I wouldn't love to see retri get MS, but a spellinterrupt and/or slow effect on the other hand. Personally i find it unreasonable to assume that retri will go live as the biggest burst/dps machines in WOTLK, if only because of the RNG or just the prospect of paladins owning PvE dps.

On the other hand, if we don't go live like that - we'll need abilities that allow us to stay on target or utility significant enough to make up for them. 50% healing reduction will always be there to set us apart from warriors/rouges/DK, they don't need exclusive rights to ALL the melee abilities to set them apart from the rest (although, these days - only retri).

I've been testing this spec on the Beta, and i gotta say it's very powerful.

The synergy between the ret talents and holy go very well togheter, lots of crit heals and you get the added bonus of the HOT afterward and the mana return of JOTW as well. As lv 80 i was planning for increased range on judgements for arena use to assist dps with judgments/shocks and get instant heals and mana back out of it, but now i'm thinking going for repentance might be good too.


I'd be a little supprised if the talents would go live like that, imo they should have more attractive talents for end of tree but i guess this way makes alot of specs possible.

In what way (support wise) is a rogue locking down the target for casters to nuke disimilar to ret paladins supporting with Freedom and Protection? Both assist their party to reach the ultimate goal of defeating the opponents, albeit one is an offensive role and the other defensive. You bring a DPS specced paladin to DPS, if all you wanted were the short term buffs, spec would not matter and even a prot paladin could have a go.

If ret paladins were meant to be defensive support and DPS, then there is an arguement for more tools of the same vein. Even then it would not solve the issue that we being a melee class, have no way of closing in the gap between a fleeing target apart from a 20 yard incapacitate and a 10 yard stun, whilst other classes are getting more/efficient escape tools. If the devs want us to use said cooldowns in such a fashion, then our burst should not be villified since we have such small windows to actually dish out the pain.

The bolded comment shows the farce that is the current situation, where the 'pure' classes are so good that you don't even need to consider bringing anything else. I'm not asking for a complete reversal of existing conditions, but is a mostly even playing field too much to hope for?

Edit for spelling.

For those interested in tanking, check my maths here on the Protection thread.

The most interesting finding is that you still do more TPS with a spelldamage weapon (Titansteel Guardian) over a melee weapon (titansteel bonecrusher), due to SP weaps melee dps increasing.

Just something I thought up in 5 minutes, giving retadins an ability to stay close to people while keeping a distinct flavor from warriors/rogues. Feel free to critique.

Stand and Fight!

30 yards range, instant cast, 20 seconds duration, 1 minute cooldown

Target enemy is affected by a challenge from the paladin. As long as they remain further than 10 yards away, they take X holy damage every 2 seconds.

Make X sufficient to give the target pause for thought, and make this physical (i.e. undispellable and unsilenceable).

It's like a variety pack of lunch meat that all looks and tastes kinda the same, one is Turkey Baloney, one is Turkey Salami, but its all Turkey.

Going back to something that took some resonance a few pages back, they need to start with defining the roles of each seal and then differentiating and balancing them after the fact.

Variety yes, but variety with purpose, like a drawer of fine cutlery, not a pile of nick-nacks.

I think that's an interesting concept. Would probably take a lot of tweaking, and I don't know how open they'd be to actually implementing something like that, but it would help out without having much overlap with other classes' abilities.

On a side note, with all the discussion of the removal of buff stacking it's been mentioned that there's a possibility that battle shout + BoM would no longer stack. Depending on how they tweak all the raid buffs, we might find that the sheath AP>SP conversion for a holy paladin won't be that compelling. I'm interested in seeing just how raid buffs will shape up.

That would be a real shame. Building synergy between as many other players as possible is one of the best "team" features in WOW.

I yield freely to your experience in arenas, and I don't disagree with any point of the above - with the exception that I don't think that, even given any two of the above abilities, we'd eclipse the other classes. (Maybe feral, for the reason you mentioned). I have no way to quantify that. It's just opinion.

We'll never control a fight like a rogue, a pull vs a charge is such a new ability but I can see so many applications where it, also, would be just devastating - and we'll never have the longevity or the burst of an arms warrior. I understand the concept of spec vs class. They do only have one option - dps. But that option is also their only role. In my case, this is a different role - and I suppose that fundamentally, I don't understand what's wrong with this role being competitive with other classes in the same role.

So the old DK quote did also intend us. I imagine they mean fixing JotW and perhaps adding something deep in ret to make us more viable as mana batteries.

What would you do if the paladin casts it on someone and then runs away from them?

Assuming X is less than the damage the paladin could do in melee range, it would make no sense for him to run away after casting this, except possibly against other melee, who all have tools to catch him.

It does however pose the problem that people would rather take X damage than go into melee with the paladin, which probably means that it needs some sort of secondary effect - such as this damage being able to proc the currently active seal, for example.

EDIT:
Also thought about this. It could be akin to a totem, though if it is killable its health would need to be significant enough that it could not be easily negated that way. I.e. an "earthbind totem" that doesn't actually snare you, but punishes you if you go too far away.

This is giving ret paladins a powerful dot, and in pvp it can't be anything but totally overpowered (dealing as much damage as a geared ret paladin in melee range), or useless (no reason to "pause for thought" since staying in melee you'll take more damage than running).

You could just have whatever the penalty is for being further than X away from the flag apply to the paladin as well. Maybe have the ability create the flag at your target's feet, so the onus is on you to get over there?

And rather than damage, why not a snare effect? Either your target gets to be in a 20-yard circle and have full speed movement within that circle, or they get to go outside the circle and get snared.

Apply that to a healing paladin, you don't do that much damage, and whatever damage you do is just as well done from 20 yards. And your goal is to kite stuff anyway. Unless it's yet another something you want to waste talent points on at 30+ ret.

