grayrest

Just got in and can confirm that AoW does make your FoL instant. You get this nifty crit->heal mechanic if you spare the GCD. I had the FoL glyph which is interfering here because it lasts 12s and you crit more often with one of the specials.

 

◊ Cathela

Will do, Synbios. Server is up right now, but I can't get past character list retrieval. I'll keep trying until I decide I need to hit the sack.



In other news, Worldie did some theorycrafting in the Prot paladin thread regarding ShR.

Assume 1000 BV "at rest" including the Redoubt buff. This is a pretty conservative estimate of what's possible with T6/Sunwell gear. Base ShR damage is then 2400. With SotT, that becomes 3120, and with the new 1-h Spec, 3432 damage. That's with no cooldowns, non-crit, and no external damage buffs. Just 3432 holy damage every 6 seconds.

Add in Autoblocker clicky and Shahraz libram and you're looking at 1400+ BV, and around 5000 non-crit ShR damage. Activate AW and it goes up to 6000. With talents in Prot and Ret you can push your unbuffed crit rate to 19%, and a crit will do 12k damage. 6 second cooldown, ignores armor, and all of this comes from the "survivability" spec.

Now I'm as happy as anyone to have some nice proactive damage out of Prot, but does this seem just a tad bit overpowered to anyone else?

EDIT: Completely untalented and unbuffed in my "Tier 6.1" gear I have 625 block value. With Divine Strength + Redoubt, 850 BV. Fully talented ShR then hits for 2900 non-crit with no cooldowns active, up to 5500 non-crit with libram/trinket/AW. I think that's gonna get nerfed.

I'm at IF; starting the requested tests now.

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

 

Rasputin

Additionally, Greater Blessing of Kings is bugged and starts off at 10% with just the 1 talent point. So the Greater Blessing gives 18% stats when fully talented. The base spell does not work this way, giving 2-10%. Good leveling blessing for now though!

Edit: Additionally, HoW is now triggering the appropriate 1.5s GCD on use. Art of War does indeed give you an instant FoL. It is a Magic buff which lasts 15 seconds, so mildly vulnerable to a purge-train. However, a purge-train on you is not the situation you're likely to be using it in anyway.

 

SanSul

Judgements of the Wise gives back 20% maximum mana on every judgement? Is there an internal cooldown, or can it apply every 8 seconds?

Holy Paladins have access to this, but it does come at a cost. You also don't get judgement range increase, so to maintain you and your raids mana regen, you need to be in close.

So basically, a Holy Paladin (with JoTW) standing in melee range judging every 8-10 seconds is providing a 25man raid with every single Retribution Paladin buff except 3% haste...isn't this a serious issue?

You do have to give up some attractive, and some unattractive deep holy talents however, but you gain 90% of Ret Paladins utility, the single best mana regen mechanic for any healer in the entire game (Full mana in 40seconds?)

 

grayrest

It applies to every judgement. Another minor point, but Benediction does not seem to reduce the mana cost of the instant FoL.

 

flyingtoastr

Thanks for checking!

This is a great little utility. Not only is it giving ret paladins a nice PvP tool but it has some great raid applications as well. With the way healing is turning out in Wrath (mana costs are so high and the removal of downranking are forcing people to heal reactively instead of spam) the little heals we can throw will make a pretty sizable difference. A 6/9/11 still has plenty of free time to throw a GCD to heal someone nearby, Divine Storm gives some nice passive healing while DPSing, etc. I love the amount of hybridity it creates, I feel much more like a supporter of my allies with this kind of stuff.

It also addresses a personal problem of my guild's healers refusing to heal my SoB recoil damage.

All they need to do to address the kind of "mid ret abuse" the holy pallys are always looking towards (the new Sanctified Seals also seems to present a problem to me, they should switch it and Heart of the Crusader really to give everyone undispelable seals) is to make deep holy more exciting. In it's current state BoL is a good ability, but the rest of the deep tree could use a little work. Making Enlightened Judgements reduce the GCD caused by Judgement (so you're not trading 1:1 with the talent) would be excellent, some more talents to take advantage of crit would be great, and a few other minor tweaks. Holy is still an incredibly lean tree and I think it could do with a little fleshing out.

It could possibly be a response to keep prot TPS up while nerfing the damage output of seals, no? You're most likely right though, that's a ton of damage.

Blizzard finally got around to sending me my invite so I'm really looking forward to trying out all this stuff soon.

 

Pyralissa

Big thumps up for those changes.

