jere

Just some quick things.

Cathela, in your OP, the table that lists the spell/ap/bv coefficients, etc. might need some extras:

1. Holy Shield AP and SP coefficients
2. Judgement of Vengeance coefficients (per stack per tick and 5 stack per tick)
3. In the table you list Seal of Vengeance damage, but really that is the Holy Vengeance portion and there is a separate Seal of Vengeance damage portion when you land an attack on a 5 stack (1.2%*weapon_speed*spell_power if I am not mistaken)

On a separate note, I was curious if anyone has taken the time to categorize the following:

1. The various spells miss mechanics (which are melee, which are spell, and are some both?).
2. The various spells resist mechanics (which ones partially resist, which "miss", and which do both)

I would imagine things like judgements changed to the "ranged" table, which I honestly have no experience with so I will need to look that up.

GUESSES:
My initial guess is that HotR is the melee table (miss/dodge/deflect?)
ShoR I have no idea as I am not 75 yet
Judgements I am guessing are miss only?
Holy Shield is probably still spell miss only?
Guessing consecration has no actual miss portion?
Hammer of Wrath maybe only miss?
Exorcism maybe spell miss (same for holy wrath?)?
Avenger's shield is maybe miss only?

I have no clue on what gets partial resists.

Anyways, stuff that I can't completely test yet, so I figured I would ask. I need to sit down and look at some of it though at some point.

 

Thorgred

Glyphs

Just did a search of all the glyphs on Wowhead. Not sure if there is any better way to look for them.

Major Glyphs:
Prot:
Spirtual Attunement Increases the amount of mana gained from your Spiritual Attunement spell by an additional 2%.
Righteous Defense Increases the chance for your Righteous Defense ability to work successfully by 8% on each target.
Avenger's Shield Your Avenger's Shield hits 2 fewer targets, but for 100% more damage.
Seal of Vengeance Your Seal of Vengeance or Seal of Corruption also grants 10 expertise while active.


Holy
Holy Light Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 5 yds of the initial target.
Flash of Light Your Flash of Light heals for 50% less initially, but also heals for 200% of its inital effect over 15 sec.
Seal of Light While Seal of Light is active, the effect of your healing spells is increased by 5%.
Seal of Wisdom While Seal of Wisdom is active, the cost of your healing spells is reduced by 5%.


Ret
Crusader Strike Your Crusader strike deals 20% more damage when your target is incapacitated or stunned.
Seal of Command Increases the chance of dealing Seal of Command damage by 20%.
Seal of Blood Your Seal of Blood or Seal of the Martyr increases the mana received from Spiritual Attunement by 10% while active.
Consecration Increases the duration and cooldown of Consecration by 2 sec.


All Specs
Judgement Your Judgements deal 10% more damage.
Cleansing Reduces the mana cost of your Cleanse and Purify spells by 20%.
Divinity (LoH) Your Lay on Hands also grants you as much mana as it grants your target.
Exorcism Your Exorcism also interrupts spellcasting for 0 sec. ???
Turn Evil Reduces the casting time of your Turn Evil spell by 100%.
Seal of Righteousness Reduces the cost of your Judgement spells by 10% while Seal of Righteousness is active.


PVP:
Hammer of Judgement Increases your Hammer of Justice duration by 1 sec.
Avenging Wrath Reduces the cooldown of your Hammer of Wrath spell by 50% while Avenging Wrath is active.
Hammer of Wrath Increases the range on Hammer of Wrath by 5 yards.


Minor
Blessing of Might Increases the duration of your Blessing of Might spell by 20 min when cast on yourself.
Blessing of Wisdom Increases the duration of your Blessing of Wisdom spell by 20 min when cast on yourself.
Lay on Hands Increases the mana restored by your Lay on Hands spell by 20%.
Blessing of Kings Reduces the mana cost of your Blessing of Kings and Greater Blessing of Kings spells by 50%.
Sense Undead Damage against Undead increased by 1% while your Sense Undead ability is active.
Warhorse Reduces the casting time of your Summon Charger and Summon Warhorse spells by 1 sec.

