I am curious, have any retribution- or holy-specced paladins tried maintanking the leveling dungeons (without respeccing, but in tank gear obviously)? Blizzard keeps saying that they want offspecs to be able to tank the normal dungeons, I am wondering how well this works. Certainly, with Imp RF going baseline and with both ret and holy getting spellpower via talents, threat generation should be better. What about mitigation?

Mitigation is fairly easy to calculate. As ret you will be missing out on 10% avoid, 10% armor, lots of blocking value/chance, Ardent Defender, 6% damage reduction from RF and some stamina. I would say that you take something like 40-50% more damage than a prot specced paladin. Your threat should be great considering how strong Divine Storm would be for tanking threat and you will have a infinite mana pool (JOTW + taking lots of damage) so you should be able to chuck around every spell you have on cooldown. 50% more damage is rough, but in normal difficulty dungeons it should really be no problem to deal with as long as your healer drinks between each pull. Once you have epic gear you would be excellent for tanking a normal dungeon since your mana bar actually becomes the limiting factor at that point. I would bet though that heroic dungeons will be exceptionally hard for a ret/holy paladin to tank until they outgear the instance significantly.

Thanks for all those details

Well, I don't see them making changes to the itemization system just for the benefit of paladins. What I'm hoping for (even though it seems like a pretty long shot) is to see some combination of scaling for paladin abilities, plus talents, that makes a combination of spellpower and strength better for Holy paladins than spellpower alone. I'll dive into the math later today if I get a chance and see if I can guess what that would be.

But yes, you and I are thinking exactly alike on this.

I guess all I can say is that on the factual points (Judgement being non-ideal for any specific task, Redemption being better raid-healing gear) you're completely correct and I agree with you. Our differences of opinion about Judgement per se really come down to playstyle more than anything else. Where I really liked Judgement was for messy trash pulls like the big packs in BWL and most of AQ40. My nominal job on those packs was healing, but I could end up having to offtank (through healing aggro) if a tank died, or dps when we were down to the last few mobs. For that situation, Judgement was excellent. I very rarely used it for healing on boss encounters (only for stuff that was solidly on farm, and mostly out of laziness) and I never used it for the rare times when I got to do any kind of tanking pre-BC.

But anyway, I'm not suggesting that paladin itemization as a whole go back to Judgement-style gear; that would be the death of Prot and Ret as viable raiding specs. What I'm suggesting is specifically a change to the class, and to some of the holy talents, to make an updated version of Judgement-style gear into the ideal paladin healing gear.

Consider: What are the differences between Judgement and modern holy paladin gear, such as the Redemption set? (Since TBC holy gear follows the Redemption design)

1. Judgement has spelldamage, Redemption has +healing. This distinction is being eliminated by new mechanics in WotLK; spellpower is now the primary healing stat as well as the primary magic-damage stat.
2. Judgement has no crit; modern healing gear does. That can be fixed easily enough, and since a single crit rating now affects both melee and spell crit rates, it becomes more broadly useful.
3. Judgement has tiny amounts of spirit, modern healing gear doesn't. A non-issue: we all know spirit is crap for paladins, so just leave it off any new gear.
4. Judgement has strength, and modern healing gear doesn't.

The last item in the list is the only real difference between the current model for healing gear and a "Judgement 2.0" kind of gear. Take Redemption, or the Holy version of T4/T5/T6 (updated for WotLK mechanics, so replace +healing with +spellpower), add strength, and you've got basically a "modern" update of Judgement.

All that's needed is a reason for healing paladins to want strength, and this will be the ideal healing gear.

If that happens, it plays very nicely with the new concept of paladins as melee-healers, whacking at the mob in between instant and short-cast heals.

It also means that Ret paladins who are called on to heal for a certain fight can equip a set of gear that will let them do so without completely gimping their dps output. Their dps in this style of gear will be inferior to their dps in true Ret gear certainly, and that's the way it should be. Primary gear for Ret should still be the standard dps-plate, including their tier sets. But with this change, a Ret paladin's "healing set" becomes much more powerful and flexible.

