• frmorrison

Seal of Blood already exists, and it is a major glyph. Seal of the Wise is a Minor and it is really weak (50% cheaper Seal of Wisdom). I think you are thinking of Seal of Wisdom glyph (5% cheaper heals).

DiS was nerfed because it did Holy damage, so it ignored armor so it was wrecking people. In fact, it was better than CS (due to magic vs physical damage).

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

flexbutt

Yeah, that's what I meant. And I know Seal of Blood exists. By "the new Glyph of Seal of Blood" I meant the new iteration of it.

Divine Storm does physical damage like you said, but most terrible PvPers whine most about that ability over our other ones without knowing how much damage it actually does.

Edit: the point of the previous post wasn't to imply that buffing Divine Storm would make us overpowered like we were on beta, but there have been people who have played since beta and remember how hard Divine Storm destroyed them when it was holy, and will see any buff to said ability as overpowered.

Seeing as GC has said for awhile that ret burst needed to be toned down, that comment confused me.

 

JettJaguar

Because of the odd wording GC used "e.g. you get mana back as if you still had SA for purposes of Blood", my thought is that the glyph will be something like SA on recoil damage only.

 

Alleyra

I'm not sure the game can distinguish whether or not an incoming heal is applied toward recoil or damage from other sources. Health received is health received.

Any type of passive regen for having SoB active or SA-styled ability will simply lead to other specs picking it up and utilizing it. If the Glyph returned a % of damage to mana, dealt through the Seal or Judgement damage (just an example here, please don't nitpick!) that would do much to limit it's use to Ret. I would hope they might take some consideration and make it a Minor Glyph. If Blizzard elects to alter Consecrate and buff up our talented abilities, perhaps it would take it's place. There's far too much up in the air to even speculate, at the moment.

In the meantime, let's keep posting those WWS/parses and logically dealing with/bringing attention to SoB-recoil, mana regen, and the other issues that need address.

Ghostcrawler: If there is a spec we want to avoid over-buffing so that we don't have to nerf them, it's Ret.

 

Prinsesa

I imagine the Seal of Blood revamp could be something like "You gain mana equal to 10% of Seal and Judgement of Blood's recoil damage".

It should be possible to detect any damage source titled "Seal/Judgement of Blood" and match the damage dealer to the player's name himself.

While this would be a "bad" change insofar as fixing a class deficiency via a mandatory Glyph, it would certainly solve the issue of "We need SA+SOB for our mana" in a scaling and fight-consistent manner.

I do agree that the Divine Storm remark is worrisome. While Crusader Strike being added to RV is a good, burst-less potential change, any buff to Divine Storm is treading into Exorcism's-extra-burst-this-is-a-step-backwards territory.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

greatrichie

We have to remember though. DS was fine on Beta. DS was only OP when it went live with lvl 70 characters and lvl 70 health pools and everyone cried, which is when it got nerfed to physical. It never even made it to 80 on live. I don't see buffing DS by itself as a bad thing, and honestly, as a 51 pt talent, it needs a buff. It may be a bit overboard with the Exor changes, but I'd rather have an awesome 51 pt talent...

 

Durinix

According to GC, DS was nerfed based on beta data, not on level 70 live data. Let's ignore the whole "do we believe blue posts" thing, that belongs elsewhere. I can see how this data might have come about. We had some pretty massive bugs for quite a long time on beta. Only after those were fixed could there be any actual balance testing. DS is probably fairly OP if your opponents are lacking in resil and health. There's no problem with that as you should be sub 1500 if you're going into arenas without resil and health.

My understanding is that we've only lost a small amount of DPS over the current PTR changes (please correct me if I'm wrong, right now, I'm too lazy to go back the 15-20 odd pages to be certain). While it's true Divine storm being holy damage means that we'd tear through warriors a bit quicker, the 34% damage increase on DS for PvE would be about right. It would also make it an ability worthy of 51 points. Another effect of DS doing holy damage is that haste would be clearly better than ArPen.

The real question we should be asking is are we going to be patched up enough to be competitive or is it going to take a hefty redesign of the ret paladin to get it right? I hope that the first is the case but honestly, we're probably better off in the long term if the latter happens. Either way, we'll be a step closer to being where we need to be.

