• Playered

They have changed Aspect of the Viper into an ability which you will cycle through to restore your mana pool ie: 50sec Hawk -> 10sec Viper -> 50sec Hawk (not accurate numbers but an example) and so-forth.
No doubt with enough constructive feedback about a similar mechanic ala Seal of Wisdom it would satisfy the mana problems of Prot when not tanking, and Ret in general without totally removing the constraint of mana from the class, although SoW does seem to be somewhat close to this already - perhaps just some number tweaks are required?

 

flyingtoastr

The difference between just how horrible SoW is versus the new AotV is pretty incredible. SoW returns 4% of our total mana (which doesn't scale at all given that our mana pools from fresh level 80 to full Arthas soloing gear increase by exactly zero) with a 50% proc chance. Assuming a 3.5 autoswing timer and a CS6/J9/DS11 rotation (our most mana efficient rotation in exchange for DPS loss) has an Attack Rate Constant of 1.528 that means you would see a proc every 3.06 seconds or so. We dump more than 26% of our DPS to do so and it takes 25 procs to fill our mana bar (76.5 seconds). That is not including the fact that SoW itself costs 14% of our base mana pool to even cast, meaning we have to have at least 575 mana just to use the ability.

A hunter doing a paltry 3000 DPS can go from 0 mana to 9000 mana in 6 seconds by popping Viper. If they have to do that even every 2 minutes that's only a 2.5% DPS loss to gain unlimited resources. If that wasn't enough AotV costs a whopping ZERO mana to cast, meaning a hunter can actually go from full OOM to full mana with the click of a button and a couple seconds of lowered DPS!

So what would it take to lower the disparity?
-SoW would have to cost zero mana.
-In order to get the "zero to full in 6 seconds" a hunter gets from AotV SoW's current effect would have be amplified by over 1250%.
-Or in order to equal the "-2.5% DPS" that a hunter gets from using AotV every 2 minutes SoW would have to bring us from zero to full in ~12 seconds (SoB is roughly a quarter of our DPS). Given that that is about 4 procs you would need SoW's current effect to be amplified by a minor 625%.

Doesn't that seem just a wee bit broken? Can't you already see the other classes screaming "OP" when in reality all it is doing is balancing us with the Hunter regen?

So please, think before making suggestions. Hell Shamans lose exactly zero DPS to get their free mana bars, why can't we be balanced around that instead of a stupidly broken seal? SoW has never been, is not, and shouldn't be the solution to any problems. Really since they split up the Judgements Seals of Light, Wisdom and Justice just shouldn't exist anymore.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Arthaal

I cannot begin to explain how refreshing this post was to read. You, sir, are absolutely correct, there are no concessions to make. Welcome to a brave new world of retribution sustainability.

I think Noctivagant has laid out a fairly comprehensive framework for us to attempt crafting a suitable talent/spell/mechanic. In my opinion, raid/group PvE settings will remain the easiest to balance (in particular now that returned mana from grouping is a known constant given any of the mana battery class being present).

The PvP side of the equation however is more difficult. The ability needs to:

- Have no or a very short cooldown (if we can get mana burnt to 0 in 10sec and our regen is tied to a 2/3/4/5 min cooldown then that won't fly).

- Similarly, mana cost should be 0 or close to it. Chain mana burns should not prevent me getting this mechanic working.

- It follows that this mechanic should not depend on a shield/DS/HoP being active to complete since shields: 1) cost mana themselves 2) are on long cooldowns 3) can be trivially dispelled in some cases.

- Speaking of dispelling: I really hoped the expansion would bring more of our retribution talents and abilities over to the physical tree, since, to me, that would really underline our holy warrior flavor. AW being baseline probably rules it out as the first physical tree paladin ability (and the change to increase healing output as well no longer makes the fit all that compelling), however I really think this regen mechanic, if it does apply a buff-like aura, should not be dispellable (offensive dispells are already much too powerful in high level arena and paladins remain one of the classes who's output is most affected by this).

- Not overly penalize our DPS (a 50% cut for 10s similar to hunters might be acceptable, though to my mind, unless I can pull hunter level DPS while dispelling it should probably be closer to the Shamanistic Rage mechanic).

- The ability should NOT BE a seal: reason being, while seals match a lot of what I outlined above (non-interruptible, non-dispellable -TALENTED, cuts DPS slightly), they are, after the duation changes, expensive to switch. Even assuming a buffed SoW filling us up in 10sec, we would then have to cast a DPS seal over this one at a significant cost to our newly reacquired mana... overwriting a 2min buff after 10s every 2-3 minutes does not seem like good design.

