A paladin can stand outside the instance and give another blessing. My point is, Ret Paladins will bring more to a raid in WotLK than they do currently. Even ignoring what a Sheathbot will bring (I still hope that BoL is buffed enough that speccing for Sheath is not something most Healadins will do), a Ret Paladin brings 3% haste and a more powerful JoW, and yet only loses the ability to keep up a Healadins Seal, which will be largely unneeded now anyway!

And the other thing every "Look! Sheath of Light is better for Prot too" poster is completely ignoring is the last part of the Hammer of Righteousness tooltip: "causes high threat." We don't know what the additional threat modifier on Hammer of the Righteous is. I suspect it will be tuned such that going at least 51 into Prot is always better than Sheath of Light for tanking, if this is not already the case (I suspect it is already the case, actually).

Right now, judgement refreshing through Crusader Strike is the most important thing a Retribution brings to the raid. And it remains to be seen if 3% haste and JotW will be more useful than this.

Edit: some syntax changes.

Right now Holy Paladins aren´t judging every 30 seconds to keep their haste buff up. Right now, Retribution Paladins are forced to judge Crusader to keep their crit bonus up. Right now is a pretty silly place to make arguments from, when you´re failing to take account several changes which affect the entire Paladin situation.

However, if JoW is so important right now that people bring along a Retri pala mainly for the purpose of keeping it up with CS, isn´t a JoW that is significantly more powerful than that of a non-retadin (and is up all the time anyway because the Retri pally has judged it) worth that raid slot to an even greater degree?

You are aware of the fact that in WoltK a Holy Paladin judging from 30 yards can give the raid Judgement of Wisdom who now includes 3% crit, right? As the talent trees looks now, a Holy paladin can even get Sanctified Retribution in the same time with Sheath of Light. So you don't really a Retribution paladin for these and here goes 90% of the utility Retribution had being brought by another spec. So what specific raid buffs are left for Retribution? Hmm, let me check my previous post: 3% haste and JotW.

Seriously, this has been debated to death. Again, the Judgement of Wisdom that a Holy Paladin can provide to the party literally pales in comparison to the one of a geared, buffed and flasked Retribution Paladin. It now SCALES. Do you understand that?Also, the Holydin speccing Sheathbot loses other not-so-irrilevant healing and non healing talents. You have to take everything into account and as it stands right now, Retadin is in a very good position for both DPS and utility. Our hope shall be that Blizzard will tune the class/spec rather than brutally nerfing it.

The new Glyphs look interesting for Paladins. Some are hard to choose between.

I like the look of these ones from a Holy Pally POV

# Glyph of Flash of Light - Your Flash of Light heals for -50% less initially but also heals for 196% of its inital effect over 1 to 0 sec.
# 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.
# Glyph of Blessing of Might - Your Blessing of Might also grants offensive spell power equal to 10% of the attack power it grants.
# Glyph of Lay on Hands - Your Lay on Hands also grants you as much mana as it grants your target.
# Glyph of Seal of Wisdom - While Seal of Wisdom is active the cost of your healing spells is reduced by -5%.
# Glyph of Seal of Light - While Seal of Light is active the effect of your healing spells is increased by 5%.
Also CS getting a nerf. Not Refreshing all Judgments

Pure speculation, but based on comments by blizz, hunters, paladins and priests will fill the utilitiy of mana-batteries, with the correct spec of course.

Given the nerf-ed nature of pots at the moment, it seems that a raid will be required to take at least one, if not 2-3 of these classes for a 25-man, regardless of their other abilities to maintain raid DPS output as a whole. DPS level of ret paladins is in an unstable state right now, and we don't know how much it will be nerfed (just that it will be).

Off-tanking with a gear swap and the odd off-heal seem plausible in emergencies for ret, as well as the other more passive things rounding out a good deal of utility when the time calls for them.

Seems fairly solid, but the foundation of ret justifiably filling a DPS slot (especially with more than one ret) is still in question with the unfinished state of beta.

Why is everyone so hell bent on ret being nerfed? The major bug was the JoJ refresh on melee swings, and from what I've heard that was fixed.