 

Exemplar

SoB recoil will remain an issue - there is no getting around that fact unless/until it is changed, removed, or capped.

The fact that SoR (with SotP) will outperform SoC is pathetic. Terribly so. We cannot spare the glyph to alter this, and if we could, the SoR glyph still outperforms. I'll say it again, pathetic. Unless they suddenly drop a lot of tasty talents in Prot there is no stopping us picking up 5/5 SotP.

It's probably time to remove SoB and alter SoC to not be PPM (which would probably require coefficient reductions if it's 100% proc). They could scale it to match current SoB or leave it below SoB and buff DPS elsewhere. Besides, it would make backwards sense. They gave us SA and Blood in BC, now they've removed SA, why not remove Blood too and pretend that xpac never happened (yeah, yeah, SoV and AW)?

Anywho, at this point I'm convinced Paladins will be balanced mid-low on the DPS totem pole for 3.1, assuming full-time, immediately after cooldown judging of SoB. Oh, and we'll be broken in PvP because increased burst from Exorcism and DS buffs that occur. Those who are big on arenas, go for big rating day one! Go go go!

Bellator Spreadsheet - new release up. You can download here. (I know mods try to prevent issues, but remember to check URLs before blindly clicking). More bug fixes. Bit more support for 3.1 - not full support. It doesn't model changes to armpen/haste/etc. Should let people do their own rough comparisons between 3.0.9 and 3.1 as well as between seals.

Rock: "We're sub-standard DPS. Nerf Paper, Scissors are fine."
Paper: "OMG, WTF, Scissors!"
Scissors: "Rock is OP and Paper are QQers. We need PvP buffs."

 

Fanvast

This may be off-topic and I know PvP talk is shunned here, but I think Ret Burst damage isnt even that high anymore. At the beginning of the arena season, my 3s team (Priest Mage Ret) saw alot of success and were ranked 14th. Then when Resilience came in full force, we steadily dropped and now no longer play.

Death Knights, Hunters, and Rogues do more damage than us, and ontop of that, they have far more utility than we do. All three of them also have more survivability. We are forced to use Seal of Blood to be competetive, and after our 12 seconds of glory, we're dead soon after, even if we switch to Command.

If anybody has noticed, Retribution Paladins are no longer common, and are in fact rare, among top ranked teams, especialy 2's and 3's.

 

Lindsfarne

I take your point, but Ret burst damage can still be formidable. Last night V Priest/Rogue I got a greatness proc on my taunt onto the priest to get in combat, then popped his rogue out of stealth with DiS. I stunned the rogue, popped wings, eng trinket, JotM, CS, HoW, dead rogue. His priest had jumped down from the bridge and I stunned the rogue before he could follow, so he was LoS. This is at 1900 so the rogue has at least 20k hp at that level, probably more like 22k with fort. Priest mage ret is vulnerable to hunter teams and with the arcane nerf and the comparative weakness of priests, and the rise of resil and health, it is not surprising that that comp is not viable at the current time and the problem can't be attributed solely to the comparative decline of the power of ret burst V the rise of resil and health. Ret burst is still good, it just requires a bit of finesse now, and still a bit of luck as always.

But in the last week GC has said that he thinks it is sad that our 41 and 51 point talents only account for about 10% of our damage each. Now that some people are running around in arena with 1k resil and 22k+ health, it isn't going to cause a lot of ret QQ to buff CS and exorcism by 15% unglyphed and to do something similar to DiS. For a 51 point talent, it is disappointing in PvE on everything but trash, and Sarth, and in PvP it's best use if for popping stealthers. It is reasonable to address this given the overall state of ret damage, and I'm willing to believe that GC would give QQers the brush off unless ret arena representation at the high levels spiked in a dramatic way.

 

• Avitus

While the latest GC post is somewhat better, I don't get why we'd need a "SoB Glyph that gives more mana"?

Why not simply balance the default Ret case to be mana neutral using any Seal and not have the Glyph at all?
Glyph-Solutions for base case problems are never good.

This and still no new info on SoB recoil. I guess they still think it's fine since we "take less damage than a tank and fire does more damage!".

