Not sure if this has been mentioned before, but what do you guys think of a 43/0/28 holy PvE spec?

WorldofWarcraft.com -> Info -> Classes -> Paladin -> Talent Calculator

This spec stops at divine illumination and 1/2 enlightened judgement, while picking up blessing of the wise from retribution. The idea would be to judge whenever you can spare a GCD to return mana to the raid. The benefit from the spec is that apart from being a solid healer, it would bring top-notch raid utility, covering everything that a retribution paladin would bring execpt for 3% haste and healing from divine storm. If such a spec is viable, this would eliminate the need for a retribution paladin in the expansion.

I apologize in advance if I screwed up on some talents as my paladin alt is prot not holy, but the idea is for 3/3 Judgement of the Wise, and optimize the rest of the talent points.

With Alliance getting Seal of Blood why all this talk about Seal of Command? Does SoC replace SoB in WotLK as the main DPS seal for PVE ret paladins?

Prot abilities still need to scale with spell damage because of the ignored spec of Pally, namely the Shockadin (which is also represented by the Holy Pally trying to do some damage).

While the Shockadin isn't popular, but the play style can't b removed since some people love it and Healers need to be able to dps too.

Adding both attack power and spell damage to every Paladin ability was genius.

Just to lay out the full argument, you can break SoC-Ret damage up into a few categories:

1) Autoattack damage.
2) SoC procs from autoattacks.
3) Judgement damage.
4) Direct damage from CS and DS.
5) SoC procs from CS and DS.

At present, 1% haste increases (1) by 1%, has no effect at all on (2), (3), and (4), and for the sake of argument we'll assume it decreases (5) by 1%.

So what matters is how (1) compares to (5), and my contention is that (1) is always going to be substantially larger than (5).

Well, we wouldn't want to get in the way of your fun, of course.

But if you determine that it's possible to proc multiple SoC's from one DS, you still might want to try a Reckoning+SoC build and see if it's possible to get two simultaneous SoC procs from a Reck'd swing.

Why would you want to eliminate the need for a Ret paladin? Most of all, why would you sacrifice your time in a raid to focus on Judging for mana return, when you should be concentrating on healing the tank. As a Holy paladin in a raid, your job is going to be healing the tank, and that's it. Unless the game changes completely, you won't have time to worry about judging.

Ret paladins bring more than just Judgments of the Wise, I don't understand why you'd want to reduce yourself to being a sub-par healer just to remove one from the raid.

It's an interesting idea. There's a whole bunch of options for Holy/Ret. Dropping DI for Repentance might even become the popular choice for heroics.

Given that a blue said they are redesigning BoL to be useful in the next beta push I wouldn't go making asumptions about holy specs quite yet.

There is a chance this is tracked on a per-mob basis just like the new JoW (much less of a chance, since it's a self buff vs. a debuff, but you can't rule it out without testing), so I don't think you can see 2 procs on a DS and 100% say there is no internal cooldown for a single mob.

A spec close to that is what I'm looking at for the moment (drop benediction for PoJ, full enlightened judgment and a couple of points here and there. Full enlightened judgment is important for hit even if range isn't an issue.) I think your spec as a healer will depend closely on what the other paladin in your raid is. If he's a prot, yeah this is a good spec, if he's ret there's overlap - although doable since the ret should have kings at least. If you spec a more classical 51/20/0 and your other paladin is ret than all is well, if he's prot there's a lot of overlap and you really should be a sheath build.

EDIT:

The biggest return happens when you don't have a ret paladin. Nobody is saying ret is stupid, simply put there are people that don't want to play ret and it's nice that the system allows for a situation like that by not forcing a playstyle to reap the benefits.

It might be easier to do this with Hammer of the Righteous and 3 mobs in the current build. Hammer of the Righteous currently does not start the auto-swing. So if you HotR and get 2 procs, then we know there's no cooldown. However, the chance of getting 2 or 3 procs, even without a cooldown, is probably pretty low.

Why that ability isn't baseline now, with all the stupid amount of CC in this game is completlye lost on me. Even if it was, we'd eek out what.. 7th or 8th in the CC race? No change.

It would also open up the tree to a defining ability, in the vein of shadowform or swiftmend. Repentance, a pvp talent, just never did it for me.

The thing is, as the talents stands, stopping at 43 imo does not make a severely gimped holy pally. Unless the new content requires a lot of haste, skipping 10% spell haste is a worthy trade-off to gain all ret utility except for 3% haste and divine storm healing. Obviously you won't be able to judge on every single CD like a ret, but I'd imagine you can quite often.

