Chrix

Would judgements really need to be included in dps cycles? since they are seperate from Gcd and do not make you lose your seal.

 

bellator

Judgements now trigger GCD

 

flyingtoastr

Ok. Now take your argument ("useless in 5-mans") and apply it to almost every other "utility" spell. How useful is Stormstrike in a group without an elemental shaman? Is VT worth casting when everyone in your group uses rage/energy? Leader of the Pack sure does help in a 5-man of all casters.

CS's utility is balenced around a 25-man raid and it works wonderfully there. Even with Holy Pallys judging there is still time when they don't want to be (if a holy pally judges at t=0 the judgement will drop at t=20 but he won't want to rejudge until t=30 when JotP runs out) where CS will keep it up.

And regardless of position, CS is the single highest instant-weapon attack that scales amazingly well. Even if it loses all it's utility is is still our primary nuke, perfect for a 41-point talent.

 

Kigale

I agree with both sides on the CS usefulness discussion. The instant damage is nice, but CS has lost some of it's utility. With JotC removed CS isn't needed to keep JoW up, the Ret can judge it. Unless JoL becomes required in 25 mans I can't see the utility of CS being used much at all.

 

Tharia

JoL will heal a lot. Just like shadowpriests are pretty huge healers on fights like M'uru or Brutallus, the new scaling JoL will of course be on every boss with raid dmg (= nearly every boss) if there's a second paladin.

 

Fiola

The utility of CS was always secondary to the damage. Take away the utility effect, and Ret paladins would still use CS because it's an integral part of our DPS output. Take away the damage, and you won't care about the utility because the Ret paladin wouldn't be worth a DPS slot.


Sure, the utility of CS is *going* to be less in the future... on paper. (We won't know how much less until we start raiding) Well, overall utility AND damage got buffed: Judgement effects scale, JotC got dropped and the 3% crit rolled into every debuff judgement, we give mana/health return to our group (/cough VE/VT), and we got an extra AE weapon strike (Holy whirlwind, heh).


So if anyone think the CS utility "nerf" needs some compensating buffs... We already got them.

 

Ellerain

Not exactly convinced. Stormstrike debuff is useful, in minor way, to shaman himself. LotP? To druid itself again, in a strong way. VT is worth casting, I suppose, as it returns mana to shadowpriest himself, and I've yet seen a group without a mana-bearing healer in it. That is 5-man content, some utility debuffs do not provide a major 'Oomph', but Crusader strike is absolutely useless, unless you really do have a paladin healer and he places that debuff on mob, which happens a lot rarer than one might think. That is the whole issue with that utility - it depends on having another person of your class, and of specific spec at that with you. Solo/Smallgroup/5-men - out. 10-men - most probably out. 25 men, with all '2 person of the class' thing going on - 50% out just by group composition.

So when I look at it, I see this: it provides a convinience to a hypothetical holy paladin to judge (is it off or on gcd now, by the way?) 10 seconds later than he would've. And if you have 3 paladins, it's useless again. CS utility may be balanced OK in 25-man raids right now, not in Wrath; not to mention the all-more important 10-man. This is a 41-point utility. Sorry, I'm not seing it.

And yes, Tharia-san is right on JoL potentially being powerful, but hardly ever boss fight requires that kind of melee raid-healing, and going by discussion on Bacon of Light earlier, it may not be that useful on fights that are. Look at it with my eyes again - in the miniscule amount of possible setups, at small part of possible content size, on not every boss fight there is, it provides a questionable utility of convinience. To another person.

Now, about the scaling. Yes, it is there. Cannot be disputed. But the utility it once had should be replaced by either another utility or more damage. Extra 10% of your weapon damage begins to outscale MS Rank 6 (+210) when your weapon damage is 2100 or more. Since I'm not Ret by raiding, can you enlighten me on what level of gear it usually happens?
(and yes, I do realize that MS and CS are not exactly best comparison material, so apologizing for that).

Oh, I do not argue that Ret is going to get short end of the stick or something to that effect; the buffs are amazing and I look forward to playing my paladin. I'm far from whining about our collective DPS future. It just never escapes my mind that somewhere out in Blizzard calculations there is a accounting sheet, where CS is marked as "DPS and PvE Utility attack" and in calculating Ret Paladin / CS DPS output this 'PvE Utiliy' part is taken into the account, whereas this utility is little more than a night breeze. And I would also like for my 41-pointer Strike to do something useful and interesting.

Chaos, panic and disorder - my job here is done!

 

Vasala

One good thought which I saw in the thread would be for CS to set all the judgements on the mob to the level that the ret paladin would provide. If further judgements by the prot or holy paladin would not reset it to the lower value this would be a nice boost to the utility of CS. Or I suppose after the initial judgement the holy and prot paladins could switch to just judging justice and leave the light / wisdom maintenance to the ret paladin's CS.

