WotLK talent trees/abilities discussion - Page 148

Kigale · 09/19/08, 11:37 AM

This argument is getting no where and isn't very valuable in the first place. Every class has optimal specs for leveling, doing 5 mans, BGs, Arena, and progression raids. These can also change under different circumstances (gear level, talents available).

Holy is weaker than ret and prot for leveling.... oh well. Holy can't be compared to the other healing classes. Holy doesn't have a spammable nuke, but they can (and should take on multiple mobs at once). While wearing plate a holy can take quite a beating while Ret aura and consecration take care of the baddies. It's slow going but I'd think it would be faster to kill 3 mobs this way than a smite spamming priest killing one at a time.

flyingtoastr · 09/19/08, 12:05 PM

Originally Posted by Blutelf

Do you seriously argue that Holy Paladins should have to respec to kill some Northrend Boars? There is absolutely no plausible reason to make solo PVE content that much harder for healers. This may have been the case at release, but is certainly out of place four years later, and I am very glad that the game seems to move away from this mindset.

You can kill Northrend Boars perfectly fine as Holy. I'm actually Holy right now, and while it isn't as fast as my previous 1-shot-everything-in-sight as Ret it isn't too slow anymore either. It is most assuredly faster than me trying to do IQD dailies on live. Holy still has lots of fun tools (Holy Shock is nearly what I would call spamable, Ret Aura does very appreciable damage, 30 yard Judgements make pulling from distance a snap) and thanks to some of the new abilities like Divine Plea mana isn't even really that much of a problem.

Originally Posted by Blutelf

EDIT: Priests have very recently received a 2 sec base cast Holy Fire, so this further strengthens the argument that the developers want healers to be able to kill things with their healing spec.

The coefficient and DoT damage were also nerfed to the ground with that change. It really didn't help them at all other than the sweet animation.

Originally Posted by Cathela

Got more details on this? I've always seen JotP as the make-or-break talent for the current version of Holy.

Sure.

It works directly as advertised. You judge, a cool little golden hammer pops out of your head, you get 10% more haste for 30 seconds. Naturally haste is still the best raw throughput stat for healers so it is always nice to have, but there was one unexpected consequence I didn't foresee that was great. The haste lowering the GCD is a massive boon. I also had a ret pally in the group and combined with my passive haste rating from my gear (255 or about 16% at level 71) I was running around with almost 30% haste, lowering my GCD to about 1.15 seconds. This was incredible, especially with just how powerful Holy Shock is now. The ability to DF Holy Shock, IoL Holy Light, and start casting the next heal in a space just over 2 seconds (along with Beacon, which I'll get to in a second) makes group healing a huge amount easier. Rejudging with such a short GCD is also not a problem, and it felt interactive to actually do something other than smash FoL and be effective. It also gave me a great reason to keep JoL up on the targets, which is now a fairly effective way to "offheal" the melee (see below).

Like I said before, Beacon is great. In 5-mans here you're the only healer on heavy AoE encounters (the third boss of Nexus, caster who splits into 3 copies for example) I never had to touch the tank. It takes a little getting used to and the refresh bug caught me off guard once or twice, but I retract my earlier statements about it's uselessness. I can see how Ghostcrawler was calling it "borederline OP" though, the double heals when you cast them on the tank mean you almost never even need Holy Light. I would expect that to get changed, but as long as the refresh bug gets fixed I'm ok with it.

Unless my MSBT was screwed up (which is possible) it would seem that JoL healing procs are now counted as a heal that you cast (much like the change to ProM and Lifebloom) instead of casted the person hitting the mob like now. Good thing about this: ret pallys gain SA regen from JoL.

And the last thing I wanted to mention about JotP is that it does affect melee attack speed. It's not much, but I was getting my swing timer to <1.5 seconds which is a small but substantial increase in seal damage while soloing.

Tilted · 09/19/08, 12:13 PM

How the hell did this turn into a holy war (pun only partially intended) regarding a "healer spec" and its ability to level? On the past few pages it's been noted that from 40 and up Holy will do more damage than they do on live servers today, and the gear will be more readily available for damage output due to the healing->spellpower conversion. And the low level argument gets blown out of the water simply because Seals of the Pure is a tier-1 talent, and SoR now scales off AP (with str/AP mail being extremely common at low levels). If you're holy at 70 and you can't kill a Northrend Ice Boar or whatever the hell they're called, you might consider hitting a button or two next time. Seal -> Judge -> HS every 6s -> loot, rinse repeat. You'll be fine.