And Toaster instead of filling up on 5/5 BoK and Improved BoM you could throw those seven points, plus that extra point, and get Spiritual Focus and Healing Light to make those instant FoLs that much stronger. Does at least seem a worthy trade off, especially if your guild runs deep on Paladins and doesn't need redundant blessings from the same Paladin.

 

Unir

I like the prot and particularly the ret changes, now that the mana issue is addressed.

I have to agree with this with a caveat - the tree is fairly lean and the current BoL has some unfortunate drawbacks in a raid setting since it uses only effective healing (assuming things like double heals on primary-healed beacon targets and the crazy crit examples are bugs). The judgement talents are numerically off-base as to the haste granted, as you mention, but also out of touch with the healing function in general.

I have to agree with a couple of others who have expressed some concern about Holy. The last three tiers of Holy need some looking at. In all fairness, my impression is that they didn't get in much in the way of Holy changes in this build (as in, little to none), so hopefully the next build will include more to look at.

I'm somewhat torn on the new Divine Plea mechanic. Non-channeled is great, short cooldown is great, mortal striking my own healing output seems a bit odd - though probably workable more often than not, depending on the encounter. The lurking question in my mind is whether you can cancel the debuff by canceling the Divine Plea. Has anyone had a chance to play with it yet?

 

Amera

I am generally concerned about Holy paladins in PvP again with the Sheathe changes. While the buffs to holy shock and instant HLs are really significant, I don't think they really eclipse what other PvP healers have gotten. And at the same time, the change to BoSac is overall a hefty nerf to PvP since you won't be able to use it to get out of CC reliably. Combine that with the lack of HoTs now on those crit heals and we aren't immensely better off than live.

Basically unless someone else manages to control the druid population (like DKs), I still don't think we will be a favorable choice over them in the metagame on most team setups. We might in Season 1, because it will probably replicate a lot of the original Season 1 issues with poor resilience making paladin baseline survivability very desirable. But once cloth/leather is resil capped again, it might shift for the worse.

Being able to PvP at 70 with a lot of these abilities should be really telling.

 

Blutelf

JoTW is with the hotfix still miles above anything they could possibly ever put into the Holy tree. I find that really sad.A simple fix to "base mana" would keep it in line, though.

Holy is still going to buff Wisdomthough, even if Kings is more accessible now.

 

◊ Cathela

Other testing results:

HotR is (still) AP-normalized.

Holy Shield appears to still be scaling only with spellpower, not AP and definitely not blockvalue.

JotP is still unimplemented. So is JotJ as far as I can tell.



As far as graphics and effects go.

HotR is the same. Very nice animation and sound once it leaves your hand, but the casting animation is still the same as chain heal.

ShR is still awful. Still no sound, and the only difference is that the gold glowy effect that comes out of your shield is more detailed looking. But your character still doesn't move or do anything physical. So it's still a shitty effect, just a more refined grade of shitty.

PC faces are all low res and ugly. Not technically a paladin issue, but it's annoying me.

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

 

Altirias

A quick question : Does sanctified seals provide 3% crit to healing spells as well ?
The wording is rather different than usual increase crit chance talents, and I feel it might be offensive crit chance only.

Otherwise it would be 8% crit Holy could grab from Ret, with almost no useless talents. Benediction working for holy shock and hands is rather interesting.

The only problem is that it puts Imp Devo and Sacred duty out of reach (knowing that missing imp devo won't be an issue if you raid with a tree, because I don't think both 3% healing aura stack)

 

flyingtoastr

Something to test if you get really bored:

How is Crusade behaving against Humanoid/Elemental/Undead/Demon mobs? Is it counting as a single 6% percentage modifier or two separate 3% damage modifiers (6.09%)? Given the incredibly small variance it will take hundreds of hours of testing and logging to determine, but it is worth knowing for theorycraft purposes.

EDIT: On live SS does apply to healing spells. I see nothing that indicates otherwise in Wrath.

 

• Avitus

Have to say this patch added so much of what we were hoping for, I'm very impressed Lets just hope they don't nerf it all to hell again :P

Also kudos on making the bottom half of the ret tree actually worth taking now.

I'm not so sure. It's probably like the 4 set T6 prot bonus: 10% of 10% is 1%. So SA is increased from 10% to 11% (not 10% + 10% = 20%) sounds pretty worthless to me unless you're seeing something I'm not :P

The tooltip is a typo. Check the attached images.

It feels almost perfect now. To be honest I'd rather they don't touch it again. We can just about get everything useful in ret like this.

