I really don't have a clue what they are planning to do with seals, so I won't comment much on it other than I personally feel that we will not be using our level 1 seal for best possible dps. As with many of these changes we need the whole picture at the end to make any sense of what is happening now - it's a little like trying to build a jigsaw puzzle without looking at the box cover.
Now that we have finally got an official comment from GC, "The best knob we have for tweaking Ret mana return is to up Judgements of the Wise from 15% to 20% or whatever it needs to be. (Holy has Illumination.)", it should be one of our new focuses to give them the exact balanced number to up JotW to. 15% is too little, 33% was too high (though admittedly this was in still in conjunction with SA)... what is the sweet spot?
To do some math I'll use a recent Razuvious parse, as Razuv has relatively constant and small raid damage, is undead and we are using our full abilities. We could eventually run oom on this fight if it were longer, as well as raid damage is not high enough to make SA overpowered.
----------------------------------------Ticks----Min----Max
Judgements of the Wise 11,863 18 659 660
Spiritual Attunement 9,413 59 159 733
Judgement of Wisdom 5,271 60 87 88
Replenishment 2,556 131 19 20
Mana Spring Totem 2,176 64 34 34
Divine Plea 1,946 5 389 390
So with light raid damage (quite common in Ulduar, or more), JotW is responsible for about 33% of our mana income, with SA trailing slightly at ~29%. SA in this parse provides almost as much mana income as JoW, DP and replenishment combined, and you don't need to do any math to know that we'd be in a horrible position without DP/JoW/Replen. To look at it another way to make this easier, SA in this parse gave me an additional 14.2 JotW ticks (9413/660) without actually having to judge 14 more times. In order for JotW to pick up the slack if we removed SA right now, it would have to provide almost double (77% more) mana, which comes out as returning 27% base mana. 27% sounds pretty good right? Not done yet.
We need to also take into account that I had Blessing of Wisdom which does not show up in wws, but would have granted me 2694 additional mana (untalented 91/5*148) in addition to mana spring totem, which will not stack with each other in 3.1. I'm assuming that they will bring mana spring and BoW to the same mp5 point, and since BoW seems to have given me more mana we will take that as the superior mana buff - meaning that we are now missing 2176 mana from the totem, or an additional 3.3 JotW ticks. So totaled up, the amount of mana lost by these 3.1 changes is almost equal to JotW itself (17.5 ticks, 11589 mana). So, JotW would need to return 30% base mana in order to get us back to where we are now in terms of mana (which can actually be pretty bad on patchwerk, which is why I did not select that fight to represent normal SA conditions).
I realize the pvp ramifications that this would have, as judging once would return enough mana to cast a single holy light without any consequence (besides, you know, not doing any dps while casting..), but there you have some math to play with at least. Also do not forget that exorcism will be used heavily in pvp, and with DP going back to dispellable it will be quite possible to make a paladin oom if you try hard enough. With the changes to holy on the way as well, it will no longer be possible to have the infinite mana holy pvp build with shock/IoL; you can still reach both holy shock and JotW (and repentance) with a 37/0/34 build, though it is a shadow of its' former (live) self. Regardless I recommend moving JotW to Tier 10 ret, swapping places with Swift Retribution to ensure that the only paladins with JotW will indeed be full retribution spec.
Of course, all of this assumes that they are handling retribution mana via JotW alone. Should we see boosts elsewhere (say perhaps a talent that halves the cooldown of DP), in addition to a buffed JotW, then 30% would be too high for sure. But if they are looking at JotW alone: JotW to 30% base mana, and moved to Tier 10 retribution (swap places with Swift Retribution). I encourage you guys to dig up some of your wws reports and try doing some of the math I've done above, both for Razuv (middle ground) and for other bosses (Patchwerk for worst-case scenario, Sarth+3 or Sapphiron for unlimited SA mana). Give 'em some numbers.
Last edited by Arikah : 03/14/09 at 4:05 AM.
