Yeah, you're absolutely right. My brain mustn't be working at the moment.

Given that Prot and holy are capable of generating more HP than us (sure, CS is not a particularly good way of generating it for holy which would have them generating less hp than us) I'm also sure that there's going to be more methods of getting HP. Prot will be able to generate 5 HP per 13.5 seconds and if we don't push the CS cd back to 4.5s we can do 3 per 12s (or more likely 3 per 13.5s). Maybe prot needs the extra HP to keep holy shield up.

This change does make CS feel a lot like a sinister strike or shred (which effectively has a 4s CD from energy before the haste changes). The difference is that rogues and druids have to wait on their energy before they can do anything else while we can still do stuff. If I recall correctly, there was a post which GC said that we were getting 3 new abilities. Inquisition, TV and Divine Retribution? There's got to be a good chance that TV is our specialisation ability, otherwise, we're going to be going for quite some time without a damaging "finisher". If druids are anything to go by, Inquisition will be trained at around level 70-80. That said, rogues get SnD at level 10.

On a slightly different note, Hand of Glory seems to be replicating the Art of War heal functionality (dps loss for healing). I wonder if AoW got cut (at least the heal part). Also, given that the mana free heal is the only thing that is good for holy in the list and unless they get more HP from talents, it would have to be a godly sort of heal to make it worthwhile. Maybe it become godly from talents. That or they are looking to add a lot more HP stuff to paladins (and just announced the no brainer/definite ones).

I also expect that the Holy Light part of Art of War will be cut since it replicates Word of Glory. It is also probably safe to infer that there will be more uses for Holy Power than those announced in the DevChat: they only mentioned 5, of which 2 are Retribution-only. Cat Druids have 4 finishers (Rip, Ferocious Bite, Savage Roar and Maim), while Rogues have 7 (Evis, Recuperate, Slice and Dice, Kidney Shot, Envenom, Expose Armor and Rupture). You need at least 3-4 finishers to give you choice and make the system interesting. And while the Rogue specs can share the finishers, we mostly cant (except for Prot and Ret sharing Inquisition and maybe something else), so I expect that we will end up with 7-8 finishers rather than the 5 already announced.

Holy in particular looks like it needs something, otherwise they are just casting Holy Shock and getting a free heal every 18 sec. I expect that one of their AoE heals and/or maybe Divine Light will scale from Holy Power, forcing them to choose single-target vs. multi-target, or efficiency vs. throughput.

I also think there must be another un-announced finisher available to Protection (and maybe ret too), because as it is, they only need to keep Inquisition up once every 20-something secs, and Holy Shield up once every 30-60 secs. At best, this implies 0.25 HP/sec (3/20 from Inquisition, and 3/30 from HS), which you could satisfy exactly with a 4-sec CS. With a no-CD CS, that leaves them with a lot of excess Holy Power. They must have some way to burn it, which means that there must be either another new ability or an existing ability that will scale from HP. It is also likely to be a something that generates threat and deals holy damage, because otherwise all of Prot's HP dumps are passive percentage increases to threat or mitigation. They need something active.

Ret is in a better place, with one buff to maintain, and then a choice between AE and single target finishers.

In short, I am fairly sure that we are only seeing a subset of our finishers, with 2-3 more still to come.

Divine Retribution has probably been removed, or rather renamed and taken out of the Ret tree, since it duplicated the effects of Inquisition. An interesting area of speculation is whether TV is our new Ret specialization ability or the 31-pt talent. Either way, both are supposed to be single-target attacks, so we are still missing something. Also, I expect that we will have at least one talent granting HP. Blizzard hinted at this (they said it was generated by CS, HS and some talents), and it follows by comparison to Rogues and Druids. Rogues have Seal Fate, Ruthlessness, Premeditation and HAT, Druids have Primal Fury. All of these randomly disrupt their rotations. Given the number of talents in Ret that seem ready for deletion or rework (SR, Conviction, Fanaticism, Heart of the Crusader), I would be very, very surprised if we did not get a proc that gave us HP on a random basis.

A few of you seemed to miss the change to Holy Shock, so don't talk about it as part of our future Ret rotation

Source: MMO-Champion BlueTracker | Holy Shock Holy only again?

Apparently Holy Wrath is currently planned to be part of the normal Paladin DPS rotation. Ret Paladins to have an actually complex and challenging DPS rotation? We'll see.

(Source: GC in the Twitter Dev Q&A thread)

At this point I would guess HW is going to be completely different than the current ability. Right now HW and Blinding Shield are pretty much the same spell (outside of the the Demon/Undead restriction) so it would make sense that one would be altered to fill a new niche.

Seems unlikely that Inq will be balanced around entirely replacing TV. If it was, why would TV even exist? If prot maintains seperate holy/regular damage threat modifiers then prot will never use TV. I think its likely the blues expect TV to be a regular part of ret's offense.

