Synbios

Going with the sort of digressing discussion about BoK, I'm still of the opinion that it should get removed from the game. I'll tell you why, and perhaps some of you will agree.

BoK is arguably the single most powerful buff in the game. Only Paladins have it. Paladins also have Wisdom (of which there is no equivalent), Might (of which there are equivalents, but they are less convenient than Might), and Sanctuary (of which there is no direct equivalent). With the way our buffing system works, in order to have all of those buffs on a raid you would need 4 Paladins to cover every, single buff on every, single class (this is redundant in most cases; in some, however (i.e. Enhancement Shaman, Ret Paladins) it is not. With Blizzard's intended reduction to "2.5 of each class" per raid, BoK skews that to the detriment of everyone involved.

Furthermore, while BoK is more "accessible" it is still 5 points that SOMEONE has to take, simply because it has to be taken. As long as it exists, there is no question: every raid worth a damn needs to have BoK 100% of the time. So some guy (or multiple guys) have to spend 5 points out of their individual specs so that the raid can be brought to par (not have an edge; be brought to par... there is a significant difference when an encounter is designed assuming everyone has BoK).

Making it trainable solves the latter issue, but it doesn't solve the former. As a flat 10% stats increase, it is a simple matter to remove it from the game and scale each encounter accordingly.

BoK is NOT the lynchpin of Paladin buffing. It is an extraneous, mandatory buff that ultimately "helps" no one. Getting rid of it will only help the Paladin class.

 

flyingtoastr

Oddly that is directly contrary to my experience last night, where I had a Judgement of Blood parried by some random chimera flying around Howling Fjord.

Then of course hit mechanics were bugged to hell so that may not be the case.

 

Redcape

Seal of Blood is parryable, just tested that. I was under the impression that Seal of Blood was not parryable, dodgeable and never missed, but it sure suffers from those on the PTR.

I tried various judgements (including a ton on a level 4 toon against a level 80 mob, so misses should have been almost all the time) and never got a miss/dodge/parry under any circumstance. Are you certain you didn't judge and get the seal parried instead?

 

• Chicken

Seal of Blood has always been following standard melee mechanics. It's Judgement of Blood that (was) special and couldn't be fully resisted.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

flyingtoastr

Given how far away said chimera was from me I'm pretty much positive it was the Judgement. But as I said, everything was pretty messed up last night so for now I'm going to chalk it up to one of the hit bugs that was flying around until I can reproduce it.

 

Aquaman7

After coming back from Hollydays, my inspiration is short right now, so i will respond by quoting a poster in wow-europe forums, the name is Moonspirit:

"I've seen a number of holy paladins doing naax 10 / 25 already and honestly there are 2 situations that account for us doing well there :

a) No mana issues whatsoever - Replenish buff is too high - blizzard already fixed that last patch
b) The places are ridiculously easy for most raiders in good gear.


I did see some Data parses with holy paladins doing the lowest total raw healing in there, but i'll skip that for now because i'll just be jumped by people saying that meters are nothing and what counts is that the tanks lived through the fight and pretend that it was just the pala healing that did that and forget the renews/lifeblooms/chain heal jumps that actualy helped us - but i digress already."

Now on my on response:

1) I do know that metters don't account for player performance, i'm one Holy Paladin for 3 years now, exploring every aspect of the game, so i do know my way around.

2) If every healer class is going to get single target heals in WOTLK, it means that we will have competition in Tank healing.

3) If spirit users (Druid/Priest) have near endless mana, while Paladins don't, that's easy to take the conclusion that with the new spells and the mana available, our time as the best Tank Healer around is going to end.

4) I do think that Priests can do aswell as Paladins or better in Tank healing right now in live. So we may have lost the crown already, but in WOTLK we certainly do to more Class's and we still don't get nothing near what they have in raid healing. In a word, Holy Paladins are replacable in WOTLK but can't replace anyone.



1) I do know about potion sickness and that is my point. Chain using mana potions was a way to keep up with Tank healing and prevent from being replaced with other healers.

2) It's not only a case of not getting oom but also a problem of balance with Druid/Priest. If they have much more mana regen, they will certainly win in one arena match, for example, and are better assets in pve situations also.

 

Rasputin

Judgements now proc seals. So it's possible for you to judge an enemy 10 yards away and still have your seal parried.

