Incendii, Exemplar did an in-depth analysis found here.
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.
This is a viable way of handling our whole regen mechanic outside of that fight too. (assuming it doesn't affect Healthstones, potions, etc.) Give us the needed Blue-Rage bar and tack a healing debuff onto it. Makes it hugely unattractive for anything but Ret and gives us precisely what we need.
Albeit 90% is high: it'd be a huge nerf to Art of War.
But if I had to choose, I'd take a reduced AoW and infinite sustainability.
EDIT: Spell details from Vezax.
From MMO-Champion:
Corrupted Wisdom is now applied as an undispellable debuff after you judge once and seems to reduce the healing by roughly 75%, this will only affect you if you have the Judgement of the Wise talent. "Your insight into Judgements of the Wise is corrupted by General Vezax's Aura of Despair, hindering your ability to heal."
Last edited by Alleyra : 03/16/09 at 8:12 PM.
Reason: See above.
Ghostcrawler: If there is a spec we want to avoid over-buffing so that we don't have to nerf them, it's Ret.
It's no wonder they removed SA from baseline, it would make the General Vezax fight pretty trivial for Holy. It does however highlight a design issue that they will always face with Enhancement and Ret: mana burning and starvation are major mechanics to add difficulty to an encounter which will always disproportionately affect the two specs vs other melee and mana-based DPS. Unless that is they build in a whole raft of exceptions. Yet another reason why sharing a power resource with ranged caster classes sucks.
As an aside, does the new Imp. Stormstrike talent have a similar debuff?
But if I had to choose, I'd take a reduced AoW and infinite sustainability.
I'm going to channel Avitus here for a minute Alleyra. Forgive the blatant plagiarism.
Why should we have to sacrifice healing output for sustainability? We are still locked by our small mana pools: no matter how "infinate" our mana is we can still only throw 3 Holy Light's before having to start DPS again or run completely OOM.
There are plenty of ways to make our mana regen unattractive to Holy without wrecking the class. At the moment the only reason Holy pallys are picking up JotW is for the Replenishment buff, not the actual return (the actual mana return after the cost of judgement is barely enough for one and a half Flash of Lights). By making our mana regen more interesting than "hey lets bump JotW up to 35%!" (there have been a ton of ideas floated in this thread alone) and tied to actually dealing sustained damage Holy won't pick it up.
One thing ret does well is providing that "half healer" role that Shadow Priests also filled. We can provide some decent healing help through things like AoW, JoL, and even the crap-heal-that-is-Whirlwind. At the moment its overridden by healers having to babysit us, but assuming JoB gets fixed somehow our healing is a small but valuable resource that plays directly to our class strengths (and lore!).
Originally Posted by Suicidal Zebra
As an aside, does the new Imp. Stormstrike talent have a similar debuff?
Improved SS is, at the moment, completely locked out by the aura (it only lets JotW, SA, Aspect of the Viper, and Shamanistic Rage to operate). I'm sure they will be hitting Shamans with the same debuff soon as well and changing the aura to allow ISS to work the same as JotW.
Let me clarify what I meant: if we're somehow ultimately presented with an either/or situation: I would take the regen over having healing-potential. I doubt this will be the case, however; nor do I think we should be forced into that sort of compromise, either. There is nothing that smacks of "overpowered" in any venue with regard to Retribution's utility. People will always complain about our Divine Shield: but a periodic AoW/FoL and a bubble, in an Arena, are nowhere near as infuriating or game-tipping as Cyclone, Fear, Seduce, etc.
Ghostcrawler: If there is a spec we want to avoid over-buffing so that we don't have to nerf them, it's Ret.
My my, this is interesting. Dresorull on Sacred Shield:
Is this a new change that I have been not told? On live Sheath of Light was not supposed to scale with Sacred Shield because they didn't want to give us that kind of survivability. As I'm been told before, that is.
Well I'm not sure where your information is from, so I can't really speak to that. It is a bug that Sacred Shield was not benefiting from Sheath of Light, and it should be addressed in a future PTR build. Please test it out once a patch has been applied to the PTR.
I think that's the first 'confirmation' from Blizz that it's a bug and should be addressed this patch. It would be very nice to see SS scale with Sheath in a way that was logically consistent.
I'm going to channel Avitus here for a minute Alleyra. Forgive the blatant plagiarism.
Good man
I think this is a good encounter mechanic considering General Vezax is "supposed to be" hard on healer mana. As a general mechanic however for the spec you're absolutely right, I think it would be ridiculous, no such concessions can be justified.
