Rasputin

Is leveling from 1-20 really such a huge deal that we need to step carefully around it when there's such a clear scaling problem at higher levels? I honestly do not understand all the care being given to nerfing leveling in the fastest leveling bracket. It seems clear that altering the scaling formula to make the seals make sense when they're all available is far more important than preserving leveling speed until you get SoC.

As for stacking of WF and Swift Retribution, it seems like it should be trivial to test for any ret paladin and shaman in the beta. Drop WF, check weapon speed. Turn on Ret Aura, check weapon speed. Try it the reverse way, find out if it stacks. I was under the impression that this was already done, and it was determined that they do not stack. Was I wrong?

to sokie, re: HoW. It WILL be just that boost, assuming mana efficiency. If the scaling stays as it is, you absolutely should be using HoW at every cooldown, regardless of the rest of your cycle. As for the duration of the boost, there's no way to tell until they fix JotW and we get some testing at level 80 in a raid buffed situation.

 

levk

Does divine plea work with spiritual focus + conc aura? Can it be pummeled?

EDIT:

Thanks for the quick replies; the last time I actually read spiritual focus tooltip it used to say "Holy Spells"

 

Rasputin

Spiritual Focus specifies HL and FoL so it would not work with that, but Conc Aura is generic pushback resistance, so it would work with that. I would assume it could be pummeled just like any other spell cast or channel.

 

◊ Oggie

Can be pummeled, can be pushed back, gives mana back on the 3's (3 second, 6 second). Does not function with spiritual focus.

 

Smurrf

Remember that Blizz has to balance for all playstyles, not just endgame. There's a very popular Lvl 19 twink bracket for BG's, that also needs to be considered (as well as 29's, 39's, etc.) There's also balancing for endgame BG PvP, as well as Arenas, 5/10/20 mans, as well as soloing. It's a lot, really, when you consider it.

 

Rasputin

As far as I am aware, Blizzard has never explicitly supported twinks, and has often done things that enrage twink players(enchant level restrictions, changing the engy helms to level 62, etc). I honestly do not believe that they do(or if they do, that they should) balance around a twink playstyle.

That said, leveling does of course need to be balanced. However, it is far easier to shoehorn in a leveling fix for low levels than to maintain a single formula that imbalances the seals such that only a single one of them is ANY use. Give the first three ranks a chunk of base damage and reduce the coefficient on them such that paladins do the damage that the developers intend for leveling, rebalance SoR for higher levels, and the problem is solved. There's no need to stick to a single formula that murders balance at 70+ just to maintain leveling speed at below 20.

 

Milou

Maybe I'm completely missing something here, but why even have AP scaling on SoR on top of it's SP scaling? To me it's a pure spell seal for holy and prot. Prot will have good SP from stamina, if threat is an issue applying a threat multiplier to it similar to heroic strike would be far more logical than adding another scaling component which in the end favours Retribution far more than Holy or Protection.

Will end-game tanking plate really have much strength on it? I keep seeing people claim this as gospel but look at TBC, 60-70 and starting Kara yes, tanking plate had strength on it but it really starts to dwindle after that.

 

• frmorrison

End-game plate will have tons of strength on it, since 3 classes are supposed to desire it and it provides threat and mitigation to all three. SoR needs to scale with strength to make this dream of all three wanting the same gear reality.


Kara tank gear started with strength since they devs didn't know what would work best, then slowly refined it as time went by.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Friesia

Judgements of the Wise

Okay, so I've done some testing on how this talent assigns the mana, and I can reliably inform you of the following facts:

• It's broken

That is all.

I've tried every single combination of group size (2/3/4/5), mana users, raid or party, and on every occasion I got the entirety of the mana return. So, in its current form, JotW is bugged, and we will need to wait for a fix before we can get some more information about this.

As for base mana values, I shall try to provide some, but currently the beta realm is down.