Another thing I was thinking about is the talent trees as a whole. The ret tree has great stuff to spec into for various reasons at points 5, 12 (for prot), 18, 23, 28, and full out. I think it's great, the ret tree is perfect, it's probably the best tree of any class.

Now look at holy, you're either going to see people specing full out there in at the very least 43 points or nothing at all. From the bottom up, there's seals of the pure. It's very nice and I'd love to spec into there but as a healer no template I come up with takes the talent, other than sacrificing one point from spiritual focus because of improved concentration, which doesn't really count. With current state of things ret would want it, but it's the general sentiment of people that it shouldn't be this way. Prot very much wants it, but with how tight prot builds are because of top prot bloat and necessity for parry from ret, a prot template would rarely include this. I don't know maybe they should remove this entirely.

And what would cross specs want from holy? Aura mastery for one, but it should be baseline at this point anyway. What else? How would rets look at healing light? Unyielding faith? Blessed hands? Maybe even light's grace - I certainly think it's becoming less of a staple for deep holy and more of an expected healing talent if you're ever to heal anything at all. I know as ret divine strength is very strong, but what combination would entice you enough to cross spec into holy (maybe not as a pve build?) It's much harder to entice prot with deflection where it is, but perhaps prot builds are supposed to be less flexible, or are they?

Cross-specing into prot as holy is certainly lacking the oomph factor than ret for me personally. Looking at it objectively there's the same reasons to go prot at 5 (for ret), 11, 18, 20, and even 27. But you just don't get anything cool along the way and kings is necessary and should be baseline. Cooldown reductions on very long cooldown abilities, passive abilities.

It's weird how it's turned around - make all tier 3 one pointers baseline. What do you guys think about this?

EDIT: I should add that making sheath-like talent in holy for rets isn't a good idea since pve rets just crunch the numbers and it's either better or worse than having divine storm, I don't think it's good either way. Just pure pvp toy talents.

I don't know - with the melee->spell crit change and Sheathe, I can easily see me getting Spiritual Focus for my PVP build, and possibly Healing Light. Not sure how long that will last, but it's definitely one of the first things I'm going to try.

Ret will still want to go 8 points into prot. In a pure dps build, you're going to have 8 points left over. They have to go into something.

It's funny to me that somehow we've gone full circle - Toaster was saying that there was enough low hanging fruit in the Ret tree that it's dangerous to a ret raider because a Holy build can easily replace most of their functionality.

Days later, we come up with the concept that the other builds are too weak in the middle when compared to Ret - so much so that every holy build is going to be picking up the utility in the ret talents in their cookie cutter builds.

Same coin, other side. I realize the conclusion is still conjecture, it's just funny that this is the same exact argument with more numbers.

Edit: Picking nits aside, whole heartedly agree that Kings needs to be baseline. It's time we get the same sort of consideration that the other classes have received in terms of must have group talents. Aura Mastery - as long as totems are 30 yards, I think we can kiss this one good bye.

I heal so much now, and it's a struggle - if i see ANY light at the end of the tunnel to be able to throw a significant heal (i.e. do in one heal what I now have to do in three), I'm going to take it. I feel like eve as ret, we're balanced against our baseline healing, and right now I'm not really able to make use of it.

I might end up going 18/53 - but it'll be a concession on my part. I can't keep Righteous Fury up in any useful situation, Hand of Freedom hasn't run to duration in so long that I couldn't even tell you what it is. A 30 s stun is nice. I've had it before. I'd rather just be able to heal for a change.

You do know that they've changed how spell casting pushback works right?

To quote blue: "The first and second hit will add .5 secs each to the cast time. All hits after the second will have no effect."

That means you can heal while being bombarded with hits as ret with no spiritual focus with a maximum penalty of +1 sec cast time (assuming no actual interrupt ability is used).

A 2.5 sec cast lengthened to 3.5 seconds is equivalent to a 30% penalty in HPS.
A 1.5 sec cast lengthened to 2.5 seconds is equivalent to a 40% penalty in HPS.


Obviously, how much that's worth depends on how much you plan to heal... for occasional off-healing, you can skip the talent with minimal loss, but I'm planning to grab it.

Yeah I was looking at that as well. Partial pushback resistance will make a difference now as well - the way I see it on live it's either 100% or it isn't. Which is why I was thinking they could bring healing light to first tier, 2 points filler in spiritual focus which are actually useful because it brings your maximum pushback to .7 seconds without conc and .4 seconds with conc, then you have unyielding faith, and suppose they move blessed hands here. From here you will go back to prot for divine strength, or sacrifice another point and go for illumination. And then you could drop light's grace a tier at 25 point requirement, above divine favor. Maybe those two together would make people think about giving up divine storm, or maybe they won't.

Hmm.. yes I did read that. Hadn't internalized it yet.

Stupid work.

You seem to be forgetting that Enhancement Shaman and Feral Druids both have snares, both can break snares, both have interrupts, and both can instantly swap forms to be 40% faster. You said yourself that Enhancement Shaman, even though they have a Snare and an Interrupt, they aren't taking the roles of Warriors and Rogues.

The Big Three is nothing more than The Big One, a Healing Debuff.


Giving feedback on the "Stand and Fight" suggestion,
When you think of this spell being used in conjunction with Death and Decay (DoT + chance for Horror), it seems a little too powerful.
This ability isn't keeping people close to Paladins, rather, it's penalizing them for being far away. Unless the damage done is significant, I don't see it compelling anyone to actually 'stand and fight'.
I do think Taunt should be usable in PvP, though, but that's more along the lines of a peeling ability.