Prot is a little trickier, since tanks rely on avoidance stats, which the other specs get nothing from. You probably couldn't wear this kind of plate as an offtanking set, unless the stuff you're tanking hits for fairly trivial amounts anyway. But even so, this change would be a benefit to Prot paladins who are called on to off-heal/off-dps on fights where they don't need to tank.

It would be an improvement for everyone, it would highlight the new melee-healer identity of holy paladins, and it would enhance true hybrid play. All that's needed is a reason to want strength on healing gear, and I think the core of that is to make the AP->STR conversion of SoL baseline.

Yeah. It's not a surprise to hear that a nerf is coming. The problem from a playstyle/fun point of view is that judgements and their connection to JotW are a large part of what makes Ret paladin so much fun on the beta right now; the rage-like mechanic. It's neat because like I said you stop think of your mana bar as being something you need to drink for. You use a judgement to fill it up, and if you're really low you just stun the mob first and get the JoC double-damage.

Obviously the game needs to be balanced, and Ret dps is pretty damn high at the moment. But I hope they can find a way to bring it in-line without destroying the very unique and very nice (and fun) feel that Ret has in the beta right now.

Cool, thanks for the confirmation. Your stats aren't that much different from my cobbled-together mess of TBC raid epics and Northrend greens, although I'm guessing my weapon (Cat's Edge) probably still outclasses yours by a fair bit. I've been reluctant to draw any hard conclusions from my Ret experience due to concerns about my gear not matching up, but it sounds like it's working well for you in level-appropriate gear.

Since you're still going at it, I assume you're finding it fun?

Haven't had a chance to try it myself (I've only gotten to tank one instance so far; beta needs more healers) but from the reports I've read it seems to work just fine. Leveling 5-mans really don't challenge you mitigation-wise, and on paper at least it seems like a Ret paladin in tank gear with a slow one-hander could get good threat effects from CS and DS. As I said, when the expansion goes live I'll probably level Ret for 70-75 because the tanking seems about the same as Prot (my "normal" spec) at that level range and the soloing is much, much better until ShR at level 75.

EDIT: Incidentally, someone on the beta forum pointed out that Ret arena gear is actually pretty close to what WotLK prot tanking gear will look like , with lots of stam and strength. The main difference is resilience vs defense, but it's a reasonable substitute.

Going out and getting a 2000 rating is probably more effort than it's worth just to get a set of leveling tanking gear for the expansion (and they might even update the current tanking tier sets to match the new mechanics when patch 3.0 arrives). But it's something to think about if you have spare Champion/Conqueror tokens lying around on your next raid.

Yeah, i'm using the Axe of Frozen Death from Borean Tundra, so a pretty significant difference in weapons.

And yes, definitely finding it fun. Makes going back to live to level up downright painful. Ret on live is... ok, but always feels like there's something missing (and the amount of downtime spent drinking is faintly ridiculous). JotW and DS (as another button to press so you're not just waiting on the CS and Judgement cooldowns) definitely make the spec feel complete in a way it just doesn't currently.

Wasn't there something stated somewhere that resilience gets shut off in instances? So crit-immunity wouldn't be possible from PvP gear anymore :-\

For some classes (particularly shamans), the downranking change + non-functioning abilities are a serious kick in the nuts for healing. Once the new talents actually work you'll probably find more healers coming out for instances (as I and some other folks I've spoken with have decided to respec, because it really sucks right now).

-50% wouldn't surprise me on Judgements, as well as stopping JoC's double damage. It never did double damage in the first place - the base damage was the only thing doubled.