I find it troubling that some extremely good discussion points are being passed over for this drivel. When we're all 80 we'll wonder why this was even a concern in the first place. For that matter, where was all this talk prior to BC when holy "leveling specs" were much worse off than WotLK specs are now?

Pyre · 09/19/08, 12:27 PM

Originally Posted by Avitus

You are going to be killing things faster as a holy spec than you are doing right now on live (and much more so as soon as you hit level 75) that's what I mean with "fine". Please learn to read.

Comparisons to live are irrelevant, since no one levels as holy on live, either. If I'm choosing between leveling as holy or leveling as prot, prot will be much faster, to the extent that I'd be foolish to level as holy. That's broken.

Blöd · 09/19/08, 12:34 PM

I think some of you misunderstood what Holy paladins really want. We don't want to DPS neither be on par with Retribution paladins.
We are just asking for decent damage with one Seal (Seal of Righteousness : The Holy seal) in order to grind/farm/Pvp... correctly in spell power gear.

I don't believe we were overpowered several builds ago on the beta whith the previous formula for Righteousness and HS on 6sec CD (Without Sheath of Light).
Now, to avoid the interaction with Sheath by correcting the formula, the devs could make a "deep" Holy talent which would up this seal damage.

(Sorry for my english)

Antmanton · 09/19/08, 12:41 PM

OK, since I started this, it's only fair I finish it. Posit me a spec (both with old and new talents, if necessary) and gear case at level 30 and I will run the numbers down for both Live and Beta/PTR DPS. I'll need reasonably-solid numbers for weapon speed, weapon DPS, AP, SP, melee crit, spell crit, and melee haste, and possibly strength and intellect if you're involving those talents. Everything else is more-or-less incidental. For extra fun, I'll also do a hypothetical comparison to SoC.

As far as high level DPS, I do want to point out that while Beta/PTR Holy is indeed up approximately 3 DPS, this does not include any talent modifications. When/if I get some time this afternoon, I will post a full breakdown of what happened to your typical 40/0/21 holy DPS spec.

[e] Responding to Tilted:

Originally Posted by Tilted

In the amount of time it would take someone to come up with a spec, look up gear, run the numbers, formulate an attack cycle from pull to kill, and tweak the results for maximum throughput, that same person would ding 31 just from grinding with a sub-par talent tree. That is why I don't see this is worth debating anymore.

EDIT: From a different angle -- when we're 80 do we want to look back at this discussion and say, "I'm glad we found bugs X, Y, and Z before they went live, otherwise we'd have been screwed for the month it took them to fix it," or, "good thing Holy builds can level to 80 faster now!"

You're missing the point entirely. I'm not trying to build a level-by-level gearing guide, I'm just trying to snapshot average numbers to prove or disprove whether Holy DPS at low levels is viable or not. I don't need slot-by-slot itemization, just approximate and reasonable numbers.

As for your second angle, the goals are one and the same. We're banging on the math now to find problems with the scaling now so no one has to get screwed at release, regardless of spec or level.

Tilted · 09/19/08, 12:51 PM

In the amount of time it would take someone to come up with a spec, look up gear, run the numbers, formulate an attack cycle from pull to kill, and tweak the results for maximum throughput, that same person would ding 31 just from grinding with a sub-par talent tree. That is why I don't see this is worth debating anymore.

EDIT: From a different angle -- when we're 80 do we want to look back at this discussion and say, "I'm glad we found bugs X, Y, and Z before they went live, otherwise we'd have been screwed for the month it took them to fix it," or, "good thing Holy builds can level to 80 faster now!"

Fiola · 09/19/08, 1:08 PM

Originally Posted by Tilted

I find it troubling that some extremely good discussion points are being passed over for this drivel. When we're all 80 we'll wonder why this was even a concern in the first place. For that matter, where was all this talk prior to BC when holy "leveling specs" were much worse off than WotLK specs are now?

I see it as a sign of progress. When the major issues are resolved, then all that's left to talk about are the minor issues.

If Ret still needed mana regen or threat reduction, I can almost guarantee you that that would be the hot topic of this thread.

<edit>

Originally Posted by Tilted

EDIT: From a different angle -- when we're 80 do we want to look back at this discussion and say, "I'm glad we found bugs X, Y, and Z before they went live, otherwise we'd have been screwed for the month it took them to fix it," or, "good thing Holy builds can level to 80 faster now!"

