Wasn't aware of HotR proccing seals. =) silly me. Another point in SoR's favor. However SoV still does WAY more threat/damage, is far more reliable now; seal twisting will be fantastic now if you can fit it in to your rotation.

Has anyone done some theorycrafting for the best threat rotation? my calculations were assuming 8 second rotation of: Judge, Shield oR, Cons, HS, 2 sec break, repeat. Or 16 second rotation with twisting of Judge, Shield oR, Cons, HS, Seal Vengeance, Judge, Shield oR, Cons, HS, Seal Righteousness. I'm sure there's a much better rotation out there, but i was never good at getting those things working together.
Are any of our abilities off the GCD yet?

As for the build lacking improved holy shield: Is there a definitive answer yet as to whether crushing blows still exist from raid bosses? HS is very low threat at that level of the game (unless scaling mechanics have changed again) so if crushing blows don't exist the improved version seems a nice upgrade rather than an important one.

Survivability: i've missed Ardent Defender and Judgements of the Just. JotJ can be compensated for in a raid situation if needed. However i agree that this isn't the best survival build. I think it is the highest threat build (if only marginally), as well as the best healing prot build (lol) although i'll try both as soon as possible.



On a slightly different note: Prot Meta Gems:
Austere Earthsiege Diamond: 32 Stam, 2% armor from items.
Effulgent Skyflare Diamond: 32 Stam, -2% spell damage taken.
Eternal Earthsiege Diamond: 21 Defense and 5% shield block value.
Powerful Earthsiege Diamond: 32 stam and 15% reduced stun duration.
(epic gems are 20 ipoints: ie Thick = 20 Defense, Solid = 30 Stam, Enduring = 10 Defense 15 stam)
Powerful is now lackluster compared to the other 3 (i mean, we never took it for the stun reduce). Eternal Cut may be giving huge amounts of BV with the increases to strength, and i'll probably end up with a helm with each of teh spelldamage and armor metas.

Well, afaik you have access to the beta, right? How about switching PVP on an go kill some horde?

While I admit that it is really funny to kill 2 lvl 75 in Sunwell gear or lvl 77 players alone with no effort at all, we all can agree that this should not be remotely possible. But the fact is: It is, I´ve done it. Ret dmg is so ridiculous in the actual beta build, it´s not even funny anymore. 3k hits, 6-8k crits every 8 seconds with judgements alone is totally out of line.
Anyone who really argues that this could be intended from Blizzard lives in the land of dreams, and every player with half a feeling for balance knows it. So GC´s quote about the state of retadins (dealing way too much dmg) is perfectly clear.
Blizzard is aware of the unbalanced state of ret, they are going to fix it, and then it will hopefully be fun.

Regarding Prot meta gems, the Eternal Earthsiege Diamond is very odd: 5% Block Value when the [Eternal Earthstorm Diamond] is 10%.

That being said, either that or the Austere Earthsiege will probably be the big winner, with Effulgent for resistance sets.

Agreed on the Eternal diamonds.
I think that the newer, 5% diamond may be to compensate for higher overall block value (much higher amounts of strength present on gear). However unless the old diamond is changed as well, i may still use the BC one for trash instance ><

on the other hand my full s3 with torch ret pally got his ass spanked silly by a slow/arcane barrage mage the other day. just pointing out that we dont auto win vs every class there is atm

They could just tone down the coefficients of Judgement of Command then, but Crusader Strike should be included in the Righteous Vengeance talent.

It is obvious that SoR and SoV have to be scaled back to what they were meant to be: tanking seals, mainly.

It is also obvious we don't want to use unreliable PvP-seal as our main dps seal even while leveling/questing. Before they fix the SoB/SoM judgement feedback damage to something that makes more sense (Oh hai, I just critted myself for 1.8k!) or nerf SoR to hell I continue to ignore both SoC and SoB as inferior choises.

TLDR version: Lets balance paladins around lvl80 raiding + arena duels in pvp gear, not based on lvl70 duels in 0 pvp gear.

My ret gear isn't that great, however a paladin from my guild with some top notch gear got transfered to live, stunned a mob, popped his CD's and hit them for an 8-9k judgement, and 1-2 shot the mob.

This is what has caused the outburst from everyone and i'm shocked that people are so short sighted that this immediately means we are outputting too much damage.

