Can't you swap your weapons right after using an ability that incurs a GCD anyway, thereby accomplishing both with one GCD? (Minus a few MS for lag) And, three seconds? You swap, wait 1.5 seconds, SHoR, and the instantly swap back. Swapping back incurs a GCD, yes, but so does SHoR, and by doing both at (almost) the same time you accomplish both with one GCD.

Haste rating/buffs would also make this substantially easier since it reduces GCD but doesn't reduce cooldowns, giving you more leeway.

Even if you do that, and you happen to get a white swing at the exact same moment, you're still at what, 5 seconds without a white swing? Unless you want to have a 1.4 speed main hand in that cycle.

No way that slam plays.

I understand the idea behind it, I just think it's incredibly counter intuitive when they had just announced how they want to make respeccing more streamlined. This becomes a major annoyance every time you respec as well as another consumable to stack.


I really think it is the case that for the first time the paladin trees truly look like hybrid trees and this has a lot of people confused. You can't look at the few healing perks (Sheath and JotW, the crit is reachable by holy) in ret and just completely dismiss the holy tree.

Fine, ret has nice mana regen and a HoT proc, but that's about it. You're still healing with 2.5 sec casts (that alone is almost a death sentence), you don't have any on demand instant heals (the buffed HS at 6 sec cd is very powerful) and occasional instant proc (every time HS crits) with massive Holy Lights. You lose all the crit talents (11% on HL/HS, 5% on FoL), illumination, some +heal, BoL (which remains to be seen how useful it really is), Divine Illumination.. the list goes on.

My point is, people are so distracted by this new JotW, they don't even consider all the things in healing throughput they're losing by dropping almost all the holy tree.


Now before someone comes along and writes a huge rant: I concede that the holy tree might need a slight buff to make it more desirable, but it's no where close to being as dismissible as people try to make it out to be.


At first glance, I'd say you'll probably lose way too many white swings with your 2h as well as incur too much of a GCD to make it worthwhile (without haste, it's 2x 1.5 sec GCD for weaponswitch + cast every 6 seconds).

It's probably true that a Sheathe build for a holy pally is a little out of reach at this point, but JotW seems very attainable.

The reason why JotW is somewhat galling is that most of the Holy tree is focused on mana efficiency rather than throughput. The main throughput talents are Light's Grace and Healing Light; crit provides healing more through efficiency than output - especially since the output is unreliable, and you do not generally have the opportunity to rely on the law of large numbers for the heal, while efficiency over time is much more consistent as the mana pool can soak enough events to reliably average out.

JotW's current return essentially invalidates maybe half of the (useful part of the) Holy tree, and this is personally what ends up ticking me off. If JotW was in the Holy tree, you could remove Illumination, Divine Illumination, probably Divine Favor, the crit talents, and imp BoW and I'd still consider it a win. With a 37/0/34 type build you don't even have to give up most of those talents and still get JotW. You give up no throughput except the spell power from Holy Guidance and BoL, gain a little utility, and in return you essentially never have to worry about mana ever again. Given the whole push for reducing 'spam healing' and making mana management more of an issue, it seems pretty clear that something has to give.

Most likely this is all a moot point since there's a pretty obvious solution to the problem - make JotW's 20% return work on base mana rather than total mana. This seems like such an obvious and clean solution that I don't understand why it wasn't simply implemented in that fashion to start with. No, it doesn't address the fact that Holy after 40 is pretty underwhelming, but the bar for the changes required in Holy to make it attractive becomes considerably lower.

One thing i am concerned about now is leveling as a paladin.

That was remotely boring anyway back when I did it variously as ret/holy (i specced holy for a while to get Consecrate ><) and i see it becoming even more boring now.

You learn Consecrate at lv20, and other than that the only thing you do for the first 40 levels is to press Judgement every 10 seconds.
Now i realize end-game is probably more of a focus, but pre-40 paladins are going to be so slow as to be painful.

Could we at least get Shield of the Righteous added as a low level ability rather than lv75? That way we could have two buttons to press when levelling, instead of just one.

The problem, in essence, is that the talents are becoming the foundation for making the class. Paladin-Retribution class-spec is like a class in another game. You can't move these things, as-is, into base. If they gave base versions of CS and DS that did NOT scale, for the first 40 levels, it solves this problem.

So, at say 4. 14. 24. 34 you give a CS that hits for a fixed amount of damage, not weapon damage. At 16,26,36,46 you give a DS this hits and heals for fixed amount.

This allows *any* level levelling player to have those interactions until they can switch to the talents, but since the damage doesn't scale, no holy or prot specialist will use them past those levels and they fade into history.

