Agreed. SoR really needs to be something along the lines of:

SoR dps = k*level + 2*AP + 10*SP

Additionally, flyingtoastr is right when he comments on Seals based on weapon damage acting as non-normalized strikes on our cooldown abilities. The easiest solution would be to go back to having only auto-attacks proccing Seals. It would scale back our damage, and also stop tricks like HotR + SoV. If this means the Prot paladin is underpowered, the base damage of HotR could be increased, as that is the only Prot strike which proccs a Seal.

I'm not confused. I see exactly what you are saying. The one thing left unknown though is how is your damage in raids and semantics of SoR/SoV use. But let's take your position and assume SoB and SoC are fine and that's what you should be using during raids. What you want is to make SoR and SoV not be attractive for raiding ret. Quick sample solution - make fanaticism not effect SoR and SoV. You'll nerf the judgment damage by not having it crit as much. Judgment will not be as good at keeping vengeance up. You'll cause a ton of threat with all that damage, threat your tank won't be able to keep up with. That's just one way.

Agree, if Fanatism and Rightnous Vangeance would not affect SoR/SoV, that would fix the ret problem SoR>SoB without nerfing the other specs.

That's the worst band-aid solution I've heard all day. By taking the threat reduction off those abilities, it doesn't solve the core problem - SoR is over-scaling and doing too much damage.

As an aside, can someone link or pm me the Spreadsheet they've been using to calculate SoR dps against SoB/SoC? I'm using one I got from here but I'd like another for reference.

Well, in point of fact, prot warrior soloing efficiency isn't much different from fury/arms. DPS is a bit lower, but with proper gearing (i.e., stacking massive block value) SS becomes a truly nasty soloing tool, and downtime is extremely low since you take very little damage (and consequently you get to use Victory Rush on 98% of mobs instead of 75%). My prot warrior solos with a mishmash of gear ranging from greens to the ZA shield, and I'm frequently outrunning the charge timer (15 seconds) when I do dailies.

There's a difference between dps and soloing speed/efficiency. A prot paladin puts out nowhere near the same single-target dps as a ret paladin, but by grabbing 3 mobs at once and leveraging Holy Shield and HotR, he can basically hit the same number of mobs killed per hour, or whatever metric you want to use for soloing.

It's true that not all specs are created equal when it comes to soloing. But in my view the devs have always tried to at least give each spec some tools to make soloing at least viable. Resto shamans get 30% anti-spell pushback from ES, and NS works on lightning bolt as well as heals. Resto druid talents have secondary effects that increase feral dps. Even holy priests get that free-instant-smite-after-a-crit talent if they want it.

I don't think the developers are concerned about whether Holy solos as quickly as Ret, but I'm sure they're going to make sure that all paladin specs can solo at least reasonably well.

What's so insane about it? I'd love to have quests where I can heal things to oblivion. Granted a DPS class wouldn't be able to do them as well with just bandaging, but that's what happened all the way until dailies; I can't kill crap as well as they can. And you're going to be leveling off the same nesingwary/nagrand type quests - go to the other end of the map and kill a million cows. The DPS specs will always be a bit faster at the cost of possible downtime, sure. But it should be comparable.

I'm not arguing for equality at all. I'm arguing for fun, using an example from vanilla and TBC launch. Yes, I can damn well kill things fast (as Holy) as well, now that I have S3 arena spell damage gear (and even if I didn't, the Healing --> Spell Damage conversion would give me around 75% as much). This meets the criteria for bearability. Contrast with level 60 (again as Holy) around Molten Bore in progression: I couldn't kill a god damn thing. Sure, I would also never ever die, but that was not fun. I once dueled a hunter for almost an hour outside of Ogrimmar because I had absolutely no DPS to speak of, but I could heal faster than the hunter could hurt me. That's what I mean by broken mechanics, and its something that needs to be avoided in Wrath.

