It's been stated as fact several times here that SoB/M is the ideal choice, even for serious PVP. Is that "fact" a misconception on our part? Obviously GC has access to better stats regarding what is actually being used in PVP--is it possible that our consensus not really the consensus of the larger (high ranking) arena community?

I checked the top 5 Ret Pallies in the World and none of them even spec into Seal of Command.

What are you talking about? CS does hit harder than MS.

The only reason people keep mentioning it is because it's a 41-pointer that feels very barren and any new mechanic/change for ret would make most sense to be added there.


Source? Statements like this really have to be supported, otherwise they just lead to misinformation.


This is exactly it, you hit the nail on the head: A small mana pool is actually good concept design, because it means they can up our mana regen to extremes without it causing extreme imbalance. If we had larger mana pools, then there would be reason to worry.

If it takes me about ~3 dps cycles (around 3x Judgements, 20-24 secs) to get a full mana bar back while using minimal rotation (J, CS, DS. No Consecration. Maybe Exorcism.), but I never hold in my hand more than 3x Holy Lights at best then I don't see this as a problem at all (in PvP).


Regarding your second paragraph: I have to say I've gone into this expansion feeling relatively positive about how Ret has been treated by the devs, there's a noticeable shift from "you're an unsupported joke spec" to "we officially want you too function now and be a supported part of raids".

However, one of my pet peeves has become this repeating pattern where during patches/PTR builds it almost seems like Ret concerns are left to the very last, despite really needing immediate attention.
Usually whenever the very last PTR build is pushed, (or even worse, sometimes it's as late as live "surprise changes!") Ret changes finally are added and not enough/no time is spent re-balancing or tweaking them.


I understand that the traditional response here is: "Every class thinks it needs most attention, we can't do it all at the same time".

However, I respectfully disagree. Take this PTR for example (rough outline):

->First build: A monkey wrench is thrown into the fundamentals of the spec (nerfing Fanaticism/Righteous Vengeance). We're suddenly bottom of the DPS pile.
->Second build: ?? (Nothing useful is addressed. "Exorcism Glyph lol")
->Third build: ?? (Nothing useful is addressed. Some superficial changes such as CS/Exo modifier talent).
->Fourth build: SA is removed, nothing is given in return.


The alarming similarity of this PTR to previous bad experiences is probably what has a lot of people here unsettled, even those of us who are trying to see the glass half full with recent WotLK history in mind.

Simply put, we're at least past PTR halftime if not nearing towards its end and it feels like a "leap of faith" to expect all our concerns to be addressed adequately in the final one or two builds. Even worse, if they do come that late then there's usually very little time to test/evaluate these changes, leading to the dreaded "wait in limbo till 3.1.x minor patch till things are fixed".


Issues in need of attention:

-DPS: We're at the bottom of the pile and have been for several PTR builds. This has been known since PTR day one. Where's the adjusting and the testing so far? Nothing is happening.
-Mana: SA was removed, where's our replacement mana source?
-Trees are still a mess. Where do you want us to spend our 14 extra points?
-SoB: The volatile nature of our DPS is rearing its ugly head in progression and it really shouldn't be necessary. Any feedback regarding the direction being taken in regards to the recoil?

Just going through patch changes as listed on the PTR, and I'm having difficulty understanding one clause:

What does this mean, exactly? Does it mean the RV DoT will now be 30% of the baseline damage of the strike that triggered it (i.e. the judgement/DS crit, minus any percentile modifiers such as Vengeance)?

Or does it mean that, currently, the RV dot is further increased by percentile modifiers on top of the damage of the strike, and this is being removed?

That might be too wordy a way of putting it. Let me try examples.

Judgement crits for 10,000. 30% of 10k is 3k. Post-PTR, will the RV dot for this strike deal 3,000 damage, or less?

Basically it means RV doesn't double dip from percentage modifiers. To take an example, lets say your base damage on a crit Judgement is 1000 damage (easy numbers). On live it would look something like this:

Let's pretend your only modifier is Vengeance, giving you 9% more holy damage. Your crit Judgement would then deal 1090 damage.

Your Righteous Vengeance takes 30% of this 1090, 327 damage. It then gets a 9% boost (since it's dealing Holy damage) up to 356 damage.

All this patch note means is the RV DoT itself no longer gains from Vengeance (and Curse of Elements and whatnot). Instead of being "30% crit damage * modifiers" it is simple "30% crit damage". It's a nerf, but it makes sense.

Thank you, that clarifies things

It takes the nerf to a whole new level though, doesn't it? Retribution dps has always hinged on the percentile scaling. Not only is the baseline DoT being reduced by 10%, its being reduced a whole lot more again in this innocuous-seeming statement.

Have CS proc of -any- judgments on the target, even if multiples (probably to a maximum of 3?). On JoJ, it could apply a movement snare or a chance to snare.

