◊ Cathela

This.

I think we're basically at the end of the "relax, they'll get to it" period. Release is coming up in less than two months. I think it's a shame, because until now the developers have taken a very calm, measured, and smart approach to balance and now it feels like they're starting to just want to wrap things up and postpone as much as they can for post-release patching ("...something we want to mess with some more after Lich King.")

Historically, major changes are far more likely to happen during beta than afterward. At this point we need to start looking at things as "this will probably go live unless we can convince the developers to change it." We shouldn't be panicky or obnoxious about things that need to be adjusted -- that's never a good idea -- but if we see major problems, now is the time to explain them as clearly and convincingly as possible.

For what it's worth, Devastate got re-nerfed to 50% of weapon damage instead of the 80% it had been doing for the last few patches. Don't know if that means anything in conjunction with SotR or not.

I still think SotR needs a base damage component; if they go with damage that's purely proportional to blockvalue it's going to end up being silly unbalanced at one end of the gear range or the other. But one alternative might be to add an AP-scaling component to the damage: 100% of block value plus X% of AP.

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

 

Mordekhuul

I don't mind if it is SotR or not that is responsible for it, but my main concern is that prot be buffed to the extent it can do that 80% DPS benchmark that is being thrown around. I can certainly understand if Blizzard wants to accomplish this by generally raising the DPS of other abilities prot paladins use, rather than putting all of the eggs in one (SotR) basket.

I think it will make or break it as a spec for me when it comes to choosing to tank as paladin in the expansion, and I hope all three other tanking classes can hit the same mark of course. I believe it will just make tanking much more fun all around.

I am absolutely happy with all other prot changes as they are, even missing an 11 point talent.

 

Siawn

Is the reduced damage from Consecration and judgments due to a damage nerf that I am unaware of, or is it the result of not using a spellpower mainhand? With the addition of Touched by the Light and the new Judgment scaling, I would assume judgments and Consecration would actually do more damage.

 

• Avitus

I was expecting a nerf, but this is absurd. I always wonder why blizzard patches always seem to go in huge steps of "massive buff" or "massive nerf" rather than tweaking things more realistically in gradual steps.

Still, I expect this is not the final form of it, I'm pretty sure more is to come as there's no way they're leaving it like that.


Just a question, are you basing this around the low 70s? Because my experienced after I hit 80 has changed considerably. Obviously part of this is going from ~38% crit unbuffed at 70 to ~23% crit unbuffed at 80 (iirc), but also many other classes seem to have caught up in the burst department with getting actual new ranks of attacks.

Additionally (and despite what they said previously), all the level 80 gear is loaded with Stam, some pieces have >2x the amount of stam of their level 70 counterparts (example, T6 gloves 37 stam, Naxx 10 ret gloves 99 stam) while other stats have not increased by as much.


Regarding the warrior talent which still gives 2/4/6% to 2h:

Of course this is relevant. This is not the case of "ohh look what they have", but a case of them going against their own logic. So far we've been repeatedly told they're trying to balance 1 talent point = ~1% dps. Why should this only apply to paladins? Especially in the light of the warrior talent very recently being changed from 5% for 5 talent points to 6% for 3 talent points (to match our old talent)?


I have to say one of the bigger issues at the moment is with this constant reduction of talent potency, a lot of talents are starting to look more and more stale. From a pure "fun" perspective, having all your talents become small incremental increases really makes the trees feel less powerful.


Btw, something seems to be happening regarding base HP on beta. I seem to have gained ~2k+ HP since last patch in the same gear at level 80. Asking around, seems most other classes have had the same.


I can only agree with this. This is the reason for my prior zeal to get things like mana management fixed for ret. The closer we come to launch the less likely you'll see any sweeping changes to fix core issues.

 

flyingtoastr

Actually if 2hWS still only affects physical damage you inflict with your weapon (I'm not sure if it still works that way and it's been ages since I've seen anyone test it) than it's actually only worth .45% more DPS per point with a 3.5 speed weapon and a 6 second CS. The warrior talent on the other hand is pretty massive given that everything they do aside from Rend and Deep Wounds is affected by it.

 

• Avitus

Yea that's why I added the squiggly "~" in front of 1% DPS :P The logic makes no sense and it's complete bs as others have mentioned. Just trying to make sense of it "in their terms".