 

Anedris

Re: Aquaman:

1) Meters are meaningless. Anyone main tank healing will in the normal course of events do less healing than anyone raid healing. That priest you suggest is a better single-target tank healer on live will, if assigned to tank healing, languish somewhere at the bottom of the healing meters in most encounters.

2) Every healer has always had single-target heals. Traditionally, some healers don't use them much because someone has to do the AoE healing and so the healers who are best at that tend to do that. Since it would not be uncommon for there to be no priest or paladin healer in a 10-man group, all classes must be able to tank heal effectively to make such content accessible.

3) Blizzard has already said mana regeneration is too high across the board and that every class with a blue bar should have to worry about mana. No one is going to have endless mana so this point is irrelevant.

4) In WotLK all classes are supposed to be replaceable. If holydins are irreplaceable, Blizzard has screwed up their stated intentions big time. As to not being able to replace anyone, last I checked there weren't any encounters that didn't require single-target healing.

Chain chugging potions was always a terrible mechanic and good riddance to it. If holydins can't keep up then Blizzard will fix them.

Holydins could use some help, but hyperbole gets us nowhere. Divine plea spam would return 25% mana per minute, which should more or less moot any mana issues. The problem, of course, is the MS-effect. I think removing that entirely would actually be too powerful, but maybe it could be reduced or changed to something less likely to make someone die during those 10 seconds.

The continuing absence of an AoE heal is also a potential issue, since it more or less requires the second healer in any 10-person group to cover all AoE healing there is. Fortunately all three other healers have strong AoE heals, and most encounters will run one tank healer and one raid healer, so the roles break down pretty obviously. Only concern would be something like Malacress where the tank healing required is pretty minimal but there is a large amount of AoE damage flying about. A paladin is going to be less optimal in encounters where tank survival isn't really an issue (Curator would be another one, although the combination of the tank and bolt soak in that encounter gives a pretty good amount places to pour single target healing) than for example a druid who can simply roll a lifebloom stack on the tank and add in some other HoTs where necessary while contributing to raid healing.

I'm unsure how you make a paladin AoE heal without it being a copy of the other classes though. Maybe a more powerful judgement of light, or a healing consecrate as has been suggested. (I didn't really like the initial incarnation of beacon - it was too too much like CoH and flourish rolled into one and slapped with a massive mana cost.)

 

burghy

Or they could remove it completely and adjust cooldown/mana return to be balanced. I don't even understand why they try to use a mechanic that causes huge situational differences.

 

Palados

They could also get rid of the MS effect but double the cast time. So instant heal won't change and casted heal gets 50% penalty in HPS.

 

flyingtoastr

That then screws over the prot pallys who are incredibly dependent on smashing this button every cooldown while offtanking to have some semblance of outgoing TPS. Even I am guilty of this at times, but there is more than 1 paladin spec and they all use and require radically different mechanics.

That's the main problem with abilities like Divine Plea and Judgements of the Wise: they might fit the bill perfectly for one spec but because they would be too overpowered for another. As it is right now the Paladin class has some wonked mechanics and abilities like Divine Plea only serve to highlight them.

Of course right now though a little creative use of game mechanics will let you get off at least a few tics here and there (i.e. use it right before the cocoons on Maxxena so while you're sitting there doing nothing you're still getting some regen) so I wouldn't call it terrible to have the MS effect. You can also click off the buff to drop the MS effect, allowing you to grab a few tics here and there during lulls in healing.

 

Mordekhuul

Has anyone taken their 80 tankadin for a spin since the (long awaited/feared) Shield of Righteousness nerf? I am not so much worried about threat (RF has ridiculous threat multipliers built in now, as discussed) as I am our DPS output while tanking or off-tanking.

So how do things look, and in particular if anyone has seen DK, Feral, or Warrior tanks in action on beta recently, how do we stack up to them and to DPS?

(Caveat - not expecting to match a DPS class or spec, of course, just looking for the famous 80% mark, or rather how far short of what we fall).

 

Synbios

Well, here's a question. What spec is the 50% healing mechanic designed to punish? All of them? Ret? Holy?

