Corronach

There are three reasons why Holy DPS is important, although not particularly to this thread.

Holy DPS to a lesser extent gives the class something to do when running 5 and in rare cases 10 mans.

It was a stated goal that healers could do more dps, thus we're an exception.

But most importantly, being able to put pressure on another team is why Priests and Druids do so well in 2's and 3's. They cannot design a healer who can't heal at all, so assume all 4 classes can heal in arenas. It then goes down to what else do you bring. We don't necessarily need more dps if we had an offensive utility like cyclone or mana burn but we're also lacking anything equivalent to their normal nukes as well for pressure.

 

Rasputin

Assuming this nerf to Judgements proccing Seals is intended, this constitutes a total Seal damage nerf of ~35% in this beta build alone. Previous seal damage, minus the 20% nerf, minus another ~17% nerf to Seal damage by removing proc chances from Judgements. Pretty powerful.

 

GSH

Not really. Costs don't scale, so mana doesn't necessarily have to scale either. We've gone away from the days of fights simply getting longer and longer. If anything, shorter, faster fights are in vogue right now.

The casters need mana regen stats primarily to balance the haste stat. Haste increases the mana spent per second, so a caster needs extra Int, Spirit, etc just to stay level.

What's really weird is they removed it from Judgement, which hits Holy and Protection as well. If they had removed it from Crusader Strike, that would have only affected Retribution. I'm leaning towards "bug", considering that.

 

Siawn

GC's latest post. What data are they looking at that is saying Ret's PvE damage is too high? I was under the impression that Ret wasn't topping meters in Naxx. Top five, but not number one. Anyone in beta care to shed some light on this?

 

Ulthwithian

Avitus: Well, currently, FFB spec seems to be top DPS (though I'm sure Roywyn could correct me if I'm wrong). It does seem that deep fire builds do their best DPS using Living Bomb, whether or not it is intended.

While I understand that Blizzard is on record that they don't want Ret Paladins using Int, they're also 'on record' that all DPS should be doing equivalent damage. That is far from the case (I say this as an Elemental Shaman, a Moonkin Druid, an Arcane mage, and a Rogue). At this point, what Blizzard wants on record is immaterial. From what I'm hearing here, Ret is broken with what Blizzard has done, so I am not sure why arguing that doing something Blizzard does not intend can't or won't help. I am just trying to think outside of the (unfortunately very small) box that Blizzard has on Retribution.

And while the dual-spec ability may help Holy Paladins, I was under the impression that that was a functionality that was going into Wrath after it goes Live. If I want to level my Holy Paladin before this, what am I supposed to do? There's also the fact that no other Healing build suffers from this issue, at least to the extent that Paladins do.

Edit: To the above, all I know is what I see on this website, but I was under the impression that Ret DPS was not top.

 

Roywyn

* One thing: Mana for mages is not a progression stat. It's a dump stat.
* Second thing: There is no such thing as longvity. There is just fight length.

A mage in T4/Karazhan gear has 11891 mana. A mage in Sunwell gear has 12191 mana.
That is a whopping 2.5% increase over 18 months of raiding. So far for a scaling mana bar.

I did however gain about 30% haste in the process. And 1% more crit which is 0.3% more mana saving.

So my time-to-OOM actually went down by around 25% from Karazhan to Sunwell!
Does it matter? Do I even care about it? No, not really. I didn't even know that we only gained so little mana.


It doesn't matter whether I can sustain my damage for 10 or 15 minutes if the fight is only 5 minutes long.


I do have a lot of options to conserve mana. Speccing for Efficiency instead of damage.
Using Mage Armour. Using Mana Pots, Gems, Evocation. Reconjure Mana Gems mid-fight! (I did that on Illidari Council and Illidan.)
Not speccing Fire Blast/Living Bomb/other mana dumps.

With raid buffs/debuffs, I can likely cast until my gear breaks (I could not before 2.4). But it's killing my DPS.
That's basically the equivalent of you using Seal of Wisdom.

