One more quite obvious thing. 50% extra FoL crit would be effectively close to 90-95% up. What do I mean using word 'effectively': if tank isn't damaged (lucky avoidance streak, etc) then we don't care about fol crit at all. As soon as tank is damaged, our FoL crit is 50% higher. So, when tank is getting hitted it is up and when he isn't - we simply don't care. Unless we speak about really slow hitting bosses, in majority of relevant situations buff will be up (assuming that shield is casted on tank).

And if Bliz will achieve their goal of eliminating chaincasting, what would they do between reactive casts?

Sit outside the 5sr and regen some mana?

If you're planning to stand around and shoot for spirit regen, you might as well judge first so that if you do need to heal all of a sudden you can do it faster.

Get out of the 5 sec rule, pre-cast heals... You know while they want to eliminate chain casting, I don't think it's going to be the case that you'll be just standing there doing nothing. It's impossible to keep healing 100% balanced towards being reactive as well as making it challenging at the same time, I'm sure pre-casting is going to be a major part of the game now (and/or just keeping up FoL spam between big heals).

Sorry to repost this twice but I felt it important enough to go into both threads. I've had someone do some very preliminary testing on new coefficients and I've found the following:

JoC coeffs: AP - 0.2 ; WPD - 0.23-0.25ish ; SP - 0
JoL: AP - 0.2 ; SP - 0.35

I just thought I'd add it here since this effects all paladins, not just Ret. I don't know at this point if it is just a bug, but I am relying on third party data here. I'd like someone to please confirm that this is not accurate

You're arguing against yourself there, I think. If we are only meant to be healing reactively, then haste loses all or most of its benefit in increased throughput and becomes solely a means of landing a heal as soon as possible after the damage is dealt. If that is our intention, then 100% cast time reduction from IoL is better than 10% reduction from JotP - particularly when we never have to slow our healing to get it. As soon as we get an Infusion proc we can save it until needed, using Flash the rest of the time to keep our costs low.

IoL only lasts for 10 seconds when you proc it. (If I haven't noted that in the OP, I should have.) (EDIT: Yep, my bad. I really need to update the OP.) Given the 6-second cooldown on Holy Shock, it'll be up perhaps 50% of the time if you're hitting it right on every cooldown, with good gear. JotP is about being fast the other 50% of the time; if you want to be worth anything as a reactive healer, you need to be fast even when you're not getting lucky.

As I said, a 48/0/23 or whatever build can be useful. You can spam FoL all day, roll those Sheath HoTs, and you still get IoL and all the emergency goodness that comes with it. If you need a dedicated tank spam-healer, it's probably the best build there is. But a sheath healer isn't going to be a reliable reactive healer the way a JotP paladin is.

if the eliminate the need for chain casting heals, logically guilds will simply bring less healers?

Two problems with that. First, can't replace 7 reactive healers with 6 spam-healers because under WLK mechanics the spam-healers will go out of mana. It's a change of what you can do in addition to a change in what you need to do. Second, not needing spam-healing doesn't mean that you necessarily need less healing overall, just that the distribution changed.

It is not eliminating the need. It is eliminating the possibility by tuning mana cost of the spells and mana restore from different sources.

Also, I am pretty sure that there will be relatively short periods of heavy chaincasting. Where each bit of haste would be quite handy. I think that both BoL and Sheath builds will have their niche. The question is, how broad will be that niche for each build.

I think that it will be hard to steer us away from the pre-casting, but they can reward us for using different heals in a rotation so instead of spamming one button and stop-casting it, we will use a rotation to gain benefits such as the Judgement haste, the instant holy lights and the FoL crit chance when sacred shield is up.

In the end we will still be spamming, but we will be spamming different spells at different times therefore making it a lot more fun and possibly challenging.

At the end of the day we do not have much except our casts and casting is what a Holy Paladin is going to do if he is to be of any help to the raid. With most of our abilities on the GCD it is a bit difficult to maintain a certain degree of healing on a tank while casting Salvation, Sacrifice, Sacred Shield, Beacon and judging every 20 secs.

Still, the Naxx clear was with done with 2 Holy Paladins, apparently, so we're still good.

Keep in mind, that GCD is hasted as well. I expect it to be pretty low already for Naxx gear (assuming you have 10% haste always up).

Was tanking a few instances on beta today as ret spec in prot gear (which got converted to all str instead of spelldamage) and damn I have to say I was very pleasantly surprised.

