What I meant by fun was that functionally, we only really needed the STA bonus and the Expertise, but Blizzard decided to throw in a bonus that would give us some exciting big numbers every once in a while without really costing us anything in the budgeting department.

I think the original idea came from Cathela's suggestion to move Conviction into tier 1 Ret, to make it similar to a Prot Warrior who still picks up Cruelty. Blizzard simply took a more direct approach by adding it into a talent that we already always take, for less points and 1% more crit.

As for the HP change, note that in TBC, we have 16.6% STA scaling bonus against a Warrior's 5% STA scaling bonus, yet the base HP gap was so large that we still needed T6 gear to achieve parity.

In comparison, we will have a 12.36% STA scaling bonus against a Warrior's 6% STA scaling bonus in WOTLK, but the reduction in base HP gaps means that we will achieve parity in pre-raid/T7 gear, which is much earlier.

Retaining the 16.6% scaling bonus AND reaching parity by the first raid instance would have skewed the values far too much.

SoL also doesn't affect SoR.


I doubt GC will admit it, but she likely doesn't want Ret Pallies to have too much "healing via SS" and wants to limit strange builds with SoR + SoL.

It sorta stinks, but the devs have to balance PvP, Arena, and Raids.

I couldn't agree more with this, which is also the reason why I'd love to see an explicit blue post explaining why Sheath doesn't work with some things (I understand the logic, but I don't agree that having more "special case" stats was the best way to solve it).

I'm sorry to ask a question that has no doubt been covered but I searched my fingers off and couldn't narrow it down, so 50 pages of scrolling later, I figured I'd just come annoy you.

I've heard a lot about the proccing of seal effects on our strikes (including DS) but every reference I've seen has been talking about SoC procs, just to confirm from people who are currently on the Beta, are all seals proccing on strikes or only Command for some inexplicable reason?

I must admit I was happily surprised with the new changes to holy, at least they make some otherwise underwhelming talents a touch more palatable.
Additionally, has anyone confirmed yet whether the effects of the Glyph of Seal of Blood are additive or multiplicative? Will we be seeing a 20% mana return on heals during SoB or the more down to earth 11% that I've been suspecting?

All seals are procing off of all weapon strikes (CS, DS and White Hits) they are also procing off of judgements. The way the gylph is worded I would say its 11% similar to the prot t6 set bonus.

EDIT Grammer

Yes, all Seals are proccing from Crusader Strikes, Divine Storms and auto-attacks. Judgements can also proc Seal of Vengeance, Seal of Blood and Seal of Command, but as of my testing two builds ago was not proccing Seal of Righteousness. I don't know if this was intended and/or if this was already fixed as of yesterday's build.

As for Glyphs, the Glyph of Seal of Blood is worded similarly to the Prot T6 bonus, which implies that it will indeed increase SA's mana returns from 10% to 11%. That being said, it would be quite odd since the Glyph of Spiritual Attunement, which explicitly states an increase of 2% would be strictly better.

He was referring to Seal of Righteousness, whose SP scaling portion did not count SP from Sheath as back as we can remember (more recent testing should verify if it has been changed though).

Shield of Righteousness has never benefited from SP, and has always scaled purely with block value. I also believe it is abbreviated as SHOR, to avoid confusion with the Seal.

Some testing in a dungeon run yesterday confirms that Judgement of Light is currently generating threat for the Paladin that put it up. I don't think it'll be much of an issue once the bug which makes Judgements proc at their current rate gets fixed though, as Judgement of Light is currently powerful enough that I can basically put it up and be certain that any melee DPS, and probably the tank, will not die, while the healing it provides will be nice but not this high once it procs every four seconds per player again.

The conclusion, for clarity, was reached by putting up only Judgement of Light, and if our tank wasn't paying attention to his AoE threat, some of the mobs would run to me a few seconds after putting up Judgement of Light, while I took no other actions in the time that passed.

