• Playered

The problem in shifting Paladins into a melee-dependant healing class, while interesting on paper - has annoying issues in regards to raiding where we are already somewhat over-burdened by melee classes as it is, having Paladins there too will end up being detrimental despite being rather interesting (a positional issue not a group synergy one).

 

Muggins

How is this really any different than spell damage leather? They're going to be designed so that boomkin and resto druids can both use them, 2 specs of the same class. While others further up the 'armour chain' might be able to plunder a piece here or there you would expect them to be looking for different stat allocations(mp5 vs spirit, high crit rating seeming to be very important for both shaman and paladin healing while not being at all useful for a hot-healer, etc), the principle is the same, just a little higher up the chain.

 

flyingtoastr

Elemental and Resto shamans can also use spell damage leather, and holy pallys can wear it if they want. 5 specs out of 30 can use it to a decent extent, again as opposed to 1 out of 30 for healing plate. It's plate. Most of the classes can't use it. That is why this holy pally thing is messed up, no other healers can possibly use the gear meaning it is incredibly small portion of a raid comp.

And just for referance so that people stop saying it:
Putting CS back to the "old version" wouldn't work with current itemization. Right now I run with roughly 4100 attack power fully raid buffed. That means my CS is gaining about 1060 damage from my attack power. If you want the "40% of spell damage" crap I would need a good 2660 spell damage with current gear to equal the damage I'm currently getting. That's not even considering how pathetic my autoswings would be if I was wearing a sword-n-board.

If you want ret to scale will spell damage it needs a spell nuke to replace autoswings. It doesn't "work for prot" (prot really isn't what I would call DPS) and we tried the split stat thing for a good 3 years and it didn't work. One or the other, no in betweens.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Unity

Sample Seal of spelldamageforautoswings

As Seal of Blood plus (spellpower * attack speed /7) holy damage per swing.
So you could equip 7 Str to get 1 physical DPS or equip 7 SP and get one holy DPS.
Illustrative only since I havent tried to pick a balanced coefficient.

Pure Warrior gear works just like now and healers won't replace their tier 9 with blues when farming. It's not 'inbetween', it's 'both'.

 

flyingtoastr

What you're describing is the way Seal of Command works right now. 70% weapon damage, 20% spell damage. It doesn't work. One set of stats (I'll give you a clue, its the melee ones) will always be far superior because of the way the scaling works. We'll still be in melee range using a melee swing so the melee stats will always scale better (unless you go apeshit with some sort of Spell Damage > AP talent which is just making things even more complicated). It won't change a thing, I'll still happily be running around in my physical DPS gear.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

slant

If I were redesigning itemization and classes with an eye towards drop consolidation, I would more strongly differentiate items intended for PvE/PvP through resilience changes and make significant modifications to baseline attributes so stats would be more equally valuable. Off the top of my head:

- Allow DoT/HoT ticks to crit
- Remove DoT damage mitigation from resilience (no longer necessary)
- Change all mobs to ignore resilience entirely, with an eye towards making PvP gear strongly underbudget for PvE
- Allow haste to impact DoT/HoT duration
- Melee haste is undervalued for some classes (enh shamans, feral druids, alliance paladins) and overvalued for others (combat rogues, horde paladins). This should be examined, and the percentage of overall damage done by white attacks set roughly equivalent for all melee classes and specs. Ability changes would have to be made also, including removing the 3s cooldown from windfury.
- Set all classes to gain both melee and ranged attack power through strength alone, 1 STR = 2 AP
- Set all classes to gain spell power through spirit, 1 SPI = 2 SP. Modify coefficients and items so that end damage comes out right.
- Remove spell crit from intellect and add it to spirit.
- Remove mana regen from spirit and add it to intellect. The more mana you have, the faster you regenerate. This makes sense intuitively.
- Remove health regen from spirit and add it to stamina. The more health you have the faster you regenerate it.
- Devalue intellect from the item budget just like stamina was in TBC.
- Itemize caster gear to include intellect by default, just like stamina in TBC.
- Give feral druids the parry skill
- Remove feral attackpower weapons entirely. Just use the DPS of the weapon they have equipped, scaled to attack at 1.0s or 2.5s.
- Allow feral druids to drink potions, use healthstones (etc), and proc weapons including windfury in feral form.
- Simply don't itemize any plate with spell power. Holy paladins will get the message and wear mail.

 

Starfire

But you are missing his point. The reason it doesn't work is because the 20% coefficient is too low. You don't need to convert the Spell Damage to AP, you need to increase the coefficient -and- increase the coefficient enough to compensate for the lack of melee/white damage.