But yeh, watch them just buff JotW until they're happy with the results I imagine.

I have to agree with the devs on one thing. Currently, our damage breakdown is not what you'd expect from our talented abilities. Judgement, consecrate, and RV all make up far too large of our DPS breakdown, while CS/DS/Exorcism remain quite lackluster.

So far, they've managed to nerf judgement and RV a little, and buff CS/Exorcism. While I don't think the changes are sufficient yet, they still have to nerf consecrate damage (and hopefully our reliance on the ability entirely, as it is a massive mana dump) and buff DS. I like the idea of CS applying a consecrate-like dot on a single target, OR (as a rogue guildy suggested) have CS REFRESH SoV stacks (so you start the fight with less burst, but have an extra dot to refresh, and it wouldn't have a major pvp impact because of the lack of burst). I'm thinking positive on this one; blizzard has had some pretty creative ideas to fix other class' problems in WOTLK.

1 Know I'm late to the boat, but don't really read forums on weekends.

Glyph of SoR buff - was 10%, now 30%. Only affects the seal, not the Judgement.
Assuming standard glyphing is: 10% Judgement, 2 sec Consecrate, 20% Exo

I plugged the new things into the Bellator's to compare.

Glyphs	SotP	Seals	Best DPS
J, Cons, Exo	N	SoB > SoC > SoR	1 - SoB
J, Cons, Exo	Y	SoB > SoR > SoC*	2 - SoB
J, Cons, SoR	N	SoB > SoR > SoC*	4 - SoB
J, Cons, SoR	Y	SoR > SoB > SoC	3 - SoR

*Remember there was no Seal of Command Glyph used. Soc+Glyph > SoR+SotP no Glyph.

As you can see, SoR surpasses SoB with the glyph and talent. However, SoB + Glyph of Exorcism is more DPS. This proves true both vs Undead/Demons (100% crit on Exo) and on other types of targets.

It will not (currently - pending any possible changes to SoB) drive us to SoR. Ideal glyphs would remain Judgement, Consecration, the reworked Exorcism.

TLDR: Glyph of SoR loses to Glyph of Exorcism, still use SoB.

2 Bellator's models 5% CS damage modifier. However, modeling does not use the information beta4Life has provided regarding talents for CS. The next version will contain this math.

3 On mana return - let me throw out:
Wisdom of the Aegis
Grants X MP5 and Y AP for every Z armour.

Rips off Warrior and DK talents, grants some scaling mana return (mostly important for increase of level in the future - even 50 more MP5 by the end of the xpac prolly won't be broken). Even gives Blizzard a good pun. Throw it in rank 3 Prot. If Holy really want the MP5 for some crazy reason, they lose a lot from Ret. Prot gets threat from the AP and Ret get something tasty in Prot. Makes more sense to have Spellpower than AP, but that would make it desirable for Holy and crap for Prot/Ret - not something we want.

Oh, yeah, it also helps makes plate more desirable than leather/mail.

4 Overall, I'm glad they removed SA and are discussing JotW. They understand the problem and are addressing it. I'm confident mana will be resolved for 3.1 - still hopeful for something other than the JotW knob turned to 11. I hope SoB self-damage is addressed, time will tell. Current worry - as has been said, time is running out on PTR and we're still below their desired damage. This can lead to the horrors of last minute buff which cannot be tested and must later be nerfed on live. Better nerfed on PTR than live - less QQ. Best of all, balanced properly on PTR.

Couldn't a simple mana fix be attached to crusader strike such as: Crusader Strike: Does X weapon damage (no change here) and increases the effect of Judgements of the Wise by 100% for 10 seconds. What is the downside? It's a little different than just instantly returns mana like JotW with judgements and it would be really annoying for a holy build to have to spend 2 out of every 8 or so gcds just to get the mana return.

More gcds are used by a non-damage based class to get the effect, while there are pretty much no changes for Ret PVE. For Ret PVP, you have a choice to make, assuming the buff is not up and you want to do something mana intensive: Judge now for immediate X mana, or crusader strike then judge for 2X mana.

Hi all, I am writing the first time here and I am not a native speaker so please excuse possible mistakes.

To my mind the SA-mana-regen and the recoil of SoB/JoB was a very unique mechanics among all (now) 10 classes.
I would prefer to leave such a thing but Blizz thinks not.

So here are my ideas for manareg of Rets.

1. Why not couple a third mechanics to our improved wings? additional to -30/-60 s Cd and +25/+50 % chance to crit a +50/+100 % manareg to Divine Plea when the wings are active?
Then every second DP is as twice effective at the cost of a GCD each time we use the wings. And it is our own choice to do it.

2. Improving CS. Each time, CS crits our next instant cast cost 50% less mana.

3. Buffing JotW a little bit may be to 20%.

Do You think that would work?

