Send in the animals

Last time I talked about the DnD spell Animate Objects, where you attack your enemies with chairs.  This time I want to look at Conjure Animals to see how that spell stacks up.  Conjure Animals is a *lot* more complicated because it gives a similar choice betwen a few big summons or a ton of small ones, but there is a lot of variety in the summons.  Animated objects always have the same stats, but a wolf is not the same as a giant wasp!

The two spells share the same fundamental flaw - the game is balanced around the idea that attacking once for 15 damage is about the same as attacking twice for 10 damage, which is about the same as attacking 8 times for 6 damage.  This idea is patently absurd, but all the summon spells and indeed the entire Challenge Rating system is based upon it.  Yesterday we saw that animating a ton of small objects is vastly superior to a big one, and with animals it is the same.  Pick the big one, you get a huge, tough critter than hits for 10 damage / round.  Pick 8 small animals though, and each of them hits for 5 / round.

Conjure Animals lets you summon 1 CR 2 animal, 2 CR 1 animals, 4 CR 1/2 animals, or 8 CR 1/4 animals.

Animal              CR     Dmg/animal   Total damage

Giant Elk             2             11                11

Brown Bear         1             9                  18

War Horse           1/2          7                  28

Wolf                    1/4         5.5                 44

You see the problem.  Sure, swarms of animals are at risk of being Fireballed, but they deal preposterous damage.  A fighter at level 5 swinging with a big sword probably does about 20 damage a round, and we don't want summon spells to completely replace fighters.  Given that, I think summoning a Giant Elk that is worse than a fighter but has a ton of health is a reasonable thing.  It lasts a full hour, has as many hitpoints as any characters in the group, and some animals have special abilities like flying, tracking, swimming etc that you can leverage.  It is a spell I would happily cast.

However, summoning swarms of weak animals is a huge problem.  If you max out on stuff like wolves your fighters are going to feel utterly useless.  The wolves do several times as much damage as they do, and if the enemies do decide to start chopping through the wolves that is *great*.  The wolves have 88 HP total!  They will still do a ton of damage and save your group a huge amount of incoming damage too.

The solution here is simply to nerf the number of animals you get when you go for lower CR ones.  Instead of doubling the numbers each step down, I would change it from 1,2,4,8 to 1,2,3,4.  Nice and easy, and it actually works out well with the damage numbers.  The CR 2 is the worst still, but at least the others all deal similar overall damage.

The other issue with this spell is that it is extremely overpowered when cast at higher level.  If you level up Fireball from 3rd to 5th level, for example, the damage goes up 25%.  However, if you level up Conjure Animals from 3rd to 5th level, you get *double* the animals.  This is a problem!  It makes all higher level summoning spells a joke compared to Conjure Animals, and uplevelling spells is supposed to be a way of filling in spots, not invalidating high level spells.  The way I would fix this is to make the spell summon 1 more animal of CR 1 at level 5, or one extra CR 2 animal at level 7.  This is still worth doing, but leaves room for actual high level summon spells to compete.

Even after both of these nerfs Conjure Animals is still better than any other summon spell in the book, I think.  At 5th level it deals more damage than the Bigby's Hand or Animate Objects spells, and it makes Conjure Elemental and Mordenkainen's Sword look like ridiculous jokes on multiple fronts.  Even after my suggested nerfs, I think you have to make the types of animals that are summoned be determined by the GM, and have the GM pick weak animals.  I tried to pick the best animal types for my numbers above, but if you instead pick randomly the spell is a lot more fair.  Many of the animals have worse attack routines than the optimized ones above, and that would reduce its power level reasonably.

I like the idea of summoning animals to attack your enemies.  It is also cool that their abilities are based on the abilities of the base creatures.  As usual, the theme is good, but the math sucks.

Send in the chairs

The Animate Objects spell in DnD is thematically great.  You are in the middle of a fight in a workshop, and you cause the bench, a couple of crowbars, and a table to rise up and bash away at your enemies.  You could also use it to help carry people, break stuff, or accomplish other tasks.  Awhile ago MattInTheHat came up with a *fantastic* plan for the spell - he threw some coins at his enemies, telling them to buy some better insults, then animated the coins and bashed them with them.

This was a great dramatic moment.  The coins were marvellously effective.  I eventually picked up the spell myself and paid for a bunch of small metal pieces with my character's initials on them so I could toss them at my enemies and do similar things.  This is all well and good, except that it is hideously unbalanced.

