Ghostcrawler has come out and stated that the Vengeance change isn't an officially sanctioned one and is just a designer playing about. I believe Kalgan also stated mages are doing something like twice the damage they should be?

Here is the relevant text on Paladins, if anybody is curious. There's another interesting post here, too.

Digression:

Mages aren't really doing double the total damage that they should be. If I had to guess as to what Chilton was referring to, he was probably glossing over the details of the fact that Frostfire Bolt is currently "double dipping" on raid debuffs. Meaning, Curse of Elements and other such buffs are increasing FFB's damage by 21% (1.1 * 1.1) instead of the intended 10%.

This is just a global mechanics change. All spells, abilities, and talents that previously gave you a percentage chance to avoid pushback instead now reduce the effects of pushback by that same percentage. So now instead of giving raid members a 35% chance to avoid pushback, Concentration Aura makes it so that spells are only pushed back by 0.325s instead of 0.5s. The ability (and subsequently the talent) still have the same worth in today's build as it did in the one previous to it. If I had to guess I'd say Blizzard is making a big push to reduce a lot of unnecessary randomness in player abilities, in an effort to elevate the esport status of Arenas.

I wouldn't call explicitly label it a nerf or a buff straight off.

Spell pushback was changed such that the first and second damaging attack adds 0.5s to the cast time, then any succeeding attacks add nothing (until you cast a new spell).

The current pushback resistance mechanics is a little RNG dependent: you can resist 4 attacks, then the 70% fails and you get 0.5s pushback on the 5th attack, something like that.

The change to Concentration Aura makes it more consistent: You're always going to get pushed back, but you know just how much to expect.

A blue poster already confirmed that they would be moving pushback resistance mechanics to Concentration Aura's current format. It's likely that Conc Aura just got the change ahead of everyone else for some reason.

EDIT: Beaten by Theras, but were ALL pushback talents changed to this?

According to MMO-Champion, Imp. Shadowform received this change, as did Earth Shield (you can see these listed on the front page, as well as the respective talent calculators). Those seem to be the only ones at the moment, so implementation is oddly spotty for now. Still, I think we can safely expect all other talents/abilities to do the same shortly.

I have a feeling that Blizzard does not want to screw around with the damage of judgments too much. I'm thinking that they WANT Judgment to be a large portion of our damage rather than the pin-prick it is now. The first change to this is Vengeance. Instead of hurting Judgment damage a lot, they decided to take away a small amount of damage from everything. I have a feeling the next hit will be to JoComm's stunned damage and that will be it for judgment work (unless I'm missing something glaring, and I probably am since I'm not on Beta as of yet).

As Avitus has mentioned, I really hope they don't over-nerf our damage (2 shotting people in a stun is nice and all, but we wont have that forever), and we definitely need more utility. 3% haste aura compared to 15% version? Sure they stack, but come on.....

I just wish they'd make up their mind. They can't tell us that they don't like us being quite so bursty, and then design a system which allows us to use 3 global cooldowns to deliver 90% of our entire damage output for a 10 second period.

Really? How much burst can your mage put out? My highest is a 12k Judgement a few days ago while I was running Utgarde keep. It was a stun+JoC. I still have all my abilities to blow, like CS, DS, and HoW just incase you still have any health left after that. If I need to, I can do all that from the safety of my bubble.


I haven't had time to play on the beta lately, but I'm going to try putting up some WWS this weekend. I'll try run as many instances as I can.

Their original statement was that they intended to make ret paladins more valuable in raids by giving them competetive dps. l'm assuming the Vengeance nerf was, as GC said, only temporary, 'cause it's pretty much counter to the issue that was producing most of the ret backlash (Judgements). Personally, I think the solution is to fix SoC judgements and then maybe wait for a healthy beta population to begin testing the tree at max level and then work on balancing out and scaling the damage.

Avitus: Considering the entire issue of 'consolidating buffs/debuffs' that Blizzard is going through, if Rampage makes it live, it probably won't stack with LotP.

I have no hard data yet. What I can say from my personal experience is that I'm easily killing same-level mobs before Judgement even finishes a single cooldown (well, when Judgement is working, that is). I'm doing this using an entirely "vanilla" ability rotation: just judge->CS->DS->hammer, and generally things are dead. I'm not stunning to get the extra JoC damage, I'm not using AW or trinkets.

Now as I said before I'm still outgearing stuff by a bit, and there's a difference between soloing and sustained raid dps, and I have no point of reference as to what Ret can do on live in this kind of gear. (Maybe I should use another copy to do a live-vs-beta test on the same mobs with the same gear.) But it feels really damn fast, and it's hard to experience it and not feel like something is at least a little overtuned.

The Spiritual Focus tooltip still has the old wording; I haven't tested yet to see how it's implemented. Right now it looks like a case of the build getting pushed out while the change was half-done.


That's kind of my sense of things. Like I've said, if you solo with a Ret paladin on beta, it feels really really fast. There's no testing data yet (I assume) but anyone's intuition says dps is probably too high. So in that position, it probably seems like a good idea to just knock 5% off of Ret dps before the hard testing begins, on the theory that that'll be starting from something closer to where we want to be anyway.

Like I said before, this isn't the first time they've tried this particular change to Vengeance, and they reverted it last time they tried it. Sounds like somebody just wants to try his idea again.

EDIT: On the plus side, HotR and DS are now properly doing holy damage.

This is in a zone tuned for level 68 quest geared right? I agree there's a difference between sustained dps and farming. I'm just curious, as opposed to how it feels like butter, have you observed other classes in similar gear to your own knocks through them?

I don't doubt for a moment that it feels over tuned - I'm just wondering if its because of what we've been taught to expect, or because you're killing mobs 2 for 1 that the other classes are killing.

Edit: I would bug you less if i ever got a frackin key.