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).
People are whining about the damage. I've personally found AoW to mostly just save me from using Seal of Light/Judgement of Light in pvp for much the same effect (which I still do on occasion, depending on the opponent).
[edit]Don't get me wrong though, AoW is very much a godlike talent. It just really isn't all that spammable in PvP due to resetting the swing timer. It's currently bugged to proc off white crits, which also inflates it's uptime a bit (though not that much).
Not sure man, I do know that AoW feels very cool on the Beta, without a cooldown and with DS proc'ing it because my crit rating is much lower there. I'd hate to see it changed, but an internal 6 or 8 second cooldown wouldn't kill it. What I did notice is what everyone has been telling me for a few days, but its painfully obvious now - JotW scales funny on a big mana bar. Its' about 500 difference between premade Beta and my Brutal Glad paladin. 500 mana goes a long way on a ret paladin budget. In my healing gear, it's... well, it's worse.
The damage I'm doing right now is probably a little high. It's just like it was before, only add DS and better scaling. I know I don't have a good solution - but a temporary problem needs a temporary solution. I only play this class, so really I don't know relative to how much other classes are doing - but 10 heals is too many. With my crit rate, and sheathe, if they don't whack the int off our Ret gear, things are going to be bad.
I have to agree with Soze though, I know with addons and with Judgement not working you can easily know when a seal drops, but... really, a 2 minute self buff? It's seems a little arbitrary. If it's the mana difference, distribute the mana cost over 2 minutes to DS and CS.
People are whining about the damage. I've personally found AoW to mostly just save me from using Seal of Light/Judgement of Light in pvp for much the same effect (which I still do on occasion, depending on the opponent).
[edit]Don't get me wrong though, AoW is very much a godlike talent. It just really isn't all that spammable in PvP due to resetting the swing timer. It's currently bugged to proc off white crits, which also inflates it's uptime a bit (though not that much).
The damage is very bursty, yes, but from what I was experiencing, it was really no worse than some of the things Arcane mages are pulling off now. My comments were in particular reference to all the duel-based whining going on, which does have some legitimate basis; any damage you can put on a Ret paladin quickly disappears through DS, JoL, and AoW, magnifying any actual damage disparity. In a nutshell, it's 2.0 launch all over again. We'll see how it goes from here.
As previously mentioned, with the shift to non stacking buffs ultimately the goal becomes that all classes do roughly the same DPS (since no one will be offering unique utility).
In that regard, yea, of course ret paladins will seem to be doing a lot more damage, they're intended to!
Look at endgame DPS meters (Brutallus world DPS record, ignore the hacked log from "Devierum" which will obviously be removed for listing a 20 mil HP Brut lol) and you can easily extrapolate how much everyone will shift: Rogue/Hunter/Fury Warrior/Lock? I wouldn't expect much of a boost there. Mage/Enhance? Slight boost. Ret paladin/Shadow Priest? Pretty massive boost (up to 1.5x/2x as much respectively).
If it turns out rets are outdoing everyone else, then of course there will need to be an adjustment, but somehow I don't think that's the case.
I'd attribute the far majority of the whines to the shift in how things will work (DPS equalization) which people need to get their heads wrapped around.
Present beta version of ret talents and abilities seems quite solid, but I still feel duration of seals is not fitting whole system.
Since seal is basically weapon imbue ( you don't switch between them on the whim, not even in PvP?), it doesn't make sense to have them last mere 2 minutes - at least 5 min (to not have to refresh it in single arena match), 15 min (to not have to refresh it in single boss fight) or even 30 min (to normalize it with shaman weapon imbues) would make much more sense.
I remember reading some where, that the very first, the oldest design philosophy when blizzard made seals and blessings was versatility. Original blessing lasted all but 5 minutes. Seals disappears upon judgement...
They've moved on from that, but I think Seals are still something blizzard don't want players to just cast, and forget about. Just like shamans and totems, they have to recast them after a set period of time.
They've moved on from that, but I think Seals are still something blizzard don't want players to just cast, and forget about. Just like shamans and totems, they have to recast them after a set period of time.
I might miss something here, but can't find connection between totem and seal mechanics. Totems are stationary, so it's only logical for them to have short duration. No one expects shaman to stay in one place for 30 min. Short duration is simply not all that much annoing - except from niche that are raid boss fights.
