rldolph79

Quote from: Daelo
Ulduar will be on PTR in the future, but we're going to have tight controls in place on what can be tested at any given time. Ulduar will also not be up permanently like Naxxramas was in the WotLK Beta. If we have something to test, we'll make the zone and encounter available. If we don't, we'll disable the zone.

It appears as though they'll be using Ulduar as the testing ground.

 

Croma

Hello there,

its my first time posting here so pls be patient with me.

Ive read a lot of u all being concerned about the Recoil-DMG done by SoB and the maybe-nerfed mana reg due SA-changes. Thats something that crossed my mind too.
Our DMG will increase by far more than our lifepool while at the same time, blizzards going to "nerf" all healers manareg. This maybe a tricky combination.

But im far more concerned about the fact, that still 2/4 (in future 2/5) of our skills dealing AE DMG. This could end in Ret not being able to do progress-raiding because there is an encounter that asks for both, max DPS and CC.

Ive already got some similar probs while trying Sath3D in the 10-man-version. U need to do heavy DPS on Tenebron. But with all the lavaadds and all the spawning little dragons, there is no chance for not having 2 or 3 adds smashing on me. This combined with the self-inflicted DMG was a huge Problem. Im really afraid of finding the same situation in Ulduar.

 

vorda

You shouldn't get much more than 1 or 2 blows on you considering you have a good tank. You can also stun one if you're taking too much dmg or LoH/bubble/heal yourself if needed.

 

Croma

Well, the point is not whether i should have 1,2 or 3. Or whether its the tanks fault or mine. And even if it was just one, if that one was big and red thats enough of a problem.

Its a mechanic that may cause huge problems in the future. You may compare ist to Lurker in SSC. If anyone broke a sheep back then, someone died. And thats exactly what im afraid of. Well, in the case of Lurker its not that big of a problem, because you got plenty of space. But what if not?

 

kysta

I think moby3012 was referring to patch 3.09, which is supposed to be going live tomorrow. It isn't going to be on the PTR at all. This isn't the Ulduar patch. Although now when I am looking for real information, I can't find any link to a blue post from mmo-champion.

 

Janraea

So what you're saying is that it's a major concern that, sometime in the future, on one or two gimmick fights, we may have to lower our dps to avoid wiping the raid? Yeah, that would be intolerable, no class has ever had to endure such pain...

If you're by a sheep that can't be broken, skip your aoe attacks. Later, ask the tank if he could please move the mobs away from sheep so you can do your full dps.

 

• frmorrison

The changes are pretty minor and internally these changes have been tested for a while. A PTR would have been nice, but for balance (especially PvP, I love the Arcane and Rogue nerfs) it is better to get it over with.

I am glad Seals will be 30 minutes, because I sometimes forget to reseal, so lose a few dps when I have to stop my rotation and reseal. Some issue with Prot and Holy.

Such a nice change, considering we had to reseal every every 8-10 seconds for four years when dpsing.

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

 

Babathong

Is anyone else as happy as I am to see no posts regarding the nerf of the Exorcism glyph?

 

Dorvan

Considering we've gotten no new information of any sort on 3.1 today, it's far too early to draw any conclusions one way or another.

 

Milou

Prinsesa, your numbers for sunder armour are wrong though, it is 785 per application. The new boss armour level would be 11448 to allow a fully sundered boss to be sitting at 9158 with a 4% per application and 9158 with a 785 per application.

 

Musclebound

The Twilight Zone 10 man achievement set up my guild ran with had a bear tank on the drakes, a death knight on Sartharion and a prot paladin on the adds. In most situations the best plan is to communicate with the add-tank if there is an add on you but for the most part you can go ape-shit on Tenebron (hero / haste or ins str pot / wings / trinket, the whole nine yards) with little worry, assuming you've been acquainted with shadow fissures and flame walls already. Once Tenebron is dead, my method was to switch to Seal of Righteousness (my spec right now is tailored for the fight and doesn't include SoC), and Judge light for additional healing. The AoE healing going out from our shaman healer kept martyr from presenting any sort of threat, and if an add was on me I'd stun or Hand of Salvation myself and refrain from using AoE. The JoL healing also was vital during the Shadron / Vesperon phase of the fight where the Death Knight cooldown cycling leaves little room for error. Its mostly an intuitive solution to keeping adds off you, skipping one Divine Storm against Tenebron won't butcher your DPS, especially when weighed against how badly dying will.

