Aurarius

This point (which is a fantastic one I might add) regarding Undead/Demons is something that has been troubling me for awhile. On the PTR it seems everyone is using good olde patchwerk for their DPS tests... this isn't very settling for someone in our position. I'm referring to posts such as the DPS parse thread and this one on the European Forums.

The issue at hand that I'm talking about is the specificity of paladins being at their 'absolute' best against Undead/Demons. For example, other DPS classes could fight a patchwerk like mob that was a giant cow for all intents and purposes and have very little change with regards to their DPS. Meanwhile, as Ret paladins, we miss out on 3% from crusade and the auto-critical effect of Exorcism (Not sure what percentage this would be). This has major implications for Ulduar as there is a lot of giants in there, and I assume Yogg himself will be of 'no type' like the Herald in Old Kingdom.

One would assume that they're balancing around this but in the aforementioned posts by Ghostcrawler suggest that hybrid dps should be 5% behind pure dps. Are they balancing Retribution DPS with the aim of Patchwerk as a benchmark? I think that's a very irresponsible and irrational choice... we're looking at being at least 8% behind pure DPS classes and 3% behind others on a lot of targets due to the lack of Crusade. Even more behind in all likelihood (I haven't played a spell caster in some time, but if a spell is an auto-crit, does it bypass some of the spell hit-table? I can't remember how the system rolls for that.)

TLDR: Are they balancing our damage around having 6% or 3% from Crusade? Having Auto-Critical from Exorcism?

 

smafdi

Stealing a post from Andris in the simple questions thread

Though that is a good question, are they basing our dps on Patchwerk or not. If they are then when we do hit Uldar we'll be in an even worse state than we already are.

 

keano

I'm more worried about them basing our DPS on one of the AoE bosses instead.

 

Exemplar

The glyph is moot. You cannot afford to glyph for SoR or SoC - you need to glyph Judge, Cons, Exo for maximum DPS.

Therefore it's vanilla seals with only Seals of the Pure as a modifier.
Vanilla SoC > Vanilla SoR, but 5/5 SotP SoR > Vanilla SoC.

Until they give us incentive to pick up talents in Prot, it's currently ridiculously easy to pick up SotP. So when you don't feel safe using SoB, you swap to SoR. You don't even talent SoC.

I guess they are fine with SoR ending up beating SoC in terms of Ret DPS.

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."

 

Musclebound

I've been trying to keep up with the thread but I think I got lost somewhere, has the recoil on martyr reached a point where its no longer usable for DPS due to the Spiritual Attunement nerfs and the amount of self-damage it does? It sort of clashes with my assumption that it was the DPS seal and if it falls behind another seal Blizzard would seek to rectify that. I suppose that isn't the case though, judging from the direction the discussion has gone.

 

lagavulin

Oh they are.

 

Ivrhan

Following up from a few threads back, I drew up a spreadsheet with the T8.25 items to cross-reference the Retrib and Prot sets. Trying to gain the 2-set bonus from each is (obviously) a tradeoff. For purposes of this comparison, I chose to sacrifice Crit & Haste to gain the 10% set bonus from the Prot set. However, if already hit-capped, it would make sense to swap other pieces. Swapping legs, for instance, is a +11 Str gain when switching to the prot set over the retrib set!

Picking Sholder & Hands pieces to drop from Ret, you lose:
116 crit
52 haste
42 expertise
Sockets: ignored because with red gems, socket bonuses wouldn't be active on those pieces.
2 Str (because the prot set is -1 str less)

Assuming you socket red only, you do gain the Prot set bonuses, which are stamina, so you gain 24 stamina (with item and socket differences). You also gain some of the defense from the prot set, but for DPS I've ignored those statistics.

So, how does 10% additional seal damage compare to a loss of 2 str, 116 crit, 52 haste and 42 expertise? What about swapping leggings instead, where you gain the Str back but lose more hit?

 

rstilskien

So about what I believe should be a nice change to account for SoB/M and the SA going away.

As we know Blizzard doesn't really like that CS and DS hardly contribute to our pve dps against single target bosses, and the fact that SoC hardly does anything good besides when lvling.

So in my opinion SoB/M should be moved to the 51 or 41 ret talent, SoC be made a baseline skill learned whenever blizz feels like, CS should be moved to where SoC was, and DS most likely moved to 41 talent spot, with SoB/M at the end. Also SoB/M should have what is now SA linked to the spell/talent, and hopefully change how SoB/M recoil works to something like the 10%hp or so mentioned earlier.

