Nerf? Maybe not so much.

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

This is a concern (obviously).  Maybe paladins a currently a little overpowered in the threat department.  But 10%?  

• 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. 

This is an obvious PvP nerf.  While is makes Hammer of Justice a little less useful, I have to admit that (currently) almost everytime I want to use it, it's up.  Chances are that this won't bother me too much when live.  We were never interrupt tanks anyway.

• 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.

This is the "Proly" fix.  What's sort of ironic about this is how the math works based on my current gear.  In my "general tanking" set, I have 2587 stamina and 1376 strength.  The current Touched by the Light (TbtL) gives me 776.1 spellpower.  After 3.2.2, I'll have 825.6 spellpower.  From what I've been reading on Maintankadin, most paladins will be losing spellpower (and thus threat).  Fortunately, I'm not one of those.  Will it be enough to make up the 10% lost on Righteous Fury?  I am by no means Theck, but I don't think it will.

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

I expect this to get nerfed.  Used while tanking, you would be hitting up to 9 (12 if glyphed) mobs with Hammer of the Righteous.  Hellloooooo Thorim arena tanking!  The same applies to Ret's melee attacks, and I just don't see that kind of AoE damage sticking around for long.

And the nerf bat swings around....

We knew it was going to come, we just thought it was going to be the Ardent Defender getting nerfed.  This is Ghostcrawler's response to a borderline troll post:

We don't think "high threat tanks" is a fun niche for the game. We don't mind some variation depending on the specific situation, but paladin OTs were accidentally pulling off of MTs an awful lot. That isn't a L2P issue. That's just the numbers being off and frustrating everyone. 

We didn't want to nerf threat until community perception had turned around that paladins could survive while tanking hard modes. 

Try out the hard Coliseum fights (once available) or the tougher ones in Ulduar and let us know how it feels.

First off, I think the first statement of the first paragraph is plain wrong.  Maybe it's subjective.  I like the fact that I can out-threat my DK MT, if I want to.  I like the fact that my DPS'ers aren't threat capped on Hodir, in fact it's probably how we get hard mode in 10-man every week.

Admittedly, I've pulled off the MT accidently.  He'll say he's grabbing a mob back from me over Vent implying that I taunted, when in fact I hadn't.  But, I think that's my own fault for not paying attention, and it doesn't happen often.  The only time I can see this maybe being a problem is in a fight like Thorim.  When the tanks are trading back and forth after each Unbalacing Strike, if the one with the debuff doesn't watch his threat and let other tank hold Thorim while it wears off, it will basically mean a dead tank.  Thorim just hits hard, and his buff/your debuff is basically a sunder on steroids.  But this is an edge case.  I can't think of any other fights where more threat is a bad thing.  If you're functioning as the offtank, it's a matter of finesse and control to make sure that the MT maintains control of the boss or mob he's tanking.

Hot-headed rant out of the way, I can see Blizzard's point of view, in that they want to make sure that the knuckle-draggers can play too, without screwing up the raid for the other 9 or 24 people.  More on this to come.  I need to look deeper at the details (not that I'm a hardened theorycrafter), but ultimately, once the change is implemented, it may not be that big of a nerf.  We will have to see. 

Onyxia returns!

According to this thread, Onyxia will be making a return.

I have mixed feelings in general about bringing back old content.  On the one hand, it's cool to see the raid content from Classic WoW.  I didn't start playing the game until just before the release of The Burning Crusade, so there was a lot of the experience that I missed.  On the other hand, it seems that Blizzard would be better off spending their time and resources on a) developing new content relevant to today's lore and theme and b) fixing issues like the current instance limit problem.

In this case, I have to side with Blizzard, since the reasoning they are giving for bringing Onyxia back is in celebration of WoW's 5 year anniversary.  An opportunity (albeit miniscule) for an Onyxia-like mount, as well as a companion pet just for logging in on or around the 5-year mark itself are nice bonuses for WoW's "Wooden Anniversary".

Oops, I'm supposed to be writing here....

Blog Noob

OK, so I'm new to this whole blogging thing and I need to learn to be more disciplined about it.  I'll get there.  'Nuff said.

Instance Limit Rant

With the advent of the Achievement system, people have been running back and farming old instances and raids.  The consequent after-effect of this is that the limit of available instances is reached much more quickly (who knew there was a limit before 3.0?).  On my server (Thunderhorn/US) this has been creeping up especially since 3.1 (Seige of Ulduar).  With 3.2 out, you simply can't enter an instance without banging your toon against the skull-portal a few times.  During peak hours, you can literally wait 30 minutes or longer.  On a couple of these particularly long waits, I've chosen to pass the time by putting in a petition.  Hoping beyond hope, that Blizzard actually tracks the number of complaints they get about certain things adds them to a "fix list".  I could quote it here, but suffice it to say I get the typical Customer Service type response that doesn't lead me to believe they plan on doing anything about it.

What I don't get is how could they not anticipate an increase in the number of active instance with the release fo the 3.2 patch?!?  I mean, with the change to the Emblem system, wouldn't Blizzard expect, even desire, more people running instances to get Emblems of Conquest??  WELFARE EPICS!!! HELLOOOO!!!  Given that, wouldn't any self-respecting company want to ensure that their consumers are happy, and, in this case, maybe expand the environment appropriately to allow a higher instance limit in anticipation of and prior to the changes?!

Fail, Blizz, fail.  And yet we suckers continue to pump our $15 bucks a month for our serving of WoW-crack.

/sigh