flyingtoastr

Ret talent feedback eh?

Hm. Makes me wish they would send me a key already (stupid forum ban). The major ones I would say:

Tier 1
Benediction- Absolutely worthless. Even 5 points in this talent is only a little more than 20 Mp5 assuming you cast Judgement on cooldown (which most DPS cycles do not).

Improved BoM- Only picked up because Benediction is so awful.

Tier 4
Improved Retribution Aura- Boring talent. PvE ret will end up taking it because we have extra points and it is a nice tank threat boost, but in it of itself it is quite a bland talent.

Tier 5
Sanctified Retribution- This is flat out worse than Ferocious Inspiration, which it is sharing a buff slot with. It needs to be bumped up to 3% just like FI.

Tier 6
Vengeance- Nerfing our sustained damage does not reduce our burst. This talent should never have been reduced to two. It does not hurt our burst terribly (see Seal of Command) and given that it can still be dispelled (unlike Bloody Vengeance and Wrecking Crew) it can be easily countered in PvP.

Judgements of the Wise- Should be changed to an amalgamation of the old and new versions. Something akin to "Restores mana to you equal to 10/20/30% of the damage done by your Judgement spells. In addition your Judgement spells grant Replenishment to 10 nearby party or raid members". We can not operate as a melee class competitively in any aspect of the game without resource self sufficiency.

Tier 7
Sanctified Seals- The crit chance is nice, but making seals undispelable shouldn't be talented. Especially now that Holy Pallys have a very good reason to use Judgements in PvP and given that both Seals and Judgements invoke a GCD (not counting the massive mana cost) with seals dispelable it becomes almost impossible for a Holy Paladin to use the bottom tiers of their tree (dispelers will simply wipe off the seal before the GCD is up to Judge). Make seals baseline undispelable and give Sanctified Seals some other fun effect ("reduces the damage you take from your Seal and Judgment of Blood/Martyr by 20/40/60%" would be superb).

Tier 9
Crusader Strike- Solid ability, lackluster talent. Crusader Strike is nothing but an instant weapon attack. It does nothing special. It is incredibly boring for a 41 point talent.

Tier 10
Righteous Vengeance- Terrible for its position. It is a very small increase in DPS for 5 talent points on 2 long cooldown abilities incredibly deep in the tree. Utter crap.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Aerynlore

Just to nit-pick, FI is 3%, but conditional on a pet's critical strike AND party-only. Some fights, it will have 90+% up-time, some fights will see zero up-time.
Sanc Ret has 100% up-time and to the entire raid. I'm willing to bet that if you run the numbers, SR is actually a greater raid DPS bonus for any 10 or (even more so) 25 man raid.

 

kharen

Can someone with access to the US beta forums throw in a link to the EU beta forum prot/ret talent feedback threads up in the relevant US threads? There's nothing stopping them from reading them anyway, but given the amount of feedback we get over here, it'd be nice for someone to remind them that we exist.

 

flyingtoastr

Between the flat out amount of crit hunter pets have and some of the new talents like Cobra Strikes (your critical shots have a 60% chance to cause your pet's next 3 attacks to crit) FI is going to easily have full uptime except on fights where the pet gets gibbed. Even so, is that a reason our talent is flat out worse in every regard than the hunter one?

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Aerynlore

If you look at strictly 2% vs 3%, then I will agree that the aura is worse.
But then you can look at 25 raiders affected vs 5 party members affected.
You can look at 100% uptime, unconditional vs at-best 100% in the most perfect ideal world.

IF FI when raid-wide, then I think paladins would have a valid argument, but as it stands, I think SR is still superior.

 

• Theras

So except for the ways in which Ferocious Inspiration is worse than Sanctified Retribution, Ferocious Inspiration is in no way worse than Sanctified Retribution? Oooooookay. I don't disagree with the premise of what you're saying (the two skills should be nearly identical if they're sharing a buff slot; see: Battle Shout v. Blessing of Might), but that's a pretty dumb argument.

 

levk

2 points are the best, followed by one point and 3 points are the worst.

For example you have 100 AP+SP, judge 100 times:

1 point - 33 judges return for 75 each = 2475
2 points - 66 judges return for 50 each = 3300
3 points - 75 judges return for 25 each = 1875

I don't think it needs any kind of tradeoff components or anything similar. Just straight up return this much per judge per talent point and put that on a curve based on levels. Ret mana usage stays constant once you get your level 80 spells since everything you use mana for is cooldown limited. Unaffected by haste or anything like that. So it doesn't necessarily make sense for ret to have a scaling self mana return. With old JotW it made sense since you were giving mana to other people who did scale in mana cost.

