Fixing the game for the majority of the players is not short sighted. It's really self-serving for a Ret paladin to say, "Hey, 70 balance shouldn't matter. Oh, and please leave us overpowered because it might be balanced at 80". Do you think that our "PVP god" status at 70 isn't going to have repercussions if left unaddressed?


Don't forget that GC has consistently said that the changes are based of all the data points they have, including the L80 beta parses. You can disagree how necessary the nerfs are, but Blizzard is justified to tweak Ret down.

Oh I agree we were OP'd I think everyone in these forums agrees with our Burst damage being OP'd.

What I don't agree with is that with all these Live WWS parses too many people are coming to the conclusion that we are OK, and that they are not having any big mana problems at all, since these parses show us to be OK at lvl 70, when Live data is flawed with assumptions like T6 mana, T6 bonus, and a bugged JoW.

I believe we should concentrate more on Naxx parses, and zero-int gear than on lvl 70 content.

Yes, I agree with this.

I also agree with the user's suggestion of adding an immune to stun/fear/etc mechanic to Divine Protection but still keeping the ability to be damaged in there.

Right now even if bubble denied the use of Divine Storm and reduced damage done that would not change the fact that it is still going to be considered over powered and cause a lot of tears because being able to become immune to everything and kill someone in the time of your bubble is not only entirely possible, but it also leaves your target with almost -nothing- they can do to avoid their fate. Very, VERY rarely can someone evade me and my bubble long enough to survive and I am sure most posters here can attest to similar stories. The only classes which can really do it are Mage and Rogue but even then nine times out of ten they are still fucked.

Don't get me wrong, I love the bubble-and-own mechanic, but I think for the time being unless Dev's can find a way to bring us in line without mucking things up even more one of the easiest solutions is removing the offensive capabilities of Bubble and giving us something similar to Beast Within etc, and on Divine Protection would be one of the best ways to do it to give both skills more meaning. Plus the change to Divine Protection would be a huge benefit to leveling Paladin's to have a reliable break to fear and CC's. So yes, adding those mechanics to Divine Protection would be fantastic, along with changes to Divine Shield to make an ability which causes such ire among the WoW community a little less annoying, and in it's own way bring us back in line.

(It seems like kind of a sideways nerf to bring ret pallies more into line with where they need to be but I keep looking at it and whats the #1 complaint about pallies? It's usually Divine Shield. Without it we go down pretty fast, so finding the happy median where we don't go down quite so fast but we still have the ability to get to our targets fairly easily could be enough to finish balancing the Paladin.)

They should really just remove the bubble or severely nerf it to make it comparable to a priest's shield in power. Maybe then we could get some proper treatment as a class without having to balance everything around the bubble.

You could put it on a shorter cd and have it remove all debuffs and absorb an amount equal to your maximum health. Or have it work like cheat death where you only take 5% of incoming damage for 12s but also remain immune to interrupts.

But lets be serious, its been an ability Blizzard has been adamant about us keeping since day one as full immunity so I'm going to assume it will stay that way.

That's the thing. It's such an iconic spell (like a warlock's fear, a warrior's execute and so on) that I don't think they would ever remove it. Modyfing it heavily could happen under GC's lead, but I'm really not expecting it.

As for it absorbing your max health in damage (i.e. the way it works now, but with your max health as an absorption cap) it could work, but I don't know how much lower the cooldown time could be. Really, even in this example, it is a pretty powerful ability.

No, I don't think the problem lies within the absorption part of the spell, but in its duration. The issue right now is that you can whack someone a couple of times, run after them, try to finish them off and if you can't, you just stop and cast a holy light and maybe a fol to get you back to at least 70% health. I think a more coherent answer would be to give it a 2-3 min cooldown and reducing the duration to ~5 seconds so that when you use it offensively you are punished for it (via forbearance or you not healing yourself) and when you use it defensively you actually have enough time for 2 holy lights.

