Unity

If Holy Paladins are to use either DPS or tanking plate the class needs a new power system - even if their heals scale with Attack Power I very much doubt Bliz would let Parry provide mana pool or Crit to regenerate it so the class would need to rebuilt as one that doesn't need caster stats.

If Blizzard is going to do such a massive revamp of class mechanics a big expansion is the time but I don't think it likely. Expect to keep seeing items built specifically for the spec.

 

Cirocco

Then there's large sections of the Paladin community who are bloody stupid. Leaving aside the term shockadin, this is how you kill stuff as holy in any reasonable amount of time, either that or spend 50g to respec any time you want to kill anything solo. How else would you do it? Stand there auto attacking? Or change into melee gear you have no skills to use?

 

flyingtoastr

That is exactly what we do. You throw on whatever spell damage gear you have and run around with Seal of Righteousness on autoattacking things. The entire paladin class is based around autoattacking things to death, for better or worse.

Shockadins are dumb. Not to get off topic for it, but I can give you a nice long rundown in PM's if you would like.

EDIT: you do understand shockadins are a 40/0/21 hybrid Holy/Ret spec, not a farming Holy pally, right? You seem confused.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Pounce

I can't disagree with your first assertion, sadly enough.

The second is also very true and in fact, I actually prefer farming as Holy. While it lacks outright killing power, it has the advantage of tons of survivability and if you gather up enough mobs, the phrase "make it up on volume" really kicks in. Barring interrupts or silences, you can AoE farm with Consecration, all while healing back any incoming damage; hitting things is usually incidental and not really required. Farming as Protection is comparatively less efficient for me, even though I'm enjoying melee interaction in the traditional sense, because of the limited mana pool involved. Is this a design flaw or working as intended?

Although Blizzard has certainly chosen a direction as far as Retribution goes, I always thought it would have been interesting to have a class where melee was simply the delivery system, and magic was the source of the damage. That's certainly how it is for Holy and Protection, where white damage is irrelevant, it's the Holy damage on top that matters. White damage is obviously very important for Retribution and with them phasing out the importance of spell power for DPS, there's little to indicate they're reconsidering. It might have been more interesting to see them go the other way, or provide a way to channel melee stats into Holy damage. There would be strengths and weaknesses to this approach, naturally, such as bad for spell reflection, good for high armor.

Whatever path Blizzard takes, I imagine they will try to incorporate as many playstyle options as possible. Holy paladins will still heal and shock, Protection will still AoE tank and Retribution will still strike faces. Hopefully, that is.

EDIT: It's possible that my farming style might be a matter of gear, and that at lower gear levels the effect might be less than spectacular.

 

Siddown

Spell Damage Paladins don't kill by Auto Attacking, they kill by JoR, Holy Shock, HoW and Consecrate. We're so off topic it's ridiculous at this point, but the one thing blizzard hates is when players try to come up with solutions because they are so incredibly biased towards their own class they completely ignore the eight (and now nine) others. You're at a point now where you are convinced that the only way to solve the problem is with your solution when we've yet to see: A) Paladin Talents, B) Paladin Abilites, C) Actual End Game loot or D) How they will distribute said loot. You've come up with an entire scenario and attack anyone who hasn't agreed with you based off a few lvl 75 greens.

This is Alpha, if we went back to Alpha of Vanilla or TBC you'd see that a million things changed before release.

 

rhea

With holy paladins scaling with ap (and what not) is that sets only 1-2 types of gear for the whole plate armor and it would be 4 specs rolling for one gear, in a raid with 2-3 holy pals, 1 retri, 1-2 dps warrior and 1-2 dk, there's 5-8 players wanting that gear.
I'd rather find a solution to make 1 more spec able to scale with spelldmg/stuff, so that holy paladins wouldn't be alone.
It's pretty much the same with shaman and druids. Enhance shamans would scale 2ap/agl or something thus making hunter gear perfect for them. Druids boonkin/resto share mostly same gear and ferals go with rogues.
Out of the top of my head I could say protection paladin having some kind of holy-prot conversion, making more use of threat scaling with spelldmg etc.
In the end, there might be some special cases of gear that scales with none other - that's all in the token loot.

I find carrying 2 sets of gear far less annoying than all fighting for one piece. That's the beauty of hybrids. Remember how Blizzard hinted "we can provide you 'itemrack' without losing inventory space"?...

