Altirias

Well they're not really saying they'll leave rets that way, it's actually all the contrary. They state that the answer may not come from JotW but something else (they're talking about 1-2 new high talents for Rets and Prots, so maybe that's going to be it)

DP will be changed from evocate to a bloodrage like ability which has a 1 mn CD I believe. So maybe they'll tune down the numbers and lower the cooldown.

 

Saltycracker

Incoming deep Ret Talent:

Cry for Strength: Reduces the cooldown of your Divine Plea to 1 minute.

Flavor text: "Your tears are your greatest power"

 

Retadin

Since nobody seems to have mentioned it yet: Apparently JotW has been hotfixed to restore 20% mana.

WoW Forums -> JotW Hotfixed? Returning 20% mana + buff.

 

Alleyra

I'm curious to see the changes to Divine Plea. If it's on a 1 minute CD, I'm skeptical it's going to give us back 50% of our mana pool, since it's a baseline Paladin ability. I like, at the bare minimum, that they've acknowledged and have stated their intent to fix the glaring issue Retribution suffers from.

As far as "enough mana" is concerned: it's a wait-and-see situation as to how they do address it. I'd hate to see Retribution completely dependent on Divine Plea for regeneration. I doubt that will be the case: (since they have stated it) Warriors and Rogues aren't dependent on continued damage output/longevity from Blood Rage and Adrenaline Rush.

The only question that seems to remain: How much is "enough?"

EDIT: Interesting hot-fix to JotW.

Napkin math based only upon the Replenishment buff and the 20%, over a 10 second period. Assuming a mana pool of 4000 and Improved Judgements.

01: Judgement: +800 mana, +20 mana (Replenishment)
02: +20 mana
03: +20 mana
04: +20 mana
05: +20 mana
06: +20 mana
07: +20 mana
08: +800 mana, +20 mana
09: +20 mana
10: +20 mana

Total: 1800 mana gained.

45% of our mana pool from just Judgements and Replenishment. Of course that certainly doesn't account for mana expenditures. There's also possibly Blessing of Wisdom and Judgement of Wisdom to take into consideration.

 

RangerSix

The current Jotw (which restores 20% of our total mana), divine plea (regens 50% of our total mana) and replenishment (0,5% of our total mana regened every sec, do scale with our total amount of mana.

So a talent that converts str into int wouldn't be a bad idea (let's just hope that they don't make it a talent that only does that though).




*edit*
Art of War : Increases your total intellect by 15%/30%/45% of your total strength and reduces the cooldown of divine plea by 1/2/3 minute(s).

Doesn't seem too unrealistic.

 

tarja

They could change Divine Plea to a very short cooldown and just change the mana returned to be a % of base mana instead of total mana - with the right tuning they could effectively buff the ability for Ret and Prot while leaving it approximately the same mana regen for Holy.

Also, as far as being dependent on DP for regen, haven't many people in this thread been wanting a similar mechanic to Enhancement's Shamanistic Rage? I would compare this proposed Divine Plea change to be much more like SR (assuming I'm understanding the proposed idea correctly), where it would basically just be a button to push every now and then while doing your normal DPS thing, to ensure you always have enough mana.

 

Thorin

hmmmmm... interesting, things seem to be moving in the right direction now.

hope they don't take it away anytime soon

 

Fiola

Is that a suggestion, or an actual change?


Because I really wanted to keep that stun dispel ...

 

levk

That's a suggestion, such a drastic reduction to divine plea cooldown every healer will get it no matter the cost.

 

RangerSix

Even on a 2 minute cooldown, divine plea would be worse the the current Jotw. Also keep in mind that they then would have to "dump" 43 points into retribution, leaving 28 points to invest into holy.

No, I don't think a 2 minute divine plea will be as attractive as you think it is.

 

Khaelarys

No way you give up HS and Infusion of Light and Light's Grace and Holy Guidance for a lower cooldown on DP. Unless you think you need DP to fuel a Sacred Shield / FoL Spam existence.


Isn't DP still a channel ability? Might have missed that update, but that means it isn't at all similar to Shamanistic Rage. Channeled mana regen on even a 1 minute cooldown means that you can't use it without shielding in arenas.

 

levk

Home page of mmo-champ now, GC said DP is like blood rage. So cooldown limited mana chunk frontloaded then some mana over 10 seconds. By the way somebody was worried about the health cost which it sin't clear whether DP is getting but bloodrage does have health cost. You probably never played a warrior, but healthcost of bloodrage is trivial, I think it's mainly for pvp balance so that you can't bloodrage -> execute if you're about to die.

EDIT: Oh and bloodrage is off gcd.