If I had to guess, I'd say it's designed to punish Ret Paladins more than Holy Paladins. I think, to some degree, they are making a bold assumption that Holy Pallies won't need to be popping Divine Plea on CD. That being said, I'm not sure why they don't just bake a fix deep in the tree. For example, tie into Beacon of Light that your Divine Plea loses the MS effect. Or reduces the MS effect to maybe 25%.

While I'm on that kick, I'm not sure why that's not done for other abilities as well. My guess is that Righteous Fury isn't 10% reduction because 10% reduction on Holy and Ret would be considered OP. Well, how about baking another 4% into some deep Prot talent, out of reach of the other specs?

I guess what I'm trying to say is, traditionally Paladin trees have been bloated towards the bottom, I'm assuming here, because Blizzard doesn't want abilities that are too powerful to be accessible to the other specs. That's why Sheath got moved down. What I'm trying to say is, you can make a powerful baseline ability like Divine Plea, or a powerful ability high in the tree like Improved RF, and then make it EVEN BETTER by baking something deep in the tree but tying it into something else so as to save talent points.

 

burghy

The problem being fights like brutallus/patchwerk where you can't afford it at all. That's why I said it's too situational. How do you balance the class when in x% of the fights you have 25% mana per min and in y% of the fights you have 0% mana per min ?

 

flyingtoastr

What spec gains the most from popping it on every cooldown?

Remember that both prot and ret are running with 0 extra intellect. That gives them a total mana pool of something like 7600 fulling raid buffed. 1900 mana every cooldown isn't too terrible.

A fully raid buffed holy paladin may be looking at somewhere in the range of 20k mana. That's 5000 mana every cooldown. That's a lot. It's actually not quite as good as Water Shield, but you could understand with how cheap FoL is they need to be careful with how much free regen they give holy pallys. So they put on an effect that makes holy pallys think before they use it.

They actually follow this method with all the healers. For priests and Druids they accomplish this with the long cooldowns on Shadowfiend and Innervate. With Shamans they have a long cooldown on Mana Tide, in addition to GCD costs from refreshing totems and Water Shield. With Pallys they can't give that long cooldown without crippling the other two specs, so they threw on a debuff that forces a Holy Pally to use the ability intelligently instead of spam it.

If you're the only healer on Patchwerk you're pretty much fucked anyway. During those times that you really need Plea you should really just notify your other healers and they can pick up the slack during your downtime. You can sit on an IoL proc and just cancel the DP buff when you absolutely need the heal to go out.

It's inconvenient, but it's not insurmountable. Again, it's just paying people to play smart instead of spam. It just separates out the good players who can weave it in from the bad.

 

Kyne

Blessing of Kings doesn't skew anything out of the "2.5 of each class" mentality, you'll only ever need 4 Paladins if you're completely hell-bent on having every single blessing in the game available to you in a raid, which a lot of guilds don't really stress on live, and min-max guilds can have alts outside of a zone to buff anyways. Let me break it down for you:

In Wrath of the Lich King there won't be Blessing of Salvation or Blessing of Light anymore. Also, the 3% reduced damage is nice but then again exactly how many guilds do you see run a mandatory Blessing of Sanctuary Paladin on live? Blessing of Sanctuary as-is reduces damage by 80, which is about equal to a 3% decrease to any hit of ~2667 damage. The obvious benefit is that it scales as damage increases, but how many fights do people actually make a point for Blessing of Sanctuary to be mandatory on live? Felmyst is an obvious choice since Protection Paladins are most commonly taken to that fight, but unless there's 4 Paladins you're never going to see that Protection Paladin slap Sanctuary on the entire raid, usually just themselves and/or the tank and that's it. How about Eredar Twins, there's a lot of AoE damage on that fight right? Well, again, unless you have a ton of Paladins chances are you're going to stick with the "big three" blessings (Salv/Wis/Kings for casters, Salv/Might/Kings for melee) using Sanctuary only on yourself, or another tank.

So really, unless you have a whole bunch of Paladins the tanks are going to be the only people to receive the buff. Having 3 Paladins in a raid is still a very likely scenario come Wrath of the Lich King, one of them being Holy (With Kings), one being Protection (With Sanctuary) and one being Retribution (With Improved Blessing of Might). The Holy Paladin can buff Kings on everyone, the Protection Paladin will still probably only cast Sanctuary on the Tanks, and Wisdom on everyone else while the Retribution Paladin Provides Blessing of Might to the entire raid (including casters with the Blessing of Might glyph in mind). Yeah, you won't have Improved Blessing of Wisdom but then again that's not really a huge issue since you're getting every buff on every single class that needs it without breaking outside of a standard raid composition.

