Suicidal Zebra

To move away from JotW briefly, mainly to save raising Avitus' blood pressure, I did a few tests earlier:

1) It appears that the phantom 3% Hit remains in the build. With full talents, no talents and multiple respecs a 5% miss was still recorded on target dummies 3 levels above my weapon skill.

2) JoW has been changed significantly. Either the proc rate is much lower or it has an internal cooldown (or both) but I don't have the tools to adequately test it.

3) JoL appears to still be proccing pretty regularly.

If anyone can suggest tools and configuration of the tools to allow me to test Judgement debuff proc rates I would be grateful.

 

• Avitus

As you yourself just put it, the concerns of fury warriors and retadins are exact opposites:

Fury warriors have too much "Resource", but not enough "Abilities" to use that "Resource".
Retadins have too many "Abilities", but not enough "Resource" to use all those "Abilities".

"Resource" = mana or rage
"Ability" = any attack ability

So why are we even bringing fury warrior concerns into this "paladin" thread if they're two completely different and in no way analogous issues?

Some might argue that from an "outside the box" perspective both are similar mechanics to reduce DPS.

This is true to a point, however once you go down to specifics: Ret is being balanced around being able to go all out, if you take Consecration, HoW and Exorcism out of the equation we're almost back at TBC hybrid levels, which on almost every occasion where blue posted it was said that this will NOT be the case.
Also from the "fun" perspective of playing each class, it's a lot more frustrating to be unable to use half of what you have available (or running towards an impending OOM situation) than it is to have too much of a resource available.

Lets move away from this broken analogy please.

Heh, its something that has been done to death over hundreds of pages. I really have no patience with people disregarding all that and coming here to rehash the same misguided fallacies yet again.

 

Cevil

It's not about spamming, it's about being able to go on indefinitely. I completely understand the decisions a warrior makes between reapplying hamstring, or going for a killer MS crit. But the rage mechanic ensures your longevity. Ret Paladins, because they lack a snare, interrupt, or MS effect, have to "spam" their attacks when they're on their target. Time-on-target is low for Paladins, they have to make it count. Now, that time on target has to be coupled with the thought "is this the best time on target? Or if Itry to kill him now, am I then useless 30 seconds from now?" It's the infinite aspect of rage's timeline, not the spamability, that gives it strength.

Coupling our ability to burn through our mana with it's extreme weakness to being burned by others makes all forms of our threat quickly mitigated and eliminated. It's absurd.

 

Lithose

Oh, I agree, I only mentioned fury warriors in regards to someone pointing out them having too much rage. Most of my comparisons are with arms, which is much more analogous to Ret than fury. (Which, right now, I feel is a mess in so far as balance goes, thats a whole different topic though.)

My main point was trying to separate infinite and unlimited. In terms of resource pools, those two words get interchanged a lot, but they are pretty different. An arms warrior has an infinite resource pool, but its not unlimited in any given span of time, he can easily "run dry" and have to forgo abilities in order to "recharge it", but make no mistake, it will recharge, it is "infinite" in that regard.

The reason why I dislike JoTW is not because it provides an infinite cycle in which to DPS in, thats a good thing, rather its because it makes smaller subsections of time inconsequential to decision making, because the resource is unlimited. There would never be a reason to "not hit" DS in PvP, there is no resource restriction. Where as a DK might need a rune for an interupt or something else, or a warrior might only have 30 rage and need a to do a refresh on hamstring before his next swing so he ditches his WW, the JoTW mechanic doesn't allow for that kind of management.

Thats the problem, paladins do need infinite mana, I completely agree, simply due to their overall design. However, I'm not sure if a mechanic like JoTW is the best way to go about it. (Also if you're wondering to, I have read this whole thread, including your suggestions about talent movements mid way through that actually became somewhat a reality.)

 

Sartuk

I'm with you on that, and it's too bad I missed your post earlier about spreading it out. I love that idea. I really believe that maybe a 15%/15% split between DS and Judgement might be a decent way to go. I really don't mind having to make choices about when to burst in PvP; as has been mentioned by others, I think needing to make decisions on how to spend mana in a PvP environment is a good thing, and could help distinguish "good" retnubs from the "bad" retnubs. Honestly, the 15% added to DS would make me completely happy.

I'd think, even with the longer cooldown of DS, that the 15/15 split would still sustain us in PvE fine, given replenishment, JoW, etc. I could be wrong, since it still would be a slight nerf to PvE mana, but I don't think that's a problem really.

 

Fiola

Ignoring how justified/unjustified the nerfs are, I think this shows that you can't create a skillset that's balanced now and balanced 10 levels later.

