Tilted

I don't want this to sound like a "everything needs to be balanced at 70" kind of argument. If I had a beta key, I'd do tests at 80, but since I do not, the only real alternative is to try things out on PTR and attempt to extrapolate from there. If there are any glaring discrepancies between scaling at the two levels, please let me know. So far the only thing I've seen to indicate anything like this is flyingtoastr's comment that things all pan out fine at 80. I'm not here to argue that point, but I do remember shadow priests looking like DPS gods as everyone was fresh at 70, and they're clearly at the bottom of the pack on live servers right now. Keep in mind that everyone in beta is basically a fresh 80, so raw DPS stats don't mean a whole lot without knowing the scaling that goes on behind them. The scaling is what I question.

I fully agree that comparisons need to happen. It's highly unlikely though that any in-depth work will be done prior to launch of 3.0 or even WotLK. I can say though that it appears that my ret specced paladin will out damage my similarly-geared takeyourpickofspec mage in most situations involving 2-6 targets. 1500-1600 per hit DS with crits upwards of 3600-3800 simply outclasses any mage AoE spell without the use of cooldowns or gimmicks to back it up (Arcane Power, Combustion, Shatter, etc), again, at level 70. If the targets are demon or undead, and from the sounds of it quite a few level 80 encounters are, the difference is even more profound. Considering mages just received quite a few buffs to "re-throne" them as AoE kings, and if further testing shows paladins doing more damage in any AoE situation, you can bet things will change.

Again, this is speculation and I haven't actually done the comparison yet, but it does look like this might be a possibility.

 

Valerys

As far as I know, level 80 Naxx logs show ret paladins being decidedly average rather than outdamaging anyone, least of all mages.

 

Blackthought

Please review the damage parses posted on the Beta Blizzard forums for actual data about how ret paladins compare to other dps classes at 80. I have not seen one parse showing a paladin at the top of the meters. If anything, they are below average. Information is available if you search. Speculation is a complete waste of time and has no place when actual data is available.

 

Pyre

Ghostcrawler's now posted on the beta boards that holy's unlikely to get any meaningful review.

 

◊ Cathela

I'd rather let them cry than go through a pointless nerf-buff cycle. I think after the CS experience the developers probably feel the same way.

--

On another note, I've been thinking about the BoK situation a bit recently, and I think I finally figured out why the current implementation (current in beta, that is) bothers me.

The problem is that BoK requires talent points without actually "belonging" to any particular spec. As a Tier 1 talent, it's something that anyone can pick up from any spec without having to waste any points on prerequisites. So everyone's going to expect "one of the paladins" to have it, but nobody's going to really know which one of the paladins should have it. Compare it to Improved BoW, which also has no substitute (at least for now). If a Holy paladin shows up in a raid without Imp BoW, everyone's going to be all "Seriously dude, no Imp BoW? WTF?" But a Ret or Prot paladin will never be expected to bring Imp BoW. Similarly, nobody's going to chew out a Holy paladin who doesn't have BoSanct, etc.

From a different perspective: If BoK was the 11-point Holy talent (I'm not suggesting this, just using it as a hypothetical) then at least it would be clear who's supposed to have BoK and who's not. You could still pick up BoK as Ret or Prot (with some sacrifice) but people wouldn't automatically expect you to have it. It would at least be clear that BoK is a Holy talent, rather than just being an "anyone" talent, which for all intents and purposes is what it is now.

So, if it's a talent available to anyone, why doesn't everyone just pick it up? Because 5 points is a pretty decent hit against your primary role. If someone else has BoK you're probably not benefitting the raid much, and every spec can benefit more from spending those points on something that synergizes with its primary role.

The result of this is going to be a situation where BoK becomes the ultimate annoyance for raiding paladins. Every raid that has a paladin is going to want BoK, but no paladin is going to want to give up the five talent points to always have it available. So there's going to be frequent re-speccing at the beginning of raids, and probably some /randoming to determine who has to be the BoK-bot for the night. That's not fun; it's an annoyance.

So, what to do? Most of the solutions proposed so far have been one of the following:

(1) Make BoK baseline.
(2) Give another class a BoK-alike buff (non-stacking, of course).
(3) Remove BoK from the game and rebalance content accordingly.

At this stage of development, option (3) is probably a non-starter, since there's a release deadline coming up and the content team is probably busy enough without having to also rebalance content they've already gotten finished. Option (2) can work, assuming the devs can find a class to give the new buff to, but it would still leave a lot of paladins facing the same issues (especially in 10-man raids) and BoK is a pretty major buff to be confined to even 2-3 specs out of 30.