Guys, I think the soloing/SoR debate has reached the point where people are agreeing on 90% and arguing over the remaining 10%. Regardless of what we think, the developers have their own ideas about soloing, and whatever those ideas are, it's not something we're going to change their minds on. It'll probably be easier on everyone's nerves if we just agree to disagree.

If you're on the PvE server, send me some mail (I'm "Cathelluh" there) and I'll hook you up. (This goes for anyone.)

Also, be sure to buy your 10-man Naxx badge shield from the vendor in Shatt while you can. (Not sure if we'll get to keep these once the "test" ends, but it's worth a shot.) EDIT: Errr... vendor in Dalaran.

Threat reduction is only one part of this change. Fanatism and Rightnous Vangeance change would also reduce SoR/SoV damage for ret spec.

I will be, although I haven't even hit 71 yet. Denogran on PVE alliance.

Cheers, but forgot to add i'm on the EU beta server (Colderra)

So any high level Blacksmith on this server please let know. Have enough mats to make the entire tempered saronite set.

Flyingtoastr wanted to add:

It's not that far off. If SoR/SoV would not benefit from vengeance that'd probably do the trick.

CS/DS add 16 attacks per minute. CS/DS effect on seals: [proc chance] * [proc effect] * 16


SoC:
proc chance: 7 PPM * weapon speed / 60
proc effect: 70% * weapon speed * AP bonus + SP bonus

SoB:
proc chance: 100%
proc effect: 35% * weapon speed * AP bonus

SoR:
proc chance: 100%
proc effect: weapon speed * (AP bonus + SP bonus)

SoV:
proc chance: 100%
proc effect: 1x stack of DoT + bonus damage * weapon speed (does it still have that bonus damage on a 5-stack?)

SoW/SoL:
proc chance: X PPM * weapon speed/60
proc effect: AP bonus + SP bonus


edit: misread your post a little.

Your post seems correct, Fiola ('cept it's weapon damage for SoC and SoB). But I don't understand the point you are trying to make.

That every single seal's bonus from CS/DS is weapon speed dependent.


If that's considered a problem for SoR, then it's a problem with the whole seal system.


Edit: This was the post I was thinking about:
SoR basically has the exact same mechanic as SoB - the difference is in the AP/SP/weapon damage coefficients.



They really need to give each seal its own niche:
SoR - the basic damage seal, reliable, scales with all types of gear
SoB - the weapon damage seal, reliable, good melee coefficients, self-damaging
SoC - another weapon damage seal like SoB, but trades reliability for more effect/no self-damage
SoV - this one is tough - make it better than SoR, and it replaces SoR; make it worse than SoR, and probably won't be used. The DoT mechanic is neat; .. but how to make it work?

Yes. Arguably it is a problem for the whole Seal system, and should be changed. Using lower dps weapons because they are slower was silly in the days of SoC, and I don't think it's a good idea to go back to that.

I think the key is the Judgements. If the the seal part of SoV does pretty much identical damage to SoR fully stacked, the first JoV is lower than the first JoR (with the new Judgements), but subsequent JoV's are higher. So set the breakpoint so that after the 3rd JoV or so SoV pulls ahead of SoR (probably 25-30s, because SoV needs time to stack to full).

Then we have SoR for levelling and short fights, and SoV for long fights.

At this point, why not just make Command a baseline ability? Then Blizzard could move Righteousness back into the realm of fast one-handers, with Command becoming the default two-hander Seal (at, say, somewhere around levels 21-30). Both could still maintain their PvP superiority over Blood and Vengeance (so no spec is left out in the cold), which, Blizzard could then turn into talented Seals that replace the two in PvE for deep Protection and Retribution specs.

How would that not fix everything? You no longer have to worry about Seals interfering with one another, as Righteousness and Vengeance could then scale in a manner that would have no bearing on Retribution Paladins (and vice-versa WRT Blood and Command), all the while providing Holy Paladins with two incredibly reasonable options available to them for free.