You forgot the Ret talents.

You get to press Judgement every 8 seconds, and while leveling you could use JoL or JoW if you need mana.

Leveling is more interactive in 3.0 than before.

Disagree. It's less or the same. Technically less because you no longer reseal, though a lot of that was done through macros anyway. Like I posted earlier, it actually feels slower now to me and I suspect it's down to seal scaling since that compromises a large amount of your damage before any instant attacks show up.

The change to divine protection also hurt at low level since it's essentially our only mechanic to survive accidental multi-mob pulls (meaning more than 2, where HoJ serves nicely), though I suspect the change to pushback will have taken care of healing issues and surviving at lower levels.

While on the topic of pushback: why do I need 5 points to spec for pushback immunity while a priest gets it for the same spells at 2 points in the same tier? Factor in that I'm more dependent on casts than instants to heal, particularly at low level and you really end up with a headscratcher.

I really do think it's simply a DPS issue. Sure it's not interactive and rather dull, but then again, so are most classes pre-50. The bigger issue is how long things took to die - waiting a full 10 seconds for a second Judgement to kill a single mob at level 12 is just not good news (since mobs only get relatively tougher as you exit the low level areas).

Edit: to remedy my ellipsis overload... too much coffee this morning.

I would guess it is a combination of
1) Holy hasn't had a review yet.
2) Priests are not Paladins

Remember that we also get 4 times more armor than priests, meaning the times when we need to heal are a lot fewer between than that of a clothie.

A Priest without a Pally Aura does not have pushback immunity (they get 70% with 2 talents) and an intelligent Priest will not have that talent while leveling.

Paladins do have a dps issue pre-50, however with the new JotW, you may be able to fit some Cons in there between judgements (pre 3.0 you would run OOM fast if you used too many Cons).

I'd argue that their AoE fear on a 24s cooldown, shields, HoTs and multiple schools so they aren't shut down so easily is what counters our armor. Healing less often is true because of the relative abundance of melee classes vs. casters in PvE content while leveling. Nevertheless, talent point expenditure is, according to a recent GC post, supposed to be roughly constant "power per point". I believe the post was in regards to Vengeance providing more than the standard % damage increase an average talent point provides. It would only make sense for a similar thinking to apply to utility/survival talents, would it not?

Well, an intelligent paladin wouldn't be levelling with his first 5 points into Spiritual Focus either.

Priests aren't pushback immune, but again, they have a number of instant casts and, really, shielding while levelling pretty much makes you pushback immune while getting beat on in anything but instances or accidental 3+ mob pulls.

I think of this in a different way, paladin pushback protection talent is more important than the priest one because we cast more. So for the priest talent to be worth roughly the same it has to cost less talentpoints.

Shielding up as a priest, while grinding is kinda bad since it costs too much mana. The generic rotation is MB->strafe away while casting SW:P->MF->Fear(rank 1)->MF->MF. Admittedly the shield will give pushback immunity in certain situations. At low levels, you can get a good 3 hits absorbed out of it, but once you reach outlands, especially post-65, you're not really looking at more than one hit absorbed (although this may have changed since I haven't played my priest for at least a year).

I side with the arguement that if they're normalizing the relative power of talent points like they say they are, Spiritual Focus needs to be a 2-point talent. There's really no excuse for it to cost 5.

Interestingly enough, I don't know if they're playing with things, or what, but Hammer of the Righteous is indeed now able to be cast through Silence on the PTR. It's the ONLY thing, mind you, but it's something. (Only tested solo on the PTR, don't know if they added in RD. Also, obviously since it's the PTR, no information from that patch as to whether or not SHoR will be physical.)

I know I don't have divine plea at 70, but my mana pool right now with my pvp gear on the PTR makes me a fantastic off healer. They really, really need to rip the int off the gear or I can see us getting CSS (Crusader Strike Syndrome) again, where we get plastered into the ground because of itemization and it takes months to get back to where we are. My heals are too powerful for me to throw that many. Throttled with a nothing mana pool and mana regen, it feels much more balanced.

I've been playing around with Prot some on the PTR and it seems pretty fun with the addition of HotR. The new Sanctuary is very nice as well. I wasn't having any mana issues grinding outside of Shatt. Instant Shield + HoW is alot of fun.

The new Seal timer isn't quite right, I find myself forgetting about my seal and letting it fall off. Having to cast a buff every two minutes is going to get a little annoying I think. Is there any real downside to making them 30 minutes at this point?

