+1 to Antmanton.

Seriously why is it so horrible for holy to spec for sheath. flyingtoastr said it, it doesn't scale with gear and all that (unless they start making sheath specific gear.) It's not some overpowering talent that renders holy the unstoppable juggernaut shooting aoe moonfire out of your ass or something. It's just a different toolset. From the point of ret there's some overlap and since you're the ret it's completely retarded and wasted (that will be a grand total of 4 talent points - three to 3% crit and one to sanctified ret.) Whatever. Still less wasted than the first five into prot.

EDIT: What in the name of Allah is this "sheathbot problem?" And the problem with seals is a ret problem. Nothing to do with prot or holy, go fix it in ret.

For the love of all that is holy, shut the hell up about sheath for holy pallys. Everyone.

We were discussing seal scaling problems and how sheath is causing it, not stupid crap that is going to be changed in the next push. This is getting old and it has been beaten to death a few billion times. Just. Stop.

I don't argue that they can handle dps scaling with tweaking seals. All I'm saying is, that in your 4398 AP, 30% of it is raid buff. I understand exactly what you're saying. It sounds like our PVE gear is very similar for ret, I'm sitting jut over 2100 AP unbuffed. But when I need spell power, when it's interesting, when I really want to be able to heal as ret isn't raid buffed - it's in my PVP gear, and my AP in that is just over 1800. Scaling the dps is the easy part. It can be done a million different ways. I'm just saying I don't want my healing ability to be balanced in a setting in which I'm barely going to be using it. My str is very consistent across those two scenarios. 100 or so different. My attack power is very different - around 50% comes from Raid.

"Touched by the Light is tier 9 Prot and Holy Guidance is tier 8 Holy, and both of those talents only provide 300-400 spellpower at 70. I don't consider it unreasonable for a talent that provides a Retridin with at least twice that amount of spellpower at 70 to be tier 9 in that tree. "

You are ignoring so many variables with this oversimplification. Holy guidance is a leftover talent from the days where healing and +dmg were completely separate, if you look at other class trees you'll find similar talents.

To be honest, sheath specced holy paladins (in combination with everything else we can get in the ret tree) is one of the aspects im most excited about in the entire expansion. It's a breath of fresh air, and i don't really enjoy the prospects of having it destroyed in beta and holy going back to being 51/20 without exceptions. Right now the balance between 51/20 and sheath specc is fairly close, a buff to the upper tiers of holy would close the gap and allow for some variation.

The fix to SoR lies with the seal itself, and the fix to sheath specced holy paladins is a better holy tree.

I'm perfectly happy to wait for more information; I agree that we've both laid out our arguments well enough. But I do think I need to defend myself here a bit:

You're entitled to lay out your opinion and see how other see the situation; have I done anything but tell you how I see the situation? If something I've said has offended you, then I certainly apologize, but as far as I'm aware I'm just giving you my take on the situation.

I know that things are tighter in progression guilds and on first kills, but you're bringing this fact up as though that ends the discussion, when it doesn't. I've explained to you why I don't think the extra CS utility is a big deal, using an example from one of the most stringent optimization-check fights in the game (perhaps the most stringent, but I can't say that as I haven't seen the last 2/3 of Sunwell). I haven't seen a concrete counterexample, or an explanation as to why mine was poorly founded; you haven't said anything except that things are different in relaxed/farming raids, which doesn't really tell me anything specific about the necessity for the CS effect. If you're certain in your mind that you're right about this, that's fine, and I know that sometimes you can know something intuitively but not be able to explain it. But I hope you can see why I might need a little more to go on before I just take your word for it.

And as for the list, I was showing the raid utility provided by a TBC ret paladin and a WotLK ret paladin. I explicitly pointed out that some of these effects were pretty negligible (you seem to have a habit of not reading everything I say) but that overall the WotLK list is still more impressive than the TBC list. (Can you really claim that the CS refresh utility is more useful than 3% raidwide haste and JotW?)



For a HotR build, the best option is 1/2 Imp. Judgement and a 9-second refresh cycle. In 18 seconds, you can do 2 Holy Shields, 2 Consecrates, 2 Judgements, 3 HotR's, and 3 ShR's.