There really isn't any cause for alarm on large amounts of damage being done in a stun. Other classes that are not capable of such large amounts of controlled burst damage are capable of many other things that necessitates that they don't need that burst damage. The addition of another GCD to our supposed stunlock will do a great deal to slow that burst damage down. What it will do is force a certain decisiveness from our opponents regarding when they use their trinket. If Judgements are nerfed down to a 0.16ish AP coefficient and the rest left intact with Prot spell power getting a large increase to make up for it, and JoC retuned to inflict 20% more damage at a 100% crit rate on a stun, that'll go a long way to balancing things in its favour. Bearing in mind that to offset this additional burst damage, most of the classes that would be more vulnerable to it (mostly the hybrid healers) are also benefiting from large increases in healing power to offset our newfound burst damage. The classes that aren't effected in this way are those that are either very good at kiting us, or flat out overpowered against us anyway (rogue I'm looking at you).

The burst isn't the problem. Against armoured targets or prepared targets it is not unstoppable, but it most certainly is not ignorable now. Ret pallies will be able to keep up a more or less constant stream of weapon damage level attacks for a sustained period of time. Healers will be forced to try and get us off their backsides and DPS will no longer be able to tank us. This'll even be consistant long after the problem of 9k Judgements is put to bed. People won't want to be close to a class more than capable of punching right through any last minute defenses they may have 50% of the time, that ignores their armour completely with three very powerful attacks and generally cannot be killed easily.

The key balance point to strike is where people treat you like a warrior. Not as in the class, but as in the same, permanent threat. While a warrior's capable of being a direct healing threat, a Ret pally will take the position of just overwhelming the target with burst damage. Against a prepared healer, this may not be effective, but having that volume of unmitigated burst damage will force more rapid heals and the uncertainty of the effectiveness of certain defenses (Cheat Death/Pain Suppression come to mind) will make people step very carefully around Ret pallies.

I don't think we'll be seeing any Strength + Spell power gear tailored to healers.
Don't you think it's a bit sloppy to design healing gear that doesn't have its potential maximized unless the player decides to put 23 points in Retribution? You're also assuming all Holy Paladins are going to spec into Sheath of Light when we haven't seen the changes to deep Holy yet.

I don't think you'll see a big switch in healing gear unless the dynamics of Paladin raid healing get changed. Sure it's always fun to hit stuff, but unless it complements your healing, what's the point? What would Strength have to do in order to be desirable? Judgement of Wisdom is most likely going to be covered by a Retribution Paladin, since they give the highest returns, and any damage done as Holy is going to be superficial in a raid setting.

I was talking about a hypothetical situation as Cathela proposed, if sheath scaling component became baseline.

They've toyed with 'wierd' gear in small amounts ever since BWL. Fallen crusader, feral drops in BWL, AQ40 sets for a lot of classes (spell penetration?) grand crusader stuff in Naxx. Even on the S4 PTR they had the massive spell haste weapons that didn't make it in the end. I think things like that make the game neat.

I'm going to go ahead and reserve my judgement on Sheath's current state until they finish this whole revision of raid buff stacking and such. Depending on how it all shapes up, we could find out that the extra spellpower gained won't be that big of a deal, and it will simply be a flavor choice between AoE HoT and crits>HoT.

I personally think the eventual extension of these types of changes (+heal providing 1/3 damage and then being wrapped up into spellpower) would be for them to move to a stat or a system that merges spellpower and attack power. I doubt that will happen in this expansion, but we could eventually see it all move to just a 'power' stat.

Basically what Sigurd said. The only way it could really work out is if our raid healing role was designed around putting up Light, meleeing the mob, holy shocking on cool down, and nothing else. If your shock crits, then you toss a HL on the tank. But that would seem to be a really weak raid role compared to bringing a full-time DPS or healer; we aren't really bringing anything unique, and our DPS would (seemingly) be terrible. And it would require every holy paladin to have Sheath, of course.