I know we like to say, "L80 balance shouldn't be based on L70 data" (just like it shouldn't be balanced around L60, L50, L40, etc). But I think the changes and the pressure behind them show that you can't ignore the balance at L70, either (or whatever level the majority of the player population is at).


What I'd like to know is if these changes are going in before the end of the L70 era, or are we going to end up with "L70 nerfs" applied right when L70 becomes irrelevant at WotLK release. (like how the CS nerf applied when TBC released and L60 became irrelevant)

 

◊ Cathela

Oh, and since someone touched on the effect of these changes on Prot a few pages ago:

I really don't see how it'll make much difference. We're already doing an extremely comfortable amount of threat, and we're still missing the ability that's going to be probably our biggest single-target threat source at level 80. A 20% nerf to seal/judgement damage will be perhaps a 5% nerf to overall threat at level 80; even at level 70 it's still less than 10%. The only really significant hit is the neat utility of building SoV stacks on multiple targets with HotR, but even for that situation those target are still taking direct damage from HotR, Holy Shield, and probably Consecration as well, so I don't think it'll matter much even then.

As far as soloing, I'm actually using SoW to solo on live because I'd rather have the mana regen so I can pump everything else out. Even once I get Divine Plea I'll probably just use the extra mana to Consecrate more often. Since SoW is unchanged (at least as far as we know) the only real difference for me is the nerfing of JoW, which is pretty small beans in the scheme of things.

TLDR: Prot is definitely the last spec anyone should be worrying about with these new changes.

[e]:

As Antmaton and Coriel and others have pointed out, it's more than that; they're trying to balance the same skills at level 1 and level 80 just through AP scaling.

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

 

• Avitus

Alright, it's good that you're making this distinction, so I'll use your terms:

Infinite regen (as in being able to never run oom): Seems this is something we can all unanimously agree on.

Unlimited regen (as in receiving unlimited amounts of mana constantly): Here's where some disagree.

Personally, I'd say cooldown restrictions on every single ability are enough of a constraint.

For PvE: If you want to limit DPS, increase cooldowns on abilities. Don't mess with the regen.

As a matter of fact, you should WANT us to be able to spam all our abilities non stop without mana concern so you can model our DPS on that. Otherwise, if we're only meant to be spamming 70% of our abilities, those abilities would have to be raised in power to make us competitive despite not going full blast, meaning you'd have imbalance when we "can" afford spamming everything in a short period of time, as well as all the PvP burst concerns.


For PvP: A retadin in high end arena won't spam Judgement every time it's up, maybe you want to wait till your cooldowns line up, maybe you want to wait till your opponent trinkets out of JoJ. It's a different class with different strengths and different limitations. Warriors still have abilities that do not have cooldowns ("rage dumps" like cleave and HS) compared to retadins. Again I think cooldown restrictions is enough here for us.

Keep in mind, mana burns will create a considerable dent even with 33% JotW, where you'll want to only Judge for 2-3 cycles before going full blast again.

 

Fiola

L1 doesn't have CS (earliest available at 50) or DS (@60), or all of the other synergestic talents. L1's effect on CS/DS balancing is nil.

Say "Seals/JotW/HoW were nerfed because of L1 balance" - doesn't that sound ridiculous?



Balance changes from high level skills do have a huge effect on lower level balance, (you can see this in which classes are popular for low level twinking) but I don't see how low level balance influenced the latest set of changes. I do agree there was no compelling gameplay/balance reason to change Seals to have no ranks, but that may have been a programming limitation from splitting up the judgement spell.



EDIT:
Looks like PTR got the newest changes. I got a RV dot ticking for 118 damage every 2 seconds after getting a 1838 DS crit.

4*118 / 1838 = 25%

I'll need a bit more time to investigate the RV mechanics, since it only ticks for 1 damage on a 1 HP mob. (Training dummies, servants in Blasted Lands)


As far as I can tell. JoL procs every hit, and doesn't seem to have an internal CD. (Double procs off SoC swings, procs for CS/DS right after getting a JoL). Will test JoW next.

 

Wrathblood

Cathela,

I probably brought up the Prot point, and while I agree that the impact on Prot is clearly less significant than the gutting Ret is going through (and the totally gratuitous, if minor, hit that holy is taking), I think the issue of prot dps is not insignificant.

IMO (and I recognize that lots of folks don't buy into this yet), if all the tanks can produce more than enough threat in virtually all situations, and tanks are more comparable in mitigation and avoidance than they were in BC (with much greater sharing of nifty tricks between classes), then tank dps will become a non-trivial differentiating factor when deciding on what tanks to use.

