I had a decent number of grouping opportunities, though I also spent a lot of time solo. (This all being before they made 1-60 easier) Funniest thing is that I got sold on being a Ret paladin from PvP. I loved being able to switch between Offense and Defense and support my team.

I'd agree that the paladin from 1-30 isn't very different from spec to spec - but I've leveled a warrior Fury and Prot, and I honestly didn't find it very different from 1-30, either. (You don't really see the difference between warrior specs until 40, IMO.)



EDIT:
The chance of 3 consecutive SoC procs would "only" be 12.5%. In comparison, Sword Specialization is 5% and WF is 20%.

Think of the Holy Pallies (who need HS and SotR to do decent dps)!

A class redesign would have been nice for levelers, but it didn't happen.


I agree that leveling a Warrior is more fun that a Paladin, since they have many abilities to use, and even have different leveling paths (either 2H or DW).


That "fun" has been a focus of this expansion, no more spamming Shadow Bolt or Flash of Light or your Steady Shot macro, you now have more things to use that are useful.

Heh, I suggested something like this a month ago: Blessing of Kings: Revamping Paladins by Upgrading Abilities

I thought toastr was discussing button-pushing for Ret at 80. Personally, I like the 3-4 abilities with 6-10s cooldowns of Beta Prot and Ret. It's interactive, but more measured than the button-mashing of warriors and rogues.

As well, it would make balancing Seals a lot easier, as we'd have several sources of damage, several knobs for the devs to turn to balance things.

Has there been any effort put into ideal tanking rotations with the new skills, and judgement being on the GCD? I looked at it for a bit, but two 6 second and three 8-10 second cd's was a little too daunting.

*Is it more beneficial to use a castsequence with those 5 powers, or to try to manage all the cooldowns?
*If we're managing cooldowns, how do we prioritize them for TPS in a single target scenario vs an AOE scenario?
*Will seal twisting ever be a beneficial use of gcd's?
*Is glyphing consecrate beneficial for the rotation?
*Is improving Judgement with talents beneficial to the rotation?
*When should we refresh HS? At second 8 when the CD is up, second 10 when the buff expires, between them if it's been hacked off, or after it because it's not important enough?

Perhaps something like:
castsequence= (hs, shotr, cons, hotr, judge, shotr, hs, hotr, cons, shotr, judge, hotr)
this relies on 1+ points of imp judgement, no glyph on consecrate, refreshing hs early. It loses some of consecrate, increases the cost of hs by a bit for questionable gain, and might put judgement at a time one doesn't want.

I'm only passingly curious, I'm holy in release, and will be ret in wotlk.

[edit] removed some numbers

I wouldn't be quite so sure; Blizzard can (er, "should be able to") easily add diminishing returns to crit rating if they want to.

It could also work to have 100% return from Illumination some of the time, which would fit with a lot of the other WotLK changes. For example (sorry, I like concrete examples), they could add something like "In addition, the mana return from your Illumination is increased to 100% of the spell cost for 2/3/4/5/6 seconds after you judge an enemy" to Judgements of the Pure.

As for holy...

Add a function to enlightened judgements that returns a certain amount of mana to the paladin whenever someone proc's judgement of wisdom on the mob.

Make beacon a light an orb that rotates around the paladin (think KJ orbs) that strikes the lowest health member of your raid/group, healing them for X amount. It fires off one bolt per second. Drains X mana per bolt fired. Bolts can crit, proc'ing all associated effects. Will not fire if everyone is above 80% health. Beacon can be turned on and off at will for a mana cost.

Make the cleansing talent instead give holy shock a 33/66/100% chance to dispel a magic effect on the target.

Call it a day.

The proc effect-return mana would easily make up for the loss of jotw. The new beacon would provide essentially a group-HoT and would be pretty damn unique.

In the case you gave, where rage starvation is a concern, you can Beacon the tank and go heal someone else without losing much hps on the tank; that should be a good alternative to a HoT. If you need the extra hps from Sacred Shield on the tank to keep up with incoming damage, rage starvation probably isn't an issue.

I've been wondering whether Holy paladins would actually gain anything significant from getting a HoT. It seems to me that between Beacon of Light, Sacred Shield, Judgement of Light, and Hand of Sacrifice, all the advantages of HoTs are covered, though perhaps in a somewhat sideways fashion. I don't know whether Beacon requires line of sight to both targets, though.

