On my nub warrior, I find myself letting hamstring fall off frequently. Reduced to 5 seconds, that's going to happen that much easier, and it's that much more rage spent spamstringing.


Perhaps it won't make a difference to the top tier PvPers, but it'll have an effect in the majority of PvP, where people simply don't play optimally.

Personally, it would allow me to save BoF more easily - sometimes I try to "wait out" a snare to save BoF for a better moment. It would also make it much easier to deal with frost mages and their passively applied snares.



hamstring - Thottbot: World of Warcraft says 15 seconds on hamstring => reduced to 5 seconds in the test
Frost Shock - Thottbot: World of Warcraft says 8 seconds on frost shock => reduced to 3 seconds in the test


Did those abilities get their duration nerfed on beta?


EDIT:
I think I remember now, there's a 10 second limit for PvP use.

<snip> I'll do some testing before I ask any more questions.

Hamstring lasts 10 seconds in pvp on live, Fiola. It was changed a patch or three ago. Most debuffs also typically 'appear' to have 1 second less on their durations than they really do, since it counts 0-1 as a second, the tooltip will almost instantly tic from 8 to 7...or 4 to 3.

Can someone tell me definitively how haste affects weapon-strike abilities and other physical skills? Does it reduce the GCD for those?

Basically, I'm thinking about the effect of haste on Prot threat rotations, and I'd like to know which of the following will have their GCD reduced by haste: Seals, Judgements, Holy Shield, Conescration, Hammer of the Righteous (weapon strike, like CS), Shield of the Righteous (I believe a physical ability, but need to test).

Thanks.

The change to blessing of sanctuary is a change a lot of us have been waiting for for a long time. However, it and kings share a very notable problem.

They are both talented, near essential... and only available in one talent spec.

Most of the other unique buffs are baseline for that class. Aka, Power Word Fortitude and Mark of the Wild. Blessing of kings is not, and remains arguably the best buff in the game. On live it is considered a must have. Therefore, I can see one of the following happening:

* Another class gets a buff that is functionally the same
* Kings made baseline
* Kings removed from the game.

Frankly, using the last option wouldn't surprise me. It would eliminate the whole two blessings in one tree problem and prevent the headache of % scaling.

As for sanctuary, I think attaching the effect to devotion aura would be a good way to handle it. To still be fair though, there needs to be another talent somewhere that provides rage/energy with avoidance. It solves many of our problems with overgearing, but it won't help our other tanking buddies unless they have a deep protection pally with them. Should be interesting to see how it pans out.

Cathela, as of Live, I know that Seals, Judgements, Holy Shield and Consecration have their GCDs lowered by haste, while Crusader Strike does not.

The first ones you mentioned are considered spells, hence get their GCD lowered by spellhaste (and general haste in WotLK).
Melee skills never had their GCD lowered, hence melee skills (Crusader Strike, Divine Storm) are not affected by haste, while spells (including HotR and ShoR) are.

On what basis are you saying HotR/ShR are spells and CS/DS are not? HotR is most definitely usable while silenced, so I don't think it qualifies as a spell unless there's some other distinction I'm missing.

I suspect ShR is probably the same, but I haven't been able to confirm that yet.

Because i can't use those 2 while silenced ^^

Hm. Well it was a couple patches ago that I was able to hammer through silences in the Nexus, so either things have changed recently, or one of us is misremembering. I've got a Spriest guildmate in beta now, so I'll try to get a test of this ASAP.

Oh, I've also picked up three major glyphs.

First of all, the glyphs I have are all usable at level 20. This puts some of the minor glyphs in perspective, assuming they have the same level requirement. You don't have greater blessings at level 20, so being able to self-buff yourself for half an hour at a time is a nice bit of convenience.

The Judgement glyph for +10% judgement damage seems to be working as advertised.

The Holy Light glyph for 10% splash healing seems to be bugged at least a little; when I cast it on myself, I also get the 10% splash heal. (I suppose the wording of the glyph doesn't exclude that as an effect, but it doesn't seem like what's intended). It also appears to work only on effective heal, not overheal. Still, I can see this being nice in a lot of cases.

The Flash of Light glyph works as advertised: the direct heal is cut in half, but then you get twice that amount as a 15-second HoT in 5 ticks. However this too only works on effective healing. (Although in this case it doesn't make a lot of difference, since if someone gets healed to full by your FoL they don't really need the HoT anyway, and the effect is really too small to be useful as a pre-heal.)

I remind last time i tried Nexus i couldn't do anything, but that was as well 1 or 2 builds ago.

I guess i'd need to recheck it... if i just could log, sigh.

Nice find, those are actually the first useful Glyphs I've seen that will benefit PvE ret. The Consecration one is pretty much equivalent to a 20% mana cost reduction and of course less GCD clashing (that's assuming we'll ever be able to use consecration for DPS, considering the regen changes).

Somewhat makes up for the shockingly useless BoK Glyph (again one of those things that make you scratch your head).


As a side note, I hope people on beta are sending in suggestions for JotW/JoW, I know I am.

Cathela, does the HoT stack or just get refreshed?

