Mists of Pandaria: All Specs
 

Please use this thread to discuss Paladins in the Mists of Pandaria expansion. Avoid excessive wish-listing and whining. Constructive criticism is fine. Make sure you are making a useful post. "I like X" is not useful. "I like X because it allows this or that" is useful. Common sense applies, if you're not sure feel free to PM a moderator or administrator. Thanks.

The talent system has been redesigned, and the only spec choices are as follows (choose one from each tier):

15
1. Speed of Light [Instant, 1m CD]: Increases your movement speed by 60% for 6s. During this time, you radiate healing to nearby allies.
2. Long Arm of the Law: A succesful Judgment increases your movement speed by 45% for 4s.
3. Pursuit of Justice: You gain 10% movement speed for each current charge of HoPo.

30
1. Fist of Justice [Instant, 30s CD]: Stuns the target for 6s.
2. Repentance [1.5s]: Repentance.
3. Seal of Justice: Fills the paladin with Holy Light, causing direct attacks to reduce the target's movement speed by 50% for 5s and deal 87 additional Holy damage.

45
1. Blessed Life: You have a 100% chance to gain a charge of HoPo whenever you take direct damage or are stunned, feared or immobilized. Cannot occur more than once every 8s.
2. Sacred Shield: When reduced below 30% health you gain the sacred shield effect. The SS absorbs 18k damage and increases healing received by 20%. Lasts 15s. Cannot occur more than once every 60s.
3. Ardent Defender [Instant, 3m CD]: Ardent Defender.

60
1. Selfless Healer: Your successful Judgements reduce the mana cost of your next FoL by 50% and improve its effectiveness by 50% when used to heal others. Stacks up to 2 times.
2. Eternal Glory: Your WoG and LoD have a 30% chance to consume no HoPo.
3. Holy Shield [Instant]: Shields a friendly target, absorbing 1507 damage per HoPo. Lasts 10s.

75
1. Veneration: Your Consecration causes everyone standing it it to be immune to movement impairing effects for 6s.
2. Acts of Sacrifice: Reduces the CD and mana cost by 20% of your BoF, BoP and BoSac. Cleanse also removes one movement impairing effect when self-cast.
3. Clemency: When activated, immediately refreshes the CD on BoF, BoP and BoSac.

90
1. Holy Avenger: When you use GoAK, none of your abilities consume HoPo and cast as if 3 were consumed. Lasts 10s.
2. Sanctified Wrath: When you cast AW, your HS has no CD (Holy), your Judgement has no CD (Prot), and you can use HoW (Ret).
3. Divine Purpose: Abilities that cost HoPo have a 15% chance to consume no HoPo and cast as if 3 were consumed.

If Fist of Justice is intended to replace Hammer of Justice, notice that it has a 30 second cooldown, and has a 20 yard range as opposed to 10.

Repentance also has no cooldown, but is no longer instant cast, and finally Long Arm of the Law no longer requires the target to be farther than 15 yards away from the player in order to take effect.

Compared to some classes, the first public iteration of Paladin talents (thatbox posted them above) are decidedly uneven. Talents being so few they should each definitely 'bring the awesome.' These do so in fits and spurts and often only for a spec at a time.

This is not meant as a whining comment: as an example the Druid talents seem to 'bring the awesome.' This means Blizzard can design talents that are interesting and require personal choices. On the other hand, each Druid talent can read as completely different by spec, making the collapse from 3 talent trees to one appear to just cause each tooltip to be triple-length - which would be effectively no change.

Expect several iterations before release - the paladin talents should be aiming for at least the initial Druid level of quality. Faith the awesome will arrive is unlikely to be misplaced - initial Blizzcon releases are often very rough and there's plenty of time for shaping.

First tier (L15):
Choice of movement increasing talents. Speed of Light is pretty nice for Holy and could be situationally useful for the other specs. Long Arm has no minimum range, so a fair bang for buck, while Pursuit of Justice feels crippled compared to old version, since HP disappears out of combat. For a first tier it doesn't look like it would help much with the leveling process - Judgement to more rapidly close with the next pull is the most probable decision.

