The whole ret itemisation discussion is moot. We will be using warrior/dk gear with no intellect, no mp5 and no SP.
End of discussion.

Bascially the whole JotW problem shows a couple of things, most notably that HOLY is the problem, not ret.
Blizz moved JotW and sheath further into ret to make them 'unattainable' for a full holy spec paladin. However, Holy sucks so badly that people would rather waste points in DPS talents and still get JoTW, than in the upper tiers of holy.

Chnage JotW to 35% base mana is a good start. But holy still needs more.

I'm personally not arguing that JotW is strictly better than BoL. For some encounters, I imagine BoL will be pretty dominant. But in circumstances where you can realistically get a couple of 10 yard judgements off, you are primarily constrained by mana, and BoL does not give a ridiculous (and necessary) amount of throughput for the cost, JotW seems generally better.

JotW doesn't have to be universally superior to BoL in order for it to be potentially a problem (part of this also depends on whether or not having Holy usually ignore deep Holy is in of itself a problem). It just has to be significantly better for enough encounters where not respeccing will put your raid at a noticable disadvantage.

The 'problem', from my perspective, is that JotW Holy feels more like the 'base' Holy build - it's great for soloing, it's more than sufficient for small group content, and it's likely the superior spec for (presumably) a lot of serious encounters. Given the state of the talents now, it seems like 51 Holy would be the niche, alternative spec for specific encounter mechanics, while JotW Holy is what you spec in general.

The other, perhaps very serious, issue is numbers/encounters being balanced around Holy having access to JotW...

Edit: I should also probably state that I absolutely agree that deep Holy needs something besides BoL to be enticing to Holy pallies - I felt that was a given. The reason I focus on JotW is that I have difficulty imagining something which is so good that JotW becomes comparable/worse even in situations where it can be used effectively (tight mana, chance to judge a couple of times per minute).

if JoTP removed the healing penalty on Divine Plea, people would be much less likely to spec into JoTW in PVE. For PVP though, it probably would not change anything. But I like that, at least on paper, a JoTW Holy Paladin can actually do something in Arena - repentance, some damage, recover some mana back.

It doesn't have to be something THAT good - but the reasons for choosing it might be limited.

JotW is basically super-regeneration tool. By super-regenerating, holy paladin is able to achieve better throughtput - more mana means more HL casts.

What holy need then is:

- better mana efficiency on its own (maybe it's time to make Illumination in deep, improved version return 100% mana again? Or at least 80% (again, deep talent)?),

- better throughput via deep talents (which is achieved to some extend by current deep Holy tree - it's not that instant HLs, haste on heals and BoL are not rising it),

- some fun, new mechanics giving paladin tools for switching to raid healing when needed (no, glyphs are not good permanent solution here).

Curiously enough, Divine Plea was supposed to deal with problem no 1, but for some reason Blizzard is hesitating in actually making it normal healing regeneration tool (like Shadowfiend, Innervate or Mana Tide) instead of emergency button/solo grinding gimmick. MT healer (which paladin seems to remain in WotLK) can't just stop healing for 10, let alone 15 sec. to regenerate.

Illumination can't return to 100%.
At increased crit rates, there is an exponential increase in the mana regen. As crit rates go from 75-100% you reach literally infinite mana return.

75% return wouldn't be too bad though

On the whole I think there needs to be a few things to make holy more interesting
A group heal - either AoE or HoT - based on Judgement of the Light would be ideal i think for Holy.
But then again, i'm starting to realise that half the things that blizz promised are being taken away/changed totally beyond what was originally specified, and we're getting less and less likely to get any sweeping changes.

Hell, i'd be glad just for the 11pt Prot talent before release.

I agree with the 35-40% of base mana for JotW. If you need to be fully raid buffed to maintain a rotation, this talent is not working how it should. This comes from someone who avoids Holy like the plague. However, saying this, I do think that deep Holy needs some work, from looking at the talents, and prot could perhaps use a little tweak in terms of regen.

People will always take throughput talents over everything else. These are talents that are basically "must have" and make an obvious improvement to your role. These are talents like Healing Light, Sacred Duty, Vengeance. I can also include here must-have talents that add an ability such as Holy Shock, Holy Shield and Crusader Strike. The spec does not function or functions too poorly without these talents.

Fun talents, they'll pick up if the talent is cheap and it will either get them to a lower tier (after throughput talents have been taken) or they have a point or two spare. Things like Avenger's Shield, Seals of the Pure, Enlightened Judgements and PoJ are "fun" talents. The talents are not mandatory, but allow the player to have a bit of fun or become a little more powerful in solo play.