That leaves (1), and I think most people reading this would agree that's the best answer, but for whatever reason the devs seem hesitant to do this. So I have an alternative suggestion. There are two other class-unique buffs in the game that are baseline, but require talents to reach full strength: Fortitude and Mark of the Wild. Change BoK to match their model.

Specifically: Make a baseline Blessing of Kings that gives a +8% increase to all stats, and a two-point Improved BoK stat that adds an extra 1% per point for a total of +10% to all stats.

There are other ways to do this; it could be a 7% baseline boost and a 3-point talent, or a 6% boost and a 2-point talent for +2% per point, or whatever. The point, though, is to reduce the baseline version to a level that the devs feel won't be imbalanced, and to make the talented improvement cheap enough that paladins won't mind having it in their spec.

For example, a Holy paladin could pick up a two-point full-strength BoK and still have 18 points free to pick up all the +crit talents in the shallow end of Ret. (Assuming for the sake of argument that a Holy paladin will want to put 51 points into Holy.) A Prot paladin could get full-strength BoK and only sacrifice 6% of his seal damage rather than 15%. It's still a hit, but it's not such a big deal that you're going to mind keeping BoK in your spec most of the time.

The other benefit is that if a raid has to get by with the 8% BoK instead of the 10% BoK, it's not an earth-shattering deal. Minimaxers will still want a paladin to respec for the full 10%, and that's fine. But it means that slightly more casual raid will only have to deal with a 2% stat loss instead of a 10% stat loss if they don't have a full-BoK paladin.

(As I said above, I'd prefer to just see the full BoK made baseline, but I'm suggesting this since the devs seem reluctant to do that for some reason.)

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

 

GSH

Take a look at what your next 10 talent points will be, and how much DPS they will add. Then, take a DPS class at 70 and add 10 talent points.

The last 10 talent points aren't going to add much damage to Retribution. I'd pick up Kings, Imp Ret Aura, and something else random (maybe PoJ). Whereas the last 10 points for pretty much every other DPS class will add more DPS.

 

Blutelf

In addition to this, Ghostcrawler mentioned an upcoming Divine Plea change : an increase in duration while keeping overall mana return the same.

To adress Cathela's post: GC may have been just using developer slang, you might expect them to think of abilities in terms of cooldown weighted against return. We'll see what they've come up with fairly soon, hopefully.

 

Arthaal

Terrible news indeed. I fail to see how giving Holy paladins Divine Plea and Beacon of Light helps us with our mobility and mana regen compared to Druids/Priests. Having used BoL, I'll admit it's more useful than I thought it would be, but its certainly very limited and suboptimal (durations/cost/overhealing implementation/LOS and range issues) in its current form. Balancing our regen with divine plea and a MS effect on all healing up 1/6th of the time is like sodomizing someone for their own good... it's just not nice.

Edit: Make that more than 1/6th of the time...

 

◊ Cathela

Well, your earlier post was quite a bit more confident and assertive ("The Retribution tree is too powerful.") so I think you can understand people are going to call your thinking into question.

And regarding how it "appears" your ret paladin will outdamage your mage -- how did you do compared to the other dps'ers who were actually on your Kara run? As I've said before, my guild clears Kara in a bit under two hours with an rDPS of 15-16k. If you cleared it in "a bit over two hours" you've really got to be doing at least 12k rDPS, meaning that your ~2k dps average is a good bit below the other 3 dps in your raid. Is it?

The last time I asked you said that it was irrelevant because the other dps in your raid were "not optimized" because they were screwing around with new talents. If that's true and they still out-dps'd you over the entire run, that only strengthens the argument that Ret isn't overpowered.

From the information you've shared so far, I think the reasonable conclusions anyone would draw from this are:

1) Ret paladin dps is higher in 3.0 than on live.
2) At least some other classes' dps is probably much higher in 3.0 than on live.
3) Illhoof is still lots of fun for a class with an instant weapon-based AoE.

If you've got actual data to counter any of these points (number 2 especially), please share. But otherwise, you're overreaching.
Bad. What's really bad is this:
They really should be. Not just for paladins but for every class. I don't think there's a tree in the game that couldn't benefit from a serious, zero-based look at what it's supposed to give, what kind of playstyle it's supposed to enable, etc. If you come to the conclusion that it's doing what it's supposed to do just fine, then okay, you can leave it basically how it is. But I don't think very many people are feeling this way about Holy right now. (I don't want to speak for Toastr, but he's one of the more optimistic people about Holy right now, and even he's got a mock-up of Holy with some pretty significant changes.)