Could it possibly be that (gasp) the devs want pallys doing damage?

Can we please, please, please stop it with this statement? Crusader Strike was not "nerfed", it was changed to be more consistent with the rest of the changes that Paladins are getting.

If Holy has incentives to Judge, Prot has incentives to Judge and Ret has incentives to Judge, then Crusader Strike's ability to refresh Judgements becomes redundant if the the new talents make the original Paladin want to do their own refreshes anyway.

===

Is Judgements of the Wise still bugged in this build? Also, how does the healing effect of Divine Storm work in a group situation?

Because DPS is not black and white, but shades of grey. It's fairly obvious that ret in beta is leading the DPS charts right now, in addition to all the other stuff can do. It's plainly visible that it's well out of line compared to other classes at the moment. Either this will be nerfed directly, or indirectly by buffing other classes.

The JoJ refreshing and doing damage on melee swings was take out a few patches ago, just recently they removed the extra attack that was proc-ing on JoJ. Maybe this is enough, but it doesn't seem like it. They haven't even changed DivS to pure holy damage yet, which should provide another slight boost in DPS.

A: Not just ret pallies will be attracted to death knights. Ret pallies will get more raid dps instead of just burst oriented dps. They must be careful not to overdo it on the PVP front.

Directly from the horse's mouth at Blizzcon. Sure, maybe the burst is a bit strong but it is clearly intended for ret pallys to be putting out more relative damage. As this is beta of course the balance isn't perfect. I for one am glad they are going with the "arms warrior" model for ret hybrid style (couple of good utility and high DPS) rather than the "shadow priest" model (amazing utility and shittastic DPS).

HotR also procs your seal and is holy damage (190% threat * whatever multiplier). You're also losing every single survivability talent in the tree and Improved Holy Shield. I'm not prot but isn't that thing just a bit important?

E: Added quote tags.

It's fair to call that change a nerf, but only if one is willing to recognize we got a net buff to CS.


Live CS: 110% weapon damage, refreshes judgements

Beta CS: 110% weapon damage, procs damage seals



Seriously, who would prefer the live version of CS when judgement refresh is so un-necessary on beta? You're refreshing JoW/JoL/JoJ every 8 seconds when you judge, you get 3% crit tossed in no matter which debuff you use, and you don't have to give up any damage to drop the debuff. AND you don't have to re-seal.

Let me reason this out. You say you need HotR to do 500 TPS.

We'll take your stats and this build (1900 stamina, 3400 attack power, 570 spell power) but add on an additional 59 stamina and 140 AP for using a real tanking weapon (bringing the totals to 1976 stamina, 3540 attack power and 593 spell power).

HoR deals weapon damage and is normalized to a 2.4. That means with the weapon above HoR will be hitting for a baseline of 221.5 plus the AP modifier, which is a total baseline damage of ~828.35. With percentage modifiers you're looking at a modified damage of about 870. At 190% threat that is 1653 threat per cast for just HotR.

Now add on the seal proc damage. SoR is a baseline of 591 per swing with these stats. With percentage modifiers you're looking at 713 threat per swing. At 190% threat that is 1355 threat per swing for SoR.

Together that means a HotR cast without any "additional threat" would be just over 3000 threat. 3000 threat on a 6 second cooldown is (drumroll please)... 500 TPS. So without any "additional threat" Hammer is already meeting your requirements.

So yeah, let's all be nice and leave sheath for the ret pallys, eh?

My prot theorycraft is crude, someone check my stuff.

I'd also like to point out that HoR is likely to hit much harder than the math FlyingToastr just posted. I was looking at that mace earlier.. 88 dps? I have an axe off prince that does 91. Kings defender does 87. Sure, it has 148 statpoints on it, but the KD has 79. With an 85 ilevel increase I'd expect that level of stats on the weapon.

Granted, I'm going by very generalized numbers here. I'd have to do some research to get the actual stat budget an item gets for x ilevel.

