My thoughts on the class balance update

[davidmage]

Protection paladins are very strong at the moment. The heal that's based on attack power with less than 10 seconds cooldown that can be used on other people and stack? I surely hope they don't nerf it but if they do, that would be the end of paladins in multiboxing.

--EDIT-- (info below is wrong) -- Edit--
By stack do you mean if they all heal their full potential when healing the same target? If you use them at the same time on a damaged character, each heal will heal more than if you use them following each other (because the missing hp part will be less after the first heal). That kind of synced heal can only be performed by us boxers I believe, so thats a bonus for us.
--EDIT-- (info above is wrong) -- Edit--

Also I recently got my second gold trait Light of the Titans. That HoT x5 on your tanking character helps. I've started to use my heal just before engaging bosses to apply that HoT.

[Lyonheart]

By stack do you mean if they all heal their full potential when healing the same target? If you use them at the same time on a damaged character, each heal will heal more than if you use them following each other (because the missing hp part will be less after the first heal). That kind of synced heal can only be performed by us boxers I believe, so thats a bonus for us.
Also I recently got my second gold trait Light of the Titans. That HoT x5 on your tanking character helps. I've started to use my heal just before engaging bosses to apply that HoT.

like a dummy i went the other way 8( it will be awhile before i get the third trait!

[davidmage]

like a dummy i went the other way 8( it will be awhile before i get the third trait!

I'm not sure which way is the best to go. The path I have left are all a bunch of dps increasing traits. That will be a big boost for when I start to try some more real attempts for the timer on mythic+. Also I have until now played with purely defensive trinkets, like this: http://www.wowhead.com/item=137362/p...ion&bonus=1826

I am now looking for trinkets providing a dps increase. I'm aiming for 1 strong static trinket, and 1 with a nice proc. I got this (845 titanforged) during my daily hc yesterday, it has an interesting proc. http://www.wowhead.com/item=137312/n...ell&bonus=1826

[CMKCot]

not really, if you cast all the heals at the same time they heal for the updated amounts. the multi heal with no reduction was hotfixed a few days before the prepatch. (you could do a lay of hands using only two heals.)

it will fully heal because the % heal is calculated first, THEN its increased Scatter the shadows and by versatility.

imagine you have 0 /100 hp (i know its impossible, but its to make the numbers easy.) you do one cast with a tooltip of 30% you get afaik 30 hp * .18 * versa lets pretend you have 10% vers so you would get 38.94 hp

this extra healing is what creates the illusion that the healed amt is updating once, so you would get 38.94 *5 = 194.7 hp .... the truth is that its not updating once, its updating with every cast. but even updating properly you still get 100% health back, just not as OP as you though. (not that having over 100% hp healing would matter) this same effect can be seen with +% healing effects from avenging wrath and the last boss in BRH

if you cast all the heals at the same time you WONT get:
30
30
30
30
30

increased to 194.7 hp


if you cast them all at the same time you "should" get:

30
21
14.7
10.29
7.203
increased by Scatter to 98.16774
and then by versa to 107.984514

BUT blizzard has some wonky serverside code to prevent this. so in reality you get:

30
30 (no effect)
21
21 (no effect)
14.7
Increased to :

85.2786



will you still get topped? yeah, but consider this. you now have all your heals in cooldown.
you could have done the same with 3 heals, and used the other two to much greater effect on other targets. this gets even worse when you consider that this serverside "fix" is not working all the time the same way, you will sometimes see 3 heals with no effect!

the point is: IF you cast all heals at the same time you will usually get healed by the first cast, the third and the fifth. the second and the third will show as having the same healing as the preceding one, even on the combat log, but don't seem to do any healing. you can see this if you tank is under heavy MS effects.

the best usage of HoP is to stagger cast. so DO NOT cast them all at the same time. just make a hotkey that does round robin. if you cast them all at the same time going past mythic 3 is a nightmare, some bosses will destroy you with meele attacks alone. if you wait for the tank to get to 20 % to do an uber heal you wont have any healing left for aoes. or the next time the boss smacks you on the face for 400k damage


the one thing that does stack is Light of the titans (each alt will cast one), that's a nice 50k hps on the tank with 100% up-time. definitely a great trait. it will also get casted on the caster. so if you cast 5x on the tank he gets 5 Hots, and all the alts get 1 for a total of 9 hots and if you cycle cast them you can keep all the hots refreshed. with proper timing you can keep up to 20 hots rolling on the entire team. currently its about 40% of my healing on Aoe heavy fights.

sadly it doesn't seem to be modified by haste, and its scaling is just plain terrible... mastery is a garbage stat for prot and without it, strength just doesn't translate in enough AP.

as far as Mythic+ goes im doing 750k dps on bosses, with an average of 675k dps on the entire run. sounds pretty good, but i feel the ceiling is at M5 currently, going past those levels you need to do invi runs to skip trash and having to take Hop over Kp and Spellwarding over Cavalier your mobility, A lot. not to mention i can't start a boss bull until i have wings, pot and my alchemy trink off ICD. so i have to sit doing nothing for a good 30 secs. (i can burst 2m DPS for the first 10 secs)

also, im chugging PoW like its candy... down about 60k gold per run in pots alone. to think regular players bitch about having to pot and flask a single character... lol

[davidmage]

Thank you sir for all this info.
Then was wrong about the mechanics of simultaneous heals of LoTP. I just assumed that because simultaneous heals could bring me to 100%, that the heals would compute at the current health (if they did not it would not be possible to reach 100% ever). Seems the bonus to the heals was strong enough to trick me. I also did not anticipate that blizzard would implement specific code to counter this which only would affect boxers probably 100% of the cases. Isn't all there single scenarios bad enough for us?

