Divine Sacrifice Nerf/Buff/Fix

So while I usually shy away from posting about patch notes - especially PTR patch notes - I saw this earlier and wanted to talk about it.

• Protection
  
  
  • Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active.
    
  • Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin’s health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the damage transferred to the paladin is now reduced by 50% before being applied to the paladin. Finally, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases.

LOL WUT?

So let's put this into English and talk about the ramifications.

As it stands now, Divine Guardian will absorb an additional 10% when Divine Sacrifice is triggered, raid wide. The change is a straight up buff (though a sideways nerf), as it is now a 20% damage reduction instead of 10% more damage absorbed.

Before, say your raid of 10 was taking 20,000 points of damage each during the duration of Divine Sacrifice (200,000 total). A fully talented Divine Guardian would absorb 40% of that - up to 150% of the Paladin's health (ignore the bug that we'll cover in a second). Fully raid buffed I am pushing about 48k or so - for the math here we'll call it 50k. This means I would absorb up to 75k of that - so each person would take about 12.5k - not bad.

Of course this was bugged where if you cast your bubble on yourself it wouldn't cap, as you never actually took any damage.

What it does in 3.3

So with these proposed changes, DS absorbtion is being halved for players not in the Paladin's party (nerf) which let's be honest - is still pretty good. The 40% was just insanely OP (especially with the bug), and allowed raids to stack a few Paladins and just laugh at raid damage. This was especially true for Anub where by reducing the ammount of damage done to the raid, you reduced teh ammount of healing he recieved. Talk about your double dipping.

So, DS now only affects the Paladin's party (nerf) - but it absorb's 30% of the damage taken still - which is already reduced by 20% thanks to DG. On top of this, assuming the Paladin is in a full party, you'll be able to absorb 200% of your health (buff) AND the damage coming in is reduced by 50%.

Show me the math!

So, same scenario as above - 20k per raid member, Paladin has 50k HP.

Non Paladin Party - each member will take 16k in damage while DS is up (with 2/2 in DG). This is up from the 12.5k they were taking pre 3.3 changes (which will probably change again by the time I post this). Sucks for that squishy mage who isn't in your group.

Paladin Party - First, each member will take 16k due to 2/2 DG. That will be further reduced by an additional 30% to 11.2k (buff from 12.5k). Now, that is a total of 4.6k x 5 (because the Paladin is getting hit as well) hitting the Paladin for a total of 23k additional damage. Not unmanageable, and nowhere near the 100k that he could absorb.

HOWEVER - we're missing a step. That 23k is actually only 11.5k thanks to the changes in DS. Now we're talking about a measely melee strike from Algalon. Hardly worth worrying about.

This can be further mitigated by using Divine Protection - cutting that damage down to 5.75k and causing the Paladin to not lose agro (we're assuming a tank here due to the 50k HP). This also means that your Holy and Ret paladins can use this ability when Divine Shield is still down - because of the double 50% reduction you'll get from using Divine Protection.

Your 50k HP tank can now absorb 100k damage, but given the damage reduction, it's closer to 250k (given the 2/2 DG talents).

So it's a nerf to total raid damage absorbed - but it's a straight up buff to party damage absorbed. The real question will be is the damage going to be considered physical or magical, and will Hand of Protection stop it. This will open up a lot of possibilites in 5 mans, but tells me we're going to see some insane raid AoE in 3.3.