I have been maining protection paladin for around 6 years now, mostly doing high keys up to 1-3 key levels bellow the rank 1 keys for the season.
I will keep it short and just say that protection paladin is fun to play, but the nerfs made in 10.1 hit it hard, making it less of a viable tank for higher end M+.
I will just make the remark that Dorki ( a streamer and high M+ tank) made and thats that all tank specs, should be made close to unkillable if they have good gear and rotate their defensives well with the externals from healers.
At the moment prot paladin and monk are the least represented tanks in high m+ ( in terms of highest score obtained and keys timed from the time of this post)
For prot paladin it would be nice to revert the changes made in 10.1, and see how that plays out in season 3 of DF ( heck can always just nerf it later again) and I guess if not now then in the new expansion, work out the standing on concecration gameplay since as it might sound cool on paper, it doesnāt feel that well in the moment to moment gameplay and movement scenarios.
And finally for the season 3 tier set. I like the idea. Until the concecration gameplay gets changed, this is what prot paladins do, replace and try to stand in concecration, but the tier bonus is underwhelming.
10% armor ( from PTR testing) equals around 2.5% dmg reduction from armor. Counting that you dont have the 10 stacks of the 2 piece buff all the time, and its like its not even there.
The 4 piece should be redesigned and given a secondary defensive benefit. Tanks first and foremost should be able to sustain themselfs and mitigate damage.
Just a bland % chance to do more damage will leave us in a terrible spot like the bad tier set from season 2 DF.
Please if any dev reads this, I feel like balancing tanks should be the easiest job from balancing a role in the game. The game should be played, not made to be tilting that you donāt get invited cause your spec canāt perform as well.
A proper tank rotation of defensive cooldowns, self healing and well stated gear should be what your tank should be doing. Not have certain specs like current guardian druid be immortal and tank 20+ mobs without droping hp, and then have prot paladins pull 12 mobs, the pull lasting 80 seconds, and you having to cycle through every defensive in 1 pull and then kite and have nothing for the next pull.
This set in its current form is unplayable. When you apply another consecration to yourself, the buff disappears, which means that we either risk standing in it for 14 seconds or we lose the buff. Additionally, when Sanguine enters the game, we can practically forget about the buff from the 4th set. Very poorly designed, as if the person who came up with this set had never played a paladin in his life.
As someone who has played enough to know what consecration is about but hasnāt touched content in more then a single season; even I get that the consecration adeptation is just bonkers, if I with my rusty self can see this ābonusā and realize just how bad it is implies the exact same issue we saw at the start of dragonflight before the rework; whoever is working on paladins isnāt playing them, at all, if they think that these tier set bonuses are a ābonusā
if anything itāll promote dangerous play for people who donāt know just how valueable consecration is and will likely cause more problems by people dying trying to get the most out of the buff you designed for them.
Please consider just changing the tier set bonus to anything consecration; because of how the game currently is thereās just not much you can change about how it works or add to how it works in such a finite way as this tier set does
Consecration focussed gameplay isnāt fun, especially with tier set bonusses like this which really just put a very strong focus on all the issues with the consecration playstyle
Tier set from s3 4pc should make concentration to move with you for the whole duration like a holy fire or something
I understand the empowered concentration but you never stand still as tank you always move so if itās stay this way paladin 4pc is gonna be pretty bad not in terms of DMG
but in terms of how to actually play it properlyā¦
Because you put the concentration down and no you need to move because something happend in that scenario your 4pc is non existant
Tbf it is rather easy to solve, just make that buffed consecration be stuck to you and move as you move.
That way it would be more of just not overlapping your consecrations.
But its blizzard we are talking about, they dont do QoL changes untill the very end to show that they ālistenā
in that scenario your 4pc is non existant