You could basically look at that melee-healer role as a different type of Ret paladin. Instead of bringing DPS + synergy DPS to equal a DPS class, you'd be bringing DPS + tank healing to equal...I'm not sure. A healing class, I guess? You could reliably gauge the HPS of a holy shock every 6 seconds, but that is going to be pretty paltry compared to a dedicated healer. Even if you add on the instant HLs, those aren't going to be reliable. So in order to justify that as a spot, you'd need to be putting out a lot of DPS - even more than a Ret paladin - which is problematic for obvious reasons. The alternative is to be healing a lot more with casts, in which case your DPS is going to drop a lot and all that Strength on your gear suddenly seems like a waste.

Maybe there is some other conception of how that could work in practice.

The scaling of strength to spellpower with sheath isn't big enough to warrant gemming or gearing for it. The bulk of the attraction stems from the large amount of attack power you can gain from different raid buffs (MotW,BoK, BoM, Battle Shout, Strength of Earth Totem, Unleashed Rage, and scrolls). All of that stuff provides attack power and spellpower bonuses to a holy paladin spec'd into sheath of light. If BoK and MotW no longer stack, and BoM and Battle Shout no longer stack, as some have hinted as a possibility, that's a healthy chunk of that attack power bonus that you would be missing out on. The skill would still be attractive, but not overwhelmingly so.

Amera you're not understanding this, your playstyle as a healer will not change at all.

Say you're a healer and something like [Legplates of Blazing Light] drops. You're thinking 'what kind of idiot put strength on that?' The kind that wanted sheath builds to get extra 6 spellpower from that item. And if you're going to itemize for sheath like that obviously they can get more spellpower than non sheath builds since strength is a free stat as far as item budget is concerned on those pants. I'm not saying that all holy gear should look like that. As a matter of fact very few items should look like that, 2-3 pieces per tier - in BC that's two raid instances. And by next tier a focused item will straight outpower this sheath item from previous tier out of sheer item budget.

EDIT: Gemming doesn't work - you get more out of spellpower gems (and you should) and you'll put in spellpower gems. The sockets are already budgeted for you to gem spellpower you'd be daft not to put in spellpower gems. You don't gain extra sockets by gemming under budget. The items will need to be designed specifically to take advantage of sheath.

The itemization is going to make those pieces of gear worse than pure sets, regardless of Sheath.

It's unknown if the item values have changed in WotLK, so I'll use current values. 1 Strength is about 2.42AP, which is 0.726 Spellpower with Sheath. 1 Spellpower costs less than 1 Strength, and gives us 1 Spellpower. If Strength is more expensive and gives less Spellpower, how can it ever be a better stat on a Healing item? Unless there's some other purpose, Strength isn't good.

But it doesn't work like that, focusing is penalized. Putting 20 strength is cheaper than putting 17 spellpower on an item that already has 100 spellpower but no strength.

Cost in item budget is on a diminishing results scale. The more of one stat you put in the more expensive the next point of that stat is. That's unless they merged those two together since the last time I checked how that all worked which was a very long time ago.

The point of adding small amounts of Strength over just more spell power is because as you stack one stack more, it really eats the item budget (see spell damage cloak from TK).

So assuming Sheath was baseline in some form, you would get more spell power adding a little bit of strength.

On Sky's point, when have you ever known the developers to side with the player to squeeze out every possible point of DPS when they design gear? If that were the case you would've seen Sunwell items that shaved off Strength for Attack Power.

There's [Cursed Vision of Sargeras] with agility and attack power. Few and far between.

Actually agility and attack power is close to the only exception to this rule; at least since TBC, most non-plate physical DPS items boast both agility and attack power. There's a small difference in between the two though, since attack power and strength both only increase your attack power (Well, unless you're a tank), while there's more differences between attack power and agility.

This discussion about making the Str->SP conversion baseline piques my interest. This is definitely something I think has been sorely needed for a long time. However, instead of making some sort of "tactical mastery" skill that is learned at the trainer at a certain level, I envisioned building the class around melee stats entirely. Let me explain.