TV is when you don't need Inquisition for whatever reason (enough time left on the duration or you need the target to die now) or cast a buffed DS for AoE. Prot has the Holy Shield cooldown as well. Those are enough expected finishers for Prot and Ret and they should be able to do the instant heal if they want to sacrifice power for healing, so those specs have four choices to pick between.

Now Holy has little choice, but that is good since there are already many new heals to use.

I've been having a look at gear so that I can get an idea of what sort of level of stats we'll be at when we hit 85. From what I can see from the blue and green items on wowhead, Blizzard has modified the item budget equations slightly so I can't talk about epic items. One point of data (ilvl 359) isn't good enough to determine how epic items scale.

My analysis of the gear we have been shown gives the following changes to the log equations in Item Level Mechanics:

Uncommon:

Rare:


The blues seem to be identical to the greens: Stormforged Helm - Item - World of Warcraft vs Stormforged Breastplate - Item - World of Warcraft

So unless combat ratings have changed in value (haste costing more than crit) then I'd say that there's some weird stuff going on. At any rate, the equations are good enough to give an idea of what sort of level our stats will be at 85.

at iLvL 359 (Item Slot Value = 646.57) if 1/3 of the budget goes on strength, 1/3 goes on stam and 1/6 for each combat rating (similar ratios to the blue and green cata gear):

Helm/chest/legs: 340 str, 510 stam, 227 CR x2
Shoulder/Hands/Waist/Feet: 287 str, 431 sta, 192 CR x2
Wrist/neck/back/finger: 243 str, 364 sta, 162 CR x2
Trinket (Say a DMC:G equivalent): 344 str, 1147 str for 15s (standard ICD)
Add in a slightly more appropriate weapon than Elementium Poleaxe - Items - Sigrie

Approximate Totals: 4400 strength, 5600 stamina, 5000 Combat Rating

That's white damage hits of around 5k before enchants, professions and buffs (but not gems, as gem slots get taken out of the most attractive stat on an item). I'd estimate that about 1/3 - 1/2 of the combat rating will go on mastery while the rest gets spread across the other 4 stats (for simplicity, equally). So that's about 2000 mastery rating and 750 of each of the other ratings. Yeah, big simplification, but until we know what the rating/1% are, if it's worth capping out and how good haste will be then there's not much point in going to any more effort over the ratings.

Unbuffed (estimated buffed), the stamina puts us at about 65k (75k) health, AP at 10000 (14500) and about 3000 (4600) spell power.

So (using MMO-Champion's ability list) before talents:
SoR would hit for around 1300 (1900)
JoR hits for about 3k (4.4k)
Consecration will do about 270 (400) per tick
Exorcism hits for about 3k (4k)
SoV ticks for about 1.5k (2k)
JoV hits a full stack for 3000 (4500)
HoW hits for 3.2k (4k)

Weapon Damage (CS) ~ 5k (~6.5k)
DS 2700 (3500)
TV 11250 (15k !)

Yeah, I know we haven't been balanced yet or even have a tree but it's nice to be able to see those numbers anyway. I also see that those numbers I got out of the equation are very close to the epic items, so maybe blizzard haven't got the scaling done yet and has just set everything to epic loot levels or intend to push epics higher. I think it's probably the latter as if the items being handed out at the moment are using epic scaling, then the testing that is being done won't be as effective.

Tons of new changes. A very rough list:

Holy Wrath seems to be using the meteor mechanic.
Improved Judgement now seems to increase damage too.
We have an interrupt: Rebuke
New talent: Rule of Law
Swift Retribution is one rank only.
Templar's Verdict is in.
Art of War no longer depends on crit, and does not affect Holy Light.
New Talent: Wrath of the Lightbringer
This seems very cool, but the cooldown has to be a typo.
Inquisition is in.
The new Divine Storm is also in.

The new Ret 31 point talent, Zealotry, sounds exciting. The 30 minute cooldown, however, gives me pause. Extremely situational with such a long cooldown as you could not count on it's availability for each boss fight.

I would prefer a toned down ability that could be used every 10 or 15 minutes, giving us a cooldown that we could reliably use on any given boss attempt.

Few others:

Holy Wrath is 15 seconds and does damage to all targets.
Judgement is 7 seconds talented.
Exorcism is 4 seconds talented, can this be right?
Art of War only affects Exorcism.
Conviction now affects healing as well.
Imp Crusader Strike might be 1 sec, making CS 3 sec talented.
Wrath of the Lightbringer might affect the cd of zealotry, as I cant see another talent that affects AW.
Zealotry must be 3 mins...

Very little downtime, still very gcd locked.
Whilst Zealotry is up all we'll be doing is CS-TV with a few judgements for mana.

Zealotry's cooldown does seem odd, and so does the duration. 10sec duration, 3min cd would sound more reasonable.

Inquisition is surprisingly learned at lvl83. Divine Storm is still the lvl10 specialization ability ?

Seals of Light and Wisdom have been merged into one, Seals of the Pure. Effect remains the same.

Looking at Heart of the Crusader and Protector of the Innocent (prot tier2), weren't those two raidbuffs intended to be removed ?