 

Trickshot

I heard a few months back that Blizzard wanted to unite gear for different specs, and I came up with an idea i think is pretty good.

What if professions could make an item their armor class. Like for a low/high price mat wise, based on item rarity and/or other criteria, a leather worker could turn a cloth item into a leather item. Adding stuff to make it that type of armor.

I didn't really conserver how to down rank armor classes. Maybe it could be cyclical.

Cloth -> Leather -> Mail -> Plate -> Cloth again.


Would make pally heal items easier to get, and the like.

 

Pounce

This is a good point. But would it be better or worse? If I were mathematically inclined I could contribute more on the subject, but sadly I'm not much for complex equations of this sort. Someone here should be able to logic out which set up would be, statistically speaking, optimal for loot distribution. It's tempting to draw a conclusion based on anecdotal or experiential evidence, but I'd be curious to see a precise breakdown. This isn't the thread for it, and the calculations might have already been done elsewhere, but either way I think it would shed new light on the debate. Many of us assume increased drop sharing would be beneficial, but the math might demonstrate otherwise. I, for one, am eager to have my preconceptions shattered.

 

Prinsesa

JoR has an 8 second cooldown.
Consecrate has an 8 second cooldown.
Holy Shock has a 15 second cooldown.
Hammer of Wrath has a 6 second cooldown can only be used when the target is near-dead.

Just what do you expect Holy Paladins to do in the 6 or so seconds of idle time between all three spells?

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Pounce

Depends on how many mobs I'm trying to kill; the more mobs there are, the more likely I'm using that time to heal myself. In that case I'm using my greatest strengths, spell power and healing, to farm and it gets the job done as well as can be expected.

I think a point to remember is that Holy Paladins aren't really designed for killing (which is why the Shockadin is the subject of much debate), so the fact that they don't have fully developed offensive mechanics is probably not surprising. Whether they should or not may be answered in the expansion, so we'll have to wait and see.

 

flyingtoastr

Yes, a holy pally's main damage comes from those spells. But he has to be in melee range smacking a mob while doing that. Therein lies the difference between pallys and every other healing class. Lets look at non-cooldown spam attacks the healing classes have. Shamans have Lightning Bolt, Druids have Wrath, Priests have Smite. We have Seal of Righteousness, a weapon imbue attack. Our class is a melee hybrid.

Yes we use spells. We, unlike every other healer, have to also be meleeing in between the long cooldowns. We don't get a spell spam, and that is why you can not classify a paladin of any spec as a spellcaster and really why our class shouldn't be bothering with a split combat system between the two. If our combat system is based around being in melee range and autoattacking why do our abilities scale with the opposite set of stats?

And I'm willing to bet a large number of those changes were a result of suggestions and discussions such as this.

EDIT: And just to make it clear, I've been championing a redesign of the Paladin class for a very long time so this isn't some new crusade because of some level 75 greens. However, with the shift of those "level 75 greens" making every other healer scale the same as one of their DPS specs now is the perfect time to do so for the paladin class as well.

Is it off topic? Sure, if this thread is now strictly about only content that has been released regarding WotLK (which means everything regarding the wiki should be silenced as well since it is technically still "unreleased content" according to Blizzard). I really don't think that has been the case for the last hundred pages or so, there is plenty of speculation and discussion which is very healthy.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Pounce

I think the issue of paladin redesign is separate from the loot system debate, and their relationship is merely causal. By that I mean to say that the disparity between the Paladin trees does bloat the loot table (due to the need for a unique set of armor), but that either/both may be addressed separately or together as desired.

Due to my lack of math prowess, I'll have to work this one out in a far less precise manner. To begin, we can take a hypothetical loot system where every drop can be used to maximum efficiency by every class/spec combination. This system would have perfect optimality in terms of avoiding loot rot but would be untenable otherwise. When you start introducing class-based looting restrictions (armor and weapon type), the system loses some of that optimality because it is possible for loot to drop that cannot be equipped by a group member due to their class. As specializations are introduced, we have another decrease in optimality because not only is loot divided by class, but by talent distribution as well. Loot rot is now an issue because there will be more and more occasions when items are undesirable to the group.

But how big an issue is this? Only a detailed analysis could really tell us, but I suspect we're debating a very minute point. Consolidating mage and warlock loot helps us regain a degree or optimality, for example, and on a larger scale, merging +dmg and +heal probably grants a ton more. When we get to healing plate though, just how much additional optimality are we talking about. Statistically, how much loot would we be saving from the shard factory? Once we know that we can properly evaluate whether it's even a problem worth dealing with.

