As it was, healing sapped us fast enough because it resulted in:

1) delayed judgement
2) standing still casting and thus losing ground on a judgeable target (which then had to be gained back to judge)
3) mana costs were high - 1 judgement = 1 HL roughly (people keep throwing FoL around, but honestly, as it is right now at 70, healers -dedicated healers- are having a hard time dealing with the burst of a number of specs, FoL wasn't putting a dent in ANYONE's DPS)

Anyone genuinely complaining about instant FoL as anything more than an interesting gimmicky healing buffer (like a ret providing a very baby sitting intensive HoT for 2000 over 10s) needs to have their head examined. It wasn't a problem.

I don't mean to try and diminish this nerf, I think there are very large problems it, despite my following warrior comparison I don't think "everything is fine".

However, an Arms warrior can not spam abilities in a PvP environment, WW is left out *a lot* in order to allow for re-applications/uses of hamtring, pummel, intercept, spell reflect ect (not to mention stance dancing drains.)..We simply don't have the rage against some targets to do it. In PvE warriors can use all of their instants, but you can't just toss out constant heroic strikes. Also those instants are more "usable" on CD because you don't have spend rage on Hamstring, Pummel, Intercept and stance swapping (Swapping stances is a huge PvP drain for warriors and it needs to be done a lot in PvP.) . In short warriors *usually* give up some utility to do a "full instant/slam damage out" rotation.

Unfortunately they are trying to use rogue resource generation consistency with arms warrior burst/output randomness, its not going to work. JoW needs to be variable depending on crit/damage done, whether thats on white swings or stays within the judgment damage, that depends on class flavor..But it would solve two issues, you could balance the damage "over time" around "expecting" a certain amount of crits/damage, so over a long time you could sustain a rotation, even if you had to throttle back every now and then..Also it would eliminate this shockadin nonsense at 80 with infinite mana holy healers.

Its a sticky situation..I understand why Blizzard did it, but I think the implementation is extremely poor and pushes paladins from one extreme (Infinite spam) to the other (Overly limited and unable to use its utility perks most of the time).

The latest round of beta nerfs make me want to weep. The reduction in ret dps plus the reduction in mana return (and corresponding reduction in dps and utility) is brutal, but has been well documented in the ret thread.

What's ESPECIALLY galling about the nerf (and that I haven't seen anyone comment on yet) is the tacked on nerfs to Righteousness and Vengeance as part of the deal. Ret doesn't use those seals (though I suppose they might have started after this). Blizzard felt Prot dps (Vengeance) and Holy dps (Righteousness) were too high as well?

Prot dps on live is comparable to prot warrior dps and inferior to bear dps. Holy dps is the WORST of the healing specs of the various classes. This feels gratuitous.

Yeah, it really appears knee-jerk, especially in this respect. They just hit pretty much anything that can be used for damage, not just stuff that was causing problems. 0_o

Well, on that note, don't forget that armor was raised on all raid bosses, which they specifically stated would lower bear/warrior protection output. I am going to guess that when evaluating DPS they figured slightly lowering Prot Paladin DPS wouldn't "harm" them due to the physical classes being lowered by a different mechanic.

It still might leave some disparity in soloing, however, that discrepancy is so minor I seriously doubt its going to concern development.

Well the problem is, they have to nerf SoV/SoR if they ever nerf SoB/SoC, otherwise ret paladins would just ignore SoB/SoC and use the "holy" and "prot" seals which is counter to their design intentions (at least what would appear to be their design intentions with seals).

It seems odd that they were saying that they were looking at holy dps for soloing and for when bosses don't need that extra healer, and then hit the SoV/SoR coefficients some more.

Perhaps there will be a counter to this someplace deep in holy? But with WotLK three weeks away... I am having doubts.

I think the issue is that if they didn't nerf SoR/SoV, they'd be comparable or even better than Blood/Command. I know at one point during beta, both were fairly close to each other

First, I was talking about PvE. I'm pretty sure neither Arms nor Fury have significant rage problems in a raid environment. We now do.

Second, this change means that we simply cannot do anything but attack. Even cleansing aggressively will oom us in short order. We will become a warrior without the MS, the hamstring, the intercept, the piercing howl, etc etc. We will not have enough mana to even use our AoW procs, much less anything else without being oom within a minute or so. THis is far worse than other hybrids at this point, who will run oom using their utility. We simply can't afford to use our utility because we'll be oom so fast. We have a few Hand spells and some cleansing and mabe 3 flash of lights at our disposal over an arena match if we're facing a team with no drain mechanics. God help us if they do have a mana burn or viper sting. After this goes through I'm struggling to come up with a reason to bring a ret paladin to an arena team over any other physical DPS. We will literally have gone from the most desireable melee DPS to the least.