The way the spell works is that you get 10 slots of objects.  The bigger the object, the more slots it takes up, but the more damage it does.  However, tiny objects are a huge outlier in terms of their damage per slot.  Consider the chart below, written against AC 16.

Size    Slots    Damage  Hit      Total Damage  Dam/Slot/Round

Tiny    1          1d4+4     +8              4.225        4.225

Small   1          1d8+2     +6             3.575        3.575

Med     2          2d6+1      +5            4               2

Lrg       4         2d10+2     +6            7.15          1.789

Huge    8         2d12+4      +8           11.05        1.381

The problem is obvious.  The thing that really matters is the damage per slot, and tiny things utterly dominate that metric.  Large things hit hard, but there are so few of them that they do terrible damage.  It feels to me like you ought to want to animate big stuff if you can, but the opposite is true.  You might think that coins are perhaps too small to work, and that is reasonable.  (The spell does not specify.)  However, you could always just have 10 daggers on a bandolier or somesuch, if need be.  

The real thing we ought to figure out is how good *should* the spell be?  I will use the spell Disintegrate to benchmark just how absurd Animate Objects is.  Disintegrate is a single target 6th level spell that does 75 damage with a save to avoid.  Animate Objects, if up levelled from 5th to 6th and used on Tiny objects does 78 damage with attack rolls - quite similar.  However, Disintegrate is a single action, and Animate Objects does that damage every round!  Also Animate Objects uses many attacks that can all smash enemy concentration and also will take attacks of opportunity if they enemy tries to move.

It is clear to me that Animate Objects on tiny objects is completely busted.  It is the best single target attack, and is as powerful as a fighter, but the spellcaster can cast other spells while the objects beat down.

So how do we fix this?  There are two basic approaches - first, to restrict how often you can use it, and second to change the numbers.  The first one would entail insisting that tiny objects be of highly specific sizes.  You could insist that they be the size of a sword, for example, so that having 10 of them on your person is extremely difficult, and thus you could only use Animate Objects under specific circumstances.  Unfortunately there are ways around that - I would probably have a summoned minion carry around a box of swords for me to animate in that case.  This approach also doesn't fix the issue that large objects are terrible.

The other approach is to fix the numbers.  Generally small things have the problem that they have low strength so they do little damage, but these small things have massive dexterity and use dexterity for their damage rolls.  I don't see any reason why we need to shackle ourselves to the listed strength and dexterity numbers.  The tiny object get many attacks, which is especially powerful against casters, so their damage should be the weakest overall.  Large things are harder to come by and are often restricted by their size, so they should hit hard.  Here are my suggested new values:

Size    Slots    Damage  Hit      Total Damage  Dam/Slot/Round

Tiny    1          1d4+1     +5              1.75           1.75

Small   1         1d8          +4             2.025         2.025

Med     2         2d6+2      +6             4.95           2.475

Lrg       4         2d12+3    +7             9.6            2.4

Huge    8         4d12+5    +9            21.7           2.713

These new values look a lot better.  If you have a bunch of small things they are still fantastic at bonking spellcasters many times to disrupt casting.  Their damage is still good, and definitely worth casting.  If you animate big stuff it is worse at disruption, but hits very hard.  (But still not nearly as hard as the base version of the spell on tiny objects.)  Tossing coins at people is a fine thing to do, animating swords does better damage, and finding chairs or tables or anvils to punch people with is better yet.  That feels way more appropriate thematically, and stops this spell from being quite so brutal.  

Having some spells be better than others is fine, but you have to keep the best ones from dominating everything.  Fireball, for example, is so overpowered that it is often the best thing to cast in a single target situation, even though it is obviously designed for AOE.  That is a problem.  Animate Objects, as written, is similar.  It is supposed to be a spell you maintain over many turns, but it is actually the best one shot single target attack.... and then it keeps doing that every turn.

Next I may tackle Conjure Animals, which has many of the same problems that Animate Objects does.  Summoning a horde of wolves or bears delivers absurd damage in the same way, because the game is designed around the idea that 4 attacks for 10 each is about as good as 1 attack for 20.

Climb on my back

In the past couple weeks I have been doing a lot of carries in WOW.  The ways it works is I am in a bunch of discord channels and an advertiser posts a run.  Boosters like me reply if the post suits them, and then we gather into a group in game and carry someone through a dungeon.  The ad will tell us how much we get paid, how difficult the dungeon will be, and who they need.

