Tier 8 Stats (and now, Divine Plea)Follow

Stats and set bonuses have appeared on MMO-Champion for the Tier 8 Ulduar gear, 10 and 25 man.

Holy - 10 man, 25 man
2: Your Holy Shock critical heals now also place a periodic healing effect on the target, healing for 15% of the Holy Shock's heal amount over 9 sec.
4: Increases the damage absorbed by your Sacred Shield by 10%.

Ret - 10 man, 25 man
2: Increases the damage done by your Exorcism and Hammer of Wrath abilities by 10%.
4: Increases the critical strike chance of your Divine Storm and Crusader Strike abilities by 10%.

Prot - 10 man, 25 man
2: Increases the damage done by your Seals by 10%.
4: Shield of Righteousness now increases your shield block value by 225 for 3 sec.

EDIT: Why'd they have to change it to a robe? I dun wanna tank in a dress ... lol

EDIT 2: changed title to reflect a later post I made

Edited, Mar 18th 2009 9:55pm by Maulgak

Edited, Mar 20th 2009 8:51am by Maulgak

OH GOD YES! Paladins in dresses again!

But somehow the stats on the new Holy pieces are actually itemized WORSE than T7.

I haven't really looked at the stats too much yet, been busy with other things, but as for the set bonuses on the tank set - they seem rather underwhelming. The 2 piece bonus at least. I absolutely love Redemption's 2 piece bonus of 10% extra damage for Hammer of the Righteous. That spell is always my highest damaging ability. Seals don't account for nearly as much damage, and I even have the 5 points in Holy to increase their damage.

Now, Aegis 4 piece does look pretty nice: 225 extra block value about 40-50% of the time? Yes please.

I agree with you too walsher on the colors. I think 10 man looks much more Paladin-like then the 25 man. Still can't get over the dress though ... lol. Should give Holy (maybe Ret too) the dress, and let Prot tank in pants.

Some dev is mad that we stopped stacking mp5 and this is how he wreaks his vengeance upon us.

Three Aegis pieces have a modest amount of mp5 and two have no crit rating. Worse yet though is the presence of those FOUR blue gem sockets. Did they get Holy confused with Prot again???

The Prot set is itemized amazingly. For a Tier set I'm simply amazed that Blizzard did such a good job with it. Tier 4 and 5 were garbage, Tier 6 was good but lackluster. Tier 7 was decent and actually got things done, but was still poor compared to the offset pieces (even after including the bonuses.. speaking of which, what a useless 4 piece on T7, wow).

Now I agree that the T7 2pc is more attractive than the T8, but the new 4pc is downright awesome. Warriors are getting a massive boost to their magic tanking ability (which is the real thing that Warriors and Paladins are getting butthurt over right now since Sarth and Malygos seem to belong to the magic tanks) and Paladins are getting a modest reduction to ALL damage that comes our way from talent/glyph changes -- leaving the 4pc open for something amazing like this. T8 4pc is what I expect a 4pc Tier bonus to look like... a great bonus that you can still do without.

I really don't mind the model all that much. It definitly looks like it was designed for the healers out there -- but we've always suffered from models that have to seem appropriate for any of the group roles.

As for Divine Plea. It's still being tuned. They've changed the functional conditions of the spell, obviously they'll have to make changes to how it works in order to make it fit in its new role. I'm actually looking forward to it for the damage reduction. I'm wondering how they're going to tune all of our mana regen abilities in the end to work with eachother.

While the prot t8 set is itemized much better for tanking, particularly MT'ing(a lot more pure avoidance than the t7 pieces), i'm not particularly thrilled with the lack of +hit on them. At least the t7 gloves have a decent amount of +hit on them. I haven't looked at a lot of the other loot so i'm assuming/hoping there are larger amounts of hit on some of the non-set items.

Divine Plea works the way it does because they want Holy Paladins to think about when they use it. I'm not sure if this happens or not, but that was the intent. Changing it to only work on some of the Paladin heals, instead of all heals, doesn't solve anything at all. And with Blizzard trying to nerf all healers' mana regen, that isn't going to change.

The problem with it, as I pointed out, is having it up also nerfs reactive heals and such for a tanking Paladin. It should be changed to only affect Holy Light, Flash of Light, and Holy Shock. That way, healing Paladins would still need to think about then they use it, and it wouldn't nerf the healing that tanking Paladins would receive.

Yes Losie, they are still tuning Divine Plea, but just because they are still tuning it doesn't mean they will get it right. We've seen it in the past: something isn't working well, and when they're done with it, it still sucks. I'm really hoping Divine Plea doesn't become such an example of this.

EDIT: today, new info. THANK YOU BLIZZ GODS for listening and making the Divine Plea change!!!



Also some minor changes to set bonuses:



Edited, Mar 24th 2009 12:45am by Maulgak

This makes a lot of sense. Divine Plea was introduced to reduce holy paladins' regen mid-fight and it's doing that to me quite effectively. However it shouldn't reduce the amount of healing a tank receives from their own Judge Light or from external sources.

I'm intrigued by the change to Prot T8 2pc. By restricting the damage bonus to Seals of Vengeance, Corruption and Righteousness, what are the cutting out and why? Is it to stop Ret Palas increasing Seal of Command damage by using Prot gear?

For all of the talk about people not liking robes on Paladins, I too have to agree that T2 was the

Best.. set.. evah.

I agree, Judgement was the best looking set for Paladins. Paladins didn't tank back then, so it's kind of a moot point =P hehe

And I do like the look of Aegis, even the dress part. I just think it would be nice if Prot got pants while Holy got the dress, and whichever for Ret (don't matter to me). But, I doubt Blizzard would ever do this. Making the same set have different looks? Yea, probably never going to happen.