Instead, what we do is that we taken our gear, our raid buffs and our expected fight length, toss it into Rawr, and then get told which mana abilities we use, and which mana abilities we skip to do the maximum damage.


* The above is exactly Consecration/Hammer of Wrath/Seal of Wisdom for you.

Barring something dumb like mana-burn fights, an optimiser would tell you to do your rotations, skip SoW, use potion X at time Y, use Z Consecrations from 100% to 20% and W Hammers below 20%.


What that means is that your DPS might vary lot by things that you cannot influence.
You can always do your baseline roations ad eternum, but your extra DPS depends on fight length and damage taken.
Both of which are beyond your reach to influence. Maybe eating Cleaves on farm bosses, but not for hard progression.


* Which means that you have two levels of DPS. Three if you include Undead abilities.
And you have no idea what you're balanced around. Nor do I. I don't think Blizzard doesn't know exactly either.

They tend to be more pragmatic. They pick a key fight and see what you can put out.
I don't think they say "Let's use Consecrate every 13.9 seconds and HoW every 6.3 seconds", I'd more guess they use Consecrate when high on mana, let mana get up before 20% and then get as many hammers as they can after 20%.


So, I'd expect you to be balanced around something in between. Balanced around how many Consecs/Hammers you can toss at Patchwerk with current mana mechanics.
The silly part being that he's undead, making it even less clear whether Undead spells are factored in or not.
But they balanced with the current mana available, so likely without Holy Wrath.
Hopefully not with Exorcism either, unless they intend to make every WotLK boss undead.


I don't know. We don't know. We're dying to know, but Blizzard rarely answers such fundamental questions.
I suspect that it is, because the mana cost has been reduced several time now and because it's too unwieldy to use as AoE.

The larger issue is that your question is not well posed. It should be "Is mage DPS in an X minute fight using Armour Y and the raid mana sources Z balanced around Living Bomb spam or not?"

We have a huge amount of mana restoration/dumping choices, and we simply don't know what we are balanced around.

Even if we assume we're balanced around a Patchwerk nuke fight (which is what I guess, they said they've used him for a lot of comparisons), it doesn't say a lot because one day you can spam Living Bomb with Molten Armour, and the next you run OOM with Mage Armour and no Bombs at all, simply because mana regen was changed.


We more or less expect to be balanced around something in the middle. Around whatever we can use while sustaining a Patchwerk fight.

But it can be very frustrating at times, not knowing what's intended and what is not.
For mages, the most important patch change has recently always been the question how JoW works right now.


* What does it boil down to?

Mages have a lot of proactive mana saving mechanics. You have to figure out your mana savings and mana dumps before the fight.
Hunters/Warlocks are fully reactive. When they OOM, they Viper/Tap. Can't prevent it, can't fight it.
You are somewhere in between, but mostly proactive.


It means that you get the fun to have a mana dump. You get the headache to plan ahead.
You never know what you're balanced around. And you can make your own choices what to do and what to skip.

Do I like that playstyle? Yes, mostly. Sometimes it's a headache. Sometimes it's terrible when you realise again how meaningless mana is.
But there is also that warm fuzzy feeling inside when you learn another trick to get more out of your class than Blizzard might have intended.

But to answer your question again - no, we don't know whether our class is balanced around Living Bomb or not.
Nor do we know which Armour, Consumable, Cooldowns we're balanced around.
We don't even know whether most thing are supposed to work like they do, but that's another topic.


Agreeing very much on your first point. 7-minute Illhoof fights in Karazhan. 10-minute Morogrim with AoE duty. 10-minute Karathress without a shadow priest.
That was all agonisingly painful compared to T6 content with it's 5-minute fights mostly.

As for haste, I partially disagree, but that's due to limited 3.0 progression.
In 2.0, you could get a little bit of haste once you were in T6 content. You had to cherry-pick to get above 8% haste.
The major haste push was Sunwell, where the extra mana was supplied by better shadow priest damage and limited fight length.

