From the hunter beta boards:

Great, more ominous generalizing comments, I wonder what it'll be this time. I've seen DK DPS shoot up to 10k+ whenever they get a bunch of mobs to spam their AoE disease on, that is clearly broken.

Ret? Slight adjustment might be needed, but that's it. On single targets we're easily matched or outdone by locks, enhance and rogues. I don't like how we're stuck in the same quote as DKs which are off the chart right now (Sartharion 25 man we had a DK do an average 9k DPS due to all the small whelps and elementals, which was about twice as much as the next guy).

Throwing around comments like that is really unsettling.

Well consider we have two very high crit chance abilities in judgments and hammer of wrath. The combination of which is putting out nearly 10k in less then a holy light cast time. They should have created more dmg abilities so they could spread it out, instead we have 3 long cooldown attacks that are meant to do competitive sustained dps. I suspect that they're going to just attempt to walk the line of lowering our dmg a little bit, which I think in the end will not make either camp (pvp non-paladins and ret paladins) very happy.

I think their idea might have been if Paladins have long cd attacks they'd have free time for other stuff like cleanse/healing etc. But many other classes in PVP have to trade off their damage attacks for their utility. Cluttering up our GCD's would help distinguish good paladins from bad paladins, lower our burst dps, but allow in PVE scenarios to do competitive dps.

I'm fine with balance. I'm just not too happy we're mentioned in the same breath as severely (extremely) broken DKs. I'm speaking specifically about DKs doing 8-10k DPS sustained over a fight with adds where as everyone else is doing 4k-5k range, compared to us being on the "high end" of the meters (along with locks, rogues and enhance shammies).

I guess I dislike the lack of tact in such posts.

As others have said we already have our strength lower in the tree, as for the crit I have to assume that it is more in line for those who will OT and heal on boss encounters. If nothing else it adds some occasional extra dps and I can't cry about that.

Reckoning is once again the talent that you use to level with before any of your damaging talents and that is about it. For what it does it is just to expensive to pick up the other skills offering more sustainable numbers. Burst works best for DPS and this, by it's nature, is for someone taking dmg where you'd want more control over your output.

Ghostcrawler's quote about unbalanced classes is referring to PvE.

At least the post she replied to was asking if anything would be done to help hunters reach the DPS of classes that were destroying them on meters "like ret pallies and DK's".

Unfortunately the response is not "you can expect some love soon hunters.", but "yea those two are broken anyway everyone knows it and we won't leave em like that".

I agree that with the Shield of the Templar change, most of my worries about Prot have been allayed.

Interrupts are something that Ret would want for PvP, but can be solved on the encounter-side for Prot/PvE. Since Bears are in the same 1 minute interrupt boat, Blizzard can design all 5 and 10-man bosses to never have a mission critical spell to be cast more than once a minute.

You can still make a "caster" boss like Aran, but tune his spells to be healable, then leave the "50k Pyro every 6 seconds" ability to the 25-man version when you can assume you have enough interrupts to set a rotation.

Finally, I also agree that an 11-pointer and Reckoning still need to be looked at. I can't believe it's taking them this long to think up a new name and draw a new icon for "Holy Last Stand". I won't go into detail about Reckoning since that's been covered several times already, but suffice it to say that it's a great place to leverage more incentive into a Warrior weapon than simply HOTR.

My experience matches your precisely. My DPS steadily dropped as I leveled, due to rating changes most likely. I went into 10-man Naxx and was pulling some 2400ish DPS throughout, no real change from today. I then ran lots of Naxx 10s and got geared to the point where I'm pretty much entirely in Naxx 10 gear, and my sustained DPS is up over 3k. Did Patchwerk last night and sat around 3700. I'm pretty satisfied with our PvE DPS situation. We're competitive with everyone except for....rogues and hunters, who still manage to outclass at least me.

However, during all this time, Hunters never seemed to be at all broken. I generally don't run Naxx10 with any rogues, but 2-3 hunters, and they have ALWAYS been above me. Last night's run had them at or over 4k DPS on all bosses. MY own DPS was over 4kish on trash only, due to Divine Storm being delicious. So I don't see how GC can be referring to PvE when she's talking about Hunters and Ret at least, and I have no real experience with geared DKs. This can only mean a PvP nerf incoming, at least as far as I can read it.

Sorry if I missed it but has there been any testing about what divine guardian actually does? Does teh paladin take take the damage despite being bubbled or does the bubble make the pally immune to the redirected damage? If its the first it makes this pretty useless since in a lot of situations where it would be helpful it would end up making the caster take an absurd spike. Najentus for example would be a great fight for this if you aren't the main tank, right before the bubble pops put up divine shield and everyone takes 30% less damage. But if you actually take the damage that means you take about 57k damage which will one shot you. If there has been testing done I would recommend adding the results to the first post.

Unholy had some fixes that reduces that number by a bit (I lost 100 dps single target on my premade, I haven't tried a instance or BG yet).

Sadly, I think GC is looking at PvP numbers. The last BG I did had me 200k above everyone else (as Unholy), with 2 Ret Pallies below me by 100k, then every other DPS.

