Exorcism - The solution to threat and ranged pulls?

[Dogfight]

Exorcism – The solution to threat and ranged pulls?

A little while ago I wrote a post about how to improve protection paladins raid tanking ability (viewtopic.php?t=5323). As I discuss in that post, protection paladins need some improvements to survivability (health and mitigation), threat and itemization to become a raid tank comparable with warriors and druids.
This was never going to happen in Classic or other #nochanges servers, but this is a Vanilla+ server where the game still moves forward and changes can happen. This is why I write these posts, to openly discuss improvements for protection paladins until it is at an acceptable level. The more I raid as a prot paladin on Twow, the more I wish this will come true, so we can finally have a working holy tank.

Recap – What is raid tanking?
In raids you are measured by your ability to tank bosses. The ability to snap and maintain threat, as well as mitigating damage to stay alive.
Dungeon tanking and trash tanking is not what’s being discussed here.

Recap – Prot paladin Weaknesses
1. Difficult to become crit immune in well balanced gear (reach 440 defense)
2. Impossible to reliably become crush immune (102,4% block+dodge+parry+miss)
3. Low health pool compared to other tanks
4. No damage reduction talents or abilities
5. No powerful defensive cooldown that also doesn't have a drawback
6. Lack of optimized gear for paladin tanking (Pre-raid and through all tiers, with exception of some single items)
7. No ranged ability for pulls
8. Holy Shield on GCD, Taunt requires Judgement off CD
9. Mana is a finite resource and requires a reliable and steady resupply
10. Mediocre threat and better threat talents in Ret tree



Exorcism
Exorcism is a signature paladin ability that, unfortunately, is only usable against demons and undead. It has 30yd range, 15s cooldown and does decent holy damage. So, can this ability fix any of our weaknesses? With a small change, I believe Exorcism can fix threat and ranged pull issue.

Threat
Prot paladins do alright threat wise, much thanks to Holy Strike, but it can certainly become better and smoother. If Holy Strike gets a nerf due to PvP issues, it will also affect PvE for Prot. If that happens we would need a threat boost in one way or another.

Holy Strike combined with Judgement of Righteousness (JoR) gives us decent burst threat. However this is perhaps where we also need more improvement; burst threat. It’s the most critical phase in any encounter, especially if we want to be able to tank any DPS check encounters. Our taunt is also connected to Judgement and for some fights we have to keep this off cooldown (CD) to be ready to taunt, which means we lose one of our instant threat generating abilities. If you Holy Strike+JoR, lose aggro for w/e reason (resist etc) and have to taunt the same mob back, or grab another one, now your taunt is on CD for 8-10 seconds. And if you don’t use JoR initially in a fight to save it for taunt, then you have lost 40% of your burst threat.
Judgement is also an important spell when it comes to the paladins ability to adapt to a fight and play a support role. For example changing judgements between Judgement of Wisdom, Judgement of Light or even Judgement of Crusader to get a weapon proc when you need it. (Not to mention to replace Judgement of Justice debuff after a taunt…). None of this is possible when Judgement is either reserved for taunt or generating threat. This is why I think Exorcism should be changed to work on all types of NPCs.

Changing Exorcism to work on all NPC types will enable us to use Judgement more freely. This allows for a more dynamic playstyle with Judgements and still being able to generate threat while reserving Judgement for taunt or saving it for other strategic reasons.

If Exorcism is useable on all NPCs we will have an overall increase in threat generation, both burst threat and over time. How do I think this will affect paladins:
1. Threat generation reaches a competitive level
2. Enables a balancing (PvP) change to Holy Strike (for those who care) without it impacting overall threat generation for prot paladins or DPS for rets too negatively
3. Possible overall PvE DPS increase, but not imbalanced
4. More dynamic playstyle where you have more options in when and why you use your Judgement

Ranged pull
Prot paladins lack a ranged pull ability and cannot use ranged weapons. This makes safe ranged pulling difficult. Making Exorcism useable against all NPC types will fix that issue. A 30yd ranged spell that does holy damage and has a 15sec cooldown. To me this looks like the path of least resistance to solve this problem. No new spells or talents, just a small change to an existing ability.

End comment
I’d like to take a moment to appreciate the work being done by the developers here on Twow. I believe most of us play here because we get the Vanilla+ experience with the extra content and class changes we wanted but never got from Blizzard. Hopefully voicing our opinion on where we believe the protection paladin needs improvements will be heard and be of inspiration to the developers. I’m no programmer or game developer, but I regard this change to Exorcism as a simple fix with little impact on class balance and no need for new spells or talent changes.
We play on a Vanilla+ server and I think we need to be open to changes to fix the basic issues that we have as prot paladins. There might be better ways to do this, but here’s a suggestion from my side at least.

TL;DR: Change Exorcism to be useable against all NPC targets.

[Ravenstone]

Good writeup. It sounds like a nice solution. I guess the idea that it can't be used on players is already ingrained due to the fact that you can't use it on Undead players, even though it says Undead. Thematically it might feel a little off being able to cast it on any NPC though. I think I'd be for it overall regardless.