With many of the mechanics changed, the way to compensate for more haste is using Evocation more or mana potions/gems, or reducing Living Bomb uptime.
Blizzard also gives us more Intellect (or Spirit/mp5) on gear, but we don't want that by choice really.
We take it because there is nothing else.

We cannot avoid getting more Intellect, just like you cannot avoid getting no Intellect.
If there was an alterntive item with less intellect but more spell power, everyone would take it. Just like you'd take one with more strength and less stamina.

The only real choice we can make is picking an item with sta/int/SP + 2 damage stats over an items with sta/int/SP + 1 damage and 1 regen stat on the same tier or one below.

The Blue Bar and you - the complete Fire Mage 2.4 mana compendium: http://elitistjerks.com/658230-post3191.html

DPS spec and class comparison in Naxxramas gear: http://code.google.com/p/simulationc...i/SampleOutput

And [Timbal's Focusing Crystal] doesn't proc on AM.
Neither does [The Egg of Mortal Essence] since 3.1.

 

Nicki

I would like some info on this. Boss armor also gets pushed up by 10% (7700-> 8470). Combined with the last build we may see ret drop significantly...

Also do note elemental shamans were told they were doing dps on par with moonkins and shadow priests while infact naxx wws and simulationcraft numbers put them just above the tank and above holy priest dps. Blzz number tests as such should be taken with a grain of salt in my opinion well atleast i don't trust them...

 

Alleyra

I don't think any Paladin who played Ret prior to 3.0 has any worries about theory-crafting or prioritizing which abilities take precedence over another. We've been there since Day 1 of TBC and it's certainly something ingrained within us. The overwhelming concern we, as a community, have is this: will be remain competitive with other melee DPS classes? Sadly that's no simple question. A fight's length, variables, and everything under the sun regarding a specific boss's mechanics affect this. With these changes will we remain competitive with Rogues/Enh. Shaman/Warriors? The concern being while Rage and Energy are infinite, we're back into a situation where our resource is finite and we're competing for a raid spot against classes whose potential and longevity are limitless.

I know from my own experience on Live that I am currently competitive with our other melee DPSers. Prior to 3.0 I couldn't hold a candle to a Rogue on Brutallus, for example. While I could push out a measly (by comparison) 2100 DPS, our Rogues were easily dishing out nearly 3000. And this is with a stacked group, drum spam, and Bloodlust spam. 900 DPS is a massive discrepancy between any DPS class. Last week's Brutallus had our top Rogue at 3300 DPS and I pushed out 2900+. Now I understand "we don't know what we're supposed to be balanced around;" but this seems to be in-line with what's necessary from classes in WotLK.

With the "standardization" of all the various classes/specs lumped into DPS/Tanking/Healing groups, every class/spec absolutely must be interchangeable in their respective roles. Certainly some fights will favor certain classes over others, i.e. Undead, Demons; but I think this is where most Ret Pally's concerns are founded. We don't want to be knocked back down to being the supposed "utility class" that provides sub-par DPS that eventually sputters. Not only does this contradict Blizzard's stated vision, but it simply makes the spec unnecessary to bring to raids with other classes whom share similar buffs/abilities.

Now we can debate in circles about the changes of the Seal coefficients and whether or not Consecration is meant to be in our DPS cycle, but at the end of the day, I just want to see us able to enjoy playing the class -- let's get away from the tedium that raiding in TBC was -- and to be competitive DPS, in terms of damage output and longevity.

I don't think that's too much to ask.

 

Redcape

I have a lot to say about these changes. I would like to preface it with the statement that I focus on pve raiding, and my comments should not be taken in the context of pvp.

This was a brutal nerf. A nerf was justified. I was running around in t5 gear doing double the damage of experienced, skilled warriors in the same gear in 5 mans. I was doing 50% of my group's damage in PUGs when the rest of the group was in badge/t4. I was soloing dungeon bosses and 5 man content in dps gear including pieces of leather with no change in normal rotation aside from spamming instant Flashes. Simply put, ret paladins were ridiculous.