 

PSGarak

If you want to be really crazy, you could design the Ret tree to allow to two separate gear- and playstyles, a melee-centric one based around base autoattack and SoCom, and a spellpower one based around SoR, judgements, and consecrate, with both making use of CS. You could even differentiate them functionally as burst/sustained. This isn't entirely unprecedented, with the cat/bear separation in the feral trees.

Paladins not scaling well enough with spell damage to support this is a matter of numbers, not fundamentals. If you went back to 2.3 and doubled all the numbers, it would be viable. You don't need a spammable nuke to be competetive if your seals get spell normalization comparable to your swing timer, or judgements get spell normalization comparable to their cooldown. So, as the saying goes, it comes down to haggling about price. Now, the playstyle being interesting is a different discussion entirely (and a valid one!) but I'm sure the game balance can be supported.

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

 

A Man In Black

It would mean that, in a roundabout way, hunters would be trading white DPS on their melee weapon for ranged DPS, which would cause all sorts of scaling issues.

Perhaps an alternative might be a deep talent that lets hunters get ranged AP from strength, since that's the only stat kitty druids want and BM hunters do not.

 

Prinsesa

There's always going to be some point of inflection, whether at the individual item level or at the general stat level where stacking one stat to the exception of the other is going to yield more DPS.

This is generally what happened with the pre-2.2 Ret Paladin gear: Completely spell damage-less Warrior was turning out to be giving more DPS than the Ret stuff with spell damage, and the occasions where STR-and-spell-damage Ret gear was superior was primarily because of the STR and other physical stats.

Of course, part of the problem may have been that the coefficients were too skewed one way or another (as in Seal of Blood scaling exclusively with weapon damage), but I can't imagine that we're not just going to see a repeat of the same even with a system intentionally designed this way.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Mynea

The historic issue with needing two sets of hit and two sets of crit will be gone in Lich King, but they would also need to fix the 7% difference between the two hit caps and that base crit for melee scales decently with Agi while base crit for spells scales poorly with Int.

Mostly, though, I doubt they would make Ret scale with spell gear again after spending the effort to both make it scale appropriately with melee gear and fix the gear that change broke.

 

Draele

Blizzard, please hire this guy. Seriously, great thoughts here, especially the Spirit/Intellect changes.

Rantings of the Afflicted, a Warlock blog: http://draele.blogspot.com/

 

Exewut

There's no need to be so condescending. It's obvious that you are completely biased and that you prefer the melee to spelldamage scaling. If you make ret scale via spelldamage (YES it is possible and not hard, try reading the counter arguments for a change) then a paladin that is geared up will truly be a SAK to use a popular analogy. All they will need to do is change their talents to be efficient, which seems to be their goal in TBC. Also this will allow holy to do some decent dps in their healing gear for a change.
There is a point to be made that it would be easier to get good gear as a ret if you can take from the same pool as DK/warrior gear. However, you still need spellpower plate for holy, and I really can't see paladins getting mail as default armour class now with plate being trainable for prot. So if you make an analyses of the two options;

Scaling: both melee and spelldamage ret can be made to scale exactly as they want. The different ratings affecting both physical and magical effects means that the 1 single thing that was stopping spellpower scaling is gone.
Solo abilities of the different specs: spell power scaling means that holy gear should be good enough for a decent damage out put. Protection I don't know, it would depend on the seal that will be used, and how many of the multipliers will be in the ret tree. If you use the way you suggest then both holy and prot need a different gear set to be able to solo.
Loot rot (I don't even know why this is a problem): You need to create just as much gear, since you actually still need spelldamage on your holy gear. If only holy uses spelldamage gear, then they will become the new moonkin leather. With spellpower scaling their would be 3 specs that are interested in the gear.
Respec capabilities: totally different sets needed vs similar sets.

It needs an autoswing that triggers the proc which scales via spelldamage. And my point about prot was that it's threat scales via spelldamage, and in a less obvious way, it's damage. The main reason thesplit stat thing didn't work was that it had to be balanced around normal mobs (5% miss) and raid encounters (>17% miss), and that it needed twice the budget for crit and hit ratings, this has been fixed now. Though I agree that they should pick one or the other. The in betweenthing rarely works.

 

• Playered

That is one issue which I have not understood for ages.

Everyone is itemized 2 AP or 1 Strength already, why they haven't just converged this and allowed much more fluidity with gear is beyond me as it would also allow them to flavour gear with the combination of them both better in the item budget.

