burghy

A mod pls delete.

 

Fiola

Errr... I don't think so. They originally shaved off a few % damage scaling from Vengeance and 2H weapon Spec (not at the same time, but for the same purpose). That's cutting both burst and sustained, but people complained that it wouldn't have enough effect on burst, while impacting sustained too much.


Cutting seal damage is the alternative to that, and it cuts burst damage much more significantly than -3%/5% overall damage. White&SoC + CS& SOC + DS & SOC is a significant amount of burst that can happen in the space of 1.5 seconds~. (depending on SoC ICD, maybe not 3 procs in 1.5 seconds , but it's definitely in a short time period).


If they were to buff seal damage, that's more burst. They could increase seal proc rates, but SoB already procs every hit, and increasing SoC proc chance would homogenize it with SoB. (SoB also has higher DPS than SoC.. buffing SoC would not improve sustained DPS significantly)



edit: On the PvP discussion, Blizzard has buffed Ret paladin control with HoJ and Repentence. 10 seconds of incapacitate, and a 7 second stun (with glyph) ever 20 seconds. All are solid improvements over Live. HoJ ends up slightly better than rogue Kidney Shot, since it doesn't need combo points and is ranged.

Toss in seals proccing off weapon strikes and SoJ, and now you have Paladins doing random stuns on each weapon swing...
(if they buff SoJ to 3 seconds, they can make us the new mace stun warriors)


editx2: We should also see how the stun dispel works out. That seems very anti-rogue/warrior control.

 

Argavaine

Why would you take a paladin over any other melee class if the other classes can do both without any help.

 

watersrog

Hate to bother you again with this, but can someone with access to beta forums make (and bump from time to time) a thread about getting our auras inline with others (45 yards range, that is). As I see it, with auras affecting whole raid now, 30 yards just isn't enough for Retribution Aura and in most fights half the raid probably won't benefit from it, greatly reducing our utility.

Seems like a very important matter, and I think we should constantly remind Blizzard that there's absolutely no reason for our auras stay at 30 yards range while all the other auras in game with similar mechanics are 45 yards range by default.

 

Fqubed

Copied the US post into the EU beta boards, although GhostCrawler and such claim to read the EU boards they dont post much so I doubt it will get a reply.

Also I dont think they will end up letting us keep macestuns with SoJ, its goes very much against everything they have been saying about less randomness of stuns and death.

 

Khaelarys

You're looking at a much more significant dps loss for Justice than you are for mace stuns.

EDIT: So as not to be a bad monkey.


If I am understanding you correctly, we didn't want to buff Spirit. Spirit was finally a stat that healers at least started to take seriously once again, rather than just stacking more and more +healing. We do want mana management to be a part of the game. The right way to play, especially for healers, is not to spam all your heals as fast as you can and then go out of mana. Instead, we want to reward players who can rely on hots, limit overhealing, coordinate with other healers so they aren't double healing the same target, and knowing when a fight is won so you can take a break and start mana regeneration. If healers don't ever go OOM, then the only way to ever lose a fight is for the bosses to hit so hard that sometimes you just get bad luck, to have strict enrage timers so you have to learn to maximize your dps, or make the fights so complicated that they take a lot of explanation and practice. In the good old days, one of the best gear checks was could you keep the tank (and to a lesser extent the group) up without going out of mana.

Does this really sound like us? I admit freely we're the weird healer, but still - this makes it seem like we're so far out of their general concept of a "healer" that they have to change gears to remember we're here. Obviously, for a long time, they've wanted us to heal, so I realize that's a little dramatic...

No real tool that we have really encourages spirit or non spam heals - we have no hots to rely on, there is no mana regeneration. Coordination I can understand, because that is how we hopefully will make use of Divine Plea - I'm just kind of curious where we fall in this concept.

Is BoL somehow intended to discourage spam healing or over healing?

I wonder if we're efficient enough now to be able to compensate for lack of a hot.

 

Ulthwithian

Khaelarys: I agree. I'm getting definite vibes of "Yes, we hear you, healers... oh, yeah, and you Holy Paladins too."

Of the four healing classes, two use Spirit (Priest/Druid), and two do not (Paladin/Shaman). As well, Shaman _can_ use Spirit, AFAIK. It's just not very optimal for them. Not only does this cause disconnects at times in the greater healing community, but one of the useful regen buffs (Innervate) is basically useless for the Paladin... which seems to be having the most mana issues right now.