Now, people have been saying a lot of things about how the damage nerf was hefty, and that is true. It isn't as bad as people are making it out to be. The mana nerf is by far the biggest source of complaint though, and I would most like to address that. Our mana in raids is going to be fine. These numbers are not something I made up, but rather the result of putting all the costs of my abilities into my dps spreadsheet using the exact same rotations I was using before where I *ignored* mana costs totally. After a six minute fight of 100% dps time I still had 1500 mana left. This is with using Exorcism, Consecrate, CS, DS, Judge, and HoW as fast as cooldowns allowed. Our mana is MUCH tighter than before, but our ability to maintain a completely full on dps cycle is not threatened at all. Aside from sub20% where HoW drains mana quite quickly, mana is in fact completely sustainable even with Exorcism and Consecrate in addition to the regular strikes.

->Spreadsheet<-

This is my newest version, 1.7. It includes full support for Exorcism and HoW, all the newest mechanics and a full section on mana management.

If you look closely you will note that mana is dropping by 8/sec using a full on dps rotation without HoW, but with Exorcism and Consecrate. You need to drop one Consecrate every 100 seconds to get that to zero expenditure at all, so this rotation is 100% sustainable. Now, this does assume a Blessing of Wisdom, so you actually might need to only cast Consecrate every 16 seconds if you don't have that.

When you drop below 20%, HoW becomes very, very good. It is your second best DPM spell, so you should be mashing HoW as much as possible. Consecrate is your worst DPM spell by a ton, so even though you can support casting for awhile, if you are low you just drop it out completely and your mana goes UP even with full HoW spam.

Our dps ends up being reduced by roughly 10% by this change. This is obviously a nerf, but it honestly does not deserve all the wailing and tooth gnashing we have seen. My dps was hilariously high before these changes, I cannot imagine that it will bad at all after a 10% hit.

Just as a note, hit rating just became massively better. Judgements can miss now, and the mana return from them is massively impactful (they are also our highest threat move) so hit rating is now very important. I would suggest prioritizing hit to make certain you are riding the cap and then stack Strength as much as you can. This is a total reversal from the past 50 pages where I was selling the exact opposite, but that is what happens when half our core mechanics change in one push.

I was having a ball blowing the crap out of everything with ease both in BGs and in pve. I will miss the feeling of nigh invulnerability and the ability to destroy damage meters with ease, but I think it is good for the game in the end. Just to be 100% clear: I am not talking about pvp. I am certain that we are nerfed but completely fine still in pve, but I don't claim to speak for pvp enthusiasts.

Edit: And btw, Blood is now top dps under any talent/rotation. The others are pretty competitive, running something like 1-3% behind in total dps, but Blood is top dog for the moment. Your fear of recoil damage may vary.

 

djkillingspree

Purely talking about PvE here.

I may be missing something, but wouldn't divine plea 1/min and chugging a mana pot help things? It seems like if you're running at a small deficit then the additional mana from a mana pot might be enough to be fine in a 5-6 minute fight. If mana is an issue for more classes than our own (as they've stated it should be, and as mages can attest to) it seems like they wouldn't want to go the route of long mana-intensive slogs.

However, one thing I will contend with in the mage's post above is that it isn't entirely fair to compare spell selection for a melee class to a ranged class. We're having to deal with things like missing occasional cooldowns to enemies moving around that makes it a little less 100% academic as to when you drink a mana potion, when you use ability X, etc. For the most part, that's true, though. It seems like you could essentially figure out exactly what rotation you need to utilise or what you need to avoid to not end up going oom. Oh, also, mana oils might actually be useful now that Windfury isn't a weapon buff, possibly? Someone smarter than me would have to run the numbers to see if the additional mana and spell power adds up to more DPS (possibly from getting to consecrate more?) than a sharpening stone or other temporary weapon enchant.

On the other hand, I think a lot of that flies out the window in PvP due to mana burn. Forgive me as I don't know much about Mage PvP but wouldn't that be an issue for mages, too, though?