 

Cevil

I'm trying to think of ways to make Seal of the Martyr work for PvE, and not work for PvP, as that is the only intention I can see in them keeping recoil. If recoil is to stay, then the best way to do this is to scale it off another stat: either stamina or resilience.

Stamina is somewhat interesting; as in each judgement deals damage equal to 10% of my health, and each seal proc deals damage equal to 1% of my health. The irony being I have more stam raid buffed in pve gear than I do on my 2s 3s or 5s team. But if recoil damage were an expected amount, and not at the mercy of a critical strike, we could both control it better in pve, and plan around encounters accordingly. Maybe. My stance is still that recoil needs to go, but if it can't go, it needs to at least change.

The other less elegant but more effective solution is Seal of the Martyr deals damage to you based on your resilience damage reduction amount. So, if I have ~800 resilience, which I believe is 20% damage reduction, Judgement of the Martyr deals damage equal to 20% of my health. This is a surefire way to make Martyr PvE only, but I'm not sure how much Blizzard wants to tag things onto resilience like this. It's an inelegant solution.

 

Nicki

Avitus while I agree that the recoil needs adjusting the community has been as bad as the designers on the subject. With statements early on that it is manageable, healable, just get a druid too hot you up.

All this was true but even in naxx there are examples (shall we call them gimmicks because every boss that isn't patchwerk is a gimmick?) where it could hurt a paladins dps. I actually tried too raise the issue alot earlier and im sitting here finding it funny now that its a real concern even more so since the major plus of mana regen is gone but in reality the function is plan bad that paladins are the only class that has to recoil themselves (both priests and warlocks have a choice and don't lose alot).

As GC implied what he mentioned are probably not the final results I also think that needing a glyph to function is a bit silly and am far more in favour of a more give-take glyph scenario (Which is rare; Avenger's shield, mind flay, frostbolt Ghostly strike and a few more). However it feels more in favour of tweaking abilities to be different than a straight x% damage increase on x abillity. Though I guess some people would find it the other way round.

Edit: The problem is the recoil is actually attractive in PvP (If it hasn't clicked yet think hand of sacrifice). I personaly think we should move away from making blood not desireable in PvP and actually make SoC the desireable PvP seal or scrapping casino once and for all (since i highly doubt anyone would be sad to see it go).

 

HamSlammer

To nitpick, CS has always been better for PvE DPS than DS, even while it dealt Holy damage. A mob needed 52% DR to make DS = CS. As for PvP, it never truly needed the nerf.

That is my fear, that we'll be bound to a glyph because they'd rather band-aid a problem rather than nip it.

I have to disagree here. I personally had a detailing post about Blood recoil back in Beta, as I knew it was going to turn into a monster if it wasn't addressed but it fell on deaf ears. Just because the issue is getting face time now doesn't mean it just recently became an issue, it has been since the 3.0 changes.

And as far as the Blood recoil being manageable, again it's all about context. Additionally, manageable != acceptable. When content isn't particularly challenging AND we derived some benefit from the recoil (SA mana), it was tolerable. But as it stands in 3.1, Blood recoil is outdated, unwanted, and unneeded.

 

Exemplar

Mana Regen is not a DPS stat. Glyping SoB to regen Mana is like putting on Int gear or socketing an Int gem. You are losing out on a direct damage-increasing glyph (Judgement, Consecration, or Exorcism) in exchange for longevity. Swapping to Int gear reduces your direct damage stats in exchange for longevity.

If we need to trade something for longevity, we're broken. Other DPS classes do not wear gear or glyph for longevity. Give a caster gear with no spirit (assuming no spirit->spellpower/etc talents, or enough extra spellpower to override) and they'll scarf it right up. Spirit is treated rather like Stam, if it's present, fine, but you don't go hunting it.

In short, no one will do it, because it's not as much DPS. The only reason people use CS or HoW glyphs for reduced mana cost is we do not currently have a third damage increasing glyph and current mana regen is crappy/sporadic without significant inbound healing. This changes in 3.1 and all the math I've crunched repeatedly shows any glyphing other than Judge, Cons, Exo glyphs is a DPS loss.

If the SoB glyph is a bandage, then it's a bandage being provided to a man born with one arm. Unnecessary, unwelcome, and quite probably extremely insulting.


