Resiana

It seems they have reduced the amount of damage bonus Seals and Judgements gains from spellpower.

I'm left to hit for 190 with Seal of Righteousness while sitting at 1800 spell power. My Judgement deal a total of 900 damage.

Keep in mind I'm Holy, but they destroyed completely all the damage I could do now.

Seal of Righteousness
Live, Level 70, 750 Spellpower: 160 damage/swing, 800 Judgement
Beta, Level 80, 1800 Spellpower: 190 damage/swing, 900 Judgement

 

Fiola

I'm sorry if this is going into nitpick territory, but I disagree with the logic being used here. If we all agreed on everything, we wouldn't need a discussion forum. = P


First off, the paladin is a buff provider - it shouldn't be "bad design" for us to use an aura that helps the group, even if it isn't directly related to our "damage role" as Ret. (ie: mitigation auras)

Second, the Ret paladin role is to increase the group's damage, both personally and by buffs. Someone is going to take melee damage whether or not we use our auras. Ret aura adds "free damage" for the group, and will be the only damaging aura after Sanct. Aura gets the axe. It makes sense for the Ret tree to improve the damage aura; with the relevant talents, it won't be a situational damage boost either.



Speaking of auras, does anyone still think it'd be good if auras were on their own GCD? I think aura switching should be encouraged; the current state of things make it very difficult to switch auras (in PvP) due to GCDs clashing. (cleanses, heals, etc) If they want to auras to keep some form of opportunity cost, they could add a 5 second "aura CD", so you have to choose auras carefully.

While we're at it, they should make auras physical school like totems, too ... (Can't switch auras when spell locked, last I checked)

 

Guybrush

With all this talk about Ret Aura main function doesn't really help much for a Ret Pala, you forget that no Pala Tank actually ever use Devotion Aura, and I know for sure I won't use it outside of raids in Wotlk. But there's a good chance I'll still spec for it.

All in all I like what they did with auras when it comes to raid enviroment.

 

• Avitus

Well, maybe it's just me, but I didn't think anyone would argue against Ret Aura being a bad choice to be the default aura for Ret paladins (and please ignore the name, it's completely misleading as it doesn't improve "ret" functionality in any way).

Fine, that's a matter of opinions then. I still find it silly that ret is forced to run with an aura designed for prot (the name is misleading).

A good design would have you giving a buff/aura while "wanting" to give it due to gaining from it yourself.
A bad design has you using auras you don't need, and justifying it with the excuse that you are a "buffing class".

Ultimately players will use what makes most sense for group combos, the difference in good/bad design however is whether they actually want to (and feel like they gain something) or not.

Just my opinion then I guess.

 

flyingtoastr

The set stats for the UBRS version of Naxx are out on MMOC. Good news is we can easily extrapolate stat values based on gear and ilevel now. Bad news is we don't know the set bonuses yet.

Retribution
Holy
Protection

Just as was assumed Prot and Ret have exactly zero intellect. The most interesting thing (I saw) was the inclusion of haste for the lowest ilevel epic gear. Strong departure from the Vanilla/TBC model of the early tier sets having very basic stats and expanding as the ilevel increased.

Another interesting comparison is that the warrior tanking and pally tanking sets are quite different. The warrior set has a large amount of Dodge and Parry while the pally set is filled with sexy Shield Block Value. Interesting.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Resiana

What the..? Where is the MP5?..

Just how exactly are Paladin going to work with mana regen without any MP5?

Why it has the feeling the PVP/PVE stats has been switched all along?

 

flyingtoastr

Remember that these are just 5 out of 17 item slots we'll be using. I'm sure there will be plenty of regen heavy crap lying around.

Also worth remembering that these are the lowest possible ilevel epics in Wrath. We're talking Kara level stuff. Don't expect it to have wonderful itemization with oodles of every stat you ever dreamed of.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

◊ Cathela

The Prot set looks well done. I like the mix of strength and blockvalue for threat.

In the brief periods I was able to stay online, I've discovered that all of my old tanking gear has had the spellpower changed to strength. This includes Lightbringer, but also my two offset prot-paladin pieces from BT and the Kalecgos legs. Haven't been able to take a look at the lower-level tank gear.

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

 

Resiana

Sure, but why the need for so much haste?

I feel like the set is kind of underwhelming atm.

Oh yeah btw, the set's look is Redemption (Tier 3).

