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Exorcism can no longer be used on players
We made a change in the 3.1.1 patch to prevent Exorcism from being used on players. We didn’t announce this change ahead of time because we were trying to get the tooltip changed at the same time to reduce confusion. We still plan on getting the tooltip updated ASAP. Exorcism’s use in PvE has not changed at this time.
Going with a “not on players” solution is not ideal and we will be re-designing how the ability works in a future patch (the plan is sooner rather than later). We don’t like for PvE and PvP mechanics to work differently when we can avoid it. We also don’t like for a major damaging ability to be excluded from the PvP game. However, we thought this had become a balance issue serious enough to address at this time.
We shifted around paladin damage for 3.1 trying to increase sustained damage while reducing burst damage. Unfortunately, the Exorcism change did the opposite. Instead of stealing a GCD from a paladin, it actually gave them an extra one. A Retribution paladin could use Exorcism to cause damage while closing to melee and then be ready to go with their melee damage attacks. (Exorcism of course is not limited to Ret paladins either.) We changed the way paladins do damage for Lich King, so while it is unfortunate (and we accept full blame), it also isn’t too surprising that it is taking some effort to get their damage in the right place.
In the same patch where we remove the “not on players” limitation for Exorcism, we are going to change the way paladins do damage so that their normal combat moves have more depth to them instead of just using abilities every time they finish their cooldown. This should make causing damage as a paladin more interesting and also less bursty. While we have some ideas on how to accomplish that, if you have suggestions or your own ideas about how this could work, this would be a good time to share them. (As examples of abilities you don’t just use whenever their cooldown has finished, you might look at Conflagrate, Brain Freeze, Rip, Overpower or Arcane Blast.) We do request that you don’t fill the forums with posts of limited content or insight about how you don’t like to be nerfed. Nobody does.
It is always a judgment call about when a fix (a buff or a nerf) can’t wait. Some things we can’t change easily in hotfixes or small patches, and some things we consider too risky for technical reasons or for their potential effects on the game.

Ghostcrawler
Lead Systems Designer

Well I guess this means the end of my not sucking in PVP.  When 3.1 was first released I did a bit of PVPing with a friend of mine Zea and for some reason I was able to roll through 5-6 players as a retribution paladin.  I am guessing this is because I have always used exorcism as part of my rotation and it accounted for my bonus damage.  Oh well, back to me sucking horribly in pvp 🙂

Last night I bucked some of the conventional wisdom and tried another one of my “bel” builds for tanking.  For some reason I have never had much luck with the canned builds. They have never really produced the results I would have expected, because I guess in many ways they don’t fit my play style.  Many in Duranub can remember the colossal failure that a deep wounds build was for me.

I have heard for years that unbridled wrath has no place in a tanking build, let alone a tanking build of a main tank.  This morning I did some investigating by looking at last nights WWS parses.  Over the course of the night I gained nearly 3 times the rage from Unbridled Wrath that I did from Shield Specialization.  To me that is pretty phenomenal. 

I think primarily what is happening here is that roughly 60% of all attacks are avoided completely.  So more attacks are missing me completely than are being blocked.  So what this is allowing me to do is have a constant font of rage coming in from my attacks.  Thanks to the revenge glyph I am getting a ton of free heroic strikes, which in turn increase my number of attacks spinning the random generator for firing unbridled wrath…  which is turned into rage that I can use for shield slam, cleave, thunderclap, shockwave etc.

So far I am digging the build quite a bit.  While it is not optimal based on the math presented by Tankspot/Elitist Jerks it fits my play style.  So far it works equally well for 5/10/25 man content.  Now we have yet to poke our heads into ulduar, so I might be retracting my praise shortly, but for now I am rather happy.

Yesterday brought us the 3.1.1 patch and with it a spec reset.  I can only guess that this was to help clear out some of the disappearing talent issues players had been having.  Always in the past a free respec was a welcome thing.  However in the world of dual speccing this turns out to be a pain in the ass.

I spent a good chunk of my evening reapplying 2 specs each for 3 different characters, for a total of 6 rapid fire respecs.  Luckily for me I had all of my specs saved in my email box.  Inside of gmail I have a label called “Notes to Myself” which I use to email things I might find useful later.  Habitually this has been the storage bin for all my spec ideas.

The only thing that kept me from pulling my hair out is that Talented has been fixed to apply imports from WoWhead.  So For the most part I could just cut and paste my spec urls into the Talented UI and then hit apply.  Granted in the case of my Boomkin spec this caused me to reapply the spec I had missing typhoon.  I had a “where the hell is typhoon” while in the middle of fighting a mob, only to remember that my earlier spec design had starfall not typhoon.

Okay I think for the most part that the blog is in it’s mostly final state.  I added the amazing Chibi Belghast to the header.  This was drawn for me by my good friend Audrae who is just awesome at chibi-dom.  I figured it was fitting since I am not exactly a “hardcore srsbzns” tank.

On the top we have some nav options, home button, House Stalwart website, Duranub Raiding company website, and the still unfinished about page.  On the side we have a spiffy armory plug-in I found, as well as links divided into several categories.

Now the hard part.  I have to think of something useful 🙂