You know things are bad when they even start breaking their own terms which never made sense in the first place. Why are we getting less than half the worth per talent points in a tier 5 talent than the other two classes are getting as tier 2 (!) and tier 4 talents respectively?

 

Demonseedx

I am somewhat trouble by the recent passes done to other classes, while the Paladin has largely been left out in the cold. I've played protection for some time now so I can most accurately look at that tree and wonder where exactly they went with our class. Blizzard has dealt with the pandemic bloat that has plagued the Protection spec since BC but looking over the tree I'm disheartened to see how much is still there.

We have a hotfix, of sorts, in Blessing of kings making it much cheaper for the other two specs but robing protection of 4 points just to get what had at one time cost us one. Then there is the new talent sinks of Guarded by the Light and Shield of the Templar; both talents which augment skills in the protection tree already. I can not help but look at the Protection Warrior tree and wonder where our tree went wrong. Warrior's talents are augmentations that changing the dynamics of the skills they have, adding more dimension to those skills and additional purpose. On the other hand, our talents are merely adding more multipliers and subtractions do the damage and costs respectively, mostly to make our class functional in the role we have chosen. That means that those few talents that do offer us something (Recokoning, Divine Guardian, Judgment of the Just) are weighed against the ones we must have to be most effective. I don't understand the philosophy behind this move, why not just roll these talents into the talents they are augmenting. IF anything our talents should be augmenting the skills we share with the other two spec's to push more out of them for our given role. As it stands I feel like the Bloat hasn't really been cut out of the tree so much as squeezed into different places in the tree.

Then there is Sheild of the Righteousness a baseline skill that has most of its strength in the skill so it needs to be balanced for three builds one of which is built for high critical strikes. Blizzard needs to learn to stop putting paladins eggs all in one basket if they want a skill to not be over powered. Let HS, Seals, and HotR carry more of the burden of our dps allowing SotR is button in our rotation. That may require some skills cut out of the Global Cooldown (I'm looking at you HS), but with those skills having a internal cool down anyways I don't how this is such a problem.

 

rozetta

I was using a King's Defender instead of my usual spell damage weapon, meaning I lost 265 SD. This is one of the things I've been concerned about. HotR, imo, isn't doing enough damage on it's own to warrant swapping out 250+ SD. I'm not sure if the white damage makes up for the loss of that spell power, but since HotR wasn't exactly doing a lot of damage anyway and our threat comes from holy damage, it might make more sense to simply still use the SD weapon and use HotR to proc seals. My heals are a whole lot better (as are anything else that scales with SD - Holy Shield, Seals, Judgements, Consecrate, Ret Aura, etc). Cumulatively, I'd be willing to bet that the SD weapon is simply better for soloing or building threat. The mitigation provided by a normal tanking weapon is insignificant compared to the loss of 250+ SD also. I'll try and get some more testing in at some point.

 

Fiola

You haven't been robbed of anything. Shield spec used to cost 8 points. Now you get it and redoubt for 3 points. Other talents throughout Prot got consolidated, giving you more potency per talent point spent - all of that in the same build that changed BoK. Prot had a net gain.


Yes, there's always room for improvement for our class and for the game, but there's no need to exaggerate.

 

Demonseedx

So instead of waisting 5 points in Redoubt I waist 4 in Improved BoK? That is only a net gain of one talent point, and with the other skills in the Paladin tree the new cost makes it difficult for a Prot Paladin to pick it up. How is that a Net Gain? I understand the difficulty Blizzard has with making this baseline but at the same time I'd rather not see it taking up 5 points in a tree that already has all but one talent over tier 6 required to tank.

 

Mordekhuul

Why would you spend any points on BoK? You'll be using sanctuary on tanks of any stripe, and someone else will have to be there for BoK.

 

Arthaal

Most of my feedback has been concerned with Ret so far because the tree seemed to need the most work. What the paladin protection tree has undergone has been nothing short of spectacular. The developpers stepped in and basically addressed every concern protection paladins had voiced, here and over on the boards at Maintankadin.
I think you're right, the tree definitely is better than it was, however some concerns remain:

Librams: have always been balls compared to flat range slot "stat sticks"... witness DPS guns or throwing weapons vs our amazing (and amazingly impossible to farm) blue +2% crit for 5s after a judgement libram... I appreciate the effort of trying to make fun mechanics on those slots to ad flavour to every class, but frankly, when the flat stats on a range slot or better than something I have to "keep up" with abilities I feel cheated all around.

