Dragonflight Retrospectives & War Within Wishlists
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Protection Paladin Retrospective & War Within Wishlist
With War Within alpha on the horizon, I thought it would be a good idea to take another look at how Protection Paladin in Dragonflight played out and ask key questions about Blizzard’s stated design goals.
I personally think Protection Paladin has gone in the wrong direction for the last two expansions. I have been extremely critical both publicly and privately of the reintroduction of Holy Power and other changes that I feel have done more harm than good. Thinking back to the last three versions of Prot. Paladin, I think that Dragonflight Prot. Paladin is a worse design than Shadowlands Prot. Paladin and Shadowlands Prot. Paladin was a worse design than BFA.
The design has gotten progressively worse with each expansion. In fact, I would go as far to say that Blizzard used tuning as an attempt to recover from design choices that did not work out as intended. The current meta strength of Prot. Paladin overshadows how poor the underlying gameplay is.
But Blizzard tried to improve the design going into Dragonflight but for whatever reason, it just didn’t work out. The first question I want to examine is: What did Blizzard try to do in Dragonflight?
What Blizzard Tried in Dragonflight
Blizzard tried to reduce Shield of the Righteous uptime and the primary way was through resource starvation and removing the Holy Power from Avenger’s Shield. But this had two primary consequences.
- It made Avenger’s Shield worse to press. Blizzard attached Barricade of Faith and Crusader’s Resolve to Avenger’s Shield but these added effects never hit the mark or gave the feeling that getting one Holy power gives.
- Blizzard didn’t reduce effective uptime. If you compare logs between Shadowlands and Dragonflight, you won’t see much of a difference in effective uptime. You still covered every relevant damage event with it.
Why would Blizzard want to reduce Shield of the Righteous uptime? After thinking about it, here is how I would explain it.
Shield of the Righteous became a passive buff that’s always up and active with the reintroduction of Holy Power in Shadowlands. This was a substantial change from where the spec was historically. If you go back and look at Shield of the Righteous uptime in Legion and BFA, you will see average uptimes of anywhere from 50 to 70%. So, the changes were aimed at bringing back uptimes that were more aligned with some historical averages.
But that’s not how these changes worked out in practice. If you look at logs for Dragonflight, you’ll average uptimes above 80%+, which is a reduction from the 100% uptime in Shadowlands but they didn’t hit the goal of 60%. One of the core issues with high active mitigation uptime is that it magnifies downtime. When you have 80% uptime on a defensive like Shield of the Righteous, that 20% that you don’t have it up becomes even more magnified into danger spikes that are very apparent, which in turn makes the concept of dropping Shield of the Righteous feel worse and harsher.
The attempt was admirable. They just went about it the wrong way. They weakened the rotation, without addressing what they really wanted to change while also magnifying the danger points. And honestly, nobody likes being resource starved. That approach usually doesn’t lead to gameplay that “feels good.”
Let’s talk about Consecration
Consecration has been a topic of discussion lately, because the Amirdrassil tier set was designed around it. It’s only made some of the concerns around Consecration more apparent and more known. I have been talking about Consecration since Shadowlands. I’ve known that this has been a problem since Season 1 of Shadowlands when the kite meta existed. You can hear me talk about this topic on MOCast as far back as 9.1.5.
At this point, a good place to start any discussion at this point is to revisit what Sigma, a former World of Warcraft designer, wrote about Consecration and the mastery rework during the BFA Beta:
Consecration is easier to work with. If you don’t have to move, you have to replace it less often, and if you do have to move, you can replace it much more quickly. While standing in Consecration still has some value, your core buttons no longer rely on it, and the loss of mitigation from being outside it is much smaller than Legion. It also provides a small source of baseline magic mitigation. … Shield of the Righteous uptime and downtime, in terms of mitigation, is less dramatic. The previous mastery made that gap get wider and wider as the expansion went on, leading to the problem of increasing moments of vulnerability when active mitigation was down.
Everything Sigma talked about in their write-up was true. Consecration management, and its defensive effects were very overwhelming when compared to the tuning of raid bosses. They rightly toned down the value of Consecration going into BFA.
But over time Consecration has been power creeped so high that not being in it leads back to the problems from Legion. We have nothing but bad feelings when you have to move out of it. And now that it has more damage attached through the tier set, it makes that even more noticeable. Being forced to recast Consecration constantly turns it into an empty global when you have other buttons like your rotation that could be just as important.
Consecration‘s power has increased significantly since the mastery rework in Battle for Azeroth. Let’s review the changes that occurred during Shadowlands and Dragonflight to make this happen.
These changes increased the pressure to maintain it and recast it if needed. Consecration can be worth ~30% EHP, which is a massive amount of damage reduction not to have and something you will definitely “feel.” But movement itself isn’t the core cause of this. People were running Atal’Dazar in BFA just like they are now and the level of feedback on recasting Consecration was not as intense. What changed was that Consecration became more powerful and integral to the Protection Paladin’s mitigation and kit. People didn’t care about moving when it was just 5% damage reduction in BFA but now that it’s 20% DR, bunch of damage, and all this other stuff, people care a lot.
Blizzard thought that Consecration was a problem during Legion and made changes for BFA. Can they do the same thing for The War Within?
Lincoln’s Vision of 11.0 Protection Paladin
I would be remiss if I didn’t take this chance to be a bit more explicit about my personal vision of Protection Paladin in The War Within and lay out the qualities that I think the spec should have. I don’t work for Blizzard and they certainly aren’t paying me. But I am a Prot. Paladin enjoyer and I want the spec to be fun.
My personal version would encompass:
This vision would do two things in my mind: It would move Protection Paladin closer to what it was in BFA and help create a better gameplay distinction between the two shield tanks. I acknowledge that this would be worse for some content like Mythic+ but I would rather have good gameplay and be goldilocks spec than be a meta spec for world first keys.
Wrap-up & Final Thoughts
For The War Within, the core goal should be to improve the gameplay of Protection Paladin, compared to Dragonflight. I think Protection Paladin is over indexed on passive damage reduction through Shield of the Righteous and Consecration, which leads to the feeling that if you don’t have either active then you feel weak and are more susceptible to death. And one way to change that is to diffuse damage reduction from both these abilities into other sources like cooldowns.
I consider the BFA version of Protection Paladin to be one of the best designed specs in the history of WoW. It had clear strengths and weaknesses, it had skill expression, it was easy to learn and challenging to master. If I had it my way, I would just turn back the clock completely. But I don’t see that happening so I hope Blizzard can find some happy medium.
About the Author
This content was written by Lincoln. He is a moderator for the Hammer of Wrath Community where he helps players on a daily basis get better at playing Protection. Feel free to message him questions, comments or concerns about what you read here.
You can find him posting random opinions on Twitter.
