This is the same build that I asked about. I would love to be able to use this, but as other posters have stated, there is no gear that would work well for this in WotLK. All of the gear is either +str/+AP or +int/+SP.

It's still necessary by all means. Running in sunwell prot gear myself (overgearing instances) you do find yourself oom a fair bit... HOWEVER my dps was also geared from sunwell, and every single class/spec is doing more damage period. If they go all out, you need to go all out too (blizzard's built-in 'omen' stinks right now btw), and that means using everything you can and hoping you take enough damage to keep the mana flowing.

I expect that at 80 in raids mana won't be as big an issue, and you'll be using a rotation similar to now, with more gcd's to use. 80 5 man's you might find yourself oom between pulls as is the case in live now... but that says to me there is a different problem (makes BoSanc return mana on block/parry/dodge thanks).

Adding on to levk's reply, for 23 talent points you're getting 5% spell crit, extra SP from Sheath, and the HoT on crits, which draws the most attention.
Using the 1500AP figure, that's 500SP. In order to get that much from Holy Guidance, you'd need ~1430 intellect.
Also, you can't say you're wasting more points in Retribution than you would with a traditional 51/20 build. Comparing the two, a Sheath build wastes 15 points in not-so-useful Retribution talents. The other option wastes 14 points in not-so-useful Protection talents.

PoJ is pretty sweet. There's a lot of overlap with ret on the raid buffs, if there's no ret in the raid there's really not that much of a waste. And honestly putting points into stuff like crusade is certainly warmer than putting them in toughness. Compared to prot where most of it is a waste.

Not sure I'm interested in reviving the whole conversation. But knowing (and not just expecting) a significant decrease in potential burst and consistent damage brings a new wrinkle to the question of melee utility (snare/interrupt/ms).

I wonder if he means we should expect to scale damage exactly as we are now, and that our better healing and better mana regeneration is what we should expect as improvements in ret-pvp. (of course, the "it takes mana to make mana" is a bit of stretch with so many drains around).

So, on the prot playstyle and prot soloing. In short: it needs some more work, but the basic outline is good and it's pretty fun.

Basically in TBC, there are two ways to solo with prot. The first is the classic AoE-farming, where you gather up as many melee mobs as you can and burn them down with HS and consecration. If that's not practical, fall back to the second method, which is a big slow 2-h and SoR, and just melee and enjoy the extra damage from extra Reckoning procs. Both are reasonably viable (and AoE farming is extremely efficient in specific spots), but neither one is terribly interactive.

HotR and ShR add a lot more viability to the "middle ground" where you pick up 3-4 mobs, including casters, and actively smash them down while they're also beating themselves against holy shield. So far, it seems to work pretty well and it feels good.

HotR has a satisflying "clank-clank-clank" sound effect, and a graphic of a hammer flying from target to target. If you zoom in far enough, you can see a dusty golden cloud floating on the targets for a few seconds after they get hit, like the residue from the impact of holy power. It's neat.

The bad part of the HotR effects is that every throw is preceded by about a half second of resurrection/chain-heal effects around you. So you hit the button, and there's a brief bit of glowy ground around you while you hear the loud hum of the "rez noise" and then the hammer flies out. It's not a good effect, and it gives the sense that the hammer has a cast time, which detracts from the melee-like feel of it (even though it really is instant-cast). It also makes you think you're lagging when you first encounter the effect, which doesn't help either.

Damage-wise it doesn't quite feel powerful enough. It's bugged right now and it's dealing physical damage instead of holy, so it'll probably feel stronger once that gets fixed. And you do get a free seal effect from it, so SoR+HotR is reasonably effective, or you get a small heal from SoL, or you can do the SoV trick on 3 mobs with it, etc, so when you consider that it's probably better than it feels right now. But it does feel a bit wimpy right now, so this bears some watching as the development proceeds.

