I think the main issue is Consecration. I don't think Blizzard wants us casting it as part of the regular rotation for single target DPS. And I see their point. Consecration is a primarily AoE spell, and should be reserved for AoE situations. It would be like a Mage casting Arcane Explosion on a single target. So they're attempting to tune mana costs and regen such that it becomes prohibitive to cast Consecration regularly.

The problem is that we want to cast Consecration because we have empty GCDs. But we need those empty GCDs to remain empty (or at least be spent on non-damage abilities), or we'll end up like Death Knights who fill every GCD but hit for like 50% weapon damage per strike. Which is pathetic for a 2H weapon class, imo.

Running the numbers, Ret's rotation isn't so bad. Unbuffed, you can Seal, Judge, CS, DS at optimum indefinitely. Raid-buffed, you can toss in a Minor spell--like FoL, the various Hands, and HoJ/Repentance--about once every 20 seconds, without a net loss of mana. Sub-20%, you can add in HoW, and burn for about 1 minute before you run out of mana. That's a reasonable amount of time to spend in Burn Mode to finish off a fight.

The major thing the JotW nerf prevents is casting Consecration and Holy Light on a regular basis. And honestly, I think that's a reasonable expectation for Ret in PvE.

I'm not a big fan of the Seal nerfs or CS/DS being poor copies of warrior abilities, but the JotW nerf makes sense.

Hmm, good point, GSH. I mean, yeah, its nice to be a bottom-less pit of mana, able to dps competitively while tossing out non-trivial heals and bringing all our utility to bear, but Blizzard may or may not intend ret to do that.

As long as ret pally dps is tuned to remain competitive, the sky hasn't fallen and we should keep working on optimizing for this new low-mana world.

Dropping Consecration from the rotation would need a buff for all the bursty abilities as Avitus pointed out well in this post (quoted below). The exact opposite has happened as we know. If Ghostcrawler indeed was happy with our PvE dps pre-nerf, we are missing something.

Deep Wounds is huge part of fury warriors dps but our similar talent is only < 10% of our dps selfbuffed. This may go up significantly when we receive all the raid buffs, but is it still as good as DW? Could this be a good talent for additional PvE-dps tunings?

Sidenote: It's pretty hilarious that Righteous Vengeance procs use the exact same sound and animation than Faerie Fire

I agree with you, im not denying that. However you miss-uderstood what I said. I said they are trying to remove burst, but havent given us any significant extra utility to make up for it.... yet (at lvl 80). Cleanse, bubble, bop, freedom, sacrifice, hoj, repent etc are all old stuff, from lvl 60. Sure, they can be good when used properly, but so far, they have proven, for the most part, to not be enough or even on par with what other classes bring. Just look at top arena teams and you will see what I mean. Are there ret pallies that got a gladiator titles? yes, some, but looking at the results, you gotta admit that untill 3.0 changes, it was much harder for ret pallies than most (not all) other specs to achieve higher ratings.

I could go on and tell you what all the problems for ret in arena were, but theres no point. I do agree with what you are saying, but in the end, they are trying to take away our burst (which we always had) and giving nothing back, except leaving us with mostly old abilities which have proven, for the most part, to be not enough. If jotw were kept at 33%, then fine, we would be able to heal and cleanse a lot more.

And to show how pvp/arena at lvl70 shouldnt be considered as a gouge, even if ret did very little dmg, we could still be OP with the correct gear and spec, simply by keep people stuned for 7.5secs every 20secs, without using repentance. That would be doable with ZG neck piece, 4 piece pvp bonus, imp hoj and glyph of hoj. But like you said, pvp atm is broken and theres no real need for that kind of utility. And thats the whole point: if pvp at lvl70 is broken, why nerf lvl 80 pve ret based on lvl70 QQ?

Ghostcrawler on Retribution nerfs. Seems really similar to what happened to Feral Druids at the start of Burning Crusade. Going overboard to make them viable and then having to reel them back in on live servers.

The comparison of Judgement of Wisdom to Vampiric Touch by Ghostcrawler isn't a fair one. JoW requires that a player hits the affected mob to receive the mana return while VT only requires that the shadow priest hit the mob for everyone to benefit, including healers. It is not the same mechanic.