Reason being if it just gets refreshed, the this massively reduces the health/sec of Flash of light.

And I would have to disagre with the effective healing thing not making a lot of difference. If theres raid damage etc, just because my inital heal only did 500 effective healing, i'd like to know it's going to be there healing for 4000 over the next 15 seconds.

Ret can still easily pick up Kings - but yea, agreed. Holy probably won't be able to get either one optimally.

We need a witty slogan for a BoK to Baseline campaign.

I'll test it but it seems to be just a refresh. It only reduces the hps if you're spamming FoL on a single target, so it depends on what kind of healing you end up doing. Definitely something to consider when deciding on glyphs.

As for the effective healing thing... it's only FoL. You're looking at perhaps 2k for the total size of the HoT in top-end level 70 healing gear, or 400 a tick every 3 seconds. It's nice, but it's not really something you can rely on in most situations.

I can agree obviously that the glyph would be stronger if it applied to overheal, and rolled and everything, but that's probably more power than they want to give for a glyph. For what it is, I think it's pretty nice.

Can we get some feedback from Ret testers on how they are doing with the JotW change both solo and in groups? Obviously its lower mana, but soloing with JoW debuff + replenishment is there some chance this would be ok?

It's basically just like on live. As long as you mainly just auto attack it's fine except instead of auto-attack +cs you auto-attack +judge. You can use both but you'll need to drink every few pulls.

Taking Toughness requires you to either drop (if you want the 51 in ret for DS and the 20 in prot for DG and Improved Hammer):
Kings
Improved RF
Stoicism
Guardian's Favor

All of which are a major trade off. Even though the reduction may be less Divine Purpose is simply in a much better location.

Of course with the change to toughness I would be very surprised if Divine Purpose doesn't get changed now to something unique.

You can't skip stoicism/guardian's favor - you still need 10 points in the tree before you start on toughness. Remember, prot got shifted around a bit.

Right. Redoubt got deleted and replaced by Toughness in Tier 2 in my head.

Swapping out the 3% +heal effect from Devo, with the 3% Dmg reduction does seem to match the 'feel' of the Protection tree more. I would probably put the +heal effect into the Holy tree, so bonuses are more inline with base roles.



They could work your idea in reverse, make Kings attached to our Aura's instead.

"Your Aura's will also increase the stats of everyone in range by 10%" etc.



The base issue is we still have too many blessings to go around. Even if we baseline Kings, and have a Warrior provide the AP Buff through his shout, we'll still 'need' three paladins for Wisdom/Kings/Sanc. I am admittedly assuming we will want to Sanc a entire raid for the damage reduction, but I am having difficulty imagining why we wouldn't. I'm also not taking into account the effects of glyphs on blessings.

'Glyph of Blessing of Might - Your Blessing of Might also grants offensive spell power equal to 10% of the attack power it grants.'

Is this still available? Do warriors have a similar effect on their shout? We may end up with four 'required' Paladins per raid otherwise.

I was trying to brainstorm ways to fix the mana sustainability problem with Ret, in light of the change to JoTW, but still trying to play along with Blizzard's direction.

The idea would be a new secondary effect for CS, which is something people have been trying to work up since it was changed to just 110% attack.

If you had replenish on you, it would consume the replenish, like we used to pop seals, and hit you with 20% base mana. This is a 12% base profit over the cost of CS.

20% was kind of arbitrary, it could be tweaked to whatever. It just has to be a profit of enough to setup the judgement and DS occasionally. This creates an interactivity between abilities somewhat as well. Replenishment, when up between CS's is still doing its little bit of work, and if really in a bad way JoW is working as well.

Any thoughts?

PS This also has an interesting effect of making people want to judge before CS as a fight starts (unless they are already FM, when it doesnt help to splash back), shifting the mindset to more of a tankmage in a way, as the thing you do first typically happens most often due to short fights, etc.

An idea I see being thrown around the various paladin forums is to just to make JotW do both the old and new effects.

Something akin to:
Judgement of the Wise: Your Judgement spells have a 33/66/100% chance to grant up to 10 party or raid members mana regeneration equal to .5% of their total mana every second. In addition your Judgment spells restore mana equal to 10/20/30% of the total damage done to you.

Of course looking at our two "low intellect physical DPS" brothers (Enhancement Shamans and Hunters) you can see the direction they're taking with mana regen. Shamanistic Rage has been a wet dream for pallys since it was first unveiled and the new Aspect of the Viper (Regenerates mana equal to 100% of the damage done by any ranged attack or ability, but reduces your total damage done by 50%.) acts as a Hunter's heavy regen mechanic. If I had to guess we'll either see something tacked on to Sanctified Retribution (replacing that obscure stuff no one has figured out yet) turning AW into SR or some sort of "empowered SoW" that follows the hunter model of short term gimp DPS in exchange for longevity.

I really don't think we'll be getting something tacked onto CS though. Consuming Refreshment sounds nice but it would still leave us in the hole unless it did some pretty whack scaling. The other problem is that you might not get Refreshment in a 25-man right off the bat, leaving you in a pretty precarious position.