Does anyone believe that Bllizzard's solution is to force us into wearing mail? We are the only plate DPS class without a talent that gives us a bonus for wearing plate and hunter mail is pretty decently itemized besides the lack of strength. Given that we have to use reduced rotations if we wear plate, there must be a point of inflection where intellect becomes a very strong dps stat.
Our basic rotation (Judge/CS/DS) is supposed to be self-sustaining. and DP is supposed to give us enough mana to use some of our other tools past those.
The way I understand it is that DP either allows consequent Consecration spam, or some Consecrations with Exocrism along with it, or HoW spam, but not all of it.
However, this is not quite the case. On a Training Dummy, judging JoL, a rotation of J/CS/DS nets in a deficit of around 1400 mana per recast of Seal of Command. Switching to JoW, I still lose around 900 mana every 2 minutes (43 Int on gear, 4623 max mana pool so I do get a bit more mana from Replenishment than usual). This without Glyph of Crusader Strike.
This shows how broken JoW was before (on live at least, I can´t say anything about the beta). It basically gave the illusion of the basic rotation being easily sustainable, allowing even quite a lot of Consecrations without mana problems.
As Judgement/CS/DS mana costs scale along our base mana pool which is intended to be our max mana too (no INT on gear), the situation won´t change at 80 and we will still run OOM. I hope the devs agree that something needs to be done about this.
I had a similar experience in Sunwell last night. In fights where there was substantial amounts of AoE damage, I didn't have any mana problems -- thank you Spiritual Attunement. Brutallus, however, was an entirely different story. About halfway through the fight (only using CS/DS/Judgement, running SoB) my mana was significantly depleted and I wasn't seeing any net gains or neutrality in the "self-sustaining" rotation. There was little to no ability to use AW, Consecrate, Exorcism, Holy Wrath, HoW for fear of running OOM. Additionally, when it came time to re-Seal, the issue was further compounded. Ultimately I ended up eating a Dark Rune and a Super Mana Potion and still managed to be running on fumes at the end of the fight.
Our damage was certainly toned down a bit. (our top Rogue did ~2600dps, while I ended up 10th with ~2200dps.) But while damage output felt a bit lower, the mana regen situation is very concerning. I would attribute my lack of being more competitive on the WWS parse due to the fact that I could barely sustain my basic rotation.
Note: The bulk of my raid noticed the JoW/Replenishment changes. There was much muttering, from healers and DPS alike, about being out of mana, etc.
I had a similar experience in Sunwell last night. In fights where there was substantial amounts of AoE damage, I didn't have any mana problems -- thank you Spiritual Attunement. Brutallus, however, was an entirely different story. About halfway through the fight (only using CS/DS/Judgement, running SoB) my mana was significantly depleted and I wasn't seeing any net gains or neutrality in the "self-sustaining" rotation. There was little to no ability to use AW, Consecrate, Exorcism, Holy Wrath, HoW for fear of running OOM. Additionally, when it came time to re-Seal, the issue was further compounded. Ultimately I ended up eating a Dark Rune and a Super Mana Potion and still managed to be running on fumes at the end of the fight.
Our damage was certainly toned down a bit. (our top Rogue did ~2600dps, while I ended up 10th with ~2200dps.) But while damage output felt a bit lower, the mana regen situation is very concerning. I would attribute my lack of being more competitive on the WWS parse due to the fact that I could barely sustain my basic rotation.
Note: The bulk of my raid noticed the JoW/Replenishment changes. There was much muttering, from healers and DPS alike, about being out of mana, etc.
Perhaps I'm not seeing this right or just don't quite understand, but if you are using JoL, and the health returned to you is counted as your heals, you do not receive mana back from spiritual attunement, do you? If in fact that is the case, it would probably be wise to be judging wisdom and allowing others to JoL so that you may in fact get mana return. I haven't had mana issues yet, granted i'm wearing 3 pieces of gear that have intel on them, but still minimal issues with mana.
An option for increasing mana return is tossing a hand of sacrifice on your tank, but this can be risky in some fights, especially if your healers aren't ready for it. I did run low at the end of brutallus this week, but of course that's with spamming everything I had.