Utility talents are almost always skipped (see things like Aura Mastery, Purifying Power, Imp. Ret Aura). These talents do things that are nice to have but are in no way mandatory and that the player will never have the budget for. They'll skip them in every build they make by default.

Blizzard needs to really get better at identifying between throughput, fun and utility talents and fixing the problem in the trees. Basically this means either merging fun talents with utility talents or adding the complement to each. If they can't do this, they need to remove or replace the talent.

Is there any news on Aura Mastery, I can't find it being mentioned by Ghostcrawler (or an other "Blue") anywhere for some reason.

Was it brought up in US Beta Forums?

We should be in a similar situation as Shamans, and they did get Totemic Mastery made baseline.

Holy crap, another 5+ pages overnight of bickering about JotW. As one of the relatively fewer EU posters here, I usually wake up/get home only in time to see the aftermath, but I really do have to wonder whether people realize how pointless this whole back and forth is while it's actually happening.


The following is a summary of the situation:

Why holy paladins feel threatened:

• The last 3 tiers of the Holy tree feel very lackluster. At the same time with a moderately heavy investment in the Ret tree virtually unlimited mana regen can be attained through JotW, which many perceive to outshine any sacrifices in the Holy tree.
  
• Many (but not all) argue that a hybrid Holy-JotW spec is almost too powerful and will probably get changed in a way that "breaks" it for Holy.This leads to a fear of being stuck with the "bad" Holy tree and no JotW perk, becoming worse off (on paper) than they are now.
  
• Therefore Holy paladins are asking for one or more of:
  
  • An alternative in the Holy tree to the regen from JotW (a popular example is a talent to reduce/remove the healing penalty on Divine Plea).
    
  • Something to make the end tree talents in Holy be more desirable enough to outshine a Holy-JotW spec in which case, JotW can be left where it is in Ret.

Why ret paladins feel threatened:

• Ret paladins are happy for once to have exactly what they asked for. JotW is very much the main thing they are looking forward to in this expansion, it is the single most important element required to elevate Ret from its currently "niche" state/heavy dependability on a multitude of raid conditions to be effective to a self sufficient "real"/desirable DPS spec. For this reason, any suggestions, implications or comments about changing JotW immediately touch a nerve.
  
• Any change to JotW for the sake of Holy balance would have to leave JotW functionality completely unchanged/identical as it is now for Ret DPS. This point is non-negotiable.
  
• Possible suggestions that would not change Ret DPS:
  
  • Move JotW deeper down the Ret tree and out of reach of Holy.
  • Change JotW to be ~40% base mana to be not as desirable/worthwhile for holy, while keeping it in tact for Ret DPS. Ret healing in Holy gear is a weak argument and I concede that it's a hit we could take if it means putting this whole thing to rest.
  • Leave it as it is and improve the Holy tree to make it less desirable.

As you can see, both sides have a lot to lose if things go in an undesirable way and therefore might be a bit blind in their argumentation. However, if you've been paying attention, you'll see that at the same time there's very clear room for multiple solutions that would be satisfactory to both sides of the argument. What is ultimately picked (if they implement a change at all) is left to the discretion of the devs and nothing we say or argue about here will make a difference.


Having said that, make yourself familiar with the above to know what has already been mentioned more often than required in case you're going to post about the same issue with the same argumentation yet again.

So please, for the sake of everyone's sanity as well as us EU people wading through 5+ pages of "no information" afterwards, can we agree that if anyone is going to post again about JotW they think long and hard first whether it's actually something new? This topic has been done to death and we're getting no where now.





Final note: To the mini derail last page about "putting int back on ret plate", besides the complete absurdity of changing all ret itemization (again), throwing all previous dev goals regarding unified itemization upside down, having to deal with the resulting required change to mechanics (again) and tweaking of the output of the majority of our damage attacks all for the sake of fixing an imbalance of holy spec being able to abuse a mid tree Ret talent...

Besides all that "obvious" stuff, you're really going past the proverbial "beating a dead horse" to something which can only be described as "stomping around on the ashes of a corpse" (?), why are you advocating wasting time on something that has already decomposed months ago?

I don't get why people are still arguing for JotW, a Blizzard poster said that if Holy Paladins spec half ret they are going to change it (move it higher, make it base mana, etc). It will be much more productive to focus on improvements that need to be raid to the Holy tree instead.

I think the main things they need to still address are:

Sacred Shield Scaling - I think something like just above 1000 per shield in full Blue gear.

JotP - This really seems fine to me, with other raids buffs (Ret Aura, WoA) I was down to ~1.75 HLs and ~1.35 FoLs with no other haste. It seems like a boring ability, but it keeps us judging. But I think they should roll enlightened judgements in it, and have a new talent next to Divine Illumination. They could do something cool like imp Divine Illumination, while under effects of DI you spell crits leave a Art of War type HoT.