 

Rasputin

This is a welcome change. I hope to god it gets implemented in 3.0, allowing us to use appropriate threat mechanics until the expansion. It will also make it significantly easier to jump into heroics and 5 mans without effectively downgrading gear to greens and blues simply because the items weren't converted to new stats.

 

Prinsesa

I'm just a little concerned at the implication of Shield Spec not affecting BV from STR as intentional given that we're still getting explicit BV stats.

This may just also mean they have another "new" stat planned out for later tiers.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Noules

I'm not sure MP5 is actually of much use any more, especially given how Replenishment works. I believe Cathela made a pretty convincing argument that itemization for intellect would be strictly better than MP5 assuming that you had a source of Replenishment (i.e. raids).

Also, haste is essentially a mana regen (or conserve) stat; anything that improves your throughput means you can use more FoL instead of HL/HS. I personally think it might have been better if they'd put haste instead of MP5 on the helm/chest pieces. With Sacred Shield, FoL is going to be extremely cheap with excellent throughput; haste lets you take advantage of that ridiculous synergy even more. The main downside is that they haven't (yet) done anything that weans us away from FoL spam - actually, given what exists so far I think we'll be even more reliant on it: HS to keep up Infusion, Sacred Shield, then FoL. Sacred Shield essentially gives a ~20% improvement in FoL HpS and reduces the mana cost by ~35%. If the amount shielded scales decently with spellpower...well, I'd feel real bad for Discipline Priests.

Edit: Due to Illumination scaling, effective mana reduction of FoL due to Sacred Shield is better than 25%.

Edit2: Actually, upon reflection, I think Sacred Shield's bubble uptime might be fairly low. If the FoL bonus goes away when the shield is used up, it could very well have a pretty low uptime. If it does, it might actually be a penalty for the bubble to absorb damage at all...which feels very counter-intuitive.

 

Snow

Actually, I think Shield Spec is working now, at least on the char sheet! It's too laggy atm to test combat.

346 str
1007 block value

adding kings...
346 str becomes 380
expected to add 17 bv
1030 listed block value
which is (1007 + (17 *1.3))!

Could someone else verify just to make sure I'm not crazy?

 

• Avitus

I'm somewhat surprised at the diversity of the sets, I was expecting the whole "unification of sets for the same role/armor class" to have the sets be more or less identical.

I guess for tanking it makes sense, however for DPS, lets break it down (the following numbers include socket bonuses):



Links:

Ret Paladin set
DPS Warrior set
DPS Death Knight set


It does look somewhat diverse, specifically the warrior sets having no haste at all but expertise/armor pen instead. I'm assuming they're intended to work out best for each class mechanic.

Besides the highest amount of STR (by a negligible margin), our set is obviously loaded with haste, I assume for SoB, though we do have the least amount of hit rating.

We also have the highest amount of stam ("wasted stats"), though it's made up for it somewhat with our set only having 1 blue socket instead of 2 and their blue sockets most probably being actually socketed purple since they have nice socket bonuses (STR, HIT).


As a general first impression, it seems Rets and DKs have very similar itemization with ours being slightly more focused on Haste and theirs being slightly more focused on Crit vs. Warrios who seem to be going all out ArmPen (which makes sense considering they're the only one of the three that gains 100% from it).




All this aside, this raises one concern: How will cross class items be balanced? For example if they throw on some ArmPen on shared items, warriors will gain a lot more from it and we'll be stuck with sub par itemisation?

And I guess this vanity speaking, but I would really like to avoid shared items that only seem to fit one set, prime example being dps plate in sunwell fitting the blackbrownish/dark warrior set and the T6 ret boots looking like they come from some sort of clown costume (bronze/white).

Attached Thumbnails

 

 

Selenia

How exactly does the new warrior "Holy Shield" compare to our original?

Immediate observation is the rather obvious one that theirs is a passive ability and ours must be activated.

At what block value does it surpass ours in damage? I'm not in beta, so no real clue on how much damage Holy Shield does at 80 in tanking gear.

 

Rasputin

It would seem to surpass Holy Shield at fairly low block values, since Holy Shield activates only on blocks, while Damage Shield activates on both blocks and unblocked damaging attacks. So if a warrior has say, 60% avoidance, 40% of attacks would trigger their Damage Shield, while a Prot Paladin would need to fill the rest of his attack table with blocks to equal that. Additionally, Holy Shield can and does get consumed before its cooldown is up, giving 0 benefit until it is reapplied, whereas the warrior ability will always function. The difference would be more pronounced at lower gear levels, where avoidance is low, gradually approaching as avoidance ramps up and it becomes easier for a paladin to fill his attack table with blocks and avoids. Aside from that, block value will be scaling up much much faster in WotLK than in TBC due to the new str->block formula as well as the redesign on tank gear to emphasize strength as a primary threat stat. This leads me to believe that the warrior ability will be superior in most ways to Holy Shield, starting out stronger in number of procs, and growing stronger in power more quickly than Holy Shield.