I am not experiencing the same mana concerns people are reporting here. Ran Black Temple last night and on Gorefiend I was able to sustain all of my DPS abilities (DS, CS, J, Consecration, Exorcism, Avenging Wrath, Holy Wrath, Hammer of Wrath) and did not run out of mana until Gorefiend was at about 5%. All I had to do at that point was pop a potion and I was back in the fight for the remaining 5%.
Granted that Gorefiend is a joke with the raid DPS that is being put out now, the fight didn't last very long (a little over 2 minutes if I remember correctly). I have very little int on my gear and a mana pool around 4,700.
Add Divine Plea into the mix, and I'm really not concerned about mana at this point.
Perhaps I'm not seeing this right or just don't quite understand, but if you are using JoL, and the health returned to you is counted as your heals, you do not receive mana back from spiritual attunement, do you? If in fact that is the case, it would probably be wise to be judging wisdom and allowing others to JoL so that you may in fact get mana return. I haven't had mana issues yet, granted i'm wearing 3 pieces of gear that have intel on them, but still minimal issues with mana.
An option for increasing mana return is tossing a hand of sacrifice on your tank, but this can be risky in some fights, especially if your healers aren't ready for it. I did run low at the end of brutallus this week, but of course that's with spamming everything I had.
A ret pallys JoL is more effective then other pally's so unless it's a fight where the raid dmg is minimal or you're on farmed content you should probably still be using JoL. The raid comes first.
As for throwing up a sacrifice throwing it up on the tank is stupidly risky. Throw it up on a raid member that is soaking meteor slashes.
Originally Posted by joypunk
I am not experiencing the same mana concerns people are reporting here. Ran Black Temple last night and on Gorefiend I was able to sustain all of my DPS abilities (DS, CS, J, Consecration, Exorcism, Avenging Wrath, Holy Wrath, Hammer of Wrath) and did not run out of mana until Gorefiend was at about 5%. All I had to do at that point was pop a potion and I was back in the fight for the remaining 5%.
Granted that Gorefiend is a joke with the raid DPS that is being put out now, the fight didn't last very long (a little over 2 minutes if I remember correctly). I have very little int on my gear and a mana pool around 4,700.
Add Divine Plea into the mix, and I'm really not concerned about mana at this point.
So what you're saying here is that in a VERY short fight with lots of raid dmg you still went oom before the end... ya there's no reason to be concerned here....
I am not experiencing the same mana concerns people are reporting here. Ran Black Temple last night and on Gorefiend I was able to sustain all of my DPS abilities (DS, CS, J, Consecration, Exorcism, Avenging Wrath, Holy Wrath, Hammer of Wrath) and did not run out of mana until Gorefiend was at about 5%. All I had to do at that point was pop a potion and I was back in the fight for the remaining 5%.
Granted that Gorefiend is a joke with the raid DPS that is being put out now, the fight didn't last very long (a little over 2 minutes if I remember correctly). I have very little int on my gear and a mana pool around 4,700.
Add Divine Plea into the mix, and I'm really not concerned about mana at this point.
I had the same feeling, and therefore I had a look at my last Brutallus fight WWS, where I really had no problem of mana, spamming everything.
It appears that JoW was responsible for 15700 mana gained, and I also had 3000 mana gained through 2pT6 bonus... (in comparison, JotW gave me 12000 mana).
I therefore have the strong feeling that I will have problems this week with my mana on Brutallus, with around 10000 less mana from JoW (I counted the nb of times I hit the boss with any ability, and applied the 25% * 1% gain from the new JoW, which gave me 5300), and it will be even worse when 2PT6 and my exta int will be lost.
Assuming I had DP right now, it would return me 4500 mana (I have some bonus int), still clearly not enough to sustain the whole fight spamming everything, which is was Blizzard was intending... I'm not completely happy with it since I will lose some gameplay in addition to some dps, but well...
Like others, I don't really see the math where DP will allow us to spam consecration (not speaking of Exorcism, and I think HW becomes completely out of the question on a single target demon boss, which is ok to me in the spirit of what this spell is supposed to do), on bosses where we take no damage whatsoever, but we'll see when reaching 80...