The problem with Sheath as a Protection Paladin is that in the end, you just lose so much for it. With the sample build you linked, you miss out on Redoubt, Shield Spec, Judgements of the Just, Ardent Defender and Hammer of the Righteous. You lose a ton of threat from your Shield of Righteousness spell and it costs extra mana.

Now what's more interesting is the *DPS* potential a Sheath spec loses out on against a HotR spec when not tanking: your Shield of the Righteous doesn't hit as hard and you miss out on the HotR DPS.

That weapon actually is abnormally low dps. I think it's probably an itemization error.

We just talked about this and it really has nothing to do with pallys, at least the way he worded it.

I just thought of that too (I just skimmed MMOC for the first tank-looking weapon), maybe something along the lines of this would be a better comparison item, in which case HotR (and the accompanying SoR) will be doing even more TPS.

What you're missing is that Blizzard 100% certainly intends for HoR to generate more threat than a Sheath build. So the coefficient will be tuned until that is the case. And actually, how hard does HoR hit? If the threat multiplier on it were 2x, as many people have suggested or assumed, it could easily generate close to 4000 threat per hit (when you include the fact that it is also affected by RF). Not 4000 threat *extra* of course, but total... so they'll bump it to 3x, or 2.5x, or whatever is required for it to win out. It's just threat, not damage, so they can set it however they want.

Some meta gems were added to wotlk.wowhead

For pve holy you're looking at these:
Beaming Earthsiege Diamond +21 crit rating +2% mana
Ember Skyflare Diamond +25 Spell Power +2% Intellect
Insightful Earthsiege Diamond +21 Intellect Chance to restore mana on cast
Revitilizing Skyflare Diamond +8 mp5 +3% critical healing effect.

Some observations: according to the combat ratings thread you'll need about 4000 intellect for ember to overtake beaming on spellcrit. There're other factors to consider ofcourse. +3% crit healing effect on revitalizing doesn't look too enticing except maybe for ego building substance. Insightful effect looks like it's the same old 300 mana restore. Unclear on the proc mechanics, wowhead lists at 5%. I don't know but a quick look steers me to insightful as still the winner here. Any other takes?

Yep still bugged, and divine storm is still dealing physical damage instead of holy damage.

I haven't paid too much attention to divine storm's healing component but it is very weak atm (partly ties into dstorm dealing physical damage)... I am fairly sure that the healing done by it is currently split up evenly among the 3 affected members, making it even weaker... could someone else confirm this for sure?

If JotW splits up returned mana evenly among 3 people, or if it returns the SAME amount to 3 people is still unclear and they really need to fix jotw so we can test this.

Cathela, I believe my explanations were anything but vague, however you seem to constantly refuse to understand things that shouldn't even need further elaboration.

Simple things you seem to be unable to accept like that there is a difference between your first boss kill (i.e. Brut) and your farm kills, I'm not going to explain in detail why having a dedicated retadin there keeping judgements refreshed with CS is a huge asset, rather than just a "convenience" in farm kills where healers have become more used the fight and can do more without losing performance. This is just common sense.


It's very evident that there are things we will never agree on.

You believe the loss of CS utility makes no difference at all. I believe CS wasn't just convenience and it was a true asset in zero tolerance healer situations in progression fights and that losing this functionality reduces our utility.

I believe that this loss, entitles us to either a personal DPS increase ("status unknown"), or a utility increase to be desired in level 80 endgame raids. And yes, it's ultimately a case of "wait and see", but I thought it was worth mentioning to see how other people reflect on it.

You believe listing all our supposed utility in a list (a list which includes "heals from DS") is somehow going to be of any worth when trying to decide whether you're going to take a retadin or not, seemingly due to how long the list is.




Now I'm sure your first impulse is to want to pull this apart and start saying how vague it is and what not, but here's the trick: It doesn't matter. We've both made our opinions clear and it is as said a case of "wait and see". I'd rather not waste 2 more pages of back and forth on something that's essentially a matter of "opinion".




Yes, this is how Divine Storm works at the moment. JotW is supposed to work the same way (60% of judgement damage caused is divided over 3 people).