I think there is a glyph missing, spell number 41093, that hasn't been discovered yet.
Currently I see myself as Prot having the Sense Undead and Lay on Hands minor glyphs, and the Judgement and Righteous Defense major glyphs.

 

◊ Cathela

Good catch on the table. I just tested and it looks like HS has an 8.6% coefficient for AP. I'll update the table.

Regarding hit tables, the original patch notes for the "new" seal/judgement system said that judgements use the ranged hit table.

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

 

burghy

Regarding the glyphs, in a 5 man run with 4 melee (3dk and 1war) Glyph of Holy Light did 0.2% of my healing.

 

madmardigan83

Was this mainly because of prominant use of FoL?

Having an over-geared tank can do this as well... you rarely ever have to use HL.

Was the instance difficulty too easy? Keep in mind, our Premades on Beta start with blue gear. If you're doing normal lvl 80 instances, you already (to some extent) outgear the place a little bit. Heroics are moreso where you should try this I think.


And still... perhaps this glyph is more of a 'raid' one? Or perhaps it needs to apply to FoL as well?

 

burghy

45% HL, 32% FoL, 15% BeoL. Usually FoL is top but the DK tank was taking a lot of damage. I was actually healing the group to a minimum to see how JoL and that Glyph do.
Instance was Drak'Tharon Keep, 74 dk tank, 73,74 dk dps, 75 war, 76 me.

 

bellator

The usefulness of the glyph is of course going to better/worse in different situations. There is very little raid damage in 5-mans, but, for example last night I was tanking Thaddius 10man with a pala healing me. Everytime he hit me with a holy light everyone in my camp (-ve or +ve) got healed due to the large raidwise damage.

 

burghy

It wasn't as much the lack of group damage as the range issue. And tbh if you can't even use it properly on a melee group it needs a buff.

 

jere

Are you sure about the 8.6%? I was getting values more around 5.6% AP and 9ish% SP on Holy Shield

 

Tilted

I got to toy around on the PTR last night with some guildies. Normally I play as prot, but since our warrior tank was on I decided to try ret instead. We decided to 6-man Kara to see how well the new talents pan out (prot war, holy priest, shadow priest, ele shammy, demo lock, and me as ret). Now, I know this isn't a popular stance, but I feel it should be brought up.

The Retribution tree is too powerful.

Granted, this was just a dinky run on the test server at 70 when talent specs are designed for level 80 play, but my damage output was obscene for the gear I was wearing. My ret gear consists of SSC/TK level stuff, using the twinblade off Kael as my weapon. My libram went unused for the night since it only benefits SoC. Half my stuff wasn't even enchanted, though the +10 crit rating added to the Surefooted enchant is a nice touch. I was able to pull 1500-ish DPS on most trash packs, and upwards of 1800-2000 on tank-n-spank fights like Curator and Shade. Dorothea died before she had a chance to summon Toto, despite our 'lock spending time fearing Roar and burning Strawman. Illhoof was just comical:



Keep in mind -- my gear wasn't anything special, and the group wasn't even stacked in my favor! And yet things were literally dying so fast it was hard to use Hammer of Wrath because of GCD conflicts. If the current incarnation of the tree goes live, we can expect a major hit shortly after WotLK, which none of us want to see happen.

There were two things that stood out in this regard:

Sheath of Light - 30% is simply too much AP to convert to SP. At 3000 AP I had 900 SP, compared to the 1200 SP that my healing set has w/o any talent points spent. I didn't think to try it, but I'd wager a 7/x/43+ build would have just as much healing throughput as any deep-Holy build, but with zero mana concerns thanks to JotW (note that I don't think JotW is the problem here, and the Holy tree desperately needs some love). The fact that most our attacks scale with SP makes this a bit more out of control. IMO 15-20% would be more appropriate.

Divine Storm - For an attack that hits up to 4 targets it does too much damage. Hell, as a single-target attack it already does 50% more than anything else I have in my arsenal, save for Hammer of Wrath. On AoE pulls it was quite common to do 8k+ damage in a single GCD thanks to this talent. I really like the idea of a "ret whirlwind" attack that DS is right now, and I LOVE the animation, but the damage needs to be toned down.

