WotLK talent trees/abilities discussion - Page 122

PSGarak · 09/05/08, 3:43 PM

On the other hand, this does bode well if they change JoW to return a percent of base mana instead of total mana. The percent would be increased to give around the same regen for a holydin as it used to, and you'd be getting the same mana per proc as them without having to load yourself down with INT. Not scaling at all is better than scaling with a stat you don't use, because it's not balanced around you having that stat. JotW could be redone in the same way.

◊ Cathela · 09/05/08, 4:05 PM

Originally Posted by rozetta

This has bothered me from the moment I heard about it. I mean, I know they're trying to get prot specs to solo with a shield, but as it stands, making this useable with a 2-hander would open up better soloing and the possibility of even PvP usage (at the BGs level). Prot still has the problem of being useless for absolutely everything but running instances or levelling up to 58. Now that they've made a conscious effort to improve the prot tree for Warriors, especially on the DPS front, I hope they don't relegate the Paladin prot tree to tanking or off-healing. This would continue to make the tree useless for more than 50% of the game.

While I certainly wouldn't complain if HotR were opened up to two-hand use, I really don't think it's necessary. Shield of Righteousness is a huge amount of proactive damage done for a very low mana cost -- with the deep Prot talents, I believe it still costs less than 200 mana for my level 79 paladin on beta. In the soloing gear I use in beta, I'm at ~700 block value (without autoblocker activated or blockvalue libram active), so base damage is 1600 or so. This is with a very imperfect selection of pre-BC blockvalue gear; I've started collecting more of it on live recently and I'm shooting to enter WotLK with 1k block value or more. That's with legacy gear of course; it's going to be even higher at level 80 in WotLK.

I don't think most people realize what a game-changer this ability is until they see it in action (I know I didn't). I don't know where the numbers come out of you compare a hypothetical 2-h HotR with 1-h HotR+ShR, but I think what we have now is going to be very nice. I don't want to solo with a 2-hander in the beta; the one-hander setup works very well, it's very fun, and it feels the way a prot paladin should feel (IMO, of course).

My one complaint is that you can't get ShR prior to 75, and the soloing experience is rather luckluster prior to that. (Though to be fair, I haven't tried ShR-less soloing with the new BoSanct; I could see it being a bit better with the mana regen.)

Originally Posted by GSH

I was thinking about Retribution's mana issues, and it occurs to me that Protection still has the same problem when not getting hit. For example, if you're off-tanking an add, what do you do when the add dies? You're in all strength gear with no int, so your mana pool is pathetic, and you can't really heal. If you try and do damage, you'll run out of mana really fast as BoSanc or Spiritual Attunement won't return anything. Prot warriors, feral druids, and death knights can at least sustain their damage for the rest of the fight, even if the damage is lower than a DPS character.

SoW. The other nice thing about ShR is that its damage is seal-independent, so having to twist seals for regen or even going SoW fulltime doesn't cut into your dps nearly as much as it would for Ret. I'm not saying a universal regen mechanic tied into judgement wouldn't be nice, but I don't think it's really a necessary piece of Prot utility.

Also, regarding healing in tanking gear: It's still not going to be awesome, but it's going to be a lot better than it is in TBC. First of all, TbtL will give you more spelldamage than you were getting from all of your non-weapon gear slots in TBC. Second, the coversion from +damage/+healing to +spellpower is a pretty substantial buff to prot (and ret) off-healing. If you have +500 spelldamage in tanking gear in TBC, you have +500 healing. If you have +500 spellpower in tanking gear in WotLK, you have (effectively) +950 healing. Your heals won't be up there with Holy by any means, but they won't be the pathetic joke they are in TBC.