Reason: link failure
Arikah, here's the data from all bosses my last nax run (we got a couple of wings down, construct and mil, trying for 20 man achievement with guildies who were on)
Energy gained Total Ticks Avg Max
Judgements of the Wise 145,655 Mana 221 659 660
Spiritual Attunement 134,805 Mana 1008 133 1170
Judgement of Wisdom 50,530 Mana 575 87 88
Replenishment 33,434 Mana 1791 18 23
Divine Plea 11,082 Mana 30 369 384
Mana Spring Totem 8,738 Mana 257 34 34
Restore Mana 4,217 Mana 1 4217 4217
Blessing of Sanctuary 767 Mana 5 153 154
I'm not 100 percent BiS and I did have a better run on some bosses than others. Restore mana is a mana pot. Two of the BoS procs came on patchwerk (we were running with two tanks and I was the last melee standing... I see now that was because I dodged hatefuls and two missed with a probability of 1/250000. God I was lucky), one on Raz and the other two on Gothik. As it was a 20 man attempt I was fairly careful about staying out of the fire so this should be a fairly average sort of set of data.
As for trash, I was less careful. I like to give the healers something to do. =P
Energy gained Total Ticks Avg Max
Spiritual Attunement 89,028 Mana 756 117 1709
Judgements of the Wise 85,687 Mana 130 659 660
Judgement of Wisdom 26,710 Mana 304 87 88
Replenishment 26,452 Mana 1434 18 20
Divine Plea 20,089 Mana 55 365 384
Mana Spring Totem 7,208 Mana 212 34 34
Blessing of Sanctuary 591 Mana 4 147 154
Hope that helps.
With all that said, i'd say that it's a fairly big assumption that our mana will be rebalanced with just JotW. There's quite a few different ways to do it. Hopefully, their solution also addresses our DPS issues.
I think it may be time to give paladins the selfish parts of the raid talents other classes are getting. Swift Retribution seems like a great place. All pve rets get it, and it would force a decision for pvp. Perhaps 1% base mana per melee swing or something to that effect. Or add something that doubles or triples our JoW return.
As for SoR: I trust Redcape's spreadsheet, if he says it's 50 dps ahead I believe him. But the spreadsheet cannot possibly account for intangible things like Vengeance uptime with fewer crit-capable abilities. It also makes the meta gems weaker, but the spreadsheet probably accounts for this. I would think that 20% exorcism damage would provide more than 50 dps. But again, I'm reluctant to argue with math.
This is a little confusing. Now that SA is a talent in the prot tree..
# Paladin
* Glyph of Divinity: Now Lay on Hands grants 100% bonus mana, and that amount of mana is granted to the paladin and their target.
* Glyph of Exorcism: Changed to 20% bonus damage.
* Glyph of Lay on Hands: Now reduces the cooldown of Lay on Hands by 5 minutes. * Glyph of Seal of Blood: Grants 30% bonus mana from Spiritual Attunement.
* Glyph of Seal of Righteousness: Increases damage done by this seal by 30%.
Of all the changes that have been done so far, there is one that would decisively put Exorcism in as a decent dps spell... and the Holy tree got it.
"Purifying Power: decreases the mana cost of Consecrate and Cleanse by 5%/10%, and decreases the cooldown of Holywrath and Exorcism by 17%/33%."
If that one talent was down as a tier 2... even a tier 3 talent... it would be worth getting i think for everyone. If blizzard really want Ret to spend talent points in other trees more, then put that talent into a reachable position for something like a 7/5/53 build (for tier 2) or 12/5/53 build (for tier 3 talent).
Glyph of seal of blood is due a major change in my opinion.
Actually, if SoB remains as is (with recoil and stuff) I can see it as the tanking seal for content you outgear. This would mean that Command or righteousness is in for a major redevelopment.
If you check my post a few pages back CS modifiers don't work this way, they actually work like this:
[(1.1(CS)*.1(AoW)) + (1.1(CS)*.15(SoB))+1.1(CS)] = 1.375 modifier, hence the 137 -138% damage range on the PTR.
Kind of an odd way of working, since pretty much all other % modifiers seems to simply multiply with each other.
Does this make the pvp gloves significant for PvE?
Also you could simplify that formula to 1.1(CS)*[0.1(AoW)+0.15(SoB) +1(Base)) or 1.1*(1+0.1+0.15). I'm guessing the gloves are applied at the end for 1.375*1.05= 1.44375 or 144% - 145% damage range.