Lets look at PvE, we can't stun mobs, ratings to % ratio have doubled. Is our dps too much. Well instead of assuming yes based on a single stunned crit JoC, I, as I have done before, modelled our dps at 80 based on 80 ratings in the best sunwell dps gear in a raid with raid buffs, and SoC/SoB seem to be outputting around 2700-3000dps. This is a lot more than at 70. Is it overpowered. No one knows. Until we have raids and see how our dps is performing comparitive to pur dps classes we won't know if we are overpowered.

The one thing that is overpowered is SoR/V. These are outperforming SoC/SoB and should be altered. Different coefficients for 1/2H weapons or make them only usable with 1H would do the trick as examples. Perhaps nerf their damage output a bit. However, what I dont see are these cry babies complaining that our SoV damage is too much. They simply see big JoC stunned crits and call for nerfs. Nerfing SoC/B based on stunned crits before seeing where our dps in pve lies comparitive to others is just foolish. I just hope blizzard has learned from it's mistakes listening to Crusader Strike whiners in TBC beta and wont destroy pve-ret for another expansion.

Now lets look at PvP. First question would be, has blizzard modelled our abilities in terms of PvP around level 70's dueling level 70's in 0 pvp gear or have they perhaps modelled it around level 80's in PvP gear in arena teams. Yes these high stun crits at 70 are nasty and overpowered, but stick the opposing player in high stamina, resiliance capped gear with 4 other players including a healer, and are these abilities as overpowering as they are now. The answer for those lacking any foresight is of course no.

Now will they be overpowered at 80 in pvp gear in arenas? We dont know, they might be, they might not be. But ret paladins are all about the burst. Once our abilities are used and we are waiting for CD's we become significantly weaker. If our burst is nerfed and becomes non-threatening, then so does the paladin.

So, blizzard should rebalance SoR/V accordingly, and leave it like that. Open 80 on beta, allow pvp gear to be easily obtained, open the 10man and see how paladins perform at the correct level all these abilities are designed for. Once this is done, then start balancing any aspects that are overpowered. Or they could listen to the whiners, and balance paladins around 1v1 duels at 70 and destory the ret class like they did in TBC.

Wall of text crits you for 8000......nerf wall of text plz

What bellator said. What we currently have in live (actually less than what we currently have in live) was consider woefully overpowered in BC Beta. Terrifyingly so. The players spoke: It. Could. Not. Go. Live. And here we are, with more than was in Beta, and no-one thinks we're broken (well, not in that direction).

Presumably somewhere blizzard have a model to work out roughly where they think various classes dps will end up. Even if it's woefully shortsighted napkin maths. They're seeing how things line up in beta, and are making adjustments as things surprise them (see Seal of Righteousness).

The problem is that they often seem to making decisions on abilities independently of anything else. When I first looked at Art of War, I thought it was a fairly innocuous talent that would only get taken because it would let you eek a tiny amount more out of the ret tree. But suddenly huge judgements meant that 8 scaling would mean even huger numbers (as opposed to just big numbers from the tiny base). It seems like the person who designed the talents didn't talk to the person who did the seals. Then the person who did the talents nerfs his talents, and now I wouldn't be surprised if judgements were badly nerfed too. Therefore an okay talent has died unnecessarily because of problem elsewhere.

End result? The BC ret paladin.

TLDR: We keep hoping the Blizzard learns from their mistakes, but they don't.

PS. My favourite part of the new ret tree is still repentance.

The better solution I can think of is to tack on an addendum to Judgements of the Just that "increases the threat caused by your Judgements by over 9000%" (kidding, but seriously). That way they could tweak it so that Judgements are still causing the same threat while lowering the damage output so SoR isn't so stupid. Holy pallys... eh.

Holy and Prot pallys have very good reasons to keep up Judgements in Wrath. Ret pallys aren't losing any utility if they're just going to be keeping them up themselves.

It's exactly those very good reasons (along with talents that allow them to do so more easily and with personal reward) that are sidelining traditional ret utility. Lets not dance around something we both know and understand, yet weigh differently.




Regarding Seal scaling, I wonder why they don't simply change the coefficients they gain from. Make SoR/SoV gain more from spelldamage (so you'd use them in healer/tanking gear) and less from AP and reverse for SoB/SoC.

But in exchange ret pallys are gaining a large amount of additional personal DPS as well as some other nice new utilities. JoW scaling alone (>30% more per proc) is worth a ret pally's raid spot- combined with the additional tank threat, additional raid damage, additional raid crit, additional raid haste (also a massive DPS/HPS increase) and mana-battery-ness ret still has plenty of utility without CS.