On the other hand, short time weapon imbue (that seal de facto is, especially talented to be undispellable) is only annoing and adds nothing to the gameplay. If there was a reason for switching between seals on constant basis then yes, it would make sense. In present situation though, where you most of the time switch judgements, not seals, short duration is just plain wrong.
I can imagine that ultimately, after long deliberations and whining from players, in 5 patches or so Blizzard will actually make seals last longer. Point is, now is the time to correct as much as possible about the class, so why wait?
Did someone test out synergy between Flash of light glyph (HoT) and Sheath of Light HoT?
My primary question is if the Sheath heal be based on 50% from glyph, 100% base value or 250% total healing done.
The wording "Heal the target for 60% of the healed amount" doesn't really clear things up for me, knowing blizzard im inclined to suspect the first and worst alternative but if anyone have tested and know for sure it would be great.
Did someone test out synergy between Flash of light glyph (HoT) and Sheath of Light HoT?
My primary question is if the Sheath heal be based on 50% from glyph, 100% base value or 250% total healing done.
The wording "Heal the target for 60% of the healed amount" doesn't really clear things up for me, knowing blizzard im inclined to suspect the first and worst alternative but if anyone have tested and know for sure it would be great.
Ah great thx. Sorry for the trouble, still learning to use the search function effectivly.
Perhaps it should be reported as a bug since you would assume a glyph improving a spell and a talent improving the same spell should synergize. Or not give such bad returns at least. It could be made to work like crit talents and resilliance currently are, with talents getting a constant chance to trigger regardless of resilliance. Sheath HoT Could use the base value 100% before Glyph.
Divine Plea - looks simmilar to a mana tide totem but with a one minute cooldown. This makes sense with the new potion sickness debuff to stop us chugging mana pots but a one minute cooldown? I get the impression that the mana bar will be much more dynamic in the expansion - we'll be burning more and regenerating more - and I think this would be a nice change.
Sacred Shield - seems a bit boring to me, Just something you have to slap on the tank every 30 seconds. Perhaps this would be more interesting If it had a much shorter duration (4 seconds), a cooldown (15 seconds maybe) and absorbed 80% damage and had 1 charge - it would act like a shield to almost fully absorb one attack and with a short cooldown it would be a like another heal. Might also be interesting to see the damage abosorbed regen the paladin's mana? I don't like the sound of the current proc. It would also reinforce the role as a tank healer.
Beacon of Light - am I missing something or does the tank get healed for all raid healing within 40 yards? Doesn't this seem ridiculously overpowered, with the current T6+ raids you could just put that on the tank and forget about him for almost any fight. Also the effect seems odd considering the name, shouldn't it work the other way around with healing on the tank radiating outwards rather than being sucked in?
Holy shock - it's great that this is being turned into a proper heal with the range increased, healing increased and cooldown reduced. Good stuff. I thought there was a proc effect on crits that caused your next heal to be instant, has this been removed?
I'm a bit worried about the effective removal of downrakning, I may have 2 spells as is but I use 8 ranks in total to heal with and a large part of healing for me is using the right rank to heal just enough without overhealing.
Some nice stuff and paladin healing is being mixed up but there's no radical new direction or change in play style us. I still think paladins ought to be battle healers, meleeing and healing at the same time though this sort of seems like what ret apaldins are doing now. Alternatively, having 5 yard range but powerful heals would cement the paladin as a single target healer, and would have abilities like lay on hands make sense. Even so things are looking good imo.
Well concerning ret dps at the moment, we're still far below others so asking for nerfs is completely uncalled for. Running heroics so far on the pre-made (granted it's not optimal gearing/gemming but everyone's in the same boat there) it feels like I'm doing a lot more damage, which I am, and I'm able to really help out with healing which should come at a cost. But everyone else I've teamed up with is doing a lot more dps than I am, hunters/rogues/warlocks are much higher, death knights much lower (though a more experienced DK should come a lot closer).
I'm not sure what the answer there is, boosting our judgements/cs/ds is probably not the answer as it will amplify what people complain about (pvp burst). Possibly with correct gearing and really stacking haste our damage will scale better? Time will tell.
I really like Sacred Shield. It soaks just enough to make sequential crits not blast ya - I noticed a big difference not having it on the PTR after I got used to putting it up. It's another buff to have to be dispelled, SS + AoW/FL is an significant instant/passive source of survivability against the classes that can't eat it.