Imp. HS is still going to be a pretty big deal, given the damage boost to HS. HS is still significant threat: max rank threat is 211 plus 10% of spelldamage, times 1.35 for the innate bonus, times 1.20 for Imp Hs, times 1.15 for Shield of the Templar, times 1.9 for RF. With, say, 600 spellpower at level 80, that's 800 threat per block without Imp. HS, 960 with. At 4 blocks/8 seconds, that's 80tps for 2 talent points. If you get one extra block per cycle from the talent points, it's 120 tps more than that.

I'd expect Eternal Earthstorm to get nerfed then; they don't like to give lower-level items scaling bonuses that make them better than the high-level items. (Maybe they'll implement a "Block Value Percentage Improvement Rating" stat. )

Good stuff. Thanks, Chicken; I'll update the OP with this.

I would suggest you read your own posts before you talk to me about condescending anything. Half of what you write here references some kind of nonexistent "sheathbot problem" as if it's some sort of new-age bubonic plague. Furthermore, moving Sheath down a few tiers does absolutely nothing for seal scaling problems; why then do so many posters (incidentally, most of the Ret) feel that this is necessary, if it ultimately fixes nothing? If there's any "problem" with full Ret not bringing enough DPS or utility to a raid group, why is one of the first proposed "fixes" always some sort of nerf to the lower tiers of Ret to force a raid to take them anyhow (a la Shadow Priests) instead of a real fix that addresses the gaps?

I am quite aware that deep Holy blows chunks; hence my suggestions to fix that part rather than kicking the last peg (Sheath) out from under healing paladins. Ultimately, that leaves Holy in a worse position, rather than the ideal solution of making Beacon actually worth specing for.

As for bloat, yes, that proposal would induce some bloat, since AoW is a pretty craptastic talent right now and Sheath is so good. No one but possibly some Arena junkie would willingly take AoW even at a lower tier, unless they needed to fill points, in which case they'd hold their nose and get it over with. By contrast, everyone and his dog would go out of his way to find points in Sheath at tier 9. Now repeat this process with, say, JotW, another hot topic for being moved down a bit. Do you see what I mean? When you concentrate all the high-value talents in tiers 7-9, you create a logjam situation where you have to waste points in crap (like Vanilla-TBC tier 1 Protection) to get to the good stuff, then you run out of points.

On the topic of seals, I agree with you completely. The scaling has to be tinkered with, but only on the seals themselves, not on the Ret tree as a whole.

In short, scaling problems have to be addressed directly at the skill in question. Making sweeping changes (of any kind, much less nerfs) to one talent tree to try to cover up glaring weaknesses in others is bad design, and ends up causing more problems than it solves.

I am also very excited about Sheath build. With the new ret talents holy gets something to do in arena except healing. That is a big holy problem nowadays, druids have tons of cc, priest fear/manaburn shamans snare/interrupt and palas only healing. The only thing they have to do is to fix beacon (like they said they would) that some palas want to have it for raid utility. More options than 41/20 is a good thing^^.

The other thing is SoR or SoB .... who cares. The better one will be used. If you think SoB should be better than why do you cry for SoR nerf, cry for SoB buff.

No. Ret damage is already too high.(It hurts me to say that) SoR does too much damage. We need things to be fixed relative to everyone else now, instead of blizzard giving us the nerf bat on live. Its much easier to stomach nerfs on the Beta side than on live.

I agree with the above poster about the existence of a whole bunch of posts that are asking for Sheath changes of some kind instead of addressing the root issues. Not sure why, but I totally see his point.

What if the SoR formula was changed to take nearly all of the AP bonus out of it?

Like this:

Weapon Speed *(1% AP + 10% SP)

Would that make everyone happy?

If you want to be actively discouraged from using SoR and SoV for some dubious or nostalgic reason that is beyond any real merit, that's fine with me, just don't crap on the other 2/3rds of the class. To graphically demonstrate my point: add these words on crusader strike "if you cast SoR or SoV, you die and take 100% durability damage." Will everybody be happy with that?

The leveling up people won't be happy. The tanks won't be happy because they have the least spellpower of all three specs and they actually use SoR the most.

If it acts like the seal does now it should be base weapon speed. Not sure about the beta version though.

The major problem with SoR scaling (as I see it) is the weapon speed multiplier. Since SoR procs off instant weapon strikes now you gain a massive amount of damage on SoR procs by using a slow weapon. This leads to situations like Ret right now where with a 3.5-3.8 speed weapon and 3 extra SoR procs every 12 seconds you get some obscene scaling. Simple solution: change it to a portion of the weapon speed or give it two weapon speed coefficients; one for one-handers and one for two-handers (like they have right now for SoR).