Then why don't you find those bugs X, Y, and Z? If someone cares about low level Holy paladin leveling and brings out mathematical evidence for his position, why are you chiding him for his efforts? Don't expect others to replace their priorities with yours.
</edit>

Originally Posted by Prinsesa

I made a post on the Paladin forums regarding Fiola's discovery of SOC scaling with haste and came across this post which posits that SOC has an internal cooldown, preventing two back-to-back procs by timing your CS or DS to coincide with your melee attack.

I'm no expert on statistics, and this probably won't change anything for "Top DPS Seal" considerations, but it's certainly an interesting read if true.

Would you kindly inform Novareaper that his statistical analysis is off? His method of calculating the chance of a SoC proc on two consecutive hits is wrong.

Originally Posted by Novareaper

If Seal of Command had a chance to double proc, the chance to proc per trial would be:
<snip>

( 7 / 60 ) * 3.4 * 1.2 = .476
.476 + .476 = .952 = 95.2% chance to proc.

Adding probabilities of 2 separate swings = wrong.

SoC probability table:

proc type	swing1 chance	swing2 chance	overall chance
2x proc	47.6%	47.6%	22.7%
1x off swing1	47.6%	52.4%	24.9%
1x off swing2	52.4%	47.6%	24.9%
no proc	52.4%	52.4%	27.5%

Chance for a SoC proc: First 3 possibilities, added together, which yields 0.725.

He did seem to prove that SoC cannot double proc if he performed 100 trials without seeing any.

Chance for no double proc a single trial: 1 - 22.7% (double proc chance) = 77.3%
Chance for no double proc in 100 trials: (77.3% )^ 100 => very, very small number*.

*My Windows Calculator gave me a 0 when I asked it to calculate that value.

Final thought - it might not even be a 1 second CD - in my PTR SoC Haste test, I never paid attention to overlapping white swings and strikes and activated abilities on CD. I ended up with an overall proc chance of 47% (expected 44.3%) In his worst case scenario, he brought his overall proc chance down to 35% (70 procs in 200 swings; expected proc chance was 39.7%, a ~10% difference),

Originally Posted by Cathela

Glyph of Divine Intervention: Your Divine Intervention spell does not sacrifice your life.

That takes away the most important cost of that skill (flavor wise). I can see "does not use a Symbol of Divinity", keeping it in line with the similar reagent removing glyphs. = P

GSH · 09/19/08, 1:52 PM

Heh, I think we already had the levelling Seal discussion 100 pages back. See p45-50. Then it was in the context of SoR being the highest DPS seal.

◊ Cathela · 09/19/08, 2:11 PM

Originally Posted by Fiola

That takes away the most important cost of that skill (flavor wise). I can see "does not use a Symbol of Divinity", keeping it in line with the similar reagent removing glyphs. = P

It turns it into a different kind of tool. Overpowered? Probably. But like I said, the developers will make their own decisions about balance, all we can really do is give them ideas. That being the case, might as well dream big.

Fiola · 09/19/08, 2:55 PM

Originally Posted by Cathela

It turns it into a different kind of tool. Overpowered? Probably. But like I said, the developers will make their own decisions about balance, all we can really do is give them ideas. That being the case, might as well dream big.

Overpowered as a raid griefing tool, definitely. =D

Every paladin in my guild (and we have tons) will have that skill on perma-CD, as the MT mysteriously gets DI'd at 1%. And there'd be no death indicating which one was guilty!

Edit: On the flip side, you couldn't use DI to avoid repair bills. /ouch

Tilted · 09/19/08, 3:01 PM

It kinda defeats the purpose if it leaves the caster alive, since it's supposed to be a wipe prevention tool and you're going to end up dead anyway (with a repair bill). Now if it put a DI on the target as well as the caster, that's something I could sign up for.

◊ Cathela · 09/19/08, 3:10 PM

Originally Posted by Tilted

It kinda defeats the purpose if it leaves the caster alive, since it's supposed to be a wipe prevention tool and you're going to end up dead anyway (with a repair bill). Now if it put a DI on the target as well as the caster, that's something I could sign up for.

Well, the idea is that with the glyph you'd turn it from a wipe-recovery tool into a way to clear debuffs and wipe threat for one person in the raid every 20 minutes. Basically, a combination of iceblock and feign death for someone besides you. It could still be used as wipe insurance; it just wouldnt' save you the repair money.

Probably OP, as I said. But the point is that that's the kind of extra flavor glyphs should give: useful buffs that get you to think about the ability in a different way. Again, look at the warrior glyphs: The sunder glyph turns it into an AoE-tanking tool, the mocking blow glyph adds a true taunt, the shield block glyph boosts block value and turns it into a temporary threat buff (via shield slam). Too many of our current glyphs don't really do that.