EDIT: Additionally, I didn't see anything on this for a while after all the gnashing and wailing re: nerfs, but on bosses has anyone figured out if it's worth it to keep Seal of Vengeance/Corruption at 5 stacks and then switching to another seal for the 20 secs afterwards?

 

burghy

What puzzles me is how they can ignore obvious pvp problems. They adjust the mana to not be in excess for pve raids while in pvp you have about 2k less max mana, no jow/bow/mana spring, can't use judgements on cooldown.
At the same time you are suposed to use mana on other utilties like cleanse, hands, sacred shields, heals because those are the reason ret doesn't have ms/interrupt/catch up tools.
Shouldn't that indicate there will be problems even without mana burns and dispel of divine plea?

 

Inu

GC's latest post. What data are they looking at that is saying Ret's PvE damage is too high? I was under the impression that Ret wasn't topping meters in Naxx. Top five, but not number one. Anyone in beta care to shed some light on this?
/quote>

Exactly, our dps wasnt too high on bosses at all. However i often was doing 40% of damage in 5 mans very often. This is mostly due to how our class is designed. Our dps is spread across 3 burst cooldowns, which we can use while moving, making us very agile on targeting / keeping up with whats gong on. Is that really our fault tho? Does that warrant a dps nerf when we already leveled off DPS wise on singler targets near enchance shamans, fury warriors and hunters?

 

flyingtoastr

What I'm more worried about is the fact that we are doing "too much damage in PvE" when we would spam Consecration, Exorcism, and Hammer of Wrath.

They delivered a massive double-whammy in this patch. They directly nerfed our outgoing damage (RV, AoW, Seals, Judgements, DS) and in addition made it flat impossible to use the "filler" abilities. So our DPS is really going to drop like the proverbial rock.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

• frmorrison

No it is not worth it. Ret is GCD locked in and in the next patch mana limited, so you cannot Seal Twist in SoV.


For people thinking about stacking int:

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

flyingtoastr

That quote illustrates how little they took mana burns into account.

They're going to have to rebuff ret. With all these nerfs there is no possible way a simple CS+J+DS rotation is going to keep our DPS competitive. Knee-jerk.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Ulthwithian

Frmorrison: I understand that they don't want Retribution with Int. However, as many people here have stated, Retribution Paladins _by design_ have a fixed 'time to OOM'. The implicit assumption is that your max mana equals your base mana (or very nearly). I am simply trying to see what can be done to get around that assumption. One obvious choice is to increase your intellect.

The Retribution community needs to prove this issue to GC and Blizzard. The only tests that GC cites is on Patchwerk. Perhaps doing tests on a wider variety of enemies would prove useful. Including non-Undead targets would probably be good, too.

 

• frmorrison

Sadly, I think it would be hard for some people to raid on Beta, but I hope some guild does it. Pre-nerf, the last WWS I saw had Ret 500 dps dps below the highest dps (Hunter) and was in Naxx 25 (Lot of undead).

Now this number is about 4500 dps vs 5000 dps, so a 9% damage difference. That is a pre-nerf number.


To Toaster, on my premade I am maintain forever Judge/CS/DS/Divine Plea rotation forever, but once you add anything else I go OOM. Mana is *really* tight.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Ngita

This has been gone over in other threads but your raid is going to expect your 2 specs to be holy raid ie with bok and without bok. your arena partners will expect your 2nd spec to be holy pvp etc. Do we go back to the bad old days of if its a 1v1 and someone jumps you your only 2 options are run/bubblehearth or stand and heal till you go oom and die? As holy we have little offensive utility to use in arena and no damage either? Currently Holy shock makes up around 50% of my holy dps in pve, But in a pvp situation i need to reserve it for healing.

 

Imala

Thank you Recape for your input. That corresponds exactly to what i found out empirically in naxx last night. Our DPS is still fine and very competitive and we actually have to manage mana. I can't believe so many people were fine with the unlimited mana.