With that, give a considerable buff to JoW and disable Holy Light and Flash of Light whenever SoB/SoM is activated. Give it a 5 second cooldown to reactivate both abilities when switching to another seal. And/Or add healing penalties to both abilities when specced into JoW.
This will in fact dissuade most people from using the seal in competitive PvP. Which is one of the major reasons why Blizzard decided to keep the recoil damage.
How about no. I don't want to play a one trick pony paladin, it's not why I rolled a hybrid. AoW instant flash of lights and having enough mana to throw the occasional heal was really a high point in wotlk design, lets not start taking steps back.
Again the all too frequent paladin forum habit of "hey lets compromise" is rearing its ugly head when compromise is not necessary. It doesn't make other classes sympathize with us more, it simply makes us look stupid when we constantly hamstring our own analysis with a seemingly rampant inferiority complex.
I'm not against compromise when it's needed, but we're talking about very basic things that simply need re-balance or re-design and not bartering with compromises to be addressed.
Taking up to 5k damage every 7 seconds to do normal DPS, does any other class need to endure this? No. Remove it, it makes no sense, no compromise needed, we don't need to promise them our first born.
PvP implications: As said, there are better ways of balancing PvP/PvE than working around the "stick/carrot" principle. If you're going to force a separate way of play in PVP with penalties/incentives on abilities then you're doing it wrong. It should come natural, like a spell that simply doesn't fit that well in arena *cough* consecration.
This is assuming such a distinction is even needed, looking at how they encouraged FURY warriors into arenas with no penalties, while they keep tacking on burst abilities for us, I'm not sure it is in their vision anymore.
Originally Posted by Kigale
But the spreadsheet cannot possibly account for intangible things like Vengeance uptime with fewer crit-capable abilities.
Surely you can crit at least once every 30 seconds even with no seal at all? Vengeance uptime is a non-issue and hasn't been since 2007.
More importantly: (This has been mentioned before) We still don't know whether that Glyph will only increase Seal damage or Judgement as well, so it's very possible that this sudden mass hysteria is for nothing (if it only increases the Seal damage, it's still inferior).
Lets sit tight and see what they're going to be up to next. I can't see them making 3 Seals suddenly obsolete like this (SoB/SoV/SoC).
...So, JotW would need to return 30% base mana in order to get us back to where we are now in terms of mana (which can actually be pretty bad on patchwerk, which is why I did not select that fight to represent normal SA conditions)...
Looking at a recent patchwerk parse of mine here gives me a slightly different answer.
First, out of the regen buffs I'm going to be losing Mana Spring, Improved Water Elemental (don't ask), and SA. That makes a total of 7504 mana over the course of the fight (165 seconds). In addition I'll be dropping the Glyph of CS for that stupid new Exorcism glyph, costing me 70 mana per cast higher than now (1491 mana over the fight). In total I'm down 8995 mana over the 165 seconds, or 54.52 mana/second.
54.52 mana/second works out to be another 436 mana required by JotW (assuming 8 second cooldown), or roughly 10% more of base per restore, up to at least 25% of base.
It is important to consider that I wasn't mana neutral in this fight however. I was rapidly pushing OOM once I started hitting HoW, and even before then. In all likelyhood we will need a close to complete un-nerf of JotW to maintain parity. However I doubt we'll see JotW buffed that much, given that they want "ret pallys to care about mana" (though oddly they're perfectly alright with giving Enhancement Shamans beyond infinite mana) and giving us that much mana tied to JotW seems dangerous. Perhaps a ret talent to increase mana returns from DP or Replenishment (on only ourselves)?
Edit for clarity.
Last edited by flyingtoastr : 03/14/09 at 11:23 AM.
I doubt they would increase Replenishment since it would affect every mana-using class, they were talking about even nerfing it more IIRC.
With SA gone from Ret, the only purpose for the Blood recoil remains to nerf that seal for arenas, and as we've seen that didn't work. Perhaps the next logical step is to simply accept its usage in both PvE and PvP, merge SoC and SoB (put SoB in the talent tree where SoC is) into a single Retribution seal, much as SoR is the Holy seal and SoV is the Prot seal. This seal would scale with AP/crit, proc on every swing and have no recoil. Balance possible PvP burst from there by tweaking where necessary.