Keep in mind that fight is still not going to be a cakewalk mana wise, assuming you're doing hard mode without mana clouds, JotW will be the only mana source, iirc replenishment didn't work, Divine Plea didn't work, neither will we have SA anymore.
Obviously this depends on how much exactly they buff JotW to, but this is still very uncertain (especially considering GC's comment was "20% or whatever", while most of us who've ran some numbers consider at least ~30% to get close to mana neutral).
GC has also made reference to some difficulty in balancing for both regular encounters and hard modes though. I think the direction he was hinting at though was that slack would be given on regular modes, while hard modes would be very finely tuned. It's hard to read where this would leave ret though -- on one hand, I can't imagine them tuning things so that the easiest way to defeat the encounter is to simply stack rogues / fury warriors, but at the same time I would imagine that they would definitely want ret to care about their mana usage on the fight. If DP, JoW, and replenish don't work, then that'd be ~200 MP5 (wouldn't mind confirmation from someone with more ret experience on this number) lost, forcing rets to skip every 2-3 consecrates (or whatever the lowest DPM ability on that fight would be). This may end up being less of an issue, depending on how frequently you need to kite Vezax (ie consecration much less effective). I'm not intimately familiar with the encounter, so things may work out differently in practice.
This means that there'll be either an over-abundance of mana on other fights (unlikely), or ret damage on hardmode will be lower (as will, presumably, all other mana-based DPS classes' damage).
A latent appliance fetishist is someone who refuses to admit to his or herself that sexual gratification can only be achieved through the use of machines.
- L. Ron Hoover
GC has also made reference to some difficulty in balancing for both regular encounters and hard modes though. I think the direction he was hinting at though was that slack would be given on regular modes, while hard modes would be very finely tuned. It's hard to read where this would leave ret though -- on one hand, I can't imagine them tuning things so that the easiest way to defeat the encounter is to simply stack rogues / fury warriors, but at the same time I would imagine that they would definitely want ret to care about their mana usage on the fight. If DP, JoW, and replenish don't work, then that'd be ~200 MP5 (wouldn't mind confirmation from someone with more ret experience on this number) lost, forcing rets to skip every 2-3 consecrates (or whatever the lowest DPM ability on that fight would be). This may end up being less of an issue, depending on how frequently you need to kite Vezax (ie consecration much less effective). I'm not intimately familiar with the encounter, so things may work out differently in practice.
This means that there'll be either an over-abundance of mana on other fights (unlikely), or ret damage on hardmode will be lower (as will, presumably, all other mana-based DPS classes' damage).
It's posts like this that make me bang my head against the desk. I would encourage you to read through this thread.
This ideology is absolutely antiquated: gone with 3.0. Blizzard cannot afford to tune encounters around favoring rage-based, energy-based or rune-based DPS. It's not possible. The fundamental overhauling of the buff-stacking system as well as the stated intent to make DPS interchangeable mean that EVERY class must be viable in every encounter. Every class must be bringing comparable DPS.
There should be no discrepancy between our DPS potential in 10man/25mans or Hard modes. This applies to Enhancement Shaman as well. It does not matter what kind of resource system a class uses: all melee DPS must be competitive with other melee DPS, just as all ranged DPS must be competitive with ranged DPS. Meaning: we cannot afford to be skipping the usage of abilities in encounters.
Specifically addressing your final comments, (emphasis is my own) from Ghostcrawler's own mouth:
We think Protection needs Spiritual Attunement for obvious reasons, so we are making it a deep Prot talent.
We don't actually like Holy and Ret having SA. It makes their mana regen depend too much on the encounter specifics. On fights like Patchwerk, they have no mana from SA. On dragon fights, they have a ton. That makes it hard to tune on our end because they are either starved in the first case or drowning in the second case.
We want to tune Holy through Illumination and Ret through Judgements of the Wise and let Prot use SA. All 3 can Divine Plea, but Prot can do it more often.
If they want to implement a resource-drain-styled fight (i.e. Reliquary of Souls) then do so, that universally affects all classes. But if you're advocating that because mana is our resource that we just need to "suck it up" and accept the fact that we can't compete as melee in harder content: I vehemently disagree and hopefully, so does Blizzard.
Last edited by Alleyra : 03/17/09 at 2:42 AM.
Reason: Emboldened areas of address.
Ghostcrawler: If there is a spec we want to avoid over-buffing so that we don't have to nerf them, it's Ret.
Which is probably why the aura had a 20% melee attack speed debuff tacked onto it during testing. Whether or not that 20% (which also affects us and enhancement shaman mind you) is the solution to producing equivalent DPS from mana using and rage/energy/rune using classes.