I hate to ever call things nerfs... they're simply adjustments. I'll "wait and see" how things play out, but I'm expecting that we see more changes related to Ret mana. The damage I'm not too concerned about.

That's all good and I agree if we're talking about "principles".

Unfortunately this is almost impossible to pull off for two very strong reasons:

-If you are going to mess up regen in order to keep Retadins from using Consecration, you will need to balance our damage around NOT having Consecration in our rotation, meaning: You need to buff the damage of all other abilities assuming their damage alone is keeping us competitive.

-Which again is 180' degrees away from where they want to go with how powerful our spammable attacks should be (for "PvP burst") as well as introducing yet another issue of having Consecration put us over the top DPS wise in the rare occasions we "can" spam it during short fights.


Again, I agree with the principle, Consecration as part of the rotation "feels" dumb, but as said before, it's actually good towards offloading some of our burst. Axing Consecration from our rotation just makes things a lot worse balance wise.


Edit: Beating by Hylo :S

Before I respond (and to get this out of the way), regarding your remark about "PvP metagame experience", I can't speak for everyone, but I can tell you that despite my main focus being PvE in this game, I've also played arena on pretty much the highest level as Ret (specifically S3 Cyclone, EU's "BG9").

Anyway, reading your post, I really begin to understand what blue posters mean when they say: Everyone thinks their class is underpowered and thinks everyone else is fine.

Make no mistake, I'm not putting your post down, I do respect the effort involved in trying to rationalize things based on your experience playing against paladins, however I really do think this is one of the things that cannot be "explained", but have to be "experienced" (when you actually play a Retadin in high end arena yourself).

If you take "any" class in the game and blindly note down all their abilities or things that give you pause when playing against them, you'll end up writing a pretty long list regardless of class. And what's the conclusion of this? Every class has a ton of "utility", if we define it this broadly. However all this utility can be narrowed down to "key tools" that are needed or burst becomes the only alternative when they don't exist (read further as to why).

The main thing retadins argue regarding PvP is usually 1v1. Fine, neither arena, nor the game should be balanced around that, and retadins work perfectly well in conjunction with someone who can lay down MS/stuns (rogue or warrior) or some CC, however consider such incredibly common situations such as 3v3 where each team loses 1 dps and you end up with healer + warrior vs healer + retadin and you see how the fight is almost over, assuming equal gear/skill. I'm speaking specifically pre-3.0, it is virtually impossible for a retadin to solo a good (I'm speaking about high end players here) priest/druid/shaman or even holy paladin 99% of the time with no outside help.
If you go on the remaining DPS, it becomes an endurance/mana game and the other healer wins due to MS. If you go on the healer, you have no spammable interrupt, no MS and no way to make his casting last longer (mind numbing). It's a lose-lose situation. This is why people don't even attempt playing Retadin + Healer on a high level in 2v2, it's unrealistic. The only way to win in such conditions (excluding grave errors from their healer) is if your healer is assisting with mana burns/earthshock or cyclone, while taking fire and trying to keep you both up against something with MS and interrupts and possibly their own mana burns/earthshock or cyclone. The odds are stacked against you two fold.

Remember, if you go through the list of utility you mentioned, almost all of them are situational and defensive, while our job in arena is an offensive one (certainly in 2v2/3v3 with a healer). In an endurance fight "get out of jail" cards are useless, in a "kill the other healer" fight they're equally useless.

Basically what I'm saying is: While our listed utility is nice (you should check on how Hand of Freedom and Hand of Sacrifice were changed btw), it really "boils down to" a few key offensive tools, which without the only alternative for success is "burst". This is what Retadins usually mean by that. Without MS we will lose every "endurance" fight and without a spammable interrupt/slow casting debuff we need high enough burst to take down a healer in ONE line up of skills (I'm speaking about HoJ on cd, Repentance on cd, neither gets resisted, is timed well and all offensive abilities are lined up and used, with hopefully some lucky crits, before the healer can recover... because if he does, it's a reset until next time our abilities are lined up in 1 minute). Think about it: If every healer can survive and recover every time after our stun + repent + spam of all abilities carefully lined up, there will never be a situation where we can take down a healer solo. Ever.

