I saw one comment earlier in the thread along the lines of "there is nothing that really says 'bring a ret paladin'". I don't know how this can possibly be said at this point because Ret paladins are basically extremely high longetivity mana based DPSers with extensive raid wide healing and mana regen capabilities. They are melee shadowpriests with no mana or aggro difficulties who scale with melee stats (one of the biggest problems with casters) and even if they nerf Judgement damage scaling to a third of what it is now they will still be doing far superior DPS to most of the other classes they are comparable to. I mean if you compare the current Ret paladin to the new one, what's the difference?

- Swing free Hammer of Wrath at a 80% crit rate
- Scaling Exorcism
- Scaling Judgements
- Divine Storm
- Righteous Vengeance/Fanatacism's increase

Do not underestimate how important the addition of attack power scaling and Sheathe of Light is to those spells. Our DPS will be nothing like it was before.

That was me, and I agree that making such a change to JoL would be sweet. The only issue that I see is that it doesn't really benefit a holy paladin (any paladin can use JoL), but a simple fix would be to tie it into a deep holy talent. And I really do hope blizzard moves us more towards a melee-healer, I'd forgotten how much fun it was to play like that.

Of course, beacon would also need to be changed (It was a lot of my healing, and the big problem with the hunter was that he often didn't get either) to have a longer range, since casters don't always want to be standing 10 yards away from the tank. Of course, that will probably necessitate a cap of some sort, which is fine with me.

Or alternately, here's a crazy idea: Make beacon a static buff that heals for some amount (probably a % of spellpower, normalized for weapon speed to prevent us from stealing rogue offhands) and drains mana whenever the paladin lands a melee swing. Between beacon and focus macro HS/insta-HL, we could heal a MT and other melee pretty sustainably while being frontline fighters. It would certainly add a very fun flavor the the class that it is sorely lacking at the moment. Oh well, a guy can dream, can't he?


On a semi-related note, I'm pretty saddened to see sheath being made more powerful for Holy. I was hoping blizzard would move us away from being single-target only backline heal spammers, not try to encourage it.

The new mini-evocate is also quite nice (I'll take something over nothing any day), but it seems to be pretty limited in use for all three specs since it requires you to stop everything (even movement) to get any use out of it. Of course we'll have to wait to see endgame encounter design and gear (if we wind up with a ton of haste, losing only 4 seconds wouldn't be nearly as bad, for instance), but right now it seems like it could be better.

Just tested the new AoW 3/3 on beta:

-Can be used on self WHILE stunned to remove stuns
-Does NOT make you immune to stuns past that point


I'm really not sure how useful this is, even for PvP. As ret vs anything with a lot of slowing abilities you'll be spamming BoF ("HoF") on cooldown, hell most of the time when chasing someone down you want to use it preemptively in order not to fall behind at a critical point, so "waiting to use it tactically" is going to be counter productive.

It's going to be only in rare situations when facing no classes with slowing abilities where you can "tactically wait" to use BoF to get out of 1 stun.

Disclaimer: I'm not saying it's completely useless I'm not whining :P, as someone put it "having > not having", but on the scale of useless to useful and "bang for your talent points" I would rate it pretty low/something I won't use.

http://www.mmo-champion.com/talent/?...00000000000000

Would be a build if you needed some mana regen (30 yard judgement is pretty nice) at the cost of a GCD and 4% haste.


Paladins could melee for JoW procs, however doesn't casting a spell reset your swing timer?

Sheathbot is a stupid term.

Aside from that, whether or not it is used in raids, it is an amazing PvP talent that will give Holy a much better chance of competing in 2v2 and 3v3.

Some spells. Currently for Paladins our instant cast spells (Consecration, Exorcism, Judgement, Holy Shock) do not while our casting time spell do (Holy Light, Flash of Light). Hammer of Wrath and Holy Wrath do currently also reset the swing timer, however in Wrath both of these are being changed to the former case (HW is going instant and HoW is coded identically to Steady Shot).

Regardless, if most caster weapons are itemized like now it won't be difficult to get in a few swings here and there while sitting on instant-HL's, 1.4 speed weapons don't worry about pushback too much.