This pays extremely well.  I make 4 to 10 times as much gold carrying people as I would doing anything else in the game.  It isn't trivial to get that gold though, as you need to have a high level of skill to do dungeons with one or two people in your group who are incompetent or even afk.  The value of the gold I earn means I am being paid between 4 and 10 dollars an hour depending on the run, which isn't a great hourly rate, but I am being paid to play WOW, so I can't complain that much.  In the end though it isn't like I convert this gold to dollars, I use it to pay for all the potions and food and other junk I need to play as well as my monthly subscription.

The booster community is an interesting place.  People seem to think that I mostly get paid to carry totally incompetent people to rewards they don't deserve, but that hasn't been my experience so far.  Mostly it is people starting off a brand new character who want some good gear but who don't want to spend months trying to work their way up.  They pay some money to get carried to a bunch of good gear so they can get into the content they actually want.  The others are people who are able to do the content but who struggle to find groups.  They don't want to spend hours trying to find people to run with and then have the group fall apart.  

Instead they pay 15 bucks so that a group of friendly, highly skilled people show up and efficiently beat the dungeon with them... and at the end, the buyer gets all the loot!  I can see people looking at it like a movie ticket, where they pay a modest sum and get the experience they want.

I am not interested in buying a boost at all, ever, but I can understand people who do.

There are downsides to boosting though.  The main one is that you need advertisers who sit in trade chat and group finder and constantly spam advertise their services.  I could apply to be one of those advertisers, but I would be miserable.  Even if the gold per hour is better, and I am sure it is, I am not interested.  However, the constant spam does annoy and frustrate players who want to find groups the normal way, without paying for the service.

That spam doesn't affect me.  Trade chat is useless, and is just there for people to post memes, chuck norris jokes, and political diatribes.  I have it turned off.  I have a simple mod that blocks all of the advertisers in group finder when I am looking, so I don't even see that.  For me boosting is all upside.  I don't care if other people buy boosts in general, and I like it a lot when they pay me stacks of gold to do fun activities.  I play the game to do challenging stuff with my buddies, and I don't care if somebody else buys an achievement I worked for by opening their wallet.  The important part is the striving and the improvement, which a buyer misses entirely.

Mostly the people I run into while boosting are a lot like the people I run into anywhere else.  Generally we get along and things are fine, but occasionally I run into a jackass who annoys me.  

One thing about boosting that I often see is people complaining that boosters are giving Blizzard money, and that any new and difficult content is just Blizzard cooperating with boosters do make tons of money.  The idea is that if something is hard, buyers will purchase tons of subscription tokens for real money, sell them for gold, and use that gold to pay me to boost them.  

This makes zero sense.  If there are 1 million players who never buy boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars a month.  If most of those players are buying or selling boosts, Blizzard makes 20 million dollars per month.  No amount of boosting can change that - everybody buys exactly 1 subscription per month.  All that happens if lots of boosting is occurring is that the best players don't pay for their subscriptions because they get subsidized by the buyers.

Boosting is here to stay, and I think we all ought to just get over it.  Focus on playing the game your way, and don't worry about what everyone else is up to.  If you don't boost, then nothing the boosting community does affects you.  Those top skilled players were not going to show up for your run anyway... if they weren't getting paid, they would just be doing something else entirely.

Cash money

Naked Man and I often lock horns about money.  Not real world money though, just the currency that we use in our RPGs.  Recently we have been talking about how our characters interact with gold and how we would like for it to work.  NM loves the idea of gold mattering to characters.  He is a big fan of them seeking out treasure to buy the things they want, keeping track of expenses, and budgeting.  In his ideal world we would each keep track of exactly how many coins we have of each denomination and have fun collecting old and obscure currencies that we can then try to convert into more useful coinage.

I, on the other hand, built a whole roleplaying system where player wealth is described simply by Destitute - Poor - Professional - Landowner - Mayor - Royal - Monarch.  What level you are at tells you what stuff you can buy and what you can own.

I often give NM trouble because in our DnD game I do a lot of rounding of money and don't bother to keep meticulous track of it.  I also complain about pricing of things when those prices don't make sense to me.  For example, early on we ended up in a big city and I wanted to learn spells.  The prices seemed ludicrous to me, because to learn a single level 1 spell was 1000g.  1000g could buy me a decent magical item, so the idea that it cost 1000g to just look at someone else's spellbook for an hour seemed absurd to me.  Who in the world is paying those prices?  The person selling the spells doesn't even expend anything when they make a sale!  These strange prices often come up because we are combining sources from a variety of editions, some of which are decades old.  This leads to some strange situations.