I'm really happy that Prot got such a "rebuild" and I feel genuinely bad for people whose preferred trees didn't/won't get one. And I think they could all be given a good look if release were set for mid-January instead of mid-November. What a shame.

EDIT:
The relevant line is "Divine Plea will have a longer duration but the same total percent mana returned per cooldown." That doesn't quite make sense as written; if you're not changing the cooldown, then "same total percent mana per cooldown" is the same as "same total percent mana", and you might as well just say it that way.

What I'm hoping is that GC meant to say something like "Divine Plea will have a longer cooldown but return the same total percent mana over a similar period of time." As in, 2 minute cooldown for 50% mana per cast so that you can get the same benefit over time but only spend half as much time with the healing debuff, or something like that. We'll see.

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

 

Palados

Well, it sucks ofc. But I won't change my spec. And I think that we are in a better situation than holy priests were in TBC when t4 and t5 progress raids of good guilds could have 0 of those.

Do we have problems healing in 5mans? Seems like not.
Are we still viable in rads as tank healers? Yes. If some other class could heal MT 90% as effective as paladin but can't bring any new buffs to raid, I don't see them stealing our spots. And I will bet - if it will turn out that some class is superior in single target healing either we are buffed or that class is nerfed. Bliz stated that we are supposed to be the best single target healing. And they are aware that we are bad in other types of healing, thus our value is based on our power in single target healing.

I am fine as soon as they will make a pass after WotLK release and fix all that annoying 'minor' things that add up and make holy build looking poor.

 

rozetta

They ran out of time and now they're trying to cover their tracks in the same blizzard blue poster style we are so used to. I wouldn't be surprised to see other class/spec concerns get addressed in the same way. The thing we really need to worry about now is - will we see a repeat of the almost 2 years of TBC again? If they're not willing to acknowledge the problems at this point, they can easily brush the issue under the carpet or flat-out stop posting for the forseeable future.

 

Endoscient

I don't think the state of Holy is that bad off from a design standpoint. We were really great healers in BC for single targets, we just looked subpar because how much AoE damage they put in the later parts of raiding, which was our weakness. From my experiences there are two main problems with Holy Paladin healing in BC.

1) Mobility, when we need moving we have no effective way to heal. Now with a 6sec CD Holy Shock that heal for a decent amount whose crits procs instant Holy Lights will greatly help this. Sacred Shield will also help a lot once they make so it scales and works properly.

2) Group Healing, currently we can only heal one person at a time. So if we need to heal someone other then the tank we need to hope they don't take too much damage in that time. I think BoL does a great job at this from a design view points, just need to fix the implementation, but conceptual it will let us heal the group while not ignoring the tank.

I don't really want something like Chain Heal, or a HoT, that would just be boring replication of another class. I like how these new abilities expand our current skills and make us stronger in our weak areas.

As for mana regen people keep mentioning, we are getting 8% additional crit from ret talents. Also getting Divine Plea, which is going to be great. While you won't be able to mindlessly spam on CD but if to intelligently use it when there is a short lull in the fight. Which I think is a lot more interesting then just having an ability to spam on cool down, and also lets Blizzard to balance it to be stronger.

 

• frmorrison

Note GC's post is referring to Holy not getting an overhaul like Prot and Ret did.

The only issue I see is JotP and BoL not being great, everything else is good enough.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Rej

It's still a bit unfortunate that we're the only melee class without a snare, and the only melee class without some way to teleport/sprint back to our target when feared 50 yds away.

Renaming Blessing of Freedom to Hand of Freedom didn't really make it any less of a feeble crutch. Feral Druids managed to see a snare, a fear break, and a 3 minute Sprint - how come all these considerations were overlooked for Retribution paladins? I would be happy with just one of those being granted to us.

I don't think Retribution will be quite as powerful as people make it out to be when WotLK comes out. Damage will eventually be normalized, but we continue to lack basic utility that melee roles need to remain viable in PvP. (Sounds like for raiding DPS we are doing alright).

 

Tilted

I didn't bring it up earlier, because direct meter parses never show the big picture, but since you've asked twice now, I crushed them all for the overall run. That said, we were nowhere near 12k rDPS overall (if I had to guess it was in the 6-7k range, but the meter's since been cleared), so if I've been citing flawed data I apologize. The main reason for the speed of our run was pulling 2-3 packs at a time and not really stopping for anything.

I still feel the ret tree is too powerful, and not by very much at all, but many people obviously disagree. I honestly feel if those two talents (Sheath and DS) remain untouched prior to WotLK release, we can expect them to take a hit in 3.1, quite possibly over-correcting like what's been done in the past. That's my opinion and I take no offense to anyone who thinks different.