As a side note, the fastest any of us have cleared Kara on Live is around 2.5 hours. We 6-manned it on PTR in just over two. The talents make this feel like a whole new game.

 

Fiola

Tilted, bear in mind that all classes are going to feel too powerful at 70 with L80 talents. Blizzard has also stated their goal that all DPS specs should be about the same in damage output.

Yes, Holy Whirlwind is very powerful for trash - it results in the level of performance you'd expect from a Fury warrior on Live. If paladins were expected to be 70% of a DPS war, I'd agree that'd be too much - but that's no longer the case.


Do you really think paladins should be rebalanced based on one Kara run with T5 gear?

 

flyingtoastr

The retribution tree is too powerful at 70.

Trust me, when you start getting higher it evens out nicely. Stop trying to get stuff nerfed that isn't balanced for that level.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Janraea

Ret's effectiveness at healing is not a problem with ret, but with holy. Healing light should probably be further down the tree, but a Holydin will already heal more effectively than a Retadin.

The amount of damage divine storm does to off-targets isn't really important. Treat it as a single target attack, and then think of damage done to offtargets over time - any class that can aoe can beat DS's aoe damage, probably even including holy priests. The single target damage of DS is slightly below that of CS, factoring in the cooldowns.

Damage meters are deceptive because they make classes that do more damage with multiple targets look too good. Surely you remember all of the meters through T5 with all of the locks having twice the damage of anyone else? But doing damage isn't the objective in most fights, killing specific enemies is.

 

Thorgred

Remember at lv60 when crusader strike was introduced?
And everyone was saying 'omg the sky is falling and ret pallys kill us in 1 stun'
-nerf, and then we suck at 70 until the patch.
Don't get us nerfed now, i'm sure everything will balance at 80.

 

Tilted

Please don't take this as a personal attack to anyone who is currently happy with Ret as it stands today. I simply bring this up for the same reason I mentioned the 240% modifier on ShoR -- when something scales too well, it will become a problem. I'm not calling for the devs to bring the hammer down on the spec, but I do feel that a couple numbers need to be tweaked.

I do realize all DPS classes are getting a boost, as I got to play with my mage as well. And I only cited one damage meter as a point of humor more than anything else. There's a difference between blindly screaming "NERF" and pointing out where a couple small changes could be made hopefully for the greater good down the road.

 

◊ Cathela

In addition to what everyone else said:

Illhoof is a fight where Arms warriors routinely top the charts even over the more specialized AoE classes like mages and warlocks. Given that a 3.0 ret paladin has equivalents to MS and Whirlwind, plus Consecration and Holy Wrath on top of that, it's not really a surprise that you'd be dominating the dps charts.

From your account, it sounds like your overall average dps for the entire run was ~2k or so? That really doesn't sound very far out of line to me, considering you'd expect a bit of a bump from new talents, and that they're removing the "you're not a real dps class" penalty.

I'm also guessing that the other three dps on your run probably did a decent bit more damage than you did?

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

 

Arthaal

Like Cathela said, 2440 DPS is unrepresentative of what you'll do on 90% of encounters. All our abilities are no ranks/scaling ones and gear while leveling up is skewed very heavily towards stamina increases over DPS stats so that your T5/T6 damage numbers are probably going to remain the same until you get to 78-80 and start getting blues and entry level raid gear.

 

Siawn

This pretty much sums it up. Please don't ask for our class to be nerfed based on a single fight of a single run in an instance that you out-gear.

 

Tilted

Perhaps I wasn't clear enough in my first post on this subject. My gear was not great by any means. The only buffs I had outside of what I gave myself was the new shaman Strength of Earth totem (untalented) and the new Totem of Wrath. Hell, my BoM wasn't even talented. I didn't have Windfury. I didn't have Mark of the Wild or Blessing of Kings. I didn't have Unleashed Rage or Leader of the Pack. Any one of those things would have increased damage output by even more, and you can count on all of these buffs to be present in a 25-man raid environment.