Loot will get sharded at some point during a guild's raiding lifetime, and as they continue to raid the same instance I would imagine the probability that a drop ends up as a shard increases. So what's the difference between Scenario A (healing plate) and Scenario B (no healing plate) expressed in terms of probability? That, it would seem, is key. Because if one unique drop type doesn't constitute a big difference in terms of loot rot, there's no reason to really address it as a serious concern.

Now if the real concern is the paladin combat system, that need not be directly connected to the previous issue. If the differences between the two scenarios is insignificant there might still be a need for a paladin revamp. And if the differences between the scenarios is outside Blizzard's acceptable range they have quite a few options available to them that don't include massive class rewrites. It also involves opportunity cost because if rebooting paladins is far more work than simply leaving healing plate on the loot table, they might be better off doing that.

I would hope that Blizzard has some very qualified mathematicians and the like going at this problem day and night. And if they don't, maybe they should hire some.

As a side note: I don't deny paladins could use some work and I hope they get it, especially since I have a vested interest in the outcome. There are multiple ideal solutions, however, and linking it directly with loot distribution could prove limiting. I'd rather they make paladins exactly right and worry about how to integrate their itemization into the system afterwards. I'd be willing to shard a little extra loot if it meant people truly loved every part of their class.

I completely agree. With a wide open topic like this I think the more discussion the better, so long as things keep moving at a reasonable pace. Even if Blizzard doesn't check these threads with any regularity, ideas have a way of spreading and sometimes getting to the right people.

 

PSGarak

There's no particular problem with paladins doing spell damage with melee mechanics. It could, arguably, make the class interesting. The real problem is the divergence of retribution and holy itemization. While it would make thematic sense for paladins to be a STR-based class, with heals somehow being based on a melee-feedback system, it would also make sense for Paladins to become plate-wearing melee-casters relying on judgements and such rather than base melee attacks. Killing things with holy lasers rather than divine fury, whatever. This would break retribution's dovetailing with warrior DPS gear, but it would dovetail with Holy instead. So while plate gear would still be highly divided between warrior(/DK) vs pally, at least you wouldn't need itemization for one and only one spec, which is currently the way it works, and currently what blizzard is trying to get rid.

As I've said before, this would be a lot simpler if there were a spellcaster DK spec that holy paladins could overlap with. I suppose a middle-of-the-road option is for Retribution to scale with either melee or caster stats, depending on build and playstyle preference. Melee stats would favor, say, burst damage (PvP?), while caster stats would favor sustained damage, allowing players to chose a dual-purpose set if they wanted.


Other crazy-ass ideas for unifying the class include holy-fied-weapon-damage attacks that also drop an equivalent heal, either AoE or target-of-target, and Seal of Refresh Holy Shock (with Judgement of Curse of Holy).

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Pounce

Diversity at the class level is a very important thing to watch. One danger inherent in loot homogenization is the possibility that classes will be too similar in how they play, since gear does have a role in determining how class mechanics express themselves. Naturally we can correct for this through the abilities the class uses, but it seems all too easy to end up converging mechanics when you start converging stats. After all, it's one thing to have Arms share itemization with Retribution but another thing to have them mirror copies of each other (or worse yet, have one end up a bare-bones version). Keeping them different in feel, but similar in gear will be the challenge.

 

Jagiya

I'd just love to see something along the lines of,
"Increases Spell Damage by 50% of Attack Power when Rightous Fury is active."

Wearing a single set of gear, vital to Warriors, Death Knights and Paladins of all Tanking & DPS varieties, this would mean that...

- A Retribution Paladin becomes a Protection Paladin and obtains all his necessary Spell Damage whilst Righteous Fury is active.
- A Retribution Paladin becomes a Holy Paladin and draws his healing capacity from the Spell Damage provided; thanks to the changes to healing co-efficients.

All with the click of one button.

Of course, with all this gear homogeny; there is of course the potential issue of having to re-enchant and re-gem all of your gear when you decide to re-spec for an evening of tanking Heroics, then back to Retribution for a weekend of questing/grinding. I heavily doubt that Blizzard would encourage this sort of frustration though, as it's in direct collision with what they'd be trying to achieve. I wonder what path they'd take with something like this, if it were.