This has repercussions, but it could, coupled with an AW change, really give us the much desired balance in PvP. Having one overwrite the other would be ideal and I could see it happening. A 2, maybe 2.5 min cd on a 5sec bubble, and it overwriting AW or the other way around.

EDIT: Besides, I love my bubble. Don't take it away from me.

Which is why most of us are advocating moving it to a straight -50% damage debuff. If anything, that matches the original "spirit" of the bubble more closely. In 1.0, halving your attack speed effectively halved your damage.

I also support the 50% debuff so that Wings + Bubble can be used together in PvP without being overpowering.


I really loved being able to use Wings every 2 minutes and still have Bubble in cast bad things happened, so whatever helps bring that back I will accept.

Well, assuming the patch notes posted on mmo-champion are accurate SoB/SoM is being nerfed down to 22% tomorrow.

I thought that GC had mentioned that SoB/SoM on live wouldn't see the 22% nerf and it'd stay at 28%?

Lelyia, I think this is just a case of "both Blizzard and MMO-Champion not updating their patch notes to reflect hotfixes and other out-of-patch-note/anecdotal changes".

Let's just sit tight and wait for the actual patch to hit before drawing any conclusions.

Source

So they ended up taking all of our suggestions. Good to hear, hopefully this will "balance" us enough that some of these damage nerfs can get reverted.

Regarding the new version of talent Righteous Vengeance. The tooltip (as pre MMO champion Talent calc) has it as being Judgements and Divine Storm crits will deal 40% damage over 8 seconds. I'm wondering how this mechanic works. With the several pages of apparent pvp discussions, I may have missed this so my apologies if this has been answered already.

I think the simplest way of asking is to list the possibility as I understand them.

a) Ability (I am using the generic ability term here as this question applies to both skills) crits and the dot is placed on the enemy. Does the dot 'tic' immediately (i.e. the crit damage and first tic damage are at the same time) or does this start at the first jiffy (I'm assuming each tic is one second so eight tics?)

b) RV dot is active on enemy and another Ability crits. What happens if the previous dot crit damage is high than the new crit damage? Is the dot *overwritten* with the new dot from the new crit. Basically, does the RV dot always overwrite the existing dot regardless of if the tics will be higher or lower or is there some sort of priority system in place? If the dot is over written regardless, wouldn't this mean you will seriously gimp your damage by 'cancelling' an existing dot?

c) is the dot applied for each ret pali in the group/raid or can there only be on RVe effect on the mob at a time? My guess is one for each ret pali.

d) if Divine Storm crits each target of it's effect, is the dot applied to all of those targets (I'm guessing it will)?

e) since the dot effect is NOT proced from Crusader Strike, are we still looking at FCFS as the most efficient/effective rotation?

Finally, a question regarding Benediction, what are classed as 'spells' with regard to ret palis? My guess is that it's really only Consecrate, Hammer of Wrath and Exorcism?


(P.S.) I realise that the changes are not live on all servers yet but I thought I'd get this post out while I can

Someone should ask this to GC in the big pally thread. I am willing to hear what they say if they tuned SoB down.

In this case, more *is* better:

1. By putting AW and bubble on a shared cooldown, we get free use of both our DPS cooldown and our defensive cooldown within a PvE setting, with the exception of a really badly timed raid damage/debuff that happens within 20 seconds of popping AW, in which case we're pretty much on the same footing as Feral Druids/Enhancement Shaman/etc., but still have bubble available on the next raid damage/debuff cycle.

2. The 50% damage reduction change is to be expected. It was effectively a 50% damage reduction back when the only thing we could do was auto-attack, and still wasn't too bad with just Crusader Strike that didn't proc Seals. This is just the spell being changed to catch up with updated mechanics, and balancing will be better off for it.

a) Righteous Vengeance ticks 4 times, once every 2 seconds for 10% of the crit damage, for a total of 40% of the crit damage after 8 seconds. The first tick occurs 2 seconds after the proccing ability's crit.