A ret pallys JoL is more effective then other pally's so unless it's a fight where the raid dmg is minimal or you're on farmed content you should probably still be using JoL. The raid comes first.
As for throwing up a sacrifice throwing it up on the tank is stupidly risky. Throw it up on a raid member that is soaking meteor slashes.
So what you're saying here is that in a VERY short fight with lots of raid dmg you still went oom before the end... ya there's no reason to be concerned here....
We run with two ret paladins, so I usually throw it on the other ret paladin to do.
Raids are a joke right now, if we wipe in sunwell on something other than:
Felmyst:
Bad breath call
Twins:
Not moving when conflag otw
Muru:
Bad transition
KJ:
Bubble Problems
Then something is wrong. Sunwell other than brutallus is a very poor testing ground for mana because of the insane amount of AoE damage going around. I haven't really been into naxx on beta, but depending on fight lengths will be a big factor as well. Most all fights (for my guild) are no longer than 4 minutes, KJ and perhaps council being the exception.
Does anyone believe that Bllizzard's solution is to force us into wearing mail? We are the only plate DPS class without a talent that gives us a bonus for wearing plate and hunter mail is pretty decently itemized besides the lack of strength. Given that we have to use reduced rotations if we wear plate, there must be a point of inflection where intellect becomes a very strong dps stat.
This is potentially a very legitimate concern/solution, which would no doubt cause as much strife with our arrow-plinking/frawshawking brethren as it did with the rogues and ferals of pre-3.0 (with the exception of badge gear, which is at our own discretion).
Now personally, I've always felt smug about downgrading armor classes. I play a moonkin, BM hunter, and paladin (all 3 specs), and on each of those I've taken the opportunity to downgrade to cloth, leather, and leather/mail appropriately. Traditionally I've found that even with item level normalization the sub-class armor pieces tend to eerily outweigh the "proper" armor choices in a very Twilight zone way. I'm not sure if this is holdover from the days of Pre-TBC when armor was considered a legitimate, distinguishing feature of each class' viability, but it's not something I've really questioned. Rather, I've just accepted it, with the reasoning that if Blizzard is balancing DPS around wearing the "proper" armor, then downgrading in favor of stats gives me a sort of edge over that balance. (The same is true for my holy exploits, where I found that shaman mail invariably possessed higher healing and at least equal mana regen with an MP5-to-crit tradeoff for most levels).
For me, that's not an issue. For many people, it is. Image is a very big motivator for why people play this game, and I'm certain the vast majority of paladin players would prefer their character to mirror the hammer-swinging, plated behemoth of virtue that they visualize in their minds. People just like the holy warrior vibe that plate gives. And there's a functional loss too; I'm lucky because I'm in a very open-minded guild that's cool on rets rolling on sub-armor-class upgrades. But there are many guilds that balk at these practices, which would result in the paladin who engaged in them becoming either despised by his guildmates OR on a permanent waiting list so that he can't ever get that particular mail piece until every single hunter/shammy in the guild has it and it's about to be sharded. And all this is not even considering the whole tier-gear conundrum.
At the end of the day, however, we're getting very conflicting reports at level 70 and 80 both. I hate to mirror the blues, but from personal experience and what I've read, it's just too soon to draw any conclusions about the severity, or lack thereof, concerning ret mana. It's certainly something to keep in mind and watch carefully on the way to 80 for sure. Blizzard has a pretty solid track record of holding off on buffs so long as "someone" is doing well (at least from a PVE Moonkin, PVP Hunter perspective). That means that mana issues are very likely to become the responsibility of players and players alone. If that's the case, we may have to adopt our own solutions such as downgrading to mail, group stacking with the shamans, item benefits from professions, and so forth. It would appear that mana management will be just as crucial a determinant of player skill as rotation.
Of course, this is all assuming mail is even viable. Lots of LK mail is loaded with haste (which ironically provides more frequent SA returns from the recoil of SoB/M), crit, and armor pen (yay physical Divine Storm! -.-), but the price we pay for the int is that we do not have any Int=AP talents like shamans or hunters. Am I mistaken in believing that when Blizzard places the AP numbers on these pieces, they do it assuming 1 Int = 1 AP for most/all hunters and shamans? As such, we could end up with suboptimal AP numbers from mail from simply not receiving the intended Int->AP conversion, and that's not even counting the loss of all that strength (which is hit even harder by the massively scaling values compared to BC). I smell some empirical testing in the eaves.
