Prot still must take Blessing of Sanctuary, so he could add -80 damage (will be higher at 80) and extra threat when blocking, so while not as good as other Pally buffs, it still is useful for everyone.


It depends on what you have for your raid group to see what is optimal, but you don't want more than 3 Paladins.

Prot pallys need Might now as well. Throw them into the "wants 3" pool (though ideally a prot pally would like all 4 Blessings).

Actually now that I think of it a Holy Pally judging anything will want Might as well because almost all the Judgements have a nice AP component (and free damage is never bad). So just put the whole pally class in the "wants 3" category.

I would not assume that vindication will work on bosses if Heart Strike does, as they are very different.

For example, let's say a boss has 1 million hit points, and he starts to cast massive heal when he is on 80% health (800,000). A quick Heart Strike will not affect his HP at all (well, other than the basic damage), but it will instead lower his max HP to 800,000. Therefore, his massive heal will have no effect, because for all intents and purposes he is at 100% health. If he was hit by Vindication instead of a heart strike, then he would actually lose a massive chunk of his HP (a further 200,00HP asuming 100% of boss HP comes from stamina, which I'm sure it does not).

I'm not sure how this would work at the beginning of a fight, because it does seem massively OP. How would it work if the boss was 100k/100k (100%)? Would he become 80k/80k and remain 100%, or would he actually be at 100k/80k? If it is the second case then in one swing a DK can do 20% of an entire raid's damage? That makes little sense to me.

On a side note, Vindication is pretty damn bugged on the Beta at the moment, as it seems to be applying a massive reduction in health. I've had mobs on me get hit by my divine storm and lose 15% of their health, then SoB procs off it and they lose another 5%, and then vindication procs a bit later (kinda laggy) and they actually die due to the huuuuuge reduction in stats that they take. I'll try and get a video of it in action later tonight.

Unless they actually give bosses attributes like Str, Stam, etc, I cannot see this applying to Vindication. Because Heart Strike claims it lowers max health, not stamina.

I don't think Sheath should be looked at as a HOT in the conventional sense of constant HPS to support your regular heals, as it does nothing so long as you keep critting. Its real use lies in preventing a drop in your HPS when you stop critting by replacing the 50% heal bonus with a tick.

Another point is that if the ticks get big enough, you can stop healing altogether for a while. I've seen people wondering how you can ever afford to channel Divine Plea for six seconds. A HOT ticking for 3000/3 may just be the answer to that.

It's less damage reduction than that in practice unfortunately. Sanctuary's damage reduction, unlike the one from Sacrifice, is applied before armor is, meaning it's contribution to the final damage taken gets "reduced" by armor. The extra threat also doesn't scale, which is going to make it weaker in the expected level 80 environment where tanks are expected to and get good results from gearing for threat.

Ironically it's also likely going to be the case that the "Prot Blessing" Sanctuary is going to be less good for threat than might is. While there's still the damage reduction component, as I said above, in practice this is going to be a fairly minor contribution of the blessing. Rank eight of Blessing of Might (With the new version of Improved Blessing of Might) would give an ~95 TPS increase to a Protection Paladin thanks to so many Paladin abilities now scaling with attack power. As each block with Blessing of Sanctuary up is worth ~90 threat, you'd need more than one block per second to match this. Even on a boss with an exceptionally high amount of attacks per second like Brutallus you'll have a hard time hitting that amount of blocks.

Edit:

In regards to Vindication, it was working oddly on the beta. Bosses are immune to the debuff, but it still affected their current health. See this video as an example: YouTube - 2 Man onyxia - 1 minute
I've heard this has been hotfixed however, or that it only applies to the first rank of the talent. Either way it's unintended, though interesting to look at. See this thread too: WoW Forums -> FOOLS! The best bug is yet undiscovered...

Crappy priest is more of a practical anecdote, I'm talking pure theorycraft here. And from a pure theorycraft perspective you arrive at one of these three situations with two paladins:

a) You have a healer and tank paladins. The tank should get imp devo and you have your healer take imp wisdom. Then there's a choice for the healer to go for sheath of light + sanctified retribution build and your standard auras are ret and devo. With this scenario you'll miss the least which basically is swift retribution. Either build can pick up imp might but I guess the tanks would rather go for benediction (I'm assuming tanks still go for deflection.) Or you have the healer go for imp devo and DG and then there's prot overlap and no sanctified retribution.

b) You have a healer and ret. Ret should take kings and after that there's the choice for healer again. If he goes for sheath of light your raid doesn't get imp devo at all, but sheath of light is just the stronger healing spec in its own right - 5% crit and 500+ more spellpower. Ret would also favor benediction over imp might, but again he probably should pick up might unless the healer's choice is sheath and he's a rock solid on raid attendance. You lose imp devo yeah, you'll just have to live with it.

c) You have a tank and ret. There's little choice on spec, there's overlap on kings and there's no way to get imp wisdom. Again tank has to take imp devo.