Base stamina: why is this even still a concern? It's an easy fix, just do it already. At this point you'd have to lie firmly on the side of stupid to not realize even trivial differences in things like stamina and flat mitigation (hello defensive stance vs improved righteous fury) are enough to sideline a tanking class in the minds of the general wow populace (whether justified or not... anyone ever run th math on what 4% really meant on an average hit? It's not that terrible, but hey, we're min/maxing, right?)

Our 11 point talent: I'm almost certain we're in for a Last Stand abiity (they handed one to druids in tier 3, we'll get the same treatment I'm sure), but get to it already!

Redoubt: I still hate this talent. I'll take it for the extra BV, but the proc mechanic is just not nearly as exciting as Critical Block or Shield Block to my mind... "woohoo, I block 10% more, awesome. Now get me some beer and a dooby and I can really get to partying."

I just dated myself with the term dooby didn't I?

Feature Request: After seeing the new Veteran of the Third War DK blood talent (2/4/6% increase in stam/strength and 2/4/6 more expertise)... can we change our Combat Expertise to that? Strength instead of Crit please, since extra mitigation from a deep prot talent makes too much sense.

I also hope they steer clear of what some earlier poster referred to as "incremental" increases in abilities. Its a symptom of the ret tree as well, where many talents can be simplified to adding multiplier upon multiplier. Those talents aren't "fun" and often demonstrate unecessarily confusing deltas in power: e.g. 2HSpec vs. Crusade or Art of War vs. Righteous Vengeance (the critical damage increase vs. critical damage bonus increase). 1 talent with a flat percentage increase, sure. A pair with the strongest at the lower tier, just confusing to new players and befuddling to the rest.

 

Demonseedx

Because you will have 3 maybe 4 tanks tops who will want BoSanc on a raid, so for the Twenty something other players your giving a less optimal buff. This is especially true when you add the Glyphs for Might and Wisdom are probably not something you will be considering as you don't have the Improved versions of either. So now you need 4 Paladins to give the "best" buffs since your only "best" buff is BoSanc.

 

Mordekhuul

Add to your list that we seem to be better set up for AOE tanking trash mobs than main tanking bosses in Wrath, even if only slightly, compared to a warrior.

Here are some numbers being discussed on maintankadin around the stats of a level 80 warrior or paladin in the same gear with the same enchants and gems.

Maintankadin :: View topic - Mitigation Differences in Nax 7.25 gear (Wall of numbers)

We seem to mitigate more damage on weak hitting trash mobs than warriors, but we mitigate less on harder hitting mobs (and as noted in the thread, the analysis didn't discuss hard enough hits, where the disparity should get worse).

He also noted that warrior shield block is more effective mitigating larger numbers of mobs, which would be interesting if true.

 

rozetta

An update on the prot testing. I swapped to the SD weapon and re-did Mana Tombs. Didn't seem to make a huge amount of difference to be honest. However, I swapped to my ret gear (with shield and King's Defender) and had no problems soloing it in the same way. In fact it might have been a little easier, since I now had no trouble with the healers.

One problem I've noticed is that the sta->sd talent is pretty weak, especially in comparison to sheath of light. Also, the extra crit healing is misplaced on that talent. I honestly think they need to re-work that talent in some way. It's kinda like the holy int->SD talent - I can see it becoming obsolete in the near future, since the return will not scale at the same rate as gear with spell damage.

As a quick aside, now that I'm thinking about it: one nice PvP talent for prot would be a talent that reduces the movement speed of anything affected by your consecration. This would allow the prot paladin to have more chances to use HotR/ShoR. With ShoR now doing gimpy damage, there's no worry about bursting people down. The PvE ramifications of this idea are hardly overpowered (see piercing howl, for instance).

I respecced ret and went to Mana Tombs to verify that it was, in fact, new mechanics that were allowing prot to solo that dungeon. Although the initial few pulls were easy as ret (especially with the 1 minute repentance), I quickly found myself in difficult situations with the 3 and 4 pulls. Definitely it's a prot-only thing to be able to effectively solo that place, and it put my mind at ease about the mitigation talents.

