3.2.2 is a Protection Patch

Patch notes! 3.2.2 is on the horizon (sorta, if you call almost 3 months on the horizon), already up on Euro PTRs, and ready to rock. I thought I'd just take our chunk out and see what's shakin' for us in the next patch.

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Paladins

* Righteous Fury: The bonus threat from Holy spells caused by this talent has been reduced from 90% to 80%.

* Talents

o Protection

+ Judgements of the Just: The reduction in cooldown to Hammer of Justice provided by this talent has been reduced to 5/10 seconds instead of 10/20 seconds.
+ Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin's strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin's stamina.

o Retribution

+ Seal of Command: This ability now chains to strike up to 2 additional targets when it is triggered by an attack.

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For Ret, it seems like they want to make SoC a Cleave-ish seal. Will this change make it better for:

a) Trash pulls? It might. We'll have to wait till the theorycrafters pump out the numbers. My outlook: promising.

b) Raid bosses? No. No, no, no. The 38% (37.95% to be precise) increased weapon damage from a full stack of SoV dots (that's including the bonus from Seals of the Pure) is too sexy. Besides, ususally there's only one raid boss, so the SoC cleave would be pointless.


For Prot, ouch. But not too much ouch.

It seems to me that the HoJ change was for PvP purposes and shouldn't (correct me if I'm wrong please) affect PvE.

The Righteous Fury nerf is technically reducing our threat. From what I hear, however, this shouldn't be too consequential.

The more weighty of the changes, Touched by the Light's basis on Strength now, instead of Stamina, will mean less spell power overall. I just checked one of our guild's raiding Prot Paladins, and currently he has 2653 Stamina and 1131 Strength. That means he's going from +795.6 SP to +678.6 SP. Why is this significant? Well, the following moves scale with SP:

- Avenger's Shield
- Holy Shield (only the damage portion, not the block)
- Consecration
- Seal of Vengeance (which applies to Judgements and the DoTs applied)
- Sacred Shield (although I never remember to put this on when I'm tanking stuff)

Again, we'll have to wait for the number-crunchers and PTR testers to see how this affects our tanking ability in the future. Again, my outlook: optimistic.