Worldie

The only current option to not just get out of mana in ~2 minutes would be using Seal of Wisdom every now and then to gather mana back.
You get full mana fairly quick with SoW (takes about 10-20 seconds to get from 0 to 100% again), but again, that's nerfing the DPS considerably.

However noone yet factored the thing that in a raid situation, we can be using Seal of Blood/Martyr, which translates in damage taken, then being healed, then mana coming back.
The downside is that without knowing how much DPS SoB/M will actually do at 80, there's no way to tell if SA mana return will be enough to substain the DPS rotation.

 

flyingtoastr

SA shouldn't need to be factored into our regen. It's pretty stupid that to stay afloat we have to rely on an ability that was simply put in place to lessen the disparity between warrior/druid tanks with their infinite energy mechanics and paladins with their mana.

And by the by, you would have to be taking ~630 damage every second to balance the mana loss for doing a CS = DS > J cycle. If you're using a 3.5 speed weapon that's something like your SoB hitting for 22000. Yeah.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Worldie

Mmm you got a good point there. Not saying i'd not be happy with SoB hitting for 22k tho!

Well i'd not be surprised if they put another mana regen talent somewhere in deep Retribution then, unless the DPS from Retribution becomes so high that they can afford SoW weaving without falling horribly low.

 

Selenia

Didn't reports state that BoW only restores about 4% of mana every proc now? I don't know about you, but I don't do 25 attacks over 20 seconds.

Something needs to change. Badly. Currently we're pretty much worthless both in PvE and organised PvP.

 

Worldie

Last time i checked SoW was restoring 300-500 mana per proc and JoW 200ish per proc (depending on which procs i actually had active on me) or close to it due to the AP/SP scaling, unless i missed a change in last build.

 

Selenia

You did. It doesn't scale anymore as of last build.

 

Worldie

Aww, that's horrible. I'd wonder if it is intended or a bug... well, guess we'll have to see what the next builds will bring then.

 

bellator

It's intended. The restored mana of JoW is now 2% mana per proc (not some AP scaleing monster). Not sure what the BoW number is though

 

• Avitus

So let me get this straight and just to hint at a previous argument:

JoW from any spec is equal to JoW from ret now? This means 2 things have to happen:

1. Fury warrior like DPS. This is more important than ever.

2. A personal mana regen talent to truly replace the old sanctified judgement

 

Vitae

My tooltips at least were scaling - JoW went up nearly 50 points when I cast blessing of might on myself a couple hours ago.

Yup, upon testing, the tooltip is just out of date. Changes in attack power don't result in changes in the values - at level 77 with 7537 mana it's 302 for seal, 151 for judgment. Meh.

 

RangerSix

With basically all our unique-utility going down the drain concerning 25 mans, yeah, I can certainly agree on that.

Thing is though, that will never happend unless we lose alot of our current utility. Since it would mean that in 10 mans (Which will be a significant larger part of the game then today.) we could completely eclipse fury warriors.

So the current situation for retribution Paladins in 25 man raids looks grim, very grim, regardless of our mana problems.
Since as it stands now, we should be getting the short end of the DPS stick in WoTLK.

... unless Blizzard balances completely arround 25 man raids.

 

CaptBooyah

New patch has shown BoSanc to be changed to 3% dmg reduc, it also gives rage/mana/rp back per block/parry/dodge which probably makes it better than grace.

I'm not really seeing the mana issue atm, surely with a retadin, spriest and a shaman dropping mana tide there should be no one in the raid who isn't always regenning that 0.5%.

Not really the place for it, but the new Beacon of Light probably nails the fact that most holy paladins are going to be sporting sheath of light and could easily go to JotWise and imp ret aura for that extra raid support.

 

bellator

Maybe i'm completely off the mark, but with the chaning of the buff/debuff system, i got the impression that it was Blizzards intention to balance all dps classes dps when the raid had the full compliments of (de)buffs. I'm not saying they will succeed as this seems a mighty tall order, but with the current situation, all the (de)buffs can be provided in the raid through tanks+healers+7-8dpsers. This leaves 7-8dps spots which will bring nothing to the raid. If there is a imbalance in the dps of any of the classes then raids will simply stack up on the ones that are providing the most dps. The only way I can see for them to avoid this stacking is to make all dpsers do equal dps when in the raiding environment.