Frankly, I still foresee a flat 20% melee haste reduction leaving DPS DKs far and away superior on the encounter due to their unique advantages with respect to an infinite DPS resource and DPS which relies heavily on instants with cooldowns.
It's posts like this that make me bang my head against the desk. I would encourage you to read through this thread.
This ideology is absolutely antiquated: gone with 3.0. Blizzard cannot afford to tune encounters around favoring rage-based, energy-based or rune-based DPS. It's not possible. The fundamental overhauling of the buff-stacking system as well as the stated intent to make DPS interchangeable mean that EVERY class must be viable in every encounter. Every class must be bringing comparable DPS.
There should be no discrepancy between our DPS potential in 10man/25mans or Hard modes. This applies to Enhancement Shaman as well. It does not matter what kind of resource system a class uses: all melee DPS must be competitive with other melee DPS, just as all ranged DPS must be competitive with ranged DPS. Meaning: we cannot afford to be skipping the usage of abilities in encounters.
If they want to implement a resource-drain-styled fight (i.e. Reliquary of Souls) then do so, that universally affects all classes. But if you're advocating that because mana is our resource that we just need to "suck it up" and accept the fact that we can't compete as melee in harder content: I vehemently disagree and hopefully, so does Blizzard.
What?
Perhaps I should have made it clearer that my post was in response to Avitus' comments regarding General Vezax, specifically in hard-mode.
I never advocated nor stated that I believed that ret having a mana bar meant that their DPS should be lower, all I said was that the mechanics of that particular fight make balancing ret DPS difficult, because you're effectively removing a fairly significant amount of their mana regen. Either you give them excess mana on other fights, or their DPS suffers on Vezax (which is of course, a bad thing).
Just to try and make it clear again, I'm not advancing any ideology here. I'm not advocating any difference in DPS between classes. I'm not suggesting, alluding to, hinting at or referencing anything at all. I'm merely pointing out the specific mechanics of a certain fight, and wondering how ret mana will be balanced for both that encounter and Ulduar as a whole.
I'm really having a hard time understanding what you thought I was trying to say? Perhaps you should stop banging your head on the desk ...
A latent appliance fetishist is someone who refuses to admit to his or herself that sexual gratification can only be achieved through the use of machines.
- L. Ron Hoover
Good catch there zebra, I'm hopeful that we will have a fully functional SS come 3.1 now... but as always, I'll believe it when I see it (the next major PTR build is a good place to put this in).
This is a bit premature, seeing as our mana issues are still slowly being worked on, but GC himself has posted an official thread for PTR damage analysis here. Assuming that in the next major PTR build they tune JotW up, we will have to do some real testing on damage output capabilities - and kindly remind the devs that we are (projected) down 9% damage from live with the same gear. If we happen to fall in line with other classes then so be it, however the last reports I looked over (without bugs) seemed to indicate that ret and fury were the only 2 specs to go from competitive to "3.0 ele shaman dps".
Updated OP with the parse link, if you have PTR access now is the time to give them all the wws's they can handle - this is our shot to get ourselves back to competitive.
Perhaps I should have made it clearer that my post was in response to Avitus' comments regarding General Vezax, specifically in hard-mode.
I never advocated nor stated that I believed that ret having a mana bar meant that their DPS should be lower, all I said was that the mechanics of that particular fight make balancing ret DPS difficult, because you're effectively removing a fairly significant amount of their mana regen. Either you give them excess mana on other fights, or their DPS suffers on Vezax (which is of course, a bad thing).
I emboldened the points in your first post that I was addressing in my previous post. Perhaps I misread the intent of your post as speculation, it seemed like you were stating that we would need to scale back and trade our damage for sustainability. To be blunt: this sentiment is bad. No other melee class would be pigeon-holed into this type of constraint. Imagine if an encounter in Sunwell was like that. Raids would only be stacked with non-mana using DPS to afford the best DPS-potential. Sure you'd have healers with mana, an S.Priest or two, but the fight would basically preclude mana classes. With regard to new content, Blizzard absolutely must keep every DPS class on an even playing field with regard to DPS-potential: otherwise we end up alienating certain classes or specs -- or these specs become niche roles. (a la TBC Ret.)
Throughout the past few pages, there has been much discussion as to what our DPS is regulated upon and how we must perform in order to remain competitive. Scaling back on usage of our abilities only hurts our viability and is not an acceptable constraint. The only exception is that if everyone in the entire raid is subject to the same penalty. (i.e. Gothik debuffs the entire raid as the fight progress.)