Am I overlooking anything here? What additional healing utility would a Holy paladin get out of having a "traditional" HoT?

The same as anyone else - the ability to respond to damage pre-emptively instead of reactively.

Isn't sacred shield responding for a damage pre-emptively? Also, assuming there are not more than 2 tanks and you don't heal raid, whom will you HoT? There is no real need for the HoT unless you want to heal raid. On other hand, if you want to throw a heal on raid - you can do it now with BoL up. Show me a situation, where HoT is really desirable and other tools that we have won't make up for it.

By the way, if JoL would proc of any ranged/spell attack, it would be sort of raid wide HoT (not including healers). HoT that requires people to DPS boss to tick.

Considering that the GCD is 1.5 seconds, you are gonna want to focus on cooldowns that are some multiple of 1.5 seconds. Shield of Righteousness and Hammer of the Righteous are both 6 seconds, so they are good. Judgement is 10 seconds, but 1 point in improved judgement will bring it to 9 seconds (a multiple of 1.5). Holy Shield is up for 10 seconds and can be refreshed as early as 8, so a "9 second" duration for it will fit the rotation. Consecration is 8 seconds, but you could theoretically wait a second (I.E. using it every 9 seconds).

As for how the rotation would look, try alternating 6 second cooldowns and 9 second ones:
9s
6s
9s
6s
9s
6s
etc.

As an example:
00.0 Holy Shield (HS)
01.5 ShR
03.0 Judgement (J)
04.5 HotR
06.0 Consecration (C)
07.5 ShR
09.0 HS
10.5 HotR
12.0 J
13.5 ShR
15.0 C
16.5 HotR
and then the sequence starts over at 18 seconds.

This doesn't account for lag, etc., but might give you an idea of what it will look like. I am guessing the glyph for consecration will mess this rotation up though.

If I was going to fix Holy, I'd link Beacon of Light to have Holy Shock as a prerequisite, and then make Beacon of Light a HoT for, say, 15% base mana that heals ~100 hp/second for 10 seconds. That's comparable to Renew, which is 280 every 3 seconds. The other change is that if a player with Beacon of Light on them is hit by a Holy Shock, the Beacon would be consumed to heal the 5 lowest-health targets within 20 yards for 50% of the Holy Shock's total heal. (any overheal would be counted) It's unique, it gives Paladins a HoT and AE heal but Priests are still clearly superior at this role, as the Paladin one would take two GCDs and cost more mana.

The other talent I'd change is to scrap the haste on Judgments of the Pure and change it to, "when a target of one of your Judgement spells hits a player with a melee attack, that player has an X% chance to increase their armor by 5/10/15/20/25% for Y seconds." I'd say a 10 PPM proc rate and 8-sec duration would give a comparable uptime to Ancestral Healing/Inspiration, and it's also unique.

The other minor change I'd make is change Blessed Life to be a straight 2/4/6% damage reduction, and add on 2/4/6% haste as well, so people will actually take this talent and to make up for the haste loss on JOTP.

I answered this at the bottom of page 166..

Shaman have Maelstrom weapon which when stacked 5 times causes spells to become instant casts. This is then uses as part of their dps "rotation" to cast Lightning Bolt or Lava Burst. This is the primary use of Maelstrom Weapon. Art of War is a talent which increases damage and as a bonus lets us cast instant FoLs. We would still take art of war even if it didn't provide the instant heals. Healing while you're dpsing is a change of role and shouldn't be part of your normal rotation.

In effect:
1. Shaman get instant casts and aren't penalised by resetting their swing timer, as it seems unfair to have a talent which is intended to buff dps but reduces it in a complex way at the same time. Using this instant cast is not optional.
2. Paladins get the optional ability to cast an instant-heal but can just as easily choose not to do so. The downside for casting this heal is a slight reduction in your damage.

Actually AoW procs would fit entirely with the "new" position of Ret Pallys as a melee health battery with Divine Storm and the scaling Judgement of Light. It would also give us something to do other than make sammiches during the cooldown period.

Remember also that shamans can cast any spell instantly with MW (yes, that includes Chain Heal) making it a singularly more powerful talent in PvP (in exchange for requiring time to stack up). There isn't any real balance issue there.

Are you sure? I think one of the recient builds took Chain Heal out.