Concrete example:

If your Divine Storm hits for 1000 damage non-crit, and you have no crit bonus increasing talents/gear
T - 0: Your Divine Storm crits the enemy for 2000 damage. Righteous Vengeance is applied
T + 2: Your Righteous Vengeance deals 200 Holy damage.
T + 4: Your Righteous Vengeance deals 200 Holy damage.
T + 6: Your Righteous Vengeance deals 200 Holy damage.
T + 8: Your Righteous Vengeance deals 200 Holy damage. Righteous Vengeance fades.

b) If you get a second Divine Storm or Judgement crit while RV is already ticking on a mob, the RV debuff will be refreshed, and any "unticked" damage will be averaged over the 4 new ticks.

Concrete example:

T - 0: Your Divine Storm crits the enemy for 2000 damage. Righteous Vengeance is applied
T + 2: Your Righteous Vengeance deals 200 Holy damage.
T + 4: Your Righteous Vengeance deals 200 Holy damage.
T + 5: Your Judgement crits the enemy for 3000 damage. Righteous Vengeance is refreshed. Note at this point that the game still "owes" us another 400 damage from the 2 remaining RV ticks of the Divine Storm crit.
T + 6: Your Righteous Vengeance deals 400 Holy damage. 400 damage comes from 10% of the 3000 Judgement crit, which is 300, plus the 400 owed damage divided by 4 ticks, which is 100. 300 per tick from the Judgement crit + 100 per tick from the remaining Divine Storm crit = 400
T + 8: Your Righteous Vengeance deals 400 Holy damage.
T + 10: Your Righteous Vengeance deals 400 Holy damage.
T + 12: Your Righteous Vengeance deals 400 Holy damage. Righteous Vengeance fades.

EDIT: On second thought, does anyone know if the tick timer is refreshed or not? That is, if a second crit occurs at T+5, does the new tick occur at T+6 (no refresh) or T+7 (yes refresh)?

I suppose it doesn't matter in the long run as long as the unticked damage keeps getting carried over correctly, but it would still be nice to know.

c) There will be one RV dot per Ret Paladin

d) Yes, Righteous Vengeance will be applied to each target crit by Divine Storm.

e) Yes, FCFS is still the best way to go.

Double post. Delete please.

Thanks for the info Prin, one question though. With your example for multiple Crits, if the RV debuff time is refreshed with the left over damage from the first crit averaged out of the new count, would this mean we are actually being 'gimped' on the damage over the original eight seconds? What I means is that the effect is supposed to be 40% damage over 8 seconds. If we use your example above, the first crit is not actually doing 40% damage over 8 seconds but 40% damage over 12 (I think 13 for a refresh) seconds instead? Is this a concern?

It's better than a lower damaging crit replacing a higher damaging crit if nothing else.

Going further down that quote flyingtoastr posted, GC indicates that Vengeance MIGHT be going back up to 5 stacks if our sustained damage needs help, as well as hope for an additional effect on Crusader Strike or more burst, again if we need it.

OK, thanks for the clarification Prinsesa.

Question about the RV dot. Will the damage be lowered by resilience since it is a dot? If true, RV is hurt by resilience 3 times: once if a crit is stopped fully by resilience, a second time by lowering the damage of the crit, and a third by lowering the dot itself.

This may be intentional since they wanted to lower PvP burst by changing RV into a dot. I would say that PvP builds may easily skip that talent and put those 5 points elsewhere.

Even so, we're still getting more damage out of it than before:

If your base hit is 1000, then a crit with the old Art of War and Righteous Vengeance (2.45x multiplier) would result in 2450 damage, reduced to 1837.5 damage after capped resilience (25% crit damage reduction).

If your base hit is 1000, then a crit with the new talents (2.00x multiplier) would result in 2000 damage, reduced to 1500 damage after resilience.

40% of 1500 damage would result in a 600 damage DOT, reduced to 525 damage after resilience (12.5% DOT damage reduction)

That makes it 1837.5 damage with pre-patch talents vs. a total of 2025 damage with post-patch talents.