Newest build is up. Haste now effects the Crusader Strike cooldown. So that's how they are currently testing it's tie to HP generation.

Judgement talented to 30 yards and a Run Speed increase tied to it through Long Arm of the Law "Your Judgment has a 50/100% chance to increase your movement speed by 30% for 4 seconds when targets are at or further than 15 yards from you."

Couple of changes on this latest build:

- Improved Judgement, moved to first tier: Increases judgement range for 10/20 yards, leads to a third tier talent. Holy no longer has a talent that increases the range aswell.

- Long Arm of the Law, new third tier talent, Your judgement has a chance (50/100%) to increase movement speed by 30% for 10 seconds when used on targets further then 15 yards away from you.

- Eternal glory, new second tier talent, Your word of glory has a 20/40% chance to not consume holy power.

- The Art of War seems to have changed, "This effect cannot be triggered while exorcism is on cooldown.", in addition to +60% damage, +100 critical strike damage on Exorcism and melee attacks have a 30% chance to reduce it's cast time by 100%. This now adds a big W icon on the middle of your screen.

- Sanctity of Battle, 2 points, NYI, new fourth tier talent, Haste effects reduce Crusader Strike cooldown, as mentioned above.

- Divine purpose, 40% chance to generate holy power on: Judgement, Exorcism, Templar's Verdict, Divine Storm, Inquisition and Holy Wrath

- Inquiry of Faith, new sixth tier talent, Increases periodic damage of Seal of Truth and also increases the duration on Inquisition by 50/100/150%. Looks like Inquisition has been changed to 4seconds per holy power, this talent brings it back to 10seconds per talent.

- Improved Crusader Strike is gone and now has a 4.5 second base cooldown.

- 20% melee haste aura did not make a reappearance.

- Divine Storm has been buffed to 150% weapon damage at 3 holy power.

Plate Specialization is up, and Mastery also seems to be up and running.
Holy Power now has a nice little bar, still shows as a buff aswell.

Imp Judgement might lead to some issues for Holy Paladins, or rather those the paladin targets. With Enlightened Judgements and Improved Judgements the range of it would become a whopping 60 yards. I foresee many a player forming a strong dislike for holy paladins in WSG. For Ret though it's a welcome addition along with Long Arm of the Law meaning we have at least some sort of gap-closer. Eternal Glory could prove invaluable for healing although the RNG comes with its usual issue of being random. It's still an overall gain though so no complaints really. The Art of War change is probably due to the proc staying up throughout Exo's cooldown meaning most times it's up it was an instant cast. Now we have to wait on the proc after coming up. I assume you meant "Reduces cast time by 100%" instead of cooldown on that?

Sanctity of Battle and Divine Purpose relate in a surprising deep way. With a 4.5 second CD affected by haste we're looking at 50% haste to bring it to 3 seconds, 9% of which will be assumed through talents bringing CS to 4.12 seconds. 12.5% haste brings it to an even 4 seconds. Using two abilities between CS, even spells, will delay it a bit. Since all our fillers have a chance to generate Holy Power through DP we'll have to weigh the costs of a guaranteed HP versus something potentially more damaging than CS that may not grant HP.

Also, Inquisition has a base time of 4 seconds per Holy Power. The talent is working as intended it looks like.

Enlightened Judgement, the holy talent, now just heals you when you Judge for a set amount.

Additionally, the movement limiting debuff was removed from Judgement last build.

I will fix my first post in a minute, just wanted to add that as of now, Judgements of the Wise restores 50% base mana over 10 seconds. Guess that takes care of the issue Xyrm mentioned.

Here's what the new holy power bar looks like (fully charged) and the "W" icon you get when you have the Art of War buff.



It looks like they might be adding a Power Auras type interface with that Art of War proc. The "W" is what generally gets shown when they haven't added an icon for something yet. With these changes you don't really have to watch your buffs anymore.

In addition to the above changes:

Exo is down to a 6 second cooldown and, though the tooltip states it should only proc when off cooldown, it seems to be procing no matter what. Even when they fix it to "working as intended" the 30% proc rate should get it back up very quickly after the cooldown finishes. Judgement of Truth was procing Exo quite regularly when out of melee range, so I would assume its still procing off seal procs and specials.

Seal damage was cut dramatically. Seals of Command only procs 7% damage now and my Seal of Truth is showing 21-22% (though, it shows the effect of some bonuses so not sure exactly what the new base damage is, but it looks like about half of what it was showing last build).

JotW now returns 50% over 10 seconds. I assume this is compensation for removing the 2% Divine Purpose regen, but I didn't actually test to see if that was the case.