Now 3.0 gave us "a lot" of burst. This might need balancing, I won't deny that, but the point established above ("key tools" OR "burst") remains and needs to be maintained. With an interrupt, this amount of burst wouldn't be needed. With MS we could play the pressure game, same as a warrior/rogue (though we'd still lack the interrupts, but it doesn't matter since it's "either/or"), lacking both we need to be able to burst enough in order to drop a healer once everything is lined up.

You might argue that our abilities line up too frequently and I might actually agree with you here, but unfortunately, that's how the class is designed. It's a catch 22 brought on by mechanics of the class and you can't blame the players for it. One suggestion that keeps coming up would be to keep HoJ on a 1 minute cooldown and remove any cd reduction, this way our burst would be more manageable (they can sort prot with something else high up in their tree).


Anyway, it really boils down to meeting somewhere in the middle while maintaining enough burst (if they refuse to give us one of the "key tools"). This is as much as I can illustrate it, but I do still maintain that this is something you have to experience from a retadin's perspective to see the full picture.

One thing that concerns me is that Patchwerk isn't exactly a long fight. We have zero ways to increase our mana regeneration, so what happens when we reach a mob that has a longer life span than patchwerk?

I'm still bizarrely confused by this. Ignoring the JotW nerf, they're reeling in our sustained damage (seals) and boosting our burst damage (AoW buff).

Most bosses besides patchwerk will also actually damage you, causing you to gain more mana from spiritual attunement.

In that respect you're similar to warriors, where if you take damage you can convert that to a slight increase in dps in the form of consecration, or help out with healing with art of war.

Not really. The Art of War change is supposed to keep sustained damage the same, but nerf the burst (going from, if I recall, +25% critical strike damage bonus to +10% overall damage.)

Judgement/Seal of Command was hit hard too, and that indeed is a hit to our burst as well, not to mention the HoW change. I'm not saying whether or not I agree with what was done, thought it should be done, etc. But make no mistake, they are *not* boosting our burst with anything they did.

Art of War was actually a straight buff. It used to be 20% critical strike damage bonus, granting us a 2.2 crit multiplier on Judgement, CS and DS. It is now a flat 10% damage bonus, granting us 1.1 multipliers on non-crits, and an effective 2.2 crit due to the 1.1 multiplier resulting in a (1.1*2) 2.2 effective crit from the base damage pre-AoW. No burst difference, straight damage buff. Doesn't offset the Seal and Judgement nerf, but the actual talent was purely buffed.

The other reason I don't foresee Ret having the kind of rolling DW that warriors currently sustain is that while ANY crit from a Warrior triggers DW, only two of our abilities trigger Righteous Vengeance, and both of those abilities are on cd's that make sustaining the effect for any significant period highly unlikely. The effect itself lasts for ten seconds, so it would require close to 50% crit chance in order to keep up the effect, and even then we are at the mercy of the RNG. Adding CS to the list of abilities that can trigger the effect would go a long way towards making this effect a significant source of sustained dps.

Quoted the above to make sure we're on the same page. Note that this is assuming an improper Replinishment, because of snipped base assumptions of MotW and AB buffs, but it's close enough. It also assumes that JoTW is up on every target, and that something is close enough to use Judgement on every cooldown. Note that this alone is completely unreasonable with the priority of using JoJ in pvp, but for now let's assume we're using JoW.

Assuming my mana pool at 80 is 5895, DP will return (if used on cooldown, and the ability runs to duration, which is a somewhat optimistic assumption in a pvp environment) 24.75 mana/second.

For PVP, add in addition
Cleanse: 26 mana /second
HoF: 10 mana/second
Aow - FoL - 20.51 mana/second
HoJ - 4.395 mana/second
Repentance - 6.59 mana/second

Total Deficit in baseline pvp ability - 42.495 mana / second

Total Deficit including Divine Plea - 17.745 mana/second.