You'd take a dps who consistently does 100 dps over another dps, right (in some hypothetical class-neutral situation)? Well, a comparably geared feral tank will single-target out-dps me by probably 50-100 right now, and by 125-175 after this nerf. Sure, dps isn't the primary way you evaluate a tank, but the other differentiating factors are shrinking in importance, and 150 dps isn't a negligible gap.

edit - grammar

In response to folks comments, I do recognize that on live we don't have access to ShoR yet, which is kind of our bazooka, and true dps measurement will have to wait until we get that.

 

Fiola

Further RV testing, smashing random mobs in nagrand:

670 DS crit yielded 4x 67 damage RV ticks. (40%)
682 DS crit followed by 1234 JoC crit yielded 3x 68 damage ticks + 4x 138.5 damage ticks. Total of 758 RV damage from 1916 crit damage. (~40%, so RV crit damage rolls)


When I saw a 25% RV DoT previously, 1180 is the amount of damage that the DS dealt (rest was overkill). That explains why I ended up with a 1 damage RV DoT on the training dummy later on - my crit damage was 1. We'll need to find out what happens when you get a crit on a shielded target (PW:S, Sacred shield, etc) - do you get RV DoT damage equal to 40% of the damage that goes through? (I expect that to be "yes")





JoL:
Using a 3.2 AS 2H, I got a JoL heal every swing with just auto-attack -> not a 4 second CD
Mashing abilities when they were available, I was able to get some JoL procs 1 second apart
Multiple procs occur often - I just got 4 JoL procs in one swing, followed by another JoL proc 1 sec later. Combat log says I had a JoC + SoC + White. (3 attacks -> 5 procs?)
Using a 1.9 AS weapon, did not observe 100% proc chance for autoattack
Using 3.8 AS weapon, 100% proc chance if just autoattack. Not 100% when I do Auto + CS + DS.



JoW:
Tooltip says it restores 1% of max mana per proc. (I'm not sure if this was changed from earlier)
Shortest observed time between JoW procs is 1 seconds. Also definitely not 100% per hit.
Observed a JoW double proc. Proc chance seems low overall

 

pope master

A 150 DPS difference when the raid is pushing 30k DPS is a 0.5% difference in terms of RDPS. That's not worth switching tanks considering all other factors:

-Communication
-Gear Level
-Survivability, Effective Health
-Threat
-Consistenecy

If you need an additional 0.5% DPS I would suggest throwing more consumables at the fight.

 

• frmorrison

Just a note (I posted in the Ret thread), but here is a summary:

Sustained damage is down by 10-15% and burst is down more than that
I had infinite mana doing Judge/CS/DS/Seal and Plea on each cooldown, but if I started doing anything else I got close to OOM

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

 

Aditu

Inc slight rant.

tl;dr - Ret nerfs reduce holy dps even more.

With regards to Ret, I feel for you guys. I really do. Your class from the beginning has been centered around burst DPS and it seems Blizzard has swung from giving you excellent burst abilities (at the start of beta development cycle) to then freaking out and not only reigning everything back in, but going a step further to ensure that its mathematically impossible for you to gear/itemize around these limitations (the end of beta development cycle). I think this really results from blizzard's insistence on differentiating you from Warriors and yet be reticent in granting you greater power then pure dps classes. I think as long as Blizzard holds the opinion that hybrid DPS classes shouldn't do as much DPS as pure DPS classes, your entire spec is going to suffer from consistently being underpowered.

That being said, I'm absolutely tired of your 'tuning' affecting holy paladins. This latest round of nerfs to judgements reduces even more what paltry dps we actually have. Killing mobs in WOTLK as holy is slightly easier then killing mobs as holy in BC; not that I spec'd holy to kill things, but having to consistently respec and worse: carry two sets of gear just to be efficient in questing is a pain. I'm not even going to begin addressing Divine Plea with regards to the regen characteristics of other classes.

Furthermore, why does holy paladin gear have spell power on it anyway. Why does ret have an AP-->SP power mechanic, and yet holy paladins don't? We wouldn't require a separate dps pass (assuming they'll even do one) if instead of relying on spellpower gear, we could just share a set with ret paladins. This actually would make dual spec viable for us as well, instead of completely not viable, as it will be, because we won't necessarily have an optimal offset.