I didn't have the same results with Judgement of Wisdom, though it's mana gains are attributed as being caused by the Paladin: "Randommanadude gains ### mana from Chicken's Judgement of Wisdom"

Though the part with Judgement of Wisdom isn't really conclusive, as the group I was unofficially testing this in had only two people benefitting from Judgement of Wisdom, compared to the four people benefitting from Judgement of Light.

I don't think ShoR gains anything from spell power. I do same damage with 1600sp as with 1000sp.

GC commenting on Ferocious Inspiration:

I'm wondering whether this means that FI will be bumped down to 2%, or if Sanctified Retribution will be bumped up to 3%.

Or they'll stick to their guns of supposed downtime on FI and leave them both where they are? That's what I expect.

This leads to an interesting extra question, then; is it worth a tanking prot paladin putting JoL up for a little extra threat? Or do Wisdom procs also generate threat for the judging paladin? I'm thinking that if you happen to be running with a particularly melee-heavy raid that wouldn't be a particularly insignificant amount.

Again, yesterday, GC said that Retadins are most likely broken somehow. I really don't understand why he keeps making comments like this - it's the third or fourth.

Now if you ignore the Retadins and Unholy DKs who are probably broken somehow, who is winning all of these fights that everyone is losing?

I've seen some references to us critting too much. I wonder if there's a bug under the hood where we crit too much in pvp and that's what he's talking about. I would really be disappointed (first time ever, huh) if they pulled what they did in Vanilla and I woke up on patch morning to some strangling change - especially after being bent over last night by an arcane mage.

I wasn't able to get conclusive results on Wisdom, which would definitely be the better of the two if it does generate threat (Mostly due to being more reliable).



Judgement of Light is still based on the amount of spell power and attack power the judging Paladin has, and also gets reduced in effectiveness by having Divine Plea active. Unfortunately I have no solid number on what kind of healing from it a level 70 Paladin can expect, and can't currently test this. I'll just assume it'll proc for 200 healing (I saw ~320 healing yesterday but that was in healing gear).

Healing threat is half the threat total of the healing done, and I assume that like most Paladin heals Judgement of Light further gets it's threat halved (Note: That's untested but I prefer assuming worst cases when something is not tested), so 50 base threat. Righteous Fury puts that at 95 threat, and the baked in salv puts that at 135.7 threat per proc. When it's fixed so it can only proc once every 4 seconds, so that's 33.9 threat per second per person benefitting from Judgement of Light.

I assume your average modern day level 70 raid has generally got 8 people (Counting Hunter pets as people) benefitting from Judgement of Light, so that's 271.4 threat per second total from putting up Judgement of Light. That does count on there being enough AoE damage going on in the fight that your Judgement of Light does not overheal at all. You can also double this number if it turns out Judgement of Light healing threat isn't further halved due to the lower Paladin healing threat.



Judgement of Wisdom unlike Judgement of Light, is based on the mana of the person proccing it, and also unlike Judgement of Light, there are no problems with overhealing. Anyone that can proc Judgement of Wisdom is extremely likely to be getting it's full benefit.

Your average raid is likely to have 10 people present that can proc Judgement of Wisdom, only counting DPS with mana bars and a Prot Paladin, and we'll just say for ease of comparison that all of them have 9000 mana (Casters are likely to have more, Enhancement Shamans, Protection and Retribution Paladins and Hunters likely to have less). This puts as at Judgement of Wisdom procs of 180, like healing, mana gain threat is half the mana gain, so that's 90 base threat per proc. Unlike healing, we only get a benefit to the threat from the baked in salv (Though on the other hand we also lack the further halfing due to being Paladins), so that's 128.6 threat per proc. As with Judgement of Light, once it's been fixed, you'll only be getting procs once every four seconds, so that's 32.1 threat per second for each person in the raid benefitting from it, or 321 threat per second in total.