That means that the absolute baseline ret pvp expectations is a drain. You'll go OOM 5:53 Anything over that and you'll simply never recover. What part of the above are we supposed to give up? The dubious saving grace of not being able to stay on the kill target might come in here to delay the inevitable, but it doesn't change that this is a bit on the bare side. Add in a draining priest (4 till complete oom), a hunter with viper (another 26 mana / second if I drain it before it ever ticks), or heaven forbid I actually have to throw a Holy Light to, I dunno, not die.

A single Holy Light spell is 1275 mana. I have a total of four of these heals in me, at 80. If I cast a single Holy Light once a minute, the OOM time is cut in half. 2.5 minutes.

A single judgement no longer gives me enough mana to complete my dps cycle. It pays for the next judgement, and a Crusader Strike. If a judgement misses (frost mages), is absorbed, or otherwise doesn't land it impacts us with the equivalent of half of a mana burn.

I just read Ghostcrawlers post. It seems I'm just wrong. It's completely reasonable that during dps one holy light a minute should oom me in 2.5.

Khaelarys, remember that all those numbers are considering no use of Consecration while our DPS seems to be balanced around it in our rotation (where we'd go oom much, much sooner).


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Regarding Ghostcrawlers comments about damage nerfs, I won't add any whining to an already inflamed thread and I'll state that whatever changes they take regarding damage I don't mind as long as the "end result" turns out to be satisfactory (as in we truly can DPS at close to pure DPS levels and/or above mediocre pure DPS players, as they have stated).

Any complaint or whine regarding this would be purely an unfounded knee jerk reaction about something we can't really establish yet.

However:

This is what the whole shindig boils down to. Playing ret for so long, it is simply not enjoyable, neither is it competitive to play a melee DPS class with a ticking endurance timer. You go oom, you're out, with no way of regenning (without becoming useless for an extended amount of time, making your overall usefulness afterwards questionable at best). Why should anyone put up with such a liability when all other melee DPS don't have such constraints?

"Mana is not rage -- warriors can't typically start a battle with a full bar"

What about rogues? Or even ferals, a hybrid that is somehow excluded from our curse of a blue mana bar since it suits the "lore/feel"?

What about enhancement shamen who have been running around for a year, with a constantly full mana bar? Why are they an exception?

As a matter of fact, even warriors regen rage in their opener (charge) enough to sustain a full rotation past the first hit, so what are we even talking about here? (I also have a warrior)

This is not an idle whine, this is an educated opinion based on experience, as well (and not exclusively) as on numbers crunched, specifically pointed at the throwaway comment at the top.

You know what, if our full mana bar feels so threatening, how about this:

Mana decay! Yea, build that into JotW and raise it back up in regen. I don't care about the first 2 hits in a fight, I care about the remaining 30 mins of an endurance fight that I will be limping at.

You might ask: "But why don't they just make you warriors then?". Well, that analogy never held any ground. We don't want to be warriors. We like our distinct class mechanics, we like our abilities, tools and utilities. We're fine not having MS/Cleave/Charge/Pummel and what not and in return have HoJ/Holy damage/Judgements/Bubble and so forth. However if we can't maintain it, what's the fun of the class then?

Again, their whole standpoint will never make any sense until they explain why it's ok for Warriors/Rogues/Death Knights/Enhancement Shamen (mana class)/Ferals (originally a mana class) to use everything to their hearts content and focus on rotations while remaining "resource positive" all the time, while we are constantly watching an impending "out of fuel" sign? (Note: Having fixed cooldowns on all our abilities vs. energy acting as a shared cooldown for abilities has been explained and done to death, please don't raise that issue).


Sorry this is too much of a generalization. You can't based the fate of a class on what "most" bosses will do. On the goodwill that they're either too short or will have high enough AoE damage to sustain you. What about the Brutallus' fights of WotLK (pre-3.0 you used to hope to get burn for the extra mana, but could never count on it)?

Take away Spiritual Attunement and bake it into a high prot talent if you will (play along for now holy paladins), but don't base our core functionality on something as random as Spiritual Attunement.

We won't convert extra "resource" into more damage (as warriors do with rage dumps such as HS and cleave), we will actually not have enough mana past a certain point to continue in fights (this is based on numbers, not speculation).