 

Milou

By that argument all Sunwell DPS plate would be loaded with Strength/ArP/Crit and a wee bit of hit and no haste. That would make it useful for Arms/Fury and SoB/Soc Ret. Instead it's all Strength/Haste/Crit with no hit which heavily favours SoB Ret.

Maybe Blizzard wants prot warriors/paladins to do dps equal to a cat druid in tanking gear? Switching weapons to help dps but not all of their gear (because it's swapped mid-combat). I don't really know, what I do know is that SoR scaling with AP and SP heavily favours ret who has a tonne of AP and AP->SP conversion. Someone mentioned only allowing SoR on 1-handed weapons, maybe that's a fix.

Actually a fix that may be acceptable is for SoR damage to scale solely with SP but add a bonus threat component that scales with AP? That would stop ret from using it, not be detrimental to holy, and be a solid threat boost for prot in line with the other plate tanking classes.

 

Mode

I wouldn't say they 'support' twinking, but blizzard has acknowledged it as a valid play style and takes steps to ensure twinking is relatively 'fair'. A blue once commented that they contemplated twink tournaments, they just didn't know how they should be rewarded. They're clearly keeping twinking in mind during WOTLK's design. Did you notice that the new LW leg patches specify that you can only use them on items in your inventory, the pants become BOP when you use the patch, and you must be level 70 to use the patches? That means the new leg patches will not affect the existing twink brackets at all.

 

Rasputin

Which is precisely what leads me to believe that twinking as a playstyle comes very near the bottom of their priorities. The entire concept of twinking revolves around acquiring gear and enhancements which would not be "naturally" available to a character of that level. Level restrictions on gear hurt twinking, they don't help it. I'm sure 19 twinks would love to get their hands on the newest enchants, leg armors, and even items. The fact that there are level restrictions on items is completely opposed to twinking. An ideal twink would be able to quip Sunwell gear at level 19 by getting brought into a kill and picking it up. Same goes for all other enhancements and gear.

 

◊ Cathela

Not that it matters, but I don't believe that's ever been the case. I've been playing a paladin since release and I don't ever remember SF affecting Holy Wrath, for example.

Right, because they didn't fully consider the effects of haste on non-horde Ret paladins when they made the gear. The fact that it works for SoB Ret is because they wanted it to work for warriors and paladins; the fact that it fails to work for SoC Ret is because they didn't think it all the way through. (It also works poorly for Arms warriors, since haste screws up Slam rotations.)

They've said in the past that they want to make gear usable by multiple different classes/specs as much as possible. Now I'm not aware that anyone from Blizzard has officially said that they specifically are trying to homogenize tanking plate, but all the available evidence (DK tanking mechanics, new talents and changes for prot Paladins/Warriors, tanking gear found in the beta so far, the new 2:1 scaling of strength to block value) sure does point to it.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Smurrf

Which exists solely as a mechanism to keep twinking from being too absurd. There's a natural progression in gear accumulation in just about any game; some games require a certain amount of X stat to use (Diablo, for instance), some simply make you spend a certain amount of gold, which implies a certain amount of game play, some require you to upgrade existing gear only.

This game has many different ways to accomplish the task, and one way to set limitations on how godly a character can be is limiting gear. They've done this by requiring certain levels to equip better gear (as well as limiting the number of talents you can use per level). Now, there's ways to BOOST that gear through other ways; armor patches, enchants, and the like, but they had to cut new TBC stuff off from the lower levels because in most cases, it's just too extreme. See the enchants that require items to be level 35, the patches that require 60, and I'm sure the new stuff will continue the trend. It actually supports twinking, in that it caps what a player should reasonably have to do in order to compete on an even footing. Basically, it ensures that players have a limited pool of options to choose from, and after a player has min/maxed their character for the level, they can be secure in the knowledge that success after that will come from skill, not from gear (which, if I understand correctly, is part of the whole reason for twink brackets to begin with.)