Its sort of like an opposite of a shadowpriest, subpar dps but high utility (in this case, subpar heal, high utility).

Of course, it all depends on what the dev's do with beacon of light. But even if that turns out to be strong, it may still be beneficial to bring a 43/0/28 pally in, much like it is to bring in an IDS priest.

Ret needs Repentance more than paladins in general need it. There's a very strong prejudice in heroic group composition towards dps classes that can also CC. While many people take this further than they should, it's still true that all other things being roughly equal, a dps class that can CC is going to be more use in a heroic than a dps class that can't. Healers and tanks generally aren't expected to provide CC to justify their slot. With the PvE duration change to Repentance, Ret will have a much easier time getting into heroics. (I bitched and moaned for a long time when they moved Repentance from 31-Prot to 31-Ret, but I have to admit it's worked out pretty well in the long run.)

Anyone know, how exactly the power of each tallent determined?
I mean, if tallent provides something very similar for different classes, can we expect these tallents to be placed in same tear, so assumption that atleast some tallents may have it power converted to numbers may appear real? Because i'm a bit confused with all this "Decreases the chance you will be hit by spells, reduces all damage taken, etc" bonuses in retribution tree to almost every pvp tallent. I love pvp, but i dont know how to take in account that some tallent reduces incomming damage by 3%. It looks like completely useless thing for me, and i wonder if it possible we see some real bonuses, more specific and reliable, like snare resistance on Pursuit of Justice instead of spell resistance, or even merging of PoJ and Divine Purpose tallent. Same with Art of War, if they are turning it into utility tallent, why dont they add something like Cleanse/heal manacost decrease instead of flat damage reduction?

Now to just get them to unlink it from Fanaticism...

All paladin specs could use repent, but it's absolutely critical for ret in PvP. Ret uses it to fulfill multiple abilities it doesn't have.

PvE wise, lets just say that turn undead is generally unusable as CC, and I don't see why repent shouldn't be baseline. Ret should get an improved repent.

Turn Evil (assuming the mob is of the two types) and other Fears are usable as CC, you just have to plan around it. Which means pulling the pack far, far away from other mobs.

While having Repent as a CC for all Paladins would be great, it will not happen .

I said generally.

As in, if you need CC to mitigate damage per trash pack pull, turn undead doesn't cut it. 5-mans this is a fairly unwavering requirement of a geared-to-the-level group where things are spaced tightly. The need to have a long clear area for the feared mob to run in also slows things down or make it impractical to use. More than a handful of times used on the Moroes fight in kara, it resets the encounter, since it's just not quite an ideal situation.

First, because the connection makes no logical sense in the way redoubt and shield spec do, or holy shock and infusion of light do. Second, because in a perfect world, I would be able to skip that in the same way I skip SoComm now for a pure raid build. It's not as big a problem because as I've mentioned elsewhere, ret is awash in extra points to spend, but if the build does ever tighten up, not having to spend a point for a heroic 5 man talent in order to make my raid build better would be nice. For instance if they were unlinked now, I could cap out imp BoM and Benediction in my raid spec, whereas that point now must be used for Repentance.

In any case the comment was largely tongue in cheek and I don't think they will unlink it. But they should.

This is perhaps a basic question reflecting a lack of knowledge of how PPM works, but how does Divine Storm interact with Seal of Command procs per minute? Since procs are being "used" on your non-main target, it seems this could result in a dps loss on your primary target over another seal with guaranteed damage on hit. In fact, you would expect less damage overall since your procs are being spread thin on multiple targets while other seals don't suffer from the same proc distribution problem when hitting multiple targets.

The Proc Per Minute term is somewhat misleading actually. PPM effects basically work by giving a chance on your character's auto-attacks that means you will, on average, get the amount of Procs you'd expect in a minute. Instant attacks just use this calculated chance.

Seal of Command is a 7 PPM ability. This means that with a 3.6 speed auto-attack it has a 42% chance to proc. Instant attacks also make use of this proc chance, despite the fact that it'll take the actual procs you're likely to get in one minute over 7. The fact that the chance is calculated from auto-attack speed is also what the conversation earlier in this thread was referring to.

My understanding is that the PPM is calculated on-the-fly based on auto-attack speed, then converted to a percentage chance on hit. An additional condition is added in the form of a one second cooldown per proc, so you can't proc multiple SoC attacks off say, Windfury for insta-gib QQ.