For example, in our last session we suddenly got rich.  Up until this point we had accumulated roughly 30,000g between all of us.  About half had been spent on various things like spell research and magic items, and the rest we were carrying around in cash.  In this session we sold a bunch of items we had gotten in our recent adventure for a total of 70,000g.  50,000g of that was in just 2 items that we were selling because they weren't much use.  It makes sense in the lore of the world that these items would be valuable and sought after - they had a history and were completely unique.  Unfortunately that windfall makes it hard for us to take money seriously otherwise.

How do you make yourself worry about small change when you randomly stumble upon single items worth as much as all the loot you have ever seen?  I think DnD has always had this sort of problem because as you level up you find more and more expensive and powerful things, and this leads to out of control inflation from the perspective of characters.  

It is hard to worry about spending 100g on something when you will randomly open a box and find 10,000g in it!

This trouble is exascerbated by our current campaign style.  We are on the clock trying to save the world from apocalypse.  Adventurers that take long breaks and choose their missions based on monetary rewards can interact with world economics in fun ways.  Do we go fight the ogres, which is easy, or do we delve into the lich's tomb, which is dangerous, but probably much more rewarding?  That is a good question.  However, our adventures are often part of saving the world and so we don't have a lot of choice.  Chasing ogres for cash isn't happening.  I suspect that interesting monetary dilemmas are extremely hard to maintain in a race to avoid armageddon.

One thing NM has wanted is for spell components to be expensive.  He likes the idea of spells that have expensive components that we have to either find or pay for as a way to bleed off some of our money.  That works for me, but it is a tricky balance to strike.  Recently I came upon a bunch of spells, some of which had expensive components.  However, the spells were extremely weak, much worse than other ones that didn't have any extra cost.  That isn't going to make for any interesting decisions - why would I pay 1000g to cast an inferior spell?

After some back and forth NM decided to improve those spells and suddenly there were some interesting choices.  A few of the spells were decidedly more powerful than similar free ones, or at least offered a unique perk.  I like that situation, as it lets me choose between free spells or spending cash on something new and exciting.  I have to decide what to prepare each day, so I face the challenges of figuring out when I will need the big guns and getting ready to spend resources on them.

There are ways to make gold interesting in a fantasy RPG, but I don't know that they end up being worth the effort.  When I think about fantasy stories none of them ever involve the characters taking months off to go fight trivial opponents to collect cash.  That isn't a bulletproof argument though, because we aren't playing a book, we are playing a game, and these are different things.  

When I am running games I don't think I am willing to put in the effort to build a complete economic system for the players to interact with.  It is just too much, and I am not interested in something half baked.  NM, on the other hand, seems dead set on including an economics simulator in his fantasy RPG.

Going walkabout

I recently finished running some gamers through a one shot scenario in my roleplaying game Heroes By Trade.  Overall they seemed to have a great time, and the experience gave me some insight into one particular rule in DnD that I did not include in Heroes By Trade.  Naked Man gave me a lot of flak for not having it, but now that I have seen people's reactions I am sure I made the right decision.

That rule is attacks of opportunity.  The basic idea is that if you do something that leaves you open your opponents can take advantage and bash you.  That outline looks fine, but the way DnD implements it is disastrous.  The key problem is that 'leaving yourself open' includes simply walking away from the enemy.

This means that once a melee character closes in, you are stuck next to them.  This is especially true if the melee character has a single huge attack, because often you lose half of your HP if you move away, so you are trapped next to them for the duration of the battle.  

I can see where this comes from.  Old DnD fighter design was that fighters walked up to people and bashed them.  They had no options, no choices.  If a ranged character was a bit faster they could simply walk away and keep on shooting and the poor fighter was absolutely wrecked.  It seems kind of silly that a ranged character who is slightly faster can so trivially defeat a melee type, so the designers decided to make it punishing for anyone to walk away from a melee combatant.  Walk away, you get smashed.

They solved the problem wrong.

The problem is that melee types have no options.  You don't solve that by locking down ranged people so that *nobody* has any options!  You solve it by giving melee characters meaningful ways to keep people in range.  Unfortunately the solution they went with is to keep fighters mind numbingly boring and make it extremely hard to maneuver around a battlefield.  Once people lock swords, everyone stands in a pile fighting.  

