Arthaal

The problem with removing seal procs off specials is that they would have to boost either: a) Seal damage overall b) Special damage c) new damage ability if they wanted to keep sustained DPS at current levels. In PvP this wouldn't result in a reduction in perceived burst:

Delaying specials to coincide with white hits would become much more advantageous and we'd probably end up seeing more paladins delaying specials for potentially just as devastating burst. You could no longer hit 2 specials + seals/white hit + seal/jugdement over a HoJ for example, but the damage increase to either seals or specials, would allow very big white hit + seal + Judgement/DS. It also frees up 1GCD (mid hit) for a cleanse/HoP/HoSac/HoF. You probably wouldn't FoL at that point, because that would be the worst time to reset your timer... so instant FoL would be hit at white hit and result in no burst for that 3.5s span.

I'm cooking up some numbers to see what the net result would be...

Percent modifiers R'US

 

Zed

It shouldn't be too hard to come up with ideas to reduce burst without touching total damage done when you are paid for it. The devs just need to look at the other classes they consider balanced to get ideas.

Examples off the top of my head:

- Judgements deal identical damage over 8 sec instead of instantly

- CS and HoJ incur a 6 sec cd on each other

It's depressing to remember however how often they rush changes and then leave classes completely neglected for months/years.

 

flyingtoastr

Stuff like that really makes absolutely no sense though. Especially now that HoJ is an interrupt we might be called upon in raids to sometimes block a boss ability, why do we destroy our DPS to do so?

They have 2 options for ret paladins if they want to reduce our burst damage.
1) Force us to Dual Wield.
2) Give us a series of spammable weapon strikes that do less than weapon damage.

You could effectively call those the Warrior and Death Knight methods respectively. Naturally the first will only happen over my dead body, and the second would require a total rework of the class from the ground up (which GC said will never happen). Really we're pretty much stuck here.

I think people are just going to have to accept that ret paladins are a major threat if you let them get into melee range. It's the same as with a Hunter right now, just reversed.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Suicidal Zebra

Honestly, I'm of the opinion that if you allow a Ret Paladin to get within melee range with more than 25% of mana you kinda deserve to have your face ripped off. Not 100% to 10%, but certainly a very hefty chunk. If that wasn't the case Ret Paladin PvP would continue to be a joke, especially now that Windfury is gone. As for Rogues and Warriors, once upon a time we were supposed to be their counter-class. I see no reason why a bit of unease in Season 5 for them when facing Paladins would be undesirable.

I'd hold off for now on any further Ret Paladin changes that aren't bug-fixes. Let everyone get to 80 and have a mock-season for a month to see who does well and why. If Ret shows the sort of unbalanced success in 2v2 and 3v3 which Druids or Warriors have for the last year then I could stand a correction, but right now I'm just not seeing the need.

 

Corronach

Going back to the seals being off special attacks portion, it would significantly reduce our dps under the effects of Divine Shield, which may be a good thing. I don't think players like being killed when there is nothing they can do about it.

 

Rasputin

Being immune is just another form of control. I'll agree with your general statement, but nobody likes being cyclone cyclone feral charge bashed controlled either. Nobody likes being fearlocked for 18 seconds because they don't have a fear break. Nobody likes being kited because their closer isn't up or they don't have one, and nobody likes being snared or stunned in general. However, a lot of arenas are focused around CC trains and DPS assists. Being immune is certainly powerful, but it's a purely defensive power, as opposed to the powers I listed above.

I honestly think the way to fix ret in PvP, if it truly does need fixing(which is still iffy, as I can't imagine any rigorous PvP testing having been done with how in flux the power of classes has been in beta) is by simultaneously nerfing Improved Hammer of Justice and giving us some other way to maintain melee range. As it stands now, HoJ is our only viable control over an opponent and without it we have no real way to keep anyone in range to do our damage. The problem is that it's also a powerful stun, so it does more than that. By lengthening the cooldown again and giving us a snare or intercept mechanic of some sort, we'll still be able to put out damage but it won't require the other guy to be bent over accepting it during a HoJ, which I feel is the thing that irritates people the most about ret paladins in beta.

 

BFG

Combat Expertise won't help you heal. It only increases melee crit, not spell crit.

No, this is not a whine post. It's legal to be a pessimist.