I didn't see anything said about seal of justice. Since the judgment is decoupled from it nobody will ever cast it again.

What if seals were allowed to stack but brought adverse effect with them? For example have seal of wisdom return a lot of mana on proc but continuously drain mana while active. Or have seal of light return a lot of hp on proc but lower your damage considerably. If nothing smart can be figured of the damaging seals then simply allow only one.

 

flyingtoastr

FI is 33% better than SR. That means that even if you only have a 70% uptime on the buff it is flat out more DPS gained than SR. A BM hunter who can't keep his pet up for 66% of the fight has more problems than worrying about buff uptime (in other words, his DPS is going to be so abysmal he'll need to worry about keeping his raid spot). That's why the whole "but it might not be up all the time!" is a pretty flawed argument. I'm saying his argument is wrong and that there is almost nothing wrong with FI.

Actually now that I think of it Hunter pets are getting something like 75% reduction from the thing that kills them on bosses; AoE. That alone guarantees even longer life expectancy for hunter pets, which guarantees even better maintenance of FI uptime.

And yes I'm assuming it is raid wide; every other buff is going that way, why wouldn't FI?

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Aerynlore

SoJ's effect could be compared to the old Mace Specs in the Warrior and Rogue trees (chance to stun + another effect). Their Mace Spec has been changed to Ignore 3/6/9/12/15% of target's armor when using a mace. Perhaps SoJ could get changed to something similar. This would let the theorycrafting go crazy about when it is best to use SoJ vs So[CVRB]. SoJ at 15% would be a bit high, but that can be a "knob" that Blizz keeps talking about.

 

Redcape

On the contrary, SoJ at 15% would never be used by anyone ever. Look at how much damage our seals deliver now, and how much of our damage is magical and ignores armor. If SoJ was 100% it wouldn't even be overpowered at all, in fact it would be total junk. Adding 33% (ish) to autoattacks and CS and giving up all seal damage would be a huge damage downgrade.

SoJ should probably be flat out removed. They are getting rid of a lot of RNG stun procs and this one has no other use. We don't need it to fill a tree or buff a weapon type like rogues/warriors, so it should just get the axe.

 

Khaelarys

All of these contortions that we're going through to try and keep the flavor of this is just ridiculous. That system is now completely dead. Just scrap it and start over. We keep coming up with more convoluted ways to do it - but it keeps breaking down eventually with an "I don't know" answer because - it's silly.

At the end of the day, seals are, literally, just an "on next swing" ability. Basically the most boring thing in the world - only instead of timing them with our swings we have to time them with some randomly arbitrary timer (30 s, 2 min) or a dispel, and if we can't activate it, we lose a ridiculous amount of our ability - it's not like choosing between MS or HS.

The more I think about it, I think seals should -

1. Have all of the attributes of an aura, but self only. (0 mana, no duration, hit the GCD)
2. All do damage.
3. Secondary effect for the role at hand.

Baseline is Righteousness, Wisdom, or Light.

Wisdom and Light do 1/2 damage. Cannot crit. (This represents 0 mana regen)

Righteousness does good damage, scales with AP and SP, but doesn't crit.

Make a 31 point talent in all trees be the seal for that tree.

Holy Seal - Increase spell critical, 1/2 damage

Tank Seal - Vengeance, roll in a decent damage soak or a mitigation ability here.

Ret Seal - Blood, no self damage on Judgement. Scales better with AP than Righteousness. S & J can both crit.

You'll never have more than four seals - more than likely most all specs will still use Righteousness for farming and leveling, and their tree seal for PVP and PVE, and all will have the option to use Light or Wisdom for regen or survival.

If you can't tell... I'm very, very tired of sitting at 0 mana. It doesn't make sense to change judgements in such a great way, only to still tie it to a very broken combat system.

 

• Theras

I'm not saying your idea is wrong, I'm saying your argumentation is wrong. Your math is also wrong, while I'm at it. The fact that an ability is always on has inherent value to it, since whether or not you want to admit it, "almost 100%" is not "100%". Truthfully it's probably closer to 96-97% if both the Hunter and pet are stationary, ~91% if the Hunter has to move, and as low as 0% if the pet is moving, dies, or there's a phase to the encounter where the boss can't be reached by melee. On some fights these things don't matter one lick (see: Brutallus); on other fights they mean the world (see: Felmyst). You can't just hand wave those things away and say that FI is better in every way, because it's not.

