Edit: Beaten

Base Holy Shield appears to be back down to four charges; it was six for a while there.

[e] Hm, now I can't seem to find that. Maybe it was always four, and I'm just crazy.

[e2] Not crazy! Blizzard calc

As cool as Art of War was, no one honestly thought it would stay. As far as PvP was concerned, if it proced, you won. I'd rather NOT have my class balanced around a single ability... er, wrong spell. Not have it balanced around a single chance on hit. Even if Art of War procced 5% off crits, it still would "one shot" those people who got hit by it, and that's just not fun.

It's obvious since the addition of resilience, the cheapening of stamina, and now the change to windfury etc, Blizzard is continuing to move away from burst. It does suck that we lost a PvE talent for a PvP one, but we're still pretty strong without it.

Arguably the biggest changes in this build seems to be to Seal of Command, getting a 2min duration and apparently a reworked damage formula.

The latest changes, while some are not unexpected, are semi-disheartening.

Divine storm is a lil mana hog now, costing 70% more mana than before. With no new change to the skill, will it still be workable into a rotation? Perhaps, but Judgements of the Wise would have to affect us first-and-foremost for it to be viable.

Art of War - Goodbye usefulness, hello more PvP talents. Really, this wasn't a necessary change, removing the damage increase altogether. Perhaps making it so there was less than double damage, but for longer/more attacks. 25% more damage to your next 3 CS/DS's would have been great, rather than the 200% judgement damage.

Righteous Vengeance - So, the ability that make AoW powerful... didn't stop affecting judgements! Great, so it only affects 2 things now: Judgements, which we use all the time, yay!, and DS, which is now a mana-intensive ability. Perhaps they could throw some more synergy with DS if they want to make it stop affecting every other ability. Mana-cost, spell-interrupt, chance-to-stun, all nice viable options they can take.

Anyway, we'll see if these stay or if they get reverted. I doubt Art of War will go back to double-damage, but I hope it becomes a PvE staple ability still, to increase our DPS in some way shape or form.

Still pretty strong? They removed the 15% crit damage talent to replace it with a crappy 25% crit damage on judgements and divine storm only instead. concidering there are only 2 judgements you wanna keep up and a holy paladin can get the ret aura 2% damage talent with a sheath of light build, why would you ever bring a ret paladin to a raid since their damage was significantly lessened by this new build?

I thought having more crit damage and art of war increasing judgement potency (albeit too much, should have just been a flat value to judgements instead of an overpowered proc like it was) was gonna put it up there as a top contender for dps in raids making them desirable.

Instead we are looking at something along the lines of a 8% damage nerf. from the last build And thats not even concidering new divine storm mana costs since we dont know yet how that will factor in depending on new seal duration, judgement damage, etc...

So, since we no longer bring any utility to the raid(assuming WF totem doesnt stack with Swift Retribution), is there any reason to not assume that they will continue to drastically change ret? As it stands, we've lost all our utility, as well as a large portion of our damage in the current build.

To Helot, trust me when I say that our damage is absolutely not good enough to justify our raid slot without ANY raid utility at all. The current build puts us at the raid utility of a rogue, and I doubt that they're planning on giving us rogue-level damage.

I understand completely why they needed to change Art of War - and I'm down with it. I think I would have tweaked it a bit, instead of burning it down completely, but okay... just not how I would have done it. But, changing Righteous Vengeance was just mean.

I think my problem is, I saw AoW as an obvious issue - and I would expect that tweak to happen by itself before chopping off other talents as well.

I'm not n beta, but I'm really having trouble liking Divine Storm.

You forgot to add in the 4% to hit with Enlightened Judgements to make SURE your holy shocks actually hit your healing target! Basically, moved precision from low prot tree to high holy tree.

the reason I kind've dislike Divine Storm is its almost a copy paste of the prot 51 pt talent... Seems so very unoriginal.

Are Hands castable while stunned? Is it possible that Art of War now allows this to be so for Hand of Freedom? Wishful thinking, I suppose. Also, I imagine this has been answered several times by now, but with Precision's removal, are Retribution Judgements (besides Blood/Martyr) still scaling off of Spell Hit?

Of course Art of War needed a nerf. Nobody in their right mind would dispute that. However, I would dispute that at the current state of raid utility, the ret tree did not need two of its deepest damage talents neutered, one no longer increasing damage at all, and one changing from a critn increase on 100% of our damage to a slightly larger crit increase on some 15%(? I'm not sure how DS would work into a damage breakdown) of our damage.

Well at least with AoW nerfed to the ground a few points were freed up. I'm assuming the PvE raiding ret spec will be something like Nyah with those 2 point's in Guardian's Favor being fillers.

And guys, 20% of base mana is all of 590 mana. DS is still worth using.

2773 is base mana for all paladins regardless of race correct? I'm still puzzled why DS was left with the tooltip showing a %. It's still only ~8% of my raid buffed mana, and even less of my questing/grinding mana, it's definitely not a writeoff spell in any way.

I can't imagine the divine storm change going through. Considering a ret pally will be using warrior gear with 0 intellect on it, this makes no sense. A spell that uses 20% of your mana every 10 seconds as a 51 point talent doesn't seem well thought out. Unless judgement of the wise has some insane mana regen i can foresee this ability being used when needed as opposed to on cooldown.

On a sidenote: The enlightened judgement change is really good, due to holy pallys lacking melee hit to regen from seals and spell hit for their basic offensive casts.

BASE MANA =/= TOTAL MANA

Your base mana is determined solely by your class and level. It is what you have completely naked with all your intellect removed (including your base stats). For a level 70 paladin your base mana is about 2950.

Honestly, it really isn't too expensive. Stop whining about mechanics you don't understand.

Anyone notice that Avenger's Shield seems to now have a 7% AP coefficient? I wonder about consecrate now...

My mistake. Delete post if possible please.

Deleted post referencing deleted post.

I have 2 questions for those in Beta:

1) Seems as though AP is now affecting Avenger's Shield. If it worked on consecrate too, my worries about prot gearing would be largely resolved. Anyone care to test?

2) Shield spec affecting block from strength yet?

If anything, the Art of War change would be a very beneficial gimmick against stunning bosses. Hello Maexxna.

Also, has it been tested to see if Swift Retribution stacks or not with Windfury totem? If someone went out and proved it, I certainly missed it.



And the most important change will be to see if they nerfed the ridiculous scaling on Judgement of Light and Wisdom.

I'll be interested to hear if they reworked the JoW/JoL formula. As far as I've seen, the reason to bring a ret pally is the super JoW.

Edit: beaten, bah.

Maexxna spell is a incapacitating effect, so Art of War nor Hand of Freedom will not help there.


I am interesting what happended with JoL/JoW/SoR scaling in this build.