 

Prinsesa

On the topic of Sanctified Wrath: It allows half your damage to ignore damage absorption effects (yes, I know the tooltip says 'damage REDUCTION', but absorbs were all I tested so far). So far, I've tested with Power Word Shield and Mana Shield, and it works exactly as advertised.

Without SAW and without PWS, my 500 melee hit deals 500 damage
Without Sanctified AW and with PWS, my 500 melee hit gets fully absorbed
With SAW and with PWS, with 500 melee hit gets 250 absorbed and deals 250 damage

Mana Shield works similarly, with the Mage only losing as much mana as his Mana Shield absorbed.

Finally, Sanctified Wratha allows you to kill the Arcane Anomalies in Karazhan's Curator trash extremely easily. I can whittle them down to 1 HP with an Avenger's Shield throw, then the Ret Paladin pops AW and one-shots them, since AW then allows 1 damage to penetrate their otherwise 100% Mana Shield.

EDIT: Clarified wording.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Khaelarys

The problem with ret is that we can have the equivalent of 6 two hander weapon swings in 3 seconds. But that's the combat system they built up. The only way to prevent burst damage is spread out our damage over a 10 second period, which I don't see how they could do.

Either way, I've been holding my breath every build for a month.

 

HamSlammer

With the rating system changing to work both as melee and spell ratings, will Haste lower the GCD of any of our abilities? Likewise, will things like Wrath of Air and Sanctified Retribution also reduce their GCD? The thought of this popped in my head for two reasons:

- On Live, Seals are effected by Haste. The GCD when I Judge/Reseal is quicker under an effect like Bloodlust.
- Our 3.0 and on rotation will be, by the looks of it, FCFS and if this is true, could provide a tighter rotation.

I don't foresee Crusader Strike or Divine Storm being effected like this, but the Judgements, Consecrate, Exorcism, and Hammer of Wrath could be effected. Oh, and possibly Avenging Wrath since it's on the GCD now. I'm going to test it on the PTR right now but the best thing method I can think of is just eye'ing it... which doesn't seem to accurate.

------------

After a 3 minutes of getting totems to work (and a failed Bloodlust) I was able to get under the effect of totems and eventually, I was able to get a Bloodlust. I'm nearly 100% positive Seals are still effected by Bloodlust/Heroism. It didn't seem like Judgements, CS, or DS was effected though. Two of my consecrates seemed to be effected but the 3rd was a bit questionable, so I'll either clarify later or if someone else can get a clear cut view, it'd be much appreciated. Couldn't test HoW or Exorcism on the dummies

 

Amera

Without a rebuild, they could continue to mess with Seal of Command, because it is the only ability that won't destroy PvE DPS. I'm surprised they haven't worked with it more than they have.

 

Arthaal

If they make it too terrible players may simply revert to using other seals in PvP. I was using corruption for a long time before they nerfed it in the last build (or the one before last)... it was the hardest hitting judgement at that point and had no penalty for using it. I imagine players in better teams may even consider using blood with an alert healer (I know I occasionally did in 3s with a great druid)... although our now non-laughable judgements may mean some scary spikes.

Percent modifiers R'US

 

Argavaine

I dont understand why people cant see that if you remove burst damage from ret paladins (seal procing from specials) that you also remove any justification of playing ret in pvp. People dont like to be killed to fast and burst is the thing that can do it. Other classes have other abilities spammable cc, powerfull kiting, powerfull debuffs and offensive spells (ms, purge, manaburn, snare etc....). I am not even sure if burst only would be enough in order to become competative in lvl 80 arena but we will see.

The other misinformation is that IoL reduses our HL to 1 sec, no it is 1,5 sec because nobody spams HL especially in pvp.

 

Arthaal

I share your sentiment. We basically lack any other of the standard melee "utility" important in arenas... then again we can heal... but that means not doing any damage, which sort of defeats the point.

As for your IoL comment, of course it doesn't even reduce it to 1sec in PvE. LG, with the downranking change, became impossible to realistically keep up. It's simply too expensive to do so now. The new IoL simply replaces its functionality. I suppose in some rare cases of extreme, sustained burst damage you might get that 3rd big/fast heal out 0.5s sooner... but then you'd run into the GCD on your 4th, so meh. Wait and see, maybe they'll come out and blow us all away with a fantabulous idea.

Percent modifiers R'US

 

burghy

You can only heal as long as you judge and it also reduces your damage output considerably.