I've given up on Holy Paladins actually getting interesting and different mechanics for WoTLK, and I've also slowly given up on the idea of interesting holy/ret holy/prot builds that might actually make the class play completely differently then every other dps/healer/tanking class in the game. At this point, I'm just hoping WOTLK ships asap so they don't work in another round of irrational nerfs such as increasing the CD on holy shock because it was deemed too 'bursty' after the 1 arena paladin that plays this game caused every other class to scream OP.

 

◊ Cathela

Yes it does. That's why I'm ridiculing them for doing it. Here's the chain of logic:

Why are SoB and SoC being nerfed? Because Ret is doing too much damage.

Why is SoR being nerfed? Because otherwise Ret paladins will just switch to SoR, since it would scale better than the nerfed SoB/SoC.

Why does SoR have to scale with AP at all? Because it's the only seal you get at level 1, and if you don't go Ret it's the only damage seal you get until level 64. Since you have no spellpower for most of the leveling process, it needs to scale with AP.

Well, why not just give SoR some base damage for leveling purposes? Because flat base damage doesn't scale with level, so any amount of base damage would be imbalanced at some point in the leveling curve.

Well why not just have multiple ranks of SoR with base damage amounts that scale by level? Then you can have it scale by level without having it scale with AP, so that it can provide good dps for Holy paladins without being OP for Ret paladins? Because they don't want to have multiple ranks of SoR.

Why not? Good question.

So yes, in fact level 80 balance issues are very literally being driven by level 1 balance considerations. There's no reason why SoR couldn't have a hefty chunk of base damage along with, say, a 10% spellpower coefficient and no AP coefficient... except that it wouldn't work at level 1 under the single-rank-seal model.

Go back to multiple ranks of SoR and this entire problem is easily solved.

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

 

Fiola

No, L1 balance is being broken by L80 balance decisions. Holy damage is being nerfed for the sake of keeping Ret damage "balanced", while still having SoR scale for Ret. (But with SoB and the new S/J mechanics, SoR just isn't that interesting/tactical an option for Ret)

They also made end-game Holy scale only with SP - while providing no such gear at low level. That's a problem following L60~80 design decisions.



A major problem is that they're using conflicting methods simultaneously to solve universal paladin scaling.

AP/SP dual coefficients for ALL abilities would work if the two stats were never on the same items. Holy can start off using AP gear, then graduate to SP gear when it becomes available. The AP->SP talent breaks that, because now all AP gear is AP+SP gear for Ret.

AP->SP would work as well - if they give it to all specs, and balance all abilities to use one stat or the other. But they put our damage abilities on AP/SP dual scaling, put all healing abilities on SP-only scaling, and gave only one spec AP + SP gear (via talents).


If they're aiming for balance between the 3 specs, they've added 2~3 un-necessary variables. This makes their job more difficult than it should be. They need to choose one model and stick with it.

 

◊ Cathela

How is this substantively different from anything I was saying? You quoted my statement, said "No,..." and then just rephrased what I was saying. You're making exactly the same points I am from a slightly different perspective, but you seem to feel some need to say that I'm completely wrong. Have I offended you somehow?

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

 

• Arikah

Seems I can't access the paladin beta forums right now, and judging from the lack of new posts it seems like I'm not alone. Anyways... once again their "balancing" of certain aspects of the ret tree swings from horrible, to god-mode, to awful once again, and as has been said probably 50 times today, it's because they see fit to change JotW once again. A quick recap of how JotW has changed throughout the beta would look something like:

v1- 60% of judgement damage as mana returned
v2- 20% total mana
v3- 33% base mana
v4- 15% base mana?

Now, v1 was admittedly overpowered; a single judgement would often return 1-3k mana, depending on if it crit. V2 was not very good for ret, and it's former position made it desirable for holy, so after some tweaking we were presented with v3, which is what is on live currently. Now the real difference between v2 and v3 was the time that you could go oom; I believe toastr pulled out some numbers that showed we would go oom in 114 seconds before v3, where as in v3 we can quite literally ignore mana in raiding situations. Doesn't take a genius to figure out what is going to happen if you reduce the return to less than what it was several patches ago... I will not be surprised when someone pulls out math showing us oom in less than 90 seconds in a raid.

JotW frustrations aside, using my latest numbers from raiding and frmorrison's rough % decrease numbers, experienced sunwell geared ret paladins will be facing at least a 300-450 dps loss in a single patch, if not more because of the inability to spam consecrate/exo/how (how can only be used at 20%, which is healthy for pvp but probably hurts pve dps by about another 100). It's nice to hear that the new RV dot does indeed roll, but a little disappointing that it only triggers from DS and judgements, and not CS. Even with the upcoming boss armor changes, that would put us back to where we were in 2.4.3 - unable to touch rogues/hunters/warriors (who should be pulling about ~2700dps depending on how hard the armor changes hit) but still (barely) above mages at ~2500.

