I disagree completely - it does a fantastic job of making up some of the loss dps for ret when I shield up, and it's another instant ability to blow when I need to shield up and pick up adds to spread around some of the damage.

As for holy... I guess I'm not sure why this being available as a cooldown is a problem. They certainly have cooldowns to spare for dps, is it because it's not purely spell based in scaling ?

More my thought is that it's a 'high threat' move, and if you're instance-DPSing for some reason, you don't want to out-threat the tank - so I would make it share a cooldown with the other 'instacast' DPS abilities and increase their DPS somewhat to compensate. In other words, if you're throwing on a shield as ret in order to help tank, it would lock out crusader strike but do equal damage and give you more threat. Otherwise, you have other instacast DPS moves.

Sorry if my post was a bit 'not in line' of how the conversation was going, I just didn't have a choice!

I couldn't create my own thread, and had to 'interrupt' here. I just needed/wanted some feedback on my TPS calculator as well as input as to the formula changes. I didn't have another place to go and I know EJ's reputation for being a bit of a thinktank/theorycrafter, as well as not finding such a spreadsheet existing 'in the wild'. I'm a tankadin looking for some luv...

Thanks ahead of time for any and all feedback

It's not just a rumor. And the bug seems to be affecting damage absorbtion shields period. Hunters, mages, rogues and warriors have all reported huge crits piercing through damage shields.

I've only been able to reproduce a small one, which amplified my damage by around 600. If you check the combat log on absorb, it'll occasionally list the absorbed amount as a negative. That damage seems to get added onto the damage tally rather than absorbed off.

Why it does this? Noone knows. Exactly when it does this? Noone knows.

Investigation is ongoing.

I understand the mechanics of what you're saying, I'm still just baffled as to why. If you think the dps is too high with SotR available all the time, why would you adjust the "dps somewhat compensate". Did I just completely miss where you reasoned this out?

High threat abilities have intrinsic deterrents to using them for dps - but a completely arbitrary shared cooldown on abilities just because they're both instant damage abilities seems - well, it just seems 'Huh?'.

Davenrothz: Feedback is, your guild link is too long.

I think it show the class's lack of interactivity when a holy spec uses a "prot" ability as a damage source. We'll take anything we can to be able to push buttons and not simply auto attack.

I really can't unerstand how this would be an issue. If a holy paladin using SotR for a dps rotation is in danger of out-threating the tank, something's wrong with the tank.

But it's the healing spec; you can't expect to have a full suite of dps tools. Healing as prot or ret isn't terribly varied or exciting either, but that's the nature of the beast.

So I finally got to copy my paladin over to the 3.0 PTR and I wanted to share my thoughts on the various specs I tested.

Due to long queues and heavy lag, I didn't get to test a lot. However, I wanted to test the two specs I play (prot and ret) so I spent one session testing each.

The first spec I tested was ret. I have to say that I was completely blown away with the new ret. It's fun. It's interactive. It has options. It has survivability. I found myself using spells I would normally almost never use as ret. Just amazing.

Day 2, I specced over to prot and grabbed my tanking gear along with some other items from the bank. I'm more interested in how prot will turn out for the expansion and wanted to savour the best for last. However, what I found was something that felt very incomplete, very muddled and not at all enjoyable. I honestly felt that, all in all I was doing less damage than on live. I had the same vulnerabilities to certain mobs (especially silencing mobs and casters).

I tried prot in ret gear, and it made little difference. Seems like a full set of spell damage gear might still be the optimal gear for grinding in this spec. It didn't seem to matter too much whether I used King's Defender or my S2 mace as a tanking weapon; HotR was hitting for very little. I had constant mana issues unless I kept SoW up all the time while soloing. I had less health than on live. The problems just seem too numerous to list - the experience left a bad taste in my mouth, and after my third death, I decided to call it quits for that session.

I can already tell that prot paladins will be in the same situation they are in on live come 3.0 if prot stays as it is. We will still be good only for instances, whereas prot warriors have been given better damage and even PvP capabilities. I'm sure ShoR will make some difference, but honestly, if one abilitiy is going to change the whole spec, there's something fundamentally wrong with it to start with.

I'll continue to monitor changes, if any, to the class as the PTR evolves and beta goes forward. However, it's going to take some effort from the devs to bring this class up to a state where it will be fun to play (in prot spec), and I'm skeptical they'll make those kind of changes this late in the development phase. Shame, considering how well they managed to improve retribution.

Are you sure you had Blessing of Sanctuary on? Casters are still a pain as Prot, even on the PTR, but ShR is a huge portion of our single target damage on the beta, apparently.

To be honest, single-target grinding went just fine for me with BoSanc up, using just HotR & Judgement (consecrate only when I had multiple mobs or a lot of mana).

Multiple target grinding was more fun than ever with Seal of Corruption + HotR + scaling Holy Shield & Ret Aura.