The other thing is: is it a ranged attack (thrown weapon) or a melee attack? It uses the ranged hit table and the animation suggests it's a throw. It requires you to be within 5 yards of the primary target, which suggests it's a melee attack. But the bounce targets can be 10 yards away from each other (that's a guesstimate, but the bounce range is definitely longer than the primary attack range).

It's not that this is a problem in terms of balance or in terms of being able to use the ability, but it leads to an inconsistent feeling. If they lengthened the primary range to 10 yards, it would definitely feel like a short-range hammer throw. I can understand that they don't want the 41- and 51-point talents to both be "throwing" attacks, but I think a small range extension on HotR would on balance make things better aesthetically. (There are still a lot of differences between the feel of AS and the feel of HotR anyway: cast time, range, cooldown, secondary effect, animation, sound, etc.)

Anyway, overall HotR feels very nice so far, and with a little work it can go from "very nice" to "really cool".

Shield of Righteousness is similar: the basic concept is good, it just needs some work.

First of all, it feels very powerful right now. It's difficult to tell how powerful it's supposed to be, because there are a couple of odd things affecting it. For one, Shield Spec isn't affecting block value from strength For another, TBC gear has a lot of block value on it, which WotLK gear probably won't have. (The auto-blocker trinket has 59BV on it, which you'd need about 100 strength to get.) So getting a handle on its power is going to be difficult until some of the bugs get straightened out and we get to real high-level WotLK tanking gear. But at the moment in my T6+ gear I can get 1200-1600 non-crit damage from this (depending on how much I "sell out" other stats to go for block value). Even at level 75 that's a nice chunk of damage for a 6-second cooldown (and unlike HotR, it is full holy right now).

The look-and-feel of it, however, needs a lot of work. Sound effects are nonexistent right now so far as I can tell; hopefully that's just a case of NYI. At first I thought the visual effects hadn't been implemented yet, because I didn't see Cath making any special move when I used ShR. When I zoomed in and panned the camera around a bit, I saw the effect: basically a glowing golden mini-shield rises out of the surface of your shield, and fires a wide glowy gold beam at the target. I don't mean to be unkind to whoever designed the effect, but to be honest it's terrible. I suppose they were probably reluctant to just plug in the shield slam animation, but the tooltip does say "Slam the target with your shield" so you really ought to be able to see your character actually slamming with the shield. Ideally we'll get a slam animation together with some kind of glowy effect on the shield, but even just using the shield slam animation alone would be a tremendous improvement.

Also, this is kind of a minor point, but the name of it really should be changed to "Shield of the Righteous", so that (a) it has a nice symmetry with Hammer of the Righteous, and (b) so that it has a different acronym from Seal of Righteousnes.

But anyway, the overall feel of the abilities and the way they work together with the rest of the Prot tree feels good right now. For soloing, what I find most effective so far is to gather three or four mobs at once and cycle through ShR/HotR/HS/judgement, and sometimes cons/exo/HW depending on the mobs. I habitually keep V-targeting turned on (for multi-mob tanking reasons) and that makes it easy to always aim ShR at the highest-hp mob in the group.

Mana management requires some work, but mainly it means switching off between SoR and SoW situationally. Like the current version of prot, a lot of the damage is not seal-based, so switching to SoW doesn't cut down on your grinding speed all that much.

The biggest differences I've noticed between Ret and Prot soloing (beyond the obvious) are:

1) Ret is "complete" at 70, and Prot isn't. The major additions to Ret in WotLK are DS and JotW, and both are talents, so right out of the gates a level 70 Ret paladin has basically all the same features as a level 80 Ret paladin. Prot, by contrast, is missing ShR, which is a major part of its toolkit. There's a big difference between Prot soloint with ShR and without -- so much so that I would really recommend any Prot paladin who plans to do any soloing to just spec Ret for 70-75. You can tank just fine for leveling instances as Ret; the threat generation is just as good, and the mitigation should be good enough that any non-stupid healer should be able to keep you alive, and you won't be gimped for soloing.