Now this should solve problems of using a specific glyph to make SoB/M usable and should also keep other specs from benefiting from this, as this is most probably why SA is now gone (Holy pally pvp). Pally tanks could spec into CS but i do not believe it would change much and would be very comparable to Prot wars using HS.

Note: this is only helpful if Blizz keeps recoil around, which maybe they should, but change how it works a bit so that we are not such a very huge liability.

 

HamSlammer

+10% to Seal of Blood comes out to 1.3-1.6% total DPS increase based off the my personal DPS parses (which have, admittedly, been plagued by horrible RNG as of late) and parses I've access to. However, it's not merely a question of 10% Seal Damage vs. the assortment of stats you've listed. By going 2piece Prot + 2piece Ret you're forgoing 4piece Ret which is shown to be a 1-1.5% DPS increase, making consideration of 2piece Prot not worth it.

 

• frmorrison

Making Blood the 51 pointer wouldn't change much, no other spec (besides a holy pally vs a Mage) would use Blood.

SA is not gone because of PvP, but because they want healers to care about mana.

Tanks would never get CS, they are pretty much GCD locked with Exo and Cons.

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

 

rstilskien

regardless SA is gone and we want/need it back, and i believe that combining blood/martyr with what was SA would help ret and no one else... which as you said and we all know was the problem. Also I only pointed out the CS thing for prot to show and reiterate that it would be pretty much useless.

plz give back constructive critisism to my original post, and Blood as a 51 pointer would change alot if it was combined as i mentioned, making sure only ret got the "SA" type mana back.

Edit: sorry forgot to mention in my original post and in this one that this solution/idea is only if Blizz. indead does keep recoil of SoB/M which I, like most others here, want to see disapear and see JotW buffed to compensate. The stuff about moving around talents is just to try and make these deep ret talents seem more important, but nothing else really. Sorry about being unclear.

 

HamSlammer

A simple increase in JotW would more than suffice for our mana troubles rather than jumbling the entire tree. Additionally, taking our dependency on SA out of the equation streamlines our mana consumption since it'd be solely based on active abilities rather than reactive ones and lessen the need for a surrogate healer to provide us, the mana battery, with mana.

 

tarja

We don't "need" SA back, we just need an additional form of mana return to take its place. Personally I don't want to see SA back at all, I want to be able to rely on always having a mana positive DPS cycle, instead of being mana starved on fights with no raid AOE damage, and permanently at 100% mana on fights with lots of AOE

 

caboom

I'd rather stay mana starved at the beginning of ulduar and get hotfixes and patches later than have SA back tbh. That would generate alot of paladin QQ on the official forums wich in turn devs will eventually have to respond to somehow. But hopefully stuff will get done on PTR rather than live.

 

Cevil

First of all, Spiritual Attunement wasn't nerfed because of Holy Paladin PVP. holy Paladin is dominating 2s and 3s as well as the single healer; there is no spiritual attunement factoring in here. The issue with holy in PVP has always been kitability and unsnarability (JoJ @ 40 yards or Repentence, Hand of Freedom with stun removal) longevity (Divine Plea + Ret crit talents + Illumination + getting away to drink easy) and incredible throughput on instant cast heals (Holy Shock to Instant Flash of Light or 1 sec. Holy Light). Spiritual Attunement was removed from non Prot because a) Holy Paladins could get healed from other sources in a raid and get back mana that way, allowing for Paladin circle jerking on AOE fights, putting Paladins at a huge mana advantage to other healers. It was removed from Ret because either ret was starved for mana (Blood recoil notwithstanding) or it was so flooded that mana was simply near 100%, all the time. This makes it very hard for Blizzard to balance our spec, because our resource system swings so wildly from fight to fight.

Losing Spiritual Attunement is a good thing for PvE Ret provided two things: 1) Our mana issues for maintaining our DPS rotation are taken care of in other ways, such as a buff to JotW, and 2) Seal of Blood recoil is now a strict negative, and changes are made to the class so it can exist without taking recoil.

As was stated earlier, I don't care HOW we do our hybrid DPS: Blood, Command, Righteousness, Vengeance. Are there some aesthetic preferences? Yes. I love the huge crits on Blood Judgements. That's fun. I love the big procs on Command swings. That's fun, too. But in the end I don't care as long as I'm doing what I should be: hybrid equivalent DPS.