It's not a question of needing a Tier 3 1-point talent. Every single talent tree since the original beta has followed the pattern of every odd tier past 3 having a single one-point talent. It would be incredibly strange for them to break that system now.

Given how close to crunch time we are I expect we'll just see a clone of Last Stand there. Maybe they'll do something interesting in a content patch (like they are planning on doing with Survival Hunters, who officially have the worst 41-point talent in existence).

----------

On the topic of boring talents, Highborn brought up a very good point on the beta forums a little while ago. The ret tree has an incredible number of talents that do the same thing. For example:

Crusade- 3% more damage
2-handed Weapon Spec- 6% more damage
Vengeance- 9% more damage
Sanctified Retribution- 2% more damage

Conviction: 5% crit
Sanctified Seals: 3% crit
heart of the Crusader- 3% crit
Fanaticism: 25% crit (on Judgements)

Art of War: 20% critical strike damage
Righteous Vengeance: 25% critical strike damage

After seeing this I kept wondering to myself "why can't we get the fun talents like all these proc chances our Arms brothers get with Slam, Overpower, Execute, etc.?". But looking at my spellbook it's pretty apparent. Almost half of what we have in our spellbooks are long-term buffs. Blessings, Hands, Auras... They're nearly the majority of our castable spells. Naturally a class with much more options like a warrior gets more offensive "fun" talents while we really don't have anything else to get. So we get these boring percentage modifiers on half of the Retribution tree.

This also has the effect of making us scale incredibly well. Percentage modifiers scale your damage logarithmically, and given the number of them that we have it is easy to see how we could end up pulling ahead as gear levels increase. So they have to make a choice then. They can either balance us down so we're weaker than the other classes in entry raiding but begin to pull ahead in later tiers (exactly what happens now) or just continually nerf us throughout the course of the expansion so that our damage scales roughly in line with other classes.

I personally would like a third option of rolling some of the redundant talents together and giving us fun proc abilities (like Art of War was supposed to be until it started to reset the swing timer and is now worthless). Given how close to launch we are though it's not going to happen.

The idea behind JotP is fine, but given that ret pallys can no longer keep up Judgements with CS and Judgements cause a GCD you're looking at having to Judge every 20 seconds (instead of 30) and gaining only a marginal 2/3 of a GCD from the haste. If there was a deep (or shallow) talent to decrease the GCD caused by Judgements and increase the duration it would be a much more shiny point dump.

While you may like the randomness of Arms, plenty of Arms Warriors have swapped to Fury because they are tired of those procs going off.

In addition, some of those abilities may just be macro'ed, so adds little to game play. I know on my DK I have Rune Strike (does extra damage using runic power if your last strike crit) macro'ed, because I don't want to worry about looking for "Rune Strike!" then hitting the ability.

It's very reminiscent of the Hunter's ability Kill Command on Live. When the hunter crits, they tell the pet to attack. It just got mashed as a macro into every ability that hunters use. Kill Command got gutted in 3.0 and is now completely different.

I see them moving away from things like that, and I would not be surprised if they make Rune Strike change in the first major patch post WLK. As such, I doubt paladins really want to have a similar ability. While macros may be stored server-side, I doubt anyone really wants every one of their abilities to be a macro just to fire off another ability.

EDIT (in response to the post after mine): Apparently this isn't a proper comparison, but I'm still not sure about the "fun" factor of macroing an ability as a tack-on to any (or all) of my abilities. It was already stated that the Rune Strike has been macro'd into another ability, and I don't find such abilities as particularly fun, save for the extra damage line it spits into SCT.

Now, maybe I'm off, and that's a fun mechanic for some, but I'm not sure it's what we're really going to want.

They scale what logarithmically with what? Percentage modifiers scale exactly linearly with every relevant stat I can think of. 3% more dps at green gear, 3% more dps at t6 - that's linear scaling.

Whatever you're looking at, I'm pretty sure that 'logarithmically' is not the word you want - logarithmic scaling would imply that, with X times better gear, we'd do twice the damage.

GC has said on *many* occasions that they don't consider that comparison apt - KC had a negligible cost, and RS has a significant one.

So far I have support for Druid/Mage/Priest/Shaman/Warlock in SimulationCraft (raid dps analysis tool). I'm looking at working on Paladins next. Up til now, I've been able to maintain parallel support for both BC mechanics and WotLK mechanics. It is a bit painful on occasion..... but possible with the current set of supported classes.

However.... examining the OP in detail has me a bit worried. Paladin mechanics seemed have undergone a major transformation. For the other classes, I would start with BC support and then add in WotLK support. This made sense because at least the BC mechanics were stable. I'm not so sure this is the right decision for Paladin support.