This decision could be hard, but not very meaningful - the differences between the choices could be nearly indistinguishable in a dungeon or raid.

Second tier (L30):
Stun, CC, or PvP/gimmick-fight. 2/3 are good and could cause the difficult choice this talent design is set to deliver, but a PvP talent in the new setup looks out of place.

Third tier (L45):
All of some benefit to tanks, but leaves Holy and Ret rather out in the cold. Again, with the extremely limited talent setup using one sixth for 'helps you survive' is carrying a lot less 'awesome' than it could.

Fourth tier (L60):
All of benefit to healers, but leaves Prot and Ret rather out in the cold. 2/3 require the use of HP to activate, and both specs have better uses for their precious HP for their main role: tanking or DPSing. The last 1/3 requires cast-time spells (FoL), which would again reduce a Prot or Ret's main role via cast time or no block/parry/dodge!.

Fifth tier (L75):
Gimmick fight mechanic/PvP option, or two options mostly tailored towards PvP. Cutting edge guilds may make clever use of some of the blessings, but the average paladin may be able to count their usage on one hand. As the talents for L75 these look quite weak - more like an old-style low level filler talent.

Final tier (L90):
Talents with a reasonable amount of 'awesome', but on the DPS perspective can easily be mathed and the 'right' choice determined long before day 1. Holy and Prot look well designed and able to select the choice best for their playstyle (or a particular fight). Possibly best designed tier of talents.

The DK equivalent talent, Asphyxiate, states that it replaces Strangulate. Fist doesn't, suggesting that while our stun would be better in MoP, we would have to talent for it or go without. (I'm not going to countenance the possibility that they'd let Paladins have two 6-second stuns on individual CDs.)

Honestly, I think the Blizzcon talent trees were thrown together semi-randomly just to show what new talents will be like and give us a basic idea of what we should expect to gain from them. The Paladin level 30 talents are pretty much proof of that - as is they would make PVP Paladins the only class with no baseline root, CC or snare and able to gain only one of these abilities from talents, while PVE Paladins would be forced to waste one-sixth of their talents on an ability that is marginal outside PVP. Likewise, the level 45 talents are all primarily for tanks and the level 60 talents are for healers. It's nothing to worry about, though; I suspect Ghostcrawler's just trolling Retribution Paladins to see how much QQ he can trigger (again).

Random other thought regarding the design:
The overall talent design is weak in regards to the future (not Paladin talents, specifically, but the entire structure of how talents function). It's not very extensible for another 5 (or even 10) level expansion (after MoP - with a 95 or 100 cap). Another X-pac would require A) re-working break points on talents, B) leaving the final stretch without any new talent, or C) grant a 7th talent for only 5 (or 10) more levels. Unless they wildly reverse direction and add 15 levels in an X-pac to warrant a new talent.

Naturally further baseline abilities are likely to be granted, so classes would evolve, but the talent design is pretty rigidly aligned to L90. Old system granting 1 talent per level (or every 2-3 levels for Cata) worked because it was a fractional increase. One talent point was a small portion of the whole, but with only 6 talents a single addition is a huge % swing.

Expectation would be to receive a new talent, and for the new talent to be bigger/badder/better than the Tier 6 talents that would exist, without losing/weakening the then-old Tier 6 talents. I.e. people would expect to be more powerful. It's never too early to start managing expectations.

I suspect option C. You don't necessarily need an even spread across the board. Cata talents don't have an even spread either; You get 1 talent at lvl 10 and then every odd level until 79 followed by 1 each level for 81->85. Although, as you stated, the % increase is a lot smaller.

Would like to add, that GC hinted, not promised, that the paladin 87 ability would be Blinding Shield, as we saw on the Cataclysm Beta.

