Perhaps an actual boost to Auras? Thinking something like Shapeshift mastery in Restoration for Druids. Something like...

- If you are in Devotion Aura you have 2% more armor.
- If you are in Retribtion Aura you have 2% more AP.
- If you are in Concentration Aura you have 2% more mana.

Something any spec would go for if they can spare the points.

A bit late reply to this, but if they want us to get a reason to spec into other trees as well why not just move Combat Expertise down to the lower tiers in Prot? That would be a great talent that I am sure most Ret Paladins would gladly pick up, and that way we wouldn't have to introduce a new talent for it.

I'd rather see new talents do something a bit more interesting then just adding a flat expertise or such at least, but then most the expertise talents for other classes are baked in as secondary effects to different talents.

This seems unlikely given the direction they've taken with our ret aura talents, making them apply to every aura. This would have every retribution paladin use ret aura regardless of what else you have in the raid, when it's clear they want every paladin to use a different aura as much as possible.

Something more from the blues:

Source: World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> 3.1.0 Patch Notes - Updated 3/6/09

That looks pretty promising, to be honest. Not overly original, certainly not getting us into other trees (neither is Divine Sacrifice but its the least of my concerns), but it is a step in the right direction at least.

I would say that the collapse of Improved Retribution aura into Sanctified Retribution suggests that they are still interested in having Ret paladins use ret aura. The idea behind the DPS increase being active under all auras is merely to keep paladins from crippling raid damage by using a resistance aura, however in a typical scenario its most effective to have ret aura on. One could also make the assumption that a mounted pally wouldn't have to waste a GCD trying to increase their damage from crusader to retribution aura.

The new Sanctity of Battle is about a 2-3% buff if you place Exorcism at 5% overall and Crusader Strike at 10% overall. The change itself won't make up for the Fanatacism nerf and the RV double nerf (less damage AND no longer double dips from multipliers, which was to be expected.) I'm unsure if it will be enough, but perhaps they wanted our dps to be slightly lower than it is on live.

Seems this little tidbit was overlooked. Found it right below the note about ArP giving more bang for it's buck.

Source

As of this latest ptr build, haste and arp buffs seem not to be included, but my expertise went up by 4 with no change in gear, will play around with talents and see what could be.

Ok, after unlearning all the talents the expertise remained 4 points higher, maybe, together with haste and arp formula, they changed expertise aswell, can any one else confirm this happened on their char

I can confirm it

I'm on PTR and noticed this from inspecting my gear and I have 7 more expertise on PTR than on live(with 213 rating):

Live:

PTR:



I've skimmed through talents and racials(I'm using an axe so it's not the weapon spec racial) so it looks like either an undocumented change to a ret talent or a change in expertise rating.

Am I the only one getting really sick of every talent being a flat percentage modifier?

Aura Mastery could be interesting. If it also applies to the damage/haste increases from SR/SwR it could be an amazing raiding talent. If not, still nothing worth speccing down another tree for.

No. I'm sure the majority of us love having them come in a patch later and castrate us for having flat % modifiers as a way of enticing some to lackluster talents in the first place. Half-baked ideas ftl.


It would provide an ok raiding talent/DPS increase depending on a few factors, but as of right now dropping 10 points in T1-2 Holy hurts dps...a lot.

For a patch where GC stated Holy was doing "too well" in Pvp, that new Holy tree rearrangement sure looks like a PvP buff.

We have 12 points completely free at the moment. It isn't wonderful and its a very very marginal increase, but it isn't crippling anything.

Worth mentioning that DP being both dispelable and MS is going to rape holy paladins against Priests.

Ninja edit:



232.5 DPS for 232's.

The extra expertise rating is there without any talents or glyphs, and according to the character screen i have 8 expertise by rating alone, and additional 2 points which i have no idea where it's from.

Aura Mastery currently doesn't work with the talented effects, either they only want it to double the "base" aura, so it would be double damage from the retribution aura hits, double resistance, etc. or they just haven't gotten to it.

Fun bonus effect; It actually doubles the effect from Crusader Aura as well, and it may even be intended given that we can use it while mounted and not get dismounted.