Originally Posted by Chicken

I'd prefer personally if the Blessing of Sanctuary effect were to become the effect of Improved Devotion Aura though: Remove the extra healing and armor, change it to the 1/2/3% damage reduction and the mana/rage/runic power restoration on avoiding an attack. Buff redundancy is nice and all, but I think in the current design having four potential blessings a person can benefit from doesn't work. With ten classes, I'd say two blessings should give the most powerful effect, with a third blessing being nice but not required. That works best if there's one blessing which is desirable for everyone (Kings), and two other blessings of which the desirability depend mostly on your class and spec, but can be nice to have both if your class is designed that way (Might, Wisdom).

Well, the counter-argument would be that we currently have exactly that system, and Sanct is the tank-specific blessing, with Might being the "nice extra".

Folding the BoSanct effect into Devo somehow would be fine with me, though, and it would have a strong parallel to Sanctified Retribution at the same depth in the tree. (I would miss having Ret for soloing, but on the other hand I'd get to use might.)

Originally Posted by Kigale

you are right of course, but 3% of 94 is less than 3% of 100.

The point though is that adding BoSanct will always reduce your damage by 3% of what you would have taken without it. It's a constant return, not a diminishing return.

Having the buffs stack linearly would actually give an increasing return. This is what the anti-spell-knockback effects do now for instance (hence the ability to eliminate them by stacking SF+Conc. Aura for example).

Phayne2355 · 09/05/08, 4:05 PM

that would be all fine and well except that not only ret paladins benefit from JoW.

Noctivagant · 09/05/08, 4:15 PM

JoW would require a pretty big change to be the Ret go-go-go mechanic.

It takes 28% to get in and out of it alone. If you stay in it, then your damage seals are removed from the plate.

JoW ala the new Aspect of the Viper, something you go into for short periods to get back to full, would be a more appropriate Ret mechanic.

I think it should be held inviolate that Ret paladins are using a) a Ret seal and b) a Ret blessing the vast majority of the time.

Khaelarys · 09/05/08, 4:21 PM

I still maintain that mana-pool % regeneration isn't intrinsically worse for us, the numbers can be tuned. If they would make the dps abilities mana cost small enough, then only our utility has to be maintained by this and if that IS the case, then it's the same rate for us as it is for Holy - Only, our mana pool is so low we have don't have any cushion, and their mana pool (plus illumination) is big enough that the "utility" that they provide does eventually burn out, but it takes much much longer.

If Judgement and Seals were Free, then only the additional functionality would be fueled by mana - and that really IS a function of your current mana pool and role, but no matter how burned you get, you have the skills necessary to regen up from 0 without hoping to activate your spirit regen.

Ret - small mana pool for utility, but if CS was very small, and DS was not quite as small, then we could still provide dps at the the same rate that we get mana back from replenished and jow. When our reserves are gone, without any conservation, all we can do is Judge to get mana for CS and DS, and white swing. If we want to give up DS, we can continue to cleanse/hands a bit. If we want to give up CS and DS we can throw a heal about 1 every 10 s. That is not at all overpowered, but at least we can still continue to deliver some modicum of dps, which is our role. Granted, if we cleanse or heal or throw hands as quickly as possible in addition to all out damage, we'll run out of mana. That's fine. But we won't always be out of mana, and we won't be useless while we are.

Prot - Extra mana from SA and Sanct, but they really don't need utility as much as they just need to fuel their threat/dps abilities. So their tank skills can cost slightly more than the ret dps skills. Assuming (not currently the case) that we don't have to burn 30% of our mana on the pull, then these two forms of mana will almost always be enough, add in JoW or BoW in a low mana environment. Either way, they still have the ability (jow, sow) to generate enough mana even when OOM to maintain something resembling a threat rotation. Even if it doesn't include vengeance or consecrate. Note, these tanking abilities still need to be a little cheap. ALL of our mana and some of our threat continues to require us to have aggro, so being oom means we also lose our mana regeneration. However, Divine Plea can be used in that case for to get enough mana to get threat back, or the tank can use his free abilities to build up enough mana to fight for aggro again.