- The ability should not be balanced around JoW: in PvE this might work, in PvP however, JoJ is a must considering our vulnerability to kiting. JoJ + PoJ is what keeps us on slippery targets (rogues/druids/shamans and now DKs) and without a charge or pull mechanic, we shouldn't have to keep JoW debuff on a target and that target within range in order to regenerate mana. Moreover, J effects are often cleansed before your GCD is up from applying them (or resealing on live).

Personally, after laying all this down, it seems the old JotW achieved all these things, but did so at 0 personal DPS cost. Shamans are operating off a similar mechanic on live and get free buffs to regen faster should they get drained in between ShRages (free water shield!), why not us? Re-implementing the old JotW seems like a no-brainer.

 

Amera

Enhancement shaman actually still do end up with mana problems in some PvP battles just because they have a mana bar. I wouldn't say it is common, but they can still be a viable mana burn target since you can still seriously gimp their DPS and support options (no mana to refresh totems), and they have a small mana pool as it is. Hunters and Ret paladins get burned too and left pretty useless. The main difference with enhancement shaman is they actually have a defense mechanism (grounding, shock) and we have only long CDs as an intermittent defense.

I honestly don't think they are really even considering Ret PvP with the majority of changes at the moment. They'll probably wait and see how the class does as a whole as the new metagame develops and make adjustments later.

 

◊ Cathela

Yeah, that's another point: Illumination, in the healing tree, scales with improved healing gear (crit), and BoSanct, in the WotLK tanking tree, scales with improved tanking gear (avoidance).

Ret's mana return mechanic should involve doing damage, and it should scale with your damage gear. Both of which the old JotW did perfectly.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Amera

That's sort of a general problem with this Replenishment mechanic as it is for everyone: no scaling. Couldn't you bring a 1 DPS spriest and get the same returns as someone doing top end DPS? It takes the biggest niche of the particular spec and removes any progression from it.

Just to clarify because I didn't see this earlier: is this true in all the 5 mans in beta right now? How about soloing prot, if you are into that sort of thing? I still need to reinstall my beta client.

The first thing I thought of seeing those changes was "well, only one of those specs will ever get a raid spot" in reference to the mana batteries. And given that hunters are the only pure DPS class of the three, they seem to be the best candidate.

 

Worldie

Soloing as protection is quite... interesting. If you pull only one mob per time it's pretty much failure, low DPS, you run out of mana, and are quite slow.

However, if you keep pulling 3-4+ mobs at once, you get full mana constantly, just occasionally have to heal yourself after the pulls, but that's not really a issue.

With the new sanctuary mana is definitively not a issue in 5 men: if you outgear them, you dodge/parry/block a lot, hence you get lots of mana back. If you don't outgear, you get enough damage (plus still mana from Sanctuary) to still not need to drink every pull.

 

DarKNecross

Survival Hunters aren't looking so great, especially since they changed Expose Weakness to be self-only.
It all goes back to waiting until they balance DPS. I'd like to think since they're giving the specs the same utility, they'd all do relatively the same damage.

I'm interested to see what happens with the Buff/Debuff stacking issue, though. Because it's an expansion, people are given a fresh slate, allowing them to level any class they want and make that their main.

I've been playing with a spreadsheet a guild mate made to determine what classes you need to cover the buffs and debuffs. So far, I managed to fill a raid with 7 Healers, 2 Tanks, and 5 DPS that covered all the necessary buffs and debuffs except MS, Grace, and Blood Frenzy.
That leaves 11 raid spots to fill up as guilds see fit. Obviously they could stack Rogues and BM Hunters, but I doubt most guilds have that many of those classes, so there would probably be room to take people that could have their buffs covered. Even if you took 3 Rogues, 3 Hunters, and 2 Warlocks, there are still 3 misc. slots that could be used for Mages, Warriors, DK's, or Shaman. Of course, this goes back to the point about waiting until we see how different classes are balanced for DPS.

http://crimson-guild.com

 

Antmanton

While we're picking apart the shortcomings of Divine Plea, let me throw this nugget onto the pile. Exactly who had the brilliant idea to make it a two-tick channel, and what were they smoking at the time? The concept of the spell is great, but that particular execution is beyond awful. You're basically forced to pop Divine Shield at the same time as you want to use Plea, or you're going to lose at least half the effect. Why couldn't the spell instead be coded as a direct buff to passive mana regen, like Innervate? And while we're on the topic of pushback and interrupts, is there a good reason that Spiritual Focus does not affect all Paladin spells? OK, they made Holy Wrath instant, which was my biggest gripe, but Hammer of Wrath and Avenger's Shield still have cast times and are often pushed back. Would it be so overpowered to have these spells pushback-free (assuming Concentration Aura) with the talent maxxed out?

Also, while I'm on the topic, speaking from the Holy side of the house, it would be really, really nice if Illumination returned mana from all Holy spell critical strikes, offensive and defensive. It's not exactly a gamebreaking concern, but as a quality-of-life issue, it'd be nice not having to drink after every couple kills.