 

Prinsesa

One thing to consider is that it's still possible to gear for unhittability (what used to be uncrushability), so we can potentially deal Holy Shield's damage on any given attack, with the exception of massive AOE packs that eat all our charges before we can refresh HS.

Perhaps the only issue with Damage Shield is that it even works on unblocked hits, so again we have to worry about filling our attack with block to achieve the same effect while Warriors do not.

I don't know enough about Northrend itemization to predict the point of inflection, but 1 point of Holy Shield damage is worth 2.565 damage (135% built-in Holy Shield threat * 190% Righteous Fury threat), while 1 point of Damage Shield (guh what a name) damage is worth 1.45 threat (Defensive Stance).

Yes, I am aware Righteous Fury, Def Stance, Dire Bear Form and Frost Presence have another 30% threat "baked-in" to account for Blessing of Salvation's loss, but those would cancel each other out.

EDIT: We have yet to receive our polish pass, and I would bet good money that Holy Shield's damage scaling is going to change accordingly.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Hylo

If we ignore ArmorPen all the other stats are very desirable for retri palas. While our set gives us 0 expertise and rather low hit we still obviously need them.

There are not enough discovered pieces yet to make any good idea how they are going to itemize these but Shoulderplates of Bloodshed and Bracers of Lost Sentiments are looking very good from paladin PoV. Given that only 1 class out of 3 has any good use for ArmorPen I'd hope blizzard keeps offset items free of it (warriors wishing to go all-out ArmorPen can always socket for it)

As for prot, we obviously shouldn't see many offset items with +Block rating/value, but still one item with them is already discovered: Waistguard of the Tutor.

 

Malleus

I've been looking at the trees and seriously wondering if Holy Paladins should even consider the high-end Judgement talents for haste. Between Enlightened Judgements and JotP we're spending 5-7 talent points for 6-10% haste (depending on whether we are a Sheathbot or not). Further, that haste is costing us a GCD every 30 seconds to put up a Seal, which eliminates at least half of the throughput increase when taken as an average. Unless the fight is one where haste shines, it seems to me that it might be better to stick purely to healing and get our faster casts by maximising up time on Infusion of Light.

With that in mind, I came up with this as a potentially viable hybrid spec. All it loses from a regular 51/0/0 [+20] spec is the haste and the option of taking Beacon. In return, it provides the BoK that we have been concerned about someone in the raid having to find the points for, along with an extra 5% crit for bonus IoL procs.

This also raises the possibility of stripping the Holy tree to an absolute minimum for a 43/0/28 Sheathbot spec with Judgements of the Wise. It would require healing from point blank range, as you'd only have 10 yard range on Judgement without EJs, but it would allow you to function as a mana battery as well as a healer. The loss of haste is counterbalanced by an increase in spellpower, so the reduction in healing ability should not be too great. I'm not sure I'd like to try this in 25-mans if another mana battery is available, but for 10-mans it could be useful.

 

Hylo

Changes to T6 tanking gear and some other items you might have (yay, strength on Bulwark

http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/8500/protvl3.jpg

Ileft out items in this image

 

Palados

Cmon, it was discussed already. Bliz intention is that people SHOULD NOT chaincast. They want us to heal reactively (as well as other classes). And if you don't chaincast, wasting a GCD once in 30 sec is irrelevant, especially if it allows you to cast the spell quite a bit faster. Looking at Naxx items it seems that paladin will be THE 'haste' class and kings of reactive single-target healing. 5/5 talent for 320 haste (that is almost 100% up IF we don't have to chaincast) - yes please.

I am actually quite surprised, that loads of people discuss healing tree and spells without taking into account a change of healing style. Bliz stated in a blue thread that they want to eliminate chaincasting. And thus, if it will be present in some form, they will change the stuff till it is not viable or effective way to heal.


P. S. I think no one would argue, that for reactive healing haste is the best stat and it would be wrong to not maximise it with talents.

 

Qalor

I did a similar comparison with the tank set gear, and found some things interesting to me as well.

