Man, nice work. I don't have time right now to look through your numbers, but I fully intend to examine them thoroughly later on.



In other news, I got into the beta so I'm going to try to do a few tests to supplement bellator and Coriel's work and maybe give them some relief.

First impressions playing as Ret in Howling Fjord:

Either Ret is really powerful for soloing, or this zone is tuned to be extremely easy. I'm wearing a cobbled-together Ret outfit that's half raid-surplus epics and half total crap (and by total crap I mean such un-Ret items as spelldamage rings/trinket, tanking boots and chest, etc) and I'm chewing through mobs in 10 seconds or less. Frequently just an opening autoattack+JoC+CS+DS is enough to drop a mob to 20% or less. Basically what everyone said earlier about insane mana/health regen is true.

Also, re-sealing after a judgement is a really hard habit to unlearn.

This thread is a little mixed up with posts about all three specs, but because of the massive changes (when compared to other classes) each Paladin change can change all three specs, so it is best to be all in one thread.

Why get 10% haste? Because haste is a powerful stat, and encourages Holy Paladins to do something different (dps) and helps with soloing (assuming the 2 spec idea has limitations).


Really the answer to most of these issues is "Wait and See", since tooltips did not always work out how they are in practice and changes are the only thing you can count on in this stage of Beta.

I think Blizzard is trying to make that tier have both PvP and PvE viability. Compare with the Ret talent at the same level. Haste off judging might be pretty useful in PvP. (Though what I would *love* to see for PvE is a talent that reduced the cast time of FoL to instant for 30s after judging.)

As for the AoE heal, we need it for 5 and 10-mans, where we don't have the other classes to back us up.

I was thinking about that. I decided when the patch hits, I'm going to move my toolbar around on purpose so seals aren't anywhere near the 1-5 keys. :P

The first zones were tuned for a green geared level 68 player, so even with half raid gear you really out gear the zone.

Regarding the resealing, a simple /cast reset=120 Seal of Command macro should do the trick.

That was one of the first things I noticed as well.

I'm specced prot, and haven't had a ton of time to play around on the beta server yet - apparently my original WoW copy was corrupt, which led to 3 downloads of the 2gb beta installation and a separate download of the original game before I finally got it working.

At 70, prot seems sorta slow to level. It's great against multiple mobs( not surprisingly ), but not particularly fast one-on-one and not particularly mana-efficient either. I was sorta more interested in exploring and looking around though, so will update my thoughts once I have had more of a chance to play around with it.

One note, the mount and pet bag space reduction is awesome for paladins.

Care to elaborate? I'd love to think that the strength scaling in prot allows for fairly fun and efficient leveling in a nice tanking build, in case they do not allow two-specs with easy switching until 80 (or not at all).

As much fun as Divine Storm appears to be, I am not seeing a light at the end of the tunnel in terms of my being stuck as the guild tankadin in the expansion like I have been in TBC.

More specifically...how often are you drinking and how fast are mobs going down. I'll walk into Wrath with a solid retribution set from all of the surplus raid epics and PVP, so pumping up my strength, AP, etc, shouldn't be an issue.

You mean stay prot specced with a 1-hand and board, but the rest Ret gear?

Uhhh... haste being the single best stat in the game for a Holy Paladin kinda makes you want more...

So I went ahead and built a crude Protection TPS spreadsheet today, and blagged about it a little. As I suspected, our threat is absolutely off the charts when raid buffs are in play. However, I am a little bit concerned that the sheet itself might be flawed, since I'm generally not all that strong with Excel. If some folks could go over it for me I'd greatly appreciate it.

People who don't like haste talent fail to realise one simple thing. According to all the changes that we see now healers are FORCED to heal REACTIVELY. Unless we miss something important, no class (save druids) would be chaincasting. And I don't think that anyone who ever healed seriously would doubt that haste is the MOST important stat for effective reactive healing. Plus it has a nice side effect of buffing our effectiveness between heals, be it DPS, throwing hands, plea, etc. Perfect talent tbh, couldn't wish more (always wanted more synergy between our spells).

I found that drinking as Protection in Retribution gear wasn't really a huge deal anyways thanks to both a tiny mana pool, and a lovely cup of Pungent Seal Whey or Honeymint Tea (depending on your level). With a pathetic 5k mana pool you'll drink to full in about 10 seconds if you have Blessing of Wisdom up.

I have to imagine that blowing up Demon Hunter Supplicants by the truckload is a reasonably effective way to get through a level or two, as well. Any comment on that versus questing?