Judging by the height of both these numbers, it's highly likely the Judgements are going to be changed to generate no threat. Though it has to be kept in mind that both healing and mana gain threat is split by all targets aware of you, so the above numbers are only accurate in cases where there's a single target you're tanking. This would also be preferential from a personal perspective: If this doesn't get changed our threat output will be balanced keeping in mind the threat generated by either Judgement of Wisdom or Light, which would be a major loss in a fight with mechanics where you do not actually get this benefit, and would also means our DPS relative to other tanks would be (even) lower.

I'd appreciate it if you could point me at a source for that crit issue. I'd really love to believe something like that is behind these ominous posts, but I just can't. At this point we've seen a comment like this in reference to PvP and PvE. I was hoping that it would be a PvP nerf and they'd tweak something like HoJ or BoF or AoW heals; basically something other than our damage, because if they start nerfing our damage they can pretty quickly break us in PvE. However, if they believe we're too strong in both PvP and PvE, I'm now suddenly concerned that they'll take some drastic measure that will crush our DPS simply because there isn't enough testing time for proper tweaking, and we'll get at least a full patch of sub-par performance.

So like I said before, I'd suggest my course of action, which is to hold your breath for each patch and hope developer expectations line up with our own in some meaningful way.

Just to be clear about what happened, while I did come up with the idea myself, so did a lot of other people. Maybe I was the first person to suggest it here (I don't really remember though) but when I went and posted the idea in the Prot feedback thread on the beta forum, at least half a dozen people had already beaten me to the punch.

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A thought about the "BoK issue": One of the ideas that people have had is to simply get rid of BoK and retune encounters to assume it's not there anymore (especially 25-mans). But the other way it could be done would be to simply "bake it in" the same way BoSalv has been handled: Give all classes a 10% buff to base stats (easy) and then increase all primary stats on gear by 10%.

The gear thing would be a lot of changes, but it's not complicated and it could be done pretty easily by a script or something with someone checking it afterward. Probably the easiest way to do it would be to increase the itemization budget for all items by 10%, and then increase the itemization cost of everything except the five base stats by 10%.

On the issue of the foreshadowed ret paladin nerf. GC said this in the hunter forum...


So we're back to the "too much burst" issue., which is fine if they just break down and give us a spammable snare like every other melee class.(and almost every class in the game has)

I'd ask someone with beta access to go ahead and confront this issue head on to try and short circuit what may be a ignorant over reaction on blizzards part but I've seen post after post already attempting to do so.

the problem with nerfing our burst, at least as far as I can gather, is that it'll nerf our PvE dps a bunch without a major change to the class that cannot happen in time for wotlk.

Or do I have this completely wrong (possible, I'm only recently getting back into a paladin mode for wotlk after maining most of BC as a shaman.)

Sorry if this has been answered but I swear I searched and could find it...

I have seen conflicting definitions on what Glyph of Blessing of Might does. Maybe its a Major vs. Minor thing?

ElitistJerks Description: Your Blessing of Might also grants offensive spell power equal to 10% of the attack power it grants.
Wowhead Description: Increases the duration of your Blessing of Might spell by 20 min when cast on yourself.

Can anyone on beta/ptr confirm how this Glyph works?

Thank you for your time and help.

nitan: At some point (I don't know which build exactly), the 10% of AP as SP BOM Glyph simply up and disappeared. The only BOM Glyph now is the minor 20 min duration increase when self-cast.

It's probably all for the best though, since BOM is in the same "AP buff" category as Battle Shout, but would be unequivocally better if it also offered an SP bonus that BShout can't match.

Yeah. I guess it seems to me like the basic process of doing this would be really simple, but it would affect every piece of gear in the game pretty much, so it would take a long time for someone to go and double-check everything. It's academic at this point though; I doubt they want to spend the time to re-itemize gear or rebalance encounters to get rid of BoK.

Not trying to put out a zinger here, but you could remove kings and all current encounters would be fine. The difficulty is surprisingly low except Sartharion hard mode.