Holy - Mana regen is fueled by illumination and Replenished and Divine Plea. The latter two are based off of their giant mana pool, the former is based upon their output (and the RNG). If they DO go oom, they can still judge wisdom and SoW (for free) and regen, but their output is going to be starved at best, or non existent while they mana up at worst. In raids, BoW + Illumination + Replenished + SA should be enough to, over time, fuel their abilities for as long as necessary. I don't know how long they want paladins to be able to heal without going OOM, but that math can easily be handled by the above cooldown adn itemization.

EDIT: What would make a very interesting deep prot talent is to make your own heals trigger SA - then you can use SoL, JoL, loh yourself, whatever you want to generate mana from healing.

Suicidal Zebra · 09/05/08, 5:16 PM

Originally Posted by PSGarak

On the other hand, this does bode well if they change JoW to return a percent of base mana instead of total mana. The percent would be increased to give around the same regen for a holydin as it used to, and you'd be getting the same mana per proc as them without having to load yourself down with INT. Not scaling at all is better than scaling with a stat you don't use, because it's not balanced around you having that stat. JotW could be redone in the same way.

Erm, Holy Paladins aren't likely to be gaining advantage from JoW in raids, they're typically well out of melee range. That aside, given that Judgement of Wisdom is a raid debuff its' regeneration rates need to be balanced against all the classes likely to benefit from it. Inevitably whatever is chosen one class wins and another loses out, but at least with the current rate of 2% Total Mana on a 4 sec cooldown it mimics an additional Replenishment for offensive mana users, and with any luck will be more useful for more classes. Hence basing JoW on Total rather than Base Mana is more sensible IMO.

By balancing personal mana regen for hunters around Aspect of the Viper they can scale Hunter regen rates independent from raid-wide regen rates. By further tweaking of mana consumption rates on shot rotation Blizzard can have a lot of fine control over Hunter-specific DPS up-time and adjust accordingly as and when necessary. The same can be achieved with Seal of Wisdom if they so desire - Seals after all are not dissimilar to Aspects - but it puts Ret Paladins in a hole in terms of justifying their raid slot vs other melee DPS classes and specs who can do 100% DPS 100% of the time.

Fundamentally, Judgement of Wisdom would only be for raid-wide Mana regen and scaled accordingly. For personal mana regen Seal of wisdom would be used.

Like I say, it's a solution but far from an ideal one. Certainly using a buffed SoW would be nothing like having a 'blue rage bar', and worse still it's a boring as heck mechanic.

Selenia · 09/05/08, 5:34 PM

Originally Posted by Suicidal Zebra

By balancing personal mana regen for hunters around Aspect of the Viper they can scale Hunter regen rates independent from raid-wide regen rates. By further tweaking of mana consumption rates on shot rotation Blizzard can have a lot of fine control over Hunter-specific DPS up-time and adjust accordingly as and when necessary. The same can be achieved with Seal of Wisdom if they so desire - Seals after all are not dissimilar to Aspects - but it puts Ret Paladins in a hole in terms of justifying their raid slot vs other melee DPS classes and specs who can do 100% DPS 100% of the time.

The huge difference is that your aspects doesn't dictate your damage to anywhere near the same degree as your seals do.

Switching aspect isn't that big a dps loss. Switching a seal is nasty.

Kigale · 09/05/08, 5:42 PM

I'd like to see CS given the functionality of Chimera Shot (MM hunter 51 point talent). It would do something different based on the Judgment the paladin applied. Mana back if JoW, Health if JoL (or could apply a healing debuff), and maybe a short snare or stun or interrupt if JoJ. The mana back can be based on base mana. Avitus' math showed paladins use about 50% base mana per 10 second rotation. Crusader Strike with JoW could return 30% base mana. This change could solve many deficiencies of the spec, but not all at once. Choice is good.

• Avitus · 09/05/08, 6:10 PM

Originally Posted by mclem

As a footnote, people are making the point that Battle Shout is now the same effect as Blessing of Might, but is there any BS equivalent to glyphed Blessing of Might?