 

GuuD

If you did watch yesterday MLG, you should have noticed how fast pvp geared players can be killed. Current #1 burst class, mage, was never considered OP, because their burst actually need cooldowns and timing. RMP team Gravitas won few matches with simple strat: rogue starts stunlock on warrior and immidiately runs to druid while mage drops warrior from 80% to 20% in 3 seconds. Druid gets blind, trinkets it, NS on warrior, who is being raped by mage and in few seconds kidney shot cooldown is ready, so is elemental frost nova, and now druid gets from 90% to 0 in 2 GCds. For mage it's fine because they actually need to cast that frostbolt. So whats wrong when retribution paladin can burst for high, but bit lower ammounts? We still can be countered in pvp, and with only anti-CC tool being Divine Shield i think retri OPness is really overrated. We cant keep Sacrifice for breaking CC anymore, Cleanse is so week that even magic-type snares are problem. Ret is dangerous in melee. So is Hunter in range. These day people have no problems CCing hunters or sitting in their melee range. I dont think that CCing and kiting ret will be a problem.

 

• Avitus

I'm not sure why it seems everyone has gone off on a tangent to discuss PvP burst when the quote that spawned this discussion was specifically answering a question about "PvE DPS".

To put the PvP issue to rest:

It's universally agreed upon by most people who spend more than 10 seconds looking at this, that Very High Burst (tm) is pretty much a requirement for Ret to function in PvP. Since we have almost no control, this burst is required to compensate. If you want to remove the burst, you'd have to change the fundamentals of how the class operates by giving us tools such as short cd interrupts, MS effect, charge, etc. "Control" in a nutshell.

It's really as simple as that, we can't have both, but we also can't have neither (control or burst).

I guess it still comes down to personal judgement and opinions, but I'd emphasize how easily ret can be kited. Purge/spellsteal/dispel BoF and we're useless against physical type slows that can't be dispelled (piercing howl, hamstring, wing clip). Alternatively just load us with debuffs and steal BoF and we're equally kite-able like hell. Spellsteal BoSac and we can be sheeped to no end (actually with the change to BoSac, we can be sheeped much more easily now). Ever been the target of frost nova + silence + nuke to the stoneage?

We are not a class that can charge in melee range every few seconds, that can slow opposition or that can deliver massive ranged nukes, it's fairly easy to nullify ret if you just keep them out of melee range.


Having said that, I really don't think there's any merit in continuing this discussion further, as it's been done to death over the past years.



Regarding PvE DPS (which is what the quote was about):

I'd like to touch on the point of "replenishment classes" being in their own subcategory in DPS. I'm sorry, but that's baloney. The whole principle of reducing buff stacking is to be able to have all specs filling the remaining raid spots equally.

There's no reason why replenishment is any different than all the other "static buffs" (think unleashed rage, battleshout/bom, fort etc) other than that you need 2 classes per 25 man raid to "cap" it rather than only 1 with other buffs. (Technically I see no reason why they can't just remove the person cap on replenishment and be done with it).

Otherwise any raid that has a survival hunter and a ret paladin would never use a shadow priest. Or any combo of 2 would never have the third if you want to optimize and this very directly goes against the plan of filling raids independent of class type once buffs are sorted.


I'm sure at the next step will be for people will bring up their interpretations of vague blue posts, however, you have to realize at this point there's a blue post supporting almost every point of view, many times even contradicting ones.

 

Fqubed

Indeed,

As far as pve dps goes I read someware a passing comment that in Nax ret was doing exedingly well due to fighting an all undead raid. Between adding exorcism to the "rotation" and 1% from the lesser undead glyph ret dps in pve is perhaps inflated over what one would find in non-undead raids.

 

Zed

This point is moot when you can team up with a class that provides control instead of you, and Paladins are quite good at helping their teammates operating at full potential with HoF, Cleanse and HoP and getting the job done instead of themselves. Some Rets are seeing success even now with these comps, in spite of pathetic judgements, heals, and going oom constantly. Besides, obviously 95% of the playerbase won't be able to adequately control Paladins and won't be very happy getting gibbed too often.

The point is, the discussion might be offtopic, but now is the time for the PvE community to come forward with ideas, realize and address these issues without crippling the class in PvE - since the PvP community obviously "won't care" about that part so much.