For what it's worth, I'm happy to drop the whole argument because Holy clearly needs some work done prior to release and the clock is ticking. I'd much rather see the devs spend time on that than tweaking down a few numbers on the spec most of us are going to use to level with anyway.

 

Rasputin

Unfortunately, the last two tiers of a talent tree being so weak that you're forced to ignore the bottom 3 tiers in order to spec your healing class into the melee dps tree for the superior healing options there is...odd at best, and a complete design failure at worst. I simply cannot see Beacon being good enough to waste points to get to it when there are much better options in Ret. I am and have been ret and I plan on staying that way, but to leave the tree in this state and gloss over it with "Well you're good at tank healing still, so don't worry about it" is disappointing.

 

Blackthought

Here is some data for you to consider:

WOW Meter Online �*�兽数据在线 - More logs!!!!!!

ER WotLK Beta Raid History

This doesnt suggest to me that Ret is out of line.

More logs from Naxx at 80 can be found here WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Hey, are you going to Naxxramas?

 

Rasputin

A glimmer of light:

Source

 

Anauel

Thing is, the talents seem to be overpowered because of the tuning. I must say that I haven't been in beta, all I can do is see the parses that some of the retadins have posted while doing Naxx and I can say we're not at the top.

One of the things I can say, based from experience, is that it really did feel like we were overpowered when the beta for BC came out and we had a 6s crusader strike. It really felt overpowered because it wasn't tuned for level 60. What the devs did give it a 10s cooldown, crippling our leveling damage because of other classes' whining. Then, when we were all 70 and everyone realized Ret sucked, they buffed it back to 6s. In the end all it did was quench the thirst for ret nerfs and left us with less dps for levelling (I remember I quit my pally at 67 because my DPS was balls). The dps gained from 60-70 wasn't really that much. You don't see people whining about ret burst in live (unless you have WF, but warriors are in the same situation and WF is getting nerfed so...)

This is exactly what's happening now. All the buffs we got aren't tuned for pvp and lvl 70 instances. They are designed for leveling and for 80 pvp. This is the reason the bear mount will not be available once 3.0 hits. This is the reason you're demolishing level 70 instances (to which I might add, you fought a demon boss in an aoe area with an armor piercing weapon-based aoe on mobs 5 levels below you).

And it's good that you don't take any offense, because in the end these boards are to discuss things rationally... otherwise we'd be in the public forums :p

--

One question I've been wanting to ask is, now that we know that judgment procs seals, how does that work? If I have Martyr and I judge... does it do 35% of my weapon damage? What about SoC, does it proc 70% of my weapon damage? If so, this seems a nice dps boost and definitely going to be great for our burst in PvP. Just time your instants so that they don't collide with each other (stupid hidden SoC cd).

Edited for clarity and an extra question.

 

Blutelf

Another GC quote for the Protection Paladins.

 

Selenia

On the retribution tree and potential nerfs, wasn't the GC quote about Divine Plea written in response to a "Will Retri be nerfed?" thread?

Ie she replied "At current, we're just planning to change Divine Plea".

 

Tilted

Isn't that a direct nerf to the ability? From how it's described here, the mana will come back slower, and the healing penalty will need to be up longer to get the same amount of mana back. That doesn't sound too promising.

 

Thiris

That's how I was reading it as well. Maybe they're looking at changing some mechanic in it though, so I think it's best to hold judgement until we see what Blizzard releases.

 

Andrast

Saying that you're "forced to ignore" Beacon of light is simply an unfair statement to make. If I had to choose a raiding spec now it would definitely include BoL because I feel it adds options that aren't currently present. It is possible that it isn't as powerful as it should be but I feel it is a much better 51pt talent than priests 41pt CoH talent originally started out being. Being overly whiny and depressed about the state of our holy tree isn't doing anyone any good, pointing out issues with BoL/JotP such as the repplication bug, line of sight and not working outside of party are very constructive and let us get some testing done on a non-buggy implementation. At that point we can begin to make comparisons and see if holy is powerful enough.

 

• frmorrison

50% lost healing may not be that bad. Looking at a Naxx 25 parse, the Holy Pally had a 80% overheal. So maybe it is not so bad .


Here is a recent GC post:
We'll take a look at Judgments of the Pure and Enlightened Judgments, since those come up a lot in the feedback threads. We already had plans to make Sacred Shield scale its damage absorption. We've gotten some bugs fixed with Bacon, so check that out next build (or so).

This has me excited to see the next build or so, to make sure deep Holy is better than Holy/Ret.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.