The players in my test game were DnD veterans.  When a monster walked next to them they wanted to move away, and then looked at me with big, sad eyes, asking if they were going to take an attack of opportunity.  I said no, because my game doesn't have such a thing.  Their faces lit up with glee, and they moved around the battlefield to find a better vantage point.  The players clearly wanted to wander, and in Heroes By Trade you can.

Of course you do have to solve the problem of melee being trivially defeated by ranged folks who keep on running away.  My solution is to give melee options.  They can knock a ranged person down, preventing them from running and making them easy to bash.  They can grab a slippery caster, keeping them within reach.  They can dash madly across the battlefield to get in position to thump.  They can't always do all of these things of course, compromises must be made, but they have ways to keep a ranged enemy pinned down, just as the ranged enemy has ways to escape.

I am extremely pleased with my choices, particularly after seeing the results in this game.  Players have a lot more fun when they are actively involved.  It is more exciting to choose to use Immobilizing Shot to pin an enemy in place that to simply walk next to them and have attacks of opportunity keep them close.

People want to make choices, to have control over their fate.  They also like to be able to run around in a fight and do exciting things.  Attacks of opportunity prevent both of these things.  Good riddance.

Bad Blizzard

For many months now Blizzard, the game company behind behemoths like Hearthstone, World of Warcraft, Diablo, Overwatch, and other iconic games has been mired in controversy and legal trouble.  The state of California is suing them for a variety of things including sexist hiring, promotion, and pay practices, failure to resolve sexual abuse complaints properly, and destroying documents  to cover up their problems.

After reading the court filing and hearing many of the complaints brought forward it is clear that Blizzard has enormous problems with entrenched sexism at the company.  There was one senior executive in particular who was widley known to grope many women at Blizzcon in particular and people regularly had to pull him off of women when he was drunkenly grabbing them.  Nothing was ever done about this, it was simply accepted as the way things are.  There are no end of other horrendous stories though, like women being sexually assaulted and then moved to other teams to spare their attacker from facing any consequences, as well as regular events where male employees would go on drunken 'cube crawls' to harass the women working there.

It is a neverending parade of awful.

Blizzard's initial response was to deny all allegations and blame overzealous regulators in California for overreacting.  The media, player, and employee response to that was *extremely* negative thankfully and the people in charge quickly decided that heads had to roll.  You know you have to do something when the people playing your game are killing an NPC named after one of your executives over and over again just for spite.  They fired Blizzard's CEO and the head of HR and began terminating all kinds of other employees caught up in the scandal.

That is all well and good.  I want those people fired, and prosecuted where appropriate.  This sort of thing is never going to be quickly or easily resolved though.  Entrenched cultural norms take a long time to change, and a rapid leadership swap just isn't going to fix everything.

The question is, what should I do about it?

Complaining on the internet is my first response of course, but should I delete all Blizzard games?  Should I refuse to ever give them money again?  I thought about it a lot and came to the conclusion that other game companies are often bad in similar ways.  Decamping to one of their games isn't really helping anything.  Awful treatment of women is extremely common in that industry.  Most likely what I would be doing is supporting a game company that just hasn't been caught yet.

I think the thing I should focus on is not trying to punish Blizzard, but rather to create a community in WOW that has the values I support.  I should speak up about sexism wherever I see it.  I should refuse to accept it from the people around me.  I should do this both in person and on forums that I frequent.  This is something I have always done to an extent, but I should push it harder now that I know just how bad things are.

There are a lot of people whose response was 'Burn Blizzard to the ground'.  I am not going that far.  I want the leadership purged, and I want to see huge numbers of abusive people get fired.  I am totally willing to accept slower content updates and worse response time as Blizzard sorts itself out and restructures.  I want the games I love to be built by a company whose values I can get behind.  That isn't true right now, but I have hopes that this will be the catalyst for it to be true in the future.

A great mistake

The newest content patch for World of Warcraft is coming in 11 days, and I am looking forward to it a great deal.  Partly this is because we desperately need new stuff, but part is that Blizzard is adding a broken new legendary item in for my class and spec, and they don't seem to realize how absurd it is.  The community at large hasn't seemed to grasp it either, as most people seem to think it is decent but no big deal.

They are so wrong.  This new item is called Divine Resonance (DR) and it is going to break things for paladins of the Kyrian covenant.

Here are the basics.  A normal legendary item should be adding roughly 5% to your overall output.  On single target that amounts to something like 300 damage per second.  Healing per second is much more complicated, but it is reasonable to think of them as having similar value.  My current legendaries add about 300 dps on single target, and as much as 500 dps on fights with many targets.

