That leaves one easy solution, if this is truly a problem in Blizzard's eyes, and that is to make BoK baseline or a single-point talent again (which would be quite odd in the top tier of prot).

I'm hoping for the best there, but pretty darn happy with the state of paladins right now despite the BoK problem.

For what it's worth the seals also proc on Hammer of the Righteous. I did some testing with ranged judgments as holy, and neither seal of wisdom nor seal of light proced on judgements (while seal of vengeance did). I don't know if this is a bug, or intended behavior. If it is a bug, and seal of wisdom is intended to proc on judgments, then it may yet be a significant source of mana for healing paladins.

As of now, if seal of righteousness doesn't proc from judgements, then seal of vengeance seems to be the seal of choice for holy paladins planing on using judgments in their rotation while remaining at range. The exception to this would be relying on other healers to turn the judgment damage from seal of blood/martyr into a minor mana return through spiritual atunement, but this seems like it would lead to a net loss of mana in the combined mana pools of the healers in the raid.

I have been trying to figure out the best spec for the patch. I want to be able to heal, but I want to be able to solo level come expansion as fast as possible. Can anyone tell me the best Holy/Ret level 70 spec? (Specing to Sheath and focusing on max hps) My limited knowledge of ret is preventing me from doing this.

You'll need to give more details. A pure ret spec can heal tolerably well up through heroics, or any raid lower than your gear level.

Let me clarify then. I want to spec as little points as I can in ret, but I want Sheath, Crusader, and all the 35 and 30 point talents. Unless someone can explain which one is not worth the points and why, were looking at 47 points spent. What would be the optimal placement of those 47 points?

Also, assuming I get spiritual Conc and Divine strength. Where would I benefit most from placing the remaining 4 points? (Personaly it is a toss between Divine Int, and Healing Light.)

You can heal any non-heroic with 0 points in any tree, assuming you have a fair healing set (at least 1k healing and 100 mp5). The instances are that easy.

However, you do lose a lot of efficiency and fun abilities.


If you want a little help with healing, do 51 in Ret (divine storm, JotW, Sheath are useful healing tools) and 8 in Holy.

Here is the comment I was talking about - I don't have time to scour the rest of the blues (I'm at work), but this wasn't the first time I'd seen a mention about something like this.

I know he mentioned again about the unequip/reequip bug throwing off numbers so much - hopefully it's as simple as a comment directed towards that.

You don't need spi focus to heal instances, I'd say go full ret with divine storm and divine strength for leveling. If you're choosing spi focus then healing light over divine strength then 2 points in divine int. Once you ding 71 go illumination. Last 5 is a battle of the mediocre talents.

Having leveled as holy 60-70 and now leveling as a damage class and realizing the magnitude of my mistake, I can't stress this enough, abandon all non damage talents if all you want to do is ding max level as fast as possible. Divine storm drastically reduces your downtime with passive heals on top of speeding up your kill rate. Leveling full holy is somewhat of a choice - while it will be slower by a factor you will get well acquainted to your skill set and have virtually no adjustment to do come raiding time, but it's still much faster to level as ret and spend some time adjusting at max level.

Sheath healing build at 70.. is like http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...00000000000000

Dump SwiftRet for CS and imp BoW if you want that.

People love to complain about Ret Pallies and Unholy DKs killing them in PvP, and the devs seem to listen when many people are complaining.

Before the last patch Unholy was too powerful, and tons of people were complaining, so they lowered total damage by 10%. Now less people complain (plus the three DK dps specs are pretty close in power).

Ret seems like it is the next target for the nerf bat, but if they do it too late then it will be bad. Perhaps AW's cooldown will be increased to lower the burst.

I was thinking about the most recent change to IoL. Some consider it a buff while others consider it a nerf. This typically is a debate between pve and pvp.

With redbout, its been shown that the last point in an ability can add something new. So why don't they do that with IoL.

The first point would give a 1 second reduction in HL with HS crit. While this is more poweful than the current first point, when you consider that Light's Grace is rarely up, we still have a 1.5sec cast time. The second point would then add a 1.5second reduction to FoL. This would give the same ability at 2 points as it does now, but allow holy some options if they choose to only put in one.

Yes, this frees up one point for holy, which means pve can put one more point into the massively OP choices of imp. Concentration aura, imp. bow, or imp. lay on hands. (/sarcasm) Also, lets be honest, it isnt like holy is tearing up arena, or has such amazing talents that 1 point is going to turn the tide.