Now from this for min/max you're looking at sheath healer + tank with imp might as strongest combo followed by holy/prot + ret, followed by tank/ret followed by everything else.

EDIT:

Holy paladins really need an incentive to judge since it's on GCD now and it's mana. So it's either sheath of light going down to judgment of wise (and actually decent damage this way) or holy/prot taking the haste talent. If you have a build without either of these there's no point.

And for sanctuary for prot, that's a huge annoyance for me - as a healer I take no benefit in having sanctuary, but tanks insist on giving it to me. I would be eternally thankful if they were to change blessing of sanctuary to hand of sanctuary so tanks could put it on themselves. Have it do whatever it does now or tweak it whatever, just not take a blessing slot.

I just noticed the different wording, yea you're right. Still this is pretty annoying. When vindication came out everyone in the ret community seemed to be gushing at the prospect that it would work on bosses and be considered a major part of our PvE utility, only to have that turned down and vindication becoming pretty much useless in 99% of PvE content.

When talking about it, the conclusion was that it would be too powerful to work on bosses.. only for them to give the exact same thing to the shiny new toy class, Death Knights (at least according to that blue post). Not a huge fan of inconsistent logic.



I keep seeing this posted. Remember any "DPS boosts" you see us getting, every other class is getting some too. You really can't decide whether ret will be "hefty" or "wimpy" DPS until you know what other classes will be doing, it's all relative.

Of course I have my fingers crossed that the devs recognize the lack of unique group/raid utility (since most of the relevant bits can be mirrored by a sheath specced holy paladin) and give us personal DPS in return, however blindly assuming they're doing that is being naive (based on their track history).

Also keep in mind, some things always have to remain true, for example "non-buffing class > buffing class" in DPS (for example rogues), since as soon as we can do the same amount of damage as a rogue, rogues become extinct (unless they also get some buffs).

Given that half the classes in the game benefit from 3 Blessings I would assume a "min/max" comp for paladins will be 3. Also, given that an ideal distribution for classes in 25-mans is 2.5 of each it is somewhat safe to assume Tri-spec hybrids (of which the paladin is one) will bring 3.

You're making the assumption that stacking 4th toons from a different hybrid class or a 3rd of a pure class is going to outweigh a third paladin's raid spot. I don't think that is a realistic scenario given how much Blizzard has stated they megaloathe the "6 shamans =win" attitude of Sunwell.

Sure, absolutely. But if you apply this kind of analysis to each class, you're going to come out with an "optimal" number of 2 for pretty much all of them. (Look at all the classes whining on the WoW forums about "There's no reason to bring more than 2 of us to a raid!") That's still going to leave 5 slots open, so at some point to fill a raid you're going to have to enter the realm of practicality and decide which classes you want to bring "too many" of.

EDIT: Also, unrelated:

Regarding Sanctuary, I'm pretty much assuming it won't stand in its current form, given that there are no new ranks for it in the beta. If it does remain, Chicken's arguments above are all correct. At this point Sanctuary is basically just an extra point you spend to unlock Holy Shield. Kings and Might will both be better tanking blessings, and possibly even Wisdom if mana is an issue.

Given that Prot currently holds both talented blessings, I'm expecting Sanct to be replaced by something that's not a blessing.

Not sure if this is directed at my post, but what I'm saying is completely unrelated to how many paladins will be taken. I still think it's probably going to be 1 of each spec, however it's too early to tell for sure since it really depends on how other classes perform.

Additionally it also depends on how different classes scale with gear and how patches affect class balance, look at the start of TBC where holy paladins were the class to stack and how that gradually reduced all the way up to sunwell.

With 2.5 spots per class, your average 25 man raid will have 5x classes with 3 each, and 5x classes with 2 each. Only time will tell where we'll land there, there's no such guarantee as "look at our damage, it's so good!" that can be made at this point.

We've done the whole Sunwell with 3 blessings fine. That is the highest end instance in the game and most likely will not be surpassed in difficulty before Icecrown. Now, one of those blessings has always been salvation/light (with the exception of hunters) - both of which are removed in WotLK. That leaves 2 blessings.

With the changes in JoW scaling and Judgements of the Wise (and other classes' similar talents) I _really_ can't see who would substantially benefit from 3 blessings unless sanctuary is heavily changed.

