Palados

I think you could swap them (like DK their runes) to optimize your performance in different fights. It would be a logical step in differentiation between good and bad players. Point is, that top guilds players would reglyph anyway, like they respec now from fight to fight. So Bliz should balance the encounters taking into account reglyphing. And I am more than sure that they would make glyphs non one-use-only.

 

◊ Cathela

I don't know that the glyph slottability has been confirmed one way or the other yet.

I'm having a hard time seeing the use for that glyph though. It increases your opening threat on one target by a bit, but that's about it unless I'm missing something. Even if you had time to cast AS in a normal threat rotation (which you don't) you'd have to deal with the avoidance losses while casting. (Adding a silence effect, even a very short one, would be enormously helpful since it would give you a way to pull caster mobs.)

The RD glyph isn't flashy, but it's hugely useful, since you won't have to stack extra hit to cap RD above what you need to cap physical hit -- which you'll want to do anyway to maximize threat from the hammer, the shield, melee, and even AS.

The consecration glyph doesn't seem especially worthwhile to me from a tanking perspective. The only time it would help is on the initial pickup of mobs, and if you miss a few there, there are usually other ways to corral them. And an increased consecration range can be a liability around CC.

The PvP-type glyphs look neat, and the healing glyphs are seriously badass.

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

 

• frmorrison

Not sure what the reason for 8% hit on RD, since spells are supposed to be on 9% hit. I guess it is good for undergeared Paladins.

The blessing glyphs are outstanding (allowing 3 paladins in a raid), but the healing ones are the best.

The one that turns Flash of Light into HoT of Light is interesting.

Here is the best:
Glyph of Holy Light - Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 5 of the initial target.

It seems like the other guys need to be 5 yards away, but are melee that close to the tank?

Meta gems are up, here are the various healing ones:

21 Intellect and chance to regain mana
8 mp5 and 3% more critical healing
21 Critical Chance and 2% more mana
25 Spell Power and 2% more Intellect

I am leaning towards the last one, since we can get 15% more via talents and have lots of it on gear.

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

 

Tharia

LOn your average Dragon or Pit fiend they aint. but it fits with beacon of light where you want to stack as many people in one spot as possible anyway. although I think 10 yds wouldn't be totally OP for the glyph, just to match the range of BoL

//EDIT: MP5/Critheal-Meta looks REALLY nice.

 

◊ Cathela

EDIT: Thanks to Prinsea below for confirming that the spell miss rate is still 16-17%.

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

 

Prinsesa

According to the Combat Ratings at 80 thread, empirical testing by a 70 Mage attacking level 73 Northrend mobs still showed a 16-17% spell miss rate.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Smurrf

Didn't they change AS to 0.5 sec cast? If so, it could very easily fit into a threat rotation for single target tanking. The mana reductions to the spell from various talents also help it. If we had the option to reglyph out of combat, I would certainly pick it up for threat gain purposes (depending on whatever other options were available.)

Edit: If glyph swap isn't so easy as just to be an OOC thing, then no, I wouldn't touch it with someone else's 10 foot pole.

 

◊ Cathela

The language about melee hits refreshing judgements is now gone from the judgement tooltips.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

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

 

DarKNecross

Didn't they change the resist rates of taunts for Melee hit?

http://crimson-guild.com

 

◊ Cathela

MMO-Champ has the complete list of changes up. Not much here:

Holy
* Illumination (Tier 3) changed to: After getting a critical effect from your Flash of Light, Holy Light, or Holy Shock heal spell you have a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to gain mana equal to 60% of the base cost of the spell.
* Holy Guidance (Tier 8 ) increases spell power by 7/14/21/28/35% of your intellect. (Previously increased spell damage and healing)

Protection
* Divine Guardian (Tier 4) now only affects Divine Shield. (Previously affected Divine Protection as well)
* Sacred Duty (Tier 6) now affects Divine Protection as well as Divine Shield. (Previously only affected Divine Shield)
* Hammer of the Righteous (Tier 11) now causes current weapon damage as holy damage. (Previously caused 100% of weapon damage)

Retribution
* Crusader Strike (Tier 9) does not refresh judgements anymore.


Looks like judgements are entirely un-refreshable now, except by judging again. The Illumination change is a language fix (previously it just said "you gain mana equal to 60% of the base cost of the spell" for all ranks). I'm pleased with the Divine Guardian and Sacred Duty changes. I'm not sure what the HotR change means (Perhaps before it was always doing normal weapon damage even when damage-increasing buffs were up? I have no idea.)