DR interacts with a 1 minute cooldown that I already have.  After that 1 min cooldown is used, it casts a spell every 5 seconds for 30 seconds, so I get 6 casts.  That spell does damage, generates holy power, and has an additional effect.  First I will do the calculations for my damage spec, Retribution.

First, single target.  For Retribution the spell that is cast is Judgement.  That does 3325 damage directly.  It also makes the target take 25% more damage from my big finisher.  Sometimes that will overlap with other things, so it is probably only worth about 20% on my finisher, which is 1347 damage.  It also provides 1 holy power to cast more finishers, which is worth about 20% of a finisher, which is another 1347 damage.  That means on average each one of those hits is worth 6020 damage.  I get 6 of those hits each minute for a total of 602 damage per second.

So on single target this legendary is worth double what other legendaries are.   That is nuts.  However, is it any good on multi target fights?  I will assume 5 targets for now.  The initial hit is still 3325, but the finisher bonus is significantly worse at 930.  The holy power is better though, clocking in at 4140 damage.  Thus DR is worth 840 dps on five targets.  It isn't as much better on multi target, but it is still absolutely my best option by a huge margin.

Retribution

                    1 target    5 target

Current        300           500

DR              602            840

Now to examine how this legendary works for tanking when I am Protection spec.  This mechanic is quite a bit more challenging to model because Holy Power has multiple uses while tanking.  I will go with my worst case estimates though, to be cautious.  The spell that is cast by DR when I am Protection is Avenger's Shield (see Captain America) which hits up to 5 targets so as we add more targets the ability gains dramatically in efficacy.  Also I heal for every damage dealt by it, so I get both offence and defence.

First, single target.  Avenger's Shield does 1744 damage.  It heals me for 1744.  Also it gives me a holy power, which is worth 237 damage and 2576 healing.  As such, it gives me a combined total of 630 dps, counting healing as dps.  This doesn't even describe its full power though, as this also grants me significant defensive benefits that are extremely hard to quantify.  I won't have to quantify them though, as DR is so busted that side benefits aren't even needed.

On five targets things get out of control.  The base healing and damage increase by five times, as does the holy power damage.  The holy power healing is unchanged.  The total here is 2120 dps.  This is off the charts.  To put it in perspective, I have another legendary that I use most of the time that is purely relevant in AOE.  It does 2370 dps on five targets and is nigh worthless on single target, plus all of its benefit is in damage with no defensive ability at all.  Realistically I only use that because I have no other good options.  If I was using a good all around choice I would be getting roughly 300 dps overall, similar to what I would get for my other spec.

Protection

                    1 target    5 target

Current        250            350

DR              630            2120

That 2120 number is a huge, monstrous outlier.  Now it should be noted that 5 targets is the optimal number for DR.  If I chose any larger number of targets it wouldn't get much better, and if I chose less targets it falls off mostly linearly.  Still, at any number of targets this is a ludicrous ability.  My total output is roughly 6000 dps (again, counting healing and damage both), so 2120 is inappropriate.  It is quite reasonable to model this as averaging 1000 dps over a whole dungeon, making it vastly more powerful than any legendary for any class.

What is funny is that these calculations above haven't even captured the whole problem.  There is a new power for the Mikanikos soulbind that reduces the cooldown of the ability that does this, by as much as 33% on 5 targets.  I will almost for sure be using that, which raises the 5 target effectiveness over 3000 dps, making it a 50% increase in throughput.

So here is the question:  Should it be nerfed?  There are two approaches to answering this.  First, yes, it is silly overpowered, and should be brought into line.  Second, Retribution and Protection paladins aren't used in *any* high end optimal raids or dungeon groups.  None.  They are trash tier.  Clearly this will help, but I don't think it will actually result in them being overpowered overall.  I suspect it will raise them from trash tier to respectable.

If you are a game designer and you make a huge mistake like this but the people who benefit from your mistake are still totally in line with other groups, should you fix it?  Ideally of course you nerf this legendary but buff the specs that aren't working well, but Blizzard seems set on leaving my two specs as weak, so they aren't going that route.

I don't get to decide that they should buff me and nerf this absurd legendary.  They should, but Blizzard isn't likely to listen to my plan.  As such, I will use the thing and be totally busted and hope that they conclude that overall I am still fair, so it should sit as is.