-'- And on a completely off topic P.S. note, I find it ironic that these mechanics are causing me to once again consider degrading my paladin's armor, while the whole Aspect of the Viper rigamarole is forcing me to upgrade back to mail from leather on my hunter. :P
DP is 25% of total mana, while Cons is 22% of base mana. While solo those are nearly the same (unless you have Kings or some other int buff), it raids Int gets a few other buffs to help it out.
While mana for me is fine now, at 80 with no int on gear or Tier 6 there were issues with the Premade.
DP is a one minute cooldown, Consecrate is a 10 second cooldown if you glyph it.
I'm sorry, I just don't see this add up, that's what I was saying above. Even if you double our mana raid buffed, it's still going to be a little over 2 consecrates a minute.
Also, potions are not the answer - I'm glad Joypunk was able to spman his cooldowns, but a 2 minute fight to and potting the last 5 % doesn't indicate to me, in anyway, a lack of concern over mana.
EDIT: My problem with using mail is that if our only option is to itemize with mail for our pve concerns, what do we do for PVP? Mana regeneration is demonstrably less for pvp.
TRIPLE EDIT: To make this post more constructive, what I'm saying is that the mana situation does NOT look doom and gloom with the *exception* of PVP. In PVE, we have several options for covering any mana issues we may have, including wearing mail. PVP is the only scenario wherein mana may prove to be a definitive, class-hampering distinction. And even then, we won't know that for sure until we get Blizzard's hinted "utility" spells, which may or may not involve a more proactive regen mechanic / burn protection.
PvP and PvE at 70 is fine mana-wise (at least for me, even with nerfed JoW), partly due to int on gear and 2 Tier 6 and/or 4 piece PvP gear, which are pretty common bonuses on people now.
At 80 on the pre-made, I wasn't fine for either role at 15% JotW returns. Therefore, I think once people start hitting 80, it will be adjusted or mana costs will be reduced. GC will not mess with it now because it is not necessary, and GC did promise he would adjust things if was necessary.
Edit: The 70 information (from doing BT and Onynia post-3.03, is doing all attacks except the Undead ones).
Out of curiosity, was that with the "prescription" rotation of CS-DS-Judge, or the loaded cheezburger option with all the consecrate and exorcism and HoW on top?
Something that I will admit does frighten me about ret mana is that in his endorsement of the "Triple Entente" ret cycle, GC omitted HoW. Even though it's only usable sub-20%, it's still an icredibly powerful DPS booster that we need to have the option of relying on. If we assume a standard fight length of 10 minutes, at a steady DPS rate, we're looking at basically 2 minutes worth of potential HoW spam. I could see our mana pools running very low in those two minutes, and we should for damn sure not be placed in a position where we have to choose whether to use our sub-20 kill ability or not, unlike every other class that has one.
This is potentially a very legitimate concern/solution, which would no doubt cause as much strife with our arrow-plinking/frawshawking brethren as it did with the rogues and ferals of pre-3.0 (with the exception of badge gear, which is at our own discretion).
Now personally, I've always felt smug about downgrading armor classes. I play a moonkin, BM hunter, and paladin (all 3 specs), and on each of those I've taken the opportunity to downgrade to cloth, leather, and leather/mail appropriately. Traditionally I've found that even with item level normalization the sub-class armor pieces tend to eerily outweigh the "proper" armor choices in a very Twilight zone way. I'm not sure if this is holdover from the days of Pre-TBC when armor was considered a legitimate, distinguishing feature of each class' viability, but it's not something I've really questioned. Rather, I've just accepted it, with the reasoning that if Blizzard is balancing DPS around wearing the "proper" armor, then downgrading in favor of stats gives me a sort of edge over that balance. (The same is true for my holy exploits, where I found that shaman mail invariably possessed higher healing and at least equal mana regen with an MP5-to-crit tradeoff for most levels).