 

Feanor73

We're talking about our personal mana issue.

0.5% of something very small is well...ultra small. It certainly doesn't feel right for a mana battery to be unable to power itself enough.

That's why suggestions were made in this thread and elsewhere to keep the old effect of JOTW (or something equivalent) for the Ret Paladin personal mana regeneration.

 

Rustik

I posted this in the General WotLK Pallty forum too, but I'll post it here, since it's the ret thread.

Benediction, in its current form, is utterly useless. Judgements are already very cheap, and we only use seals every 2 minutes. The resulting benefit of benediction is about as useful as putting a candle in your BBQ grill.

I submit that Benediction either effect ALL offensive abilities, or it returns mana on judgement. Surely there's a way to scale it so it's useful to a ret/prot pally, but not overly powerful for a healing pally. Base the return either on level, base mana, or even bring back the damage done part.

I admit I'm not crazy about spending ANOTHER 5 points on our mana return just so we can last longer than 111 seconds, but if there's a talent there, it might as well be worth something.

Also, judging by the Aspect of the viper change, my guess is they might intend for us to put up SOW every so often to bring back our mana before going all holy Fury warrior on stuff again. Personally, I'm fine with this, I don't mind having to switch seals every so often to get mana back then switch back. And truthfully, 111 seconds is damn near right on the money to switch back and forth between DPS/JOW, but I'd really rather last a wheee bit longer than 2 minutes before I have to go "regen mode," unless regen mode only lasts 15 seconds or so.

 

Arthaal

As much as benediction makes little to no sense in its current implementation, spending 8 talent points simply to function for any significant length of time (or survive a dreaded drain team longer than the first 10 seconds) is simply not intelligent design(TM). You are correct, Benediction should be changed, but the proper way to fix the current mana regeneration for retribution is simply to acknowledge that they screwed the pooch and give us back the personal 60% of damage returned as mana on judgements. PERIOD. It worked, why fix it if it wasn't broken?

 

• Avitus

Note how fury warriors now give 5% raid wide melee crit (more than jotc) as well as raid wide Battle Shout, I wouldn't worry about 10 mans, our utility doesn't need to be reduced, they'll give a very similar amount of utility to the one we do.


I think it was fine until you started stumbling in this part. "111 seconds is damn near fine", but then you want it to least a "whee bit longer", so which is it? :P Even if you're sarcastic it's a bit conflicting/confusing.

Anyway, personally I really don't think SoW should be the solution (and it's not now, since it doesn't scale with damage anymore, it's back to the same crap it has always been, a fixed amount). As others have mentioned, the whole "mana bar" system especially for melee classes is an outdated system. Having to go into "regen" mode ever so often will put a nail in our DPS coffin, or if they give us ridiculously high DPS to compensate for regen phases means that it'll be almost impossible to balance for short fights/trash.

Benediction should be completely axed or changed into a 1 point talent to be worth it, it really makes no sense. JotW as it was should return for personal regen, somewhere high/mid ret tree.

 

burghy

I wouldn't mind using SoW to regenerate mana, being forced to alternate seals. But it should regen a LOT more than it does.
Also seal cost should be removed or set to a minimal value. The current values are just too restrictive and take away some interesting choices during combat.

 

• Avitus

burghy, you have to remember it's all about maintaining the status quo with our DPS.

As established, we need to match other class DPS now to remain desirable. If they force us to switch to SoW ever so often, the only way to keep us competitive DPS wise is to raise our base DPS considerable to compensate for low DPS SoW phases. Now you're getting into whole mess of DPS balancing for short fights where we won't be using SoW but will have too high DPS, I'm sure you can follow where this is going.

Making SoW regen a lot more, reducing/minimizing the cost of Seals would just be an incredibly contrived way of adding a [Shamanistic Rage]-like ability (though a lot more cumbersome to use).

Really, there are so many simpler and more fun ways to do this, I hope this isn't the course they take.

