holy Shield should be Tankidins HPP dumb.
WoG, cd should be reduced deep in the tree to 0 CD.
Holy Shield should return to the BC days, adds 10% more block, instead of current 20%. With the reflective damage that scales with ap/sp.
This would give us pallies, a HPP dumb for magic attacks(WoG) and physical.(HS)
that is my 2c