OK, I finally sat down and did some math on this idea. Basically what I did was take the old [Judgement Breastplate] and scaled it up to iLevel 151. To reflect the mechanical and philosophical changes to itemization, I applied Burning Crusade Stamina weightings and converted the Spirit and spell resistances to crit rating. I also tried to keep the stat budgeting true to the original distribution, as a equivalent percentage of total budget spent per stat. Here's what I came up with:
New-Fangled Judgement-esque Breastplate
1886 Armor
+32 Strength
+64 Stamina
+43 Intellect
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 34.
Equip: Restores 10 mana per 5 seconds.
Equip: Increases spell power by 50.
For comparison purposes, I chose [Savior's Grasp], an iLevel 151 healing chestpiece from Archimonde. I believe the 106 healing translates to 56 spell power. So here's the breakdown between "new Judgement" and Savior's (assume level 70, with new Divine Intellect and Holy Guidance):
Total lost crit: ~-0.60%
Total lost SP: ~-8
Total gained MP5: 10
Now, let's apply Cathela's proposed baseline 30% AP to SP conversion:
+32 Strength (+64 AP, ~+19 spell power)
Total gained SP: ~+11
So is 10 MP5 and 11 spell power an even trade for 0.60% crit and a litte bit of health and mana? From a healing perspective, I'd call it pretty even. Seems like an awful lot of math and work for effectively breaking even, doesn't it? But wait, there's one last wrinkle to consider: Judgements. We'll use Judgement of Light to illustrate the point with each piece of gear:
Obviously, if you expand this out with a full set of gear, the point becomes apparent. This makes a Holy Paladin's Judgements actually worth something to the raid (and his seals seriously useful to himself), as opposed to simple fodder to proc Judgements of the Pure on himself, further emphasizing the paladin's role as a melee healer.
One more point in favor of reitemization. With Blizzard's stated assessment of over-the-top Ret damage, everyone is expecting a massive coefficient nerf. By moving the AP-SP conversion to baseline and reitemizing gear, you gain much more freedom to tweak coefficient numbers without necessarily crippling low-to-mid Holy and Prot paladins, since they would still have a viable gearing solution that scales independantly of level and spell ranks. Furthermore, this change would also address Holy gearing gaps in the 30-50 levelling range, strengthening the paladin's role as an instance healer. Best of all, it requires very little work to be done in the pre-50 range of items, and much of the remainder could be handled by an automated script with minor touch-up work by hand in special cases.
I'm still unfortunately kind of skeptical any of this will come to pass, but the more I think about it, the more I believe this could be a major solution to most of our scaling problems.
[e] As a further note, gear itemized in this fashion becomes at least somewhat desirable to Prot paladins who are otherwise capped out on defense for threat sets. Holy gear as it stands now is in a class of its own, so by reitemizing for Strength, we can expand the target audience without necessarily compromising its primary purpose. As Cathela said, win-win situation on all sides here.
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.
We share rings, trinkets, and weapons with the other healers.
Second, if Blizzard really wanted, they could design paladin healers to work with DPS plate. That immediately eliminates an entire style of armor, and allows us to fully share itemization with warriors and deathknights.
That Blizzard has chosen not to do this, indicates to me that they prefer healer itemization to be similar. Blizzard has deliberately chosen to coalesce itemization around roles, not classes. Healers are itemized similarly, tanks are itemized similarily, DPS are itemized similarily. Paladins are *not* itemized similarily. Deliberate choice to have modal hybrids--and role specialization--as opposed to fluid hybrids.
As a proponent of fluid hybrids, I don't like their choice, but it is pretty clear that is the route Blizzard has chosen.
I've been going over the Item value formula again, and I concede the scaling point. I had to dig out my TI-84 (which had dead batteries in it for 6 months). However, the mechanics would need to be changed to give purpose to Melee.
It's fun to talk about changing itemization and class mechanics to allow healers to run around hitting things, but unless there's reason to, and it allows us to perform our job as effectively as we do when we stand still and spam heals, what's the point? I'm sure people can come up with a bunch of interesting solutions to this, however I don't feel that's the direction discussion should be going. At the end of the day it's all just speculation and nothing constructive pertaining to WotLK beta is said.
I heard Sigurd scored an infinity on Rock Band and ascended to heaven.
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).
I'm gonna bite this one now:
Resilience will NOT stop working in pve.
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.
This is my dream. I wish the item sets were the same for all specs with each spec converting base stats to other stats. An AP coefficient on heals would be awesome. Very little would have to change if they went this route. The only thing I can think would be Holy Guidance. It could change to AP -> Mana. On a pure hypothetical basis I would love this change. But it is too big and would require too many resources. Blizzard is on a deadline after all.