A good argument for Sanctified Retribution being bumped up to 3% would be that it's range-limited to within 30 yards of the boss, while Ferocious Inspiration has unlimited range. The trade-off is that Sanctified Retribution is always on, while Ferocious Inspiration has a sub-100% uptime and gets gutted in melee out phases. That makes them equal but different, and is good design. A bad argument is that 2% is less than 3%, and FI has no negatives except for the ones that we're ignoring. That's what I'm getting at.

 

◊ Cathela

I've actually been wondering how well HotR+SoJ would work as a PvP tactic. Probably not well, unless the proc rate is higher now. If an increased proc rate for SoJ was added to a deep prot talent, it could become an interesting tool for tanking casters.

But yeah, if they're serious about getting rid of proc-based stuns, they won't want it to be good anyway.

SoJ needs a "vision" or it needs to be removed.

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

 

Spenda

There has been a considerable amount of discussion about what to do with Blessing of Kings now that Protection has two useful blessings. Most of the ideas revolve around making it a baseline ability. Blessing of Kings is probably the most powerful all around buff in WoW because of its usefulness to every class and spec (especially now that Blessing of Salvation has been removed). My suggestion is that it be removed entirely.

Without Blessing of Kings, each spec would have its ideal blessing (just as they now each have their own ideal aura). No Paladin would be needed to spec into another tree just for a buff. Encounters would not need to be designed with the assumption that raiders have access to 10% more stats.

Everyone loves having kings, but if it wasn't available, would we really miss it? Currently, it is one of those buffs that makes me feel naked if I'm not wearing it.

Any thoughts?

 

levk

If they're hellbent on not making it baseline it's better removed than left at 11 prot for sure.

I still don't get why the new sanctuary is a blessing and not a hand spell. It could be all the same thing a blessing is except not a blessing. It could even have a "Greater Hand of Sanctuary" version that eats the same reagents.

 

flyingtoastr

I'm just going to take a BM hunter from my guild. He has (with raid buffs) close to 40% crit. His pet has around a 20% chance to crit.

The pet itself has a 1 in 5 chance of scoring a critical strike on any attack. A hunter pet gaining from Windfury (20%), Swift Retribution/Boomkin (3%), Frenzy (30%) and Cobra Reflexes (20%) has an autoswing timer of 1.04 seconds. In the 10 seconds required to lose FI the pet would have almost 10 autoswings. Using that magical 20% crit you're looking at average 100% uptime.

Let's look at the pet's focus dump as well. Assuming you can use it once every 3 seconds that increases your pet's attack rate by 3.3 attacks per 10 seconds. That brings you up to 12.92 attacks per 10 seconds. With that 20% crit chance you'd be looking at an average of 3.87 seconds between crits. The chance that you get 0 crits out of those 12.92 pet attacks is about 5.6%. A pet alone can maintain the FI buff about 94% of the time.

Now bring in the new Hunter talent Cobra Strikes. With a 40% crit chance and spamming steady shot non-stop (1.5 seconds) with a 60% chance to proc off a crit you're looking at roughly one in every 4 Steady Shots guaranteeing the pet a series of critical strikes. 4 steady shots is 6 seconds.

Worst case scenario: You go through those 12.92 pet attacks and 6.67 Steady Shots and you still don't have a crit. With the numbers earlier (40% hunter crit and 20% pet crit) the chances of this happening are astronomically small, .897%. A BM hunter doing nothing except smashing his face against Steady Shot will have more than a 99% chance to keep FI up. Even if the hunter isn't attacking the pet alone can maintain roughly 94% uptime.

Even assuming the pet dies every 30 seconds (and we'll say he stays dead for 8 seconds with another 2 of movement for 10 second downtime every 40 seconds, or down a quarter of the time) over the course of a 6 minute fight you're still looking at a percentage damage increase for every of greater than 2.14%. Still better than ret aura! A BM hunter letting his pet die more than that, especially with the Avoidance talent, is just unrealistic.

To use your Felmyst example: sick the pet on a skelly. People are so spread out during air phases that ret aura isn't going to reach them anyway so the point is moot.

This isn't the hunter theorycraft thread though. We've made our points.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Kaincael

I thought I had heard that it would scale with spellpower. Is this not the case?