Looks like I am using my heals in a bad way then, as I have clumped them together by x2 and x3 same time usage. Definitely best to go round robin then, and it will work nice since there is no GcD in it anyway.

Light of the titans and it's hots are nice indeed. But I was also worried about the scalability for the same reasoning you mentioned.

Sounds like you are running mythic+ with 5 paladins? Which Ilvl are they at? Artifact progress? I'm curious since I'm planning to get going with that in the future. (beating the timers that is)

I'm still in the stage where I have not bothered with any of the expensive enchants or gems, and I've only drunk 1 flask ever. I'm chugging old WoD pots which are basically free.
I'm planning to step up my game when I have filled all the dps increasing artifact traits, and have replaced my defensive trinkets with dps ones.

[zenga]

@zenga care to explain that bit about affliction locks?

Affliction has 4 dots if you talent them like this.
Agony can ramp up to 20 stacks, corruption is eternal, siphon life heals you. All 3 instant casts. Phantom Singularity heals you as well and is also instant. And the way unstable affliction works in legion means you can cast 4-5 in a row if you don't have to move for a couple of seconds. Drain life is your filler spell and thus channeled, but not as important as UA or Agony.

To put it in an extreme way, the point is that you can basically run around and spam dots, and that your damage spells heals you w/o really needing a healer.

Grimoire of Supremacy has the advantage that you have a pet that does a lot of dmg as well that adds to the mobility. And if your tank happens to die you just summon a tank minion. That tank minion is not gonna tank a mythic boss 24/7 but if you have 3 of them out (summon has no CD) you have plenty of time to get a rezz off / survive a hectic phase (3x soulstone as well). The pets are incredible in the open world, like solo my pet tanks pretty much every big ass Danger Boss from world quests (talking about the dudes with 40m-ish hps) without the need for a heal.

TLDR 3 affliction locks really allows you to cheese many mechanics if you take it slow.

[Andreauk]

How about drop that tank and healer and go x5 aff locks.. could it work?

[JohnGabriel]

I don't have a dev quote but some complaints in the forum that they are nerfing locks ability to tank.

http://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20749825587

Have not been keeping up with things but seems like something you'd want to look into if you plan on 5x locks.

[CMKCot]

afaik the fix wasn't for boxers, serverside wow uses a similar system as the one EVE online uses. time on the server is divided in "ticks" i guess they do this for the same reason they do it on EVE, to save bandwidth and keep the server hardware usage to the minimum.

using ticks works usually, but can lead to things that shouldn't happen and potential exploits by top end guilds. back on beta the only team to make mythic +6 and over, was made of 4 tanks and a healer, and 3 of the tanks were prot palas. after this they changed the heals (around the time they also buffed the heal on prepatch), after this the dudes running those teams decided to deck them and play the game proper.

keep in mind this "ticks" seem to go at a one second interval, more than enough for a coordinated team of players.

if you were boxing on old azeroth, back on the day, we could activate the same thing on multiple characters at the same time and we would get multiple credits to quests, for example.

in some VERY rare cases we still can. for example on the WQ in suramar where you have to give arcwine to the meth-heads if you click the dialog option on all windows at the same time you can get multiple credits using only one mob. not a real abuse seeing as the advantage we get is doing a quest in two minutes when it usually takes 5. but think of how this could be used on mobs that used to give you things for interactions. or to spawn mobs with quest items indefinitely, bosses in dungeons, or a wide arrange of weird and unintended things.

blizzard has been actively moving away from this, after the azeroth revamp in cata and ever since with new content finding quests where you can take advantage of this is very rare. on legion the only quest i found is that one in suramar. and if i recall correctly there's the one where you have to ress the small drakes.




as far as the team, im currently doing 5 prots, the DPS is pretty good, and on par with high lvl mythic groups. the problem is mobility and the disparity between damage on trash and damage on bosses. on trash you can pull some INSANE dps, specially if you pull a ton of mobs and let them pick whos going to tank them instead of taunting them and then just rotate blinding lights and hammers while consecration and Avengers mow them down.

on bosses whoever, DPS can tank badly. if you can burst and don't mind trowing 5k gold in 5x pots then you can pull some monster DPS. but if the fight has a lot of movement, lots of gtfo the fire moments and target swapping, DPS stinks. it can go from 700+ down to 400ish... that's usually and two to three minutes on the fight. and some fights are a bitch to do. Nal'tira and the worm boss in neltharions lair come to mind. doing that on a single pull on mythic 4+ is pretty much impossible.

im thinking of going 3 prot 2 ret once i get the proper legendaries. to compensate for the lack of boss DPS

Artifacts are at 22, took the HoT first and moved my way up to Tyrs enforcer and down to bulwark now. (2 points away from it)
http://www.wowhead.com/artifact-calc...UbAFG4BRvAVPwE

i think its the best for boxers, hammer time is useless. faiths armor is nice but only as a burst dps gain. and faiths armor is only good if you have one tank, quite pointless when you have five and you can just taunt off if you are in danger or debuffed.

and all the talents along the way are useful with the exception of the extra block chance.

and don't even bother with enchants... get the crap ones for rings for extra Versa... the neck enchants are complete crap. mark of the priestess is garbage... heals for about 1.5m when i add up the entire team on a fight where they healed over 50m. its not even a smart heal. :/ and will often proc at the moment you pull doing an overheal. -.-'

[Andreauk]

Changes here for classes: http://www.wowhead.com/news=255940/p...h-notes-music-