 

DarKNecross

Also note that we're not exactly competing with Fury Warriors for a raidslot, as the new buff/debuff changes suggest.
You can bring a Fury Warrior for 5% crit and a Ret Paladin for 3% crit. The only competition I'm expecting is with Moonkin (that spec into Imp Moonkin), Totem of Wrath, and BM Hunters.
Considering BM is looking to be the highest DPS spec for Hunters (plus Survival is trash without Expose Weakness), I'd assume Ferocious Inspiration replaces the utility of Sanctified Retribution
Looking at the Balance tree right now, there are way too many talents, and given the opportunity to not have to spec' into Improved Moonkin to save 3 talent points, I can't imagine anyone not jumping at the chance. So at least we have Swift Retribution.
Totem of Wrath depends entirely on Raid Composition. If you have an Elemental Shaman, forget about Heart of the Crusader - it just can't compete. If there isn't an Elemental Shaman, Heart of the Crusader is in.

I really don't think it's about justifying our spot against everyone else anymore, rather, justifying our spot if you have a Moonkin/BM Hunter/Elemental Shaman. Sure, we still need competitive DPS, but it's not Fury Warrior vs. Ret Paladin anymore.

http://crimson-guild.com

 

Prinsesa

On that note, I weep at the thought of Ret losing Judgements of the Wise's great mechanic at the same time that Hunters get an awesome Aspect of the Viper remake - deal half damage for 5-6 seconds in exchange for completely refilling your mana bar.

I'd be just as welcome to a similar mechanic for Ret, perhaps supercharging SoW?

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

burghy

You could have something like this: 90s of offensive seal -> depletes mana. 30s of sow (but still using the rest of the abilities during it) refills mana. That's something like 5% dps difference versus a 2min offensive seal cycle.

Anyway, regardless of how they choose to solve the mana issue, I'd really like to see a low mana cost on seals. They have the tool for some interesting gameplay and are blocking it. Seals could be our way to deal with different combat situations. but 10% mana is just too expensive for "twisting".

 

Rustik

1) Fury warriors give 5% raidwide Melee and Ranged crit. Heart of the Crusader gives 3% raidwide everything crit. It's understandable it's 2% less.

2) What I had meant by that statement is 111 seconds is only 9 seconds away from the point where we have to reset our seal anyway, and would fit well with a change in seals for regen, but that also implies we'd end up spending 2 minutes filling our mana bar back up, which is lame.


As far as comparing Aspect of the Viper:

Avitus mentioned our DPS would need to be godlike to make up for the regen periods. Well, hunters are now nerfing their damage (by HALF) to regen their mana. Perhaps they have the same intentions for ret pallies. If we throw up seal and use nothing but Judgement, replenish, SoW, and JoW would probably be pretty effective in bringin our mana back. That also means we have to find an excessively fast weapon for regen mode (2 seconds, minus 0, plus .2). It's still not nearly as efefctive as the hunter's, though, and it needs tuning.

They can't really supercharge SoW, because then a holy pally could just use it to heal forever. If they added a whole lot of extra melee damage just to discourage the holy pally from using the supercharged wisdom, then the actual melee DPS would soak up a lot of extra healing and they would be unwanted in raids.

EDIT: I forgot to mention: Aspects are mana free now, so switching to regen is hardly an issue. Hunters have much larger mana pools, since dps mail has intellect on it. Switching seals is 14% of our base mana, which is 14% of OUR MANA. Period. SO I'm going to agree, free seals, or another mechanic.

 

flyingtoastr

It is 100% of damage as mana though. Assuming a good BM hunter can do 3000 DPS on brut right now, he would gain 1500 mana/second when he popped Viper. That would translate to a whole mana bar in something like 6 seconds.

AotV is like Divine Plea that scales with gear.

Remember, hunters attack really really fast. They are the reason JoW was given a cooldown. Ret pallys on the other hand are one of the slowest attackers in the game. Even if they gave us AotV it would result in a massive DPS loss, which is why even an "empowered SoW" wouldn't work.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

• Avitus

Rustik, maybe if you put SoW at hunter levels, maybe, but I don't see it happening.


You're missing the point. It's an all out domino effect at this stage. Class A competes with Class B and C, which compete with calls D and E and E and F, which compete with...

That's exactly why this is such a mess, you can't say we don't compete with fury warriors if all our buffs are being sorted by other classes. It's an all out free for all

With group constraints not being an issue anymore (due to far majority of group buffs going raid wide) you'll cover all buffs/debuffs with a handful of people. The spots left to fill will all pretty much compete with their personal DPS.