For the new version of Art of War, has it been determined whether "Your melee attacks" means all of our abilities on the melee hit table, or just white swings?

Also, the current incarnation of the talent trees really seems to highlight the "dps vs. utility" choices the devs have continually mentioned. Seals and Judgements of the Pure are very sexy on the surface, but to pick them up as well as all the tasty DPS talents in the Ret tree, one would have to forgo the majority of Heart of the Crusader, Eye for an Eye, Rebuke, Repentance, Swift Retribution or Pursuit of Justice to manage a 3/3/35 build.

Can anyone tell if the current build has a Bugged Sanctified Retribution? in Beta its shown as 3 points on current build but the tooltip doesn't change from 1 point to 3 points.

I highly doubt the 31 point talent is 30 minute CD. That would make NO sense. It's possible there's been a type error somewhere or it's a place holder (i.e. 3 min CD). Although, the usage of it seems very fun.

If you look through the current talent trees released via mmo-champion, you'll see that some of the talents are non-complete. Improved CS, for example, lowers the CD of CS by 0 seconds with 2 points. Same with Wrath of the Lightbringer, reducing the CD of AW by one second. I wouldn't be too hasty is assuming that certain spells have the appropriate CD they're listed with. It is, after all still Beta

Although, one thing does trouble me about this new build. Blizzard supposedly "liked" Art of War, however, according the updated talent trees, it no longer, in anyway, does what it does on live.

I'm guessing they removed FoL from Art of War because we can use holy power to cast the 0 mana, instant cast heal instead.

EDIT: and with the majorly reduced CD on Exorcism we'll need AoW up more often to keep using it as often as they want us to.

looks pretty funny.

3HP-> Zealotry -> Avenging Wrath -> fun begins
CS->TV->HoW->CS-> and so on.

only forget Jugdement

According to the MMO-Champion spell comparison Imp. CS is supposed to reduce the cooldown by 3 seconds, basically removing the CS cooldown. I think that actually makes sense to have CS as a filler without a cooldown generating holy power for other abilities. Zealotry would then allow a burn rotation of CS>TV>repeat.

In-game it reduces the cooldown by 1 second, dropping it to 3 seconds. That should make you use every other GCD for CS - I'd guess it'll be worth waiting even after a hasted spell GCD due to the Holy Power generation.

No point using HoW during zealotry, CS -> TV -> CS -> TV repeat until it is down, no other ability is even close. I am seeing ~18k crits during AW, HoW tops out at ~7-8k.

CS has a 3 second CD talented now, which is extremely nice for getting more of a rotation down, since it lines up with the GCD.

TV ist not going to have any cooldown afaik. So you can cast it (or DS) after each CS under Zealotry(whichs cooldown is a placeholder or mistake obv.)

Didn't blizzard want us to choose between different cool stuff? To spec max dps 5, 3, 33 there is not any utility we can pick at all. No Eye for an Eye, Rebuke, Repentance, or Pursuit of Justice. And all that having already cut Sanctified Retribution(3 points for a support other classes will bring to raids).
I'would miss Pursuit of Justice badly.

Also we seem very GCD locked, even more than now in my op. Didn't they say, that they dont think to be GCD locked is a good thing, and gave us that new ressource because of that?


No (self) heal anymore? I current endgame content I used instant flash of light a lot! But 3 spending Points of Holy Power for word of glory? We would loose a full TV/DS. We are not goint to see many words of Glory unsless someone is sure he will die unless.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Rebuke: Retribution Paladin Talent HotC is gone, and JotW is 1 talent point. I'm looking at this build WoW Talent Calculator - Sigrie. While repentance has a cooldown someone else can CC and someone else can bring the 3% raid damage buff imo.

Zealotry seems awesome provided the cooldown is sane. In the 30 seconds we do 3700% of weapon damage from CS and TV alone. Add on another 15% per swing from Seals of Retribution and a 3s swing timer (for simplicity) gives 5150% of WD. Inquisition would drop off no later than 20-21s into Zealotry. If you buff Inquisition part way through, it drops to 4910% but considering the 30% to holy damage (provided Seals of Retribution is holy damage) put it at 5040.5%. Not refreshing Inquisition while Zealotry will yeald between 5150% and 5250% (Depending on how much time was left on Zealotry). Poping wings during this time will yield around 5900% WD.

I'm still not 100% sold on Inquisition. The problem is that between a reduced CD on CS, a reduction in seal damage in Seals of Retribution, TV being physical and the removal of consecration from our rotation, we're going to do a lot less holy damage than we do now. Zealotry just pushes this further. Maybe once righteous vengeance and seal of corruption dot ticks are added to the Zealotry consideration, then it might be worth keeping up, however, those sources of damage have to be doing about 8 weapon swings worth of damage during the time where the buff isn't up to be worth the opportunity cost of refreshing Inquisition during Zealotry. Maybe the penalty on the 10s of damage after Zealotry is over is enough to make up the difference or maybe spending 1 CS after zealotry is over to get the buff back is worth it.