It's going to be same as it is now in endgame Sunwell gear (at least for PvE): You are going to be running at base mana pool (same as when naked), even the ret paladin specific tier 6 bracers/belt/boots have no int on them.

They're making it all about the mana regen through abilities/synergy, not the mana pool. Not a perfect solution (it has been criticized by many people for obvious reasons), not completely bad either, anyway this is what the devs are going with.


Well I don't want to go off topic with this, so all I'll say is that there's a big difference between aligning cooldowns and an easily reproducible 20k damage from one single ability at level 70.

Well, Avenger's Shield is having its cost significantly reduced, and I think that even with zero +INT on gear, our base mana at 80 will be enough to Seal > Avenger's Shield > Holy Shield > Consecrate > HotR (+ Judgement of Wisdom) > Shield of Righteousness (possibly reverse this order, not sure yet) with enough mana to spare.

Our base mana pool at 70 is about 4k, and even using level 80 mana costs you can fit that entire rotation into one mana bar (at 70, no less) with ease (not even counting the mana return you'll get from Judging wisdom).

All of the following are assuming you have 2/2 Guarded by the Light and 3/3 Shield of the Templar:

Seal of Righteousness: ~560
Avenger's Shield: 312
Holy Shield: 238
Consecrate: 1033
HotR: 240
Judgement of Wisdom: 200 (and you'd get some amount back from using this)
Shield of Righteousness: 204

Total: 2787


So, even going off a level 70 mana pool (and using level 80 ability costs, minus the abilities that are a % of base mana but those should obviously scale appropriately) we should be fine without INT on any of our gear.

Pally Tanks get their mana from being healed. That's pretty much it; Protadins appear to be being moved over whole-hog to Warrior Str/Stam style gear.

Group setups will require more thinking, since there are still many party only buffs that have to be taken into consideration.


Mana Tide and Vampiric Torch are party-only. There is a thread here called something like "Wrath group setups" that has a good list.

I am curious about haste and GCD in beta currently. With all the spell/physical hit/crit/haste stats being merged now how is haste's affect on the GCD working?

Reducing GCD with haste gear would be quite nice, and in the case of paladins not really affect our rotations enough to be a huge boost to dps (but on some fights getting an extra cleanse or two off would be huge for example).

Also, someone said that DST is changed on beta to be a physical only haste but I have my doubts about them actually knowing this or not so confirmation would be nice.

a few questions:

1. will the set bonus from t3 that reduced LoH CD by 12 minutes be changed? because a 4 minute LoH would be pretty sweet imo. not significant at lvl 80 since lvl 60 gear would blow, but still fun

2. will conviction increase the critical % of all spells? aka heals? at the moment i dont see any clarifier that says it effects offensive abilities only.

3. is divine guardian going to absorb 30% of the damage (while active) that a tank receives as long as he is in 30 yards?
like, is this going to be a mini shield wall that a MT will set up a rotation for and yell for occasionally in raids?

4. with the increase in number of charges base holy shield has to 6, along with the reduced cooldown of 8 seconds (meaning up to 10 blocks every 8 seconds when talented) is this going to represent a shift in tanking towards blocking more often, or are they simply trying to improve aoe threat generation by allowing us to get more reflective holy shield damage spread around.

5. will judgement of the just work against boss mobs?

thank you for your time =)

I suppose a kludge for that would be to make it such that damage done while under the effect of Art of War cannot exceed 50% of a target's health.

I'm personally expecting Art of War to changed to a much more reliable proc rate, but at a lower damage gain on procs. That'd save in the whole "20k damage procs!" department while keeping the damage gain.

Well that all depends on how you interpret things.

Everything Blizzard has said for the past year is "we want paladin DPS to be less bursty, and more sustainable"

Everything Blizzard has done for the past year has been "make paladin DPS more bursty".

Of course, the chance that you get a Art-of-War critted Judgement off on a resilience capped target is about 1%. Maybe they're just ok with 1% melee insta-kills.

Your math is wrong. At level 70 a player would need 1k resilience to negate 25% crit. At 80 this will be higher. There is no way someone is running around at 1k resilience. At best someone would have 500, meaning they would lessen crit chance by about 13%. Unless you think paladins will cap out at 14% crit your math is wrong.

Not to mention the fact that with spell/physical crit being merged, combined with talents, Judgements are going to crit quite a fair bit even on high resilience players.