I honestly don't know what Holy Paladins are expected to do at this point. Switching what glyph applies to which of our heals would probably be some place to start. Turn Holy Light into a Regrowth effect, and Flash of Light into a mini-Prayer of Healing, or something. The current setup does nothing to help a Holy Paladin deal with constant low-level damage to a raid.

The main issue at using glyphs to give Paladins extra 'healing utility' is that it's zero-sum. Paladins have very few heals. We have three main heals. If you change one of our heals with a glyph, we have... three main heals. I submit having three main options does not suffice in today's environment.

 

• frmorrison

The reason why these two classes do not use spirit is the low base spirit regen and no talent that makes it work during the 5 second rule. Spirit is just as bad for Shaman.

While these two healers get little use of the being out of the 5sr, you still "save" mana by not casting at all. Healers certainly can lower their overheal a bit without tanks dieing (tanks have 25k health in Naxx helps this) with some coordinate, so GC wants to add more skill to healing.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Ulthwithian

Morrison: Oh, I'm very well aware of why we don't use it. I was just pointing that out.

Unfortunately, as others have stated here quite eloquently, Blizzard just removed most of a Holy Paladin's ability to 'sit on their heal'.

I'll note that Shaman have a HoT now (Riptide), a multi-target main heal (Chain Heal) a method of dealing with low-grade damage (Healing Spring... not that I think they use it), and the 'normal two' main heals.

The Paladin's eccentricity is becoming more and more pronounced, it seems.

 

Khaelarys

Well, obviously not casting saves mana. I don't think not casting - saving mana is a valid form of regeneration or efficiency. The point of that comment is that we have the exactly same single target healing ability that we've had since day 1 of vanilla - controlling our overhealing means spell canceling and flash of heals with some amount of intense single target throughput when necessary.

So yea. I guess I really don't see how his comments apply beyond "don't suck so bad".

 

Hylo

I was referring to Fanaticism critical strike chance and 2h Specialization changes. You are correct that 2h Specialization doesn't make our burst but Fanaticism certainly does.

What I meant with reducing burst with buffing seals is that you have 2 extremes:

1. Seals do 0 damage and all you yellow damage comes from specials
2. All you yellow damage comes from seals and specials do 0 damage

(for clarity, consider specials not proccing seals)

Both could be "balanced" (not very meaningfully, but anyway) to provide similar dps. The problem with approach 1 is that you can load all your yellow damage in 3 GCDs as specials down't have linked cooldowns. Approach 2 would spread the yellow damage to happen when you auto attack (which obviously can't be spammed).

Now, if we nerf the specials and slightly buff the seals we can still end up with similar dps but that would be less bursty. This would certainly move us in the PvP-viability scale.

 

Selenia

Seals proccing off specials kind of throws that out the window though. The main source of our burst currently are SoC procs on specials.

 

Shenoir

Has anyone given consideration/done the math on 18/43/0, as opposed to the sheathhbot 18/0/43 spec?

I mean, does 18/0/43 scale with gear? Is there paladin gear out there that has Int, AP, and SP that isn't mail/leather (I haven't been able to find anything on wowhead that has both int and AP)?

Are healing paladins simply going to forgo Int on gear, and gem for it (Int), in an attempt to compensate?

I'm seriously considering going 18/43/0, and gemming for crit/int instead, given that nearly all "healing" paladin gear is int/stam oriented. Granted, the crit loss is substantial (8% less than sheath), but I'm pretty sure that I will be able to find gear with Int/Stam/Crit on it, more so than int/ap.

I did a small representative sample of "baseline" heals (no buffs, auras), averaged them out, and I came up with these numbers (keep in mind that I'm currently gemmed for haste - Arikel's Armory:

18/43/0

FoL: 2268.8
FoL Crit: 4414.5
HL: 5764.6
HL Crit: 11144.8

18/0/43

FoL: 2191.2
FoL Crit: 3271.2
FoL Sheath Total: 5233.9
HL: 5668.4
HL Crit: 8522.6
HL Sheath Total: 13636.2

Granted, the Sheath totals make sheath look nice, but I don't anticipate staying at my current baseline stam to level 80, while I *probably* wouldn't elevate my AP.

Thoughts?