Tilted · 09/19/08, 3:32 PM

Seal of Vengeance/Corruption

I noticed wowhead and thottbot have conflicting values for SoV/SoCor, listed as follows:

wowhead: (0.019*SPH + 0.039*AP) * 6, over 15s

thottbot: (0.019*SPH + 0.039*AP*6), over 15s

My guess is thottbot just has the closing parenthesis in the wrong spot. That aside, I noticed something else -- both equations multiply by 6 as if they still have the 18s duration even though they've been changed back to 15. So I guess my question would be, are the tooltips wrong or did these spells just get an inadvertent 20% buff?

◊ Cathela · 09/19/08, 3:48 PM

Originally Posted by Tilted

Seal of Vengeance/Corruption

I noticed wowhead and thottbot have conflicting values for SoV/SoCor, listed as follows:

wowhead: (0.019*SPH + 0.039*AP) * 6, over 15s

thottbot: (0.019*SPH + 0.039*AP*6), over 15s

My guess is thottbot just has the closing parenthesis in the wrong spot. That aside, I noticed something else -- both equations multiply by 6 as if they still have the 18s duration even though they've been changed back to 15. So I guess my question would be, are the tooltips wrong or did these spells just get an inadvertent 20% buff?

I tested this a bit awhile ago, and I think what I found was that you get a tick when the DoT starts and another when it finishes, so the 15-second DoT that ticks every 3 seconds actually gives 6 total ticks. But it was awhile ago and my memory of that is a bit foggy; I'll test it again next time I'm online and the lag isn't terrible.

If someone gets to this before I do, also check out what happens when the DoT is refreshed: do you get a fresh tick with each hit? (If so, that's going to be a major dps boost with a fast weapon.)

EDIT: I've done an update pass on the OP; should include all the updates for the latest patch. Also added a pretty spell scaling chart Sigurd worked up. Still more work to do at prettifying, and I need to update the glyphs.

Tuftears · 09/19/08, 4:04 PM

Slightly relevant, I spent some time practicing 'seal twisting' with a holy shockadin build - 31 holy, 40 ret - and managed 1050 dps. That's reasonably on par with what a disc-holy priest could achieve last I tested.

39.5% Holy Shock (28 hits for 2614, 17 crits for 3963, 1 miss)
15.0% Holy Vengeance DoT (112 ticks for 475)
11.6% Shield of Righteousness (35 hits for 777, 9 crits for 1571, 2 misses)
10.5% Judgement of Vengeance (13 hits for 1338, 7 crits for 2841)
10.5% Melee (120 hits for 162, 46 crits for 352, 10 glancing for 158, 38 dodges)
6.1% Judgement (of Righteousness) (10 hits for 812, 8 crits for 1705)
5.9% Seal of Righteousness (246 hits for 246)
0.9% Seal of Vengeance (63 hits for 20, 37 hits for 51)

Gear stats:
Spellpower: 31 holy, 40 ret
1535 +damage
38 hit rating
27.72% holy crit
1090 AP (BoMight)
20.04% melee crit
274 block

I mainly alternated SoR and SoV. SoV judgements are stronger, but switching to SoV for just judgements would have pushed cooldowns back, since seal switching still incurs GCD.

Ret appears to have been reduced in DPS. In retspec, netiher I nor a friend who normally plays a ret paladin could get over 1350 dps with SoMartyr and the premade gear. I'm not sure what to make of this; this seems low. He had been able to hit about 1600-1700 dps before the latest build.

flyingtoastr · 09/19/08, 6:52 PM

Another reason Judgements of the Pure is wonderful.

Divine Plea still scales with haste even though it is no longer channeled. The duration and the time between tics is lowered by the amount of haste you have. This means the haste from Judgements of the Pure is once again great for Holy Pallys, allowing you to get more tics before you have to click off the buff (faster tics) or less time under the healing reduction effect (lower duration).

This is reflected in both the spell tooltip and the buff tooltip.

Thoma · 09/19/08, 6:57 PM

So I noticed this blue post:

We did add the interrupt to Hammer of Justice. This was done solely so that Protection paladins wouldn't feel like they couldn't tank mobs that needed to be interrupted but were stun immune. We just think that interrupt capability crosses over the line into something that a tank needs to do his job.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - [Tank] Boss abilities and Paladin Deficiency

I double checked the various sources and hadn't seen this before, so I think we could be looking at something in a new build.