Then again, I'm in 6/8 T6 and such and was using a Rising Tide as my weapon, so there might be some gear discrepancy issues.

Either way, I recommend you give it another shot.. what were you trying to grind, anyways? I did SSO dailies (which used to be a complete waste of time attempting to do them as Prot, and it felt much more enjoyable on the PTR, sans lag).

Shield of Righteousness needing level 75 feels completely arbitrary and unnecessary since it scales off block value which which scales roughly with level anyway and shield slam at level 40 which scales the same way ours does. The only things making us wait for 75 does is make leveling/soloing as prot harder than necessary and make ret tanking of instances harder while leveling. Considering that tanks are already hard enough to come by I don't see either of those as beneficial. I really think we should be raising hell on the beta and ptr forums to get the level of it reduced to something reasonable.

I've had a completely different prot experience than you, and I've tried prot levelling from level 70 with bad gear, levelling from level 70 with sunwell gear and level 80 with pvp gear.

Damage is considerably higher than live right now, however, SoR is no longer the optimal choice for a damage seal. You should be using SoV (I think SoR still scales slightly better, but it takes a long time to catch up). You need to keep up BoSanc, and you should probably use holy shield.

My HotR hits for about 600 damage (1200 crit), which is not at all unreasonable, especially if you are fighting 3 mobs. Also applies SoV (on 3 mobs as well). My white damage is all of a sudden reasonable. Avenger's shield is instant and can be tossed in as a dps skill.

BoSanc keeps you from losing mana, JoW does the same. Occasionally if I'm going all out on single targets I might run lowish on mana, but being moderate, or pulling groups keeps my mana up. If you know you're pulling singles exclusively, you might consider BoW. Once you hit 71 and get divine plea, it gets even simpler.

Your efficacy scales with the number of melee mobs you're fighting however. You can fairly easily pull 10+ melee mobs, and as long as you keep JoL and Holy Shield up you can go with a full out threat rotation, because, unless your avoidance is terrible, you'll be recovering 1/4 of your mana bar every few seconds.

Caster and single mob pulls pre-65 are typically: SoV, JoW, HotR, (maybe consecrate if mana's high), Avenger's Shield. Maybe throw a stun if they cast something nasty. Instant HoW if they're still alive. Once you get ShoR your initial burst is pretty high.

But before that I've never really felt my single mob kill rate was terrible. Sure, you might end a second or two after the ret paladin beside you, but I should hope so, because this playstyle is tank-centric, and ret is dps-centric. However, I can go and gather as many melee mobs as lag will permit me to and aoe them down in about the same time as it takes me to kill a couple of solo mobs. You could realistically do the same with some casters in the group, but they can somewhat cut through your defenses and you need to LoS them to get them into consecrate.

I cant' see how you could say we're doing worse than on live. Just at 70:
- We have a mana regen mechanic through BoSanc.
- We have a new attack that does ~100 DPS + seal proc on up to 3 targets.
- We have stats that increase our white damage.
- HoW and AS have had their cast times removed making them reasonable in combat.
- JoW scales up with AP/SD and deals damage. (So you don't have to choose between wasting a judgement on a non-damaging seal, or losing the regen throughout the fight)
- Touched by the Light makes our heals quite reasonable in tank gear, and pushback mechanics mean we can cast a heal with mobs beating on us (in case you erm... overestimated your potential to tank large groups and need to heal)

At 71:
- Divine Plea makes mana issues go away, unless you're very wasteful.

At 75:
- ShoR is _very_ nice burst damage every 6 seconds.

We'll probably not be the chosen spec for pvp, especially arenas. But I can see us being viable in BGs and wintergrasp. ShoR still hits pretty damn hard. We're still pretty much impossible to kill by melee. And we now do enough damage to not be completely ignored.

I'm having fun in the new prot spec. If you're not, maybe you're doing something wrong, or maybe the playstyle is just not up your alley.

I think I've died more from falling down cliffs than from being killed by mobs in Northrend on both the green geared, and the purple geared paladin. I'd have a hard time figuring out how someone would manage to die 3 times to mobs in 1 day without doing very foolish things.

Regarding the Ret tanking instances, I have a hard time seeing how that is really an issue. Especially considering the ridiculous threat modifier currently on Righteous Fury, the number of dps modifiers in ret, and divine storm dealing holy damage.

I kind of see why ShoR is left until 75, and I would say that is mostly because due to gearing methodology. Anyone with level 70 prot raid gear will have a massive amount of block value, just due to the way old gear was itemized, while anyone with typical leveling gear will have very poor block value. And this wont start to reconcile until the late 70s. In my current gear, I could probably hit ShoR for 6000 crit, which is 70%+ of a northrend mob's health at level 70 iirc. As well that it's instant and fairly mana-cheap, that seems a bit overtuned for level 70.