 

Lightflower

It took me a few minutes to work out what bothered me so much about GC's comments in terms of Paladin healing but I finally understand.

Thinking of Paladins in terms of mana efficiency and minimising overheal, we have to hold off on our heals (by cast-cancelling HL) or use FoL spam more (and accept any overheal) in order to achieve the efficiency gains that will allow us to match other healers with spirit.

The problem with FoL spam is it runs directly counter to GC's comments and I can't see how you can reconcile what she said with a healing turret who mashes 2 over & over again.

Turning to HL cast-cancelling, we find that HL is such a large heal that if you want to minimise overhealing then you have to let the target's HP dip uncomfortably low which risks wipes and is not something that your raid leader ever wants to see.

This is further compounded by HoTs which effectively 'snipe' heals from a cast-canceller and by smart target heals employed by Priests & Shaman that can inadvertently snipe heals. This means that cast-cancelling can be almost impossible to employ in practice because there is no practical way of knowing the true status of incoming heals on the tank.

So yeah, GC basically seems to be saying to Paladins "don't suck so bad" while simultaneously giving other healers the exact suite of tools that are all designed to make it harder not to suck.

 

◊ Turik

As much lack of faith I've had in Holy, I ran Naxx-10 last night on Murmur, with mostly premade gear (2-3 slots not), and I was shocked about how well I performed. It was clear it was the Kara of LK (albeit much much easier the first time), but I was drawing my weight on every fight - it wasn't even close. I was #1 on every boss except maybe the first fight. Saphirron and KT, I destroyed - above the resto shammy/druid, more than them combined. Being able to throw Bacon on the MT and just constantly cross was amazing. And any two-tank fight was a joke.

That being said, I really don't see this scaling well to a 25 man. I'm not going to be able to rely on Bacon as much, and there will be much lesser "need" for cross healing (with 4-6 people covering it instead of 2).

turik(at)elitistjerks.com

 

Mearis

I disagree with your assesment of the PvP side of things. If you take a few seconds to browse arena junkies, there pretty much is a consensus that the amount of burst present at level 70 with the 3.0 talents is completely unhealthy.

This isn't like 2.0 and vanilla TBC, we are talking about level 70 characters in full Brutal gear getting dropped in a hammer of justice. Arguing that burst is all that paladins have is naive - everything that happens in Arena happens towards the goal of getting a kill off on the other player.

Ice mages for example got some really heavy nerfs on deep-freeze because the amount of burst they put out was very high. Mutilate rogues got nerfed pretty heavily. Now, there is a lot of room for disagreement, but right now PvP is more imbalanced than it has ever been at any point.

PvP balance at level 70 with 3.0 is meaningless, and what matters is the balance at level 80. If ret paladins end up coming live with the current burst, who cares if they end up in godmode for the 3 weeks or so before WOTLK is released. My experience is that even at level 80 the burst in general is too high, and ret paladin burst in particular is also way too high, but trying to guess what balance will be like at 80 is way too early.

Reguarding PvE dps:
I completely agree that trying to piece together blue quotes to get an idea of the state of game balance and what their intentions are is like diving the future from sheep entrails. What is apparent is that right now ret paladins are very ahead of both survival hunters and shadowpriests, and they both provide roughly the same utility.

From blue posts it is very difficult to guess weather they want classes with replenishment to be on their own tier slightly below main dps, or if they consider replenishment to be a utility like any other, and all classes are meant to be roughly neck and neck. In that case, survival hunters/shadowpriests are due a quite hefty buff since they are nowhere near being able to compete for the main slots at the top of the meters.

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

Prinsesa

If anything, Ret Paladins may very well be the most numerous and accepted Replenishment-providing class/spec.

Survival Hunters have received so many nerfs over the last few Beta builds that BM/MM are solidly ahead in terms of DPS.

Meanwhile, Vampiric Touch's Replenishment proc mechanic (must Mind Blast a target that is debuffed with VT) is so awkward that maintaining the effect may very well be a DPS loss.

In contrast, our Replenishment proc is slaved to our best DPS ability (making it easier to maintain than VT/MB), is on a consistent trigger (unlike Hunting Party's crit requirement) and our class/spec itself is currently performing better DPS than both those other specs.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Mearis

Nah, you would mindblast every cooldown even if replenishment wasn't triggered from it, mindblast is our best ability. Our coefficients / abilities are just not good enough to keep up with ret paladins, and survival hunters got some nerfs because their burst in PvP was very very high.