 

Fqubed

Unless you add a cooldown share abilities, say CS and DS give each other a 3 sec CD (lower DS cooldown to something lower to compensate) there is little that can be done to fix PvP burst and retain PvE dps.

That said, I dont see how Ret burst is any different than that of any of the other burst capable classes. There _should_ be a penalty for allowing a retribution pally to close on you.

 

Khaelarys

This is contrary to everything that they seem to be trying to do. It's a very arbitrary category, this replinished dps slot. If it stacked, then sure if a replinished dps class could do similar dps to a non one, it's a no brainer. But it's not stackable. Is there even really any advantage to bringing more? Not really, but if not you can guarantee there will be exactly enough of those classes to keep up replinished and no more. Great, I've gone from competing for the one ret paladin slot in a raid to competing against shadow priests and hunters for the 2 replinished slots in the raid.

 

◊ Cathela

Two points on Ret:

First, I don't really get why replenishment is treated as being somehow different from every other kind of buff. Why are the devs (apparently) treating "replenishment DPS" as a separate category, but not, say, "crit debuff DPS" or "global haste buff DPS"? The whole point of the new system is to avoid these kind of distinctions and give every class roughly the same DPS, specifically to avoid the whole "sorry, we've already got a Ret paladin" thing. Why are they making an exception for this one case?

Second, I have very little experience playing Ret, and just about zero experience PvPing with Ret, but it's always seemed to me that the big problem with balancing Ret for PvP is that there's a huge range of damage possible due to the mechanics of SoC. If you land an autoattack, a CS, and a DS in a two-second window, you might get the equivalent of (roughly) three normal weapon hits, or you might get three normal weapon crits, plus three SoC crits, which is a huge difference in damage.

So you have to choose what you're going to balance against. If you balance against the low-damage case, then Ret paladins are happy because they have control over their minimum damage, but the RNG will frequently one-shot people, which isn't good for the game. If you balance against the high-damage case, then you won't have the problem of insane lucky burst damage, but then playing a Ret paladin sucks because you go back to the old "Seal of Casino" feel.

I think they're taking the right approach by toning down SoC damage to reduce the randomness of the damage. Would it work to tone it down a bit further and then buff Ret's sustained damage (e.g., with an Armed to the Teeth kind of talent or something similar)?

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

 

rozetta

On the point of ret paladins being able to crush a player if they get into melee range, what about prot specs? On live, I can hold my own against ret paladins, but on the PTR, I get completely smacked up. I'm playing a class/spec that _wants_ to be in melee range against other melee classes, doesn't dish out huge burst, but wins through attrition and survivability. This concept seems to have now been invalidated. I wonder if the last remaining feasability of prot specs in PvP will be gone come WotlK?

 

• Avitus

If we don't have burst or control, why exactly would we be interesting over a class that can provide additional control? I've gone pretty high up in 3v3 myself when I bothered (in about 2 weeks time investment 2.1k in S3, Cyclone BG which is considered one of if not the hardest BG in europe), so I know very well where we stand and what we can do with a good group combo that provides the control we lack.

However, our bargaining chip for being so useless control wise is that we have burst as well as some minor utility. If you take out the burst, I don't see a ret paladin being that desirable in such combos. You'd much rather take a 2nd control melee, there's no such thing as "too much control".

I don't think the Devs are treating it as separate DPS. This is just what some people here believe they are. As said, there have been blue posts contradicting themselves regarding this issue, depending on what you make out of the usual vague statements.

Regarding toning down SoC: It already has been toned down (56% rather than 70%), even more if you consider there's no +10% to holy from sanctity aura anymore. JoC has been changed to not do double damage anymore on stun, but only to force a crit, to remove the double damage crit burst. Also Windfury's "extra attack" has been taken out of the game. Sure we've gained DS, but I wouldn't say we're any more "OP" than we were.

 

Fqubed

As it stands now I dont see using SoB as that bad an idea if you have a healer and good comunication, you could even swap to SoC for 100% judge crit chance when you are going to stun. Using SoB you have the same 3 attacks with a guaranteed 3 extra hits from seal.

Any tone down of SoC would just lead it to looking like SoR, or the old vengance that was a joke (18 ppm? unlucky casino) to the point that it would just be a small upgrade from SoR or a non self damaging version of SoB with less dps.

What I want to know is those who have 80 wars whats the scene like at 80? As I understand fury (or suden death arms) also has insane burst capability, although not as on demand as we do.