Ret was able to easily solo a Fel Reaver - something I can't do on live with my gear. I attribute this to Divine Storm and Art of War. Once I got a rhythm going, it was impossible to die. Of course, this is not news, since ret paladins are soloing Onyxia on the test realms, but it was something I really wanted to check for myself.

I'm overall happy about the prot changes right now, with the exception of the PvP front, and to a certain extent, the soloing front. I still haven't tried tanking, and this will not happen until 3.0 goes live. However, I still wouldn't be completely sure that I can keep up threat against some of the DPS guys in our guild. I guess I have to wait and see.

I'm also skeptical, as most of the rest of you guys are, that we'll see enough changes before WotlK goes live. It seems they made a good start on the changes, but are getting rushed now and won't complete them before the patch and release date. I just hope things don't go the way they've done for the last 3.5 years. It seems the new dev team are a lot better than previous group, and they really seem to be talking sense. However, the long periods with a lack of blue posts is reminiscent of old times and this also worries me. It also worries me that they're still trying to balance PvE DPS and haven't even thought about PvP. Their numbers are wrong compared to what we can come up with (look at ret DPS, holy healing and prot mitigation), and it seems they're not doing enough proper internal testing, relying on theory more than actual playtesting. Also, it's very worrying that they started so late with these changes. We were all lead to believe a long time ago that they would be working on this stuff, and it seems they weren't. Imo, there's no way they'll balance PvP before WotlK, which is quite a huge fail, if you consider the epeen sports thing they're trying to sell. I'm honestly expecting another 2 years of the farce we've lived with up until now, and I really hope they prove me wrong.

 

Arthaal

BoS reduces incoming damage by 3% on top of its other effect. This is still a valuable buff on any raid member if AoE damage encounters continue to be the norm.

The BoW and BoM glyphs were removed in a recent patch were they not (the ones making them useful to cross specs I mean)?

Another good roundup of current protection paladin numbers:

Maintankadin :: View topic - Warrior Blocking Mechanics: Posting to Beta Forums

The apparent contradiction in paladin tier gear being put to better use by current warrior talents really highlights how little forward thinking (or lack of cross-departmental communication) was employed in designing the various class talents.

 

bv728

Because a big nerf followed by buffs tends to get better testing results from the community, and generates less overall outrage than nerfing an ability three patches in a row.

Also, given the nature of Blizz's internal iterative design when they're doing basic testing internally, they're looking at extreme numbers to start with; normal numbers only need to come out once bugs are fixed. Given that in any build you can throw away abilities entirely, cutting an ability in half lets you look for the threshold below which it's a waste of a GCD.

 

BFG

I haven't seen this mentioned yet, you can now block elemental melee attacks. I got Beta access at last, and noticed this while killing elementals in Borean Tundra. Double checked on Skettis Surgers, you can block in Beta and still can't on Live.

 

Halion

I'm not sure this is intended. Were the elementals still hitting for magical damage? I've heard that elementals are bugged atm, and their attacks are physical and thus blockable. If you are blocking magical damage, this is indeed an interesting change. If you are blocking physical damage from an elemental, then that bug just hasn't been fixed yet.

 

Endoscient

I actually like the current state of the number of talents in the Prot tree. While it might feel like you are wasting points and getting Kings, it is much better the way it is now then say Holy in TBC. Where there was pretty much exactly 41 talent points that was for Healing, and you could use the other on filler talents. I probably could have done Sunwell with 20 talent points unspent and no one would notice. Now with prot you have actual meaningful choices to make. On other end of that you bloated talent trees, like prot on Live. Where they added 7 useful talents to the tree since it was released, while not taking anything away from it. So there can be useful talents (like Spell Warding) that I just cannot pickup in most specs. There isn't really isn't choice, just good talents I wish I could take, but can't.

But, I do agree that BoK should become trainable. Mainly though for the benefit of ret/holy pallies though. It serves no real purpose except for one Pally in the raid to become the Kings bitch and lose 5 talent points. It wasn't bad in TBC since we had the extra points to do it, and along the way could pick up other useul talents like Imp Rf, Stoicism or Imp Conc aura. Now except for pure PvP specs, talents are much better spent in Ret.

 

• Avitus

They don't "nerf an ability three patches in a row" however. They bump things up and down to extremes almost randomly till they settle on something very close to the original instead of going there directly.

