Prinsesa

1. The assumed answer is yes. The removal of downranking and the so-called 'importance of running OOM' implies that we are moving from a spammy healing model to a reactive healing model, which should theoretically free up enough GCDs to spare one every minute or 20 seconds, depending on how important the Judgement debuff is.

Of course, this is just the intended behavior, and it remains to be seen whether reactive healing works in practice. Any Beta Holydins want to chime in?

2. Yes. 15% spell haste is a significant increase in throughput if you have to spam, or an increase in reaction time if you have to snipe-heal. Judgement of Wisdom is a great source of mana (or rather an overpowered one in its current bugged state) while Judgement of Light is a non-trivial source of raid healing (although JOL is best left to Prot/Ret Paladins because of its AP/SP scaling, assuming 2 Paladins are available).

3. Judgements cost 5% of base mana, or 147 mana at level 70. In order to gain 147 mana, you would need to be healed for 1470 damage. In order to deal 1470 damage with Judgement of Blood, it needs to hit for at least 4454 damage.

This is probably unfeasible, since a 4.4k Judgement is pushing the limit of even level 70 Ret Paladins. If you really wanted to push it, you can spec into Benediction to lower the Judgement mana cost to 132, then get a Glyph of Spiritual Attunement to increase the mana gain to 12% of heals. That narrows the point of inflection to 3355 damage per JoB, but that's just to break even.

As Qalor said, it would probably be better to use a Glyphed Seal of Light or Seal of Wisdom instead.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

• frmorrison

Pallies can sometimes do reactive healing, since tanks all have over 20k health, it gives you time to cast a big heal when you need it.


To your other point, SoL or SoW is what a good Holy Pally is using due to using either Glyph.

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

 

Mearis

If someone chimes in with an opinion that does not align itself with the choir, then they are shouted down and called a troll. PvP players, and Arena players in general disagree on everything and complain nonstop about different things.

Pre-3.0, the only issue you could probably get an agreement by a wide variety of players was that pve-geared rogues/druids were overpowered and mace stuns were dumb. Post 3-0, the only issues that gather similar consensus/complaints are unholy DK's/ret paladins.

Right now ret paladin burst is incredibly high, and people are not pointing this out because they somehow have an unfair hatred of ret paladins and want to keep THE MAN down. Try looking at the situation with some objectivity:

http://img.waffleimages.com/81a268e2...4077/15327.PNG <- is on a protection warrior during the span of a HOJ.

There are other classes that can deliver huge bursts. Frost mages can deliver shatter combos at around 6000 damage - but they require a target stuck in LoS for 2.5 seconds, a 3 minute cooldown, and casting a spell with pushback for 2.5 seconds. The reason why you see frost mages always with a rogue (or rarely a priest) is because they need somebody else to 'set them up' for the burst, and even then, frost mage burst is much much smaller than ret paladin's burst. Frost mages had their 51 point talent gutted because their burst was way too high with the damaging version of deep-freeze.

Having burst of that magnitude on demand is not healthy for the game, and most of the burst is holy damage that is not mitigated by absolutely anything. Now you can put your hands on your ears, shout about how 'burst is all we have' and 'we were gimp all this time and deserve to have our time in the sun' etc, but if you actually step back a little and examine the current status without bias you cannot really believe the situation is balanced.

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

 

Kigale

Glyph of SoW scales well with Illumination since it returns mana based on the base cost. With the glyph a crit returns 63% of mana. So it costs less and returns more. It works out to be a net savings of about 8% per crit.

 

burghy

Yeah, it's probably not good for the game. But why did they deny the basic utilities for retadins then?
- spell interruption very poor
- no healing debuff
- no intercept
- no snare (for example ferals got a snare to alleviate lag issues and the funny thing is ferals move faster than paladins (even considering joj up).

 

heidegger

These answers are based on my raiding experience up to, and including Malygos.

1. Yes, definitely. I even have time to get in a melee swing on the boss in many encounters. Even on patchwerk I am able to judge (though not melee).

2. Again, definitively. I have 23% haste from gear and judgements of the pure (at the current 10% haste). This goes a long way toward responding to the damage taken by the raid and the tank. Healing as it is right now is more reactive given beacon of light - I don't want to heal the main tank.

3. Judgement returns enough mana to offset the cost of judgement. Whether or not its intended, as it works now, you get a proc of the judgement even if the judgement isn't already up. An example: I pull a mob with judgement of wisdom which costs me 197 mana, however I get 417 mana back (with my gear) completely offsetting the cost of the judgement - I just gained 220 mana. Actually, that isn't entirely true. Right now it likely bugged, as I actually get two procs of 417 mana.