I really am hoping that with their proposal of "reducing the amount of bagspace your gear takes up", this is what they had in mind. "1 item now represents up to 3 items."

 

SanSul

Blizzard already has shown precendent for solving hybrid gear issues. A staff that turns into spell damage or healing depending on what you need. Absolutely nothing is stopping this from happening with tanking/healing/melee plate. It could even come with or without a cooldown, or simply a cost.

We already have gear turn ins from Sunwell that require a sunmote. There is no reason why we can't have every single piece of Plate for paladins be turned in and for a cost of say 500g by todays standards, have the entire set converted into the spec of choice.

The best solution is still one set of generic stats, that are then converted into different ones by means of talents.

But I think people are pretty much tired of having loot tables clutters with items used only by one spec of one class, not to mention if the gear designed just for that class is in fact inferior to other options.

Examples can be mail +dam boots, but cloth are better
Or plate +dam tanking plate, but warrior version is better

The severe severe surplus of void crystals in the game is a pretty good indicator of how much unusable/unwanted gear there really has been in TBC.

Another issue is loot priority. Off specs simply don't get priority in raids. It took me forever to collect a tanking set, and I wasn't allowed to tank because I didn't have a tanking set, so I had to wait months collecting scraps until I reached a point where my gear was superior to "fresh" raiding warriors. Getting anything for my Ret set was out of the question. Maybe a two hander due to the fact arms warriors were also considered off specs in raids, so we had equal chance for the same non fury gear.

It seems unreasonable for one person to get 3 tokens before someone even gets the only one they need. So we wait...and wait...and sometimes you have moved on past the content before you ever got a chance at your token and now the cycle starts again, where you get your healing token, but wait and wait for your ret and prot tokens. So, everyone gets their token, and that is all they need.

The paladin token buys whatever piece of gear you want, and you simply return one day with your piece of gear and exchange for whatever off spec piece you desire. Sunwell already uses this system, but it is limited by armour class, and thus excludes a large percentage of the raid for said drop.

 

◊ zirky

What you just suggested is essentially stances for paladins. I think your point about re-gem/enchant doesn't hold up under this system. If you went to a stance based paladin, everything would be more or less based off the same stats. You'd want the same gems and enchants for ret or holy simply because the "stance" would convert it appropriately. Sure there would be a few pieces of utility gear which would differ, but that isn't so different than what warriors put up with between tank and dps gear.

 

• Rerox

Honestly, this whole Paladin-stuff has gone so far off topic to what the thread originally was that I think it would be best to close this thread until new WotLK stuff surfaces that can be discussed.

Sorry to say, but could you please move the whole paladin-how-it-should-be discussion to a "class mechanics" thread? I am sure there is one where new WotLK stuff exclusively to the Paladin-class can be discussed.

Its not only boring and completely off topic, but also due to the biased attitude of some posters turning in circles for the last ten or so pages

It's really frustrating to see new posts in the WotLK thread at EJ's and then read only the same rant about how bad Blizzard did with Paladins over and over again

 

Cube

I would argue that the surplus of void crystals is more due to the existence of Karazhan and heroics than unwanted gear.

Karazhan has always been the best place to farm Voids: 11 bosses, each dropping(on average) 2 DE-able epics. Adding in a trash drop every week, and you'll get at least 23 void crystals per run. Given that there's a pretty high chance of getting 2 crystals per DE, 23 is on the low end if you shard everything.

Even counting the 1 or 2 alts that guilds probably run on their kara farms, they'll still get quite a few voids every week-definitely enough to keep enchants flowing.

Hopefully, Blizzard will avoid this in Wrath-I'm tired of seeing LPS going for 2x+ the cost of Void crystals, even after 2.4...

 

• Rerox

It always comes down to how long you farm certain content. As long as you freely distribute "non-raid-spec" equipment to your people, few items will get DEed. We hand over Damage gear free of charge to tanks and healers and healing equipment to those who could use it, as long as noone with primary role as DD or healer wants the item anymore.

When we reached Shahraz and were creating shadowresist gear for our raid, we actually ran low on void crystals!

Nevertheless, I DO like the new turnin system Blizzard created with Sunwell VERY much. It reduces loottable-size from bosses. Also items have a longer lifespan before they get DEed if you have two or more purposes for one item. The new system nevertheless still leaves the "surprise" factor in killing and looting a boss.

