Divne Plea nerfFollow

For me right now, there are only very limited situations where my pally is at risk of going OOM as a tank. What I find is that I have to severely moderate my rotation as a prot paladin on single mob boss encounters where I'm not tanking. There are a lot of fights like that in Naxx where we'll have 2-3 tanks in the raid for trash and certain encounters, but then we get to the a boss that only requires one tank and if I lose the proverbial coin toss, I'm running highly mediocre dps further limited by the need to conserve mana because the vast majority of my options for mana returns are taken away.

It almost makes me think that's why they're implementing that specific change. Not to help pally tanks with mana regen while tanking, but to make it so we don't feel so damned useless in situations where only one tank is needed and you happen to have more than one in the raid. Most fights in Naxx tend to involve at least a trivial amount of raid-wide magic damage, which would be enough to keep my Divine Plea available to run a full rotation with Righteous Fury off and contribute more than simply auto-attacks, HotR and SoR without going OOM 60 seconds in.

It would also be later on in WotLK progression when T8/9 gear makes heroics trivial (even moreso than a lot of people feel they are now). I ran heroic HoS last night with some guildies and I was amazed at how insignificant the trash was. A lot of the time, my blocks were mitigating all of the incoming physical damage. A number of times I almost went OOM on trash. We could always pull more trash, sure...that's the standard overgeared tank solution to mana/rage issues in 5-mans (and it's fun ;D), but at some point, a lot of the pally tanks I knew towards the end of TBC found themselves removing gear to tank some heroics just to reduce their mitigation to the point where they wouldn't have to stop and drink so often, and what's the fun in that?

I would still expect to see a hidden cooldown of some sort that would limit how often Divine Plea could be refreshed by magic damage (if that's the way it ends up being refreshed). Being able to spam Divine Plea every time it wears off wouldn't be OP...it would be useless. We only need so much mana.

Well cleared the following this week.

25 man Naxx with 19 people. No mana/healing issues, even on Patchwerk.

25 man Malygos. No mana issues and topped meters.

25 man OS Three Drakes, with 24 people. No mana issues at all.


So yeah, lets just keep complaining about the nerf before Blizz realize its still not affecting us.

Edited, Feb 12th 2009 12:53am by bodhisattva

Solo healed 10 man Malygos, no off healer.

Confirmed, we are still good.

I have to say... although on paper it looked like a big nerf to me. I've not really noticed the difference.

I never hit Divine Plea on CD anyway as it is pointless but now when I need it I just pick a suitable time. Just about forseeing when you will need it and timing it right.

You also never really notice how many stopping points are on some of the bosses until you need to use them. There are plenty of opportunities to still use Plea during combat. As other have said, you just have to be more selective. And it still will be a no brainer after fights finish.

I am just glad they are leaving Illumination alone. That is how we get most of our mana regen. Just keep stacking +crit, and the world is still good.