WotLK talent trees/abilities discussion - Page 339

Puretide · 10/09/08, 11:14 AM

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.)

nitan · 10/09/08, 11:16 AM

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.

Prinsesa · 10/09/08, 11:22 AM

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.

Cathela · 10/09/08, 11:45 AM

Originally Posted by Khaelarys

Just to be clear, you're saying that maybe it's easier to do this than to rebalance encounters without Kings?

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.

Corronach · 10/09/08, 11:56 AM

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.

Mordekhuul · 10/09/08, 11:57 AM

Originally Posted by Cathela

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.

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.

Spenda · 10/09/08, 12:38 PM

Originally Posted by Prinsesa

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.

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.

hellshound38 · 10/09/08, 1:14 PM

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.

Janraea · 10/09/08, 1:23 PM

Originally Posted by hellshound38

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.

hellshound38 · 10/09/08, 1:48 PM

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.)

• frmorrison · 10/09/08, 1:48 PM

Originally Posted by hellshound38

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 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.

Avitus · 10/09/08, 1:53 PM

Originally Posted by Khaelarys

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'm getting really tired of this vague bs and I really, really dread to think that history will repeat itself for the third time:

WoW-beta: Strikes galore, ret was godemode.
WoW-live: Retlol the joke was created. Not viable for PvE and meh in PvP unless you had very OP gear (Avengers+Sulfuras/r13)

TBC-beta: 6 second CS, you know the drill, things started looking up
TBC-live: "CS syndrome" with CS nerfed to hell at 10 sec cd, until 2.3 it was pretty sad. Pretty ok throughout BT afterwards and now starting to fall behind big time again in SW.

WotLK-beta: Finally standing on its own two feet.
WotLK-live: "Vague blue doom and gloom comments every few days", where is this going?

Worst of all is the all too well known pattern of "pendulum swings" with "balancing". Rarely do I see things changed in small meaningful steps, instead it goes from massive buff to massive nerf, the only question is where the pendulum ultimately rests the day things go live.

For the sake of sanity, I hope GC stops with his vague remarks on hunter/other class boards making us look like the black sheep of balance, jeez. Either be specific or hold your peace.

Khaelarys · 10/09/08, 1:58 PM

Originally Posted by Rasputin

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.

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.

levk · 10/09/08, 2:06 PM

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.

Janraea · 10/09/08, 2:27 PM

Originally Posted by hellshound38

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.)

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.