 

Argavaine

There are two ways to talk about a problem:

1. your way -> to say nerf, nerf, nerf qq more with other words

2. make some suggestions

You make a funny statement with "Put your hands on your ears, shout about how 'burst is all we have" but "burst is all we have" is also a truth.

 

Mearis

Blizzard have stated about 5 or 6 times in different contexts how they don't want suggestions. What they want are people to identify problems, then they can come up with a solution, they are not interested in hearing people play armchair developer and pitch their own ideas.

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

 

Argavaine

It is taken out of context. Although in some cases it might be true and devs dont like to be educated by everybody but normaly GC/Tigole thank players for their suggestions.

 

Kaylee

D'oh, I forgot about Judgement of Wisdom. In that case, with SoB running you'd be trading 5% base mana for 2% max mana and 10% spell haste and a minor mana return from Spiritual Attunement.

You'll still be better off running Glyph of Seal of Wisdom, but it might be a nice little trick to know in the unlikely event that an encounter demands mana restored rather than mana saved.

 

Andrast

There is a difference between people saying the following things:

"Paladin's have too much burst because of reasons x, y, z. In my opinion this is unbalanced due to a, b and c. In order to fix it I think you should foo and bar. This would fix the problem without changing things drastically because of p and q."

"Paladins are way overpowered I can't beat them. I don't see how you can possibly think they are balanced. You need to nerf paladins so they will be balanced." (Note that in the vast majority of occasions the poster makes far less sense than this)

How can you possibly be claiming to know what everyone will be thinking Post-3-0 when we haven't even had the patch yet? I will be playing my enhance shaman in the expansion, I won't like fighting ret pallies but I'll be doing my absolute best to capitalise on their weaknesses and try to nullify their strengths. Perhaps this is what you should be thinking about too.

PS: Your comparison with frost mages made little to no sense.

I think you'll find that in the early dungeons paladins will be going for Seal of Light for the extra healing done since mana will be far less of an issue. I would suspect that as time goes on mana management will become far more difficult so many paladins will switch to seal of wisdom. That is pure speculation at this point though. Right now I know I have no issues with mana in any of the early level raid instances I have run at level 80 on my paladin. Therefore using Seal of Light with the appropriate glyph will be more effective.

 

burghy

Mana was a huge issue for me until I got some heroics/nax gear. I had like 13k unbuffed at 80 with my sunwell gear and as soon as HL was needed my mana bar went down instantly.

 

Aquaman7

I think that killing a player during one stun is normal:

1 - It happend all the time with Rogues before BC.

2 - Hammer of Justice has high chance of resist, so we are talking of a situation that can happen little times during one arena match.

3 - How many times did you die in pvp in the duration of a fear, silence or other cc? I remember Mages, Locks, Rogues...

4 - If Ret has their burst nerfed, then they will need some gamebraking mechanism, like Druid's Cyclone, or Priest's Mana Burn.

 

flyingtoastr

It all comes down to the fact that people haven't figured out how to play against a ret pally yet.

Ret has burst. Yes. Everyone knows it, we all accept it. In exchange we're the only melee class that is missing an interrupt, a snare, and a distance closer. Balanced. We have weaknesses (Mana Burn, good players who know how to kite, spammed CC), people just haven't figured out how to capitalize on them (just as with Holy Pallys in Season 1) and thus simply scream "nerf". We penalize you for getting into melee range, but if you stay out of it we can't do a thing.

I do find it interesting that Mearis is so worried about ret pallys "killing you in a stun" when right now on live a shatter team (Rogue/Frost Mage) can do just that. Why don't you head over to the mage thread to complain about burst and leave us to discuss constructive issues please.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Blackthought

Are beta paladins finding that the increased use of HS and judgment are making benediction a mandatory holy talent?

P.S. Mearis, your posts are not adding any valuable insights or discussion regarding beta paladins. One might even construe them to be off-topic. I therefore humbly request that you refrain from such machinations and suggest that you fish in more palatable waters.

 

Khaelarys

The other solution here is that you're just flat wrong, and repeatedly coming off completely ignorant of the situation. In general there's very often more than 2 sides to the coin you're talking about.

6000 is not high for a mage. It's fairly high for a frost mage, who's about control. It's not at all high for an arcane mage. I know this because I fought an arcane one, in ptr, and they did 10k of my health in damage in less than 4 seconds. I know, anecdotal and not very convincing ... this sounds a lot like what you're doing here.