Agreed, for holy it seems like it'll only be good for helping soak raid damage, or just overall mitigation for tanks when they aren't rage/mana started. Overall 12% mana to soak best case 2500 damage over 30 s and giving you a periodic 50% flash of light crit - seems pretty neat idea to me.
Divine Plea - looks simmilar to a mana tide totem but with a one minute cooldown. This makes sense with the new potion sickness debuff to stop us chugging mana pots but a one minute cooldown? I get the impression that the mana bar will be much more dynamic in the expansion - we'll be burning more and regenerating more - and I think this would be a nice change.
With one huge difference, it causes a self inflicted MS debuff. While I intend to roll prot/ret in the xpac and ditch my healing garb, I'm currently praying they buff the regen and diminish the debuff effect for those times I do find myself healing. If they balance our mana usage around using DP every cooldown, we're looking at a 17% uptime of this -50% healing for a maximum reduction in output of 8.5% (if still spamming max rank for max HPS)... seems overkill really. I don't really see retribution or protection using it except if mana burns are in effect or while off-healing without the benefit of illumination (this is hopefully the reason for the 1min cooldown, not holy spec healing mana expediture).
On the other hand, short time weapon imbue (that seal de facto is, especially talented to be undispellable) is only annoing and adds nothing to the gameplay. If there was a reason for switching between seals on constant basis then yes, it would make sense. In present situation though, where you most of the time switch judgements, not seals, short duration is just plain wrong.
For PvP, there is a reason to switch it up. I regularly swap between SoC and SoJ depending on the situation. (I'd use SoW, too, if it didn't provide so little regen) Depending on where the final SoV/SoR coefficients end up, I'd expect to find a use for those as well. If it turns out that only one seal is ever used, then I'd argue that the other seals need to be made more useful instead of locking us further into using a single seal.
Originally Posted by Palados
Btw, after unification of ratings, is int giving melee crit now? So AI would be wanted by melee as well?
For PvP, there is a reason to switch it up. I regularly swap between SoC and SoJ depending on the situation. (I'd use SoW, too, if it didn't provide so little regen) Depending on where the final SoV/SoR coefficients end up, I'd expect to find a use for those as well. If it turns out that only one seal is ever used, then I'd argue that the other seals need to be made more useful instead of locking us further into using a single seal.
The thing is, with the new seal/judgement system I can't imagine there being a need anymore to switch. Pretty much everyone will use Seal of Command for arenas/pvp (except for those more daring)... and with the ability to judge light/justice/wisdom on demand, there isn't much point to switching seals, the way I see it.
Formally Xyrm/Zurm, the Ret Pally. Now playing my rogue, Zyrm, more casually with RL friends.
If we keep doing decent damage, I can definitely see using SoJ more now than I do - which, I guess isn't really that rare now. I can actually kill something now without my seal Damage, given some time and luck. That means I can seal ANYTHING and still be able to function. One thing that does do is make it useful to be able to swap Seals - this is a function of mana cost and regen, not duration. One thing it doesn't do is exclude (necessarily) a longer duration.
The mana cost alone can control everything they want it to. They can use mana cost to control seal twisting and manage how often we swap seals - how long the buff lasts doesn't really matter, unless they want our combat system to include an extra button push ever 120 seconds, or they feel the 30 mana / 5 drain is an impact. It only affects us - I don't see a very compelling reason that a resealing can't correspond with another of our buff cooldowns. Thirty minutes seems like the magic number to me.
Individual Damage Spellpower Melee
Holy Shock 2796/3734 1796/2744
Melee 275/542 920/1918
Shield of Righteousness 1349/2787 1345/2786
Seal of Righteousness 231 278
Judgement of Righteousness 779/1543 652/1344
Holy Vengeance DoT 443 669
Judgement of Vengeance 1303/2632 1094/2316
Seal of the Martyr 97/204 340/703
Judgement of the Martyr 869/1732 960/2052
Individual Damage Spellpower Melee
Holy Shock 2796/3734 1796/2744
Melee 275/542 920/1918
Shield of Righteousness 1349/2787 1345/2786
Seal of Righteousness 231 278
Judgement of Righteousness 779/1543 652/1344
Holy Vengeance DoT 443 669
Judgement of Vengeance 1303/2632 1094/2316
Seal of the Martyr 97/204 340/703
Judgement of the Martyr 869/1732 960/2052
Numbers on left of slashes are average hits, numbers on right are average crits.