Adding up the stats, I found some oddities. Deathknights I expected to have more avoidance, but they had a TON more avoidance. ~40 dodge rating, ~50 parry rating more than warriors. Now, granted, lacking a shield for its large armor bonus and shield blocking does make an impact...we'll have to see how that balances out. Surprisingly, DK had the least amount of strength on their gear. Conclusion I get here is DK makes a streaky tank, and either scales better with strength than the other 2 tanks, or is being balanced against the ability to use a 2 hander for more damage than the others.

Warriors had the most balanced set of the 3. The only slight oddity to how things are done nowadays is a large chunk (~60) of shield block rating. Guessing that's to counter the fact they can't spam shield block anymore.

Paladins surprised me however. We got a lot less avoidance than the other 2 tanks (~15 defense, 50 dodge, 50 parry rating less than warriors), but even more block rating than the warrior has, a bunch more block value (~115), and a bit more strength than warriors. This all points toward paladin either scaling worse with stats, or being higher threat. The avoidance difference is huge, but I guess the only counter to that is we can still block every attack from a single mob so we take more predictable damage with less streakiness. It'll be really interesting to see how this all pans out.

Gemming is another interesting thought. I did not consider gem set bonuses when comparing the stats, but if we decide to gem with stamina in every slot, the paladin gets 3 out of their 5 set bonuses for free, DK gets 2, Warrior gets 0. Whether this indicates what they want tanks to do with their gems, or is completely random...I have no idea.

 

◊ Cathela

It's going to have a lot to do with Holy Shield's damage scaling; the current spelldamage-only scaling is (IMO) extremely unlikely to last through the next couple weeks; we'll have to see where things shake out when the "numbers" pass is done.

Incidentally, I don't like this skill. Not that I'm opposed to warriors having neat things (they definitely need the help for AoE tanking) but I have a warrior alt I usually play as Prot, and I'd like to feel like I'm playing two different classes when I switch between them. Of course, they're also giving paladins shield slam, so this blurring of the distinctions is coming from both directions.

I'd prefer they'd come up with a way to do things differently, though.

When I tried adding BoK, I seemed to get the right amount of extra BV from the added strength.

However when I was speccing into Shield Spec, I ended up a little bit short of the block value I should have had (if I had indeed gotten a straight 30% increase). This only amounted to losing ~10 points out of ~800, which isn't really enough to worry about, and I was kind of rushing things because I knew I only had a minute or two before the server crashed, so I might have just gotten the math wrong.

But anyway, it appears that Shield Spec is now working correctly, or very close to correctly.

I agree. But it does seem like they're leaving an alternate route open for people who really want to chaincast: skip BoL and JotP and pick up Sheath instead.

EDIT:

It makes sense, though; DK's have to spend item points on everything that warriors and paladins do, minus block value and block rating. Block value in particular appears on every single piece for paladins (and I would assume warriors as well, though I haven't looked) so freeing those points up gives you a lot of value to put into avoidance stats. And, although I haven't looked at DK mechanics seriously yet, you would expect skills based on a two-hander to scale more strongly with str/AP than skills based on a one-hander.

From the looks of things, it looks like off-set tanking plate will include pieces tailored for DKs and also some pieces tailored for shield-using tanks. So if you want to eschew block stats and build a high-avoidance set for a warrior or a paladin, the pieces are there.

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

 

• Avitus

My thoughts exactly. Additionally there's also the hit cap concern. I'm assuming Warriors as well as Death Knights will be dual wielding, so unless something has changed, they'll have a much higher cap than we do, so I'm hoping Set + shared plate items will not go over the 2h hit cap and work out as wasted itemstats for us. Dual wielding classes can always add more hit through gems/necks/rings/trinkets/capes.

Yea those last few points in the holy tree look pretty weak to me. With the change to how BoL functions (arguably less useful), I can see a lot more holy paladins going for Sheath and saving themselves those ~5-7 points in holy. With a Retadin and a Protadin in raid they won't even need to judge. Even with only 1 ret/prot they'd probably just forgo JoL.

10% haste vs HoT everytime you crit for 60% of the amount (optimal case scenario: you're solo healing and there's no overheals, sheath would add 60% more healing to all your crits. in all other cases it's still a nice buff)

 

Eligos

I can't speak for the Beta, but the Warrior's Shield Absorption talent, at least on Live, has always added to Block Value, even though it doesn't explicitly state that it does. My guess is that this change in wording has very little to do with unlinking the threat component from mitigation.