Blessing of Might — Places a Blessing on the friendly target, increasing attack power by 11% and restoring 2 mana every 5 seconds for 1 hour. If target is in your party or raid, all party and raid members will be affected. Players may only have one Blessing on them per Paladin at any one time.
Blessing of Kings — Places a Blessing on the friendly target, increasing strength, agility, stamina, and intellect by 6% for 1 hour. If target is in your party or raid, all party and raid members will be affected. Players may only have one Blessing on them per Paladin at any one time.
Finally, one click, and the entire raid is buffed. We're a long ways away from handing out 40 5-minute Blessings in Molten Core.
I'm somewhat surprised that Blessing of Might still increases mana regeneration. I guess they want it to be attractive to casters. Still, I wonder why they didn't extend the Demonic Pact Spell Power boost to it instead of mana regen. However, that might make Blessing of Might too good.
As well, apparently Mark of the Wild will now have the same effect as Blessing of Kings, making Blessings much easier if you have both a druid and a paladin. A good move.
The thing I like best about the new Blessings is that they retain the ability to do "drive-by" buffing. It's odd, but I enjoy casting Blessings on random people who pass by, especially when out leveling, or when you come across a lowbie questing. One of the best changes in recent memory was when buffs were changed to automatically cast the correct version on lower level characters. I was a bit concerned that in order to get one-click Blessings we would have to give up the ability to buff random strangers. I'm happy to see that this is not the case. Excellent work by the dev team to recognize this corner case.
I guess this means that Blessing of Sanctuary must be being rolled into Righteous Fury?
ReplyDeleteI have no idea what happened to Sanctuary. I just saw these changes.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a Paladin but I can say these changes are long overdue. The combined Might/Wisdom blessing is a much better implementation.
ReplyDeleteThe nerfing of Kings to 6% was also much needed, since the buff was considered too valuable. So much so that Blizzard made the Drums of Forgotten Kings to make up for a possible lack of a Pally in 10-mans.
I think they're dropping Sanctuary and rolling the stamina buff and damage reduction into Righteous Fury. That's why Might has mana regen; it'll be the new tanking buff.
ReplyDeleteA someone who also enjoy administering Drive-By buffings I also find this a welcome change. Hopefully this also means we will no longer need to carry around stacks of Symbols. I needed to DI the Healer in a Random PUG last week and couldn't because I had no Symbols of Divinity.
ReplyDeleteShould be interesting. I wonder if the removal of reagents for the "Greater" Blessings is a sign for the removal of other similar items?
ReplyDeleteFirst we had minor glyphs to remove the "I use this way too often or way too rarely to bother carrying reagents", now we may see them being removed completely.
I'll third the Drive-By blessings comment. That's one of the little fun bits about playing a pally. My hunter feels a bit antisocial due to having nothing in this area.
ReplyDeleteFunny story, but I remember leveling my first toon. I saw a paladin running by and put a blessing on me (my warlock). I tried desperately to look for something I could throw on him. Best I could find was Water Breathing.
ReplyDeleteSince then I've always had blessing envy. That was part of the reason why I rolled a paladin next.
"...2 mana every 5 seconds for one hour."
ReplyDeleteSurely this is a description of the base "level 1" version of the spell, before level scaling is applied. Right?
The real question is why is the AP section a percentage (the buff is more valuable the more AP you have), while the MP5 is static additive.
ReplyDeleteOk the two aren't quite the same (AP + MP5 rather than AP + SP) but it seems odd that one scales with gear and the other is static. Realistically it seems Paladins should have the 3(4) Blessings:
Blessing of Might: Increases Attack Power by 11% and Spell Power by 11% (duplicated by Warrior Battle Shout + Totem / Lock Pet)
Blessing of Wisdom: Grants +2 Mana per 5 Seconds, 2 Energy per 5 seconds, 2 Focus per 5 seconds, 5 rage per 5 seconds, 10 Runic power per 5s seconds.
Blessing of Kings: Increases Intellect, Stamina, Agility and Strength by 6%.
Blessing of Sanctuary: Your Blessings now reduce damage taken by 3% and you regain 5% of your base mana when you dodge, parry or block an attack.
One generic blessing, one protection blessing (since buffing kings is not really appropriate), 1 power blessing and 1 regen blessing.
Ghostcrawler had mentioned in a comment a while back that they might roll the benefits of Sanctuary into talent(s).
ReplyDeleteThey could also put some of the effect into Righteous Fury as was mentioned -- we'll have to wait and see what they think is baseline tanking, that they want any spec to have available, and what is going to be Protection perk. I suspect mana return on blocking might be more of a baseline ability for all, where the damage reduction seems more Protection-ish. Either effect could be talented into Kings, too. (Since they've already turned Sanctuary into 'Kings for tanks' this expansion.)
As a Shaman I don't really give drive by buffings. Closest thing was when I'd make a random person participate in a wet t-shirt contest.
ReplyDeleteI can honestly say I'd kill for the BoM/BoW merger right now.
ReplyDeleteBlessing different flavors of druids and shamans has gotten really, really old.
mp5 on a blessing is senseless in the light of removing mp5 from the game.
ReplyDelete"mp5 on a blessing is senseless in the light of removing mp5 from the game."
ReplyDeleteMp5 is being removed from GEAR and GEMS. Mp5 is remaining in the game the same way Spellpower and Attackpower are being removed, but the stats and their respective buffs are remaining.