I'm curious - how do you consider frost to be mitigated? Shadow? I could go into an arena back in the day and use resist gear. Now, I can't. Tactically, it's very foolish. With the amount of raw penetration available, my aura is completely useless. So please, the "not mitigated" is a fairly simplistic argument.

I do not know if the current state is balanced - but your opinion means little to me - you've proven yourself time and again only interested in keeping the status quo, and you've said that you're totally cool with a a couple of classes being too strong - so forgive me if most of your posts come out as nothing more than noise.

We completely lack control, for which we gain the base line ability to heal - that's a hard sell. But if you want people to listen to you, instead of linking random screen shots (which don't work for me, btw), why don't you line up some 10 or even 8 second burst potential for each class, and discuss the math involved. Stubborn or not, once the numbers are out there you'll have more success and you'll sound less like you're just sad because your rogue / priest faceroll team just finally lost a match.

 

Kigale

Well said sir. Let's keep the "nerf plx" talk to the official forums. I hope Blizzard has learned from their past experience with expansions. When 2.0 came out hunters were incredibly OP because of the new talents and scaling. They terrorized BGs until they got nerfed so hard they became by far the worst arena class. At the start of season 1 Holy paladins were strong because people hadn't adjusted to new mechanics. They got nerfed to be the worst of the healing classes. Let's hope knee-jerk reactions will be avoided in favor of slow gentle progress.

 

◊ Cathela

Not to pile on (considering the last few posts in this thread), but you're proving this correct, and this really isn't the place for it.

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

 

Nicki

While reducing the cooldown has immensely made the abillity more useable it still has its functionality limited and can not properly function as 2 taunts in one spell.

AoE taunt is clumsy as it only targets your target's target and taunts 2 other mobs attacking that target. If there are 3 mobs and 1 goes to xyz, 1 goes to yzx and 1 to xzy you will only be able to taunt 1 mob i.e. this is not an AoE taunt.

Single target is faulty as well in many situations you want to only taunt one mob however often you will try taunt off an off tank and end up with his mob as well! Twins gauntlet provides a very stiff reason why this taunt is not very effective as you could end up with a commander and a deathbringer and then some possibly!!!

There is also the issue of the target's target taunt mechanic. I press RD it hits target's target while target switches threat to another target who did not gain the RD buff. The secondary target gets aggro and not the paladin.

In short paladins need to be given the same tools as the other tanks.

1 single target taunt with 20 yard range and 1 aoe taunt on a long cooldown. While the flavour of this taunt mechanic was innovative it is not in any circumstance reliable and does not support the concept of bring any tank. 2 paladin tanks would create huge issues on trash! e.g. paladin one go 3 mobs, paladin 2 tries to taunt 1 mob of but gets 3 mobs they all hit him at the same time he dies and hence it would have been better to let paladin one die either way you end up with a wipe situation.

Righteous defense in short does not meet the needs of raid tanking in any form and I hope that people can start complaining about its poor mechanics.

 

levk

Ret has very strong options and their way of balancing them is cooldown duration. It's a simple way to balance them from a dev point of view but it creates these anecdotal whine situations. If somebody encounters a ret paladin cooldowns down and owns him they just dismiss that as the player being terribad and as such shouldn't be included in the sample. A general non arena ret play - like 1v1, random ganking and the like - isn't rocket surgery. Either you have your cooldowns or you don't. And that determines the outcome of that situation.

Hammer of justice is the strongest stun in the game right now, without the glyph. It's longest duration, somewhat ranged, and most of all doesn't require momentum build up like a rogue does. And there's no cast time like poly/fear. It's balanced out by its cooldown. Divine shield is still the best escape mechanism despite mass dispel. It's balanced out by its cooldown. Yeah I'd rather have cloak of skill and evasion because of the cooldown but if its off cooldown it doesn't matter, bubble is better. Avenging wrath doesn't have any downside whatsoever now, it's a large damage increase only variable is whether the cooldown is up or not and it's balanced on that.

I don't see them changing this situation at this point, they either give in to the whines and nerf ret damage into below mediocre again or more or less explain this fact to people. I think it's bad game design, but there's just not much that can be done at this point short of removing the spec - which is what they would do with a flat nerf.