Just a note: It's still unclear whether the added spelldamage from the BoM glyph will even stack with pure spelldamage buffs. It would be a pretty glaring flaw if it does and Battle Shout doesn't get a similar glyph though, you're right. (Or a "glyph minigame" headache as toaster put it).

Originally Posted by Chicken

More in the "Unlikely to happen but it'd be neat if..." realm would be if Kings were made baseline, and each spec basically has it's "own" blessing. That is, every Paladin can provide Might, Wisdom and Kings, but if you have a Paladin of the appropriate spec, you get a slightly more powerful version of each Blessing. That'd probably require improved Might to be moved slightly deeper in the Retribution tree. I'd say it'd be neater design anyway if it was a 2 point talent on about the same depth in the tree as improved Wisdom.

I have to say agree here. On a tangent to this idea (which you may or may not agree with), I wonder if it made sense to change BoSanc into an "improved BoK" talent. This way, all paladins would have Kings and if you have a protadin their kings spell would have the effects of BoSanc rolled into it (10% stats + 3% less damage reduction, regen when parry/dodge/block). It would certainly make the blessings system much more streamlined, rather than the mess it is right now (who can even play without pallypower?).

One might argue "imp BoK would be too powerful as a single buff, but this can be fixed by a deep prot placement, out of reach of anyone who'd use it in PvP.

Originally Posted by Kigale

Avitus' math showed paladins use about 50% base mana per 10 second rotation. Crusader Strike with JoW could return 30% base mana.

Actually 54% per 8 seconds not 10 seconds (or 32% if no Consecration is used).

On a complete sidenote, this is one of those cases where "when your house is on fire, you don't really comment on the small things", but one of the things that should get changed is "Retribution Aura". I really have to wonder why they chose to roll the effects of imp Sanctity into one of the most useless auras there are (for ret). I always felt that an aura should augment your main role, having to stick on Retribution Aura ("thorns") just for the talented benefit while the base benefit is useless to us, makes no sense.

Not to mention of course, how a raid wide "thorns" aura is a dumb idea to begin with (why does this aura in this form even exist?).

Suicidal Zebra · 09/05/08, 6:13 PM

Originally Posted by Selenia

The huge difference is that your aspects doesn't dictate your damage to anywhere near the same degree as your seals do.

Switching aspect isn't that big a dps loss. Switching a seal is nasty.

Blizz would probably balance that by either making the time required to return to full mana relatively small or increasing the DPS during DPS-Seal up-time to compensate, the former being more likely.

It's probably time to remove the mana cost, duration and 'Magic Buff' nature of Seals entirely now too. The 14% of base mana cost to re-Seal puts an extremely severe crimp on making SoW functionally similar to AotV, and if Seals cost no mana then there's no point in them being a limited duration magical buff.

And, just to reiterate, I don't like this idea, I just think it's the one that Blizzard is most likely to go with. It definitely doesn't go anywhere to solving how tough Retribution has it in PvP against drain-teams, which was another huge plus for the old Judgements of the Wise.

◊ Cathela · 09/05/08, 6:42 PM

Originally Posted by Suicidal Zebra

And, just to reiterate, I don't like this idea, I just think it's the one that Blizzard is most likely to go with. It definitely doesn't go anywhere to solving how tough Retribution has it in PvP against drain-teams, which was another huge plus for the old Judgements of the Wise.

I think my view on this is that if the devs want to implement a bad solution to the problem, they'll have no trouble coming up with one on their own.

If you're going to spend time outlining and explaining a suggested solution, make it worth your time and propose a solution you like.

Tilted · 09/05/08, 8:12 PM

Originally Posted by Avitus

Just a note: It's still unclear whether the added spelldamage from the BoM glyph will even stack with pure spelldamage buffs. It would be a pretty glaring flaw if it does and Battle Shout doesn't get a similar glyph though, you're right. (Or a "glyph minigame" headache as toaster put it).