Taunts are affected by melee hit rating, but (I believe) they start with the base miss chance for spells, which is 17% against a +3 mob).

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

 

Arthaal

So now that Crusader's Strike judgement maintaining functionality has been removed and that judgements must be maintained by the issuing paladin, holy/prot/ret are all going to be judging... at least the holy talents increasing range now make more sense I suppose (though regenning through SoW/JoW is still impossible for us at range ).

However, this leaves CS as an instant attack causing 110% weapon damage... that is all. I know it technically scales better than the comparable (though earlier in the tree) warrior talent, MS (100% + 380... parity reached at 3800AP), but it looks wholly inferior to Frost Strike (100% + 505 damage... parity reached at 5050AP). While 5k AP will probably be reachable at 80, Frost Strike is dealt as frost damage (meaning no mitigation from armor). In light of the loss of extra functionality, it seems to me it's time to switch CS to holy damage dealt. After all, sanctity aura is no longer present to cause scaling issues with this kind of mechanic.

 

Jessie

I interpreted it to be dealing holy instead of physical damage, though I could be wrong.

When we look at you we don't even see the testicles on your chin. We see the testicles in your heart.

 

• Avitus

I think I called it sometime when the beta started that the new holy paladin changes (longer range on judgement and a REASON to spam judgements) would make Ret paladins for the purpose of keeping up judgements redundant.

Guess they took it an extra step with the CS change.


Now my hope/expectation is that they'll add some secondary effect to CS (like pretty much every other instant weapon attack in the game), even if it's only PVP related, I'll take anything over nothing at all.

As a matter of fact (and I don't usually do this, but it's too obvious not to mention), the easiest and most logical fix would be to move [Heart of the Crusader] to a CS effect rather than a judgement effect and we'd be back to where we used to be (+3% crit being provided by ret only).

To consolidate remaining unique buffs to a raid from a ret:

-3% haste aura
-To an extent, Judgement of the Wise from a ret will be better/easier to spec for than from a holy, giving still to be compared mana returns at a time when every second class is getting a mana battery ability (hunters, druids).

Everything else can be mirrored by other specs, as a matter of fact, so can JotW. Hmmmm?



So far, for the glyphs for Ret I'm not impressed. Before people comment on how powerful some of them might look, remember that's how glyphs are for every class.

I'm speaking specifically of Ret PvE buffs that are completely lacking.

Ret specific glyphs:


I'm trying to keep an open mind for future additions, but as it stands now, there's 0 ret specific PvE buffs through Glyphs. Something like a buff to one of our main PvE used (read: Not SoC) attacks like it seems other classes are getting out of their glyphs.


In general what I feel is lacking for Retribution PvE is a unique reason to take it to raids and make no mistake, with a spec history such as ret, this will be needed.

Unless they're planning to give us 100% of the DPS of a fury warrior (and I do really mean 100% considering we give nothing unique that is worthwhile anymore, not 80%) to make us a valid alternative to fill a DPS spot with no strings attached, I see trouble looming.

 

ZulazeeluIcecrown

This was a rumor that has subsequently been proven incorrect. I don't have the link on hand, but it's hashed out in at least the Elemental Shaman thread if not elsewhere. Essentially, the confusion arose from the fact that spells now "miss" in the combat log instead of "resist," so when the person testing did a search for "resist" and got zero with a 9% +hit total, he assumed spells had been changed. They have not, however the 1% unremovable chance to miss is gone; spells can now hit cap for real at 17%... thus the +8% hit to Righteous Defense.

 

◊ Cathela

Well, the healing from Divine Storm could be useful for a melee group. But yes, Ret in WotLK really doesn't bring anything to the table that can't be brought by other paladin specs, albeit at a little more inconvenience.

The thing is though, that that's really not any different from the way things are in TBC right now. My guild had a ret paladin for awhile, and then we didn't, and now we might be picking one up again because we have a promising app. When we have one, we take advantage of the utility, and when we don't we work around it (mainly this involves me taking Imp Crusader in my prot build, and a holy paladin keeping JoW up manually.)

The Ret-specific utility doesn't amount to much more than convenience. Mainly what makes a Ret paladin worthwhile is dps, and the benefits of an n+1th paladin. (Even if we already have 3, there are a number of classes/builds that can benefit from 4 blessings.)