The complaints that Hunters & Rogues also get 1 AP from Agility is stupid because they are still getting 40 AP instead of 20 Strength on their items as it is.

They just created a new stat for one which already exists, and near enough abandoned the old one for half the classes, it's just odd.

 

Fordel

Has there been any hints towards what (if any) the new shaman CC spell would be? I know there was that hex spell floating around, but that could go either way (player or mob spell).



As to the Ret/Holy gear split. The assumption is Holy Paladins will 'need' spellpower gear. A few folks have already toyed with the idea of Holy Paladins becoming true 'melee healers' and Resto Shamans have been granted a great deal of overlap(with paladins) this go around. The efficiency niche seems to be moot and Holy Paladin presence has been dwindling all around and the need for Paladins and Shamans to be roughly equal in terms of role has long since passed. Perhaps wishful thinking, but we very well may be seeing a reworking for Holy. Would anyone truly miss the current Holy Paladin "playstyle" ? Something much more like a Friar (from DaoC) or Captain (from LoTRO). Again, maybe I'm just hoping for too much.

Reworking Ret to use spellpower gear.., seems very much like 1 step forwards, 2 steps back. Wouldn't having the 'default' plate being DPS gear used by the majority of plate classes be just like how cloth will have spellpower be its 'default'. With the gear being tailored for specific specs while maintaining a general usefulness for everyone in the armor class? This would give each armor class two 'types' of gear.

Cloth Would have DPS and 'Healing' (or perhaps simply endurance)
Leather would have Spellpower and Physical
Mail would have Spellpower and Physical
Plate would have DPS and Tanking


It would be real easy to add a "convert BlockValue into Spellpower" talent for Prot Paladins and just do away with the idea of Spellpower plate all together. An amusing circle from release to TBC to WotLK itemization wise, but I believe ultimately better for the game.

-Bird of the Storm

 

flyingtoastr

Again, I'll go back to my previous statement.

If we are scaling with spell damage we're going to be using spell-damage weapons (which presents a problem in that most casters are already heavily competing, why add another class in?) which means our autoswings fall to close to zero effective DPS. Fine. I'll play along with this.

Seal of Righteousness has a fairly complicated system of computing damage, but I'll try to be quick. The formula to determine SoR damage is: SoR = 0.85 * (coeff * MWS / 100) + 0.03 * (max + min) / 2 - 1 , where coeff is the rank coefficient (2610.43 for the current max rank), MWS is the main-hand weapon speed, max is the maximum weapon damage and min is the minumum weapon damage. This is of course then added to the ~9.8% +spelldamage coefficient. We'll assume you're using a nice juicy [Hammer of Judgement] for now.

Our formula for baseline damage of SoR for our hammer would look like so:

SoR = 0.85 * (coeff * MWS / 100) + 0.03 * (max + min) / 2 - 1
SoR = 0.85 * (2610.43 * 1.80 / 100) + 0.03 * (129 + 19) / 2 - 1
SoR = 39.94 + 2.22 -1
SoR = 41.16

Ok, so our baseline SoR is about 41. Assuming the hammer has an average weapon swing damage of 74 we're looking at a baseline of 115 every melee swing, or roughly 64 DPS.

Lets take a recent Brut kill (a low DPS one for me, I'm only sitting at around 1600 sustained on this one). My average white swing (including crits) was around 2092 damage. My swing time was about every 2.63 seconds. My white DPS only was therefore about 795 DPS. Remember that though this includes Windfury procs, as a spell damage sword-n-board toting retnub has no place in a melee group you will need to compensate for the lost DPS.

My SoR will have to match this DPS through only the spell damage coefficient, about 9.8%. For My SoR, hitting every 1.8 seconds, to hit 731 DPS (795 minus the baseline damage of 64 DPS) it will need to be proccing for about 1315.8 damage every swing, or almost 13500 spell damage to match physical stats AT LEVEL 70. This is just white swings when you include the additional DPS I've lost for SoC and CS it gets even worse.

So yes, how could they fix this? They could bump up SoR's coefficient, but even a 100% coefficient on each swing you would need to be running around in T6 level warlock gear to be equal on white swings only (bringing in SoC bumps the requirements up to about 1700 spell damage at a 100% coefficient). Is that what you would call feasable? They could give us a new seal, but it will still suffer from the same problems unless it has a pretty massive baseline damage (which would then scale badly, causing an entirely different set of problems).