Say an ability does 10% damage, they feel it's overpowered. 8% would make sense, everyone on the forums thinks 8% would sound right, everyone here at EJ thinks 8% sounds about right, what is done? They bump it to 20%, then 2%, then they change it into a PvP talent, then a few random changes later, we get the 8%. Random fictional example, yet very close to the truth.

Sure you can claim this is "testing", but some things are too dumb not to take offense from (like cutting things in half or adding random 2x multipliers that everyone knows will cause trouble), especially when you have no guarantee whether the latest "ability cut in half" is just random craziness or something that's going to stick this time.

Some things just make no sense at all and I believe the culprit is the "left hand doing X, right hand doing Y" syndrome the devs seem to have in releases.

Anyway, don't want this to digress further into a rant, this is just a response to the above quote.

 

Ngita

What blessing will you be applying to non tanks? Optimal for the raid might be 2 paladins both with bok, one with imp wisdom ,the other with sanctuary. The reality is I couild see respeccing on a raid by raid basis to trade off loss of healing functionality with BoK.

 

Aquaman7

Well, i couldn't agree more with you in this statement.

However, and moving on to the things i read about the beta, i'm still convinced that Holy got minor Buffs and the final situation, if nothing is done meanwhile, is that when WOTLK is out we will still be the weakest healer ingame and with a major gap to spirit users (Priests / Druids).

I'm not in the beta and my info comes from reading a lot of information sources, however i have to say that feedback from Holy players in beta is very scarce, and made most of the time by people that respecc holy to do a few tests and then go back to the major fun of being in good speccs like retribution and protection.

Protection and Retribution got their second pass in beta but Holy is still waiting for it and i don't know if we will get it before expansion goes live.

Many people come to this forums and talk about Holy specc, but they aren't Holy in the beta, they don't post feedback on Holy in beta or any tests that they have made, they don't even intent to go Holy specc when the expansion goes live.

So i will kindly ask: Why do you Guys come here and say "Holy is fine!"?

I'm not talking about you or Cathela that have the sole purprose of improving the game and the Class in its 3 speccs, please understand me. I'm just a bit tyred of people coming here, not doing anything for Holy and saying that we are fine when we didn't even have our 2nd pass like Protection and Retribution did.

Please lets be a bit constructive when it comes to discuss Holy issues, it won't hurt the other speccs and maybe it will even help them.

 

Thorgred

I will be speccing for Kings simply because I'll be spending much more time in heroics than in 25-man raids.

I'll use BoSanctuary with Retribution Aura for easy content, and BoKings with Imp Devotion aura for harder content.

Kings will still be the best buff in the game, especially in 5mans/heroics, which is something that kind of irks me: the change to kings catered to raiders who can be assured that someone else will have kings; but causes the lower level of players to spend more talent points and end up with 'sub-optimal' specs. Although it's not a huge deal - mathcraft has shown to me that Reckoning and Seals of the Pure are barely worth the investments, so Kings spec it is.

 

Redcape

Awhile back in the retribution thread people were asking if we should be stacking hit to make sure judgement landed and Replenish proced. I went out and tested Judgement and found some interesting things:

1. Judgement cannot miss. I tested it with a level 4 paladin vs. a level 80 training dummy (no, not boss, 80) and never missed. It did get massive resists though, usually hitting for 20% or so of expected damage with the usual spell resist text.

2. 2 spells are cast when you Judge. The damaging Judgement portion cannot miss, the Judgement of Light/Wisdom/Justice can. However, even though the L/W/J portion can miss, it does not matter that it does because Replenishment, JotW mana return and the debuff all happen regardless.

3. At the moment I don't actually have data for a boss level mob, just level 80. With a level 70 character the level 80 dummy was resisting an awful lot of the damage but I don't have good data for a +3 level mob at this point.

The upshot of this is that a ret paladin really has minimal incentive to stack hit since a substantial portion of our damage simply isn't affected by it and our utility is completely independent of it. It is an excellent change for prot paladins since now they actually have a 100% guaranteed threat source to grab a mob off the bat. It always made me crazy trying to pick up dudes when Judgement resisted and that is no longer an issue. This does beg the question of why holy paladins are getting 4% hit in their late talents though... not that I have an issue with them getting it, but if that 4% isn't there to make Judgements hit, what exactly IS it there for?