I must have misread. I thought the interrupt immunity was on the cooldown, and the 100% effectiveness was a passive.

Well if you only have a single paladin specced into Aura Mastery it only has a 1 in 12 uptime. I could see an issue arrising in a resist fight with a heavy and predictable Magical bursts. It could lead to bringing a glut of paladins just to cover all the bursts. The only thing holding back such a situation is the fact that a 130 extra resist will only reduce the maxium hit by another base 10% in most cases. That of course makes this talent less desirable for prot paladins.

In the end I suspect we will see this changing some more.

+130 resistance to X for 10 seconds every 2 minutes does not strike me as a requirement or even a particularly powerful buff. Any fight where resistance is that critical you're going to be geared for it, in all other cases I don't think it'll make that much of a difference considering the duration/cd.


No disrespect to how anyone chooses to spend their time in game, but there's something to be said when they decide to divert focus to an extreme niche group ("arena prot paladins"?) while the general populace is left hanging. It's like polishing your windows when your house is flooded.

Yeah, it's not that effective only lasting 10 seconds. I misread the talent and thought the interrupt immunity was what was on cooldown only.

At this point it seems easier to get to the Prot 11 pointer if you're considering the points you're essentially wasting to get to either. 5% more healing done/taken means your JoLs are a bit more powerful. On battles like Sapphiron where my JoLs are proccing for over 1000 and also accounting for 20% of the raid's effective healing, I would find that handy. However, both of Holy's tier 1 talents are useless for Ret.

Is it just me or are changes going in the complete opposite direction...

The change to Sanctified Seals: Renamed Sanctity of Battle. Now also increases damage done by Exorcism and Crusader Strike by 5/10/15%seems like a more burst damage buff. The very thing they tried to get rid of and did so.

On the flip side righteous vengeance now does 1% of your total dps now maybe 2...For a last tier talent selection its not exactly anywhere near the power of other talents at the same tier. Which is a sustained dps loss.

Divine sacrifice is so so its terrible to use while tanking anything that could kill you but its a good pvp talent (CC breaker, reducing team mates damage etc.) however it really doesnt fit the prot tree. Aura mastery would fit more as protection would gain a kind of raid wide mini cooldown via the armor buff to devotion aura. Divine sacrifice also seems fairly bad to use while dpsing especially with martyr backlash in certain situations (the ones where youd want that talent to be used no less).

Anyway its still fairly early days and im not calling end of the world.

Just to confirm that after some testing, Divinity does indeed affect JoL output

Aura Mastery is also not on the GCD, and u can use it while mounted like someone else already mentioned, giving it a 40% speed increase

This is Blizzard's interesting thinking, first I will nerf the top (Holy Pally) and then buff the bottom (Prot). The 3 second silience on Avenger's shield and perma-undispelable-3% less damage-Plea seems nice.

Regarding Ret burst, Ret is doing fine in Arenas (3.8% in 2s, 5% in 3s, and 4% in 5s) but not doing our Naxx dps in Ulduar, so they need to watch what they are doing.

These changes demonstrate just how narrow the Paladin design space is: Aura Mastery: Making your boring auras twice as powerful for 10 seconds. It's boring, but MORE of it.

Divine Sacrifice: AOE Hand of Sacrifice. 2 minute cooldown. Requires use of second 3/5 minute cooldown to effectively survive. It's Hand of Sacrfifice, but MORE of it. It's a terrible talent. They might as well call the talent "Pariah." When our biggest problem as Ret is already out of control Martyr recoil, they try to entice ret with something to take even more damage?

Exorcism: buff to damage, usable on all targets: Burst single target damage. Ret As Blunt Instrument reinforced. Incoming nerfs to damage output when undergeared PvP target cry about dying in a HoJ from Ju > CS > DS > Ex > HoW.

As I said above, they're demonstrating how narrow the Paladin design space is, and how they really don't want to break out of that. Yet they're giving Warriors Divine Shield popping, which is going to metagame Paladins -- Ret and Holy -- right out of 5s, and possibly 3s.

The solution to all of these problems can be solved with 2 steps.
1. Stop balancing the game around arenas. The majority of blizzard's income is paid by raiders. It's always been that way, and they need to take a minute and think why the hell they are purposely picking a fight with the entire raid community every patch in the name of arena balance. Every QQ post on the forums isn't about Rets amazing sustained dps or Holy's incredible ability to heal, it's all about burst. And then, to go and buff 2 burst abilities while nerfing 1 of our main sources of sustained dps from RV shows an abyssmal lack of reading comprehention.

2. Enough with the bubble effects. What was originally designed as a personal O-Shit button has since evolved into a directly offensive ability.... If you don't see the offensive use for it in arena's then perhaps the blizzard PvP balance team has just found it's newest member! Didn't we just go thru bubble tweaking to prevent 'Bubble Stormer' teams.... Am I the only 1 that see's this as a step backwards?

Sidenote: Aura Mastery... that has to be a practical joke right... i mean... it's almost April 1st.

So a quick recap, instead of doing what they said and upping sustainability, they do the exact opposite and buff burst, while making us completely vulnerable to mana drain teams. Awesome, i mean.. im sure all of this will magically work out as soon as Ulduar hits right. That is the developer's motto, Don't think about it, just embrace it.

Anyone care to place a bet as to how long after 3.1 patches that GC comes out with his standard "Unforseen Effects" post?

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)

Avitus beat me to it.

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.

Or like worrying about talent tree spec symmetry instead of noticing entire trees consist of stacking +% modifiers with 1 or 2 actual fun buttons to press. TThey're failing to address the main concern of 2/3 of paladin players, the overly simple play of retribution and holy. More procs or reactive abilities to shake up ret's FCFS rotation and more buttons like the old IoL for holy.

Thinking back to TBC, the main thing I thought was more fun about healing as Holy wasn't Beacon or my flast 15% haste. Those added raw throughput, sure, but they aren't fun or particularly interactive. IoL and a strong, 40yd HS was what did it. Those two spells had synergy with each other and the older Divine Favor (which, without IoL really falls on the wayside when you're critting over 50% of your casts anyways) and made for very fun, varied play. We need moretalents like this, not for them to be gutted and replaced by more efficiency on our 2-3 main spells.

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 ?

He/I am sure that isn't the final. First off, 116 is the Naxx Libram and a Druid libram also dropped that was the same as a Naxx libram (you can buy the Naxx librams for 25 badges in 3.1). Also, the new Libram would need to beat the Deadly libram (worth about 100 AP overall).

I'd rather them move Relics to the vendor, but it seems like they rather players wait on the RNG.

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.

At least the best 2-hander shown is strength itemized instead of agil/AP.

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.