Two concerns:

-Since tooltips don't update with talent points (and it seems that they never are going to fix this), it means BoK shows up as "2% increase" when you buff people when it really gives 10% improved. Expected, but counter intuitive for it to show 1/5th of the effect it actually gives (where as most talented improvements just add a little bit extra).

-SoR vs SoB (vs SoC). From running around and trying different things it seems SoB is doing more damage than SoR, however JoR still does more than JoB (all assuming SotP). Spreadsheet people it would be nice to nail this down considering all the changes so we know where we're at exactly.

What are people leveling with at the moment? With instant FoLs every now and then I usually just heal up the SoB damage, but I'd like to know what others are doing.

Attached Thumbnails

 

Attached Images

 

 

Unir

Interestingly (or strangely), JotW is still accessible to Holy paladins with a reasonable healing build. Something like a 38 / 0 / 33 build would provide access to IoL for instant HL's on a shock crit, along with JotW out of ret.

Until Holy gets some changes in the last three tiers the only thing I would miss is DI and the spellpower from Holy Guidance. Obviously DI would be less an issue if JotW were used. You would also have to be in judgement range, since Enlightened Judgements would be off the table, but that's a small price to pay for 20% maximum mana return on a judgement.

My gut says they didn't intend such a build and this is either an oversight or a result of top-tier Holy needing some attention, with the 20% return being meant purely for ret dps sustenance. If that's true I suspect they'll have to change it somehow, either by a) moving JotW higher in ret, b) changing the mana figure somehow to be functional for rets but not holies, or c) improving the last tiers of Holy so much so that JotW isn't an attractive option for healers.

 

Pyralissa

It does on live, you can armory most Retribution paladins in every state of gear having over 8% crit (5ish base, 3% from talents, 1-2% from int on tier gear).

 

• Arikah

Some interesting bits from a couple minutes of testing:

- Divine Plea's "healing reduction effect" is NYI, or bugged... i was able to pump out the same heals with it up as without.
- Art of War (AoW): spec into it, and you may/may not notice it adds a spell to the ret spellbook tab. I was able to activate it without critting, or even going into combat (!), though it did not give me the maxrank benefit when i did this, only .75s off (not instant). Intended, or bug... probably a bug
- Sacred Shield is still not functioning properly, though i can't explain why, it's behavior is inconsistent.
- Big, huge, massive thumbs up to the current JotW. I find myself unable to run oom unless i spam consecrate - that is, i can use a full skill rotation and freely use the new AoW flash procs without even having to glance at my mana bar. Tested with JoW on the boss test dummy (using SoCorr), and then with JoL using SoB, and didn't really notice a huge effect on my mana. I got down to 25% at one point, but then the new Divine Plea came into play... ret feels almost completed.

I have three complaints that still remain with this patch, that i hope will be seen by a dev reading this:
1) Holy is still underpowered, especially deep holy. I have not tested beacon quite yet (servers are a tad unstable) but JotW is a little too attractive for holy still. It feels like this patch was the 'ret patch', not the 'paladin patch'. Protection could also use minor work, which leads me to...
2) We (ret and prot) still lack an interrupt, or a charge/gap closing ability, or an actual snare. Crusader Strike is still a little underwhelming for a 41 point talent, could something be tacked onto it? An interrupt or 1 yard knockback maybe? Prot got a little light around the tier 3 section, could there be a charge or something worked in there?
3) Cleanse is still terrible; this might be tied into issue #1. When holy gets its' review, can this spell please get buffed either baseline or via decent talents?

@synbios:
- Benediction is not reducing the mana cost of spells that become instant via talents (art of war procs, infusion of light)
- Art of War does indeed make FoL instant, the tooltip is (assumed) a typo
- HotR seems to be ap normalized :/ Although, it was hard to tell for sure, because the premades only have access to a few 1h weapons.
- Holy Shield i did not check i forgot :|

i'll do some testing when i'm awake tomorrow, hopefully the servers are a little more stable. Looking good so far though folks...

 

flyingtoastr

The 4-piece set bonus was unintended though. I remember seeing something about the intent of the bonus to bump up SA regen to 20% but because of the way their multiplicative system works it only gave 1%.

I doubt they'd make that kind of mistake again.

 

Xequecal

Remember that Avenger's Shield base damage is like 1000 and there's a glyph that increases its damage 100% in exchange for only hitting one target. It's instant cast now, so right after you SoR them you can Avenger Shield them for ~3500 damage noncrit, and then swap to a 2H and HoR them for 120% weapon damage.

I don't think it's that overpowered, though. Prot has a VERY low mana pool and no way to get it back in PvP. You can do this like twice and then you're worthless.