This is a nice suggestion. It's a proc, so could be leveraged by good players to set them ahead. The restriction to instant cast prevents it from being used on HL in PvP. Maybe rephrase it to "next damage causing ability" to rule out instant FoL from AoW.

If you could make Consecration cost 50% a good portion of the time, it could be quite nice. Only problem is gimmick fights involving crit rate or inability to use CS, but that should be vast minority.

Sadly, I think it would still devolve into press every button on cooldown, but randomly some cost less mana - delaying an ability to spend the proc on Consecration would be less DPS even if in the long run you were able to use another Cons that fight.

It's still a neat starting point for something possibly more interactive. I hope Blizz takes an out of the box approach such as this, rather than only increasing JotW. JotW needs an increase, but we don't want all our eggs in one basket or it makes missed/absorbed/etc Judgements worse and worse.

I do like the change with SA because it was a broken way of getting mana return in the first place. If we do end up getting the correct modifier to make us not go OOM in ulduar i think this is a really good change.

SoTM recoil certainly needs to be adressed with these new changes to SA, but the one thing i REALLY do not want to see is a change to the SoB glyph that takes off recoil.

We have enough mandatory glyphs without just making a quick fix for SoB via Glyphing for it.
This just came to mind after i read the post where ghostcrawler said the SoB glyph would probably have to be changed.

Source : MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Ret Paladins and Spiritual Attunement

You can be sure nobody wants that... don't fool ourselves, choosing between a dps glyph and a "less likely to die" glyph, most of the time we will just go for more dps. Maybe for some fight we would change to this one, but nobody would consider this a fun choice... and it's already lying to call it a choice, as it would just be a constraint.

Hopefully Blizzard will have nice ideas for us, as nice as what we can read in this thread... but for the moment, we certainly do not have the slightest idea of what they have in mind, as they are completely mute on the subject. We can just hope it is a good sign because they have heavy internal debates, and not, as Avitus said, because they've just left us for the end...

I'm not sure how much of Ulduar you've been able to test, but given the nature of the Ulduar encounters I have tested I very strongly disagree with this statement. A dead DPS does no DPS.

My point was, If they are going to Fix the recoil on SoB i hope they do not do it by changing the SoB glyph to...

SoB glyph : Seal of blood no longer triggers recoil damage.

If they are indeed going to fix SoB please do so within the constraints of the Spell not the glyph.

To me the paladin glyphs feel mandatory instead of a nice perk

Just did General Vezax testing on the PTR, and god, we have serious manaproblems that fight;P

I know the fight is designed around the fact that you cant waste mana on stuff, but JoW doesnt work, and I dont use consecration at all. I have to stop using DS and Exorcism and end up using judgement and CS as the only attacks to avoid going oom.

The removal of SA + JoW on that encounter really fucks us over majorly. Last time he was on PTR it was still neccesary to skip consecrations to keep up with manausage, but now its just crazy..

My bad then, I actually didn't think the situation was that bad in Ulduar.
But having this "must have" glyph, not to have additional/different gameplay (although you may argue that not dying is sort of a gameplay), but only to be able to just play and compete as expected, would not be great fun... Although I'm not saying that we have great fun at the moment with our glyphs anyway.
And of course, if the choice is only between getting the current recoil or glyph out of it, it does make sense to have such a glyph, but I still hope that the recoil will be handled separately and that'll we have a nice SoB glyph to hesitate with.

Lau, I agree with you. The principle is: If it's a necessary change, don't cop out and make it a Glyph.

It's similar to the ridiculous SoC glyph, if they think SoC should be balanced at 8.4 ppm, then just make it 8.4 ppm, don't make us waste a Glyph for that.

I'm not sure why they went that "bland Glyph" route, as originally (in wotlk beta) Glyphs were touted as "functionality changing" buffs that make your spells function differently (you give up something and gain something).



I was consecrating the whole go, though I did manage to catch a mana cloud or two.

On hardmode you're absolutely right however, beats me how they imagine to make us viable there.

Regarding the step to SoR...

was some able to test it more intensive on the PTR?
So still if it comes very close to SoB, isn't ist possible that it gets more interesting in future - f.e. if it scales better with optimized gear?

I don't know how SoR scales, but someone wrote some post ago that it scales with haste. (Which SoB does not)
So together with the generel melee haste buff for paladins, DK's .... SoR could be very interesting with Ulduar gear?

Little update to the General Vezax fight: if you have JotW it gives you a debuff that reduces your healing (done I assume) by 90% according to Wowhead. So looks like they want JotW to be buffed & work on that fight, but only for Retadins.

My original thought when reading his abilities, was that if healing was an issue on that fight I could throw on my Holy set as Ret to heal & just sustain myself via JotW. Sounds like they beat me to the punch.