Overall first impression: I'm really liking this build so far (and not just because things are actually playable now). GC was right when he said that palies would really like the new version of Imp Judgement. 30 yard range + mini-sprint gap closer is a really cool way of giving us a tool we were missing. Basically everything except Consecration and Hammer of Wrath have a chance to generate HP, so it feels like you can just mash buttons and do OK but that using a rotation will obviously be a big benefit. The new Sanctity of Battle making haste effect CS cooldown will be interesting to see what the conversion rate is on that (currently NYI) but it will definitely have an interesting impact on our rotation at different gear levels and how we reforge our gear.

Definitely appears to be gone now, passive regen is much slower than it was at any rate.

New holy power generation seems much faster on average but much more sporadic with a 4.5s CS (due to a NYI talent, so we'll just have to see how the numbers pan out there), I'm actually able to TV every 4th or 5th GCD sometimes. Exorcism feels much nicer. With full talents, inquisition, and no glyph, I was seeing almost 15k crits on the target dummy (Exo crits for double damage).

As stated previously, Seals AND the SoC secondary effect both took a hit.

Some ratings have become less oppressive as you level. My crit, haste, expertise, and hit all went up.

Not ret specific, but hit now has a breakdown when you mouseover the stat in the paper doll:

Long arm of the law sounds quite useful in a PvE build provided we will have the points for it come release. That little run speed boost could add up to some nice DPS on movement intensive fights.

Seems a bit underwhelming for PvP though. Assuming it does not stack with PoJ, adding 15% to our run speed isn't much of a gap closer. More of a gap mitigator. Still, it's a (faster) step in the right direction.

But what will this be like in PvP? Especially in BGs becoming much more important in Cataclysm.
Will it help to close up to the druid, which is almost in meleerange and running away from you?
No it won't, as the target isn't more than 15 yards away from you.

Of course you might judge another enemy, which is 15+ yards away to get the movementspeed.
But judging target B to close up to target A, feels somewhat wierd.

And Even more confusing: If the initial target is almost 15 yards away(with no target B around) you might run away first, to get in the 15+ yards area, judge to get the buff, and then run towards him again.


After all I don't really see this helping with the 'snare+dispell freedom' issue at all.

Not just that, but the conversions are better now even at level 80. I noticed that my 260 hit rating is now 8.45% hit rather than the 7.93% it gives on live. I think my other stats have gone up as well.

As for Long Arm, I'm more excited about the concept than the particular numbers it has right now. Blizzard could easily change it from 15 yards to 10 or from 4 seconds to 6 or give it a HoF-type effect while active which temporarily negates slows. Overall I think its a cool new (and unique) ability as-is and has plenty of room to tweak for balance purposes.

I think the bigger issue is how its become much harder to use the Judgement of Justice effect in PvP. Now that its tied to seal of Justice you have to give up almost all your seal damage to keep people in melee range. With seals being less of our damage this might not be as big of a deal but it still won't be insignificant. Perhaps seal twisting will make a comeback in PvP to get at least some of that damage while slowing the target, but I would imagine Blizzard will switch up the mechanics to make that impossible if people start doing it. (Also, if SoT is the PvE seal and SoJ is the PvP seal, where does SoR fit in?)

SoR would be the cleave-esque seal. Cleave damage has been getting the Chain Lightning treatment with each jump doing less damage than the previous, but so far it's only affected tank-spec cleaves.

Have they finally gotten around to fixing the unique and strange undocumented seal properties that were inherent to us? (SoR proc on Judgement, extra proc chances on items like Shadowmourne and TAiaJ come to mind) I recall the emphasis for cata will be the prevalence of proc type enchants and weapons. Unless limited to only white hits, we will relive the Byrntroll nerf issues again.

It will be absolutely integral in PvP to get a range mod for judgement. And to have a focus judgement macro for specific situations where speed is more important than close-range damage. The talent is an excellent idea in furthering their purpose of making paladins more complex in PvE and PvP, though yeah, it might need a little tweaking.

Your druid scenario is a little strange since you're unlikely to be that isolated. But if you really were alone like that with a druid FC, you could simply HoJ and swap to SoJ. If HoJ is on CD, you could fall OOC and mount (perhaps judging and sprinting out of shift+moonfire range first).

Of course there are ways to do that, but I can't really imagine blizzards wants us to do that. Doesn't this sound strange to judge another target to get the buff? oO
After all i wonder why the 15+yards restriction exists at all. This is not Intercept(a garantied gapcloser).