 

Holtzhammer

It wouldnt eliminate the need for Ret in the expansion--our JotW wouldnt return nearly 1/3 of the the mana that an *actual* ret-spec'ed pally would be returning with regular 6 -8k Judgement crits. a Holy spec'd pally with a reasonable amount of spell damage and ap, with the improved talent will be giving a decent amount back ( and to 3 people I might add) but the healing from DS will be healing us, thus giving us even more mana--in the event of raidwide damage. I think raids will be better that a main healing spec can provide such a nice amount of mana back to the raid while being fun and innovative at the same time.



It seems like a solid spec, but I've been trying to get some dialogue rolling on adding a healing component to Vengeance. Something that just works for Pvp and Pve for both Ret and Holy. Tweak the percentages if your like if some feel that +15% extra healing, with 3 stacks for 30s is too much. I'm just looking for a reason to get out from behind the priests and back on the front line for Holy.


Christ, Ive been advocating this forever. It makes no sense why they are linked, considering people who do 1. Pvp usually DONT get fanat, but do get repent, and the exact opposite for those of us who raid exclusively and dont pvp/instance outside of raids much. The part that hurts the most is that they added a completely Pve aspect to fanat, but still require its pvp counterpart. I think this linking could be looked at if and when they reconsolidate Ret.

 

• frmorrison

Adding healing to Vengeance would be overpowering, especially when crit and haste apply to both healing and melee. Sadly, with all the anti-melee abilities in raids and the range talent for judgements, getting in melee range is not worth the cost for a Healer.

PvP players do not get Fanaticism today because it adds little damage for a high cost (judgements don't hit too for much now), and there are better things. With JotW, I think some PvP players will put some points into it.

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

 

Tresjynn

If a ret judges Wisdom, and a prot judges Light, then does anyone really care whether or not the Justice from a holy falls off of the boss for 10 seconds at a time?

Ok, there's the situation of ret/holy or ret/holy/holy, but the critical one's usually JoW, and there seems to be sufficient reason for the ret to put that one up themselves. The other ones, JoL perhaps, if there's scheduled to be a lot of raid damage in a given fight (not present in all fights), but JoJ? Unless there's a new Judgement spell added at level 80 or something, there's basically one, or at most (depending on situation), two judgements that need their uptime refreshed as a matter of convenience.

 

Anedris

Did I miss a change to Justice that would not simply a waste of a debuff slot on a boss?

Not every ability has to be amazing. CS can drop back to simply being a piece of the DPS rotation and it'll be fine. Ret utility comes in the form of a far more powerful JoW, mana return through JotW, and some melee healing through DS (which may or may not end up being at all significant).

 

flyingtoastr

I'll repeat myself once again since you can't seem to read my whole post.

CS does a ton of damage.

Everyone is still stuck in this mindset of "ret is here for utility". Look at the new talents. Ret isn't about heavy utility anymore, it's about decent utility with very good DPS. No matter how "useless" CS's utility is it is still the single hardest hitting Strike attack in the game (110% weapon damage is much better than 70-100% + x like every other strike) and does provide somewhat useful utility. That's it; for them to give CS more utility we're going to take a hit in the damage department, and frankly I'm happier with it as is.

It also might be worth having that Holy pally in your situation judging Light instead of the prot pally depending on who has a better scaling Judgement, which would incidentally make your whole post moot.

Cheers.

Judgement is both on the GCD and costs a fair bit of mana so rest assured your Holy pallys will be casting it as rarely as possible. CS also allows for periods of heavy damage when the Holy Pally can't be wasting time Judging to still have that active Judgement.

But hell, right now CS is just "convenience". My guild doesn't even use a ret pally for Brut most weeks anymore, we just have a holy pally rejudging every 20 seconds. Is it more convenient to have that ret pally keeping it up? Sure, but it isn't required right now. How can you argue that it will be different in the future?

 

Tresjynn

I was simply saying that the utility that IS there has been made more or less obsolete (Ret/Prot already had reason to maintain their own judgements, now Holy does too), so they could look into a more up-to-date edition of it. Maybe replace the refresh with a bit more damage instead. Maybe give it the Scarlet Crusade edition of Crusader Strike's debuff effect. Either of those and we'd not really miss the refresh effect.

 

• frmorrison

If a Holy Pally judges it, he gets 10% haste for 30 seconds. If a Prot Pally judges it, the boss attacks 20% slower.

Even ignoring the fair damage it does, it is worth 1 slot.

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

 

Rustik

Any of the judgements will give the prot and holy pally the intended effect, but if you already have a light and wisdom on the target from pallies with more ap/SP, then justice will bring the desired effect without overwriting a more powerful judgement (assuming they even overwrite in that way).