Once you get to 75, the gear gap between 70 raider and 70 quester narrows enough that it's not a massive discrepancy, and the fact that you're hitting for 3k and critting for 6k wont be quite as ridiculous as mobs dont typically have less than 10k health.

mods, please delete this post.

I think you're forgetting that DPS goes down when you put a Shield on. Shield of Righteousness also only costs 6% of base mana, which at level 80 with Benediction would be ~221MP. Also factor that Holy Paladin gear has a ton of Intellect and Mp5 which is absent on the other sets. Your perceptions are off if you think 221MP of a >16,000 mana pool is an issue. And to mirror what Cathela said, if your Holy Paladin pulls aggro from your tank because he decided to whack a mob, get a new tank; actually if any Healer pulls aggro from your tank because they decided to hit Smite/Wrath/Lightning Bolt/ShoR, I'd wonder how they kept threat off actual DPS classes in the first place.

As it stands, all 3 specs have about the same amount of damage attacks, but I think Protection has an extra (which isn't actually technically an offensive ability).

1) Judgement
2) Consecration
3) Holy Shock/Crusader Strike/HotR
4) DS/ShoR/ShoR
5) (prot only) Holy Shield

On another note, it appears JoL/JoW have been redesigned in the combat log to give credit on HP/MP return to the casting Paladin. I noticed when I put JoL on one of the target dummies and saw heals pop up. I wonder if this is going to inflate healing meters,

I still don't get it. If you buff seal/judgement of righteousness, you risk it becoming too good for ret. So your major complaint about it is that holy paladins will want to use it to dps and it costs them too much mana to do so? If that's the problem, why wouldn't you advocate upping the damage of holy shock?

I don't really understand what's wrong with Holy Paladins slamming people with Shield of the Righteous (or swinging 2H hammers, to go in the other direction). They're still paladins, after all.

Second, SotR doesn't do increased threat anymore. Blizzard is removing the extra threat on most abilities and giving them increased damage. This is to improve tank damage and fix scaling issues.

Edit: explaining my second comment.

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Tanking Take - Part 2. Now with more epics.

Also, in the last Beta patch, Hammer of the Righteous went from 100% weapon damage + 30% threat to 120% weapon damage. Similarly, SotR went from 200% block value + 30% threat to 240% block value.

Crusade, and what it does now.

I was doing some crit testing on Crusade and got some interesting results. Crusade says that it gives 3% damage all the time and 3% more damage to specific types. These are mutiplicative, as per Cathela's tests.

It also gives 3% more crit damage. This damage is applied in a really interesting way, though. You would think the game would figure out critical damage something like this, but you would be wrong:

(Base Damage + Critical Damage Bonus * (1 + % Critical Damage Bonus))* (1 + % Critical Damage)

How the game actually figures out crit damage:

Base Damage + Critical Damage Bonus * (1 + % Critical Damage Bonus) * (1 + 2 * % Critical Damage)

Basically instead of multiplying the total by 1.03, the game multiplies the critical damage bonus by 1.06 instead.


What this means if consider Crusade and do 1000 damage baseline:

1000 + 1000 * (1) * (1.06) = 2060

This all makes sense. However, if you have Righteous Vengeance going:

1000 + 1000 * (1.25) * (1.06) = 2325

Whereas if Crusade only multiplied through by 1.03 then you would have gotten instead:

(1000 + 1000 * (1.25))*(1.03) = 2317.5

This only makes a difference if you have both regular critical damage bonus multipliers as well as multipliers like Crusade or the [Relentless Earthstorm Diamond]. Because both Crusade and the meta multiply the bonus damage given from other sources (and multiply with each other as far as I can tell, though that is obviously very small) they actually get better than 3% more damage on crits if you have other sources of improved critical damage.

At the moment Art of War is hilariously broken and is giving 40 bonus Critical Damage to Judgement and 20 to DS and CS. Whether it will multiply through as Crusade/metagem do or as Righteous Vengeance/Everything Else do when it is properly implemented is unclear.

Regardless of AoW, the metagem and Crusade now need to be modeled differently than we had previously thought. I will be updating my spreadsheet to account for it, though I might hesitate a bit on that hoping they get AoW to some kind of rational state so I don't have to do it all again when they actually make the talent work.

Edit: spelling

And so we come full circle again. Just buffing Holy Shock works well enough... at level 40 and beyond. Leveling as full Holy would still be incredibly gimp, if not outright broken. While this might sound minor enough ("Just spec Ret!"), keep in mind this is an entire healing class removed completely from the equation until past Scarlet Monastery or so, because it simply cannot sustain itself outside a group.