Seal of Righteousness is really, really strong. In my Ret gear, Ret specced and with 4/5 Seals of the Pure, SoB is around ~65% of SoR damage. JoB is about 115% of JoR.

Maybe SoB will benefit from the physical damage increase of Vengeance, but SoR still looks amazingly good to me. 5/5/51 + 10?

Given that SoB can crit while SoR can not (unless that has also changed) as well as the (marginal) recoil regen I could see eventual balance being reached between the two, but that is kind of fishy. I really do wish they would tone down SoR though; prot pallys have plenty of TPS spam abilities without the need for ultra-SoR and ret deserves a slightly more interesting ability than our level 1 seal.

5/5/56 +5 would be the "cookie cutter" spec then for PvE ret.

The problem with SoR is that they can't nerf the AP coefficient too hard, as it is our levelling Seal for a whole bunch of levels where we don't have SP.

They may end up having to add a breakpoint in the SoR AP scaling. I.e. The first 1000 AP gets 36% coeffient, but after that, extra AP only grants 18%.

Is SoR getting a weapon damage component as well or simply AP scaling? If it is the first they could tone down the AP coefficient without hurting the low-level seal too much.

EDIT: Wowhead to the rescue!

Ok so on WoWhead it is reading as [MWS * (0.05 * AP + 0.1 * SPH)], or ( mainhand weapon speed * ( 5% of AP + 10% of spell power ) ) if I'm looking at this correctly. So yes, the simplest way to nerf this would be to simply reduce/remove the AP component while tacking on a base weapon damage range variable, though it would create a leveling problem. Perhaps removing the spell damage portion? That kind of screws holydins over...

Hm...

Just AP and SP scaling, modified by weapon speed, not weapon damage.

They really should, but its a toss-up. Its hard to go 8 points that deep, but I think that picking up +SD from Sheath makes up for it, even though it scales 5% worst. 43/0/28 is looking better and better everyday for raid utility and main-tank healing.

Protection is a lot of fun for solo questing. It's not as fast as Ret, but it's pretty good. I used Judgement, Hammer of the Righteous and Holy Shield, and easily went through 1-3 mobs at a time. I didn't feel it was worth using Consecrate for so few mobs. Prot is a little mana-hungry, but I went JoL + SoW, and still killed fairly fast while keeping my health and mana pretty high.

The caveat to this is that I did not use Prot gear. I used my Ret gear + a green 1H hammer from one of the first WotLK quests (~84 dps) + an Illidari Runeshield. When I tried with my epic Prot tanking gear it just felt terrible. I think you really need a decent amount of strength to make the new Protection work. I'd probably get the new Cobalt blacksmithing gear as soon as possible, and replace all my precious epics.

I think I'm probably going to level as Protection in WotLK. It's solid for soloing, and I can tank instances on the way up.

They won't, at least not quite yet. The only tier in a talent tree that is "allowed" to only be 5 points is the second to last tree, where it is always exactly 5-points.

So the only way you would see HG going to 3 is if they move/add another talent to that tier. Heals not affecting swing timers, go go!!!

The Art of War change is disappointing in that they went in the direction of a defensive talent, and a PVP oriented one at that. Granted it's original iteration was clearly busted, but still.

I wish they changed it so that it mimicked Unfair Advantage although perhaps with different triggers. Or maybe it increased the damage/healing throughput of targets affected by your Hand of Freedom, turning it into a mini-hysteria.

Um, sorry to back track to sheathbots, but has anyone confirmed whether it functions like a ignite in the way it refreshes the tick counter. By which I mean, does every crit mean you are now waiting another 3 seconds for the HoT tick? And with a high enough crit rate of FoL, for instance (50%), does that mean you could be waiting forever (though getting a monstrous Sheath tick at the end of it)?

I dont understand why people want SoR to be nerfed because it is better than SoB/SoM. Only because the alliance have waited so long for this seal does not mean that they have to use it.
Nevertheless SoB/SoM scales better with crit and has a self damage part so it will probably become an endgame seal. Its ok if SoR becomes a better grinding Seal and SoC a better pvp stun-> burst Seal.

I really hope you're right Rheyah, but I have several worries :

- Hammer of Wrath seems to be doing good but is only usable below 35% target health.