Instead of making heals scale on spellpower, make them scale by some function of strength. Imagine that for a second. Of course, this sort of change would force all sorts of other changes for the way the class works too. Healing spec'd paladins would suddenly be able to run around and melee with a two-hander like the Retadins do, so this changes the entire game. The holy tree and playstyle would be revamped completely. I imagine a more melee-centric role for the class, as was originally intended. You may remember the old Blizzard class description, which pinned us as a melee hybrid.

Protection is being changed to use Strength a bit more, the only thing left behind now is Holy. If we could all share gear but use it in different ways, I think it'd be a huge bonus for the class as a whole. Of course, I'm no moron, I know Blizzard would never change the spec/playstyle so drastically at this point in the game.

What levk and frmorrison said: nonlinear cost scaling means that splitting itemization between two stats gives you more total bang for the buck. Suppose you're wearing two greens. If one is "of Strength" and the other is "of Intellect" you're getting less total stats than if both pieces are "of the Wolf" (or whatever the hell str+int is called.)

Take the [Lightbringer Chestpiece] for example. In its WotLK version the +healing becomes +62 spellpower, which costs 53 itemization points. 53 to the 1.5-power is 386. That's the number that goes into the final itemization sum, so that's the real amount "spent" on the spellpower.

Let's split that in half: 193 for spellpower and 193 for strength. The 1.5-root of 193 is 33.4. That gives us 33 strength and 39 spellpower.

With no raid buffs, SoL converts 33 strength into 20 spellpower, leaving you with a total of 59 spellpower -- 3 points below what you used to have. With BoK alone you get 22 spellpower from SoL, leaving you just one point shy of 62. If you wanted to, you could tweak the numbers a little and get your final total up to 62 (splitting the itemization power 60/40 or thereabouts would probably do it), and if you really wanted to go crazy you could solve a differential equation and find out the optimum split for maximizing your total spellpower.

The point is that given the right itemization, an AP->SP conversion lets you add strength without losing spellpower. For a holy paladin this leads to equally powerful heals, but stronger damage and stronger judgements. For a ret paladin, it means you can have healing gear that gives you the same healing as pure spellpower gear but doesn't completely gimp your physical damage.

Here's the point: if an AP-SP conversion were to become part of the baseline of the class, and redesigned healing gear to take advantage of that:

• Ret paladins would see no difference in their standard gear, but they'd have more hybrid flexibility in their healing gear.
• Prot wouldn't notice the difference for tanking if you removed the sta->SP conversion from TbtL, and would have more flexibility in healing gear.
• Holy would have better melee dps, stronger judgements, and a stronger reason to melee.

Since paladin healing gear is in a slot by itself as Antmaton pointed out, there's no other class that would be affected by this. So why not? More flexibility for everyone. Win, win, win.

So consider a two-phase fight where you have to heal as Ret for the first phase but it's not necessary for the second phase. Would you rather be swinging your weapon with base AP plus raid buffs, or would you rather be in a set of gear that gave you, say, 70% of your normal full-Ret-gear dps?

EDIT: I mean hell, if you're Ret this isn't even a theoretical discussion, because you have sheath. If there were gear with a mix of strength and spellpower on it, you could wear that and literally get the same healing power as you would in pure healing gear, but if you had to heal and dps within the same fight you'd actually be able to do non-trivial damage.

That's not an option right now because there's no such gear in the game anymore (by "right now" I mean "in the current WotLK beta") and there won't be any if things stay the way they are, because the developers aren't going to design specialized gear for one off-spec activity for one spec of one class.

But if the AP->SP conversion were made baseline, this type of gear would exist and would in fact be ideal healing gear for all paladins. And it would open up more options for true hybrid play, and it would be more fun.

[Legplates of Blazing Light] (ilevel 76 36 sp + 9 str = 42 sp with sheath) is just one end of the spectrum though, now apply that line of thought to [Replica Marshal's Lamellar Legplates] (ilevel 71 27 sp + 20 str = 42 sp) same exact pants for 5 ilevel deficit. That was a lot of ilevels back then too.