Man, if the +15% Damage to Exorcism along with the Glyph does Live, this is going to be a seriously hard hitting spell. People have been getting 8000~ Exorcism in current gear on the PTR on the Patchwerk test. Slapping 15% to that is quite large.

I don't think the 3% Crit is going anywhere, as the description says, "Now also increases..."

As for the Expertise issue, it looks like the Expertise:Expertise Rating ratio got tweaked to require a bit less rating per 1 Expertise.

Lastly,

Obviously to nerf our OP Thaddius DPS. However, I wonder if that includes the damage reduction from Divine Shield?

A druid has reported a similar situation with expertise on the PTR forums and they have said they are looking into it so I guess we just have to wait and see if it is a bug or intended change.

What OP DPS?

Deep Wounds and Ignite is still way more OP than Righteous Vengeance on Thaddius, and that's not been nerfed.

It was sarcasm. They fixed Deep Wounds and Ignite on Thaddius a bit back because it was double dipping into the +%s. so it was only natural that they do the same with RV. The fact that Deep Wounds and Ignite deal more overall damage on Thaddius (Any fight, actually) is because both work off of all their attacks. Ours is only from two.

Well 6% Damage and Haste to a whole raid is nice as well, though limited with the 10 seconds duration. But if they made it affect our talents, then we could buff the raid with any aura we'd like while also increasing their damage and haste by 6%.

But it needs to last longer, like 20 or 30 seconds, possibly have a debuff attached so you can't chain it.

Just seems kinda pointless, unless they plan on introducing similar encounters in Ulduar.

It's just 150% of the paladin's health, that's barely 45k. It's not going to make a large difference in a 25 man raid. It is also quite dangerous to use without DS up, as even 5 players unexpectedly hit by a damaging AE effect for 8k each might instantly kill you in addition to the damage the MT may be taking.

Of course it's still worth the talent point, but it's not a very polished talent in my opinion.

As for something else, Holy has currently Purifying Power, a talent which is very lackluster for Holy. However, if it became available for Ret to spec into, it would actually be an interesting talent to pick up in the early Holy tree. As a reminder, it's 10% off mana cost of Cleanse and Consecration, and a 30% CD reduction on Exorcism.

Given that Bubble/Shield Wall are on a GCD though, and I would assume DS as well (not to mention the DPS gibing you do by popping bubble), you're looking at a fairly massive DPS hit to use the ability.

Just look at something simple like Saph. You take 1000 damage/second from the aura, in addition to 300/second from 24 other auras. From this you're taking at a bare minimum 8200 damage per second. Throw on top of this retards standing in Blizzards (~1.2k per person per second), the damage the tank is taking (ranging between nothing and massive 4k spikes for unavoided hits), and Blood damage and you're looking at pretty much instant-gibage unless you pop Divine Shield (in which case you were better off with the old talent anyway, given that you didn't have to waste 2 GCD's to activate that one).

I really like the idea of Divine Sacrifice, it fits the Paladin class incredibly well, but the implementation just seems so hackneyed.

Aura Mastery is another one of those things. The idea behind it is really cool, and I can see certain instances were an amped Resistance Aura could be pretty incredible. But at the same time it just seems like another PvP talent. I'm pretty much positive amping SR/SwR isn't going to happen, which makes it pretty lackluster as well.

I'm not saying there's a right or wrong way to spec, both talents are situationally cool but otherwise have no impact on our damage. And since there still is nothing in the low trees of either prot or holy (except Divine Strength of course) that contributes to our DPS we're still in the situation where we could just not spec 12 points and do our job perfectly fine. Hopefully the next build will have some actual talents that give us some DPS, I just don't feel that we're lacking in utility right now.

I doubt that Aura Mastery is going to increase the percentage damage or percentage haste effect, given that it's a raid buff category (shared with Ferocious Inspiration / Improved Moonkin Form).

Slight derail: That would seem to make it quite a lackluster talent for anyone except Holy, since it would provide no useful DPS effect for Ret, and is far too deep for Prot as a weak tanking cooldown.

They're doing much to curb Holy paladins and their momentum in arenas outside of their talent tree (shattering throw should stand out in that regard).