Even if they do add something similar for Battle Shout, there's the added problem of limited glyph slots. What warrior do you know of would use a glyph that only benefits other players? I'm not saying it can't happen, but odds are the vast majority of the warrior community would write that off as totally pointless and wouldn't even consider using it.

DarKNecross · 09/05/08, 8:20 PM

Originally Posted by Tilted

Even if they do add something similar for Battle Shout, there's the added problem of limited glyph slots. What warrior do you know of would use a glyph that only benefits other players? I'm not saying it can't happen, but odds are the vast majority of the warrior community would write that off as totally pointless and wouldn't even consider using it.

I think you're making hasty generalizations here. Plenty of Warriors had no problem using the Solarian's Sapphire trinket well into Sunwell. Do you think that random Warrior running around in greens with +Defense gems in his gear is going to have a glyph that benefits other players? Probably not. You can say the same thing about Paladins, though. If they're in a competent guild that pays attention to the needs of the raid, I don't see it being a problem.

Fiola · 09/05/08, 8:33 PM

Originally Posted by Avitus

On a complete sidenote, this is one of those cases where "when your house is on fire, you don't really comment on the small things", but one of the things that should get changed is "Retribution Aura". I really have to wonder why they chose to roll the effects of imp Sanctity into one of the most useless auras there are (for ret). I always felt that an aura should augment your main role, having to stick on Retribution Aura ("thorns") just for the talented benefit while the base benefit is useless to us, makes no sense.

Not to mention of course, how a raid wide "thorns" aura is a dumb idea to begin with (why does this aura in this form even exist?).

I'd guess it's because Sanctity Aura is flat out more "worthless" than Ret Aura. Sanctity Aura is useful to paladins and non-shadow DPS priests. Ret aura is useful to any tank type, as well as being the equal of Sanctity Aura for soloing. Ret Aura still has value for Prot paladins since it deals Holy damage, and 95% of mobs will attack you in melee, and until max level, the static values of Ret aura keep up with the 10% holy damage added by Sanct. Aura.

Besides, it shares a name with the talent tree. = P

• Avitus · 09/05/08, 8:49 PM

Fiola, why must you nitpick

"I understand how the game works", I understand what ret aura is good for, it still doesn't change the premise of what I'm saying:

Using an aura that's useless for your own role is bad design. They need to come up with something different and roll the thorns effect into something prot uses/has.

That and of course the whole "indiscriminate raid wide thorns" effect is horribly dumb.

Resiana · 09/05/08, 8:54 PM

Sacred Shield
Each time the target takes damage they gain a Sacred Shield, absorbing 500 damage and increasing the paladin's chance to critically hit with Flash of Light by 50% for up to 6 sec. They cannot gain this effect more than once every 6 sec. Lasts 30 sec.
12% of base mana, 40 yd range, Instant cast

Added functionnability to Sacred Shield, probably will be working on this Beta patch. Discuss!

flyingtoastr · 09/05/08, 8:55 PM

Getting off the argument of how silly our auras are (which they are), couple of changes in the newest beta push that I've found:

-Beacon of Light can only be on a single target at a time, making it once again a pretty "meh" talent.
-Sacred Shield procs increase FoL crit chance by 50%. Cost increased to a massive 12% of base (~500 mana) which once again pushes it into the "meh" category.
-Hammer of Wrath is instant! My pet project is officially complete!

• Avitus · 09/05/08, 9:07 PM

Originally Posted by flyingtoastr

-Hammer of Wrath is instant! My pet project is officially complete!

*Cheers* Looking forward to not being able to use it in PvP due to being oom all the time :P

Jokes aside, this should be very good for PvE if we get mana fixed. Almost too good, making me hope they don't balance our DPS too much around it.

Thorgred · 09/05/08, 9:10 PM

One of the best suggestions i've seen lately was posted up the thread: Make druids Mark of the Wild a % buff like kings.
The only problem being that Improved MotW is a tier 1 talent accessible to everyone.