Actually testing out retribution specc for the first time in beta myself I have strong doubts that Blizzard will leave paladins as godlike as they are now. The heavy returns in dmg/health and/or mana through divine storm are just ridiculous... (e.g. I got death gripped by a lvl 75 DK into some 5-6ish guards and total destroyed him without bubble because of upped Seal of Light and Divine Storm healing me for half my life pool on top of dealing truckloads of dmg)

I like the changes very very much don´t get me wrong, but the coefficients need a complete overhaul. For example: Why is spellpower even existant on paladin gear if every skill scales way better with AP than spellpower? With ShoL even furthering that issue and leaving TbtL way less powerful than it´s retri counterpart, despite being deeper into the prot tree, this all makes up for some weird class mechanics... again /sigh

Once they SoR/SoV scaling better with spellpower and SoC/SotM scaling better with AP we have a clear line for what to go for.
I also think that CS proccing upped seals could be left as a balanced mechanic, but in my eyes divine storm proccing your upped seal on 4 mobs will never make it to release, not without reduced effectiveness (e.g. 1/4 strength per target).

The XP required for levelling has increased a fair bit, like in the Original->TBC transition. I think questing in Northrend might be faster, as you get larger amounts of XP per mob and quest.

But then again, you can kill an awful lot of supplicants in a short time.

Because heals still don't have an AP coefficient. Until Blizzard changes that, they're going to have to do funky things with talents to make the entire class scale with one set of gear.

Someone who blazed through outlands in blues and greens might find the leveling more consistent in difficulty as they land in Northrend, with maybe just a token epic or two. Everyone says the damage gets reigned in a bit when they hit 77, although it is still higher than just about every other class.

That sounds very good actually, while quests give a lot more xp in northrend(like 15k-20k in first zones iirc, against 10k in outlands), the mobs don't really give much more, and questing is arguably not that efficient on pvp servers on release day. On my DK I believe it took more than that too, questing. I had shitty gear, like all DKs, but I also had bugged Death and Decay and stuff like that, so I think the ~4hours I spent per level are actually not so far from what people will experience with T5ish gear level.

The issue is, how many protadin on your server read this thread, and how many will do this. I doubt the spot can hold too many people ^^. Questing, even in crowded zones, has the benefit of always going forward at a decent pace, grinding if the spot is overcamped is straight up terrible, and frustrating.

As for entry zone difficulty, remember the early zones are lvl 68, and tuned for outlands greens, so even with normal 70 instance blues, you'll still be both outgearing and outlvling them, which makes the difficulty hard to gauge. As a DK, I found them decent. It wasn't much harder than BC stuff, and the progression felt pretty natural. Leveling has never been hard either. And I believe retadins are still overtuned currently, they do quite impressive dps even in shitty gear, much like DKs.

The problem with the supplicants is they have a fairly lengthy respawn timer of 3-5 minutes. I can clear the entire terrace in one pull (as I'm sure most of us with some prot raid gear can) but then I have to sit around waiting for it to respawn. I guess given the enormous number of mobs that get butchered in that one pull it may still be worth it though... (and obviously one can find something else to kill in the intervening time).

Hope this isn't too much of a derail, but if I'm waiting for Supplicant respawns, I just hit the ramp to the south with the Seal of Blood-casting Blood Knights. It's a little slower single they're single wielders that throw some minor heals, but I don't have to wander too far and they're just as "pullable" as the Supplicants.

Upon further reflection, I'm probably selling my Ret gear a bit short; I do have a Cataclym's Edge, and a high-dps weapon can make up for a lot of lacking gear elsewhere.

But even so, it really does feel just insanely strong. I did a similar exercise with Ret in the TBC beta using leftover dps gear from BWL and AQ40, and it was efficient, fairly fun grinding. But this is just on a completely different level.

I always fly across to the Fel Orc half of the temple. There's a long stretch on the edge there where one of the huge elites patrols back and forth, with about a dozen melee orcs lined up along his path. If you sweep them all up (you can't go too fast or some of them will de-aggro) you can kill the whole pile in a minute or two. Not as lucrative as the supplicants, but you can AoE them efficiently. Then fly back to the Aldor or Scryer post, make bandages, vendor/mail all the drops, repair, and fly back just in time to catch the Supplicant respawn.



EDIT: Oh, Heart of the Crusader takes up its own debuff slot separate from the judgement. The icon is the same as the JotC icon, but physical rather than magic (presumably to keep dispel effects from being "wasted" on it). I haven't had a chance to test Prot yet, but it wouldn't surprise me if Judgements of the Just used its own slot too. So yeah, we need more debuff slots.

It doesn't. If I had to guess, I would say that the seperate debuff for only the Retribution skill is a specific response to a frequent community complaint that the build's utility is largely transparent to an uneducated raid.