I'm beginning to think the ultimate culprit here is the split-coefficient scaling on our spells. While a noble experiment with laudable goals, it simply does not work without true split gearing solutions. Ret effectively scales too well with AP, while Holy scales too poorly with SP. Buffing Holy meaningfully generally has the unintended side effect of either sending Ret effectiveness through the roof, or closing the barn door on Holy's shortcomings long after the new player tries it for a few levels, gets fed up, and rides off in the sunset to respec Ret or Prot.

In truth, any solution requires a deep, unified mechanical change to all hybrid classes, such that all specs have both manageable and predicatable amounts of both AP and SP across any given gear level while at the same time discouraging (or outright prohibiting) the kind of skewed imbalances that make Ret so delicate. With corresponding changes in itemization to balance stat distributions, you also gain the ability to itemize support stats (Intellect) directly for everyone and avoid clumsy kludges like what JotW has become.

Failing that far-reaching vision, though, about the only thing left to do now to fix Holy soloability is to go back and change our offensive abilities to scale exclusively on a constant value plus the greater of attack power or spell power. Any other solution is going to break early content or have scaling problems down the road.

Beta and PTRs are down for a patch. I am hoping this patch will have the deep Holy changes and am interested to see how they affect Ret and Prot (Prot is worse than Ret!) damage.

We will see what the patch brings tomorrow morning.

Well, as far as the warlock comparison, you're talking about a 200%-threat ability versus a (formerly) 120%-threat ability, you're talking about a 1.5-second cooldown vs a 6-second cooldown, and you're talking about a spell whose damage scales with gear versus a spell that's not going to scale much at all for a holy paladin. That's beyond apples and oranges, it's more like apples and rocks.

And the problem with buffing SoR is that both Prot and Ret paladins are going to use that to tank, so that affects your balance for those specs as well. The whole point of making SotR baseline is to make it a broad baseline tanking buff for all paladins, and then each spec can use its own instants for added threat.

If you're going to make SotR use a linked cooldown with shock and CS, you might as well just make it a prot talent and give shock and CS some kind of "generates more threat when RF is active" effect.

I'm pretty sure they were both +20% threat rather than +30%, so the net effect of the change on threat is zero. (Not that it matters, just sayin.)

Has anyone else seen the Hateful Gladiators gear? The way it has been itemized doesn't make sense to me.

Paladin : http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...adin_spell.jpg

Priest : http://static.mmo-champion.com/mmoc/...iest_spell.jpg

The priest gear is all itemized with crit, whereas the paladin is Mp5. Why?

In reply to Antmanton;

You're relating leveling/solo play to class balance (more specifically, inter-class balance) when not all leveling specs are created equally. Almost all classes rely on base abilities for leveling, and their spec only further complements that. You could argue until level 40, Protection and Holy level similarly. It's not until you get to the 31 point talents that any real flavors start to emerge. The flavors are Healing, Tanking, and Damage. The Holy tree supports the Healing role, and doesn't support doing damage or leveling. The same can be said about the Discipline, Priest Holy, Shaman Restoration, and Druid Restoration trees. Sure, you can level as a Healing spec, but it's never been as powerful as the tree that specializes in the abilities they use - Smite Spam, Lightning Bolt Spam, Wrath Spam, etc.

Holy has been assumed to be the "Caster Damage" tree, which is semi-true, but a little misguided. 4 out of the 26 talents cater to that playstyle: Seals of the Pure, Holy Power, Holy Shock, & Holy Guidance. 3 of those effect healing as well. Fundamentally, while doing damage you're using 3 baseline talents with the addition of Holy Shock - Consecration, SoR, & Judgements (question: does JoR work off of Melee crit now, or does Holy Power still increase its crit chance?).

If the concern is "but Holy Paladins don't have the gear to level as another spec", you do what the other healing classes do, either build a gear set for an alternate damage spec, or use your healing gear in with the spec that it suits the most. For Priests, it's Shadow, Shaman it's Elemental, and Druids it's Balance. For Paladins, the best way to use healing gear would probably be spec'ing Protection, since you don't need high HP or Avoidance to do well (most of the Protection gear has tanking stats anyway). I don't think Holy Shield is modified by Attack Power, but I'm going to have to search this thread for it and ask Cathela to update the main page (maybe there could be a section that just lists the Spell coefficients like there was for TBC). You're not going to doing as much damage as a Paladin that has strength-itemized gear, but that's a tradeoff other specs make as well (not having Hit or Crit).

The problem I have with trying to make Holy as effective as other specs when it comes to leveling is where does the increase come from? Holy mostly uses base talents, and changing those is hard to balance, as you have said. Do you then try to load Holy with talents that increase damage? Do you forsake talents that increase healing, the main purpose of the spec? It'll be easier to see what happens after the Holy tree review and gutting, because there are obviously some pretty crappy talents in there. But Holy is first-and-foremost the Healing tree.



They said they were in the process of changing it.
The post was 2 days ago, so I'm assuming he'll follow through with all the sets by the next push.