Tank Balance

[Sapphidia]

I'd like to ask the forum goers to please avoid discussion about supposed "useless" skills and focus on factually verifiable issues that are either present or may become prevalent in the future. The use of some skills like Shield Swipe may not be optimal in their current state but they do reduce incoming damage by forcing enemies to only auto attack for a certain amount of time.

This is very short sighted to say (i wont be pedantic and point out that shield swipe's pacification -is- basically useless on all bosses, important mobs and a lot of trash, i know what you meant), because you can't look at things in isolation. You can't just ignore Shield Swipe which is a tool the paladin has but is basically worthless in its current incarnation PURELY DUE TO THE NUMBERS, and then try and fix the class by suggesting big changes to things like strength debuffs being moved around.

Shield Swipe is very very important to look at because it's a skill that has -become- useless in the space of an expansion. It saved TP whenever it procced. It increased your DPS whenever you pressed it because it did more potency damage than your average rage of halone combo (210 vs 203.3). You WANTED to press it as much as possible provided you had a threat lead because it increased your damage! It made Bucklers a viable shield type because they'd result in more procs, and made Bulwark almost a DPS cooldown.

In 3.0 they added bonus threat to it but failed to realise that because they didnt increase the potency it's now rendered worthless. In a dps-heavy meta, the focus is much more on tanks outputting as much damage as possible. In 2.0 it would have been a great part of the kit. In 3.0 it's a dps loss to press shield swipe. It's also a threat loss per GCD to press shield swipe instead of just using Halone combos. That's ridiculous. This skill has become worthless simply due to numbers not being tweaked.

The reason it's brought up so much is because anyone should be able to see that tweaking the damage value (and maybe threat value) will fix a LOT of the issues paladins currently have. It's a three-birds-with-one-stone. Make Shield Swipe a button you want to press as much as humanly possible due to doing higher damage and you'll increase paladin threat over a pure goring/royal/royal rotation, reduce paladin TP consumption as you'll be using more 40 TP skills AND do more damage when tanking to bring the class a little closer to WAR/DRK without eclipsing them. Something like a 260 potency on the swipe would likely be enough, as the average potency of the entire goring/royal/royal rotation is 251-256 depending on skillspeed and how much the dot clips. 260 would make it always a dps boost to press.

It's by far the most flawed part of the kit, especially compared to how it was used at 50. It should NOT be ignored because making it viable has a good chance of fixing a whole host of issues with the class.