Shield of Righteousness hits like a truck in all holy damage and costs almost nothing, Divine Storm was an added heavy AoE threat attack and with the regular RF having the same power as imp RF (90%) threat was rock solid. Add to that Sheath synergizing perfectly with the STR loaded prot gear, sanctified retribution, higher crit chance and damage on judgements due to fanaticism and righteous vengeance, I really think they did a great job with ret becoming a very good instance tank + raid OT.

Only thing missing is a ranged pull.

That's interesting feedback on offspec tanking. I'm still hoping against hope for a similar kind of synergy in holy, as, strange as it seems, I enjoy both healing and tanking on my paladin. Thank you for the input from a ret point of view - and particularly the comments on Sheath. Perhaps we should indeed be looking to ret rather than prot for a solution to holy's tanking problems, as odd as it seems.

Plus likely 10% spellhaste from raid buffs (WoA totem).

SoR is now (apparently) doing 58% of the damage it used to.

I didn't chase the judgement numbers down too hard; it seemed like 60 +/- 1%.

You can use that Axe from Prince in Kara goes for 30 yards, but note it has a 3 minute cooldown and 30 second charge-up period. It would be nice if another item with a ranged attack was introduced.

Speaking of pulling, did anyone remark on that in the Prot feedback thread? A 10 second daze on Avenger's Shield is so excessive, I already get antsy waiting for the current 3 second daze to pull mobs to me, I can imagine how finger-drummingly boring a 10 second walk would be.

And then we get to Gag Order, which gives Weapon Throw the casting-pulling functionality we've been clamoring to give AS all this time.

Assuming WoA is 10% Spell Haste (Rank 2 NYI?), that could mean we'd only need 14% Haste, or 459 Haste rating to have a 1sec GCD. The 5 pieces of Naxx gear have 225 Haste Rating, meaning we'd only need 234 more Haste Rating to reach it. That seems entirely doable.

I was looking at the weapon drops in Naxx, and it occurred to me that we're going to end up fighting with casters for 1H weapons. It's hard to distinguish Caster Weapon vs. Healer Weapon because of the change to Spellpower, along with Haste being a great stat for both roles. Take for example [Grieving Spellblade]. The weapon would be great for either a Paladin or a Mage. Even if DPS classes would lean toward Spirit, like Warlocks, they'd still compete with Priests and Druids. The only real distinguishing stat between the two is Hit.

Yea it never really was that useful with that cd for constant trash pulls however. Brings back memories of Linken's Boomerang :P

Anyway "just need a ranged pull" was more of a throwaway comment/wishful thinking, my "initial impression" from comparing tanking an instance as ret vs. traditional prot (or even holy with holy shock/long range judgements).
Though it would be nice to get something, I don't see how we can claim to be entitled to it ("the other two specs have something" would be a weak argument in this case).

Anyway from an aggro/utility (Divine storm/jotw) standpoint tanking as ret is amazing, I can see it overtaking tanking as holy. Which does make sense in raids if you think about it: Have one of your "DPS" switch gear and OT a bit when needed rather than one of your potentially needed healers.

The only difference to a full out prot spec is the obvious lack of all the damage reduction talents/holy shield, but I can see us "farming" heroics with good gear like this.



I'm guessing we're intended to go for the traditional spellpower "maces" (since mages/locks can't use them) without hit.

As you say however, I can already foresee a lot of drama. Unless the weapon has hit rating, it's free for all from a usefulness perspective.

Which of course makes perfect sense, as mayor part of our damage output is from swing+seal (so haste is superior), but at the same time significant part of it is not physical (and so is DK damage), so armor penetration remains warrior/rogue stat. In case of DK most of the time damage comes not from swings, but from instant attacks/spells, so they prefer crit over haste.

I find this quite refreshing, after whole TBC initial sets stats fiasco.


It was obvious from the moment Blizzard annonced that they are going to unify items for different classes that some of the items will be netting bigger upgrades for some of them, while minor for others. I assume Blizzard decided that with their present knowledge about itemization they can afford that and that it's small price for loot rot and overspecialization of gear. It's good to know they leave specialization where it should be present though - which is on token based loot. Hopefully, it will be the case with badge loot as well.

Of course, it's big step back to the times of vanilla WoW in terms of loot dramas and such and for less organized groups it will be quite annoing.