 

mclem

But that's a large thing to accept as a given, and I wasn't. I was considering the cases where a prot paladin might not *have* a complete mail set - got no healy mail shoulders? It's more sensible to wear *nothing* there, then, rather than your plate ones. Got no mail at all? You'll heal best naked.

Another important case is when you have to change to healing while in combat, after you've been tanking, when you *can't* strip off your gear on the fly; this change suddenly makes us worse at it than we already are.

Besides this, of course, one of the major benefits of all this talk of homogenisation was to *reduce* the number of full sets people have to tote around.

 

Siddown

Definitely agree, I'm not sure if anyone even noticed that screenshot 3 or 4 pages ago about the Group Debuff that Drums will give in WotLK, nobody's commented on it anyways. As news from the Alpha trickles in after the initial rush, it's going to be harder and harder to notice.

Honestly, to the Paladins involved in this conversation, I know you really want to think that Blizzard reads this thread and that this thread is being constructive, but even though they frequent this site, I doubt they look here for whole sale class changes. They look for tweaks or it is very possible that after they get all the data in (which they have much better access to then the players do) they come up with their own conclusions that just happen to be similar to the ones discussed here (which are largely data driven descision as well). Correlation does not mean causation as they always say.

 

• Chicken

It's been mentioned a few times that it's looking like the separate spell versus physical ratings are being merged into single stats. This poses no issues for either critical strike rating or haste rating, but it does raise a question about hit rating.

As it currently stands you need less spell hit rating to get 1% spell hit than you need hit rating to get 1% hit. Presumably the spell resist rates and similar things are also based around this. This means that if all these stats were to be homogenized into single stats, that casters would either see a 20% decrease in the amount of spell hit they have, or melee would see a 25% increase in the amount of hit they have. Alternatively the rating could be worth different amounts of hit depending on whether it's a spell or it's a physical ability, but that seems a rather messy implementation.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

flyingtoastr

Why would we comment on it? That debuff was mined long before that SS was posted and I think everyone agrees it is a perfectly acceptable nerf to drums.

You really haven't been reading anything.

This entire discussion revolves around itemization and loot drops. Its pretty obvious that they are changing it up pretty drastically to make RNG less painful, but of course there is a problem with Holy Paladins using one specific type of armor that no other spec or class in the game wants. So we discussed possible outcomes. Yes, we may have digressed into the general problems with the paladin class, but last time I checked it is a job of the moderators to warn us for getting too off topic, not rogues. Go ahead and report our posts for off-topic behavior if you feel that way.

Again, if you want to limit this thread to only "released content" (I use that term loosely since again, everything on that wiki page is "unreleased" by Blizzard standards) then we're going to need about 150 pages of banhammers. This entire thread is about speculation, whether it be about raids, class balance, new abilities, etc.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Fiola

That piece of news has been brought up at least 2 or 3 times. Majority of responses were, "sounds reasonable. Now there's no reason for the entire guild to be LW". There's really nothing else to discuss about it. It's a bit of a nerf to the profession, but no worse than the one made to Alchemy (elixir,s etc), and it's good for high-end min/max raiding(no reason for everyone to be a LW). How many posts do you want to see saying, "that's a great change"?


This whole paladin itemization tangent is a result of there being little else to discuss. It's speculation on how the paladin class should fit the current trends of itemization. Cloth drops are being consolidated on the PTR. Spell/Physical ratings (hit/crit/haste) are being consolidated as well. (it'd be nice to see a screenshot to confirm this change) If cloth drops are worthy of consolidation, then plate items are even more so, considering the different categories we have and the number of users of each. (paladin healing, paladin tank, generic tank, generic DPS)


None of the points I've made are intended as suggestions for what Blizzard should do with the class. I don't expect Blizzard to take player suggestions. All I'm pointing out is that considering what they've already done for other classes, XYZ for paladins is a logical extension of what they've already being doing. I make no guarantees (and can't, anyways) that XYZ is going to happen. I don't have any preferences for XYZ to happen. Some don't like XYZ because they think it's not logical, it's too complex, or various other things. I and others have explained why the alternatives are no better.
(Which doesn't prove that Blizzard will do any of that - absent proof Blizzard is going to do something, expect the status quo)


I agree that the paladin itemization discussion doesn't have anything interesting left to it at this point. Bring up something interesting from Alpha and the discussion will naturally go there. If there's no information from Alpha, then there's nothing else to do in this thread except speculation and wishlists.