Just a thought.

I think one of the main issues is the increase in judgment damage and an extra strike attack (DS). We now may be doing more then intended damage while bubbled. Instead of an attack speed reduction while under the influence of Divine Shield would it be better if say we only did X% of our normal damage?
This may be more the case now that we can double up AW with Divine Shield. This wouldn’t be much of a nerf to PVE. Ret being able to pump out some of serious numbers while invincible to all except a few spells can be OP at times.

Ret is a very strange fish at the moment, it is one of the strongest classes in PvP by the amount of sustainability added to it's very strong burst. IMO it is easier to play Ret and be effective then it is to play the other melee dps so many players are trying it out. This means there is a much higher percentage of Paladins out there in Beta and PTR PvPing it up. That means more people will complain about them because more people are encountering them. On the PTR yesterday I did an AV where the alliance had 5 Ret paladins and 5 Arcane Mages out of 18-20 people. They pwned the hell out of us and it is those kinds of numbers that skews the communities opinions no matter the actual balance of the classes.

Honestly I'd much prefer if Blizzard had gone in the opposite direction with the Spec keeping the survivability/sustainability very high and drop the bursty damage for a more sustained one. Now it seems like Ret is likely to lose some of its bursty damage as the 70-80 march begins because the community gets fed up with ganking Retadins "ruining their fun." Ret has always been a razor edge between overpowered and under and unfortunately it looks as if WotLK hasn't done enough to change that dynamic. Hopefully the saner heads will bring logic to these debates and debunk the emotion that always runs rampant on the Forums.

The problem is one that I think we've all commented on by now: Paladin mechanics are inherently bursty. Increasing AW's cooldown merely makes our maximum burst period occur less often rather than reduce the level of that maximum burst. In fact ironically some of our new talents seem deliberately designed to increase our burst (Art Of War and Righteous Vengeance for instance) rather than sustained DPS.

If they truly want to decrease our maximum burst they're going to have delve quite deeply into Paladin mechanics and talents, but frankly I just don't see any way of them being able to do it which doesn't make Ret a joke again in PvP. That said, I think that part of the subtext of GC's comments is that Blizzard are willing to see how PvP shakes out in Wrath before any wholescale changes.

ADDED: It's not helped by the shear number of Ret Paladins on the PTR and Beta Servers right now. You can hardly swing a gnome without hitting one and there seem to be many more of them than any other class spec.

I'm not sure what makes you think that when we have three specific posts that tell us that we are broken, they will not let us stay that way, and we are doing too much damage. All I can see is some last minute changes upcoming which may or may not be balanced and accurately target what the developers want to target without hurting us badly in PvE and PvP.

I really do hope the devs will see through this and not cave under "emo pressure". It really isn't much different than rogues. Ever gone into WSG against 5+ medium/well geared rogues? Same as you describe here, but no one says anything, because this is what people are used to from rogues.

Survivability? I'm not in the mood to start a lengthy PvP debate (or face the 2005 argument of "you have bubble"), but I'm fairly sure rogues have at the very least the same survivability and definitely more escape options.

Of course there's a ton of ret paladins running around, it's a class that's being elevated from "hybrid DPS" to "real DPS". Taking the rogue example again: They're much less likely to be running around in mass like this since their upgrades are much more gradual, "nothing new, nothing to see here".


Anyway, personally my main concern is that if they do do something about PvP burst, I will be gutted if it affects PvE sustained DPS in the process.

I'm a big fan of the new mechanics, but Sanctified Wrath + Divine Shield + Instant HoW + 2 strikes that proc Seals + 20 /30 s HoJ, is strong. If our burst for pvp is the problem, then to keep pve safe I have to agree - really the only thing of that formula that they can adjust is damage output during divine shield.

I already feel HoJ is much more powerful in 3.0 than it needs to be - but I've already brought that up in the WotLK forums.

That's not really what my gripe is about. My gripe is that they need to put their big girl panties on and head into the paladin forums and say "We're seeing X, we feel this is too powerful because of Y, and so we're going to try to tone back ability Z and see how that plays out". Buddying up to the other forums and trying to gain a common point of interest by saying ret paladins are over powered is just insulting. Doing it in a manner that they are, pretty much as though us being incredibly over powered right now is a forgone conclusion is just mean spirited.