[Geojak]

+1 I have made the same suggestion over half a ywar ago

[Kairion]

With this change Exorcism would work in a similar way to how holy shock is currently used in Tankspecs.

So we can easily feel out how it would work. But there is one giant problem with exorcism. To make up for only being usable in narrow circumstances, its values are over the top. Its an instant spell that deals more base damage than Shadow bolt for a cheaper manacost.

In Conjunction with the array of holy damage increasing effects this is insanely strong.

So its damage would have to be reduced by quite a bit to make mechanical sense. Also flavorwise its a bit of a fail. Exorcism is quite iconic and tailormade to hunt explicitly demons and undead. By making this a general bread and butter spell, it looses its flavor completely.

[Ravenstone]

So its damage would have to be reduced by quite a bit to make mechanical sense. Also flavorwise its a bit of a fail. Exorcism is quite iconic and tailormade to hunt explicitly demons and undead. By making this a general bread and butter spell, it looses its flavor completely.

You could reduce the base damage and boost it back to its normal levels specifically for Undead and Demons. But I guess it still loses a lot of the thematic. In my mind, overzealous Paladins wouldn't have any problem exorcising anything they don't see as similar enough to themselves, much like the Scarlet Crusaders.

[Kairion]

Well the scarlet crusaders are considered hostile by the alliance because of their fanatism. The Alliance would likely not tolerate paladins who subscribe to the same level of zealotry as the scarlet crusade.

But from a purely mechanical point of view, if its weaker against non undead/demonfolk but still usable, it would give paladin a much needed tool. Holy shock can be used in the same way but its a heavy point investment that can often not be justified as a protection paladin.

[Ravenstone]

I think thematically, Arthas slaughtering an entire Alliance city yet still being hailed a hero on his return says a lot about the mindset of the people. I think you can get away with it being for more than the Undead and Demons, though I guess it shouldn't really have a different amount of damage in that case, since it's all based on the belief of the Paladin.

Maybe Hammer of Wrath would be a better candidate to change for this purpose if you got rid of the health requirement and rebalanced the rest of it.

[Dogfight]

I think thematically, Arthas slaughtering an entire Alliance city yet still being hailed a hero on his return says a lot about the mindset of the people. I think you can get away with it being for more than the Undead and Demons, though I guess it shouldn't really have a different amount of damage in that case, since it's all based on the belief of the Paladin.

Agree. I didn't write it, but I came to the same conclusion myself. I can look past it being a signature paladin ability only for demons/undead and understand that anything can be exorcised. It would be a welcome and helpful change. Obviously there are other ways to do it, but to me this seems kinda straight forward without adding new abilities. I guess it could be altered through talents, but not sure if that's the way to go.

[Bittermens]

Wrath Exorcism was changed to hit players and also do double damage on undead and demons
Holy Wrath became instant and could also stun undead and demons, and later it became a tanking spell.

https://wowwiki-archive.fandom.com/wiki/Holy_Wrath

[Reploidrocsa]

in order for people not cry over paladins in pvp i would add to share CD with holy strike and make both of those skills a 15 sec CD

[Geojak]

So basically make, it useless for tanking except for intiital pull with shared CD. Doesn't sound very fun.

Just nerf holy strike, let it be affected by armor but still holy dmg (a bit werid but needed so it Stil gets the trhest multiplier)
Then make exo usable on all, target but only 50% dmg on non demon and undead.
And done

[Kwayver]

In one single moment, a Paladin can...
- holy strike
- proc seal of command
- judge command
... Without using a GCD. Allowing any other offensive ability to exist within that combination will break paladin PvP even more than it already is. Seal of command and holy strike have put paladins pve damage into a corner where they have no room for ideas like the one suggested (unless it was a very deep prot talent, but even then Seal/judgement of righteousness with that combination is still an issue).

Until this issue is resolved, ideas like this will not be implemented.

[Ravenstone]

Was thinking about this again and had a question. Does Exorcism rely on spell hit? Also, was thinking it would feel nice to replace Vindication in the Ret tree with this, and have the extra talent ranks increase damage up to an appropriate level. Thematically it'd make most sense to require some investment in the Ret tree.

I do agree though that it's too much to add as is without nerfing the rest of the Pally kit.

[Robear]

IF threat is an issue for pallys at 60, wouldn't the easiest suggestion to fix that would be to just increase the % on imp RF? Maybe I am missing the point, but it seems that would be a simple one.

I think the bigger issue is more of having taunt tied to judgement and the lack of gear designed for prot paladins and sets not reclassed for them either.

[Ravenstone]

IF threat is an issue for pallys at 60, wouldn't the easiest suggestion to fix that would be to just increase the % on imp RF? Maybe I am missing the point, but it seems that would be a simple one.

It would work, just you'd probably have to tinker with it every time you want to solve another one of their problems. It is also just boring design wise to do that so no-one talks about it.

I think the bigger issue is more of having taunt tied to judgement and the lack of gear designed for prot paladins and sets not reclassed for them either.

The gear is a big problem, but whilst the taunt isn't greatly implemented, it's a non issue when you have proper threat. You don't need taunt except for a handful of raid bosses.