You still want to cast Judgments every 8 seconds or so. There's no downside to casting it, and you actually "judge" the seal that you're using. Having a 2 minute Seal is both good and bad. There are times in a boss fight that I totally forgot about re-sealing, and remembered when I couldn't judge again.

I did notice that you don't have to use Consecrate so much anymore. I think I used it for probably 5-7 separate pulls in Utgarde Keep (UK). Just remember on the last boss in phase 2 to use Exorcism. :P

Druids have their pushback as Tier 1 with 3 points and Shaman have it Tier 3 with 3 points. Assuming they made it 3 points and assuming Tier 1 didn't change that would mean you would get 10% better Seals/Judgements as Holy.

Maybe that is a good thing since judging as Holy can give benefits.


With regard to forgetting to Re-Seal, the Judgement button grays out (just like the mount button indoors), so that helps remind you to Re-Seal.

Off-topic slightly:

PW:S must have changed since then, because I just topped 69 with my alt-priest and casting downranked shields I can usually avoid pushback entirely if a single mob is on me. At 2-3 I use full strength PW:S and a fear once that breaks. Mana wise, it's very sustainable with spirit tap proccing and 3/3 meditation... I usually end up drinking once I reach 1/3 of max mana after pulling 6-7 mobs...which, frankly, is when I usually have to wait for respawns/re-assess where I'm going next anyways.

Back on topic:

Admitting that making Spiritual Focus 2 vs 5 talent points isn't the sexy change the Holy tree needs, it seems to me the core issue is that while the new deep talents give us added throughput (which is in short supply early on in the tree) in the form of a flat haste buff, they use up 7 points in order to achieve this. Then they top off the tree with a moderately useful PvP talent (which, btw, needs to dispel more per GCD) for another 3 talent points and a BoL which no one is quite sure how to work. The haste buff for judging is a nice idea, but feels very rough around the edges still.

A bit of both. Mainly people are influenced by the past patches and the grand majority won't even bother checking facts. Take the people yelling that we "Completely dominate Naxx damage meters" for example.

On the other hand, our abilities in 3.0 are balanced for level 80. PTR is level 70.

We will most likely get another Crusader Strike Syndrome.

I disagree. For one the devs know they haven't done DPS balancing yet. I highly doubt they'll listen to people at level 70 screaming "nerf".

And of course everyone is aware of the Crusader Strike Syndrome this time around, I doubt they'd repeat that bad of a mistake.

I was fortunate enough to copy over to the PTR yesterday, and I can say that I'm more than a little worried, myself. While 6-second Holy Shock does help offset the consecutive SoR nerfs, it also eats mana like you wouldn't believe. Compared to live, I find myself down about 250-ish DPS, with similar time-to-OOM, since the extra mana from no longer needing to reseal every eight seconds more-or-less covers the cost of the extra shocks. The obvious solution would be to buff the SoR spell coefficients, but I suspect that doing so would likely expose a gear or buff scenario where SoR would eclipse SoC and SoB/M again. Also, it fails to address the true problems now exposed in leveling Holy or Protection, which is something I've brought up before. For the same reasons, adding a DPS buff in the Holy tree (necessarily deep to keep Retribution out) would also fail to completely address the problem.

Moving Shield of the Righteous down to level 20 or so, on the other hand, does present an interesting alternative. This would neatly cover some of the gap for Holy and Protection paladins (provided they stay in appropriate itemizations; Holy paladins in cloth are still screwed, although presumably they at least gain some spell power). It still leaves 40+ Holy paladins kind of in the lurch, although at that point a talent-based solution could become feasible.

On the bright side, however, Infusion of Light really is all that and a bag of chips (but see below). Instant 8k HLs in the middle of a DPS cycle does wonders for general survivability... as long as my mana hold out. I haven't been able to really test instance healing thanks to server instability and RL issues (fucking floods), but from first blush Shock spam looks to be pretty good.

Honestly, I think a large part of the backlash is from Art of War again. From my (again limited) testing, AoW had extremely good uptime, and instant FoLs (with Sheath HoT) heal for a rather large fraction of what I can do as Holy on Live. With the change to JotW, even spamming instant FoL with an otherwise-full rotation really didn't put much of a noticeable dent in my mana pool. The [Libram of Avengement] in particular seems ridiculously good now, since you now have enough time to toss off two potentially critical FoLs in the buff time (rotation and crit permitting, of course).

Now, having said that, this is still only level 70 testing, and some things will shake out in leveling and further polishing, but I can understand why many people (and a lot of Holy paladins) are screaming so loudly now. Hopefully the Holy pass isn't too long in coming, and satisfactorily addresses some of the issues (and silences some of the whines).