Now, I don't think, at this point, Blood is going to lose it's recoil. if it does, it's simply Super Seal of Righteousness. It's strictly better. I don't see Blizzard doing that. I do believe it should do that but it has threat implications for Prot Paladins. Because of this, I think Command is a place worth exploring by Blizzard. Something like Improved Seal of Command talents that replicate the glyph, or add it's damage to Righteous Vengeance, or increase the damage done by the Seal aspect, are all ways of making Command more attractive and our go to raid DPS seal. Some of these even have the distinction of being PvE only options (Seal damage on RV). You could also make things like Crusader Strike and Divine Storm have a 100% chance to proc your seal: useless abilities for Martyr, but it suddenly makes Command look potentially attractive, provided the 1 sec. internal cooldown doesn't get in the way.

All I want to see is us doing the level of damage expected of a hybrid, and not smashing our own faces to do it. Be it Command buffs, or recoil-less Blood, I don't care. But those are the two major things that will keep our spec out of raids.

 

Exemplar

Roughing around some numbers in the theoretical 3.1 spreadsheet, I find that fully raid buffed:
JotW 20% gives OOM at around 130 seconds against Undead/Demons and 215 otherwise (Holy Wrath isn't cheap).
JotW 25% gives OOM at around 230 seconds against undead/Demons and barely infinite otherwise (0.7 extra mana per second).

No raid buffs:
JotW 20% - 60 seconds against Undead/Demons and 90 otherwise.
JotW 25% - 80 seconds against Undead/Demons and 160 otherwise.

With a single buff (Kings, AI, BoW/Manaspring) 25% stretches to closer to 2 min and 4 min, repectively. This is fairly realistic for a 5man. Fight length seems fine. Skip a few HW or Consecration, perhaps.

At a glance JotW at 25% is probably the best balance point. On long undead/demon fights we can choose to use fewer Holy Wrath, pop a mana pot, self-LoH, or throw in movement for some time off target (drop a few CS and DS). You know, that skill thing people mention - what sets a good Ret apart from a bad Ret.

These numbers are very rough and do not include 4 piece T7 with the Judgement reduction, as we better not be balanced around having that set bonus. I do hope someone has pointed this out to Blizzard if their tests take place with people in 4piece. If they balance mana around that... we will suffer at something like 20%.

TLDR: If they only turn one knob, JotW, it should increase to 25% mana return to allow reasonable DPS in all situations. This does not require SA in any form.

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."

 

flexbutt

When raid buffed, do you also include JoW? Divine Plea each cooldown? I saw that you mentioned BoW and Kings, didn't see if JoW was assumed.

 

• Zurm

I can't speak for regen, but after the Rawr fixes Endoscient has implemented (not in a release yet) it seems that with the same gear, DPS has increased with 3.1. Yes, we lost some power in fanat and RV, but the changes to haste/ArP are pretty big.

Also, didn't they promise us 15% more CS/Exor dmg in swift retribution? It's no where to be seen.

 

• Arikah

Sounds harsh, hopefully your spreadsheet is wrong about time til oom exemplar. Some of the hardmode fights in Ulduar take between 5 and 9 minutes that I've seen, and I do not want to entertain thoughts of being low on damage, then going oom and doing as much as a tank. Skipping or delaying a consecrate on a fight like Grob is done due to an experienced choice (not doing a whole lot of damage when he moves out of it!); skipping a consecrate or HoW or whatever due to mana constraints is not an acceptable balance point for a dps spec, and being oom really isn't a choice. When I calculated 30% JotW I actually forgot about wearing T7 4pc - to be where we are on mana now without 4pc would actually require 33% JotW (why does that look familiar..?). If they want to make mana a more constraining factor for dps classes, which they really shouldn't, then yes 25% would put us back to thinking about mana. However I do not see enh shaman having mana issues, so why should we? Even recalculating losing our set bonus I still believe 30% is the best point for JotW.

I'm disappointed too that this ptr build had none of the paladin class changes integrated because I don't want to see us go live untested or buggy (think 3.0, but instead of topping everything we become 3.0 ele shamans). It did have some gearing information, thank you zurm for laying out some math on the T8 bonuses - I'm working on updating the OP for 3.1 and solid info with math is good stuff. I'm going to be quick to shoot down 2pc prot+2pc ret, stat allocation aside the 10% boost to seal damage is the same damage boost compared to 4pc T8 ret (1.7% vs 1.5%). T7 vs T8 arguements are also stupid, of course T8 is better (there is about 13% more STR on each piece not counting sockets and better stat allocation).

I'm amused that our 2pc T8 will be used heavily in pvp; exorcism hitting 52% harder on pvp opponents will be pretty ridiculous.