On the topic of SoR vs SoB with the SA changes, I believe its been mentioned previously that SoB is the intended DPS seal (it was in regards to the SoC changes and how that might pull ahead), so SoR pulling ahead would make it useless. There would be no point in even training a seal that deals a percentage of the damage you deal with it back at you if it wasn't superior for DPS. I'm sure if SoR pulled ahead, as stated before, Blizzard would do what is necessary to fix that.

 

• Avitus

Regarding 10 man Sartharion 3 drakes and adds on you, your best bet is to communicate with whoever is tanking the whelps/flames. If it's a prot paladin they can get 3 mobs off you every 8 seconds so this shouldn't really be an issue.

It's interesting to watch, the majority of "changes" paladins (and specifically ret) have received since the expansion (wow 3.0) revamp and beyond have been playability fixes or corrections rather than actual changes/new additions. The most core of which has been the removal of int as a dependancy and making all abilities scale with AP ("and spelldamage"). It's playability/scalability fixes that should have been in there from day one.

It's always funny when they change something that has been annoying people for years yet they would never change (5 minute blessings in Molten Core anyone? "But giving paladins blessings longer than 5 minutes would be overpowered!!", "Paladin strike? taunt? threat reduction? instant HoW? BoK baseline? Never!").

Not that I'm complaining, whoever is at the reigns of ret design now finally seems to know what they're doing, I'll take long overdue things like this over new junk we might not need any day.


I'm hoping that a modification to JoB recoil is in the pipeline, I'm not sure how long 33% damage back is going to fly. It was designed at a time where Judgments did ~300-600 non crit and ~1.5k crits on ~10k health pools (very rough values) and never intended for the WotLK monsters they've become (5-6k non-crits, 12-15k crits) after all the scaling modifiers were added (at ~20k HP).

Regarding your second point, despite some people shooting you down, it's actually a legitimate concern. Assuming fights will ever get tightly tweaked as they were at the start of Sunwell for example, you can't afford to have some spec with a handicap in your raid, specifically progress raids. I'm hoping this will be a rare case however and that AoE in our standard rotation can probably be of benefit more often than not.

 

• frmorrison

JoB hurts, however people still successfully PvP with it (they have a good healer).

With the self-healing from the aggro-free JoL, and imp LotP/Divine Storm/imp Blood Aura, the self damage isn't that bad. I would like to see lower JoB self hits, but perhaps the devs want that handicap on us with that downside.

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

 

Prinsesa

Thank you Milou and Chicken for correcting my Sunder numbers.

That does make things line up quite nicely. Currently, a boss would have 13083 armor pre-Sunder, 9158 armor post-Sunder. If and when Sunder is changed to -20% armor, pre-Sunder armor would have to be lowered to 11447 to make the post-Sunder armor line up with 9158, which is congruent to the preview notes of both lowering base armor yet keeping the Sunder effect relatively the same.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

• Avitus

I understand how the class works *cough* and yes, you can use Blood in 5s with 2 healers, but beyond that it probably does more harm than good.

This is beyond the point anyway, it's not about healing up the self damage (or PvP in this case), it's about the spike damage cause by JoB nukes in fights with AoE and/or RSTS.

12k JoBs (which is the high average, but by no means the maximum) saps 4k life off you and this can happen every 8 seconds. It basically means that at any given fight you're operating with 4-5k HP less of a margin of error and it's something you cannot in many cases control regardless of how "skilled" you are, if a randomly timed effect hits you at the same time (or within the server latency range) as you are judging you might have just killed yourself.

What it boils down to is you're going to have to switch to SoC on some of these fights in order not to be a liability, irrelevant for farm, but completely undesirable for progression.
It's a pattern of too much baggage for Ret to do its job (this and having 2 AoE attacks in our standard rotation). Seeing as they're changing Spiritual Attunement, it would be the best time to take a new look at the "self damage = mana" system (and figure out something else to keep SoB out of arena for the mainstream.... or maybe simply don't? or offload damage into a new PvE only ability as mentioned a few months back *hint hint*).