Balancing our spec and our DPS is not hard. But it requires acknowledgment from Devs that we should have DPS balanced around a resource mechanic that allows us the same potential as a Warrior, Rogue, Enh. Shaman, or DK. Until that happens we will always be at some sort of disadvantage, a false handicap: imposed by a throttling of our throttling mechanic. Yes, a throttling of our throttle. It sounds convoluted, but that is exactly what we have at present.
Whether by sheer luck or planning, we have been afforded a bypass of the latter throttle (being mana) due to SA, which has allowed us to operate as intended. But we all know know what's happening with SA in 3.1.
Ghostcrawler: If there is a spec we want to avoid over-buffing so that we don't have to nerf them, it's Ret.
The fires typically do a lot more damage than Seal of Blood. What is the most you have ever been bled for on a Judgement crit? Maybe 10K? And that’s a crit. No offense, but your healers probably laugh at the kind of damage you are inflicting on yourself. The tank is getting hit for much more, much faster and the fires or big AE sprays generally do more. A stray PoM or CL can probably top you off. I know you don’t want to use Command, but if you’re sitting at 10% of your health or you know the dragon is about to breathe, it may be an attractive option until you get healed back up again. I know the self-damage is a concern of the paladins though, and we’ll keep an eye on it to make sure it doesn’t feel like too much of a liability in raids.
I emboldened the points in your first post that I was addressing in my previous post. Perhaps I misread the intent of your post as speculation, it seemed like you were stating that we would need to scale back and trade our damage for sustainability. To be blunt: this sentiment is bad. No other melee class would be pigeon-holed into this type of constraint. Imagine if an encounter in Sunwell was like that. Raids would only be stacked with non-mana using DPS to afford the best DPS-potential. Sure you'd have healers with mana, an S.Priest or two, but the fight would basically preclude mana classes. With regard to new content, Blizzard absolutely must keep every DPS class on an even playing field with regard to DPS-potential: otherwise we end up alienating certain classes or specs -- or these specs become niche roles. (a la TBC Ret.)
This is what concerned me when looking at the Vezax fight. Unfortunately, as an Aussie, I work during most of the scheduled PTR tests, so I haven't seen the encounter yet, but restricting ret to only JotW regen to me suggests that either a) Ret regen as a whole will be tuned around JotW only, and replenishment / DP / JoW will simply be excess mana that won't have any effect on ret DPS, or b) Ret DPS on Vezax hardmode will be lower than on other fights. The first strikes me as unlikely, and the second strikes me as a serious concern. As I said though, I haven't seen the encounter first-hand. It could be that the shadow residue zones are up frequently enough that stacking casters with +50% damage and -30% mana costs might blow other strats out of the water, but on paper it seems that with limited mana and 20% less melee haste, ret DPS simply might not be viable.
Someone with actual experience on the fight could probably offer a much more informed opinion though.
A latent appliance fetishist is someone who refuses to admit to his or herself that sexual gratification can only be achieved through the use of machines.
- L. Ron Hoover
What has been addressed is Ghostcrawler doesn't think it's a big deal. What has not been addressed is why the recoil is there in the first place. Additionally, if it's expected that we have to switch to Command when we're at low health, or when a dragon is about to breathe, our DPS should probably be balanced around these mechanics. That seems like a pretty annoying procedure they'd have to go through, though, so we're back to removing the recoil, or doing less DPS than other hybrids because we have to be more careful.
Any 3.1 build(s) already made for a raiding retadin? Since BoK will be 'given' to us, it seems we have talentpoints spare...
Still seal of the martyr or is seal of the righteousness the new deal with the new glyph (Glyph of Seal of Righteousness: Increases damage done by this seal by 30%)?
I, for one, was absolutely appalled by that quote. I now fear that all of our concerns have fallen on deaf ears. His theoretical JoB recoil was even 10k, and still he tries to make it sound like that isn't so bad! I just don't see how someone in GC's position, especially after everything that has been done to make healers jobs slightly more difficult of late, cannot see the problem with a class dealing this kind of damage to itself simply to produce DPS on par with other hybrids(on live, on the PTR ret is way behind) that require no babysitting what-so-ever.
I have responded in that thread with a few WWS parses showing the huge discrepancy between SoB and SoC damage, to address the portion of his post that basically said "might die? switch to SoC", I would recommend that anyone else that may have some similar data sets post them as well so we can enlighten him at least a little.
GC says that if we judge ourselves to death then it's RNG's fault for not bouncing PoM to us!
