Right, but just because something *is* does not mean it's ideal. I mean these are suggestions about how to improve the game and the classes therein. Why shouldn't all classes have 3 nice, purposeful trees? Don't confuse paladins asking for Ret changes for wanting other classes to stay the same - many classes certainly need talent revisions also. That's just not what this thread is about.

An MS ripoff debuff would probably impinge on war territory too directly, but I mean, it's the standard argument of what people expect from a class called a paladin: a warrior who happens to have some support and buff options. There's no design reason why Arms warriors and Ret paladins could not exist in the same game and provide interesting and different options for players who like a big-weapon melee play style.

Imo...

Crusader strike needed to be at 31 points with some sort of imp crusader strike further down (similar to MS/imp MS)
It needed to be holy damage not physical
It needed to gain 100% of weapon damage not just 70%
It needed to have a real utility bonus not the lousy refreshes judgements

It's laughable when your relatively mana expensive strike does less damage then your 0 mana soc proc and gets heavily mitigated by AC.

We tried a ret pally and basically he wasn't up there with the dps, not compared to either a shadow priest, elemental shaman, or moonkin (which are all specs we've raided with, although not all at the same time). If there are already paladins for blessings, right now I'd rather take any other dps-hybrid before a retri paladin.

I'd like to see them get a buff too. It's the only spec where we've asked someone to respec out of it to raid.

Don't most physical dps classes have attack abilities that are mitigated by AC? I thought that was the benefit of crusader strike having a heavy spell component, unless that carries the heavy downside of diluting your itemization (having to wear +ap AND +dmg).

Crusader strike uses weapon damage + 40% of your spell damage, but deals physical damage.

Interesting, I never knew that. Alright, I understand now.

As I read this, an idea struck me that was very appealing. At various points I have seen the suggestion to provide a some kind of a conversion talent for ret paladins that converts strength to spell damage or spell damage strength, similar to the feral strength -> + healing talent. However, a more direct exchange could be more unique and considerably more functional to raiding without imbalancing PvP. Consider the following replacement for Fanaticism:

Holy Empowerment:

6/12/18/24/30% of the paladin's physical damage is converted to holy damage. This damage is unaffected by armor.

Against a high-armor raid or PvP target (30-50% DR), the ret paladin would see a very noticable boost in DPS (9-15%). However, against low armor targets (<10% DR) the paladin's DPS boost would be much lower (3-4%). While this would not provide an incentive for a Ret paladin to actively melee in a raid, it would provide a significant dps boost. However, that boost would not transfer over to PvP except against high armor targets. High armor targets tend not to draw the initial assist train in arenas, so the boost in paladin burst capability would not be outlandish or unbalancing.

Thoughts?

It would be mechanically unworkable, considering how the game treats melee attacks and elemental damage attached to melee attacks. The closest you can approach right now is the mechanic used for Seal of Blood, amongst other things. I suspect it would be a huge hassle to make the game truncate damage done without discarding the remainder.

It's also a kind of silly solution. The thing is that Ret right now doesn't work really wrongly in any specific, it just doesn't really do enough in any category (damage done, group support, ambiguous opportunity costs about using a ret and it's benefits versus some other option), to be even equal when compared to other "offspecs".

Judgment refreshes wouldn't be "lousy" if they were better. Right now the only real judgement for raids is Wisdom. Light heals too little and Crusader is inferior to Misery yet requires potential refreshing. Keeping three or so judgements that are good for the raid would be great.

Another issue is that keeping up judgements isn't always a big deal. If you had a ret, prot and holy paladin in the raid...only the holy paladin needs his or her judgement refreshed.

I've been wondering whether it wouldn't be a somewhat elegant fix to have Crusader Strike give a self and group haste buff with a duration akin to its cooldown. 10-15% maybe (15 might be reaching but 10% seems reasonable on a glance). Physical and spell, or only physical. They don't want our "damage" to be higher because we frontload everything, and that makes us look considerably better than we are on our 1/minute HoJ in PvP, and that's what the devs are keeping an eye out for and slamming the breaks on. This would give an incentive to both keep us swinging our weapon instead of chaining FoL in +heal loadout as well as actually put us in a dps group, a la other hybrids.

So I mucked around with Ret on the PTR today. I purchased the full T5 Ret set, filled it in with mail bracers/belt/boots from the hunter box, tricked myself out with cape/neck/rings/trinkets from the hunter and rogue boxes, and equipped the two-handed crit/ap/stam sword from the hunter box. I filled in the gem slots with green gems cut by my JC alt -- mostly strength and crit -- and added the CE helm enchant and the exalted Aldor shoulder enchant (AP/crit).