OK, I finally sat down and did some math on this idea. Basically what I did was take the old [Judgement Breastplate] and scaled it up to iLevel 151.
...
For comparison purposes, I chose [Savior's Grasp], an iLevel 151 healing chestpiece from Archimonde. I believe the 106 healing translates to 56 spell power.
Nice work; you took it a lot further than I did.
You can see the WotLK version of a legacy item by mousing over the little WotLK logo in the upper-left hand corner of WoWhead (and in fact you're correct: 56 spellpower.)
Originally Posted by GSH
We share rings, trinkets, and weapons with the other healers.
Second, if Blizzard really wanted, they could design paladin healers to work with DPS plate. That immediately eliminates an entire style of armor, and allows us to fully share itemization with warriors and deathknights.
That Blizzard has chosen not to do this, indicates to me that they prefer healer itemization to be similar. Blizzard has deliberately chosen to coalesce itemization around roles, not classes. Healers are itemized similarly, tanks are itemized similarily, DPS are itemized similarily. Paladins are *not* itemized similarily. Deliberate choice to have modal hybrids--and role specialization--as opposed to fluid hybrids.
As a proponent of fluid hybrids, I don't like their choice, but it is pretty clear that is the route Blizzard has chosen.
Well, you might be right; perhaps this possibility has occured to them and they've rejected it already, in which case it's just not going to happen.
But look, first of all I'm not suggesting that our class's gear be unified in the manner that tanking and dps gear are being unified. I'm suggesting that this particular niche of gear (plate healing) that's only useful to one class be redesigned to be more flexible and more interesting.
Second, paladin healing gear has been largely the same since Naxx and the end of classic WoW. Prot and Ret gear has evolved over TBC. When they decided to unify gear across classes, folding Prot and Ret gear into the plate-tanking and plate-dps piles was easy and obvious. But there was nothing to be done with plate healing gear. Paladins need to be wearing plate, and healing paladins need to heal.
So it remains it's own little niche, and since it is, they probably saw no reason to alter the design philosophy behind it. That's not proof that they want it to remain as it is, it's just proof that they haven't so far changed it.
Originally Posted by DarKNecross
It's fun to talk about changing itemization and class mechanics to allow healers to run around hitting things, but unless there's reason to, and it allows us to perform our job as effectively as we do when we stand still and spam heals, what's the point? I'm sure people can come up with a bunch of interesting solutions to this, however I don't feel that's the direction discussion should be going. At the end of the day it's all just speculation and nothing constructive pertaining to WotLK beta is said.
As opposed to the dozens of posts theorizing about snares and interrupts for PvP? Personally I don't think there's a snowball's chance in hell of either of those happening (and my own little pet idea probably faces the same odds), but I don't begrudge people the opportunity to discuss it so long as it's interesting (to someone at least) and doesn't run in circles.
Originally Posted by nevinera
I'm gonna bite this one now:
Resilience will NOT stop working in pve.
Fair enough, but the question I have is why strength? What purpose does putting strength on healing gear serve Holy Paladins (aside from Str->SP)?
Mostly for help with soloing, but somewhat also for group utility, both uses leveraging our dual coefficients to the maximum. Plus as a thematic (and cosmetic) issue, a Paladin has traditionally been portrayed as a holy warrior, heavily armed and armored, dispensing justice through force of arms supplimented with spiritual powers rather than through directly magical means.
[e] Also, should anyone find it instructional, we can do a full mock-up of hybridized gear at an arbitrary iLevel under our current list of conditions and assumptions and compare it out to traditional specialized setups on both sides of the fence to try to find holes in the theory. I would be happy to build the hybrid set.
Fair enough, but the question I have is why strength? What purpose does putting strength on healing gear serve Holy Paladins (aside from Str->SP)?
It's stats. I don't think there has to be a specific purpose deeper than stats. Str->sp is a very big reason. You get stronger scaling that's good enough, that's what gear is for anyway. Now it might be that a playstyle X is more effective than doing Y in Z situations, that's all upto the player to get there.
It's stats. I don't think there has to be a specific purpose deeper than stats. Str->sp is a very big reason. You get stronger scaling that's good enough, that's what gear is for anyway. Now it might be that a playstyle X is more effective than doing Y in Z situations, that's all upto the player to get there.
Instead of Strength, why not use Intellect? We could have a conversion like 35% of Intellect becomes Spell power.
I heard Sigurd scored an infinity on Rock Band and ascended to heaven.
Fair enough, but the question I have is why strength? What purpose does putting strength on healing gear serve Holy Paladins (aside from Str->SP)?