I do agree that we have strong combos, but so do other classes. I think this is what happens when you had a mediocre class, that posed no real threat to other classes and then made them viable. For instance, there is absolutely no way I can kill a resto druid or a priest or a shaman, live, unless I vastly outgear them. I am of no real consequence to them unless I have a rogue with me. In the PTR at least I have a chance.

On your other comment, I'd also have to agree the fact that Ghostcrawler goes on and on saying we are doing far more damage than we're supposed to be and spreading it across the class forums just keeps the topic alive. I assume all her comments have been regarding PvP, because the number in PvE seem to say otherise. So if the problem is PvP, why nerf our seals and buff our crit modifiers? I don't want to bash on the developers, because I do believe they are rational and have shown that they do know the general direction they want to bring ret, but sometimes their decisions are beyond illogical.

All I can say is that I think most of us are a little bit alarmed, because we know how it has been in the past, and no one wants to go into Wrath as we did into BC. It is, however, important to see that they've done a great job with the tree. So here's hoping they don't butcher it in the last minute.

People are always afraid of things they don't understand, same goes for players when something new and unexpected hits them. As usual, bad players, instead of trying to understand the mechanics and find the weakness, gather into an endless train of QQing children. On the other hand, good players think and adapt.

Take rogues for instance, bad ones open up with the same TBC combo: CS/KS and have no idea how we get rid of it without trinket. Good rogues use Garrote, Dismantle, and kite us as much as possible.

Our undenied burst ability makes up for our greatest weakness: no long range gap closer.

Regarding the nebulous state of Ret at the moment:

They really really need to hire someone to manage communication between the dev team and testers. GC is doing well enough when she posts, but she's doing that on her own time. Having someone to regularly sit in on dev meetings and convey information back and forth between devs and testers on a regular basis would really improve the beta testing experience and probably get them better feedback as well. (e.g., "Okay, you'll notice we just added talent X. We'd really like you guys to try that out and give us feedback on how well it works. Oh, and don't worry about the nerf to talent Y, we've already reverted that in our next development build, so just work around it as best you can for now.")

This sparked my interest.

You can get around the loss of healer mana by having a Shadow priest use Vampiric Embrace. VE's healing is 'for free' in as much as the priest doesn't spend any extra mana. If that was to work, it would be an interesting throwback to the early days of TBC where a paladin backed by a Shadow priest could heal forever.

The questions I have are;

1. Can a Holy paladin afford to spend a GCD on Judgement without endangering the raid?
2. Is casting Judgement actually worthwhile, factoring in the Judgement debuff for the raid, the haste effect from Judgements of the Pure and the very slight increase to raid DPS?
3. Does Spiritual Attunement return enough mana to offset the cost of Judgement?

The first two are obviously situational. They depend on the fight (movement vs tank and spank), the type of damage taken (high burst vs raid aoe), the paladin's specific healing role (tank healing vs raid healing) and the raid's composition (JoL and JoW are great, but if you're the third paladin then JoJ serves no purpose).

The third is math. I'm not very good at math at all, but I worked it out anyway.

Wowhead lists Seal of Blood as dealing 20% AP + 32% SP + 45% weapon damage. With 1200 spell power, 500 attack power and an [Archon's Gavel], a paladin would be dealing 347 to 400 damage on Judgement. The health lost from that is 115-132. 10% of that damage is returned as mana from Spiritual Attunement, rounded up as 12-13.

Now, my very basic math is flawed. It ignores crit, AP buffs, vulnerability debuffs and any talents that increase damage. I also didn't take into account the effect of that 500 attack power on weapon damage, but unless my math is absolutely terrible then the conclusions are the same. A Holy paladin at level 70 gets very little mana back from casting JoB, certainly not enough to be able to use it as a mana generation technique.

WotLK spell weapons have much higher DPS than in TBC, so it's possible that this might be different for a paladin in T7. Sheath spec paladins might also get much better results by wearing a mix of normal spell plate and hunter mail with AP and Intellect, but casting Judgement is also less practical or useful for them without EJ and JotP from a deep Holy build.

I would think it would be far more worthwhile for a holy paladin to either be using seal of wisdom or seal of light and the corresponding glyph, depending on whether they preferred 5% more healing or 5% less mana cost.