Of all the changes that have been done so far, there is one that would decisively put Exorcism in as a decent dps spell... and the Holy tree got it.
"Purifying Power: decreases the mana cost of Consecrate and Cleanse by 5%/10%, and decreases the cooldown of Holywrath and Exorcism by 17%/33%."
If that one talent was down as a tier 2... even a tier 3 talent... it would be worth getting i think for everyone. If blizzard really want Ret to spend talent points in other trees more, then put that talent into a reachable position for something like a 7/5/53 build (for tier 2) or 12/5/53 build (for tier 3 talent).
I don't think reducing the cooldown would be all that hot for Ret. Our GCDs are pretty full at the moment, and having our weakest spell be able to slot in slightly more often wouldn't be a big deal. To be sure it would be a slight dps increase, but I really think something that increased damage rather than lowered cooldown would be real news.
Originally Posted by Kigale
I think it may be time to give paladins the selfish parts of the raid talents other classes are getting. Swift Retribution seems like a great place. All pve rets get it, and it would force a decision for pvp. Perhaps 1% base mana per melee swing or something to that effect. Or add something that doubles or triples our JoW return.
As for SoR: I trust Redcape's spreadsheet, if he says it's 50 dps ahead I believe him. But the spreadsheet cannot possibly account for intangible things like Vengeance uptime with fewer crit-capable abilities. It also makes the meta gems weaker, but the spreadsheet probably accounts for this. I would think that 20% exorcism damage would provide more than 50 dps. But again, I'm reluctant to argue with math.
My sheet shows Exorcism doing almost exactly 200 dps over the course of a whole fight given my gearset (half 25 man gear, half 10, full raid buffs). With the new talent change giving Exorcism 15% more damage we can expect 230 dps, so the glyph would be supplying 46 dps. That isn't awful, but it isn't blowing my mind either and when I adjusted SoR to do 30% more damage and put 5 point in holy the seal pulled way ahead of SoB/M. If JoR gets the 30% bonus, it will likely be the way to go, particularly since it relieves the healers from having to heal me.
I don't know about everyone else, but I am usually running at 50% + of the damage taken of the tanks, and on some Naxx parses I end up 3rd on damage taken over a whole 25 man Naxx. That is really outrageous, and getting rid of that liability is a great benefit.
Originally Posted by flyingtoastr
Looking at a recent patchwerk parse of mine here gives me a slightly different answer.
First, out of the regen buffs I'm going to be losing Mana Spring, Improved Water Elemental (don't ask), and SA. That makes a total of 7504 mana over the course of the fight (165 seconds). In addition I'll be dropping the Glyph of CS for that stupid new Exorcism glyph, costing me 70 mana per cast higher than now (1491 mana over the fight). In total I'm down 8995 mana over the 165 seconds, or 54.52 mana/second.
54.52 mana/second works out to be another 436 mana required by JotW (assuming 8 second cooldown), or roughly 10% more of base per restore, up to at least 25% of base.
It is important to consider that I wasn't mana neutral in this fight however. I was rapidly pushing OOM once I started hitting HoW, and even before then. In all likelyhood we will need a close to complete un-nerf of JotW to maintain parity. However I doubt we'll see JotW buffed that much, given that they want "ret pallys to care about mana" (though oddly they're perfectly alright with giving Enhancement Shamans beyond infinite mana) and giving us that much mana tied to JotW seems dangerous. Perhaps a ret talent to increase mana returns from DP or Replenishment (on only ourselves)?
Edit for clarity.
I think that they need to get away from just stacking regen onto JotW. Doubling it would make it a monstrous source of mana for Holy again, which has been demonstrably an issue. I think that stacking extra regen onto melee strikes is the answer. They could just adding a deep ret talent that gives us a % of base mana on each melee strike, or triple our contribution from JoW or something. That would be a knob to turn that doesn't tempt holy but does allow our regen to stay at current levels.
I adjusted SoR to do 30% more damage and put 5 point in holy the seal pulled way ahead of SoB/M. If JoR gets the 30% bonus, it will likely be the way to go, particularly since it relieves the healers from having to heal me.
They could just adding a deep ret talent that gives us a % of base mana on each melee strike, or triple our contribution from JoW or something. That would be a knob to turn that doesn't tempt holy but does allow our regen to stay at current levels.