I think as well in this kings debate that we're assuming 3 paladins in a raid- this might not be a fair call...
If prot pallys stay with Kings and Sanc, then they will be almost mandatory. A Ret pally brings mana return ability and some good buffs -haste/might/wisdom. Yet I can't really see Holy bringing anything unique to the table.

I still think the best solutions would be to either fold Sanctuary into other paladin spell, and/or make kings baseline (possibly at reduced effectiveness).

as for new changes- instant HoW, YAY
-beacon- it still sucked anyway
-sacred shield - ~80% crit with FOL for 30 secs isn't worth 500 mana? this seems pretty good to me...

flyingtoastr · 09/05/08, 9:11 PM

Originally Posted by Thorgred

-sacred shield - ~80% crit with FOL for 30 secs isn't worth 500 mana? this seems pretty good to me...

It's 500 mana, a GCD, and the increased crit only lasts for 6 seconds (basically once the ability proc comes off cooldown it drops, so it will never be perfect 30 second uptime). It's not bad, it's "meh".

If it was removed from the GCD though it would be the most sex-leg ability ever. /here's to wishful thinking!

bellator · 09/05/08, 9:14 PM

Originally Posted by flyingtoastr

Getting off the argument of how silly our auras are (which they are), couple of changes in the newest beta push that I've found:

-Beacon of Light can only be on a single target at a time, making it once again a pretty "meh" talent.
-Sacred Shield procs increase FoL crit chance by 50%. Cost increased to a massive 12% of base (~500 mana) which once again pushes it into the "meh" category.
-Hammer of Wrath is instant! My pet project is officially complete!

I agree with the meh'ness of Beacon, but think Sacred Shield could be quite powerful depending on the healing method emplyed in raiding. Whilst the 500 damage reduction is poor (hopefully there will be a spdam coefficient with it now), the FoL Crit increase is nice. The wording of the FoL buff implies that provided the tank has the shield on at all times, the uptime of the FoL buff will be fairly high. After facting in illumination, the Sacred Shield will pay for itself on average after 5.7 FoL heals. (0.15 / (0.07 * 0.5 *0.6)). If encounters are biased towards FoL, this will both increase the hps and decrease the mps of using FoL.

• Avitus · 09/05/08, 9:18 PM

Additionally, the new Sacred Shield seems like a big PvP/Arena buff to me if you consider Sheath.

500 damage reduction every 6 seconds and every time it procs, just throw a FoL with ~70-80% crit rate to get Sheath HoT rolling. I'm sure it'll be purged, dispelled, but it's still powerful nevertheless if it stays up.

flyingtoastr · 09/05/08, 9:23 PM

It would be nice to get SS changed to a hand at the least. Holy Pallys have 1 point floating around in the pre-8 tiers that they have to throw somewhere, putting it in Blessed Hands or whatever for the cost reduction would be excellent.

bellator · 09/05/08, 9:55 PM

Originally Posted by Avitus

Additionally, the new Sacred Shield seems like a big PvP/Arena buff to me if you consider Sheath.

500 damage reduction every 6 seconds and every time it procs, just throw a FoL with ~70-80% crit rate to get Sheath HoT rolling. I'm sure it'll be purged, dispelled, but it's still powerful nevertheless if it stays up.

I hadn't thought about it's combination with sheath, but stacking crit, to get the FoL crit to as close to 100% as possible could lead to some Crazy stacking HoT's.

bv728 · 09/05/08, 11:32 PM

Originally Posted by Selenia

The huge difference is that your aspects doesn't dictate your damage to anywhere near the same degree as your seals do.

Switching aspect isn't that big a dps loss. Switching a seal is nasty.

For most hunters, leaving Aspect of the Hawk is a several hundred DPS loss. Imp AotH is a big DPS talent for Hunters, providing a significant boost especially in a raid environment.

While dropping SoTheorycraftBest looses you a lot of DPS, I think it's comparable (not equal, but comparable; the loss, especially with LK talents for Ret, isn't different enough to make comparison unreasonable).