 

Eskostar

Are you confusing with sanctity of battle?

 

Exemplar

Raid buffed assumed everything of which I'm aware.
AI, Imp MoW, Kings for more Int (feeds into replenish effect).
Replenish
BoW/Manaspring
DP on cooldown
JoW procs
JotW return (at varying rates, as listed).

Dark Rune, Mana Pot, Mana Tide (Resto shaman in your party? Uh oh), and LoH were not included.

I only tested AI alone, Kings alone, and BoW alone to see how it affected time to OOM for a guesstimate at a 5man or 10man PuG.

Zurm - my numbers disagree, I'm seeing a drop in DPS which seems in line with the WWS linked so far. Have you updated the new armour mechanics (new armour value on bosses, Sunder and FF doing % rather than values, etc) and updated raid buffs (Spellcrit from 10% down to 5%) and such? Armor Pen and Haste are still crap compared to Str, Hit, Exp, AP, Crit, or Agi. They still only beat Spelldamage.

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."

 

• Avitus

Exemplar, I don't want to open up a massive can of worms, but any argumentation that includes a "time till OOM" for ret I have a very hard time agreeing with, no matter at what point you draw the line.

It goes back to the fundamental question: Why take a ret over any other melee without a "time till OOM" liability?
Whether people realize it or not, when you take a melee class it's inherently implied that they don't have that liability and instead need to deal with such things as constant boss movement, cleaves, a lower threat threshold and so on.

This is the meta game in wow. Ranged classes have some concerns, melee have others. Any class that has both immediately becomes a liability and I only need to point to all other melee classes not having that problem as proof.


"Optimal" conditions (read: all possible mana buffs/debuffs/conditions) are pointless to quote if it means under all other circumstances we are gimp. Does anyone want to get back to TBC standard of "unless there's windfury in the raid I'm useless"? I don't think so.
Do we want to be the "useless as a brick" class/we lost the match if you get burned to 0 in arena or having to run from mana leaf to mana leaf in WSG?

What's even worse is trying to balance a class such as ours around a "less than maximum" ("suboptimal") rotation. It basically means that said suboptimal rotation has to be balanced to be competitive/equivalent to the DPS all other non-pure DPS classes do. Which means that given a very short fight we'd do tons more by going "max rotation" (where we use all abilities).

Obviously that second part is not true as they didn't give us "mana dump" abilities for extra damage.


So again, I come back to the core of the issue: What is the problem with keeping ret always mana positive under any (even solo) conditions? Absolute DPS ownage? We don't have mana dumps. Absolute healing abuse? We have a mana bar that only fits 3 heals at a time when full. Holy paladins speccing into ret? Put it high enough and it's a net loss for them to spec there.

What further underlines the issue to me is if you combine JoB recoil to the equation. Why do we have to be such a ridiculous liability over all other classes of our role just to function at barely acceptable levels? And if you add a "time till oom", needing specific buffs to be merely ok with mana and all the extra healing we need, why should any raid put up with this? Why are we so incredibly high maintenance compared to other classes when we don't provide anything special?

Anyway, I'll take a step back for a while since there's really nothing to say until they (someday) add something new in a PTR build worth talking about. Fingers crossed it's not as late as live.

 

Aurarius

I'd like to put my agreement with this statement; in particular the bolded area. I do so with some discretion though (this is just an inference, take it as you will); from the standpoint of Blizzard it seems like they think Holy Wrath and Hammer of Wrath in particular are 'mana dumps'... maybe even consecrate depending.

After thinking about it a bit more, I'm beginning to realize what a balance nightmare Crusade is. If we assume the perfect world of Hybrid DPS being 5% behind Regular DPS then the situation arises on select fights (while many types not all of them) Paladins are the superior Hybrid DPS because they'll only be 2% behind (not withstanding Demons/Undead, that gap could actually shrink to 0% really). This is assuming they balance with Crusade not being there. Meanwhile, if they balance with crusade being there, on select fights Retribution Paladins are 8% behind pure DPS, and all other hybrids are the plain 5% back.

My suggestion: remove any of the specifics from Crusade. Make it all damage if you wanna keep it as a boring percentage modifier, but keeping it as it is will only make for more problems left and right. Percent modifiers on specific targets are just bad ideas when it comes to balancing.

 

• Avitus

Aurarius, any ability with a cooldown is by definition NOT a "mana dump" because it can be balanced around that cooldown.

 

Gungrave

3 yellow gem slots? Like i will ever gem for something else than STR, outside of the meta gem requirements.