Perhaps it is time to ditch support for Live mechanics given WotLK is only weeks away.

What is the general consensus on WotLK Paladin mechanics? Are they fundamentally very different from Live? Or does starting from a Live architecture still make sense?

An Arms warrior has 2 straight damage percentage modifiers.
6% - 2-handed weapon spec
10% - Wrecking Crew

A ret paladin has 4 straight damage percentage modifiers. On a demon/undead/humanoid/elemental boss he has 5.
3% - Crusade
3% - Crusade
9% - Vengeance
6% - 2-handed weapon spec
2% - Sanctified retribution

Let's say both of them have a 500 average damage 3.5 speed weapon.

Baseline they each deal the following damage.
Warrior: 583
Paladin: 625

With 1000 Attack Power.
Warrior: 874
Paladin: 938

With 2000 Attack Power:
Warrior: 1166
Paladin: 1250

With 3000 Attack Power:
Warrior: 1457
Paladin: 1563

With 4000 Attack Power:
Warrior: 1749
Paladin: 1875

With 5000 Attack Power:
Warrior: 2040
Paladin: 2188

See how the Paladin's is increasing faster and further each time? It might not be logarithmic, hell I don't remember my high school math classes, but it does mean our DPS scales better with gear increases.

And mind you the differences here are small given that the total percentage modifiers are 1.166 versus 1.250 (warrior and paladin respectively). Think about what happens when you compare it with a class with almost no modifiers. Think about what happens when you bring in our massive crit damage modifiers. Get it now sugar?

The class is about the same. Hit your cooldowns, go make a sammich, repeat. The differences would be the scaling mechanics, which are quite a departure from TBC. It would most likely be best to just start at Wrath, though as our scaling mechanics seem to be changing every push I wouldn't get too attached.

toastr, this is just linear scaling, with a higher coefficient. y=mx + b. All classes have this issue, notably destro warlocks vs mages in TBC.

You can still be balanced with a higher coefficient. Maybe paladins need a higher coefficient to account for the fact that we don't have a resource dump like Heroic Strike.

I do understand what you are saying about our paucity of abilities leading to very generic talents. But that's part of the design of the class. Our playstyle is slower than rogues or warriors. That is deliberate and should be preserved. People who want a more active play experience should roll a class explicitly designed to be more active.

Ret is a 2H weapon class. We hit slow, but we hit hard. If you want to button-mash, we'll end up like Death Knights, who swing often, but do like 50% weapon damage per Strike. Which, imo, is pretty lame for a 2H class.

The mechanics are fundamentally different from live, yes. I recommend you go with WotlK only, since we are likely 1-2 weeks away from 3.0 anyway.

Is there anything in particular that you feel uncomfortable about? From my point of view, there have been some changes to Seal scaling, a new attack and a method to regen mana (Divine Plea) were added, and some gear consolidation took place. From a general raid DPS point of view, surely there is not much of a difference once you update the calculations?

We sure did not receive any new and exciting mechanics that might warrant a complete rewrite, at least I do not think so.

EDIT: I don't think there will be much raiding going on after 3.0.2, so I would too suggest that you take a look at WotLK mechanics, we'd be glad to help.

At this point ignore Live Retadins.


Beta versus Live is different (gaining over 500 dps, due to better scaling and abilities), but the main idea is the same. Put up a Seal, then Judge, Crusader Strike and in Beta Divine Storm and Hammer of Wrath at 35% over anything else.

Cooldowns on all these abilities makes timing things interesting.


Seal and Judgement damage changed last build (no idea if OP is updated), however you still could use what is in the OP and then just tweak a few formulas in a month (they will likely change again, as dps gets balanced).

So if Warriors do an appropiate amount of more instant strikes in the same timeframe for example, they may scale just as good as Paladins again. You just ignore too many aspects, having more straight % modifiers doesn't equal better scaling.

Well, a warrior is more active than a paladin if all you're doing is dps'ing. The "activity gap" is presumably supposed to be filled in with the other utility stuff the paladin does -- instant healing (if it didn't reset the swing timer), cleansing, hand spells, etc.

I guess the logical answer to "our talents are too alike" (which in Ret they definitely are) would be to focus more talents on the utility abilities. But the "community" generally doesn't seem to be very interested in that approach.

The problem with that comparison is that you assume that weapon damage converts to total DPS at the same rate.

But I agree on your base point, ret feels a lot like spam DS/CS/Judge on CD and go to sleep. At least now tho you can try to work in Consecrate, Exorcism and Hammer of Wrath. But still, the combat mechanics aren't that interesting.