Not seeing a problem.

 

• Avitus

Aquaman, I have a feeling you only read the first sentence of something then you write your replies. Go re-read your own post and that quote of mine in it and understand what I'm saying: If holy paladins turn out to be that far below other healer classes in regen, there is no doubt in my mind they will get a boost there. Some things in wow are negotiable, this one is not, or at least there is no way holy regen will be left as low as you imagine it to be when it goes live.

They've already acknowledged the pattern we've all seen in TBC: Going from gods of never ending mana at the start to a really uncomfortable position now that TBC is coming to an end. They know what's up, so why keep complaining about being replaced and bad mana regen?

And lo and behold there already is a solution now: Divine Plea is a very powerful tool now that other classes do not have. Just to put things in perspective: At ~20k mana pool you're looking at a 5k mana return every 1 minute. This perfectly scales with gear, at a theoretical 30k mana mana pool you'll have a return of 7500 mana every 1 minute. This is an almost obscene amount of regen to be stacked on top of all our other regen from gear and talents. Mana is actually fine in the long run for holy.

Want to complain about something? Focus it on the correct target: The Divine Plea healing debuff is the problem, not the mana regen. In that regard if this is what you would aim your complaining towards, I would fully agree with you, it's an overly penalizing debuff: 10 seconds out of every minute you're healing at 50% efficiency, just so you can have your regen go at full blast. Either the duration of the debuff or the potency of the debuff needs to be reduced to make it more acceptable.



Finally, regarding your other post on the previous page about ret players not having a valid opinion/experience with holy... I can only say I have experienced every single fight in the game as holy, WoW classic as well as TBC. I've also been ret on every single fight in the game (though for vanilla classic it was mostly past 5 piece Avenger for fun) and I've been prot on every single fight of TBC with the exception of Kil'jaeden. Not as a replacement or as an off event, but for extended periods of time many times holy being my main spec again for a while, depending on guild need. I never considered myself a paladin of spec x, y or z, but simply a paladin. Until very recently, the idea of being a dedicated retadin wasn't even that viable.

Why am I writing this? Well, I'm very sure the majority of the "retadins" you're dismissing in your post have similar to very similar experiences. So please think again before you dismiss a whole collective based on things you simply do not/cannot know or stereotypes you'd like to imagine.

 

Endoscient

Live BoSanc is much worse then 3%, a lot because of how it reduces 80 damage before armor. And most bosses probably hit around 10k before armor, so you are looking at less then 1% reduction. Also that doesn't count the gain of mana/rage/runic power when you avoid an attack, which is going to be great for aggro.

You will probably be fine having 2 pally buffs. Since BoM and Battle Shout won't stack, you won't need it most of the time.

Tanks: Kings, Sanctuary
Melee: Kings, and maybe Wisdom (for Pallies/Shamans?)
Nukers: Kings, Wisdom
Healers: Kings, Wisdom

Though 3% less damage can help on AoE fights if you really want to min/max, then 3 Blessings is needed. Which most likely means someones alt.

I am quite excited for Divine Plea, because it will actually take skill to balance max regen, while not gimping your heals when they are needed on the tank. It is much more interesting then just something like a mana pot you spam every time it is up. Also remember Avenging Wrath now effects heals, if you think you won't ever be able to safely heal at 50% effectiveness for 6 seconds, you can use AW to help offset that.

 

Andrast

Not quite sure what holy spec you're looking at but it certainly doesn't seem to be the optimal one. However holy pallies can get imp might and imp wis relatively easily and these buffs are usually mutually exclusive. It is much more likely that the ret paladin can pickup kings. Therefore the ret pally will do kings, the holy pally wis/might and the prot pally wis/might/sanc. It does mean a class like a hunter has to choose between imp might and imp wis but for most classes it's much more straightforward.

Correct me if I'm wrong but hasn't the Glyph of Blessing of Might been removed? This means you don't need raidwide might (which doesn't make sense) and means only ret paladins, shaman, hunters won't have sanctuary and everyone has the buffs they need with only 3 paladins.

