A standby in the paladin spell arsenal:

Divine Shield
Protects the paladin from all damage and spells for 12 sec, but increases the time between your attacks by 100%. Once protected, the target cannot be made invulnerable by Divine Shield, Divine Protection, Blessing of Protection again or use Avenging Wrath for 1 min.

The ever-popular pally bubble, aka Divine Shield.

Well, there we were fighting The Lurker Below in SSC last night – for those who aren’t familiar with the fight, the strat we were using involved boiling the water around the boss’s spawn point, so the water deals about 500 fire damage a tick.

Divine Shield didn’t protect me from it.

I got roundly mocked in Teamspeak when I grumbled about it; cries of “oh go on, now your precious bubble is worthless, boohoo” filled the air. But that’s not the point: what bothers me is that the spell description explicitly says “protects….from all damage“. All damage. Not “all attacks”, or “most damage”, but all damage.

It really bugs me when Blizzard breaks their own rules in order to make encounters challenging. I understand that some existing game mechanics might trivialize a new obstacle and steps need to be taken to keep stuff fresh and interesting – so, for example, I’m fine with the reports that we won’t be able to use our flying mounts in Northrend (come Wrath of the Lich King) until level 78 or so.

But there’s no real reason to prevent a pally bubble from protecting against the boiling water; it’s 12 seconds of protection on a 5-minute cooldown. Big deal. And if you don’t want Divine Shield to protect paladins against everything, don’t write “protects the paladin from all damage” into the spell description!

There are other examples of Blizzard breaking their own rules like this, although now I’m trying to write about them naturally I can’t bring them to mind. If you can think of any, feel free to comment. In the meantime, I’m going to be over here grumbling about this pointless little attack on consistency.