Edit: Why did Alliance QQ so much to get SoB? Because not only did it do superior damage, but the SA mana regen helped us cast more Consecrations for more damage. It was a huge win. We wanted and welcomed the self damage at that stage. No SA chops off the mana return. We're left with slightly superior damage seal for self-damage. Increasing damage of SoB as it scales > increasing risk of death in progression content? That's up to the individual to decide, but I think the community currently disagrees. We should be able to output full DPS without risking death.

Rock: "We're sub-standard DPS. Nerf Paper, Scissors are fine."
Paper: "OMG, WTF, Scissors!"
Scissors: "Rock is OP and Paper are QQers. We need PvP buffs."

 

Fisker

Well new PTR build being deployed tonight: New PTR Build, Razorscale Testing, Arena Tournament

Hopfully there'll be a couple of Retribution changes, though it may be too soon to have anything regarding Seal of Blood, fingers crossed though.

Regarding the glyph, i agree that removing the recoil would be a bandaid fix, which should be applied base to begin with, personally i was thinking something along the lines of the Corruption/Vengeance glyph, could be interesting, though probably not high enough a damage boost to warrant it.

 

Eskostar

It is probably a bit too soon for some retribution changes, as of yesterday's post GC was not sure of any change, so I don't know if in a day's work they ironed anything out regarding retri, but I for one am eagerly awaiting, at least for a JotW buff to atleast 20% to see how it will behave, and ofc, the RV fix

 

• Avitus

Just did another Patchwerk DPS, took us 310 seconds to kill, both myself and Caveman (other ret) were at ~5k DPS in top 12-14. Top 5 was all ~6.8k.

That and we ran out of mana sometime during the 4th minute.

Fingers crossed for next patch.

 

Cevil

For comparison sake, what were the top 5 DPS classes? DKs still look to be amazingly high in our raids. Rogues as well. Also, where were you before you ran out of mana, if you can recall? Did you plummet due to mana issues, or were you consistently bottom rung?

Very disheartening, especially knowing that not much attention has been paid to us until now. Seems like Holy and Protection took the lion's share of the class's attention.

 

madmardigan83

I took a recent Patchwerk fight to look at SoB dmg and recoil. This is pretty much as fair as a look as I think we can see because it has no gimick, no dps increase for myself, and has no AOE dmg. So it should represent a baseline of the dmg that is recoiled back to us with numbers that aren't scewed in my favor to make my point:

WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish (excuse the alts in the raid)

My recoil was 77,053 back to myself. The fight was 3:02 seconds.

DPS back to myself: 421
Average tick: 588
Max hit: 4,373

Me damaging myself accounted for 3.07% of the dmg on the fight. The alt ret pally we had took an additional 2.43%. All other dps? 0.

This is:
8.32% of tank 1
8.91% of tank 2
13.29% of tank 3.


Regarless of how this is healed (and let's be honest, this amount isn't too difficult to heal on a fight like this)... why should ANY dps require 8-13% of the tank's healing? This is similier to standing in the fire that hits for 421 every second. A small amount, yes... but on cutting edge content, why take the dps that needs this at all? Not to mention that we don't bring unique buffs any longer. The recoil dmg even at it's "not dagerous to suicide" is outdated and not needed.


Now, let's take a quick look at a self dmg increase gimick fight: Thadius WoW Meter Online - Combatlog Replay in Engrish

Here, my largest recoil is 8,073
My total dmg to myself was almost 8% of the total dmg to the raid in the fight (~2% was nature dmg). Just me being there causes almost 8-10% additional healing. Now, this fight isn't healer intensive, but had it been... that size of a recoil can cause some problems. In fact, I think later on that run I killed myself on a decimate from Gluth (my own dumb fault on that one, but if the ability was random? Wouldn't stand a chance)


Obviously these are Naxx fights, which have been shown to be less than challenging in comparison of what is to come. I think the best way to accomplish our goal is to perhaps get some PTR WWS's of the same type of info. Heck, examples of people killing themselves by accident would be even more effective.