The SoR glyph seems to only affect the Seal damage. While that means SoR is less damage than Blood, that may be worth doing so that you don't die as much in PvE.
I also agree that JotW shouldn't be largely buffed, however CS should give some base mana back when you hit a talent, similar to the new Stormstrike Shaman talent.
That way Holy Pallies in Arena don't spec JotW ever again.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
CS = -8% per 6
DS = -12% per 10
Exo = -8% per 15
Judge = -5% per 8
JotW = +15% per 8
losses = 3.69% of base mana per second
Gains = 1.87% of base mana per second
Deficit = 1.8167% of base mana per second
During the Judgement cooldown we're using 29.52% of base mana without consecration. Consecration nearly doubles our mana consumption.
DP raid buffed is about 39.83% of base mana per minute ( 0.6% of base mana per second)
This rotation was meant to be able to be supported by JotW. I can see why JotW was initially at 33% as that was probably the amount of consecration that they were happy for us to sustain. Honestly, I think they didn't expect just how much we get out of SA because on paper 33% was reasonable (if you forgot about SA). Will this be what they do? Who knows. In a week we're likely to have a much better picture but I will make the point that we'd be fine if we got the dps from consecration for free (and then some extra to bring us in line with the other dps that we should be in line with).
Just have a question regarding Judgement of Light,
Now as far as i understood JoL benefits equally from Spellpower and Attackpower, which is why Retributio is usually recommended using it, while holy should supposedly be the weakest spec for JoL.
Well i were looking over some WWS reports from a guild run, and one of the holy paladins in the guild also used Light, even though i used it, and the prot paladin used JoW.
But looking at the numbers the Holy Paladins JoL seem to heal for about the same as my JoL.
Far be it from me to suggest something completely off the mark but... why not just reduce the mana costs of our base abilities across the board? Actually along that thought... why not remove the mana cost from one of them entirely? I dislike the idea of tweaking Judgments of the Wise again because as other posters have pointed out the Holy abuse in arena is still a problem.
I suppose judgment is a bad choice simply because that does give an infinite mana loop but what about just removing mana from crusader strike all together? I fail to see how that would be overpowered in PvP or PvE. Or if we're being balanced around the concept of consecration being in our rotation, drop the mana cost from it (I realize this is huge) but for PvP it's on a long cooldown, is stationary and isn't exactly massive amounts of damage. Roll the reduction of cost into swift retribution or something if you wanna exclude other specs from it, but I doubt giving consecration out for free is game breaking for protection or holy paladins.
Then you are free to leave JoTW as is, or give it a slight bump (obviously some more math is required here) and all of a sudden we're peachy on mana for 3-4 minutes which is where I think we need to be.
All that being said, I still think we need another look into possible recoil changes. SoR is an interesting movement, but really for Retribution it would make more sense to give a buff to Command and make the 11 pointer worth looking at.
I think that they need to get away from just stacking regen onto JotW. Doubling it would make it a monstrous source of mana for Holy again, which has been demonstrably an issue. I think that stacking extra regen onto melee strikes is the answer. They could just adding a deep ret talent that gives us a % of base mana on each melee strike, or triple our contribution from JoW or something. That would be a knob to turn that doesn't tempt holy but does allow our regen to stay at current levels.
Stacking mana return on JotW wouldn't be that terrible if they made it return double on judgment crits. Holy should have significantly less melee crit to make it less substantial. Still, Swift Retribution is probably the best place for anything new. JotW already has a pretty big tooltip. An equal concern, to me, is making mana regen possible during absorptions like they did to rage.
But looking at the numbers the Holy Paladins JoL seem to heal for about the same as my JoL. Any theories?
He might outgear you or you're missing raid buffs.
Stacking mana return on JotW wouldn't be that terrible if they made it return double on judgment crits. Holy should have significantly less melee crit to make it less substantial. Still, Swift Retribution is probably the best place for anything new. JotW already has a pretty big tooltip. An equal concern, to me, is making mana regen possible during absorptions like they did to rage.
Not really, crit is crit. While holy i've got something on the order of 20% melee crit. Holy would still get quite a lot out of it.