A bad ret paladin isn't worth bringing; we'll bring another dps and work around not having CS. A good ret paladin, though, is very much worth bringing. It looks like that's the way it'll stay in WotLK, and I think that's the way it should be.

Deathknights in Lichborne form are susceptible to Exorcism; presumably so are warlocks in Demon form. These are both talents, so this glyph really only affects some members of two classes, but I suppose it's something. It might also be situationally useful in some PvE encounters with undead casters. (Imagine paladins actually participating in an interrupt rotation.)

I do agree however that in general the glyphs look pretty bland from a PvE perspective, aside from the Holy glyphs (which are really cool across the board), the blessing glyphs (which are neat), and the RD glyph for tanking (which isn't flashy but is very useful).

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

 

Danath

Ok, so my questions on Glyphs are:

-Is Crusader Strike Glyph worth it?
-The cooldown on Turn Evil should have been removed long time ago. Can someone please check this in the new beta build?
-Exorcism says it interrupts spellcasting. If it still works only on Undeads/Demons, I don't think it will be any worth it; if at least the interrupting portion works on Humanoids, then it'lll be the interrupt we asked for years.
-Do you think Glyph of Blessing of Kings will be worth considering?
-Glyph of Blessing Might: this rings a bell, I considered a given fact that the 30% AP>SP conversion was ALSO applied to Blessing of Might, I don't see why it shouldn't...But this suggests otherwise. Can anyone try this?
Overall, yes, very few Retribution PvE utilities...But great PvP ones, indeed.

 

• Avitus

But that's exactly it, you just said it. In WotLK, a retadin won't even be able to offer the convenience you mentioned, CS doesn't work that way anymore. Neither is speccing up the ret tree for a holy a disadvantage anymore (only gains to be had).

So it's not even a question of convenience vs inconvenience.

Compared to now where a holy spec going up the ret tree gains nothing, has to stand at 10 yards range and only loses out by having to perform this duty, in Wotlk, the benefits of a holy speccing into ret are abundant. Holy paladins will *want* to spec into ret (5% spellcrit, +heal and a HoT through sheath of light), judging gives them benefits. Imp Sanctity Aura (+2% damage)? That'll be in there by default in any sheathbot spec.


"A bad retadin, a good retadin", I do ~2100 DPS as an alliance retadin at Brutallus (the handful of times the guild bothers going all out these days). Sounds good? Where does that put me on the chart? 10th? Guess how desired I am if all I brought was my personal DPS compared to the top rogues/locks/hunters hitting 2.8k and legendary bow hunters closing in on 3k DPS.


No matter "how good I am", I will never be able to be desired for personal DPS only as it stands now, the game hard locks us to 75% of pure DPS classes. This is exactly the point I'm trying to make people aware of/hope that the devs understand.


So with the "convenience" of a retadin non-existent anymore, there's two options left:

A. Unique raid utility making us desirable (which as of now are all comfortably and conveniently mirror-able by holy spec).
B. Make our personal DPS equal to pure DPS classes that offer very limited buffs (such as hunters, warlocks, enhancement shamen, but maybe not rogues who actually give no buffs at all).

Otherwise, it will not be "as things are in TBC right now", we don't even offer the convenience we do in TBC now, so why take a class doing 75% DPS no matter how good they are?




Edit: And lets please not dilute a discussion with such neglible things as "heals from Divine Storm". If you spend 5 minutes of napkin math, you'll see that it's really worth pretty much nothing on a raid boss.

 

Danath

Enhancement Shaman is
A)A pure dps class
and
B)Offers very limited buffs? Come on, it's evident that you're a bit negatively biased at the moment. It's not like this is the end of the world, surely Blizzard will add some secondary effect to Crusader Strike (and hopefully change its graphics and, possibly, the animation). Many people really dig Retribution as it is right now in beta, our personal DPS has been incredibly increased and great buffs were overall provided to the tree by Blizzard; of course, we still need some tweaking, and a secondary effect to Crusader Strike is going to be on top on that list. Beta has still a long way through and with new builds flowing in crazily, I have lots of hope still.

 

• Avitus

You do know that you're making my point for me? An enhancement shaman is anything but "a pure DPS class" and "offering very limited buffs", yet their personal DPS is miles ahead of ours in endgame (more inline with "pure DPS classes"). I put them in there for a reason.


Anyway, this is not a negative bias, this is a logical breakdown. I'd love to see a reply with something more supported than "Many people really dig Retribution as it is right now in beta, our personal DPS has been incredibly increased and great buffs were overall provided to the tree by Blizzard".