Unbuffed stats with a 5/8/48 build:

237.7 dps, 3.60 speed
1462 AP
+8.39% to hit
25.41% crit
+187 spelldamage

Self-buffed with BoM (Improved, so +264 AP) and Improved Sanctity Aura, I was able to do 750dps sustained on one of the Servants of Allistarj (level 54) in the Blasted Lands for 130 seconds before going OOM. If I'd had BoW, and JoW up on the target I'm sure I could have gone quite a bit longer than that.

(EDIT: Subsequent test with BoW/JoW keeps mana at full indefinitely.)

Skill breakdown:

46.9% white damage
24.5% Seal of Command
15.7% Crusader Strike
12.9% Judgement of Command

So, there's one mostly-unrealistic data point.

A short list of ways this is inaccurate:

- No external buffs (raid buffs, consumables)

- No external debuffs (sunder, blood frenzy, etc.)

- No enchants on several pieces of gear

- Vengeance possibly bugged and giving +30% instead of +15%

- Unrealistically low armor and avoidance as compared to a level 73 mob

- Slight dps boost from hasted swings due to parry

- No environmental damage, no need to reposition, etc.

- Wearing gear that a paladin is unlikely to be given in a raid

I'd be curious to see what kind of damage the pure DPS classes can put out in the same situation with the gear from the goodie-boxes.

Totally OT, but this would be wonderful if it stayed.

Prot warriors that are able to farm and are viable DPS with the same spec. Kinda reminds you of the feral tree.

Yowch, still a fairly large gap (from the Fury warrior; ignoring Prot for a moment). So do the other things a ret paladin brings to the raid make up for a ~400dps difference in direct damage?

Well, it's clear Prot warriors will get a dps boost, and that's a Good Thing. But it's unlikely they'll go live with more dps than Fury warriors. That would entirely defeat the purpose of having a Fury tree at all.

Yes, OT, but I was only trying to point him to what he asked for with a link =). Devastate is being reverted back to 2.0 it seems (see warrior forum). (END OT)

This is what I did in my natural gear that I came from live with. (I did this before they gave out free T5 and I did healing T5 when I finally got some, so I can't test again until I muster the courage to wait for more boxes from mcweaksauce)

http://www.saepirothsux.net/Images/W...507_011131.jpg

1100 dps sustained, working with a drakefist/thunderfury warrior and a dw enhancement shaman with some T4. Lasted for 5min before the enh shaman ran out of mana (for the second time, after shamanistic rage) just as I was dropping to 0 and we stopped.

Just buy the rogue box from McWeaksauce and use the armor turnins from that and the rings, etc.

2 Major points, one of which deserves recap, the other I can't see has been mentioned.

1) Paladins offer utility, rather than straight DPS. In every game I've played or made, it's been very difficult to convince the playerbase to accept a utility class over a class with direct, numerically visible benefits. A paladin with a spare BoP who saves a mage riding too close to the aggro threshold immediately adds thousands of DPS to an encounter or wipe prevention if the target of the mob's wrath is a healer. Ditto with a well timed LoH, ranged taunt to bring stray mobs back towards the melee group, etc. And 3% crit, plus blessing, plus aura is not neglible.

How much is 10 minutes of 10-25 players' time worth? Like I say, excel will not provide answers here.

2) Ret Paladins need to use HoJ/Repentance to maximise damage output and to maximise utility. A lot of mobs are simply immune to these mechanics, which makes a significant proportion of their DPS/Utility mechanics about as useful as rogue poisons.

It says weapon damage, I asummed it was 100%, are you thinking of SoC, which is 70$?

If it were holy damage, it would be rediculous, very few instant melee attacks ignore armor, there is really 0 reason for a paladin to have one.

Refreshing judgments is pretty awsome, however, its not reliable now..Crusader should refresh whether its parried, dodged or missed, regardless.

Paladins also need an "on X"-->effect buff....Like on critical strike paladin gives X buff to party members...The question is, what can they have thats not taken up by priests, druids and shammies? Since *most* of these "on X" effects (Unleashed rage ect) are offensive bonuses, perhaps, paladins could be defensive? Like when they score a crit, all group members recieve 5% armor?