Assuming they are happy with where ret paladin dps is at the moment, shadowpriests/hunters are due for some big buffs.

<manly> then my sister calls and proposes the one thing that has never before occured in my entire life

 

Kigale

I think paladins will continue to spam FoL and will not directly heal a tank in 25 mans. While spamming FoL on the raid beacon will provide a steady stream of healing on the tank, similar to Life Bloom on live, while a priest or shaman keeps the armor buff on the tank. This is going to be very boring. I have only been a paladin for a little over a year (guild needed a paladin much more than a hunter). I can't imagine how people who have been a Holy paladin since day 1 still find the game interesting. Regardless how the numbers work out they need to make holy more fun, not more effective. It wont matter how much throughput a paladin provides if no one plays one.

 

burghy

Imo usual beol use in 25 man raids will be to output a steady stream of healing on a second tank while you heal "MT".
As for the fun part, it is really a sensible subject. I find tank healing with different ranks of HL more boring than the old fol spam. At least you could watch our for problems in raid and help a bit with fols.
I think a big factor toward healer annoyance is this requirement to preemptively heal a tank, to get a heal in an interval lower than 2s or the tank gets gibbed.

 

Ulthwithian

Shenoir: I did some napkin math on it several pages ago. The issue is that, while the 18/43/0 spec is far superior to 18/0/43 when considering solo healing, when you reach raid levels, you must factor in raid buffs.

Thus, factoring in BoK, Battle Shout (since you should be judging for JotW, you should be in range for this), Unleashed Rage, etc., the static gain from Sheath is hard for Touch builds to overcome.

When you further consider that leveling as a Sheath build is probably superior to a Touch build, it's hard to justify the Touch build.

I calculated the cross-over point where Touch becomes better than Sheath at around 1550 Stamina.

 

Kigale

With the change of JotW to base mana is there any advantage to wearing Int on gear as a 18/0/43 spec? It seems that a paladin with full ret gear and 18 points in Holy could heal indefinately with a high amount of SP from Sheath plus crit and haste. What are average AP and SP numbers at 80 in raids? Is SP close to 30% of AP?

 

• Avitus

I knew you would, because you're arguing against something that is not even part of my "assessment".

Simply put, I don't care about the 1 month of "limbo" level 70 classes will be at between the launch of 3.0 and the launch of wotlk proper. It doesn't matter. Expecting things to be balanced for that 1 month is bordering on ridiculous.

Level 70 was never my point. Level 80 is and I'll just quote you here: "but trying to guess what balance will be like at 80 is way too early."

Still think we disagree?


Regarding PvE:

Since you're problem is with Shadow Priests/Survival Hunters doing too little DPS (and this is something I won't waste time on analyzing in depth since this is the "Paladin thread"), you'd be better served posting about your concerns at the Shadow Priest and Hunter forums rather than here at the Paladin forums, don't you think?

 

KnThrak

Wouldn't this depend majorly on the fight in question though?
I don't see Bacon's primary use in putting it on the MT and then raidhealing - though that is very well a common use especially in a 10man. I see it's best use in putting it on the MT when you're assigned to tankheal the ST, or on the ST when you're assigned to heal the MT.

This ofc needs a 2-tank fight. Of which there are plenty, but I got no beta access so I got no clue how this evolves in WotLK. In either case as soon as a secondary target takes repeated and noticable damage, Beacon should provide an amazing source of power, no matter which way around you heal (ST -> MT, or MT -> ST).

SQUEAK.
-- (The Death of Rats, Terry Pratchett, Soul Music)

 

Selenia

On the subject of 1v1 PvP (which the game isn't balanced for, but figured I'd throw it out anyway)..

At level 80 PvP, I get killed completely by mages, locks and competent hunters.
I kill warriors, rogues, shamans and (irony strikes) resto druids.

It's a tossup against Unholy DK, boomkins, ferals and good priests.

Speaking of priests.. I noticed that we don't actually get any mana back if all of our judgement is absorbed by a damage shield. Is that intended? It made it reasonably easy for a priest to manaburn me into oblivion and it makes fighting mages a lot harder.

I don't mind at all if it is intended, I just hadn't seen any official word for it.