Quite honestly, I've been wondering why we need 3 different abilities (SoR, SoC, SoB) that all cause holy damage on a melee attack. Now, prior to WotLK, I could see a use for at least two: One melee-scaling seal for ret, and one SP-scaling seal for prot/holy.

But now that all 4 damage seals scale with both AP and SP, I really can't figure out why we'd need 3 abilities that are only slightly different, and one that is only noticeably different in a few situations. The current situation is a lot like the old shaman weapon imbues: 4 distinct but similar abilities that are mutually exclusive. The result, of course, was that 3 of those abilities were almost never used because windfury was the best one 99% of the time. I predict a similar outcome for seals in wrath, especially since all of them have the same scaling factors now.

What if, instead of trying to create a unique niche for all 4 damage seals (Not an easy task considering that we only have two roles devoted to hitting things, with the only variation being how hard they're supposed to hit things vs. how hard they get hit), blizzard just nixed 3 of them and left us with a tweaked SoR? Just make it based off weapon damage+a very small portion of SP, and allow it to crit. Since prot now favors melee DPS weapons, it should still deliver good TPS, and with scaling tied mainly to weapon damage instead of AP/SP, ret wouldn't be seeing such insane numbers. Toss in a boost to the SP scaling in tier 5+ holy, and the result is a single damage seal that works well for everyone. Plus, it would open up a talent and a baseline ability for new additions that would see more regular use. Hell, they could even call divine plea the replacement for SoB/SoV and just give ret a new talent (the 100% judgment damage to stunned targets that was suggested earlier would be good), that would be fine with me.

I like where this is going. Instead of 100% damage to stunned targets, you could just have Seal of Command become "Enables your Seal of Righteousness ability to critically hit."

Protection could have SoV tied into Touched by the Light instead of the 30% Crit healing. "Seal of Righteousness hits have a 33/66/100% chance to apply Holy Vengeance, which deals ??? additional Holy damage over 18 sec. Holy Vengeance can stack up to 5 times."

I love the idea, but I'm not sure how feasible it would be. I can't imagine Blizzard developers completely scrapping 3 of their Seals. I know they got rid of Seal of the Crusader, but it was only marginally useful.

I think they serve their niches well enough (aside from the fact that they're balanced poorly at the moment).

As Coriel said, for one-handers SoR is the things-that-die-fast seal, and SoV is the long-fight seal. For two-handers, Command is the PvP seal and Blood is the PvE seal.

The reason why windfury was the only worthwhile shaman totem was because none of the shaman totems behaved differently for different speed weapons. Windfury (weapon) is a 20% chance for two extra attacks with an AP bonus, so using a faster weapon doesn't change the value of it; you get smaller procs but you get more of them.

But the seals are far better differentiated. The fact that SoR is brokenly good at the moment is a balance issue, and the answer (IMO) is for Blizzard to decouple the level scaling from the gear scaling. But fundamentally, the system is fine and if it's balanced properly there's a good use for each seal.

It's about a different damage delivery method, to give you the choice of different "feels". Reliable damage? Bursty damage? If balanced to do roughly equal damage considering opportunity costs, you can pick the one that you enjoy more. (ie: fun).


Look at rogue abilities: Hemo, Sinister Strike, Backstab/Mutilate. You only use one of those attacks; they all scale with AP, dealing physical damage. They are in a sense redundant - but they give you different combat options and let you play in a way that's more fun. (Stab in the face, or stab from behind? Daggers, or big swords? etc)


I think different damage seals gives us a similar mechanic, and it's why I'd prefer the SoR fix to leave it useful to Ret paladins. (as a reliable damage seal, vs. a reliable self-damaging seal vs. an unreliable damage seal vs. a reliable dot seal)


I personally think balance is just a matter of coefficients. Blizzard has quite a few variables for tweaking: base damage, AP scaling, SP scaling, and weapon damage scaling.

(In the long run, I predict AP/SP scaling will be merged, but that's probably a long way off. The expansion after WotLK, perhaps?)