Infraction for Methyl_Druius: Wishlisting, post signing and quote splitting, oh my.

• Chicken · 06/07/09, 11:33 AM

Post: 3.1 Retribution Paladin Thread
User: Methyl_Druius
Infraction: Wishlisting, post signing and quote splitting, oh my.
Points: 2

Administrative Note:

Message to User:

Your post is very long, and yet has a pretty low content count. You also signed it at the end, while even on a long post we can still see to the left what your user name is. Your ideas are not particularly interesting or exciting in and of themselves. And splitting up someone else's post to respond to it piece by piece usually just leads to a long, rambling post with very little content.

Original Post:

Originally Posted by Arikah

[...]and without judgements eating seals (which was also part of the micro, the GCD loss has now been replaced by DS)[...]

Not like it matters much now, but I'm pretty sure Judgement by itself didn't used to trigger the GCD; having to re-seal did. So they allowed us to keep our seal up but made Judgement trigger the GCD instead. (Most people had Judge/Reseal macro'd so they didn't really notice the difference though.)

Originally Posted by Arikah

With the recent dev post looking for feedback and questions on the official forums, it sounds like they are truly interested in ways to fix the class. I plan on putting up a long-ish post on the official forums with the slim hope that we can get dev responses, but before I do that it'd be nice to have input from readers here. Since we haven't much left to discuss what with the total lack of bugs or theory (yes I'm referring to the squabbling on the last page), I'll pose some questions to you all:

- What would you like to see our "rotation" changed to and why would it be better than FCFS?

I've been thinking and posting alot about this lately, but my posts tend to be quite long and mostly go un-noticed on the Blizzard forums. What I am envisioning is a system which smooths out our damage while providing more consistency, synergy between abilities, and a more interesting and skill-based rotation (also more single-target dps and hopefully a higher skill cap). The following are my ideas for changes to the Retribution combat system:

Exorcism:

Deals roughly half its damage up-front, and applies a ~15sec DoT dealing the rest of the damage. Our next Judgement spell unleashes the remainder of the DoT, in addition to it's normal effect.
Art of War procs can be used to cast Exorcism regardless of cooldown.
Exorcism is also moved to the melee hit table since our dps will be greatly affected if it's not up when we cast Judgement. (This should happen anyways, in my opinion.)

Crusader Strike:

Damage reduced significantly, and cooldown removed.
Now adds a stackable debuff to the target which greatly increases Divine Storm damage received (stacks 3 times).

Divine Storm:

Base damage reduced significantly. Deals additional damage against targets with the CS debuff, and consumes the debuff stack when it lands.

Consecration:

An alternative form is added to our spellbook that is an instant-cast DoT (~10-yard range) which deals base damage equal to our normal Consecration, but the ticks each have a chance to critically strike. Also based on the melee hit table, because misses would burn the entire 10sec cooldown (not just the first tick like with our AoE Consecration).

These changes would result in a standard rotation of:
Cons=>Exo=>Judge=>CS=>CS=>CS=>DS=>Repeat

Note the rotation lasts 10.5s, which falls nicely within the current cooldowns of Consecration and Divine Storm, and slightly longer for Judgement, but the extra damage from Exorcism should make up for that. Crusader Strike loses its cooldown as mentioned above, and the Exorcism cooldown is refreshed by using an Art of War proc.

Originally Posted by Arikah

- Is it time for us to get offensive utility (gap closers/snares/interrupts)? What would you be willing to sacrifice to get such tools?

Sacrificing burst and requiring more setup for our damage would require certain tools to help keep our time-on-target up and prevent our damage from being easily healed through. Perhaps Divine Storm could have an additional effect based on which Judgement is on the target: JoL reduces healing done by a percentage, JoW increases mana cost of spells, JoJ reduces base movement speed (see what I did there Druids? =P). Having to choose between these different effects based on the situation would be interesting and should separate the face-rollers from those who actually think before pressing buttons. Also note that it would be less effective to Judge then immediately DS because DS will hit like a wet noodle unless the CS debuff is stacked on the target.

Originally Posted by Arikah

- Would you enjoy playing a complicated spec over playing the faceroll game? If on a scale of 1-10 with sunwell sealtwisting being 9, and the current FCFS being 3 (vanilla autoattack/leveling up is about a 1), where would you like to see our difficulty-to-play at?

I can't say I ever had the opportunity to seal-twist in BC, but using your scale I would target somewhere around a 6 or 7 for raid dps. Our current situation of having our dps cap out too quickly is quite depressing. Let's admit it; it certainly doesn't take an expert to come close to theoretical maximum dps at the moment.

Originally Posted by Arikah

- Would you sacrifice some of our current "passive aoe" damage in order to gain more single target damage? If not, how would you increase our single target damage while keeping it balanced (hint: this ties in with question 1)?

Absolutely. I believe reducing the base damage of Divine Storm in exchange for Crusader Strike buffing the ability on the main target is a very good mechanic. Generally, Consecration deals more damage in AoE situations anyways, and it's not bursty so doesn't spike our cross-threat in a dangerous way like Divine Storm can. Offering the option to use a single-target version of Consecration with some additional benefits is another mechanic that I think is a very good idea.

Obviously I've not included any numbers here, mainly because the entire system would have to be re-balanced with this many changes. Essentially the goal is to increase sustained, single-target dps while reducing our dependence on passive AoE abilities. If tuning our damage in this system does not come out quite right, or is deemed to not be skill-based enough, I believe the addition of the following mechanic would be really interesting:

Divine Storm:

Now refreshes Seal of Vengeance on the target, but reduces the periodic damage done by Seal of Vengeance by 5% every time it's refreshed.

So, at the start of the fight you'd want to build a stack, but at some point you would have to rebuild it because its damage would be significantly reduced by refreshing it with Divine Storm. An interesting mechanic, which would require alot of theory-crafting and some skill to manage. Anyways, please let me know what you guys think, and I apologize for making such a long post here, but I feel this is an important topic worthy of exploration.

Thanks for reading,
Meth