I haven't raided at 80, so I don't know how can you reduce Unholy and Ret PvP damage with balancing them for raiding, but something has to change .

Well they did the exact opposite what one would expect few patches ago. They reverted the nerfs to our burst and nerfed our seals. If they want us to have more sustained damage they need to buff the seals and nerf the specials. That would help us scale with haste better too.

I don't know how much damage we're doing now (edit: comparatively in pve), but the only way to really kill our burst at this point is to remove seals from proccing off of our specials - and I think that would break my heart.

Shadowpriest brought up the fact that our damage sucked, and we were told that if other classes that had replenishment were outdamaging us, we'd get tweaked, but that we shouldn't compare ourselves to the true top tier damage dealers.

Basically, they want classes that don't provide replenishment to be lower than those that do, but not significantly so. I expect survival hunters/shadowpriests/ret paladins to be pretty much at the same damage, if any of those classes matches ' pure ' dps, they will likely get tuned down.

I don't know if it means that shadowpriests/survival hunters are due massive buffs or ret paladins non-trivial nerfs, but don't expect to keep up with rogues if you provide replenishment.

Depends greatly on how you choose to read that. You can focus on the bit about not comparing yourself to the true top tier damage dealers (implying we're meant to be worse) or you can focus on the bit about tweaking your damage up if it's below the other classes (implying you're meant to be equal).

As to us, Ghostcrawler has stated specifically that retri is supposed to be able to be up there with rogues and hunters.

Then we face the (non-)stacking problem. If your 10man raid already has a shadow priest you specifically DON'T want to get a retri paladin or survival hunter.

This flies to the face of Blizzards idea of "getting the best player" in. If a rogue with worse gear / experience / performance still does better damage than a good retri paladin, that idea is ruined.

Why should replenishment be different from other raid buffs? How can you say it's better than, say, windfury? If Blizzard is going to balance our dps below other dps just because we have replenishment they are walking on very slippery road.

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Here is the thread - basically she implied that shadowpriests should not be a top tier dps class, but if classes who brought the same utility as shadowpriests were ahead, it was because they were not done with balancing.
There were other posts where she said that all classes that provide replenishment are meant to be balanced around providing the same damage, and there's meant to be no best 'replenishment' class.

Replenishment is one of the best raid buffs in the game right now specifically because of Blizzard's new stance on mana usage, regeneration and conservation. I have zero doubt that mana classes are being balanced around Replenishment being present in both 10 and 25 man raids. To do otherwise would be to destroy the importance of that tactic, because Replenishment scales with gear, and gear has plenty of Int on it. So while you can't say that Replenishment is the most powerful buff in game, I would certainly consider it to be one of the most powerful buffs and something that you would specifically look for when forming a raid. Whether or not that defeats their raid-stacking agenda is a different issue.

As for GC's statement about Ret(and DKs), I'll be holding my breath for every build until the end of beta, and then some. They looked like they were tweaking ret up and down and the changes were getting smaller, seeming to indicate that they were zeroing in on where they wanted the spec to be. I'm not super happy to be designed lower than certain "pure" dps classes, but it wasn't insane either, so I was willing to deal. But that quote was mostly in reference to PvE damage, and it gives me shivers. I expected some level of PvP modifications, whether to damage or healing, but I honestly thought we were about finished in PvE, and now I'm not so sure anymore.

I said that either shadowpriests were going to get buffed significantly or other clases with replenishment would get nerfed.

However, parsing blue quotes for hints on game balance/future directions is very hit and miss and is part of why they hate posting, since everything they post gets deconstructed nonstop.

Let's wait and see what happens, hopefully they buff up all DPS classes to the point where replenishment classes are all equally worth bringing for raid slots, and are competitive with other dps.

If Blizzard does want to reduce Retribution DPS, I really think they should stop Seals proccing off specials, rather than adjusting abilities. It's the way things work now on Live. It reins in our overall DPS, and it reins in our burst DPS. Right now, you could line up a CS, DS, white hit + 3 SoB procs within two GCDs, all of which can crit. Cut procs off specials, and you remove 2 SoB procs from that combo. It might even give room to tune CS and DS upwards.

I don't really know why they're so insistent on having seals proc off specials. About the only reason I can see is maybe to push SoB/SoR above SoV for Ret (2 specials), but push SoV above SoB/SoR for Prot (only 1 special). Or maybe to preserve being able to triple stack SoV with Hammer of the Righteous. Either reason seems very niche to me.

(Does Shield of the Righteous proc Seals?)

This might be the best way to resolve the issue without creating new mechanics. You'd have to adjust seal dps to whatever amount keeps PVE dps consistent, but it would take a huge chunk out of our burst.

SotR does not proc seals as of a few builds ago (haven't looked since then).

I think the reason seals proc off weapon instants is aesthetic. They proc off your normal weapon swings, why shouldn't they go off a special weapon swing? That being said, they could change that, but given that you'll be looking at a loss of at least 3 seal procs per 10 seconds for ret you'd have to massively rebuff some of the other ret talents to make up the difference.

Seals procs off some of the specials was added to remove the utility dps penalty of TBC.

I guess further messing with Seals is what they have to do to balance PvP and raiding. It is a tough job balancing the most complicated game in existence.