I'm not even going to touch the pvp implications of their hacksaw tuning, because anyone with a brain knew that paladins were still not really desired for arenas, and never will be at this rate.

 

Fiola

L1 balance is not the cause, it's the effect. The cause is the choice to half-ass the "universal scaling" mechanism of Paladins. They happen together, but even if you ignore L1 balance - it doesn't fix the stat requirement disparity between Holy/Prot/Ret.


And no, you don't offend me, Cath. I'm just disagreeable, especially at times like this.

 

Proudmoore

That sounds very much like the Chicken and the Egg to me.

So much for "surgical adjusments". I'm guessing that in a day or two we'll get another post to the effect of "you got a build that a developer was tinkering with, it wasn't meant to go live".


An interesting test on the new RV would be a mob with a "heavy" shield - like the Mana Shielded ones before Curator in Kara. I don't know about Deep Wounds, but Ignite (which I think is the same mechanic, it does 40% after partial resists/absorbs) behaves strangely - since the spells are fully absorbed, it should provide a debuff that does 0 damage over X seconds. Ignite at least used to give "Ignite absorbed" messages, suggesting it did at least 1 damage.

 

GSH

Actually, what would work better than multiple ranks of SoR is to get a consistent AP Seal as the level 1 seal, and then get a consistent SP seal at level 64, which is roughly when SP gear becomes available. So Seal progression would look like:

Level 1 - Consistent AP seal (for levelling, Prot)
Level 20 - Burst AP seal (for Ret)
Level 64 - Consistent SP seal (for Holy)
Level 64 - More powerful consistent AP seal with Drawback (for Ret)

Now, there's a couple ways you can do this with the existing Seal structure. SoC and SoB fit the Burst AP seal and Drawback AP seal slots effectively. As for the other two slots, you can either move SoV down to level 1 and SoR up to 64 (and slant SoR more towards SP), which would keep SoV as the Protection Seal, and SoR as the Holy seal. Or you could push SoV towards SP, and SoR towards AP, which would make SoR the Protection Seal, and SoV the Holy seal.

The only real advantage you get with SoV being the Protection seal is the stacking of the SoV dot on multiple targets with HotR. While that's kind of cool, it's also a bit unnecessary, I think. Second, SoV is a good seal for Holy, because Holy doesn't have extra specials, and thus SoV and SoR behave much the same. Prot would get extra SoR procs off Hammer of the Righteous, but doesn't get a significant increase from the extra SoV proc (on a single target) once the full stack is up and running.

 

Cevil

I think what people are forgetting about this change to JotW, too, is that it will *never scale.* There is no gear we can get to make it better. Our damage will go up over time and gear and tiers, but from Naxx to Arthas, our Time-to-OOM will be constant, 100%. There is no way a Ret Paladin can improve his mana regen abilities through gear, so unless they plan on making Ret Paladins have endless mana, their DPS time will be constant no matter what fight they are on. Other mana-based classes get int on their gear, allowing for a bigger mana pool, and more return from replenishment. Ret will never have their DPS time scale, so anything but unlimited mana will make us useless, at any tier, on any fight that exceed our Time-to-OOM.

 

GSH

I don't think this matters with the introduction of Haste. Haste doesn't decrease our Time-to-OOM, but it does for the caster classes. So essentially between Haste and Int, they stay more or less consistent, just like we do.

 

Corronach

But they have three stats to counter going oom, spirit, int, and mp/5.

 

Anedris

Mana expenditure doesn't scale either though. The reason [non-arcane] mages never want int or spirit on their gear is because if they have enough mana to do a 6-minute encounter in Karazhan, they have enough mana to do a 6-minute encounter in Sunwell (pre-haste anyways; haste does change the picture). Our mana return doesn't have to scale so long as its sufficient to cover our mana requirements. (For the problems with scaling mana return see late-TBC shadow priests.)

A rogue's energy return doesn't scale, but this doesn't matter because the use that he can get out of that energy does scale. Same for the retadin - it's going to be all but impossible to balance the class such that a longer mana bar results in more DPS. A "mana-limited" class whose PvE DPS is balanced against other classes is always going to have spectacular burst in any circumstance where he doesn't have to worry about the long term (i.e., any circumstance in which he is effectively not mana limited). The prime example of a case where the encounter is likely to last less than a minute and burst is extremely valuable is, of course, PvP.