But they still can't farm all that well, because you need to take the time to put up 5 sunders before you get the high damage. Applying 5 sunders is anywhere from 45 to 60 rage and, at best, 8 seconds of GCD.

Making the current Devastate actually apply a Sunder would be more useful for farming. Perhaps making it cost less rage as well. Alternatively, apply a small buff to its damage but make it cause something like 10% extra threat per Sunder rather than additional damage.

I've been disappointed with Devastate for awhile now, but I certainly think the idea of a weapon-based strike is a good thing. Maybe they need to make it based entirely on the damage of the weapon (i.e. exclude attack power) and do some large multilple of threat. That would be one way to implement effective threat scaling with gear, while not having to rely on relatively trashy stats like block value.

CS is more reliable than most give credit for. In a "DPS" situation, you will be attacking from behind and negating parry. That leaves dodge and miss. A little bit of +hit will reduce that to a pretty reasonable number. (I can reduce it to 5~% dodge on a even level mob, a +3 mob will prolly have around 10% avoidance)


In 5 mans, I can keep a fellow paladin's judgement up on a boss/mob for the entire fight. Yes, one miss will cause judgements to lapse. But if I refresh the judgement 90% of the time, the average duration of that judgement is at least 2~3 refreshes, which could be somewhere between 30~60 seconds.


Rejudging every 20 seconds for a paladin who is focusing on MHing is a huge distraction. Rejudging every 60 seconds... not so much. In raid situations, I notice my fellow paladins rarely keep up judgements - it is tough to stay out of harm's way, MH, and keep an eye on JoW/JoL. Assuming that there isn't too much danger to melee (Ha!), the Ret paladin can improve judgement uptime for a lot of raids. Maybe your raid's pally healers keep up judgements religiously while healing. Mine don't; CS provides some nifty benefits in this case.


Anyways, what do people think about the +2% damage Sanctity Aura? Now there's a reason to put a Ret paladin in a DPS group, and it works on both melee and ranged.


3% raid wide crit, +2% to 4 other DPS classes... how does that look now?

Problem is partially player percepetion, the 2% buff is good, but its rolled in with all the other damage so its hard to see.

If SCT reported 1000 point cirt (+20 for improved scnaity aura) or some BS then it would help. I know that seeing the VE mana gains or the +600 Improved Leader of the Pack goes a long way to making me feel like those things are doing something.

I dont think the DPS is that lacking, it lacks 2 things, 1) a Flashy "look at the damage the paladin added" effect, and 2) Synergy with some other class. Warriors make rogues better by sundering, Spriests make mana users better by draining, and make warlocks do better damage with a debuff, etc. I feel like the paladin strike should heal rage and energy like VE does for mana. Like 1 rage 5 energy restored each crit. Does nothing to help the paladin, but rogues and warriors will just get better with the paladin around.

My 2 cents anyway.

Arms Warriors with Flurry and Imp Slam fwiw are putting up insane numbers with any of the 2nd Tier 2h'rs, annd are pretty much equal with Fury Wars at the moment.

Feral Druids are more useful than Resto druids in my experience, as Feral Druids are currently the best off tanks due to raid stackability since they can swap gear and put up impressive DPS #'s.

All 3 Warlock Trees are viable for Raiding, with your chart going the wrong way - Demonology is by far the almost always #1 damage for our raids, with Destruction then Affliction following behind by 1 or 2%.

Mage has 1 spec - fire. Anything but fire performs pretty poorly in a raid setting.

Shamans have two awesome DPS Trees - with Elemental providing a little more healing utility and a little less of an overall DPS increase to the raid, but still a very good dps tree. Enhancement is putting up insane numbers, they're generating so much DPS that sometimes they can't earth shock - enhancement really needs a threat dump. And when the two work in concert - Elemental Shaman damage skyrockets.

Paladins have 1 tree. The only other classes with 1 tree are Hunter and Mage. This is because their class is such a single focused role - DPS. You can only DPS in so many ways.

However Priests have 2 distinct and viable roles.
Warriors have 2 distinct and viable roles.
Shamans have 2 distinct and viable roles.
Druids have 2 distinct and viable roles.
Paladins will never attain this lofty "2nd role" status due to being the worst possible choice for Offtank, and virtually no raid stackability unless you spec 30/31 which doesn't really help much with tanking does it, along with the fun of trying to tell your Main Tank that hey - we got a new Main Tank, you're the off tank now. Blizzard overpowered Warriors for so long, they don't even know what to do with them.