For me, that's not an issue. For many people, it is. Image is a very big motivator for why people play this game, and I'm certain the vast majority of paladin players would prefer their character to mirror the hammer-swinging, plated behemoth of virtue that they visualize in their minds. People just like the holy warrior vibe that plate gives. And there's a functional loss too; I'm lucky because I'm in a very open-minded guild that's cool on rets rolling on sub-armor-class upgrades. But there are many guilds that balk at these practices, which would result in the paladin who engaged in them becoming either despised by his guildmates OR on a permanent waiting list so that he can't ever get that particular mail piece until every single hunter/shammy in the guild has it and it's about to be sharded. And all this is not even considering the whole tier-gear conundrum.
At the end of the day, however, we're getting very conflicting reports at level 70 and 80 both. I hate to mirror the blues, but from personal experience and what I've read, it's just too soon to draw any conclusions about the severity, or lack thereof, concerning ret mana. It's certainly something to keep in mind and watch carefully on the way to 80 for sure. Blizzard has a pretty solid track record of holding off on buffs so long as "someone" is doing well (at least from a PVE Moonkin, PVP Hunter perspective). That means that mana issues are very likely to become the responsibility of players and players alone. If that's the case, we may have to adopt our own solutions such as downgrading to mail, group stacking with the shamans, item benefits from professions, and so forth. It would appear that mana management will be just as crucial a determinant of player skill as rotation.
Of course, this is all assuming mail is even viable. Lots of LK mail is loaded with haste (which ironically provides more frequent SA returns from the recoil of SoB/M), crit, and armor pen (yay physical Divine Storm! -.-), but the price we pay for the int is that we do not have any Int=AP talents like shamans or hunters. Am I mistaken in believing that when Blizzard places the AP numbers on these pieces, they do it assuming 1 Int = 1 AP for most/all hunters and shamans? As such, we could end up with suboptimal AP numbers from mail from simply not receiving the intended Int->AP conversion, and that's not even counting the loss of all that strength (which is hit even harder by the massively scaling values compared to BC). I smell some empirical testing in the eaves.
-'- And on a completely off topic P.S. note, I find it ironic that these mechanics are causing me to once again consider degrading my paladin's armor, while the whole Aspect of the Viper rigamarole is forcing me to upgrade back to mail from leather on my hunter. :P
I am not really familiar with the gear in the expansion except that it won't have Int. If Int is needed, what do Int/mana enchants look like as opposed to the standard DPS enchants? What about the possibility of supplementing the DPS plate with caster gear for the rings, cloak, etc. Also, what about Holy or Prot pally gear? will that have Int on it? Would swapping out a Plate item designed for Ret with something designed for Holy severely decrease our DPS? And if it is a viable option, how hard would this be to balance out to get adequate mana return?
Judgement of Light is supposed to heal for 10% of holy spellpower + 10% of AP. For me, that's 2650 or so, thus JoL should heal for 265, which is what the tooltip says. Why is it only healing for 205, which is 10% of my AP? These are all unbuffed numbers.
Has anyone taken a closer look at Righteous Vengeance? The way it's calculated, both for stacking purposes and just in general, seem to be a bit wonky. Looking at our Brutallus kill for last night, it seems that both have some oddities in them. For instance, when Righteous Vengeance is partially resisted, the damage done plus the amount resisted adds up to 5-20 damage less than what an unresisted tick will do. In addition, when you overwrite a previous debuff, it seems to stack, but not in any way that I can figure. At first I thought it might be seal damage, but that doesn't seem to work either. Here's a link to the filtered WWS, in case someone wishes to take a closer look, maybe you'll have better luck than I will.
As for the mana issue, I'm a bit worried about what we'll look like at 80. I was still top damage for Felmyst, thanks to liberal AoE damage, but as that report shows, I was #6 on Brutallus, and I was pushing HARD for extra damage. I had to use a potion for the first time since 3.0. Without 2pc T6, and the int from the S4 chest and gloves I use, I would've been even worse off, and the problem is only more severe as fight length scales. They've gotten our damage under control; what's the reasoning behind forcing mana to be an issue as well?
Another note: Judgement of Light seems to work very strangely. Last night it was varying in amount healed by a large margin, with the average heal being for 529, but a maximum tick of 1627? It wasn't an AP or SP-scaling bug, otherwise it would've been more noticeable in my damage, I think.