 

Eelyssa

To add a bit of additional food for thought (or beta testing), I asked a colleague of mine who is in beta to test the current effect of Judgment of Wisdom to clarify how it scales. Apparently the Judgment tooltip reflected a mana return value of 175 before blessing of might and over 200 after it was applied, suggesting that (whether this is a bug or an intended result) AP in fact still plays a role in JoW scaling.

[e]Testing shows this is just an in game tooltip bug in beta. See post immediately following.

 

Vitae

The tooltip is out of date. I tested it myself yesterday, I had the same value actually restored (2% of my total mana) before and after applying blessing of might.

 

Thorgred

1) Ret needs more mana regen. A nerfed, self-only version of old JotW (say 33% but only for yourself) attached to new JotW would work.

2) New beacon of light? Is this any good yet? So we can spam heal the raid/party without worrying about the MT's HP. Ok, thats cool. Is it an AOE heal yet? Not really.
One suggestion I have seen for an AOE heal was called 'prism of light' - which 'refracted' 20% of your heals on one target to the nearest 5 needy people - the same doubling of heal output (100% + 5x20%) but split evenly between 5 people, is an enormous difference in the viability of AOE healing.
Holy has always seemed a lackluster tree to me. Compared to the Shaman healing tree--- look at things like Ancestral Awakening or the amount of bonuses that directly increase the amount healed by a spell.

3) Protections: (yeah, i keep coming back to this spec whilst you're all on about Ret, but Prot is my spec)
New Sanctuary. It's exactly what we ordered, yet I'm still unhappy. Why?
a) Kings + Sanctuary. AArgh. Two talented blessings both in the same tree, Kings being the best buff in the game and Sanc will come a close third for tanks (after Fortitude etc).
b)Sanctuary will be 'required' for the cutting edge raids. Which means you must have a prot pally. Which goes against what Blizz is trying to do in terms of keeping raids available for all specs and classes.
Sanctuary should be tacked on to the prot pally's other blessing. That, and/or make kings baseline.

Also:
I've been reading this thread on the warrior WotLK forums.
They seem to be up in arms that Warriors are outclassed in every single way for tanking and they may as well quit now.
Whilst I disagree with most of what they're saying (it seems to be a lot of 'dey tuk ur jerbs!' and not understanding fully the changes) one point did stick out at me:
Paladins still have 16.6% stamina from talents. This was implemented because of the base HP difference between Warriors and Paladins which was multiplied by paladin's need to wear differently itemised gear. Come WOTLK however, base HP difference will be a much lower % of total, and we will be wearing fairly well the same gear. Paladins will be the tank with the highest HP - is that intended or just overlooked?

 

Eelyssa

Many thanks, Vitae, that conclusively resolves the issue, I think.

 

Altirias

More and more I think that they should remove the double damage for JoC on stunned targets.

The vengence nerf was supposed to address the fact our dps was to high (understand : other players being one shot by a ret pal) but the issue was the silly burst you could get with a crit JoC on a stun target. 21K with Art of War v1 would mean that JoC can still crit for 10k on a stunned target which is too much, I think we all agree on that.

This would also be a reason for not giving us back a JotW v1-like regen talent. Even 33% of a 10k judgement is huge amout of mana (actually not far from our entire manapool). I understand that they wanted to limit the utility of the talent to align it on what hunts and Spriests have, and that's ok. Yet we need part of the talent to work only for ourselves and provide us with mana regeneration. The only issue I see with a nerfed and personnal-only JotW talent is that it would be OP with a crit JoC on a stunned target.

So I'm ready to trade the double damage on judging SoC on stunned target against a 3 stack vengence and a revised JotW that would provide extra mana for the judging paladin. I thing it would solve some issues and be a rather fair deal.

 

Joasuf

If you have a look at the Holy Light Glyph from Inscription you can see the suggestion has already been implemented. Albeit its only 10% of your heal but the idea is already there. The only issue I can see with the glyph is it only has a 5 yard range and so will be virtually useless on the usual raid damage type fights (ie something like Najentus/Illidan or maybe Brutallus) for anyone other than possibly the melee as you all have to spread to minimise damage taken. If the range was 10-15 yards it would be much more useful.

On the HP issue warriors have always had more mitigation than us from talents (10% compared to our 6%) and so us having slightly more HP may be a way for Blizz to balance this out.

 

flyingtoastr

One thing I see suggested a lot is to change the double damage to an autocrit, much like Lava Burst + Flame Shock. It preserves the "burst" appeal of JoC in PvP situations but doesn't especially unbalance anything.

