Cevil, I couldn't agree more. People touting the new "take 30% of raid damage" as PvE ret utility are delirious. Design is being horribly counterproductive and people are naively falling for it.

In other news, General Vezax hard mode:



Seems 239 is the hard mode ilvl and since it appears all bosses will have a hard mode, I take back what I said about lackluster Ulduar loot At ilvl 239 from all bosses there should be a lot of good stuff to go around in addition to the end bosses and their hard modes.

(He also drops a libram that adds +116 to CS, but obviously that has to be a placeholder)

Raiders certainly are a good part of the population of WoW, but I believe Arena is even more popular. They refuse to make two rule sets (PvP/PvE), so you have to live with the majority rule. The Exo glyph or the new talent change will most likely be reverted and so other sustained dps ability will be added or tweaked.

How is Bubble offensive? You get 50% less damage while it is up. All Warriors in Arena are less represented than Ret Pallies so they needed a boost, so killing bubble/block will increase Warrior representation.

Aura Mastery seems intended, since Holy only had a few buttons to push.


Regarding the new 2Hs (all three are 3.4 and swords/polearm), I like that they are at that speed. It limits PvP burst while still giving meaningful upgrades that will not have to be nerfed.

BTW, item level 232 = 232.5 dps and it is great that there are already three nice 2H weapons.

There are a few reports on the official forum of Righteous Vengeance now being affected detrimentally by partial resists (similar to Consecration). Can anyone confirm if this is this case, if it is a change from Live and to what extent this impacts RV DPS and Ret DPS overall?

Do bleed effects suffer a similar drawback?

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Righteous vengeance is worthless now

There's definitely some sort of bug. I flew out to SP and Judge crit'd a L78 mob on the PTR.

3784 JoC crit
22 holy (204 resist)
68 holy (159 resist)
45 holy (182 resist)
22 holy (204 resist)

total of 157 holy, 749 resisted. 906 damage from RV
Expected: 3784 * 0.3 = 1135.2 damage

another trial, no aura, no crit damage meta
2745 JoC crit
50(115)
50(115)
16(148)
50(115)

expected 2745 * .3 = 823.5
got 166 (493) total 659

take actual damage divided by expected damage:
906 /1135.2 ~= 0.8
659/823.5 ~= 0.8

Take the tooltip 30%*0.8 = 24%, which is exactly what we expect from 3/5 RV on Live. (8% total crit damage per point). 2 bugs here: The talent doesn't match the tooltip, and there's ridiculous partial resist rates, even on lower level mobs. I'm filing a bug report.

Actually the entire Paladin class has problems with interactivity, Prot Pallys doing a 6969 rotation do almost nothing once the boss is in position. They could easily macro it, automate their keyboard, and go somewhere else and win at the encounter.

The original IoL was my definition of the perfect talent (instant HL on HS crits). It allowed for fun mechanics like "sitting" on an IoL proc to melee a boss for JoW procs (back when JoW didn't suck) or throwing FoL's around the group until a tank really needed the heal and then dumping an amped HL on to them instantly. It created a real split between a good Holy pally who could keep his tank alive and a great Holy pally who could use IoL to both keep his tank alive and other things.

Given how Blizzard are trying to tone down Ret PvP burst but keep sustained damage as it is on Live, are you sure about that :P ?

Just a quick side question, does this mean the damage from Righteous Vengeance is no longer modified by resilience? Wouldn't that get rid of the "double penalty" from resilience that talents like this used to have?

Yes, as there's already a Libram that does exactly that ([Libram of Radiance] vs Libram of the Sacred Shield). Also with that name, I don't think it'll be a ret libram.

So with some of the new talents and blizzards announcment, wanting to add desirable ret talents in other trees, ive jotted down some of my ideas. Some are forms of what ive been reading in this post and some are new from myself. Keep in mind all the numbers could easily be adjusted as needed.

Prot.
Swap the positions of reckoning(5th tier) and improved devo aura.

Change reckoning so the damage taken from seal of blood is included. This may seem like a bit much, but even with a reasonably fast 2 hander its hard to get 3 of the 4 swings in. Most the time the paladin would get 2 extra "white" attacks. This gives haste an additional value and helps create some appeal to a faster 2 hander. It also adds an appeal to use SoB as prot for a "high threat seal" in a low damage scenario.

Change divine Sacrafice. What the talent is now is just another reason to force a healer to keep one eye on his ret pali (liability player?). Change this talent to; Decreases sacraficial damage done to the paladin by 30% (including hand of sac and SoB/SoM) and when the paladin has recieved 6000 points of sacrafical damage, increases the damage and healing done by holy shock, divine storm, and hammer of the righteous by 15%, the buff is consumed by the next ability used (regardless if you utilized the 15% increase.)

Holy.
Seals of the pure: Add Seal of command to this increasing its chance to proc by 2/4/6/8/10% (effectively increasing the ppm) and increasing the Seal/Judge damage by 1/2/3/4/5%.

Swap unyielding faith (tier 2) with Purifying power (tier 6)

Healing light: Add to this talent; and when any of these spells crit, increases the damage of shield of the righteous and divine storm by 15%, the buff is consumed by the next ability used. (I purposely avoided adding holy shock into this to keep it from being considered "over budgeted" since its already a very good talent for holy.)

Illumination: Add agressive spells so it would be 20/40/60/80/100% chance to return 5/10/15/20/25% of the abilitys base mana cost (This would help to regen mana without the self damage done while useing SoB)

Summary
The holy/ret build would basicly be the SoC build, stronger in healing, while the Prot/ret would be a SoC/SoMbuild, more durable variety. Both would make you pick the talents in the ret tree you left behind. The additions to both healing light and divine sacrafice help to elleviate the FCFS rotaion (and shine a little light on "better" ret players), as well add a smaller amount of flavor to the holy tree for tanks and vica versa.

Im personaly really enthusiastic about splitting the ret spec. Are you an SoC ret or an SoB ret?

Edit: i understand that the reckoning change would have a great effect in pvp. Adding somthing like a reduced chance in pvp to somthing slim could solve that.

It appears that we're going to need to suffice with ArmPen being the "flavor of the month" stat in this tier, considering the increase in its effectiveness come 3.1. Unfortunately we do not scale so well with this stat, so itemization problems most likely lie on the horizon. So far in released drops, we have:

Voldreth - Dark Blade of Oblivion (Str / Crit / ArmPen)
Lotrafen, Spear of the Damned (AP, Crit, ArmPen)
Stormedge (Str, Hit, ArmPen)
Ironsoul (Str, Crit, ArmPen)
Rune Edge (AP, Crit, ArmPen)

I think that's all that have been discovered thus far. It clearly seems that Blizzard is going to push the ArmPen envelope this tier, and if this is a foretelling of what the remainder of gear is going to look like, we may be hard pressed to find simple Plate pieces with Hit/Crit or even Crit/Haste combinations, which I would guess to be more beneficial than the former.

At first I was considering whether such a chance with ArmPen eating one of Plate DPS' two stats would lean us towards leather, but there's the possibility when more leather drops that we may see leather which has one of its three stats eaten by ArmPen.

After running some test for the last hour or so I am seeing these results exactly, RV is now doing exactly 80% of its intended damage (when you add the partial resists), however it is also seeing 70-90% partial resist on every single tick. The result is RV doing ~1-1.5% of our total damage right now, making the talent almost useless, here is hoping for a quick fix to this.