First of all, I would like to apologize if this has already been discussed as I have been too busy lately to browse through all the content this thread has to offer. Should this be the case, just take it as a fresh view on the matter.
Second of all, I should point out that I am not participating in the Beta. Thus this is pen and paper theorycrafting.

I want to find out what to do with the remaining talent points after speccing deep holy to pick up Beacon of Light. The 8% crit from Conviction and Sanctified Seals, the 10% cost reduction of instants from Benediction along with the raid utility of Heart of the Crusader and Improved Blessing of Might are of course a solid choice. Yet I cannot but dream about the wonderous possibilities of Divine Guardian. Its powerful potential has more appeal to me than "more of the same".


Let us compare the qualities of Divine Guardian and the Lost Illumination:

What do you gain or lose from Divine Guardian? It smoothes out spikes at the expense of having another single target to heal: Raidwide damage will - hopefully - be less overwhelming and bursts on tanks will be less spiky. For the paladin it also offers another way to regenerate mana through Spiritual Attunement, although Hand of Sacrifice can serve the same purpose of a gimped Innervate.

How will the lost crit impact the paladin's healing? Well, critical heals do of course increase your HPS and even provide a bit of haste through Infusion of Light, but first and foremost crit means longlivety. Therefore, in my opinion the real question is, whether or not Divine Guardian can return more mana via Spiritual Attunement.


Let us have some math:

Divine Shield has a cooldown of 5 minutes. Let us not worry about spell costs for a moment and just assume that the paladin casts 300 Flash of Lights during that time. The above mentioned talents would yield 24 additional critical heals, which would roughly return an extra 4400 mana (24 x 7% base mana x 60% = 4.435,2).

For Spiritual Attunement to grant the paladin 4.400 mana, he would have to be healed for 44.000 hp. Divine Guardian redirects 15% of the damage, therefore the Boss would have to put out roughly 300.000 damage per 20 seconds or 15.000 dps (44.000 / 15% = 293.333).
If the damage is shared by the other 24 raidmembers, it would equal an aura ticking for 625. If the damage is focussed on a tank entirely, you have to ask yourself whether bosses in WotLK are able to put out 15.000 dps. (To me this does not sound far fetches, considering Brutallus' roflstomps and the fact that tanks will increase their health. How much health will a tank have at level 80 starting naxx? 30k?) These two scenarios do not sound unrealistic to me.

Conclusion:

The above math shows that Divine Guardian can make up for the loss of 8% crit in terms of mana regeneration. It will also provide additional raid utility. Therefore I think that it is preferable to spend 17 points in the prot tree for a deep holy build.

Notes:
- The Glyph of Spiritual Attunement would work well with Divine Guardian for obvious reasons.
- I should probably run the numbers with chaincasting 150 Holy Lights, again blatantly disregarding how you are getting the mana to pay for the it. My guess is that you would be talking about aura ticking for 2k damage raidwise (possible) or 45k dps on a single tank (very unlikely).
- Feel free to point out any brainfarts.
- Edited for layout.
- Sudden idea upon rereading: Can you pop Divine Guardian and cast Hand of Sacrifice on the tank for 35% damage reduction?

I don't think you actually take any damage from Divine Guardian. It hits your shield and stops. Which is why they took the ability off of Divine Protection.

If they aren't going to give us any int, at all, in any slot of our gear, then our mana pool is going to be burned out in 5 seconds. That's if I'm not spending mana. If they catch me at the right part of my cycle, it'll be less.

I am not going to spend another expansion mana burned and oom'd into the ground. There is nothing fun about being so crippled by a mechanic.

I could not agree with you more. This is a massive hit in every possible environment.

BG's? Well, I guess it's not too horrible there. I don't mind having some mana issues in a BG. Still, though, any class with a drain WILL put it on us, and we'll be stuck either auto attacking for DPS or running and drinking/divine plea. It'll be frustrating, similar to what a lot of Hunters are dealing with now.