 

Antmanton

You're probably going to continue seeing 38/0/33 type builds, especially with the relative decrease in value of Holy Guidance. Short of moving the rest of the somewhat-desirable crit talents (and Benediction) down past Repentance, those points are still a better investment than JotP and BoL. The problem is that neither talent is exactly compelling; you can gear/gem/enchant for haste if you find yourself short, and Beacon is simply too inflexible in its implementation unless you're only interested in spam healing two particular targets, both of whom are taking damage at once (maybe like a continuous Saber Lash attack?).

To be honest, I'm not entirely certain how to fix JotP; the problem's beyond simple number tweaking, the talent just doesn't feel like it belongs in that position, or at least doesn't feel like it gives the correct type of benefit for its location. Perhaps some kind of buff to or rider effect on Light or Wisdom would be better?

Beacon I have a better grasp of. If it caused all healing done to the Beaconed target to be intelligently split amongst the "X" number of nearby allies based on health deficit (kind of like a backwards Divine Storm) at the cost of individual throughput, I wouldn't expect anyone to pass it up. As long as it's locked into one extra predetermined target, though, it'll still be a strictly "meh" talent, which will send people over to the Ret tree for crit and regen.

[e] Also, if anyone's still taking testing requests, can someone please try speccing primarily Holy (say at least 40 points) and see how grinding feels with sword and board spell damage gear? Particularly please test SoR and SoV, if you could. I'm trying to build a damage model, and keep coming up with SoR hits of less than 140 per hit with 450 AP and 1200 SD, which strikes me as very low.

 

Khaelarys

Admittedly, I see things slowly - but I'm just not seeing the point of moving Improved Ret Aura. Though I guess I'm still finding it difficult to imagine a build with E4aE. No reason to pick it up as holy - as prot, it makes 0 sense - and as ret, I'm spending at a minimum 32 points in the first 6 tiers - that's not counting the tasty pvp talents. Even shockadin builds, I just can't work those points in.

I guess it just makes more sense to yank the E4aE talent than it does to move Ret. What I'm definitely not complaining about is the much better fluidity - they talk about wanting a slight amount of bloat so that you have to pick and choose what you really want, and for the first time (ever) Ret really feels like that. There's several builds i wanna fool around with - all in ret. Very cool.

Question -
So with AoW and Righteous Vengeance, we're looking at a 2.45 damage multiplier for crits, plus the ability to sprinkle some Flash of Loving around.

I guess at this point, Fanatacism has found a way to make it into pvp builds?

Bah - I guess not. This is the best I can do for my first shot at a pvp build at 80. I think 3.0 is going to make me cry.

 

Prinsesa

I think Shield of Righteousness would be the best way to test this because of its very predictable damage (no range variance, unaffected by armor). Spec into something like this, then slap on some tanking gear.

For example, 750 BV would produce a 1.35 damage gap between a 6% Crusade and a double-dipping Crusade.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Rasputin

I'm currently using SoC simpyl because that's what I expect to use while soloing. I'm also using GBoK because 18% stats is significant enough to forgo the AP from Might imo while leveling. I'm also Judging Light because....I....I don't need the extra mana back from JoW. It's amazing.

Also for everyone excited about our hybridity(should be a word), keep in mind that while instant FoLs are certainly exciting and powerful in solo and small group play, that spells made instant by spells and talents still reset the swing timer, so tossing them of willy-nilly in raids will hurt your DPS, by quite a bit if you aren't careful about timing it. It certainly adds a little burst healing in emergencies, but I can't see using it every time it's up.

Crusader Strike remains underwhelming as well. IT is now the lowest priority spell in my rotation, which now looks like HoW(when possible) > DS > Judgement > CS. That seems odd and unsatisfying for a 31 point talent.

 

Rugrud

One thing that worries me in the mmo-champion notes:
"One-Handed Weapon Specialization (Tier 6) now increases damage you deal with one handed weapons by 2/4/6/8/10%."

Can someone please check that it's still +10% to all domage while wearing a 1h, and has not been nerfed to +10% to domage dealt with 1h? do you get +10% to consecrate, SoR, holy shield?

Thanks in advance

 

Arthaal

This situation is only aggravated by the fact that it isn't included in the increased scaling of Righteous Vengeance, which remains a terrible talent (comparable net DPS increase to Fanaticism, 2 tiers lower when Judgement DPS = DS DPS - I'm fudging numbers a bit because they obviously differ in effective cooldown by 1 sec and one is physical while the other is holy damage, so their DPS on any given target is likely to vary wildly).