- Warrior and Paladin tanks: Sanctuary in it's current form is minus ~20-30dmg per hit and neglible threat boost, BoW nice for palas but then again, you have JoW up
- Druid and Deathknight tanks: Sanctuary minus ~20-30dmg per hit
- Hunters: JoW will most likely solve their mana problems so no BoW needed
- Enhancement shamans: are already self-sufficient what it comes to mana so Wisdom is not needed, huge benefits from JoW
- Ret paladins: Currently seem that they will be self-sufficient without BoW due to JoW and Judgements of the Wise
- Holy paladins: gain 158 spell power from talented might if specced Sheat of Light


[e] Also consider that there are only 2 beneficial judgements in PvE now that improved Crusader is no more. You only need 2 paladins to judge Light and Wisdom.

But if you have 24 in your raid and it's a choice between a "correct" rogue and a ret pally who would bring more DPS? Assuming the ret pally has halfway decent gear and can mash Crusader Strike hard enough I'm nearly positive you'll benefit more from bringing that extra paladin over a third "pure" class that doesn't bring anything to the raid.

Maxing out damage doesn't mean bringing only the classes that can put out the most DPS, otheriwse every raid would be Destro lock x20. Utility DPS specs need to strongly be considered in raid composition.

I suppose you're too lazy to look at spell costs, eh? I'll give you a clue, JoW might be hitting harder but most spells cost at least double than their level 70 versions. Hell Hunter shots alone have increased in cost by almost 300%.

So yeah, is a third blessing required? No. Is a third Blessing nice to have? Yes. And no matter how "useless" that third Blessing is it has some benefit which is added to bringing the third paladin that no other class can match.

And again, Holy Pallys will be Judging often, and Judgements do damage based on AP even if you're not specced Sheath. Prot pallys pretty much require Might now. Ret may be "self sufficient" with mana now, but JotW is bugged to hell, who knows how it will be in a raid?

Rememeber, regardless of class extra regen is always extra DPS. For a ret pally it means you won't have to use Plea as much or can take a Haste Pot instead of a Mana. For an Enhancement Shaman it means the use of SR as a damage mitigation method instead of popping it every cooldown to be able to use his abilities. For a Hunter it means Hawk instead of Viper. Almost every class can turn that extra regen into extra DPS.

I still find weird that Heart Strike is gonna work on raid bosses. Let's consider an easy case. You have 6mins to kill a boss who has 1million hps. If you bring a blood DK, the zerk time still stay 6mins, but you only need to do 800k in those 6mins. Doesn't that totally trivialize every zerk timer? Doesn't that make blood DK mandatory on pretty much every fight? 20% of the total health is a lot.

So yeah, don't know if the blue post was referring to 5man bosses or what, it seems way way overpowered for raiding, not a single class can bring an ability that instantly does 2millions+ dmg on a boss, which is pretty much what heart strike is. In comparison, Vindication(or Ebon plague as unholy DK), would only remove stam, which is probably not the total of a boss hp(say boss has 1000stam, but 5millions hp, you'd only remove 4k hp, which isn't much). It'd nerf their damage quite a lot though.

How does heart strike work with agro? Still if he can do 2 million damage to a 10 million hp boss, might as well pay a soulstone for that.

But what I'm talking about here is viability of bringing more than one ret to a raid.

Unfortunately we still don't know that, this is what everything is hanging on at the moment. Will it be 3 random people or will the casting paladin (ret paladin) be always one of the 3. All assumptions either way are pointless until this is answered.

I'm fully aware of the spell cost changes, thank you very much.

Here is something to keep on the back burner:

Currently HotR is not normalized as testing has shown.

I found this blue response, which in context refers to death knights, but may apply to others later:

Source:
WoW Forums -> New Frost Strike


So currently there is a bug preventing normalized attacks from doing non-physical damage (HotR anyone). When they fix it, some of the death knight abilities will be normalized. We should probably keep an eye on HotR too to see what happens with it.

So how can you say that classing with terribly chronic mana problems right now (for example Hunters) will be "fine" in Wrath with just a tweak to JoW?

Remember chain-potting is gone. You get 1 potion per boss fight, outside of that you're sunk. Any extra regen you can get is going to be used.

I've already been calculating the ability as if it was normalized myself as I assumed it would be in the future. Normalization still favors slower weapons, as it gets free extra damage out of the higher damage damage range on the weapon itself as normalization only applies to the attack power benefit the instant attack gets.

While the number of classes/specs that could use 3 blessings might be half of available, if you look at a raid that is even favorable for a third blessing - one enhance, 2 paladins who both benefit, and say 3 hunters, that's 6 people out of 25.

My understanding is that warriors want faster tank weapons because of heroic strike and cleave which are on next swing abilities. Closest to that is SoR which scales with weapon speed, but if it didn't you'd favor faster weapons too. Alternatively, they could modify the threat caused by SoR to scale with SP/AP and be independent of damage it does and you'd favor faster weapons as well.

EDIT: to the post below, actually if SoR did extra threat, it would also rule it out for a raiding ret.