Spenda · 09/19/08, 6:57 PM

Looks like we are finally getting our spell interrupt that works on mobs that are stun immune (bosses):

Originally Posted by ghostcrawler

We did add the interrupt to Hammer of Justice. This was done solely so that Protection paladins wouldn't feel like they couldn't tank mobs that needed to be interrupted but were stun immune. We just think that interrupt capability crosses over the line into something that a tank needs to do his job.

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> [Tank] Boss abilities and Paladin Deficiency

Mordekhuul · 09/19/08, 7:06 PM

Originally Posted by Spenda

Looks like we are finally getting our spell interrupt that works on mobs that are stun immune (bosses):

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> [Tank] Boss abilities and Paladin Deficiency

Nice in a pinch, though 30-60 second cooldown means it won't be counted on like a warrior's interrupt can be. Nothing we'll refuse though! Whether three points are spent to drop the cooldown to 30s will just have to depend on how necessary it is at 80.

Cuer · 09/19/08, 7:08 PM

Interesting thoughts from Ghostcrawler on how Paladins are shaping up (emphasis added):

Protection -- We want more tanks in the game. Main tanks. We think it's fun to have a diversity of players and see how different spells, abilities and class mechanics get used to solve problems. A Protadin with the right skill and gear should be able to tank any fight in the game. Previously, we tried to push Prot into the offtank and AE tank roles. While your abilities are still really well suited for AE in particular, overall our philosophy has changed and we want you to be able to do anything the other tanks do. Note that this means other tanks will get better at AE tanking though. Prot represents a special challenge when not tanking because you can both heal and do dps and some players want to do either. Or both. One final comment, that you have already seen, is we want you to gear like a warrior: collect Strengh and Stam and use tanking weapons instead of caster weapons.

Retribution -- You're a melee dps class, and one of only a handful of classes that can fill the "mana battery" role. With the changes to the way raid buffs work, we are blurring the lines a lot more between "pure" dps classes and hybrids that have the potential to respec if their dps doesn't work out. But we don't penalize classes for having awesome buffs the way we used to. Also remember that one of Ret's big limitations before was just getting in the group with the good melee buffs. That problem is solved. If you're good and know your stuff cold, you should be able to be up there with the rogues and hunters. Maybe not every fight, but not 500 dps below them either.

Holy -- You're still the best high-throughput, single target healer in the game. I suspect you're still going to get called on to heal the tank a lot. Holy was in a really good place in BC, so much so that other healers (probably priests more than anyone else) began to get overshadowed. To shift things back a little, as well to just challenge the player base, we introduced a lot more fights with AE damage and movement. Unfortunately, those mechanics hit Holy. Hard. At the same time, CoH and CH seemed to be able to handle any encounter. Beacon of Light isn't a panacea to solve all of those problems, but it is designed to help. It still needs a little work, but I think the basic spell design is sound.

One thing that has been mentioned is that the three paladin trees feel pretty separated from each other. We've gotten better in some other classes of making it a valid choice to go deeper into a second tree, and not just to get a single, incredible talent, but because there is some legitimate synergy there. It's going to be harder to get that feeling for the paladin than it is for the mage, but it is something we want to mess with some more after Lich King.

Obviously beyond the individual trees, we completely redid the whole seal and judgment system. We think it works pretty well, but we're just going to have to play with it some more to find the rough spots.

I realize I haven't talked a lot about PvP, because it's a very big topic... and this is already pretty long... and I'm always encouraging players to be more succinct. Anyway. We suspect we changed the landscape quite a bit in PvP with all of our changes and we're waiting for it to shake out a little more. It's much harder to theorycraft PvP.

• frmorrison · 09/19/08, 7:30 PM

I didn't like reading GC's text that was bolded. I think deep Holy needs more work, hopefully it will get another look next build.

Prot and Ret I think are in a good place for 3.0.

RangerSix · 09/19/08, 7:33 PM

We did add the interrupt to Hammer of Justice. This was done solely so that Protection paladins wouldn't feel like they couldn't tank mobs that needed to be interrupted but were stun immune. We just think that interrupt capability crosses over the line into something that a tank needs to do his job.

Wow, now there's a nice addition!

Blutelf · 09/19/08, 7:41 PM

Something else probably worth mentioning is that Paladin and Warrior melee crit rate has been lowered by 3% due to hotfixing the increased mob crit rate; also Dodge/Parry is supposedly generally horribly bad due to the recently hotfixed diminishing return formulae not working correctly (again).

Both from Avoidance Change

flyingtoastr · 09/19/08, 8:10 PM

They also said that both of those are bugs that will be addressed in the next push so it really isn't worth mentioning.