Also, the new Beacon of Light (I believe)? Seems quite a bit more useful, yet at the same time, a little awkward.

1 minute duration, 40 yard range... that one minute seems like it would quickly be a pain.

Anyway, what it really seems to me... is that healing two people at the same time is not really AoE healing. Personally, the only part I would love it on would be RoS phase 2, and that's only because the tank is taking damage (but not too much) and practically everyone needs to be raid healing.

@levk: Oh yes. That would probably make raid balancing (numberswise) a lot easier, especially for 10-mans.

 

◊ Cathela

The new model is that blessings last a long time and occupy a slot, and hands are shorter, on cooldowns, and take a separate slot. The point is to separate the buffs you cast before the fight according to people's roles from the buffs you cast during the fight according to the situation at the moment, and remove collisions between the two so that you can use freedom, protection, sacrifice, or salvation on someone without fucking up their long-term buffs. Setting up a Hand as a pseudo-blessing undermines the whole reason for the split between Blessings and Hands.

I'm perfectly fine with removing BoK entirely if that's the best solution. Right now it's the white elephant that everyone wants to have in a raid, but nobody wants to have in their talent spec.

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

 

Kaincael

Exactly. I can't even tell you how often Freedom/Sacrifice goes unused simply because it'd eat up Kings/Might/Salv. BoP is a little different... but even then half of the time I'm like, "Eh, I don't feel like bopping that Warlock. I'd just have to rebuff him anyway. Maybe he'll shatter."

 

Hylo

If a comment like this, coming from a paladin, is not going to wake the developers up that something is seriously wrong, I don't know what is.

(and yea, I'm inclined to agree with you)

 

PSGarak

Blessing of Kings probably should be removed, for much the same reason that Blessing of Salvation was (effectively) removed. It's irreplaceable, and a noticeable difference to the point of being mandatory, which makes it silly. Probably not as bighuge as 30% agro, but 10% stamina is a Big Deal even if the rest of it is not. Granted that the stamina is more important in raids compared to the agro in 5-mans, it still sticks out as a comparable situation. The alternative is to make it a non-blessing buff, but unless it's baked into devotion aura, or all of the paladin's blessings (hm...), I don't see that really fitting in with Paladin's current buff system.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Arthaal

I assume this will end up identical to whatever DK's Bloody Vengeance ends up as. Quoted to suggest once more that some of our abilities should be moved to the physical (holy WARRIORS after all) tree to protect us from dispells without having to resort to gimmicky talents. Your point about holy specs in arena not being to get a judgement off because seals are dispelled immediately is a prime example of why a class who can be dispelled to naught in 3-4 GCDs is not something we want.

ADDING
Divine Purpose- is utter shit. Obviously designed as a PvP talent, but with the new toughness and the fact that, so far, they apparently don't stack, I don't see anyone speccing into the talent for the AMAZING DAMAGE REDUCTION (/sarcasm). Very boring talent and even more so when you stop and think about the number of such "diminish damage by %" + other effect talents in the ret tree as is.

Had to quote just because I don't think it's said enough... compare that "talent" to all 3 similar talents in the DK tress for example. All flat 10% more damage based on a debuff they apply anyways or 75% or greater HP. Ours ends up very much below that 10% figure in any situation.

 

Khaelarys

Druids get battle rez and innervate. Warlocks get Soul Stones and Health Stones. It's okay for us to have some single draw for the class - it just needs to be baseline so it isn't tied to the spec. (Disco priests have a superior Spirit Buff - not sure why that isn't baseline and the improved be the talent. but whatever)

I'm not really sure what they draw for distinction between utility and individuality - but as long as druids get their tasty treats, I'm not at all embarrassed about sporting Kings and getting an invite for it.

 

Spenda

All of the abilities mentioned are nice, and add flavor to those classes, but none of them are required in a raid. We would still have one blessing per paladin up to three, and our auras. If kings is really the reason to bring a Paladin, then something else is wrong. To be fair, if kings is kept, it seems there should be a non stacking buff a different class could bring to provide a similar benefit.

 

Khaelarys

How many of your progression kills don't include a battle rez or maybe an innervate? I know there are cases where they aren't included, but gun to my head I'm guessing the vast minority.

Are you suggesting that none of the fights are tuned against a BR here or an Innervate there? If so, then those buffs are pure profit, and they're amazing. If they are tuned for them, then they're as required as Kings.

Where exactly is the point between flavor and required?