You can get a lot of essentials for 28 in holy still. You'll definitely get most of the longevity points. It's a moot argument anyway, it's a very unrealistic suggestion, not everything has to be about ret afterall.

And I wouldn't compare to replenishment, these things stack.

For pvp this regen mechanic is preferred even, you're likely to get drained and this mechanic lets you get a chunk to do something with right now if you're empty as opposed to a slow regen from usual regen sources. I hope it's a reasonbly short cooldown, not longer than 2 minutes for 20% max mana return.

 

rldolph79

Maybe I'm crazy, but I think Divine plea is going to be next to useless for raiding as any spec.

Even if they reduce the cd to 1 min, that would require us to stop attacking for 6s of every 60s... 10% down time doesn't exactly help our damage. Protection paladins don't need it unless they're nerfing spiritual attunement, and holy paladins have to be chain casting or they can't be effective healers. Unless Blizzard has plans to add periodic 6s timeouts to boss fights I just can't see how a channeled spell could be useful for raiding.

Don't get me wrong... It'll be great for soloing and pvp, but not so much for raiding.

 

Fiola

If it works "more like bloodrage than evocate", then it sounds like it won't be channeled anymore. But let's cut the speculation and see what the next patch brings.

 

Wrl

Given the ridiculous amount of scaling Rets already get from strength I couldn't imagine them giving us a str->mana or ap->mana talent. Something like a low tier prot talent that gives mana from armor would be good and would make holy a bit more interested in prot again.

Maybe replace Benediction with Divine Strength and to Tier 1 Prot add
Divine Armor
Increases your maximum mana by 6/12/18/24/30% of your total armor.

Gori | Aja | Secured | Sao | Wrl | Lloem

 

• Avitus

I'm not sure where this latest trend of "increasing our mana pools" came from, but I really do have to wonder how this appears any less of an imbalance (assuming for the sake of the argument that it is) to nay sayers than the direction we seem to be going in: Very small mana pool, very high (rage like) regen.

With a massive mana pool you're only introducing more possibilities of imbalance, specifically in PvP/Arena (the potential to hold a lot of "healing power" at any one time), while at the same time keeping with the problem that no matter how far you move the goal post, in order to be truly equal, Ret as a melee class needs to be able to sustain DPS infinitely like all other melee classes. (More extensive post about this in the other thread).

I'm sure it's partially a case of "the idle speculate" , but the whole larger mana pool argument is really not the cure here, as it would come with its own baggage.

 

Khaelarys

It comes from the concern that we can be burned to 0 mana in 6 seconds.

The problem is that even with the regen, we still need mana to make mana - and even with more mana, it's just delaying the inevitable. So, yea - until I play with it, I don't really know how well things line up, and its conjecture on my part - but waiting on my spirit regen to tick up to 4% mana only to gain one mana burn's worth of mana every 8 seconds - I dunno, just doesn't feel like we're there yet. Maybe the new divine plea is the answer.

The truth is, at this point I'm so cynical and generally just disgusted at the mana burn mechanic that my requirements for a solution are probably just completely unhinged.

 

• Avitus

The higher our regen the better we are against mana burn. I prefer the small mana pool/high regen to large mana pool/low regen since the latter would only delay going oom but put you in more trouble once you are.


For 0% mana until Judgement Cost (5% base mana) there might be an issue, you're correct, seems the popular suggestion would be to make sealing up into SoW cost 0 mana.

 

Fiola

I think it'd be pretty difficult to keep us at 0 mana. There's BoW, the replenishment buff, SA from any healed damage, and maybe JoW. (I find JoJ is mostly for rogues, druids, and mounted opponents; can easily/safely switch to JoW for most others)


We should be able to see when we're being mana drained and switch to SoW ahead of time. Replenishment lasts 15 seconds after each judgement, returning 7.5% total mana (about 2 judgements?). To keep us OOM, they'd have to mana burn us down, and keep up vipersting/ mana burn/drain mana while also dispelling replenishment and any JoWs we manage to land.

Any time we hit 5% base mana (220~ mana@ 80), it starts all over again. We gain 20% total mana to be drained off, we gain a replenishment buff that needs to be dispelled, and someone gains a JoW debuff that also needs to be dispelled. If they don't drain us to below 220 mana in 8 seconds, they can forget about keeping us OOM.


It's a lot of work, especially compared to the Live Ret paladin. If SoW is active, I don't think it's possible for them to prevent us from gaining mana.

 

flyingtoastr

The problem is twofold with that though.

1) Replenishment, BoW, JoW are all magic buffs/debuffs. That means against the real burner (priests) there is no possible way to keep them up.
2) They're all very slow regen. JoW is 2% of total mana per proc (~112 mana). SoW is 4% mana per proc (~225 mana). BoW is only 18 mana per second. You regen yes, but so slowly that your DPS is gimpped for a long period of time. During that time you're not putting any pressure on anyone (especially with the loss of seal damage) meaning you're pretty much a non-threat and they can safely destroy you or your partners.