What Ant and levk said, but also:
The developers have put a lot of work into setting Holy Paladins up as the melee-healer. All the instant heals, the haste from judging, the powerful mana returns from SoW. Actually putting strength on healing gear would emphasize that. Even if the actual dps done didn't amount to much, it would still say "you should be hitting things".
(I'm assuming here that they'll follow through on the talents and tune them to make the melee-healer playstyle actually work.)
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
Seal of Vengeance duration is no longer 18s. Reverted to previous duration, it looks like.
Vengeance (Retribution) now stacks up to 2 times, reduced from 3.
Originally Posted by Cathela
What Ant and levk said, but also:
The developers have put a lot of work into setting Holy Paladins up as the melee-healer. All the instant heals, the haste from judging, the powerful mana returns from SoW. Actually putting strength on healing gear would emphasize that. Even if the actual dps done didn't amount to much, it would still say "you should be hitting things".
(I'm assuming here that they'll follow through on the talents and tune them to make the melee-healer playstyle actually work.)
Kind of honestly, Cathela, I think you're reading too much into the changes. All the Holy changes work perfectly well from 30 yards away. I think the melee-healer playstyle you see is an unintended side-effect of Blizzard trying to get us to mix up our heals--rather than spamming FoL all night long--and not an intended change to Holy paladin playstyle.
Instead of Strength, why not use Intellect? We could have a conversion like 35% of Intellect becomes Spell power.
I see what you did there...
Ap scaling is very strong though. An actual stat other than stam to get scaling like that you'd need 100% no less. I'm skeptical they'd do something like that (baseline ap->sp scaling.) Druids have 70% agility to healing in feral, nobody goes to dig for resto gear with agility. You could argue for judgments of wise though, it's where I draw the line for a nonret build. With the scaling baseline it's pretty deep there, long way from even 17 to 28. All of a sudden looks like a gimmick build, the HoT alone wouldn't really do it I don't think. Don't matter it's all ramblings, but it's not like they're giving us something new and exciting to talk about.
EDIT: I agree with GSH, I don't think they planned all that far ahead. All they wanted is to get people out of stand here chain cast this routine. Now that you have all this extra time you're thinking what to do with it. And he's right as long as you have judgments of pure you can stand way the hell back and still get half of what you'd gain by going melee.
I don't think it's their intention to cram every paladin into melee. Pre 1.9 all paladin specs had the exact same playstyle. You whacked stuff while cleansing or you whacked stuff while cast canceling. 14 points in holy got you all you could eat pass for healing and then you'd go full ret for minor pve utility of kings which at 31 wasn't all it grown up to be now or did some pvp wierdness in prot with reckoning and holy shield, picking SoC or repent. Nobody cared that much. Some really weird people went holy for a ranged attack. I want to say holy shock had a minute cooldown back then but I'm not sure. It definitely didn't heal. Regardless, every spec played exactly the same. Everybody had the same gear and played the same. Seal command, walk up to mob, whack. In raids that was supplemented with either HL4 or cleanse.
In came 1.9 and cleaned that crap right up. In a completely totalitarian fashion I might add, but definitely you could see division between specs. You could now spec to suit your playstyle. I don't think they want to go back on that specifically. However with attack power benefiting judgments of everything and judgments of wise should you decide to spec it it's certainly a better stat than spirit or agility.
Seal of Vengeance duration is no longer 18s. Reverted to previous duration, it looks like.
Vengeance (Retribution) now stacks up to 2 times, reduced from 3.
I'm not surprised by the SoV change. If they only wanted to make SoV easier to keep up, increasing the duration AND 100% proc chance was overkill. If we still had the old seal/judge system, it'd have been nice for damage seal swapping, but that seems to have been phased out with the new 2 minute seal duration.
The Vengeance change seems like a way to tone down the damage added by seals proccing off strikes. That change roughly doubled seal damage, which would be an overall DPS increase of 15~20%.
Vengeance (Retribution) now stacks up to 2 times, reduced from 3
I assume that means a 5% damage decrease.
Trueshot Aura is now raid-wide for the Holy Sheath spec.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
Bah...The Vengeance nerf is totally unnecessary imo.
And you're free to your own opinion, but seeing as how Retribution Paladins are, apparently, out-damaging God, this is one of the more subtler routes they could have gone. As for adding Strength to Holy Paladin gear, uhm, no thanks. It took forever and a day for Blizzard to get around to properly itemizing Holy Paladins, so excuse me if I don't long for the times when Paladins had to resort to leather or cloth because of the itemization gap created by 1.9.
And you're free to your own opinion, but seeing as how Retribution Paladins are, apparently, out-damaging God, this is one of the more subtler routes they could have gone.