Once you hit 75 and get ShR, Ret is still faster and more efficient for soloing, but the gap is much smaller, and more importantly, Prot actually starts to feel fun at that point (which hopefully is why you're playing the game.) If I were designing the game I'd probably switch the level requirements for ShR and DP (ShR at 71, DP at 75) which would probably also make holy soloing a bit more interesting and fun as well.

2) Mana. As I said earlier, JotW basically turns your mana bar into a rage bar. If all you do is judge/CS/DS/HoW as Ret, you'll pretty much never have mana issues. Use bandages for healing and you can safely ignore your mana bar 99% of the time. (And for the other 1%, spending 6 seconds with Divine Plea will fix it.) You'll burn through more mana if you're consecrating, or if you're fighting undead and using exo/HW, but it's still really really hard to run into mana issues as Ret. (Well, at least with the mostly-T6-epic gear I've been using so far; I should probably reserve judgement until I get to the point where my gear matches the mobs more closely.) It takes a lot of work to run into mana issues soloing with Ret; JotW is really that good.

For Prot, you do have to pay more attention and manage your mana a bit more. Running a prot soloing rotation with SoW up chugs along reasonably fast and it's net mana-profitable, so it's not like you have to stop and drink aside from rare emergencies, or to top yourself off before trying an elite or a big pull. Against undead I'm using SoW about 80% of the time. Against non-undead, more like 50%, with SoR the rest of the time. (I haven't tried any SoV cleverness for soloing yet.) But it does slow you down a bit compared to Ret, which just keeps tearing through shit at full speed without any mana issues for the most part.

I don't honestly know whether this says more about Ret or about Prot; I guess it depends on how fast the devs want us to be able to grind through solo mobs. They might decide they need to nerf the soloing potention of JotW (an easy change would be change it to 20% per target on up to 3 targets, which would leave it largely unchanged for groups but make it weaker for solo play). I can see why they might do that for balance reasons, but I think it would be unfortunate, because it would seriously detract from that "rage bar" feel, which is a big part of what makes Ret so much fun right now.

The other possibility is buffing Prot's mana-sufficiency. There have been complaints of mana issues while tanking, although it's hard to tell how much of that is "real" and how much of it is just a result of the mismatch between TBC gear and WotLK mechanics. But, assuming there is a mana issue for prot and they want to do something about it, this is one popular idea:

What I like about this idea is that it kind of addresses the whole "the more you mitigate the less mana you have" factor of Prot right now. If a block returns, 10% of the amount blocked as mana, that replace the mana lost from non-healing through SA, making blocking a "mana-neutral" action for tanking. A higher percentage would make blocking "profitable" for tanking. And any non-zero number would make blocking a mana-profit while soloing. If this was linked to Holy Shield, then the maximum return would be 10% of block value per second (8 charges, 8 second CD) or whatever percentage they decide on.

Anyway, in sum: Prot feels good right now, and with some tweaking it can be made to feel really fun and exciting. The soloing experience is pretty dull until 75, and pretty good after that, though still inferior to Ret in efficiency at least.

I've only tanked one instance unfortunately, at level 71. My T6 tanking gear badly outgears the instance in one sense (much higher ilevel than the introductory instances are geared for) but at the same time it also didn't match up with the new mechanics at all. I tanked just fine, but it's extremely hard to draw any conclusions from that (even more so because HotR is still bugged and not doing holy damage.) But for what it's worth, I ended up using consecration more as a "gathering" tool to get initial aggro and pull mobs to me, but using the hammer and HS for the grunt threat-building work after that.

And HotR doesn't seem to be affected by Reckoning (which is what you'd expect since it seems to be treated as a ranged attack.)

As someone pointed out, a holy/sheath raid build would get a sizeable amount of spellpower just from incidental AP from raid buffs. Battle Shout plus BoM plus UR (which I think is raidwide now?) gets you up to 1500AP pretty easily (using level 70 gear/buffs), which is 450 spellpower, or around +850 healing under the old system. Nothing to sneeze at, and you're also picking up the extra 5% crit from Conviction along the way.