PvE? Consecration is not an efficient tool in our DPS rotation any longer. The mana cost is just too high. Not using consecration is going to not only hurt our DPS (thus partially, or even fully, negating the boost we got from the RV change) but it's also going to lead to a lot of downtime in our cycles, where we're simply waiting on cooldowns. Consecrate gave us something to help fill in those gaps, and to me, made raiding a bit less boring. This isn't even to mention that any utility of using HoW procs to self heal, HoF's, and cleanses are now more or less out the window. We still bring some great raid buffs (Replenishment, JoW/JoL, Ret Aura's buffs, etc.), but I just can't see our sustained DPS being worth bringing any longer.

Arena's? Brutal. At 80, we're not going to be a big threat here, at all. A lot of what helped us at 80 was the fact that, depending on the opposing team, you could play a few different styles. Ret could easily go as an outlast team with the good heals, or a burst team with the stuns and damage. Now, a few drains and Ret is pretty much nothing.

It's a sad state of affairs, and one that is probably going to make me *gasp* play my Hunter at 80 (not that they don't have their own Arena issues, obviously...but at least they're solid in PvE...I found PvE on ret more enjoyable pre-nerfs, but I don't see myself enjoying it as much now.)

All that said, I haven't really ran any numbers or tested any of this out. I don't know exactly how bad it's going to be, this is mostly all conjecture right now. I just don't see it ending well, though.

Even in PvE an Arms warriors can not use all their skills consistently, they can use WW/MS/Slam every cool down, but if you do sudden death, you need to drop one of the other attacks from the rotation (Slam, or MS depending on if your taste for blood or not.). This isn't even including heroic strike, which is only used as a rage dump if we get a few criticals in a row. So, really, no, warriors don't simply spam moves. As for fury, they sit without GCD uses for quite a while sometimes, they can do HS a lot more but thats because they lack a third attack.

As for the rest of your post, I agree, to an extent, and I said that in my post. There needs to be a way for Paladins to use various utilities while still keeping the option open for burst when the situation arises. I assume you're talking PvP here, though, because MS, Hamstring, Pierce and Intercept are fairly useless in most PvE encounters (With a few notable exceptions that I'm sure are countered by having an BoP.)

Again, I think the nerf is too much, but I also think a lot of that has to do with needing to limit a classes usage of their various tools in any given window of time, but not particularly limiting their DPS output over the long haul..I believe JoW is an extremely poor mechanic to accomplish this, rather some "dynamic" mana regen that is based on active melee combat should be added. The fact that holy paladins felt, and feel, extremely comfortable using JoW and continuing to heal should send off alarm bells that the talent isn't "interactive" or at least "Melee constraining" enough for a melee hybrid.

I don't know how reasonable this is, but would it simply be possible to make the "mana back" system from JotW apply to something else, like Divine Storm for instance? Maybe I'm just throwing ideas out there in a hope of finding something that could possibly help, but really, I think Ret right now is in a state of...well, almost emergency, really.

I am a Holy paladin, and I agree that Retribution needed some kind of change with regards to PvP. But it seems that "TO THE GROUND BABY" was not, in fact, a joke, but a rather concise description of an upcoming patch. My main concern at the moment is that the already lackluster feeling DPS of a questing Holy is getting nerfed even more. I suppose it can only go up from this patch on, but I do wonder how I keep sane levelling with just Holy Shock left as an ability that does useful damage.

Late to the party as usual (EU person that's not at home during the morning), there really is not much I can say which hasn't been said. A few comments however:

-It's hilarious reading the comments of people (who don't play paladins as mains by the way, let alone retribution) about what should and should not be a sustainable cycle and again opening that pandora's box of who does and who doesn't have an infinite resource cycle.

It's been established over hundreds of pages of discussion that without a significant enough JotW mechanic, paladins are the ONLY melee class that cannot sustain an infinite cycle (infinite as in, without having a fixed time where they go oom and become as useless as a brick).

Want to reign in damage? Increase cooldowns, reduce damage, but do NOT mess with mana regen.

Don't think consecration should be part of our damage? Then you CAN'T still balance ret DPS around it being there (it's very significant with the new mechanics), meaning you'll have to raise the damage of everything else: This is completely counter what is needed with reducing our burst. Consecration in a retadins DPS is actually a Good Thing (tm) balance wise.

Additionally you can't have mana management be part of a spec that has no tools to mana manage to begin with, neither can we chain spam mana pots anymore just to keep up with other classes. This whole argument is about maintaining competitiveness and I see absolutely no way this can be the case if we're mana starved all the time.