The tooltip reads: "When you critically hit with a melee weapon, you have a 100% chance to reduce the cast time of your next Lightning Bolt, Chain Lightning, Lava Burst, Lesser Healing Wave or Healing Wave spell by 20%. Stacks up to 5 times. Lasts 15 sec."

Maelstrom Weapon - Spell - World of Warcraft

I think the instant chain heal was ruled OP and taken out.

Ah, I missed that one. Point remains, a Healing Wave is still a shitton bigger than a Flash of Light, with the obvious downside of requiring stacking rather than single critical hits.

I can understand why instant-cast offensive spells though MW don't reset the swing timer. What nobody's explained is why you think there's some fundamental reason why instant heals should reset the swing timer, or more to the point, why you think the devs think it should.

But we are getting very strong melee healing abilities already. It's pretty obvious they want Ret Pallys to preform much like a Shadow Priest except for the physical DPS rather than the casters. By making AoW reset the swing timer it is completely worthless for both PvE (where resetting the swing timer is the worst possible thing you can do short of DIing a tank) and in PvP (where FoL is too small to matter) which means the real talent could simply read "increases crit damage by boring percent" and we would see no difference.

Enhancement Shaman DPS is balanced around using MW procs for DPS in PvE (and I'm willing to bet for heals in PvP). Are you trying to argue that our DPS is going to be balanced around using AoW procs to mess up our damage rotation?

Remember that shamans are a caster hybrid. Their main combat system is still based on using a castable nuke to replace autoswings. Paladins are not. The only two possible casted abilities we have are Holy Light and Flash of Light. For AoW to do anything it has to be a heal.

As it is right now the proc is worthless. Unless it changes the talent is another instance of boring versus more boring.

Would you like to add some more hyperbole into that argument?

First of all I'd like to think that saving the life of another raider is an example of good play rather "the worst possible thing you can do". But in a dps check fight such as Brutallus or Patchwerk then you're right in saying that using our AoW proc would be a bad thing to do for our dps. You have the option of not using it.

Currently with a 5 stack of Maelstrom Weapon a shaman has the option of casting a heal. They can even cast a relatively large heal but this would massively impact their overall damage rotation since their regen is much less flexible than ours. Shamanistic Rage is a long cooldown ability compared with Judgment so throwing out heals for them is arguably worse for them to do on a DPS check boss than it would be for us.

Here are my reasons why I think that incurring the penalty of a swing timer reset is fair for us:
1. It is a change in role from DPS to one of active, targetted healing. Divine Storm and JoL are not active targetted heals there is a difference. Just as a shadow priest has to drop form to cast flash heal on themselves and stop DPS.
2. Since shaman suffer the mana and damage loss penalty for casting a heal paladins should also suffer a penalty. What people are arguing for is the ability to heal and dps at the same time with zero drawbacks.

The reasons for removing the swing timer reset from an instant-fol are:
1. The proc is useless if it resets the swing timer.
2. Because shaman get this!

Surely the response to the first argument there is that you don't need to use the proc to continue your DPS. I actually don't understand what is meant by "our DPS is going to be balanced around using AoW procs to mess up our damage rotation". I'm saying the an AoW proc is meant to be used in an emergency situation where you can have a definite effect. Sure it will be an extremely beneficial PvP ability but our DPS will be balanced around using our damaging abilities and healing will have nothing to do with it. Are you claiming we should be DPSing and healing at the same time?

I'm not sure worthless is the proper term. Definitely, not ideal. But you'd get that talent anyway. I will give you even somewhat low value for pve. But in pvp, max dps isn't the point, and I think AoW fits nicely.

I agree it could be a great PVE and a great PVP ability - but the fact that it's only one of those doesn't make it boring.

You might want to done down the hypberbole a bit yourself, chief.

How about:

Because the talent is substantially less useful, and more to the point for the developers, substantially less fun, if it significantly impacts your dps.

Remember we're talking about FoL here. Sheath of Light is nice, but it still ain't gonna be that much for a Ret paladin, and it only has a chance to proc every 8 seconds. It's not as though letting a Ret paladin toss off one ~2k heal every 15+ seconds without penalty is going to cause a major balance issue.

Edit: Ignore this post. Was accidentally hitting two mobs with Divine Storm.

Er... were you hitting multiple dummies with your DS? Cause that's the only way this makes sense to me.