What I find kind of unappealing about that, at least aesthetically, is that the sheath benefit doesn't scale. Since a healer will be wearing sta/int/spell/mp5 healing gear, the AP will all be from raid buffs, which won't change as you gear up. Basically it's worth the same amount of spellpower regardless of where you are in the raid progression. That doesn't feel right.

Now about the gear (which ties in with this):

Between the 1.9 talent revision and the first half of TBC, there was a lot of what I used to call "generic paladin gear" which basically was a combination of str/int/sta/spellpower/mp5. The Judgement set was the most familiar armor of this kind, but there were some Naxx trash drops that followed the same pattern, as well as a lot of the TBC quest reward blues, like the X-52 Technician's helm. The original Hammer of the Naaru was str/int/sta/spelldamage, which made it a very nice "fooling-around" weapon for prot or holy paladins. That's the sort of thing that would work very neatly for a sheath-type holy build, and make it genuinely progress.

But really, if I were doing the class design (or redesign, I guess) I think a more elegant way to do it would be to make the AP->SP conversion a baseline part of the class. Unify the class around the AP->SP conversion. Bear with me on this. The effects would be:

1) Ret would stay the same. If necessary for balance, you could set the baseline conversion lower than 30% and have talents in Ret to increase it.

2) Remove the stamina->SP conversion from prot. It doesn't feel right anyway; it's like the developers knew they needed to give prot a source of SP, and they just picked stamina because it's different from holy and ret and because prot paladins like stam. But there's no real internal logic to it: SoL makes sense for Ret because it converts physical power into spiritual power, and Holy Guidance makes sense because a holy paladin derives his spiritual power from meditation and mental training. But there's no real thematic connection between stamina and spellpower. So remove the stam->SP conversion from prot and just let prot get its SP from AP; this unifies prot threat generation around AP/str, which makes sense.

3) Holy could probably keep Holy Guidance in addition to the new baseline conversion (perhaps changing the values on both for balance if necessary) Holy gear would then come with a mix of sp and strength, giving it more melee punch and also making its judgements a bit more powerful. (Healing plate is going to be unique to one spec of one class anyway, so they can itemize it to fit any design for the holy paladin spec.)

Basically what I'm driving at is that this system of each spec having its own SP conversion seems kind of haphazard and contrived. Basically, Ret's conversion would work just fine for Prot, so having Prot use a different conversion seems like a case of "being different just to be different" without adding any real flavor. Unify the class around an AP->SP conversion for all specs, rebalance the trees to mesh, adjust gear to match (healing gear especially) and overall I think it would be a much more elegant system.

Anyway, that's enough rambling from me for now.

I sure hope Exorcism becomes usable on Non-demon/undead, because that Glyph would be great.

It would also give us a better interrupt than mages, since it would be on a 15-second cooldown vs. their 30 second. Not as powerful as Rogue/Warrior/Shammy, but i don't know if it should be more powerful than a mage, who's been able to counterspell for 90% of their life.

Either way: Glyphs rule, happy to have them. Can't wait to try the new Ret one's out.

The origin of the animation is actually from the center of your character's chest. For most races this comes down to looking like it comes from your shield, but it's very noticeable that it actually originates from your chest when playing a male blood elf. Male blood elves have a very defensive pose while fighting with a one-hander and shield, with their body turned towards the side so that their shield and shield arm fully absorb the blows they take. Unfortunately due to how the animation works, this also means that the animation for Shield of Righteousness fires off to the side into nowhere, which is quite disappointing.

I'd much prefer a simple shield slam animation with the addition of the shield glowing upon impact; perhaps add the same kind of glow as Holy Shield has upon casting or even an entirely new effect. And obviously, there needs to be some form of sound effect.