The last thing I want is for one of our builds to be nerfed into the ground. I also don't want to see 10 Retribution paladins showing up to every raid when I get to 80. Yes, this is an exaggeration, but neither one of these outcomes is good for the game as a whole.

PS - My overall standing at the end of the run is a bit irrelevant since the other DPS classes were intentionally trying out new talents and weren't "optimized" by any means.

PPS - A large part of why DPS warriors dominate on AoE pulls is because of Sweeping Strikes, a talent that is now out of reach (and much weaker, to boot) for Fury builds that focus on Whirlwind damage with Titan's Grip.

 

Khaelarys

You're being very clear - you're just talking about ability scaling and dps ability of a class at 70, and then extrapolating that a raid @ 80 will be 10 retribution paladins.

I think everyone above you is just saying that you might want to see how it scales before you say it's too much.

 

Fiola

I typed this up as an edit to my earlier post, but my Internet went out before I could make the change. To add on to what Cath already said, the ranking on the damage meter for Illhoof was predictable.


The fight starts off with 2 targets, with a stream of adds coming out 1~2 at a time. You have an instant weapon based AoE that reaches maximum potential with 4 targets. Enh Shaman have crappy AoE. Warlock Seed of Corruption AE takes time to set up, works better when there are >>> 4 targets, and is undercut by your ability to annihilate the adds as they come out. Spriests have crappy AE.

The class with the best AE for Illhoof topped that damage meter. I expect that a fury warrior would have had a similar level of performance, since whirlwind has the same advantage as DS does. (Maybe a bit more, if Cleave out-does Consecrate)



That damage meter may be comical, but it proves nothing with respect to Ret paladin balance needs.

 

Vangalius

At this point, I wish there wasn't any content patch prior to WotLK. So much outcry over balance at 70 - something that, by the time the patch hits live, will only matter for what? A month?

 

◊ Cathela

Well okay, perhaps the overall damage done for your raid wouldn't mean much, but as an overall metric for class balance, it's very relevant.

The reason I asked is because when my "Tier 6.1" guild does a fun Naxx run, we typically bring 8 dps doing ~2k each (single healer, single tank) and do a full clear in a bit under 2 hours. From your account it sounds like your overall Ret paladin dps is around 2k or perhaps a bit more. Since you have a total of 4 dps'ers in the raid (perhaps 5 if you count the new high-dps tanking warrior) and you're clearing the instance in ~2 hours, I think it's a safe bet that your mage and warlock at least are putting out a lot more damage than you are.

Simply saying "Ret paladins do 2k dps in 3.0" really tells us nothing about balance unless we can see what other classes do. If the results from your raid aren't really applicable to that question, then fine, but we still can't judge the balanced-ness of Ret dps unless we have something to compare it to.

As far as the warrior comparison, what they can do in 3.0 isn't really the point; I'm just using the current performance of Arms warriors as a convenient analogy. Sweeping Strikes is a big factor, sure, but consecration, Holy Wrath, and getting SoB procs on each target hit by DS are going to be even bigger.

Really, the point of the objections is that you're trying to make a pretty sweeping conclusion about balance based on some data from a highly unusual situation.

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

 

Palados

But he is right in the sence, that all those mages and locks who used to see retri doing 50% of their damage will cry a LOT if they ever meet a situation when they do 80% of retri damage. No matter how justified it would be from theorycrafting PoV. Believe me, this will be the case. I would rather started with a bit nerfed abilities being buffed to current state on wotlk release than got abilities nerfed in WotLK and restored to current state in 3.10.

 

Anauel

Crusader's Strike Syndrome. It happened in BC and it's happening in Wrath. Don't spread it. Get to 80, go to Naxx. If you do 50% of a boss's health with a mage and a lock there, then there's a problem.

EDIT:

They can cry all they want. The devs specifically said they wanted the damage to be around the same across the board. No more 50% of a mage's damage if you're full ret. There's also no point in toning the abilities down and then start bringing them back to what they should be from the beginning. As someone previously said, this won't matter a month after Wrath.