 

Khaelarys

I almost completely agree with this assessment - but I think the problem is that the costs/power of these abilities are simply balanced against a class who is 70% auto attack damage and 2.0-2.5 second heal based. We're not that guy anymore. Flash is a real heal. Holy Shock is a 6 second cooldown, our Holy Lights can reach 1.0 cast time. We have 3/4 really good dps cooldowns to blow. Like you said, Avenging Wrath's only downside is really a mage stealing it and to a lesser exent, it getting dispelled. It's Healing or Damage based now without the forbearance. Divine Shield + AW is crazy.

I think if they simply changed the DS penalty from haste (no longer a significant penalty) to a flat damage penalty it would be acceptable. We can output the same damage in 8 seconds now that we could before in 12, even less if AW is up.

Divine Shield - Protects the paladin from all damage and spells for 12 sec, but decreases his damage output by 40%. Once protected, the target cannot be protected by Divine Shield, Divine Protection or Hand of Protection again for 3 min. 3% of base mana, Instant cast, 5 min cooldown

Divine Protection - Doesn't need to change. It's subject to dispel, and the penalty and advantages are tied too closely to prot to really screw with safely.

Sacred Duty - Increases your total Stamina by 6%, reduces the cooldown of your Divine Shield and Divine Protection spells by 60 sec, reduces the damage penalty of Divine Shield by 50/100%, and reduces the attack speed penalty of Divine Protection by 100%.

No one wants to die while they're being CC'd - that goes double for being wasted by an immune guy. It doesn't matter if it only happens once every five minutes (your point, and I agree completely). You can still do damage, with AW up it's only a 20% penalty. This has no real PVE side effect.

I'm the first to whine about pvp impacts on suggestions or abilities - but I think we've come a long way and toning back a little on invulnerable damage doesn't seem very devastating to me. I empathize with the other classes having to deal with shield. Nothing pisses me off faster than fear death. This has to be comparable.

HoJ, on the other hand.. is a different matter. I've already posted on the Wotlk forums what I think about it, hoping to generate discussion (which, I didn't really do much of). This skill (baseline) is very strong for ret - with the talent, it's too strong. Again, I pvp a lot more than I PVE - I don't think this is one of Avituus' "paladins looking for ways to nerf themselves" - I sincerely believe this is just being objective.

 

• Avitus

Mearis, we've gone over this whole burst vs missing tools issue a million times, but you seem to be stuck in a loop. Your ultimate proof: "Oh noes look at this picture".

"Hey I might not have the popular opinion but I just GOTTA say this: Nerf!", no body cares what you have to say. Even assuming some people may be biased here, no one would be that biased that they wouldn't at least offer a concession if you came with a well supported argument.

Unfortunately I've yet to see anything worthwhile from you here, most of it is whining and dragging discussions off topic (like right now) especially when half of it are badly disguised priest complaints that have no place here. So I'll just echo the sentiment of the above posters: What are you doing here? Please go bother someone else.

Actually I can see where you're coming from. I don't see it as a major issue, but I would be pretty indifferent about it if they moved Imp HoJ out of reach of Ret.

Personally I've done Ret Arena on a pretty high level without Imp HoJ (max damage + pvp talents) anyway.

 

levk

To expand on HoJ; as a rogue builds up momentum - combo points - he then chooses where to spend that momentum: it being damage in evisc or snd or control in kidney shot. There's no such choice for a paladin, you're free to stun and blow everything inside that stun.

I'm not trying to get them to copy this concept or anything like that, such cross class comparison might not be applicable and I'm not really in a position to judge if it should be. Just trying to identify the issues.

As a possible solution they could put in a shared cooldown on HoJ/AW for the duration of the stun. It's just an idea what would you think about that.

 

• Avitus

I don't think that's necessary. A 50-60 sec cd is ok for the power HoJ provides. If they can keep ret from getting a 20-30 sec cd on HoJ it should be sufficiently balanced.

 

Nhul

I do agree that the 20 sec HoJ is a bit much for what can potentially be such a long stun. I also have to wonder if SoC proccing off of instants is balanced from a burst perspective and would like that to be looked at before nerfing our overall damage on a per ability level.

If they moved Imp HoJ and/or perhaps changed the pvp set bonus, which many of us thought they would do in the first place, and removed the chance for CS/DS/Judge to proc Seal of Command I think our burst would be brought in line, and the very overwhelming level of control would be removed.

We will still have our on demand damage with an extra strike, meaningful healing, a replenishing energy source, a real finisher, and burst from AW. Those seem like substantial changes on their own without the need for instants proccing our PvP seal and a very low cooldown stun that has no other real costs compared to say a rogue combo point system.