Figured I'd post what's been said today on the Live Q&A that might concern us:

Holy Wrath becomes a nuke for Holy. Ret and Prot will generate Holy Power from Judgment, Exorcism procs, Hammer of Wrath and other abilities that make sense. We still want there to be some small gaps in rhe rotation, but smooth over some of the frustration of today.

Harvest of Life upgrades Drain Life (Drain Life turns into Harvest, which is a mechanic we use for several spells such as Strangulate -> Asphyxiate and HoJ -> Fist of Justice). Soul Harvest is being removed, but shards passively regen outside of combat or can Drain Soul in combat to replace them. Mortal Coil is the new Death Coil.

Also RE:Ret

With Ret specifically, we wanted to try and address some of the feedback from players about the rotation. Divine Purpose and Zealotry add too much complication or RNG for some players, which is why we think they make good optional mechanics. Overall, when you see the rate at which you get new spells, you are still rewarded about every other character level (much like today). There are just a lot of core or spec spells that used to be no-brainer talents.

Also just confirmed by GC that Fist of Justice is indeed an "upgrade" that replaces Hammer of Justice.

15
I can't see anyone picking PoJ here. I mean 30% max speed on a power gain related cd. And considering there seem to be more ways to spend HoPo, why on the least speed gain option.

30
No Holy/tank love at all here. Utility, gimmick type fight. I agree with Exemplar, pvp here seems weird.

45
I really hope this is a work in progress. Them talking about being a hybrid should be a choice. Having all 3 talents here as tanky is dumb.

60
Now we have all healing talents. And a cool idea in a shield. So pick a tank talent and then force yourself to choose between 3 good ones. And the guy playing ret is going arg????

75
1. Veneration: Your Consecration causes everyone standing it it to be immune to movement impairing effects for 6s. Aura mastery for non holy? rofl
Rest are situational and quite lackluster

90
WoD/LoD tree form spamage. HS spamage.
Ret's seem to get bagged on this one a bit getting HoW activation which they have now. Double dipping HoPo between this and Eternal Glory seems interesting

I believe you misread. It is a passive increase while you have HP. So out of combat, when you have no HP, you have no benefit. In combat you are semi-randomly moving 0-30% faster. The only thing more annoying than no speed bonus is an unpredictable one - it makes it very hard to navigate with precision. Also, humans being what they are, anyone with the talent is extremely likely to resent it - we'll only remember when it's at 0 and we need 30 and vice-versa, and quickly forget when it was actually useful.

If you assume that a Ret/Prot paladin will CS after an HP finisher, (always keeping 1 HP) I think it'd be more fair to model it as a 10~30% speed boost. Since we control most of our HP generation/usage, I also don't see the random speed boost causing that much angst.


When PvPing I find it extremely annoying to have 3 HP and unable to catch up to a target to use TV - with this talent, you'd have 30% bonus move speed to catch up and use TV (followed by CS to replenish 1 HP). Combine it with Blessed Life (+HP after various CCs or taking damage), and it seems like a solid speed boost for PvP purposes. Definitely seems on par with Long Arm of the Law, situationally better depending on your playstyle.


LAL will be more reliable and grants a higher burst of speed (45% for 4 sec); PoJ is slightly random but seems it'd grant higher average speed in a PvP environment (10~20% most of the time; 30% when you have 3 HP to dump).


Would also be interesting to see how the talent interacts with Holy Avenger. It probably only works off what you have; but you could build up 3 HP, use GoAK, and have 30% speed boost while throwing out 3 HP TVs.

LAotL = sprint for 60% speed with 50% uptime, instead of averaging 20% speed passively. Seems far superior to me.

LAotL is 45% speed, so the average benefit from that talent is 22.5%.

Say that you'll always have at least 1 HP for PoJ; add in a random 1 HP from Blessed Life, and PoJ can probably average at least 22.5%. It also opens up kiting options, since you can choose to keep the 30% bonus "indefinitely". (Rets will probably hate chasing Holy paladins with the talent)