My entire point is directly in response to this:

It is very hard to make us scale evenly off spell damage if we don't have a cast nuke. One way or the other paladins will need an absolutely massive overhaul if they want to stick us on one stat system. Sticking your head in the sand and saying that "giving the old CS back" will fix ret for spell damage scaling is WRONG. Research first next time. Yes, I am a very condescending individual, I have no problem with admitting it. But there is a difference between being condescending and correct and just making assumptions because the mean old ret pally said something you don't like.

EDIT: And now that I think of it, SoR would be horrible for gearing. It can't crit and doesn't gain much from spell haste (though I heard that melee and spell haste are being consolidated like hits and crits, which would be decent) making ret pallys another shadow priest that really only scales with 1 stat (spell damage).

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Vihermaali

As a holy priest I must add here, that one of challenging things about this class (or rather, SPEC) is juggling and handling spirit mana regeneration. I really hope Blizzard puts more emphasis on this and removes focus from mp5 based regen. In addition, I fully support the idea of putting a mana sickness on mana potions (after 1 minute of using a manapot your whole manapool is drained).

Your ideas of manaregeneration changes could simplify regen way too much, possibly making it something that comes naturally. Refer to rogue energy to understand what I mean. No thank you.

 

Anaram

I guess different people see different things as good. I *really* don't see how most of the above make things any better. In fact, lots of the things mentioned above I downright dislike.

Strength vs attack power. Strength has been on it's way to become a tanking stat of late while attack power is DPS stat. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the current +str talents got changed to +ap talents.

Hots ticking faster: it's not necessarily a good thing that hots tick faster. Rejuvenation is swiftmendable, lifebloom is "rolled". Sometimes you just throw hots around to keep people topped through a relatively long period of light damage. Should roots tick faster? What about Vampiric Touch? How would Curse of Doom work?

I'm not sure what feral parry is about. Defence would still be mediocre for druids due to -crit talents and no block. Infact with current -6% crit talent, druids wouldn't need defence at all. All tanks can use dodge, any gear which Blizzard wants to benefit all tanks equally can use dodge instead of parry.

I think the "windfury club" is already much more full than it needs to be, adding ferals in there also would just further increase the dependency on specific classes (=shaman). If ferals don't scale well enough, just make them scale better. I much rather see ferals work well in the hunter group. It wouldn't hurt if some rogue specs joined there also.

Playing around with spell power/crit/intellect/spirit etc. just begs the question: why? Is there something so fundamentally wrong with the current system that it needs a drastic overhaul?

Proportion of yellow damage vs. white damage: playing with these can have quite severe PvP consequences. I think it's pretty important part of class flavour that some classes are autoattack heavy while others depend on specials. It's a balance issue for certainly but I'd rather see some other change/fix to it if it indeed causes severe problems.

 

Anedris

Can we stop talking about paladins until we see the alpha paladin new talents and spells? Please? There's a place for speculation, but we've been back and forth over the same ground for about a dozen or more pages now. Paladins are a little gimped at the moment. No one is suggesting that Blizzard doesn't have huge changes in store to try to fix the class. Let's just wait to see what those changes are, and then applaud or complain as appropriate.

 

PSGarak

flyingtoastr: I (we) are quite aware of how infeasible spell damage is currently without a rather drastic overhaul. We are proposing a drastic overhaul.

If SoR were given a spell coefficient similar to it's swing speed (ie SoR on a 1.8-speed weapon got the coefficient of a spell with a 1.8s cast time), and could crit, that would give your autoattack a comparable untalented baseline to a caster chain-casting a mainline nuke. I see no particular reason CS couldn't do ~100% plus ~100% spell damage, it's possible to tinker numbers to make it work.

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

 

Exewut

Let's see if that's managable with just changing one number in one spell shall we?

Old soc: 20% of your spelldamage per proc, 70% of your weapon damage

New soc: 500% of your spelldamage per proc, 70% of your weapon damage

Very very simplistic dps totals (4.0 weapon, 7ppm soc (46% chance in this case, 1k spelldamage), 150 dps sword):
total dps = autoattack + autoattack*speed*(% weapon damage)*7/60 + spellpower(% spellpower)*7/60
total dps = 150 + 150*4*.7*7/60 + 1000*5*7/60
total dps = 150 + 49 + 583
total dps = 782

Then add in consecration which gets 95% of your spelldamage over it's 8s duration.
total dps = 782 + (1000*.95+512)/8
total dps = 910