 

HamSlammer

I, too, have worried about this. I even made a thread on the Beta forums detailing how JoB recoil might get out of hand come later raid tiers. We're currently hitting 15k+ Judgements now, just imagine what they'd be if [Betrayer of Humanity] was a 3.8 speed weapon? It's something that needs to be addressed before we become too much of a liability.

Anyway, I've lightly discussed this with my guildies and I told them I'd sooner pull myself out of the raid on a progression fight than swap to a sub par Seal because, chances are, nearly anyone could outDPS a Paladin at that point.

On a lighter note, I do love Seal of Blood...

20:24'35.046 Sartharion #8 melee swing hits Arrent for 13721 Physical.
20:24'35.375 Arrent Seal of Blood hits Arrent for 69 Holy.
20:24'35.781 Arrent died.

21:10'06.796 Onyx Sanctum Guardian #7 melee swing hits Arrent for 10310 Physical.
21:10'07.000 Arrent Seal of Blood hits Arrent for 154 Holy.
21:10'07.359 Arrent died.

 

Milou

Weapon speed has no effect on judgements, in fact the only difference a weapon makes is it's stats.

 

Aramul

Judgement of Blood and Command are both modified by weapon damage. A slower weapon makes for a higher damage range, which does, directly, increase Judgement damage.

 

Bubbele

Concerning AoE damage in our single-target rotation, I've read the idea (on these boards even iirc) of putting Cons and Exorcism on a shared CD, adding a dot effect to Exorcism's initial damage.

Would atleast take care of 1 of our CC breakers, while also reducing mana cost on single target fights.

 

pamela

That would decrease our current DPS on undead (not crippling, but a noticeable decrease), when GC has said that the damage that ret is doing in raids now (on undead) is at the level where they want ret doing dps later (on non-undead).

 

flexbutt

Ideally it would be the same dps, since Exorcism initial damage plus a dot (like Flame Shock) would be equivalent to Exorcism plus Consecration sans one GCD and some mana spent. While it isn't a terrible idea, I'm personally not looking to dumb down my rotation. Additionally, it could be too much damage in PvP as it's essentially consecration damage one would not be able to walk out of (if no dispels are available.)

 

rldolph79

DS and consecration breaking CC really shouldn't be an issue. CC as a general rule is only used on trash, and if your CCers are competent then CCed mobs will be far from those that are being tanked anyway. Blizzard very rarely designs boss encounters that allow CC at all, and even in those where it's possible, it's usually not completely necessary (think M'uru door adds).

If our biggest concern in Ulduar turns out to be dps on trash, then we're in pretty good shape.

 

Tonyk

It would be interesting to see how they handle our mana regen when they change SA and Exorcism.
Will they buff Glyph of Blood, which is arguably the worst glyph in the game?
Will they add some synergy into our talents for Exorcism? I'd love to see Righteous Vengeance also proc off Exorcism criticals. It would also give more incentive to get Hit rating - gemming for Strength in every socket will get boring eventually.

 

flexbutt

Adding Righteous Vengeance procs on Exorcism would not be enough incentive to gem for hit. Keep in mind that hit rating for spells is more powerful than hit rating for melee. While my 240 hit rating is only 7.32% for melee, the same 240 is 9.15% for spells (then add in the 3% you'd get for Misery). In order for it to be worth it to not gem for strength, other stats would have to be buffed.

 

Ashbringer

Mana Regen may eventually become something that is a concern.. but I don't believe that will be until the depths of Ulduar. At times, I do run low on mana on Patchwerk, but that's the only boss in current content that I ever get that low with. The main issue I'm running into is the lovely Twilight Torment crit + Judgement of Blood killing me on the Tridrake encounter in 10 and 25 man. It's just becoming so very old... so very fast. It would be nice to see a change for that in the pipeline at some point, but I suppose you could also blame it on Blizzard's lovely random number generator.