I, for one, would welcome a return to exactly this kind of itemization. Judgement Armor was my favorite set not just for the looks (which were completely bad-ass), but for the playstyle. Needed to heal something? You could do it in Judgement. Needed to whack something with a big hammer? You could do it in Judgement. Needed to melt some faces with Holy Shock, JoR, and Consecrate? You could do it in Judgement. It truly was the handyman's armor.

Unfortunately, the current trend seems to be for hyper-specialization in both talents and in gear, so I'm not holding out too much hope for hybridized armor or weapons on loot tables or quest rewards. But maybe we'll see a few pieces here and there on reputation or badge vendors.

"Better" is a relative term here. Mages do get a longer lockout period with Counterspell, and have the option of talenting into a full silence effect to go with it. And don't forget that a mage also has Polymorph, which is a completely spammable ability that serves quite well as an emergency interrupt for any spell with a long cast time. Just follow it up with an immediate fireblast or ice lance if you don't want the heath regen to kick in.

Glyphs seem like they are going to be much more powerful than mere stat increases. Perhaps there will be glyphs that add a spell breaker effect to CS, or an interrupt, or a snare, or MS. It's too early to tell, but I like the potential of the Glyph system. It allows the developers to fill in any class weakness without requiring new abilities or large content patches. It also creates choices for a player, i.e. can have a snare on CS or an interrupt, but not both. I like options.

I'm not sure if any of this is outdated, but I thought Seal of Justice was changed to a guaranteed stun and Crusader Strike and Divine Storm were guaranteed to proc seals. Doesn't this effectively give Ret Paladins an interrupt, at least as far as PvP is concerned?

I guess the SoJ change was just a wish list item that got mixed with the real reports. It's too bad, as I was a bit excited that SoJ would finally have a use.

I've been thinking of and playing with a somewhat similar (in concept) build, but more offensively focused.

Basically, it's a really gimmicky build, mostly focused on 2v2/3v3. The idea is to wear full ret gear with a spellpower 1H/shield, relying mostly on judgments, seals, ShR, and possibly shock for damage output, and using infusion procs and shock to keep your team healed. If you played with really control-heavy classes with high burst damage and good survivability (i.e. rogue/mage), you could probably get away with playing an all out offense and keep so much pressure on the opposing team that instant heals, BoF, and BoP would keep your team alive for enough time to get a kill. Plus, if you played with an ice mage, every deep freeze would give some sickening burst potential if you swap to a 2-hander and judge SoC right as the shatter combo lands.

No idea if it would be good or not, but I've been having fun playing it

Also, RE: going back to old-school paladin itemization (with changes to support it), I would welcome it, although it does present some potentially ugly balancing issues (namely some sort of 20/0/51 ret paladin with near the healing capability of a Holy paladin, but that could be fixed by tweaking talent placements I'm sure)

Exactly. Judgement wasn't the best healing gear, or the best tanking gear, or the best dps gear, but it was decently good for all three, and gave you some hybrid flexibility.

What I have in mind is tweaking the mechanics so that that a more advanced version of Judgement-style gear is actually the preferable paladin healing gear while also allowing good physical dps. This would serve as the primary gear type for holy paladins, and as a situational secondary set for ret and prot paladins.

Seal of Justice is somewhat good for a Holy Paladin in PvP, if you can do a few autoattacks between healing, although with SoR's scaling perhaps it is worth it to try to dps.


I would like to see a new Judgement 2.0 set, but I don't think it will happen, since the devs don't like extra sets, even though Holy Paladins gear is the sole outlier.

And what with having just said that Holy gear is already unique, Cathela's very interesting points suddenly have merit. What if Blizzard were to ditch pure spell power armor in favor of deliberate hybridization? I'm not suggesting removing spell power entirely, just itemizing it along with strength. This would also serve to consolidate Holy with Prot in terms of gear desirability, provided Prot has some method of filling in the holes for defense and avoidance stats. The only real downside I see is that Blizzard would probably be forced to monkey around with the stat budgets (ie, reduce the item budget "price" of Spell Power when combined with Strength or AP) to fit all the necessary stats in all the necessary quantities.