In effect SoR is acting like an additional ultra scaling non-normalized attack for ret pallys.

Stop being an ass. SoR is a baseline level 1 seal, it makes no sense whatsoever that it is better than either the level 66 or the talented DPS seals. Blizzard never has especially liked it when people use really old abilities to "exploit" (I use the term loosely) game mechanics; see downranking.

They should really just either talent up SoB/SoC in deep ret to make it hit harder (which leads to more balance issues) or nerf SoR and talent it up in deep Prot/Holy. Again, Judgements of the Just and Judgements of the Pure are perfect places to tack on some additional Seal damage for those two trees without affecting too much.

I can cry nerf just the same though. I don't spec for those instants why should I get the short stick on farming 8 billion fel armaments with a cool two hand?

EDIT: Shadowbolt is a level one spell. Heroic strike is a level one spell. The fact that SoR is a level one spell doesn't change anything.

Because as sad as it is Blizzard doesn't balance the game around holy pallys farming. Actually Blizzard never has or will balance anything around soloing. Cry more?

Noobtank wondering if Vindication talent in the Ret tree does anything at all against raid mobs. I have heard that it does nothing and I can understand that we cant drop attributes on bosses etc. but I was wondering what it does do in pve settings. Anyone?

Sigh. Certain classes and specs are always going to be better suited for particular tasks. Thats what makes them unique. If SoR is scaled around doing the most dmg for sword/board players then why wouldn't you farm with a shield on and use YOUR instants to do damage? Clearly you can't argue that a holy paladin needs to be able to kill things as quickly and easily as a ret paladin. Or a prot warrior should be able to kill things the same as a fury warrior...or are you?

Yes, but you don't use the level 1 versions (rank 1 shadowbolt... roflcakes) and those are the bread and butter spells/abilities in the class with nothing else to replace them. Warlocks don't get Shadowbolt at level 1 and Megablast at level 66 and then make a choice to use Shadowbolt because it scales better. Warriors don't get HS at level 1 and Massive Strike for talenting 11 down Arms and choose to use HS because it scales better.

If Blizzard wants us using SoR for all 3 specs for everything why even bother taking all the time to code SoC, SoB and SoV?

The only place where Vindication does anything really meaningful in PvE is on the adds during the M'uru encounter, where they will lose some of their maximum health when it procs. It also might work on the Naga during the Lady Vashj encounter, too, but who does that fight any more? Any actual TBC boss is immune. Nefarian was vulnerable in WoW Classic, and I think Emperor Vek'nilash might have been too.

If you're asking about WotLK raid bosses, there aren't any yet.

Oh my god they could've made heroic strike add like twice your level as damage and it would be just one rank as well. SoC has pvp merit, and SoB, I don't know, getting mana from SA or something.

EDIT: I was actually thinking to run SoB most of the time as holy raiding and judge that for mana from SA. That is until they made the glyphs.

levk, I think you're confused. SoR is the reason ret paladins are doing too much damage. SoC our damage is fine, SoB our damage is fine. SoR the damage is out of hand. Now, tell me that something doesn't need to be fixed regarding how ret spec'd paladins scale with that particular seal.

That's actually pretty much the issue.

If they restored multiple ranks to SoR/SoV, and gave them all the same mana cost (percentage of base mana), then it would basically be the same as the current situation with warrior abilities. Then they could adjust the base damage for each rank to make sense for that level, and at the same time set the scaling coefficient to give sensible scaling with gear.

Right now they're trying to balance two different things by tweaking one number; anyone who's got knowledge/experience with multivariable systems knows that generally that doesn't work.

Time per kill ought to at least be comparable. No one should want to go back to the days before the Healing --> Spell Damage conversion where healing and tanking specs could sit around bored to tears while they slowly whittled down a mob in between heals or CCs + bandage. What makes a DPS worthwhile is less top-end burst than it is sustainability. Every spec of every class should have enough burst to make questing, farming, and grinding at least somewhat bearable without repeated respecs and/or having to lose arenas for half a year to get half-decent damage gear.

Funny, I can do my dailies as holy fine without respecing. Sure, it's a lot slower than when I do it on my arms warrior, but it isn't "unbearable".

Time-per-kill should be comparable between jobs. DPS classes/specs should have about the same TPK. Healing specs should all have about the same TPK. But if you're trying to arge TPK should be equal between DPS specs and healers you're insane.