Actually with the changes to the trees both have 10% avoidance from talents now (5% from Deflection and 5% from Anticipation). This is a pretty simple problem to fix though, all they need to do is juggle the numbers of Vitality versus Combat Expertise. Paladins should have a higher percentage modifier than warriors since we do start 1200 lower than them though.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Joasuf

Poor wording on my part I was referring more to the fact RF gives us 6% damage reduction whilst if I remember correctly warriors get 10% so if a pally and a warrior were both to be hit for 1k the pally will take 940 damage whilst the warrior takes 900. Admittedly its not a massive difference but on hard fast hitting mobs it all adds up.

 

JulianMaiev

And druids now get 15% global damage reduction from Mother Bear, along with 26% stamina scaling. Maybe we shouldn't be asking for nerfs quite yet.

 

PsyBomb

hmmm, Beacon of Light on a target means that all healing you do within 40 yards of them hit them, too, right? A Glyphed Holy Light is healing for 10% more than it really should, so essentially if there is raid damage going around, BoL combined with it becomes the highest HPS tool a holy paladin has other than LoH, even when you only consider the main tank the Beacon is on. Just a thought.

To teach and to learn, to laugh and make others laugh. This is my purpose, and any day in which I don't wasn't worth the time it took to get through.

 

Jessie

I've found that even with 1 mob at a time, it isn't too bad after you pick up SoR at 75. That, plus the Tome of the Lightbringer makes for decent kill times. However, pulling huge groups of mobs still makes for the best grinding method. Figurine of the Colossus remains quite useful.

When we look at you we don't even see the testicles on your chin. We see the testicles in your heart.

 

Smurrf

The break-even point appears to be at 2000 stam from gear. Right up until that point, Warriors and Paladins in identical gear have Warriors out in front. At 2000 stam, however, Warriors gain an additional 200stam from talents, equaling a bonus stam of 2200. Paladins gain an addition 320stam from talents, equaling 2320 bonus stam. The difference, 120stam, equates to the 1200 initial HP difference between the two classes, and so at that point they're equal. At any point after 2000 stam from gear, however, the Paladin starts getting more health than the Warrior (again, given identical gear.)

The question is, is 2000 stam from gear a possibility or a definite? If that's going to be the model at killing Arthas-level of raiding, then perhaps it's alright. If 2k stam from gear will be on our bodies by the time we're done with Naxx, however, then it'll need to be addressed...but probably through the use of tier pieces rather than screwing around with talents (either stack more stam on Warrior pieces or give as a 2pc bonus an extra 2% stam or something.)


(This is entirely napkin math, and going off of numbers listed in here as the difference between classes. My numbers may be off, and I invite anyone to go back and check it on their own.)

 

Liar

Scaling is always a nice thing but in this particular case Paladins will outscale Warrior health in the near-future. It may not be in Naxx, but a tier later because getting 2000 Stamina doesn't sound all that hard to me. Some Warriors already run around with 1400 Stamina unbuffed at level 70 so getting another 600 from 10 levels, higher ilvl gear and raid buffs doesn't sound unreasonable. As ugly as it may sound, why can't the talent give Paladins +1200 health and a +5% Stamina scaling (or whatever the equivalent is with the Warrior Vitality at release)? That would provide scaling and would prevent long term problems.


I don't think we can compare Warriors/Paladins to Druids. We don't share the same gear. Druids are meant to use Rogue leather which naturally has less Stamina than a Plate tanking item of the same ilvl. Warrior vs Paladin comparisons are fine, Warrior/Paladin vs Druid ones are, in my eyes, not (or atleast not as easy to do).

Unexpected TankPoints error Clearly someone doesn't understand how EH works. That, or upgrading from T8 to T9 is optional in beating Arthas. Clearly.

 

flyingtoastr

Well my guild's prot pally has around 1750 stamina now fully raid buffed. Given prot pally gear will be very differently itemized in Wrath we can't make any major assumptions, but I wouldn't doubt that we'll see tanks breaking 2k stamina easily in early Naxx.

Mmhm. Ugly solution but most likely the best. The only thing that would need to be addressed from there is to maintain about equal mitigation/avoidance between the two classes. With the changes to Crushings Paladins won't be penalized by having to stack avoidance at low gear levels (when warriors can stack stamina with no consequence).

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Deathwing

Isn't that because druids have to use rogue dps gear? So their physical mitigation without mother bear will be below plate, as will their stamina.

Also, mother bear counts yourself?

 

Khaelarys

DPS is already lower on SoC than stock seals under pretty much any circumstance. We have very real itemization concerns for this seal - it doesn't scale on either ArP or Haste, and only sideways with the dps of the weapon, and now you can't rank 1 it.

Eventually this seal has to be superior in some way to be worth the talent point. Auto Crit on judgement under a stun condition just doesn't seem like that's it.

EDIT

I'm curious at this point why RF isn't baseline.