I really really like the class to get more complex and a semisprint is an awesome idea too, but there might be other ways to realize that.(Maybe melting it into Inquisition, so that we need holy power to activate it.) I think blizzard is right now just testing paladins beeing this little bit faster.
Things obviously aren't set in stone yet, as we are still by far to much kite-, slow-, snare-able, without having a real slow on our own. 15% more movementspeed doesn't make up magic dispell and dispell resistance.
e.g. Frostshock -> Freedom -> Purge ... dreaming of rebuke range...


Do you think SoJ is the intended seal for pvp? Blizzard might think about it like rogues using crippling poision(which is much more powerful), but how does this go along with our holydamage mastery? Or won't mastery be a pvp stat at all?

Long arm of the Law talent is interesting and a definate must have for pve. When you judge at 30yd, you get a speed boost, which is akin to a little sprint and it's the gap-closer we've been asking for so long. Any time you need to run away from a mob (think sindragosa) then need to return, this will make a difference, just spam the judgent button as soon as you can and get back to melee range faster. Or of you need to change to another mob that's away. AGain taking sindragosa, judge an iceblock, get a speedup to run/hide behind it.

Talents are messed up atm though. I keep loosing my spec each time I zone.

NPC damage output has been increased dramatically. Don't pay attention, and pull too many mobs (more than 2) is a serious chance of dying.

The change to CS and haste is interesting and not entirely unexpected. It's not implemented yet, keeping CS at 4.5 all the time which does feel awkward, especially with NPC damage increased.



Overall tip for levelling: Make sure your first aid is maxed, don't leave home without a stack of food/water.

I have to wonder if its going to be worth casting consecration in anything but the most mob-rich AoE situations. That mana cost could make it detrimental to longetivity from just one in a fight.

When I first saw this it reminded me of the enhancement shaman talent Frozen Power. While not exactly the same, the serve the same general purpose with similar conditions... to act as a gap closer.

Can anyone confirm if this is a magic buff or a physical one? Physical ones can't be removed... magic ones are still prone to mass dispel, spell steal, purge.

I have a large amount of in combat regeneration also, I noticed the same thing last night. The UI lists my regen from spirit, which is paltry, but I have this other regen to the tune of ~220 mp5 that I don't have a source for.

I noticed that even when I changed my rotation to include Cons and HW and hit TV with a low stack as long as everything else was on cooldown I couldn't run out of mana and I didn't even have BoM. I am only level 80 but this current regen model allows me to do whatever the hell I want with my normal rotation, though obviously it would become slightly more of an issue under Zealotry. With the current holy power proc mechanics you might be able to get away with judging under Zealotry after TV procs a Holy Power and hope to get off a 2 HP TV.

EfaE is now 12% damage reflection on magic only instead of 3% on all. It does make it worse for tanks but it increases it's dps contribution by 300% for retribution, though that contribution is still likely to be pretty small. It may well be worth taking though.

This is by far the build that felt the best so far for me. The rotation isn't fixed at all and I have to keep an eye on lots of things at once, the holy power bar works well, Exorcism feels like it is in a good place and I definitely have a few open GCDs here and there to use utility powers.

With the cooldown on Crusader Strike brought up to 4 seconds, does the rotation feel as GCD locked as before? Are you able to cast exorcism more?

What effect does the extended duration of Inquisition have?

I fear that, depending on the haste->CD reduce conversion rate, we'll probably need to gear for another cap, namely haste to reach a 3sec CS.

And on topic of manaregen; isn't manaregen increased all across all classes during beta? I remember my druid having a full manabar just some seconds after switching spec and my disc guildmate not once dropping below 80% mana even during healing intense aoe situations.

a) It's 4.5 seconds (further reduced due haste, but not yet implemented)
b) As written above, there is more freedom and a few open GCDs here and there
c) Exorcism CD is reduced to 6s. So yes, although Art of War is buggy and triggers even when your Exorcism is on cooldown
d) There is no extended Inquisition duration for Ret paladins. Inquisition uptime is reduced across the board for Holy and Protection paladins, the talent itself only makes up for it to fit our original duration

If it goes by the standard haste reduction then we'd need 50% haste to cap CS at 3 seconds. We already get 9% from talents, so that leaves 41%. It's doubtful the CD will be improved through spell haste so there's nothing else buffing it aside from gear. I think we can safely say 3 second CS won't be happening except during Bloodlust/Heroism since there's no way Blizz will allow 41% haste from gear unless they really change the model of wanting to lower things like crit and haste across the board.