I really want to stress this point. It would have been a bad design not to have to think about our resource: mana. Warriors have to think about rage. Rogues have to queue their energy and make critical decisions on how to spend it, we didn't. We just had to spam every abilities that were not on CD and voila, top DPS. I remember couple of pages back seeing someone suggesting we do a macro with a cast random and spam it. I was completely depressed seeing it could have worked. I played this mage in the MC days and burned out in 3 days of spamming frostbolt. There is nothing more depressing than that. I think spamming HoW is fine when < 20%. warriors spam execute too and it's part of the "finish him" fun (in my case anyway ^_^)

I still very happy of where ret is now. We're 1000 miles better off than in TBC, repentance is a real CC ability now, we have to manage mana without it being the hideous burden it was. I mean when you check the large picture, it's not so bad at all!

Now we have an extremely difficult class to balance. if Class A is doing 20000 dmg every 10 seconds VS class B doing 2000 dmg every second. they both yield the same DPS, but clearly class A has an immense advantage in PVP. You can't take PvP out of the equation and suggesting balances saying "Purely for PvE" is just not constructive for a class that is this bursty. Although i think mana will be fine for PvE, i think the PvP case is more sensitive. Overall, enh. shaman have it smoother for now on the mana regen front (shamanistic rage is pretty decent to regen a full bar). I wouldn't be surprised to see JotW tweaked again before or couple of weeks after release as well as divine plea.

Also, a lot of people are discarding the trash clearing power of the pally. although not as important as bosses, it's good to clear trash fast for morale, focus on boss etc. As Inu noticed, we are doing extremely good on trash and honestly it's a trade off to higher DPS on bosses. Have you seen how HORRIBLE is a mutilate rogue on trash? I can tell you for experience it's also very frustrating to be near useless on trash while you destroy bosses. Mutilate rogue, which is probably the best single target DPS in the game today (with hunters being nurfed) have to have a very steady and long environment to perform well on bosses. when they are started, they destroy, true. but they can't use half of their abilities on trash because it dies too fast, they waste a ton of combo points because that Execute crited and killed the mob and made his Slice and dice refresh go to the pooper etc. etc. I think being able to fly from boss to boss because the raid clears the trash super fast is good for many reasons and is overlooked today mostly because bosses were designed to be so insanely hard. With the new design of class buffs and dungeons in general, I'm pretty sure trash clearing will be taken into account by raid leaders too and we really really shine in that department. We can't be top single target DPS and best trash clearing class (debatable, but i think we are) at the same time. We also have many advantages such as best survivability, a not-to-be-overlooked CC and useful situational tools. Every classes tend to think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, players tend to only see the strengths of the other classes without their weaknesses or limitation.

I apologize for this not so structured post (which is not about theorycrafting at all either :-( ), but I'm saddened to see so many paladins yelling murder as the situation really isn't as bleak as it is made to be, imho. I just hope I boosted the morale of the troops a bit!

 

GSH

If I recall correctly, the HoW@35% is because it has a weird interaction with Vindication.

If a player has 10,000 health (assume it all comes from stamina, for simplicity), without Vindication HoW@20% kicks in when the player reaches 2000 health. However, if the paladin also has Vindication, Vindication reduces max health to 8000, and HoW@20% only kicks in at 1600 health.

With Vindication, HoW@35% would kick in when the player reaches 2800 health. To be honest, I'm not sure why it is 35%, it should be closer to 25%. The point is that because of Vindication, HoW should enable at a higher point than 20%, in order to trigger at the same absolute health value as pre-Vindication.

 

eMagdAeH

Honestly, I think I can safely say most of us aren't upset about any of the damage nerfs. You would be hard pressed to find a ret. paladin with any intelligence (or without a God complex) that didn't agree with the damage nerf. It is the mana consumption problem. I cannot speak from experience, mostly because I'm terrible at math, but I can understand other's testing. The numbers that have been displayed thus far worry me a lot about my raid spot in WotLK. I'm not saying the world is ending, and I'm certainly not re-rolling. I love my class with or without buffs/nerfs, but I still need to earn my raid spot and without a second change to our mana sustainability that spot looks to be in danger. I think THAT is the source of most of our anger. Again, this is a second hand opinion and not to be taken as fact. I do not have the ability to test, and with my knowledge base sticking purely to matters of human anatomy/physiology I will never have a legitimate say in what is and what is not. This is just my observation based on other's work.