Really, I'm not going to make it easy for you: Go back and read the past 200 pages (and about as much again on the Ret forum) before you come here and mention JotW again.


-Lets examine what just happened in this build:

*Double nerf to crit multipliers
*Across the board nerf to all Seal damage
*Across the board nerf to all Judgement damage
*Divine Storm nerf (now physical damage)
*JoL healing for less
*SoL healing for less
*JoW restoring 50% less mana
*JotW reduced to 45% of original

This is only weeks after the fact that a certain developer was joking about not nerfing us "TO THE GROUND BABY", which really makes me wonder what would constitute "TO THE GROUND BABY" in his/her eyes? This complete breakdown of communication is borderline misinformation, telling us not to worry and that things will be dealt with without going overboard while at the same time all this is going down? How exactly is there supposed to be any faith left in what we're being told when actions and words couldn't be any more different?


-JotW:

I'll just echo the sentiment of so many posters here: Do what you will with all our abilities and mechanics, but do not touch the mana regen (JotW). If the expansion was to be summed up in 1 change for Retribution, it's going from a constantly oom, constantly requiring outside help, constantly dependent on a million outside conditions to be semi viable 2nd class citizen to standing on our own two feet.

Take that away (or cut it in half as has been done here) and you just axed pretty much everything we had to look forward to regarding the expansion. 3 years of running around as an oombot is enough.


-Wait and see?:

The only concession I'll make here is this: It's a beta patch, we've seen them go back on such sillyness before. We're not amused. Lets watch the next 1-2 weeks of blue posts and hope for the best. If still things will remain that way, well then I'm at a loss of words:

I'm not really one to throw the "reroll" word around, but honestly.. if this ends up going live with the wrath launch I don't really see many other options than reducing my paladin to an alt and choosing another class as a main if I want to be able to pull my weight in PvP/PvE.

And that saddens me enormously.

Question for those who are on the beta. Does the new Righteous Vengeance dot overwrite itself? (i.e. judgement crit followed by DS crit) or does it just put 2 dots on the target?

That's really annoying, assuming it's accurate.

I've used bubble+DG several times now and never taken any damage. The point of "redirected" instead of "absorbed" or whatever is that damage that gets through a bubble will still hurt you if it's transferred by DG (e.g., "chaos" damage and some kinds of PvE damage that are supposed to kill you even if you're bubbled.)

[e]:

Like most of us, I'm hoping this latest set of changes is either an experiment, or laying the groundwork for other buffs.

Please read my post(s). I said fury warriors sit without GCD's to use, not that they lack rage. A fury warrior does BT/WW and hopes his slam proc lights up, for 50% of the time they are staring at auto attacks, or tapping their heroic strike button. Sure, they have a lot of rage, but unlike a Retribution Paladin or Arms warrior, they don't have a way to spend it until sub 20%. Also, I'm in the camp that Titans will be impossible to balance, so you're preaching to the choir about fury being a balance nightmare.

In PvP, the concerns about mana are true..but the rest of your statement goes on to say that rage concerns in PvP are untrue, which is absolutely absurd. No high end arena warrior can spam his moves, often times we have to conservative in order to build up to a burst, WW on cool down every time? No, not going to happen, sorry.

Warriors stating "I can't use every tool I have" is absolutely, 100% true in PvP, less so in PvE but mostly thats because our utility is useless and we don't need to use reactive abilities like stance swaps, reflects, disarms ect *and* because we benefit from raid buffs, a great deal. However, paladins will regenerate much more mana on raids, to.

Now that all being said, I stated why this nerf is bad...Trust me, I do have a paladin that I love playing, I'm not advocating that this is in any way "good", I see how terrible it is. However, my "problem" is with JotW being a terrible mechanic in the first place for a class with a two hander.

I mentioned this earlier about spreading out the mana regen. The main culprit of the 'infinite mana syndrom' is that with one spell on a 8 yard range (or was it ten?) we regen 33% base mana. In pvp this is 'good' due to our kitability. If the regen was also tied to a melee range attack (ie crusader strike) then we get 2x15% (or some other numbers) that will be stable for pve purposes (unless we have to run about alot) but in pvp we can effectively be kited till oom (which ties in with our range weakness). Whether this is good or bad depends on where you sit on the pvp fence, but I would really prefer if the pvp nerfs do not adversely destroy pve competitiveness.