This is still way out there in terms of actual probability of occurance, but it seems at least thematically sound.

[e] And right about now is when I realize I basically just rewrote the entirety of Cathela's suggestions in regards to itemization. Beaten to the punch is bad enough, but by eleven hours is just tragic. Moral of the story: Posting at 3 am is bad, mmkay?

It seems blasphemous since almost every paladin loved it so much, but Judgement was terrible set. You were better off wearing a different set of gear for whatever you wanted to do. Non-class specific tanking, healing, and DPS loot from MC, BWL, or even ZG was all better than judgement; it just took up three times the space.

I understand the desire to want to have a set of armor that is "universal," that that isn't realistic. If the choice is between universal armor that makes me sub-par at every job, or having three sets of armor, I'd rather just buy bigger bags. Redemption was the only paladin set in vanilla WoW that had any sense behind its itemization.

I have not yet seen this posted in the thread:

Emphasis mine
Source: MMO-Champion - World of Warcraft Guides and Raid Strategies

I guess none of us are really that surprised. It will be interesting to see how they deal with the problem.

I won't argue that our dps is not too good. I do hope they think that we've got at least 3 scenarios where you need to balance the incoming nerfs:

- AoE: With Consecration (unlimited targets) and DS we can do very respectable AoE damage. If you use SoV you can build stacks on your secondary targets with DS too! Even if you use more traditional dps-seal you'll get nice extra dps. Maybe our AoE damage is a bit too much, can't really compare at the moment. MASSIVELY better than what our AoE damage is at the moment in live.

- Single-target burst: Judgement, Auto-attack (+seal), CS (+seal) and DS (+seal) in a bit more than 3 seconds is HUGE amount of damage. This is the PvP-concern mostly. I believe this is their major "problem" with paladin at the moment.

- Single-target sustained: Mana is not a problem at the moment so we can go mostly "all out". This was seldom possible in TBC. DS is not that good for single target dps and judgement has decent cooldown. Apart from one new instant ability and heavily buffed judgements this is not that far off from TBC.

I fear that if they nerf our single-target burst severely they are cutting too much single-target sustained dps too.

The target will be Judgements, so most of our single target burst will remain intact especially considering SoC now procs off special weapon attacks. That in itself has the potential to boost our burst damage by a significant margin

Considerng most of the random whines are abut single target burst, it SHOULDN'T remain intact. As long as we can (reliably) down people from 100%->0% in one stun they are continuing to nerf us.

Judgements are the right right target, yes. Even something like -30% judgement damage wouldn't really surprise me. We still haven't seen fixed JotW though so that might need some tuning.

I have a pally i copied over at 66 to test exactly this sort of thing (currently an alt, possibly becoming new main in WotLK). He's 72 now, and i've upgraded everything from my old outlands levelling clownsuit, so i'm using entirely level-appropriate gear (all quest rewards, mostly greens with a few blues sprinkled in, haven't had any luck on instance drops yet), and mana is only an issue if i'm going all-out aoeing groups with consecrate/holy wrath/etc. The only times i've had to drink have been the aforementioned AoEing situations (before i got Divine Plea), and when i respecced prot to tank an instance (where i wasn't even getting much mana return from spiritual attunement on the trash, as we had a T6-geared ret paladin pulling aggro constantly and basically tanking everything...).

For the record, in Northrend quest rewards at 72, my current stats as ret are 1579 unbuffed AP (1961 with talented BoM), 24% crit, 1.64% haste, 96 hit rating (5.26%), 9 expertise (-2.25% dodge/parry), and a bit of armour penetration scattered around here and there. I could tweak all of those numbers in various ways thanks to the masses of redundant quest rewards with slightly differing stats.