While I don't disagree that the relative seal damage between spellpower gear and AP gear is depressing for Holy paladins, I was very surprised by the relative numbers for Shield of Righteousness. They are close enough to assume they are actually unaffected by the gear change. That doesn't make sense at all because without the strength found in the AP gear I would expect to see Shield of Righteousness hit for significantly less in the spell damage gear. Perhaps this is a bug?
On that whole "Crusader Strike Syndrome" thing, remember that CS was changed to 10 seconds on Beta before the 2.0 patch hit the PTR. I've seen a few people say that CS damage at level 60 influenced the CD change, but that's just a post hoc fallacy.
I've been having fun on the PTR, but not because I'm running around beating bad players in duels. Most of the people I look to fight are Gladiators with S4 shoulders. Dueling them, Retribution doesn't seem as overpowered as one might think by dueling people who sit at 1600 rating. So far, the most fun has been Frost Mages, although getting hit by Deep Freeze after I use Hand of Freedom is annoying, and I hope they fix the Divine Purpose bug. Shaman and Warriors are the only classes that are simple out of luck when pitted against Retribution Paladins. Weaponless auto-attack with SoL/JoL usually is an easy win, especially with Retribution Aura/E4E.
Can a bad Paladin beat a bad X class? Yes, that's what we've seen on the PTR. Can a bad Paladin beat a good player of most classes? Probably not.
I have to admit, Seals proc'ing off CS/DS makes for some retarded burst. I passively killed some Hunter's pet with 2 Divine Storms.
I heard Sigurd scored an infinity on Rock Band and ascended to heaven.
The old justification for the CS syndrome was this post.
Given how... shittastic... ret DPS has been for the majority of TBC I'm not sure if you want to say that CS was a result of internal testing or beta testers screaming "omg nerf ret plx". You'll have to make your own judgements there.
While I don't disagree that the relative seal damage between spellpower gear and AP gear is depressing for Holy paladins, I was very surprised by the relative numbers for Shield of Righteousness. They are close enough to assume they are actually unaffected by the gear change. That doesn't make sense at all because without the strength found in the AP gear I would expect to see Shield of Righteousness hit for significantly less in the spell damage gear. Perhaps this is a bug?
Could be that it's actually working right - like other paladin seals/damage, it should scale off both spellpower and melee.
The conclusions I draw are:
* SoV DoTs scale better from AP than from spellpower (+50%)
* JoV scales better from spellpower than from AP (+10% or so)
* SoR hardly changes between the two gear sets; AP does more damage because of the melee damage increase
So, I think they have some normalizing work to do on coefficients.
Sacred Shield - seems a bit boring to me, Just something you have to slap on the tank every 30 seconds. Perhaps this would be more interesting If it had a much shorter duration (4 seconds), a cooldown (15 seconds maybe) and absorbed 80% damage and had 1 charge - it would act like a shield to almost fully absorb one attack and with a short cooldown it would be a like another heal. Might also be interesting to see the damage abosorbed regen the paladin's mana? I don't like the sound of the current proc. It would also reinforce the role as a tank healer.
Holy shock - it's great that this is being turned into a proper heal with the range increased, healing increased and cooldown reduced. Good stuff. I thought there was a proc effect on crits that caused your next heal to be instant, has this been removed?
I'm a bit worried about the effective removal of downrakning, I may have 2 spells as is but I use 8 ranks in total to heal with and a large part of healing for me is using the right rank to heal just enough without overhealing.
There's nothing really wrong with something to slap on a tank every x seconds, as long as x is long enough for you to do something in-between (aka the Thunderclap Syndrome).
Yes, Infusion of Light is still there - Holy Shock crits will proc a 15 second buff that makes your next Holy Light (not just any heal) instant.
Finally, note that we're moving from various ranks of FOL and HL into max FOL, max HL, Holy Shock, Sacred Shield and Beacon of Light. Combining Divine Favor with Holy Shock to force an Infusion proc is probably going to be its own macro, then we also have Divine Plea for mana management, as well as Avenging Wrath as a healing cooldown.
09/15/08, 3:31 AM
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