- New Righteous Vengeance is really bad for a tier 10 talent : some napkin math : 5% more critical damage on judgements/divine storm : if we assume that judgement + divine storms are doing 30% of our damage, and that we have a 40% average crit rate on this abilities (more for judgements, less for for Divine storm) : we have a DPS increase of : 5%*0.3*0.4 = +0.6% DPS par talent point. Even tweaking this a little bit, it is weak.

- Nobody seriously thought that AOW could stay in its previous form, but the new one as a pure (and not so good) PVP talent is disappointing.

- The most important point : we don't know exactly how Judgement of the Wise will work in raid situations : will the Ret Paladin always be the first target for the mana return ? Will it be a smart AI going for the lowest mana pools ? As long as we don't know the answers, I will stay cautious about mana longevity.

Concerning our comparable classes (most notably DPS DK and Enh shamans) I think we will have to wait some time to have more informations about their DPS and ours.

So you wanted Hammer of Wrath to be usable at free will? Are you serious?It was usable below 20% target health, now it is usable under 35%, has 80%+ chance to crit and does not reset swing timer. AND scales better. Come on, be realistic! Of course talents could use some changes. Notably, Righteous Vengeance could be changed to work exactly like Impale, on every special skill or ability. Since our damage majorly comes from skills or spells, this would be a fair tradeoff.

AoW is good, maybe it could be improved to have 3/6/9% self haste and breaking also Fear effects with HoF.

Hm, I don't see either why sheath is 'that' good. You could always have 5% extra crit and BoL. In this case you should choose between:

1. 10% haste and BoL
2. AP -> SP conversion and HoT

Even if you manage to get 4% haste in sheath build it is negated by the fact that you should be in melee range to judge it. And if you could be in melee range it usually means there is no mechanics that prevents raid to stack on boss and BoL just rocks. If there is a lot of aoe and you should spread out, then you couldn't use that 4% haste on regular basis. So basically it is a choise between 10% haste (both melee and spellhaste) AND BoL vs AP->SP and HoT. I bet that 10% haste alone for high lvl of gear will overweight extra SP and HoT.

Sadly it isn't 5% more crit damage per point, it's 5% crit damage bonus which is equal to 2.5% of crit damage. (Ignoring RED, no point in complicating things.)

So it's 0.3% DPS per point.

To point out some similar talents, Impale gives a slightly worse effect, but applies to all yellow damage instead of two abilities, as a 2 point talent on talent tier 4.
Predatory Instincts is a 5 point T8 talent, applies to all attacks and gives a 20% crit bonus increase. In addition it has a secondary effect, which is half the power of the talent.

Righteous Vengeance should give at least a 25% bonus to all attacks if it's supposed to be close to competitive as a talent. That'd make it about 0.8% DPS per point assuming an average crit chance of 30-35%.

I'm not exactly saying that SoR should be nerfed. I understand that the scaling with attack power is essentiel for tankidins threat scaling now that they seem to require more strength on their equipment.

The fact that SoB/SoM can crit where SoR cannot, and the fact that judging SoB/SoM will deal more damage than judging SoR are hints that SoB/SoM will be a better dps seal for Ret pals.

My concern is somewhere else. I'm quite confused with the purpose of every seal. Let me explain.
Today we have something like :

SoR => tanking seal / "caster" dps seal
SoV => "caster" dps seal if that ever mean anything. It is mainly usefull to holy paladins that have consequent spell damage
SoB => Physical dps seal
SoC => physical dps seal and pvp

now it is sort of all mixed up. SoR seems better than SoC for a Ret Dps, judging vengence with 5 stacks will deal more damage than judging SoB/SoM, and so on...

So basically what I'm saying is that maybe coefficients needs to be tuned anyhow so that every seals keeps his purpose. Maybe you're right, and it's ok that way, it'll free 1 talent point for "pure" pve ret palys. It's just that I would expect more from a talent seal than being just a pvp utility and not a dps upgrade from our very basic seal we get at level 1.

Still I'm very thrilled by these changes. Our new combat mechanics (ie no dependancy on seal of the crusader and aura of sanctity for decent dps) and the mana regen perspective from JotW (even though it still needs to be checked out) and the ability to judge wisdom more frequently is a very nice outlook from my point of view.