 

flyingtoastr

I think he meant Judgement of Justice. That brings up a good point, if you have 3 or more pallys in a group will some of them be stuck "wasting" a debuff slot on Justice?

Take this example. You have 3 pallys, one ret and two holy. The ret pally obviously puts up Wisdom. That leaves one of the holy pallys to do Light. Now for the third Holy pally. Pretending he has less AP and SP than the first one would he get a "more powerful spell" message and the inability to judge Light (thus forcing him to "waste" a spot on Justice)? Would his weaker light simply refresh the stronger pally's Light timer? Would it replace the strong JoL with the weaker one?

 

Rustik

Sounds like we have something else for Bellator to test for us. :P

Until we figure that out it's nothing but questions.

 

Kigale

With the addition of Death Knights (a debuffing class) and many new debuffs being created, I assumed the debuff limit would be increased. Is this not the case?

 

Pyros

It's not currently, they're reworking diseases a bit on DK so there's less diseases up, but honestly it'll be a pain to have an unholy DK or an aff lock waste 5-6slots alone. They really should raise it, even by only 12 or something. You'll run into debuffs falling in wotlk most likely with the current number.

 

DonGuapo

I was under the impression that certain debuffs no longer stack and they were trying to have certain specs share debuff "types" like the new improved scorch talent mimicking curse of elements.

 

Prinsesa

If you're pure PvE, you'll want to get Fanat because it's a threat reduction. Right now, it's not so hot for the damage because our Judgement damage sucks, but +25% crits on Judges that'll be doing 1k-2k damage non-crit is going to be a lot.

The fact that it's linked to Repentance is bad now because Repentance is almost useless in PvE, but it's going to be a major part of our 5-man slot justification once it becomes a CC.

If you're pure PvP, you'll usually skip Fanaticism because again, our Judgements do crap damage and you need the points in Prot instead. You'll take Repentance because it's another short CC for PvP.

Once Wrath hits, Fanaticism is going to be a great talent for PvP, because it's going to be one of our key sources of controlled burst.

TL;DR: The fact that Repentance and Fanaticism are linked now is bad within current context, but since both PvE and PvP specs will want to get them both in Wrath, the fact that they're still linked then is much less relevant.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Amera

The only change I'd recommend to CS is a type of side-effect that is only useful in PvP. Right now there is a lot of crowding for melee spots - War, Rog, DK, Enh, Feral, and Ret. Since the first three in that last can't do anything else, they generally have to stand on their own, whereas the healing hybrids have at least one alternative option. Regardless, Blizzard has mentioned several times that they envision enhancement as the shaman spec for small scale battles, and the placement of PvP talents in the Ret tree (like the new Art of War) suggest a similar thinking.

So what you are left with is 3 support melee specs who need to bring enough useful things to the table to have a spot in the metagame. Right now as it stands, I'm not sure Ret has enough to stand on its own against those other hybrid melee specs, especially with the nerf to BoSac (long cooldown is going to make us just as CCable as a warrior). If that ends up being the case, an interesting option that has been tossed around a fair amount is a "spellbreaker" effect on CS. I'm imagining something that lowers the spell power/damage of whatever target it is applied to by x%. It would only functionally be an MS effect if it was placed on healers who were healing themselves, but not on anyone else. And it would thematically fit the class and its defensive/protective scheme, and would seem easy enough to make bosses immune to.

For PvE, I can't really understand the utility complaints. It may not be universally useful, but in the context where it is (25 man raids), it's fine. At this point we are balanced more around JotW and Ret aura than anything else.

 

Arthaal

I've been mulling over various PvP specs (which require at least 18 points into Protection for reduced HoJ cooldown) and being limited to 53 points in Retribution I end up having to chose between fanaticism and righteous vengeance. At present, I've always considered Fanaticism to be a pure PvE talent, however the increased damage from Judgements certainly make an extra 25% chance to crit a lot more attractive in a PvP setting (nice controlled burst). Additionally:

Say a judgement hits for 3k and crits for 200% damage and we have 30% melee crit, then we have:

0/5 Fanaticism, 5/5 Righteous Vengeance: (3000 * 0.7) + (3000 * 2.25 * 0.3) = 4125 avg. damage

5/5 Fanaticism, 0/5 Righteous Vengeance: (3000 * 0.45) + (3000 * 2 * 0.55) = 4650 avg. damage

Granted, this ignores the effects of Righteous Vengeance on Divine Storm, but I honestly don't know if that would make up for losing an on demand greater than 50% chance 6k hit.

 

Drops

At the rate judgments are going up in power, they should make HoW a long range judgment. :P