 

PSGarak

The only thing that operates like WLK BoS is the live version of Shadow Embrace, the warlock talent that reduces physical damage done by 5%. It's strictly more mitigation than BoS, and with the CoE redesign malediction means it's no longer a noticeably DPS decreaes to bring an affliction warlock, but it's still treated as a somewhat optional debuff. In all seriousness, the stronger part of the buff is probably the 'rider' effect of extra energy regen, and that varies from class to class (and patch to patch and fight to fight) whether it's really necessary. So while I'm always in favor of SE, I don't think there's much arguement to be made that BoS will be a high-demand buff.

http://sig.gamerdna.com/quizzes/INFL...erks/Garak.png

 

Darandor

I was just browsing through the PvP items listed on mmo-champion, and couldn't find a spell power/crit rating 1H weapon usable by Paladins. The 1H mace is there with its MP5, which isn't really an optimal PvP stat since Infusion of Light.

Correct me if I'm wrong, and if not could somebody please mention this on the beta forums?

 

Endoscient

Grace (Grace - Spell - World of Warcraft) is the spell which is supposed to be redundant for BoSanc. Though as you said the large part of it is the power gained on avoiding an attack. BoSanc will almost surely be required by top end guilds, but it is something that can easily be relegated to an alt though.

 

Nutron

When you mention 80 damage reduction being equal to 2667, this is applied pre armor in its current form. What it means is a hit of 3000 will be negated by 80 damage first, and then by armor.

On a tank running 70% damage reduction from armor/talents, the attack becomes 2100. (3k*0.7)
With blessing of sanctuary on, the tank will be hit for 2044. ((3k - 80)*0.7)

So instead of negating its supposed 80 damage, all it does is negate 56 damage. This is why it is so terrible in its current form. It scales backwards with armor and mitigation talents since its reduction is a static value. Also concider blocking was not concidered into the equation making it even worse.

Now lets look at the same setup and the same attack with the new wotlk BoSanc:

You take off 3% of the 3000 hit, meaning it is now a 2910 hit. With the same 70% avoidance as last example, the hit becomes 2037. Now if the same value is applied after armor and mitigation, the final value will remain the same. This is all assuming the blessing is not additive to other mitigation values. 3000 * .7 = 2100 * 0.3 = 2037.

If you are trying to progress on a new fight with alot of damage, every single bit counts, and with 15k+ hits coming up in wotlk, this blessing is an extremely big upgrade to what it was.

Now I understand your point that it may not be mandatory and i Agree with you that it doesn't skew the plan for blizzards of having 2.5 classes per raid, but on a progression fight, every bit counts and this will be a very strong tool that will only gain in strength as things hit harder and harder. It will most likely be the 2nd blessing of choice on tanks, and the 3rd on almost every other classes.

The only advantage of having 4 paladins would be for ret paladins and enhancement shaman, which you will most likely bring 1 of at most in a minmax type of raid. The disadvantage of not having BoSanc on those 2 classes is very small over the course of a whole fight.

Actually, not to nitpick the last part, but the ideal way to distribute blessings would be the holy paladin doing wisdom and improved might, the ret paladin doing kings and the protection paladin doing sanctuary. Picking up kings for a ret paladin doesnt hurt their talent spec whatsoever for pve.

 

Kyne

Can pick up Kings just fine with any Holy Spec, I'm not really sure what you're trying to get at.

The original assertion was that Kings skews raid composition and breaks away from the "2.5 class per raid" model, which is what was being addressed. You can do Blessing assignments however you want, that's not the topic of discussion, it's just being used as an example so stop wasting time analyzing it.

The point is that you can get every buff in the game without a lot of trouble.

You're missing the point. The 2667 figure is a rough estimate to prove what PSGarak basically just said: BoSanc isn't a mandatory raid buff because there's almost no point to use it on anybody but a tank, so there's no point in figuring it as a buff every member of the raid needs to have. To boot you're not going to get a whole lot more extra damage reduced out of Blessing of Sanctuary between the WOTLK version and the live version with current raid-wide damage figures. The math is completely pointless because common sense rules the day here.

 

Nutron

I am not missing the point, I mentioned this wasn't mandatory but was a much stronger buff than you make it look to appear on a very weak hit. You should read what I wrote more carefully