The thing is, nerfing vengeance isn't going to really fix anything. losing 5% of a 6-7k JoC crit isn't going to change the ridiculous things ret paladins are doing in PvP atm. Judgments are the big problem, and it is there that they should really start looking to tone things down imo.
Bah...The Vengeance nerf is totally unnecessary imo.
Agreed, what scares/scared me with these whacked burst judgements was that blizzard would as per their usual behaviour answer with a different nerf because honestly the left hand never knows what the right hand is doing. Why not change Seal of Command to have it's judgements on stunned targets be 100% crit chance? That would cut the huge 1 shot judgements that people were so unhappy about (and rightly so). Probably also scale back judgement coefficients by about 20% but otherwise this is crap as our burst remains which means more nerfs incoming and a long slippery slope of pve nerfs will be the side effects.
Kind of honestly, Cathela, I think you're reading too much into the changes.
Well, I could say the same thing about your speculation from the non-changes to holy paladin gear (in fact, I did!) But yeah, I take your point, and the 30-yard judgements are kind of hard to square with my thinking. To some degree we're all reading tea leaves here.
The other thing I see as leading to a melee playstyle is the drastic drop in mana efficiency for Holy Light and Flash of Light -- priest direct heals are not getting similar treatment -- so it seems to me that they intend holy paladins to have some other means of mana regeneration, and Divine Plea ain't it.
Originally Posted by Milou
Why not change Seal of Command to have it's judgements on stunned targets be 100% crit chance?
That sounds to me like a pretty good idea, but I expect they want to nerf PvE damage as well as PvP damage, and stunned JoC's don't really figure into that.
The problem with the Vengeance nerf is that 10% just sounds too weak. I'll give it a shot when the patch finishes downloading, but I think perceptually there's a line between 10% and 15% that changes people's reaction from "meh" to "oh, neat".
For what it's worth, they floated this exact change on a PTR a couple years ago and ended up reverting it.
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
I actually like the Vengeance change. In a round-about manner it's a buff in my eyes. If the damage is balanced at 10% instead of 15% then we don't have to worry about a long unlucky critless streak. Especially in a resilience environment.
The more immediate issue in the beta right now is that Judgement is bugged and pretty much completely nonfunctional. You get the animation, and you get talent effects like Heart of the Crusader, but there's no damage and no JoW/JoL/JoJ debuff.
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
The other thing I see as leading to a melee playstyle is the drastic drop in mana efficiency for Holy Light and Flash of Light -- priest direct heals are not getting similar treatment -- so it seems to me that they intend holy paladins to have some other means of mana regeneration, and Divine Plea ain't it.
I still don't understand this - how is Holy Light and Flash of Light's efficiency being drastically reduced? If you look at the base values, perhaps...but the thing that has always made FoL more efficient (and now HL) is that it has a very favorable coefficent/mana cost ratio. FoL has around double the coefficient/mana ratio of any of the direct heals (I posted asking about this earlier with the specific values) due to the very low cost and the boost for having BoL baked in. HL is also pretty efficient for what you get, although the difference is much smaller (and potentially more or less eliminated once you factor in talents).
I still don't understand this - how is Holy Light and Flash of Light's efficiency being drastically reduced? If you look at the base values, perhaps...but the thing that has always made FoL more efficient (and now HL) is that it has a very favorable coefficent/mana cost ratio. FoL has around double the coefficient/mana ratio of any of the direct heals (I posted asking about this earlier with the specific values) due to the very low cost and the boost for having BoL baked in. HL is also pretty efficient for what you get, although the difference is much smaller (and potentially more or less eliminated once you factor in talents).
Oh, I just looked at the base values. I suppose I assumed that all the spells would scale at roughly the same rate with spellpower, but if paladin heals are scaling faster then that definitely changes the picture.
I knew FoL and HL were getting higher spellpower coefficients than we "expected" based on the +healing->spellpower conversion math, but I suppose I assumed this was just some new baseline Blizzard had set that would apply to all heals.
My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.
The thing is, nerfing vengeance isn't going to really fix anything. losing 5% of a 6-7k JoC crit isn't going to change the ridiculous things ret paladins are doing in PvP atm. Judgments are the big problem, and it is there that they should really start looking to tone things down imo.
Soo before we cry wolf, do we have any reliable dps tests? and on what? the only nummbers I seen myself is my own lvl 70
recount nummbers from 5 mans on beta.
Yes we have really strong burst at times if we set it up right and ppl dont trinket, but what else do we have? My warrior friend thats dual wielding cath and torch seems to do just as much dps or more than me in pve(and didnt they get buffed in the last build?).
atm Im guessing most of us are all going by the "feelings" we get from zomg big ret crit vids.
08/21/08, 6:48 PM
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