Fixing the Holy Paladin Itemization Problem

It’s important to recognize that the gear for holy paladins creates a problem in boss loot tables. There is a drop for every class and spec in every loot table, and when the developers give a plate drop with spellpower, they are dropping a piece of loot that is meant specifically for one of the 30 trees, the holy paladin. This seems in direct contradiction of the great gear consolidation of 3.0.2, and also requires developers to create a piece that is often going to be given to a prot or ret pally for an off set or sharded. This is more likely to happen in a 10 man where you may not even have a pally healer at all. The 25 mans are more likely a plate wearing healer just from the numbers needed.

I can attest that while gearing up, I was able to create a very solid healing set with nothing but unwanted drops in 5 mans. Those unwanted drops then turned into vendor rolls as I would tell the pugs that I already had the piece and for everyone to roll greed if we didn’t have an enchanter. I cant tell you how many times in my month long quest to get Lavanthor to drop his pretty talisman how many times we ended up fighting Erekem and saw his sabatons (that no one wanted) instead. I have yet to see the talisman, and have pretty much given up all hope, but that is a post for another day.

Let’s first acknowledge there is a gear issue with plate.

Cloth: With cloth, you have essentially 2 sets of gear for 3 classes. Blizzard (though the debate among mages, the kings of QQ, rages on) did a decent job of making squishies all want stamina, intellect, and spirit. The only thing that really separates a true DPS piece from a healing piece is hit rating. All other cloth can be used by everyone. Even the gear without hit can be used by the DPS as long as they don’t sacrifice too much hit on their total gear set. Blizzard’s grade for cloth: A

Leather: There are 2 classes that desire leather, druids and rogues. The caster leather can be shared by the boomkins and the restos. The spellpower from spirit that a talented boomkin gets is a nice way to make use of a stat that used to be considered almost exclusive to trees and make it useful. Allowing intellect to affect MP5 was also a step in the right direction for trees to grab upgrades that might be missing some spirit. The melee leather is a little less seamless. Sure cats and rogues gear up the same say, but Blizzard is completely lost with bears. Instead of making high stamina pieces and then showing concern over bears being too much of a damage sponge, why not, along with the new savage defense mechanic, just normalize all leather gear to have about the same amount of stamina per iLevel piece. It’s a little sad that the quest chest piece (Exotic Leather Tunic) that you can obtain from Utgarde Pinnacle and a BoE zone drop from heroic Violet hold (Chain Gang Legguards) have so much stamina that bears need significant upgrades before they can get a piece that doesn’t compromise their total health. If Blizzard would stop putting in pieces like this, they could stabilize bear stamina with a modifier that doesn’t send their health through the roof. Bears in iLevel 200 should have an expected range of HP based on the gear. The range should be just that and fluctuate some, but overall the gear should not have one or two weird pieces that are going to be sought by bears at any cost. Blizzard already understands this with regards to bears and armor on trinkets, rings, and cloaks, so why are they missing the point on leather gear and its stamina allocation? Blizzzard’s grade on leather: C+

Mail: Caster mail needs stamina, intellect, crit, and spellpower, while physical mail needs stamina, agility, intellect, AP, and crit. Total win! The only perceived additional gear is the caster gear with hit rating, but like the clothies, it can be easily balanced with other gear to stay above the cap. Blizzard’s grade on mail: A+

EDIT: After reading Rossi’s Totem talk from 7/11/2009, it is apparent there are a little more issues with mail itemization than I originally thought. After reading his article, it might be necessary to reevaluate the grade originally given to mail, and bring it down to a B. The armor pen issue and the MP5, though not game breaking, do mean that sometimes gear may drop that a certain specs doesn’t covet, but is willing to equip. This does not mean the gear is useless, only not as desired as first thought, which btw, I think we should all be more understanding. Not every piece needs to be desired by every spec and min-maxing gear means sometimes lateral iLvl moves are indeed upgrades for us.

Plate: Now the fun gear. As I noted before there is an entire set of gear that’s designed for only one spec in the game. Add that Blizzard is being forced to change the berserker stance bonus from AP to Str because they don’t want the warriors wearing leather, and they seem to have hit a couple of design flaws. I, personally, like the zerk stance change but only because I feel that Blizzard has put too much emphasis on secondary stats and often neglects the primary ones like strength, agility, intellect, and spirit to balance gear. Blizzard’s grade on plate: D

Now, like I said, I think the zerk stance change is a step in the right direction, but that still leaves holy paladins out looking for one piece. One thing to note in my solution is that caster mail allows you to dps and to heal, as does leather and cloth, so again holy paladins are getting cheated. Dual specs will help alleviate this problem, but a paladin will still be forced to carry around a ret set and a holy set. Why not help them out a little?

Solution 1. Get rid of divine intellect. It’s not a cross tree talent. This means that prot pallies aren’t spending points on it and neither are any rets. Replace it (though probably deeper in the tree) with a talent called Brains from Brawn.

Brains from Brawn: Increases your intellect by 33/66/100% of your str. The only foreseeable problem here is that intellect gear like cloaks could be less attractive to a paladin because they might want the one with equal str if they get bonus from divine str. The spellpower and MP5 on caster cloaks and rings will keep most holies honest though in my opinion. Few are going to pass up a cloak that has intellect and spellpower only for in the intellect bonus they get from strength.

Solution number 2: Dump Holy Guidance, and replace it with Light infused Armor.

Light infused armor: Increases spellpower by 4/8/12% of your armor. A pally with 20K armor would then have 2400 spellpower. Degenerus, a holy paladin in my guild, has about 20K armor and 1800 spellpower. That number may need to be tuned down to 3/7/10% of your armor, but it allows a paladin to scale as their gear improves and, in the same vein as punishing the warriors in leather, discourages them from using mail caster gear. Mail will now make paladins feel even more dirty that cloth does on my resto druid. Similar stat itemization or not, a paladin isn’t going to roll on a marginal upgrade that happens to be mail if they are going to lose a significant amount of spellpower.

I guess it’s probably time to address the possible consequences, and I would ask that anyone share the ones I didn’t see. The loot tables would go from 1 spec rolling on a piece of gear to adding another spec to a set of gear (DPS plate) that is already sought after by so many classes. You could leave the loot tables alone and turn the caster gear into DPS gear. The crit on the gear is still highly coveted by a holy pally, and will be so by the DPS classes. One advantage of the crit consolidation is that warriors and pallies can both benefit from a single stat in different ways. The introduction of death knights, all the warriors in love with the super sexy Titan’s Grip, and WotLK’s rise of the retadin means that another piece of plate in the loot tables isn’t going to hurt anyone. In fact, it could end up being more advantageous to the overall raid composition. You already have DPS DK’s with various specs, fury and arms warriors, and ret paladins all sharing gear. That’s more specs than any other set of gear, so adding one more spec to that ensemble and adjusting the loot tables would seem to be the logical solution. Blizzard adjusted the drop rates on tier tokens when they had to add a class to one set of tokens, why not do the same thing overall with the loot tables?

-Rhab

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