On a serious note it's quite obvious there's more changes coming since we have 3 major issues with our spec at the moment, which includes a half implemented mana regeneration change, so it's probably best to wait and see what the future holds.
For once I see great responses in that post for the moment, quite nice for the official forum. One thing that has not been mentionned yet (and, as you see, I'm not able to post it myself), is that GC says:
"if you’re sitting at 10% of your health or you know the dragon is about to breathe, it may be an attractive option until you get healed back up again"
he seems to say that everytime something is about to breath (meaning everytime we will get hit by some 15k raid damage, and I understand there are a lot of these kinds of damage in Ulduar), we can just switch to command, and then get back to Blood when the situation is coped with. Well, that's around 1000 mana, and we surely can't do that regularly without getting OOM very quickly... sure we don't know what the new regen mecanic/fix will be, but I'm pretty sure it won't allow us to waste 1000 mana several times per fight.
I'm not standing strongly against this type of gameplay (although I really don't see the point since wolk, and particularly since we have the 30 minutes seals), but this would require to lower the cost of seal to around 100 instead of 500... not likely to see this.
Another guy mentionned the warrior, but he didn't go far enough and could have suggested: give SoB the same mechanic as fury stance, increasing the damage we take by X%. In fact, X could even be valued to 20 without us being harmed more than currently (15k will only go to 18k... still better that doing 5k to ourselves every 7 seconds).
I hear protection paladins boo me here... well, sorry guys, but you've already a bunch of nice seals to use... we don't.
That might even be a great idea for the glyph of martyr/blood.
** Tag on a nice 3% Crit buff to it and there's a little more deeps too. Probably never happen though because it would be too similar to berserker stance.
There are so many issues with seal of blood but for me its a question of:
No other DPS class needs a fulltime baby sitter to be able to do decent DPS.
How much DPS do we have to lose in fights that aren't patchwerk style? (switching seal even if changing back is still a DPS loss and not judging every cooldown is also pretty detrimental) Is it viable too impliment such a penality on one class? (as our seals do have quite a distant DPS difference)
It is also possible that there are changes too SoB as well the SoB glyph issue demonstrates that not everything is fully checked.
Originally Posted by Lau
give SoB the same mechanic as fury stance, increasing the damage we take by X%
Lau, I think that would be a good way to go I even thought of that at one point the other day another option to strike it from PvP entirely is have it reduce resillience (Very far fetchd I know). Though my fear is removing it from PvP has consequences if its now currently the pvp seal of choice.
I can sort of see where GC's comment is coming from, 10k by itself is healable and other damage sources can do a lot more.
However, surely he realises that judgement is a key part of our DPS and as such we want (and need) to hit the button every time it's up? That we can't decide not to crit this judgement or not take the damage multiplier effect on Thaddius or Malygos, only to judge or not judge according to what DBM's timers say. And that for healers this damage is in addition to the damage taken by the tank(s) and anyone who stands in the fire.
It makes me wonder if he's not simply playing devil's advocate in order to get healers' views on the subject, since healers may not read the damage dealing forums where there's already a 20-page thread full of ret paladins who think it is an issue.
1) It is our highest damage ability.
2) It is our mana regen.
3) Seals are too costly, both in GCD's, mana, and DPS loss, to switch in combat.
GC is right, taken alone the recoil is fairly small, usually no more than 7 or 8% of total raid damage. It is the health deficit combined with the large amounts of AoE that they throw in to "challenge" healers which kills us or, at the very least, strains healers. Combined with the dev's new hard-on for making healing hard again by destroying mana regen this isn't a good sign. He can go on and on about how incidental healing should keep us up, but he fact remains that no other class has to deal with this kind of self damage to be even marginally competitive. Even Beserker Stance is having it's detriment reduced in this patch!
If they addressed #3, though a combination of mana cost reduction and addressing the opportunity loss (GCD reduction, making baseline Command not suck major balls) he would have a viable position. Right now though I think pretty much everyone finds his statement rather... stupid.
I also find it funny that he mentions ProM bounces healing up up from the recoil when ProM doesn't actually trigger off of it.
I think we are missing the point (as is GC) if we maintain a rotation at 100% hp and drop to 60% every 7 seconds, this is "fine". We can get babysat by a druid and nothing will happen, on patchwerk. If the boss every 10 seconds hits a random raid member for 15k. Well if it happens at the same time, understood as the GCD necessary to heal us up from the druid, we die.
Our 10k selfhit is easy to heal, as long as we're alive.
03/16/09, 8:03 PM
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