 

Wilken

Was Not RIghtous Defense Changed to Rely on Phyiscal hit instead of Spell hit?

So basing off lvl 70 where 9% miss rating is the norm without precision being in the try anymore this could give you a 1% fail rate on Rightous defense with the glyph. This could allow you to go for expertise on items instead of hit. All depends on how they itemize things but it seems very useful for an undergeard pally.

 

Danath

It IS miles ahead of ours in endgaming. Now. Live, in 2.4.3. In WOTLK, all signs (e.g. experiences and calculations from players in the beta(including these forums) point to "not really". Logical breakdown? You basically said that the Retribution paladin is now useless, already forgetting how much of a DPS increase we should see in WOTLK. Also, is 3% haste aura nothing? And you're giving straight away that every holy paladin is going to be Sheathbot specced...Do you really think Blizzard isn't going to improve the last tiers in the Holy tree so that every single paladin healer would have this Sheathbot spec?With a worthy 54-pointer Holy spec, the holydin won't even be able to take Sanctified Retribution, let alone Judgement of the Wise(which would scale enormously better with a geared/raidbuffed Ret paladin, anyway).

My opinion is that you're really seeing the half-empty glass in here. I too am hoping for buffs, but let's not make this tragic, Retribution has been greatly improved and pretty much anyone who played beta confirmed it.

 

Stardusty

I called this awhile back about ret lacking an 'active-procs-in-combat-buff', but this was prior to a blue statement lumping ret paladins in the mana battery pack. Until we see Judgements of the Wise working in a raid setting, its all up in the air, but I think we might end up being compared more to a shadow priest than an enhancement shaman.

 

Danath

Exactly. A blue poster clearly stated that "Retribution Paladins, Shadow Priests and Survival Hunters will be the mana batteries for raids". So, it's extremely unwise to judge everything before we see how this talent works in a raid setting; it should be quite definining for the Retribution tree.

 

Antmanton

Before we manage to get into another really nasty spec war here, we should perhaps review the design goals for the paladin class in WotLK. I submit that the goals should be as follows:

• Ensure that 25-man raids are balanced around having three paladins (of whatever spec) actively in the instance doing whatever it is they're built for, not sitting in group 6 outside the instance just for buffs.
• Ensure that each spec of paladin has something useful to do in raids, to avoid wasting slots on an otherwise useless spec just to get another blessing or utility ability.

Notice that nowhere on that list of goals is something like "Ensure spec X is absolutely required in all raids." It's very important to note that while spec X should be useful and desired, it should not be all-important to the point raids get scrubbed by its unavailability.

Something often repeated in this thread is "Talent X is too easy for Spec Y to pick up and abuse, move it further down in the tree," where Talent X is your choice of Sheath, JotW, Heart of the Crusader, or even Sanctified Retribution. While moving these talents down in the tree sounds easy and effective, it's really a very dangerous move. Quite simply, if Blizzard moved all those talents down, what would be left? Answer: Absolute crap in the first half of the tree, and incredible bloat further down, a la Protection. Sure, now 25-man raids are all but guaranteed to take a Ret paladin, but now they're indispensable for 10-man content too. Additionally, you end up with raids being canceled because your Ret paladin can't make it and his utility contribution is simply too much to do without, not to mention infinite whining (and responsive Blizzard nerfing) from other classes who feel they are warming the bench to make room for you (regardless of whether or not this is actually the case). Conversely, by keeping the utility functions earlier in the trees, and filling the latter slots with self-buffs, active abilities, and straight passive DPS boosts, you keep a raid leader's options open, and avoid cross-spec and cross-class backbiting over raid slots.

Now, to address the current problems with Ret, yes, it's still got too little sustained DPS (and possibly a little too much burst, oddly enough, though the Art of War nerf probably fixed that) to compete with mages and rogues. This can be fixed easily enough through further coefficient tuning, rather than massive talent tree shake-ups which serve only to Band-Aid the real issues; i.e. your damage and healing still suck ass, but we have to take you anyhow (and resent it all the while) because we need the 3% crit or mana battery effects.

 

Amera

The Ret PvP Glyphs are pretty insane. You're looking at 20 sec HoJ (if the set bonus remains) and pumping out serious stun-burst with those glyphs. Especially given how SoC judgment damage is now, an HoJ is like the new shatter combo - 75% or more of someone's life in a few seconds.