Spirit Link gets my vote.

I'm not so sure. I must admit, being alliance, i never bothered to look too much into SoB. But now that we are geting spell dmg, is SoB still going to be better than SoC? SoC and JoC do have coefficients, but what about SoB?

And If SoC does turn up to be better than SoB, we need to make it scale with haste, which is here to stay.

I dont think we will miss precision, as long as HoW, judgements and exorcism use melee hit. Sharing gear with warriors means we will get enough hit from gear.

In regards to mana regen, yeah, I'm not confortable with it yet. BoSac might be the answer is some boss fights, but what about everywhere else? Judgement of the Wise affects random 3 people from the raid, so you basically have a 1/8 chance of geting mana from it. And I still see we going oom vary fast in pvp. We need some sort of constant mana regen. The idea of spending mana to maybe get some mana back is flawed in the 1st place, since once you are oom, you dont regen.

One thing I'm worried about is the new Blessing of salvation. Hopefully we wont have to micro menage it and buff somebody with it every time the cd is up. I'm already constantly on GCD as it is and then having to stop dpsing to buff people mid fight is not ideal.

And lastly, they gotta change retribution aura. Ideally, only the MT will be geting hit, and giving him 200 dmg (and threat) when he gets hit in exchange for our 10% holy dmg loss doesnt seem right to me. You can say im being selfish and all, but I see ret pallies being great support for the raid with these new changes. While thats cool and all, if our dps doesnt come close to others (despite how much of a buff we give them), the majority of people are still going to laugh at ret, while the minority who understand things a bit more will aprreciate us.

Don't forget that you are going to have to cram Divine Storm into your rotation; another instant attack that will almost certainly out-perform Consecrate every 10 seconds. With the 2 min CD on Hand of Salvation, Ret and probably Prot pallies will certainly have to join in the rotation; or tanks will have to generate a ton of extra threat.

It certainly seems as though everything is stacked against SoC. WF totem changes favor SoB (Seal of the Martyr); Ret aura changes favor SoB; Blizz came out and said that WF is to replace Rockbiter for shammies (at level 30) and I think that the pally changes are tantamount to saying "Take SoC off your bar at level 66."

Yeah, I thoght of that as well. Ideally, we want to use consecration as well, specially with multiple mobs. But the thing I dont like about the new salv is that the person you might have to buff (locks?) will usually be out of range, meaning we will have to move around find them, salv them and then head back to the boss.


We still need SoC for pvp. I dont mind making SoB the pve seal, but we cant neglect SoC and let its problems stay there. And if we fix SoC to scale with haste (which we have to, since most people do pvp as well and sanctity has been replaced by haste) would SoB still be better?

Or you could tell people to move themselves if they don't want to pull.

I still see no problem with the spell as it, its some nice unique flavor.

I am thinking it will be an aggro dump for the ret pally. Let the healers deal with locks who still have soulshatter. The other thing to keep in mind is that we haven't really seen (in action) how much more threat tanks will generate. As it stands, Salv wasn't really a buff; if you had one pally, that was what they cast. Blizz probably realized that they built game mechanics/itemized gear based on an assumed "buff." This finally addresses that and will hopefully let single pallies in smaller raids/5-man groups actually buff other players rather than just providing the assumed, multi-group, threat reduction aura.

I saw a screenshot of a BT geared Pally doing a 7,000 damage judgement, gaining about 600 mana. Note that is with all buffs up and a clickie trinket.

Is it true that both melee and spell hit are being merged into one stat? And melee crit and spell crit, again, just one stat? That's what I read on pally forums, so i dont trust it too much. It would be nice if both spell hit and spell crit used out melee stats.

Just read the patch notes again. AWSOME change. I went straight to pallies last time, sorry.

Please read the patch notes.

http://chuckg.org/dump/2008/loljoc.jpg

To be honest, I don't think Art of War is going to make it to Release as is. 7k Judgements will be a edge case, for sure, but how long until someone makes an "Indalamar's old school Bloodthirst" video showing off the kind of burst you can pull with it?

Yeah i'm very interested to find out new coefficients etc. Plus if anyone has found details of divine storm, please share

Of course it is silly to plan talent builds etc at this stage but face it, we all love doing it. Here's my first try.

Raid wide auras is also interesting. Increasing auras to 40 yards with the holy talent could prove to be a significant buff in certain boss encounters. Here's a plan to incorporate that.

Retribution Aura damage increased and now gains damage based on Holy spell power

So, just to make sure I understand this correctly:

1. Everything about ret gets changed to melee stats.
2. They give us interesting buffs to Retribution Aura.
3. Then they force force us to take a talent that increases spell power by a percentage of attack power and gives our critical heals a chance to a chance to have a HoT(really dont understand that one), because it is the only way to buff our new main aura without choosing poorly itemized gear.

Did I miss something? Is there a reason the aura could not be buffed by attack power? They we could get a different, and maybe slightly more useful(?) talent.

It is buffed from attack power.

Sheath of Light buffs your spell power by 30% of your attack power, so the more attack power you have the more spell power you have and the more damage Ret Aura does.

I think the point with Sheat of Light (aswell as Touched by the Light) is to improve our healing, (Yea, we are hybrids, still) and improve Seal of Command and Judgement of Command. It's not a bad talent even though Crusader Strike got changed.

With spell crit and melee crit combined into one stat. The healing part of the spell actually becomes quite useful.

If you don't like the talent, do not get it.

It allows hybrid Sheathbot builds with 37/0/24, helps Ret heal themselves and maybe an instance, and scales the "holy" abilities. Pallies have been asking for a HoT for years, now there will be one available (also 51 Holy has a HoT).

I'm sorry. I meant everything which significantly adds to dps. Consecrate and Exorcism are nice, but are the first things I drop if mana is becoming an issue. Hammer of Wrath and Holy Wrath are not part of my dps rotation and I only heal in emergencies. Being Horde, the only thing I use Seal of Command for is Prince.

At the same time, it is hard to justify not taking the talent and reducing tank threat as a result.

It just strikes me as odd that they chose to scale the main Ret aura off of spell power when everything has been focused on us gearing more like warriors.

They gave us the AP->SD conversion because us paladins have been whining (and rightly so) that our Holy damage abilities have been stuck with no scaling. Don't forget that JoB is a Holy damage ability, so that will scale, as well as the aforementioned Consecration/Exorcism. Effectively, what this means is that these abilities will comprise a larger percentage of our damage now, due to the fact that they will have a scaling factor associated with our primary stat, attack power. I personally was quite pleased to see that talent; the only thing that disappointed me was no apparent fix to the mana issues ret paladins face - and even more so now that we'll be wearing warrior gear. But that is an entirely different topic.

Actually JoB, JotM and JoC are now based on weapon damage not spell damage.

As in that is a change in WotLK or that is on live? JoC clearly scales with spell damage and it would seem that JoB might as well (based on screens of 19K and 7.5K crits respectively). The Seal damage is weapon based and I don't think has a SP modifier.