Why is it so wrong that we lose one outdated and somewhat worthless utility in exchange for increased DPS and other utilities?

Prot's main threat stat is AP so putting SoR/V to straight SP would result in a major nerf. Right now both gain more from SP than AP as it is. The real problem is the multiplicative coefficients when combined with instant attacks.

I agree it's not so easy, I thought about this one.

I think all Seals should continue gaining from AP as well as SP, yet with different co-efficients. At least this would be the solution for Ret and Holy.

Prot can always be improved by changing the threat co-efficients themselves instead of damage, then again it seems like Blizzard's working practice right now is to up tank DPS.

It's definitely a tricky issue, probably since they're trying to do too many things at the same time. They want every Seal to work for every spec, with any type of gear, 2h as well as sword and board and I'm not so sure that's going to work.

Kind of makes you miss the times when there was a dedicated Seal for threat *cough* Seal of Fury (no, I'm not really advocating bringing back the stone age).


This is still unknown. You know it's not the first time we're overpowered in a beta (yea I went there) just to end up castrated when things go live and they just forget about us for a year or two.

I'm on the beta myself and I agree the personal DPS at least seems like a pretty big upgrade, but no one knows how this will hold up through beta patches, through level 80 raiding gear or what the ultimate developer vision is. And no, vague blue posts really don't help the issue.

I wonder if Blizz could set the co-efficients so that you gain it from AP or SP, but not both? So if you're a major AP retadin you'll scale on AP, but if you're Holy you scale with SP. An inelegant 'fix', but could prevent the worst of the double-dipping.

This would have been a good solution (something I actually suggested a few months back somewhere on these boards) if it wasn't for the new AP -> Spelldamage (Sheath) and Stam -> Spelldamage talents. Doing so now would undo a large part of the synergy these talents are supposed to offer.

I think Blizzard is not content with always packing "causes high threat" on abilities like judgements for deep prot, as flyingtoastr suggested. I agree that SoC and SoB/M need to be better than SoR and SoV for a retadin though, but this could simply be done by shuffling the coefficients arounf, speak: making SoR/SoV more rely on spellpower and SoC/SoB/M more on AP. This would also lead to TbtL not feeling so unnecessary, because prot threat actually doesn´t scale good at all with spellpower (compared to AP) anymore.
Nobody likes tanks dealing near to zero dmg but producing hight threat with those little numbers, because it is a pain considering PVP and solo grinding. Blizzard wants to do the right thing, they just need to get those numbers straight.

If they make fanaticism not effect SoR and SoV it would already go a long way to devalue those for use as raiding ret.

Of course we are. We're getting 10 levels worth of abilities, but so is every other class out there.

Doing more damage was never a question, how this damage will be relative to all the other classes at 80 is and this is something you can't conclude yet by saying "look it's a lot more than in TBC".

Prot will at level 80 scale with AP and blockvalue. There will just be no gear with protection stats and spellpower if i interpret blizzard correctly. So if you make sor/sov scale only with spellpower, that is fine by me as shockadin, but you will nerf protadins too badly with that.

What could work is either: rework the stamina -> spellpower talent so a protadin never would want any spelldamage, you could do this by lets say, remove the stamina -> spellpower talent, but add a new one 'increase your spellpower by ten times the average damage your weapon hits for' (with a normalization of 1.8s for a 1h and a 3.5s for a 2h)*, that way, protadins will want a purely AP/str/blockvalue kit, and for soloing stuff they just put on a 2h and whack stuff with SoR.

*numbers are made up, tuning needed :P

I'm guessing one reason Seal of Righteousness benefits from Attack Power more than Spellpower might be because it's used primarily when leveling new Paladins, and there isn't much Spellpower gear available. Not to mention Protection Paladins making a shift over to Strength/AP based threat.

Regarding CS not refreshing Seals, remember that we are also losing a Judgement. In TBC, there are two Judgements, Crusader and Wisdom, that need to stay on the target for maximum DPS. Light is a nice bonus, but can be compensated for with AoE healing. Therefore, the Ret paladin needs to be able to refresh multiple Judgements in order to keep both essential debuffs up.

In WotLK, only Wisdom absolutely has to be on the target. And the ret paladin can keep that up by herself. Again, Light is a nice bonus, but it's not directly related to DPS in the same manner. So the value of the debuff refresh in WotLK is much lower than it's current value.