And if consecration is your answer (the "mana dump" to be held back), please read what's been previously said about this. It is not the answer, not by a long shot and I'd love to see someone raise a constructive counter argument.

Also you can't "help out with Art of War" in any realistic way in almost all cases in a raid encounter (with very few situational exceptions) it would be an overall loss to your contribution, as it resets your swing timer (the heal will be pointless and you will lose DPS, hence it is not a "dumpable" extra functionality to help out with).


Disclaimer: This is not an idle whine, but a heated debate. It's gotten to a point where we really need to watch what we're saying around such a volatile "nerf/buff" issue I agree, however trust that everything above has had some definite thought and calculation put into.

Wait let me make sure we're on the same page. You think that being able to maintain the most reasonable effective DPS rotation in PVP, while using every single one of your utility abilities for longer then 6 minutes? How can you think that is not unreasonable? At a conservative 500 dps that is about 180k damage. How does that not seem reasonable to you? You are aware paladins have always been intended to be a class that manages a mana resource?

Just for comparison, a mage with an optimal talent build chaincasting super efficient frostbolts, doing no high mana utility spells, using a mana gem, etc. will go oom in 87 seconds and do about 100k damage. Edit: For level 70 values, my PvP gear.

The difference is, however, spells like Judgment of Wisdom, and Replenishment both scale with your gear and are designed for int-wearing gear in general. Replenishment is going to do a lot more for the mages in the raid than the Ret Paladins in the raid. Same with Judgment of Wisdom. Plus, as your gear gets better, with more int on it, these will scale, increasing your longevity. You also have a self-restoring ability that scales with Spirit, and while it's not a primary stat for you, it is present on a lot of cloth gear.

As for Paladins supplementing with Intellect via enchants/gems/hunter gear, I would say Blizzard's design intentions state that is exactly what they don't want us doing. They removed melee plate with int from the game in LK, including the PVP/Arena gear, so I think it's safe to say their design vision is for us not to use intellect. Plus, the intellect we'd gain from such outlets listed above would be marginal, at best. The inflection point spoken of is almost assuredly outside our reach.

Personally, I don't see the design sense in Retribution having to manage mana in the way it does currently, as every single one of our attacks is on a 6sec. or greater cooldown. Those are the limiting factors on avoiding spam, I would say. As it stands now, if it's not unlimited mana, it's a specific, non-dynamic time-to-OOM for Ret Paladins, that no amount of gear will ever change. From Naxx to Arthas, our time-to-OOM will be static.

The math was crunched on this before. It takes 1 hour 36 minutes to regen enough mana for a single point of int to regen enough mana to consecrate. In other words, it would take ~750 Int to keep consecrate up.

The above is about PvE sustainability. this argument has nothing to do with PvP. If you're going to imply that PvE balance should also keep PvP in mind, well then that's exactly what's going wrong here.



-Is mage DPS balanced around Living Bomb spam?

-I really would stop worrying about "holy DPS" considering the coming dual spec options.

It's something of a conceptual debate. Many people see Ret as a melee spec that is designed to be able to replace or substitute for a warrior or rogue, not always play support for them. If this is the case, mana shouldn't be a resource to manage for them because sustained pressure is too important to that playstyle.

The other perspective is that changing your spec doesn't change the theoretical basic design of the class, which is defensive support. So Ret is designed as melee support that needs to play with another melee class to be most effective, and should have to manage it's mana like any support class/healer.

My personal issue with the second one is that it means the spec can only be viable when linked to another melee class, which seriously limits the possible team matrices you can play on. You also have the lingering issue that in s1-s4, it was typically better to just bring 2 melee (war/rog) than a melee/support.

As I noted in the generic Paladin thread, Judgements are not proccing Seals in the current Beta build, with the exception of Command, which does proc from Judgements. Unsure whether this is intended, I submitted a bug report for it.

To add to what Amera said above (and I'm pretty sure it's been mentioned to death), ret pallies are the only class in Wrath that won't have a scaling mana bar, since plate in WOTLK has 0 int on it. So from the moment you ding 80 till Icecrown Citadel, you have the same amount of base mana. For a mana managing class that cannot increase it's mana pool, it's quite a daunting task don't you think?