Edit: I also think the argument about trash is purely an opinion and not to be taken as a hard evidence reason that we are still viable. For instance, our guild leader doesn't care about trash performance. It's how we hold up on a progression boss that weighs raid spots.

 

CaptBooyah

The biggest change I loved about our mana regen after 3.0 was simply how I didn't have to drink after every 3-4 minutes on trash mobs in raids unlike the rest of the melee dps who just kept on going with no downtime at all.

You definitely feel like your contributing when you can keep up with the rest of the raid.

 

Foxconfessor

I think we have to chalk this one down to a fundamental difference in philosophy. Developers think one thing, most players seem to think another.

As Alleyra noted a few posts up, those of us who raided ret full time pre-3.0 had to be quite proficient at managing our mana during encounters (and bring lots of mana pots to not be left behind on trash). Technically, it's no problem for competent players to do so again. However, it all boils down to two things for me. Firstly, whether our resource system is equitable compared with other melee classes for raiding, both in terms of downtime between trash packs, and longevity during encounters; and secondly, whether it is fun to play.

The last few days have made me think about Warhammer a lot. Not in the sense that I'm off to play it (already tried it), but it made me remember and envy the simple equality of its resource system. Every class without exception has energy, or 'action points' that regen over time. If a similar system was ever universally introduced in WoW it might feel a little flavourless, but it could potentially solve what seem to be some insurmountable gameplay dilemmas.

On another note, I know that GC has cited too much dps and too much sustainability in pve as a reason for nerfs, and people are already repeating this. While I don't want to dissect public relations strategy too much here, I think it may promote better understanding of what is happening to our class and why if we pause and examine these statements. We have to ask ourselves what would be the response from many pve-focused subscribers if it was freely admitted that the nerfs were mainly due to pvp, nay battleground, considerations.

We also have to ask ourselves, in the light of the outcry against ret's capabilities, why ret has received these nerfs first when there are probably four other classes who are doing both far more and probably too much dps in pve (arms warriors, hunters, mages, and possibly rogues), and that our closest relative (enhancement) does about the same dps as pre-nerf rets. Their time may come, but for now it is ret in the spotlight. Just some food for thought.

While I'm sure you're right when it comes to Naxx, I'm not sure how long this policy would hold when the difficulty of encounters inevitably rises through the WotLK cycle. I think most raiders would agree that doing well on trash is fun, but trash is just the appetizer before the meal. Also, not since AQ40 in vanilla have we seen a lot of insanely tuned-up trash that required any kind of careful play. Even Sunwell trash was mostly pretty easy.

 

Imala

It's true, it's an opinion. My whole post was an opinion. I'd be hard press to find any raid leader NOW considering trash for a raid spot. it owuld even be a bad raid leader. But i think the focus has changed a bit with WotlK. if every DPS classes and specs are within say 10% of each others. If the bosses aren't designed to have rolling bloodlusts and all the things they promised about new designs. A raid leader will have to ponder "Ok, does it really worth it to get a rogue instead of that paly, if i can expect him to be within 10% of his single target DPS, but helping immensely on trash? is it an acceptable trade off?" currently no it's not. it's out of the question. but i think it will be a valid concern in wrath, since min/maxing will be harder and more dependent on player skill.

 

Inu

One may have to wonder if the upcoming 10% armor to bosses buff will effect the hunters / rogues, and if that will pull us slightly closer to them in DPS.

I know hunters can potentially do alot of non armor mitigated damage and i imagine it'll hit rogues the hardest. Although pre nerf our judgement did something like 25% damage? Never really cared to look too hard. It'll do slightly more Total % without consecrate because of the nerf, although since consecrate did somethng like 10% it wont change much but either way with the armor buff who knows.