My experience from last night with the changed mana and dps pushes in the patch showed very little change on DPS overall. The main problems I experienced were mana on bosses where AOE damage isnt feeding us mana back like Brut. In this fight I had to use a mana potion to keep all abilities rolling through it and with DG we should be able to maintain it for longer than 3 minute fights. This problem wasn't helped by the fact that our prot paladin (who healed for the fight) didn't judge wisdom so it does skew the results slightly.
The other main issue that worries me is threat with the increase used of JoL. On Felmyst I was horribly threat capped and often could only auto attack (running about 5% above the tank through most of the fight). Stupidly I didn't use HoSalv on myself which would of alleviated the problem slightly but it is still a big issue for us and it may be we have to get a less optimal judgment from a prot or holy paladin on these fights which is disappointing.
Here are the webstats Wow Web Stats for those interested, I have been running the Judge>CS>DS priority rotation for most fights. Also my KJ dps may be a bit off cause I tank on that fight.
Now we just need people who can beat the ledge boss at twins and can stack properly for darkness...
For threat issues with JoL:
Hand of Salv is very powerful, since it works off 20% of your total threat amount and only costs a GCD. Plus other Pallies can cast it on you as well.
Vigilance is pretty easy to get by picked by a Prot Warrior, which is another 10% threat off.
Mana wasn't an issue on brutallus spamming everything however on KJ which is a longer fight in which I did have too switch from light too wisdom (i usually judge light on that fight just for survival).
However losing 2 t6 will be equiv too losing wisdom in a sense so in that respec I do think mana issues may arise in wrath..
I am interested that i did get a normal hit with hammer of wrath, I have 50% crit raid buffed so adding the talent +50% to hammer of wrath should yield 100% crit chance right?
Anyway its a pinch of salt but maybe someone will find the logs interesting even though its just a case of the RNG (getting a larger judgement crit after crit damage multipliers have been removed is interesting for one!)
I did BT last night through Mother. With all of the new nerfs I didn't have any real mana issues. A few times on trash I would have to drink afterward. And on Mother I got a little low due to the AOE silence and not being able to Judge as much. Besides that, I was still using a full FCFS rotation with Consecrate, Exorcism, and Holy Wrath when appropriate.
DPS wise, I was #1, so it seems the fixes with the RV DOT, etc, are working. I'll post the WWS as soon as my guild gets it up!
Also, to the above poster, HoW was available at 20%
As promised, here's my WWS report from last night. I don't have the 2 pc t6 bonus or 4 pc pvp. I was number 1 overall, and number 3 when just looking at bosses.
I am interested that i did get a normal hit with hammer of wrath, I have 50% crit raid buffed so adding the talent +50% to hammer of wrath should yield 100% crit chance right
Excelent way to test crit supression against bosses. You have lower chance crit against bosses than equal level mobs. There is some theories how much this crit reduction is but it's never tested with enough data to get accurate number.
You know something, I've been reading these pages for the last five or six months, and I've come to the following question:
Why is everyone so concerned about being better than 5th on the top damage? I mean, at the end of the day, lets get some actual facts sorted: Retribution is a Melee Support DPS spec, and while this wonderful last six or seven weeks of being far over powered was nice, we were never meant to top damage over the heavily pure dps classes (Warlocks, Mages, Rogues, Hunters). In truth, if you take a "rough average" of 2 of each of them, we should be fighting for a 9th spot overall against the over 5 non-pure dps classes by lvl 80. Yeah, we all wanna get better than that - heck, its great to have a goal to reach - but be realistic: we are not supposed to be the kings of DPS. We are here to provide a variety of utility effects WHILE providing respectable DPS - and i dont mean hitting 5th on the damage using a not-so-well-reviewed WWS.
For example, lets say the eight people above you did, for a full night of raiding, 3 million ish damage each, and your doing about 2.8 million. Yeah, thats 200k damage behind... and yeah, that could generally mean your DPS is lower... but consider that your 200k below PURE dps classes, do the math: we'd only be approximately 7% behind those same pure classes.