I think he meant that:

Player critical chance: 40% (for example)
Reduction due to target's resilience: 15% (again e.g.)
Remains: 25%

Chance to proc Art of War: 15% of 25% or 3.75%
Chance for Art of War Judgement to itself deal critical damage: 25% + 25% = 50%
50% of 3.75% or ~1.9%

This type of mechanic.

EDIT: Ooops, nevermind. Misread Art of War tooltip. Would be 15% x 50% or 7.5% with the numbers above.

Remember at the moment (on live), with no spelldamage gear you run around doing wimpy 300 non crit JoCs unbuffed. At most as crit, stuned JoC (unbuffed) you do what, 2k?

In that sense, doing double that (Art of War) shouldn't be a problem, but not of course at the base damage judgements are doing on beta.

Why all this? Well it's not the first time that during a beta you feel that left hand is designing one thing, right hand is changing something else and suddenly you have crazy results. It's a beta after all.

Anyway, if you think 20k Judgements are going to remain like they are, sure I don't mind. All we have to do is wait a few weeks till they start patching the beta.

This is far from conclusive, but I did a couple nexus runs, and the results were:

run 1: myself, prot war, fury war, 2 DKS: Most of my healing was JoL and beacon, so I stayed 75%+ mana the entire run because I spent most of the time meleeing with SoW.

run 2: same group, but we replaced the fury warrior with a hunter: Since the hunter couldn't be healed by JoL and wasn't always in range of beacon, I had to spot heal him with HS/FoL a lot. The combination of extra mana spent on heals and time lost meleeing made my mana pool pretty tight on several occasions.

Basically, it feels like anything beyond an optimal group (all melee) is going to be tough for a normally geared paladin trying to make use of all the new deep holy stuff.

TBH, I probably could have healed the whole thing just fine with normal FoL-botting, but I wanted to give the new talents a try. With the way things are currently, I get the feeling that sheath specs may be the best option, not because deep holy sucks, but because we can't afford the mana for all the new toys under any sort of intensive healing situation. Beacon especially, at over 1k mana per cast (@70) with no benefit from illumination, is just far too expensive to use whenever you're having to cast a lot of other heals.

I do think that Holy has a lot of potential, and with some serious work, blizzard could pull off the kind of changes that they had promised. Particularly, making beacon more affordable/versatile and giving us more options to heal without resetting the swing timer could lead to a very effective, very unique, and most importantly, very fun playstyle.

Out of curisosity what sort of gear were you using Obligatory? I imagine that Beacon is probably planned around raids and using at least lvl 80 blues+epics. Using it along the way might have negative effects on your mana.

Aye, we couldn't chaincast highest rank HL for any reasonable time when we entered outlands (unless you was more or less fully t3 geared). In SWP gear effectiveness is much higher. Till we know first epic tiers it's hard to judge. Maybe set bonuses will be 10% increased BoL healing and 20% decreased cost of BoL. Something similar they did for priest CoH - there was a LOT of whining about useless CoH centered tier bonuses and now it's one of the main priest spells.

CoH also received several outright buffs along the way; reduction in mana cost and a non-trivial increase in healing, at least. I'll reserve judgement on Beacon til we see how the spell is at level 80, but at the time when people were talking about CoH being useless, they had a point.

Art of War has been nerfed into a pure PvP talent. At least it frees some points somewhere, right?

Shit, Righteous Vengeance was nerfed too.

Ok, I'll just post the link. http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?paladin

BoL did have it's cost reduced (marginally). Of course to balence it Holy Shock is a fucking mana hog now... Incidentally Divine Storm had it's cost almost doubled as well.

Urgh.

EDIT

Eye for an Eye was changed too.

Now procs from all crits (melee and caster) against you, but only deals 20% of the crit back to the enemy.

Divine Str buffed to 3% per rank.

Divine Int buffed to 3% per rank

Burning questions for the new build;
1. Has SoR/SoC been changed?

2. Has Hammer of the Righteous been normalized and/or bugfixed (only uses green AP)?

3. Is Art of War a once-only stun-removal-on-application, meaning you can still stun a Freedom'd target, or is it immunity?

4. Can you use your Art of War'd Freedom to break yourself out of a currently running stun on yourself?

Divine Strength/Intellect were always at that rate in beta.

That change to Art of War makes me feel sad. Why take that away from us? I know people were getting some ludicrous crits with some judgements, but was it really all because of AoW? No beta access here, no clue what's going on.