Sure, it's more micromanagement to keep these buffs/debuffs off people but that's a small defense against good teams.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Blackthought

I truly believe that replenishment should work off base rather than total mana or that paladin gear needs intellect. It is not reasonable that we are the only mana using class that does not get scaling benefits from replenishment.

Move it to base mana and up the percentage and it would be more equitable.

 

Noctivagant

A large mana pool, with slow regen has already proven to be horrible against mana burn, but if you have less mana to burn, and it comes back post burn, then you have defended against the mechanic somewhat.

I agree on Replenishment not working well with us. However, if the talent is the 20% plus replenishment, then it technically deals with this; here's what YOU get, here's what everyone else gets. The fact you get replenishment on top is a small benefit, but not the main benefit to YOU. Again this is if the hotfixed JotW sticks.

When the new DP comes out, we can start to theorycraft on how the combination works against mana burn. We just can't speak to the pair without knowing about DP.

 

Mandibleclaw

I think you might be a little confused on which is which.

if Replenishment worked off of base mana rather than total mana, it would mean:

a paladin with(for example) a 5,000 mana pool with zero gear on would regenerate .5% of 5,000 mana from replenishment

if it were to go off of total mana, it would mean:

a paladin buffed with Arcane intellect, Blessing of Kings, etc. etc. up to, lets say (for example) 7,000 mana would be regenerating .5% of 7,000 every second, instead of .5% of 5,000

sorry my computer at work doesn't have a calculator on it, and I'm terrible with math, but you can see the general idea.

.5% of 7,000 every second is greater than .5% of 5,000
meaning basing replenishment off of total mana rather than BASE mana is a good thing.


unless I've misunderstood anything in reading the notes. If so please point it out so i can correct it.

 

Khaelarys

All of this is accurate, but the situation you describe above -

- Switch to SoW to fuel judgements.
- Use judgements to fuel utility and secondary dps options.

Tactically, very sound.

At this point
- I've lost my judgement damage and my burst damage from Seal of Command (or blood, watever).
- I've lost DS from my damage rotation. (Also, please give me a DS version of the AS glyph kthxbai).

I still do BJD on cooldown, and without amazing timing on their part I can do CS. In fact, with SoW up I bet I can continue a Judgement / CS cycle indefinitely, though it might push my practical CS cooldown to 8 seconds. White damage ( ~3.5 s intervals) + BJD (8 sec) + CS ( 6 sec intervals) won't kill anything. Ever. It will barely even help. The fact that I can subsist on this much mana is only slightly more interesting than being OOM.

Normal viper sting removes ~60% of our mana in 8 seconds. Improved Viper Sting removes ~80% of our mana in 8 seconds - and is 30% unlikely to be removed, even assuming that we we can cast a cleanse, and that it targets that poison. I'm sorry, once you're behind that ball, you're done. That's more than replinished, it's more than replinished + SoW.


Mana burn removes 30% of our mana in 2 seconds (talented, but most of them are). In the time it takes you to close the gap he can get two off. (Unless you're mounted). In full duration fear he can get 5. The next fear he can get 3 - assuming he doesn't pop PI. He has to work more to keep you there - but then, he can easily remove BoW, JoW, Replinished, DP, and he can burn you faster than you can cast a heal. At this point you can continue beating on him while he never gets below 95%. Your mana regen doesn't even support enough dps to get through a shield / PoM or renew. So yea, in this case the guy does have to work to keep me down.

I know this isn't about one on one. I'm not trying to say I spend my time dueling priests or hunters. But - and gun to my head, this is just an estimate - 30% - 35% of our damage to be able to continue our dps cycle, in perpetuity, still makes me nervous.

The classes that can drain will remove Replinished before it runs duration. Most classes will, actually. Expecting replinished to behave as anything more than a raid buff is irresponsible, if you ask me. SoW being free isn't the same as Water Shield + Shamanistic Rage being free. JoW being free is close, but there's no way we get that if it does damage.

 

Blackthought

Every other mana user has int on their gear (scaling). Therefore, Blizzard is setting replensihment as a relatively low % of total mana so that mana doesnt become unlimited. This only hurts ret pallies because our mana pools dont scale with gear. Look at the current JotW if used by a holy paladin to see more issues associated with mana returns based on total mana vs. base mana. If replenishment were a % of base mana, the percentage would be higher. This is a benfefit to Ret Pallies because we dont get intellect gear. I thought this point was obvious so I didnt spell it out.