Obviously this calculation is very rudamentary, I don't really want to go to deep in the calculations since you would need to balance out the influence of the melee weapon damage (70%) and the spelpower (the 500% in my example) so that you would recieve the same benefit of stacking strenght and all the other melee attacks as you would from stacking spelldamage. The idea is to make spelldamage a meaningfull stat, not to turn paladins in a caster who happens to be swinging a 2h weapon at the boss instead of being casting a spell.

edit:
You could go even further and make SOC only take pure weapon damage into account, but with a large multiplyer (say eg: 300%) and then you get a dps spec that can be played in holy gear. You can even keep SOB (alliance too) for the more melee stats minded people, for who everything stays the same. All this needs is 1 seal change. (and some fiddeling with crusader strike)

 

flyingtoastr

Weapon DPS =/= Weapon Damage.

Lets take two different senarios with your assumed SoC changes. With the first one you'll be gearing for Attack Power with no spell damage. For the second we'll use your 100% conversion and the item budget that would have been spent on AP is instead spent on SP (at a flat 5:3 conversion, see the comparisons between [Bright Crimson Spinel] and [Runed Crimson Spinel] for example).

So with the old system we'll say you have 1667 attack power and 0 spell damage. Taking your 4.0 speed weapon with 150 DPS we'll be looking at an average base swing damage of 600. This is modified up by the AP to about 1076 (1667 / 14 * 4).

SoC = .7 * Swing + Spell
SoC = .7 * 1076 + 0
SoC = 753

Now we'll take the opposite gearset and assume you have 1000 spell damage and no additional attack power.

SoC = .7 * Swing + Spell
SoC = .7 * 600 + 1000
SoC = 1420

Awesome, we just got a nice boost to our SoC damage.

But then here comes the other ugly problem with pally mechanics. Our white swings scale with AP but get shit from Spellpower.

Assuming you get the 1667 AP instead of the Spellpower you're looking at 476 more damage on every one of your white attacks, or another 119 DPS that the Spellpower can not possibly match. Over the course of a minute you will have 7 SoC procs and 15 white swings. Discounting crits and misses you're looking at:

Old AP Model: 356.85 DPS
New SD Model: 315.67 DPS

If you've skipped everything at least read this:

The reason pallys are not casters is because we don't use weapons as a raw stat stick. As long as we are hitting things and using our weapons as an appreciable form of DPS there will always be a point where melee stats work better than spell stats (unless they give some really whackjob coefficients).

This is the pure reason why the class needs to be one way or the other.

EDIT: spelling

EDIT 2: In order to make us a spellpower based combat system they have to somehow make spell damage scale our abilities better than AP can scale abilities and white swings. That is really what I'm getting at, and that is an incredibly difficult change.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Fiola

Not that I care for the SD proposal, but it really is just a matter of coefficients. Let's say you could swap around your gear and have 800 +dmg instead of XYZ melee stats. Slap a "100% of +dmg as DPS" coefficient on SoR, and now you're dealing 800+ auto-attack DPS using SoR. Such a SD ret paladin would still have room in a WF group, because that SoR damage is still buffed by WF totem. Sure, SoR doesn't crit, but it scales with melee haste at the same rate SoB does, and a large enough coefficient *will* compensate for lack of crit.

That does lead to a different problem - now you have paladins with coefficients better than casters (mage gets SD/3.5 * modifiers. A hypothetical 100% coefficient means SD / 1 * modifiers). In PvP, that paladin will be dealing "raid level DPS" that cannot be countered. A caster can be interrupted or silenced, dots can be cleansed, a melee class can be disarmed - but SoR has none of those counters.



But back to SD based scaling's downsides - Ret paladins in general prefer the melee scaling. That's a "soft" factor, but one that should be considered. (How many Feral druids or Enh. Shaman would like the idea of scaling with spell power instead of the current melee mechanics? Same thing with Ret paladins.)

 

Rasputin

In addition to all of this, the current gear outlier is the HOLY paladin. Re-doing a different spec to work around that seems odd in the first place, especially when you consider that the only known mechanics moves in recent memory have been AWAY from spell damage. It would be far simpler to re-do Holy to scale with melee stats such as AP than it would to re-do Ret to scale with Holy stats. Not that I consider either of those the "proper" way to solve this perceived problem, but I'm unsure why everyone is latched onto re-tooling ret in the complete opposite direction that it has been headed.

 

rhea

Which is more problematic, prot paladins not getting "dps gear" or holy paladins? It seems every holy paladin wants to scale with melee stats because retri does dps, so they get the gear too. But then Prot paladins are left without?
How about that prot - holy scaling?