Take another example: you end up 12th - fairly low - but the difference between you and the guy five people ahead of you is say 100k damage; The only real difference there is he had alot more crits, or he managed to keep hitting longer, not because you suck, or your damage is bad. Technically, your still doing the same percentage of damage, near enough, and seeing as the margin of difference is tiny, i'd stop worrying about it.
Look at his damage place - overall, yeah, he's 11th, with a million ish damage either side between his spots. Ok, so he's 6 million behind first place. Knock off the trash damage - which most of us should not be caring about when it comes to real issues: The difference between the top dpser and Thephoenix is now only 3 million. Thats not a large gap at the end of the day. So yeah, he's still not amazingly high.
Thadeus: he's 5th on the DPS - in fact, he';s joint 2nd, considering the difference between him and the 2 above him is a few crits here and there. Gothik: he's 14th. Does that mean he totally sucked on one fight, and everyone else sucked on another? No. It means that in a melee-heavy fight, he can deal out some real intense damage, and be very competative. In a normal fight, he can hold his own without being over powered. In a ranged-focused fight, he sucks like most other melee do.
Our DPS is gonna be fine, and yeah, maybe our mana is gonna be an issue. Guess what - we can't have our cake and eat it. Every class has to have some degree of management of their abilities, and it's just dumb fate that we have to manage a sucky mana bar. Do i hate it? yes, absolutely. What am i gonna do about it? Handle it. There are always alternatives to these issues, so rather than complaining about "omg i'm going oom", start working out in-game solutions to solve the issue. This is supposed be about Theorycrafting on improving performance, not complaining about not being able to get everything we want and then some.
I don't see priests having nearly 300 pages about their nerfs and pathetic buffs - hell, most of them have to take talents they all hate to stay competative in healing now, and they still try and do math. Lets stop with the long pages and posts about complaints, and actually find ways of dealing with the problem. Thats what this forum is supposed to be about.
Sorry for the rant, but I think everyone is kinda forgetting what this place is here for.
The problem with the mana issue, is that it just makes people pick up Mail with int on it in order to sustain a full rotaion for every fight when it comes to PvE. When it comes to PvP, an OOM paladin is basically a CC on the paladin, except its spamable, with no diminishing returns.
It sucks when I go OOM on KJ when I get several fireblooms, and am using SoB, so I'm getting massive heals. I can Only pot once a fight, and if I'm on a fight like patchwerk, we better kill it fast or I'll just be auto attacking to get mana back.
Honestly just a little bit more mana return on JotW would make it a choice in what we can do rather than forcing us to get int mail, and forcing us to use the base three attacks while we rub the bottom of our mana pool.
Blizzard stated no more than four main goals for the whole paladin class in Blizzcon class panel and one of them was:
* Retribution paladins are supposed to deal a decent amount of DPS without running out of mana.
Whatever that "decent amount" might be is debatable, but in the light of other statements that should be roughly the DPS of elemental shaman, fury warrior, shadow priest et al.
For me it seems that Blizzard trying to balance us around "limited mana" will eventually fail. If we do the same dps than other hybrids with Blizzards stated sustainable target cycle (Judgement + CS + DS), fine.
The problem is that players are not always playing according to their ideals and targets. Competitive raiding paladins ARE going to find the mana, one way or other, to sustain higher dps cycle. These paladins are doing more damage than other hybrids, which certainly isn't in accordance of Blizzards views.
Even with the buff changes there are so many things paladins can abuse for more mana:
Demonic runes
Shaman/priest group for totems/hymn
Hand of Sacrifice
LoH on self
Offtanking low-hitting adds
Mail gear with intellect
Standing in fire
etc.
Most of our abilities are relatively cheap and even small mana gains may result in big returns in dps.
If we are then rebalanced to this higher dps cycle (with consecration, exorcism and all the bells and whistles) without changing our basic mana return mechanisms (JotW, JoW) accordingly, for most of the people aforementioned Blizzards main goal fails. Average paladin that doesn't master the Art of Getting Mana and are only using the easily sustainable cycle are not on par with other hybrids.
Or is the skill of dpsing as a paladin mostly about the skill of how much mana I can get from external sources?
11/05/08, 11:46 AM