Blizzard may never have come right out and said 'we support twink bg's', but rest assured, it's not something that they refuse to take into consideration, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

 

◊ Cathela

If so, I'd appreciate a link to the testing report so I can include this in the OP.

If the test hasn't been done, then to be absolutely sure you should also have a third person in the group just to be sure the "self-haste buff" exemption doesn't apply to the shaman and the paladin.

Wait, so does this mean that damage doesn't just immediately kill the spell? (I thought any damage to an evocating mage would end the evocation, for example).

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

levk

I don't think it ever did affect anything else, but I vividly remember the tooltip said holy spells. I can't find anything to prove myself though, not in any patchnotes.

 

Fqubed

Basically twink BG brackets are as close to arena in the sense that if you do it "right" the opposing side will not have a significant gear advantage.

Anyway big derail on this.

Is it testable on hammer of wrath? Or are any channeling items that use holy to test it?

 

Altirias

It was definitely without Seals of the pure witch make the difference even worse.

Like Avitus said, we don't know if our global dps output is rightly tuned until we can compare it to other classes. The answer to that question will tell if SoR needs to be nerfed, or if SoB / SoC need to be boosted.

I liked the idea of a soR usable only with a one hander, but the problem I saw was that all paladins start the game with a two-hander.
Too bad ! You have a spell, but you'll just melee until you get some sort of one hand weapon to use (and your damange will be of course really crappy until you reach 20 and spec ret)

So this leaves :
- tuning down the coefficients of SoR and add a threat multiplier (Holy pals have vengence / corruption for dps after all)
- boosting the ret seals

I sometimes get tired to wait for a SoC proc. Maybe this seal could use a higher PPM ?
As for SoB, I dunno, maybe lift up the numbers a bit or make it crit more often by some abscure mechanics I'm not thinking of right now.

Or maybe Righteous vengence could be a flat % damage increase to the ret seals ? this would provide the same dps output than the current talent (even higher wouldn't hurt), but It would encourage ret pals to use their seals

 

GSH

Yes, yes it is. New players are always more important than experienced players. The experienced players can adapt, the new players will quit. Games that do not realize this end up dying.

And it's not just level 1-20, it's 1-64 for non-Ret player. There are many new players who won't immediately spec Command. Making their initial experience more unpleasant is a very bad idea.

There used to be a constant base damage component for each rank of SoR. This constant component no longer exists, it was replaced by the AP scaling. So if you remove the AP scaling, SoR will pretty much do zero damage until you start picking up spell damage gear in Outlands.

 

DdarkDdemon

A channeling spell will get pushed back, just like a normal spell, only reversed, the time left on the spell wil be reduced.

 

Argavaine

I have no problem with using SoR as our main pve dps seal, which can be good for every spec. Out talented SoC is still good for pvp because of the burst damage and stuned bonus. SoR is as good as SoB/SoM without the random and dangerous drawback. This drawback does not make the seals fun and if our manareg would be fixed in WotLK with JoTW/JoW there would be no need to abuse it. If anything they should do is to change/buff SoB/SoM and dont change/nerf SoR to 1 hand or crappy scaling.

 

• frmorrison

Note many of the spell damage plate was removed from quest rewards, and totally removed from Instances (except Prot Pally gear). The numbers of spell power quest reward gear is 38 vs 82 plate quest rewards with 0 spell damage. So SoR needs an attack power component.

A solution to SoR scaling is to add a higher threat component to the cast. Someone posted SoR made 120 threat each cast, just bump that up.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

mrbreck

This sounds crazy, but with the new Strength to Block Value conversion ratio and the Shield of Righteousness spell, it would be interesting to see the difference in Ret DPS for 2H vs 1H+Shield. That spell would easily hit for over 1k for a level 70 Ret with a 1H+Shield.

 

Qalor

But it has a high threat output, which means only an undergeared ret could even use it in that manner.

 

mrbreck

Ah, didn't think about that. Although, it may be useful in solo or small team situations. I imagine you may also see it used in PvP with a weapon switching macro.