Only thing that makes sense to me is if the Judgement of Light procs would sometime go to the wrong person, he used light and so did i, but they're not supposed to stack, so my guess is that sometimes it procs off him, and other times off me, but they keep the coefficiency of my version.
Will probably tell the healer to do JoL exclusively, on the next raid, just to test.
Just a minor point, but Glyph of Seal of Blood doesn't mention that you need to have Seal of Blood active to gain the 30% SA increase. With the removal of SA from ret, I'm going to completely guess that they just forgot to change the name for the patch notes? Has anyone actually seen it on the PTR? It's just a little odd that a SA glyph is linked to Blood, since a 30% increase of 0 is still 0.
This rotation was meant to be able to be supported by JotW. I can see why JotW was initially at 33% as that was probably the amount of consecration that they were happy for us to sustain. Honestly, I think they didn't expect just how much we get out of SA because on paper 33% was reasonable (if you forgot about SA). Will this be what they do? Who knows. In a week we're likely to have a much better picture but I will make the point that we'd be fine if we got the dps from consecration for free (and then some extra to bring us in line with the other dps that we should be in line with).
Not to be terribly nit-picky here, but again, Ghostcrawler has enumerated the fact that where Retribution's damage is in Naxx (on Live) is where they want us. Their vision of where we're targeted to be relies heavily on Consecration usage, as well as the 4pc T7 bonus.
However they elect to balance mana, be it off CS or Swift Retribution, I don't mind. But I would like sustainability and competition between us and other classes. For example, Enhancement Shaman currently have very little regard for their mana, they're going to have even far less with the addition of the mana return on Stormstrike. Enhancement Shaman will (arguably already) have "infinite mana," in performing their role. I would like to see us given the same opportunity, given that we don't have any instant, no-CD abilities. Cooldowns are our throttle, much as is a Shaman's. We don't have the capability of mashing a single ability and massively boosting our damage output. Giving us a continuous resource pool will not in any way make us overpowered.
On that same front, I don't feel Ret really should be reliant on DP for basic sustainability. DP in the Ret spectrum should behave like Adrenaline Rush or Bloodrage. Those abilities allow both Rogues and Warriors to push out a little more damage -- they're not forced to use them just to stay in the fight.
Ghostcrawler: If there is a spec we want to avoid over-buffing so that we don't have to nerf them, it's Ret.
I'd like to see Seal of the Martyr get retooled to a) do less recoil damage so we don't suicide in ulduar and b) make it appeal more to DPS paladins than the current situation with Seal of Righteousness. Adding an Armor Penetration or Haste bonus of some type to it would be nice, or have some kind of regeneration mechanic be worked into it, and then rework the glyph to empower the regeneration mechanic.
On the topic of Divine Plea, I first interpreted Divine Plea as an ability you pop in desperation, having played a druid and having Innervate at my disposal. As a druid I barely used it on myself but when I needed it I could rely on it to get me enough mana (macroed with a spirit stick) to heal well again, or give someone else mana. But as time went on I only really used it to keep topped up between pulls.
When I saw Divine Plea I thought "if its anything like Innervate then I won't really find a lot of use for it until late in a fight." I didn't count on it being used every CD. If its being retooled specifically to cater to prot paladins then I'd like to see ret rely on it less often altogether.
Agreed, Divine Plea would be much more interesting if it were more of an "oh crap" button like innervate, maybe giving us back ~50% mana (make it base mana if too powerful for holy) but on a 2-, 3-, or even 5-minute cooldown. But just "mash this button once a minute to sustain your DPS" is just kinda... silly. I mean, they balance as if we have it, so there's no benefit, it just turns into 1 lost GCD per minute and a pointless (for us) healing nerf 25% of the time.
That being said, the changes are going in the right direction. Removing SA was the first step, it's now so logical to remove SoB recoil (or have us use a different seal), I have to believe Blizzard is doing this. This should help Blizzard balance our mana regen from fight to fight. I wouldn't have said this a few days ago, but I now have faith that they will come up with something workable.
The idea of returning mana on judgement CASTS instead of hits is a nice one, it would certainly make mana return more predictable. On the other hand, leaving it as-is (dependent on hit rating) makes our itemization choices a tiny bit more interesting and thought-provoking.
03/14/09, 3:46 AM
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