 

Vova

To take the focus away from wish lists for changes and interpretations of GC's comments, I request some math on the following subject:

Since we are getting 30% bonus to haste, and since SoC scales with haste better then SoB/M does, is the new level of required haste to reach the break point and have SoC surpass SoM/B still out of reach?

 

• Avitus

Top 5 was rogues and locks, 6th was Unholy DK, 7th was fury.

We were losing ground steadly even before mana problems hit after the first AW bump faded. Mana probs just solidified our position down there.

 

Arthaal

No, Nicki is correct. Some of us had brought it up in the beta thread, but the overall reaction at the time was that it wasn't a pressing issue. When we started discussing it again this PTR I was actually quite surprised it was picked up by a very vocal majority.

It's rather surprising that the designers wouldn't consider a DPS class routinely ending up 1st on damage taken after the tanks a problem. I dunno how common this practice may be, but going through WWS parses, looking for high damage taken offenders was one of the hallmark yardsticks for identifying bad DPS in late TBC encounters for my guild. Once you've got everyone where they should be, what else is a good measure of your success chances? Minimize raid damage and everyone can focus on doing their jobs.

The anecdote above, where a player would have come in 23rd on damage taken without recoil ("amazing raid awareness!"), but cam in 4th instead ("liability...") is pretty striking, but hardly surprising. Frankly, ignoring raid wide periodic damage which can't be avoided, most "fire" effects can be expected to hit for anywhere between 25% and 75% of a health pool... A retribution paladin is hitting himself for 15% - 25% every 7s. Even at above average DPS, that would make taking him equivalent to taking someone eating cookies/flames/bad green stuff every 7 to 21s, which falls firmly into the terrible player category.

TLDR: It's a problem and a big one.

Changing gears: when I read about the designers being disappointed with the % of our total damage made up by CS and DS, I assumed that the idea would be to shift some of the damage off Judgement and onto those abilities, thereby reducing the recoil problem and making CS and DS a bigger % of our damage. I actually am not expecting big bumps on those abilities. I could see them feeling as if recoil is only a big deal because Judgement got out of hand and replying that it's not an issue with that type of change already built in to whatever version of the game they are currently testing internally.

Regarding glyphing for extra mana: the only way it is a good thing is if 2 conditions are met.

1) Our DPS is balanced around a minimal rotation, which can be sustained without the glyph providing extra regen (but raid buffed).
2) The extra mana allows introduction of an extra ability into this minimal rotation, effectively acting as a dump for the extra regen. Then the glyph actually is a choice, extra DPS on a base ability (Exo) or extra mana to use Consecration more often as a dump.

I don't like that solution for all the problems it entails for PvP and everyone's made that point numerous times already SO: if you want to go ahead and give us this glyph of extra mana back, balance the existing regen to allow a full rotation against which our total DPS output is to be measured. Once that's done, introduce a mana dump mechanic. I argued earlier for a new ability for this, but building a Arcane Mage like functionality into a base or talented ability would also work... something like recasting Consec while it is still active on the mob causes its periodic damage to increase by X% at the cost of Y% more mana to use it. Stacks up to 3 times.

Percent modifiers R'US

 

Dale

Not sure this is actually a good idea, but thought I'd throw it out there:

What if DS proc'd cons (assuming it was not on cooldown)? It would:
1) Make DS more interesting
2) Help our mana issues in a somewhat more interesting way then just increasing the jotw percentage
edit: 3) also frees up a GCD

It would not:
1) Help the low level of ret dps on ptr (besides mana-related issues, covered in 2) above)

Not sure how it would impact arenas, since I'm not much of an arena junkie

Edit: 3) above

 

lagavulin

I do not have many alts so I don't keep up with a lot of the other class changes so I was wondering if there was a list somewhere with all the raid buffs given by specific classes and specs that directly increase ret pally's damage? (i.e. Rampage - 5% melee crit from Fury Warriors) And I'd also like to know which buffs don't stack with each other or which are synonymous (i.e. Horn of Winter and Strenght of Earth totem)

Some weeks in our raids we have a fury warrior and some weeks we have an enhancement shaman and some weeks we have a Beast Master hunter so I'd like to try and figure out which buffs are different from week to week and how that may be affecting my dps.

Maybe this could be added to the original post in this thread (which I am constantly re-reading because it's so informative)