This + General Vezax = ?!?!? It's fine to self damage yourself. Here's a fight where healers will have trouble keeping up with normal damage, much less Emodins.

It's also fine for us to swap seals mid-fight to prevent killing ourselves. Therefore they need to balance mana regen around swapping seals twice (from Blood to Command, from Command back to Blood) multiple times each fight. Right? As Toastr said, our DPS should also be balanced around seal swapping eating our GCDs.

What we really need are Ret pushing themselves to the utmost and killing themselves repeatedly on PTR in front of Blizz testers. "Sorry, SoB killed me. Again. That's SoB 7, boss 2." Also check out the healing in WWS more closely - is there indeed a healer babysitting you or is it just incidental healing? If one healer is regularly showing as most of your personal healing, I think that could be pointed out to Blizz.

I really like this idea and I am just bringing it over to EU Pally boards (credit to Lau given of course) so all the flame can go at my name. I think this might be the change we need, pushing SoB out of arena because of very deadly dots coming in that way and allow it to use with high damage modifiers in PvE.


edit: World of Warcraft (en) Forums -> Seal of Blood - solution?

One thing to remember regarding the JoB recoil is that with the removal of SA, we are free to use JoL without worrying about losing mana regen due to healing ourselves with it. Combined with Divinity my JoL & DS are healing all of my own recoil(if given time by healers ofc).
That leaves raid damage burst as the only things to worry about, but considering I already have 4-5k hp more than our mages & plate seems to be getting even more sta in Ulduar and the fact that I haven't noticed any major melee specific raid damage in Ulduar testing so far, I'm really not worried about SoB recoil.
Also you keep saying stuff like the recoil has no purpose etc because the recoil was only to stop it being used in PvP and most ret's in arena use it anyway... My opinion is that it wasn't designed to stop its use in pvp, but to give a penalty for using it, and when your being trained by high rated hunter's & dk's in 3v3/5v5 it can be a big risk to use it.

My guess is, that blizzard will change the SoB Glyph so it will reduce the self-dmg by x%.

When i look at the recent blue posts regarding this topic, i doubt anything better will happen.

Currently fully raid buffed I top 25k hp, not sure if this is similar for everyone else, but I would assume that is the case, I need to replace a couple pieces, but I don't think it will affect my stam much. Looking at some of the new Ulduar gear, I can easily see me topping 30k fully buffed. Cloth seems to be getting a smaller upgrade. I wouldn't be surprised to see us having ~10k more then mages and other cloth wearing classes, I wonder if to some degree this is why they don't worry about recoil? Not saying this is the case, but it makes me wonder. Also, if they made a glyph that just lowered recoil, no one in their right mind would ever use it.

This is a great idea.

There's no reason we should even think about accepting a penalty on SoB, when using it means we're barely able to keep up with other dps. And I sure wont tell my healers not to heal me because my JoL/DS will do so over time. The big problem is not the damage over time (though it's a problem still). It's bosses throwing 10-15k (random) damage at me right before or after I hit myself with a judgement recoil.

Given GCs response I too think we can expect a "Glyph of Do Less Damage to Yourself". And that worries me.

This statement is indicative that he just does not understand the issue. As was stated earlier in the thread, it needs to be demonstrated how recoil is unsustainable as content becomes more and more challenging. Remember that not four months ago we were staring down several class changes to "tone down our damage." Most of those changes have been undone. A few remain: namely a reduction of JotW from 33% to 15%.

Look where we going with that one, now!

Parsing, evidence, and logic will win this fight. We just need to show them the situation.

Right now Rets bring a disadvantage that, to my knowledge, no other dps class brings, namely extra healing required during the fight (warlocks to some extent but thats voluntary).

If you took a hypothetical fight with environmental damage, Sapph or Sarth with drakes perhaps, and had all required buffs/debuffs covered with 10 dps slots left to fill, would it be possible to clear that with only Rets in that dps slot? (Hypothetical here so everyone is comparably geared/skilled.) I'm not sure it would be possible because of the increased healing required. I cannot think of any other dpsers who would present the same problem, are there any?

I would submit to GC that this is a good example of where class matters more than player, no?

(Obviously some fights are more friendly to ranged vs melee, etc so compare melee to melee and ranged to ranged if you like.)

Edit to reply to Nicki below:
Obviously speculation on my part but I believe they have intentionally not put the finished talent trees on PTR for us yet. I suspect they have them in an "unfinished" state to see what the players can do with them in case the devs have missed some builds/combos that prove stronger than expected. Just my 2c.

As already said, Glyphing to solve a problem only creates another problem this is very much a simmilar situation to paladins needing single target taunt at the time it was verging on glyph or new spell, new spell was the better idea. Why glyph to fix an inherant game problem and make the abillity more desireable in PvP.

Prehaps a better route is creating/merging a talent in prot or holy at the moment we have no real reason to go beyond 5 points in prot for PvE dps going to 11 infact gives us a 'save raid' CD that hurts our dps (as you will mostlikely bubble when you use it reducing your damage done by 50%). As for aura mastery its a semi useful pvp cooldown but anything else its more or less a joke.

They want us to not be 0/5/6x yet they don't provide treats or reasons too not be. Unlike priests who are prehaps too forced into those 14 points of discipline.

My interpretation of their response is that they don't want to spend the time and energy to create a well thought out mechanic that would resolve all the PvE and PvP issues that exist with the SoC/SoB/M dynamic. I can understand this assertion which is basically the cliche "If it ain't broke don't fix it." I mean, the solution could cause more (but different) problems than it solves. But really ultimately I think it is laziness/lack of imagination behind this resistance to changing this situation for us. This is their fault as other posters have mentioned, for waiting too late in the PTR cycle to implement changes to paladins. They understand our concern, but they aren't convinced therefore I agree that we need to prove to them though data that we SoB/M damage is actually breaking paladins in Uludar to force their hand.

Edit: The counter argument is probably that it is intended for raids to have a ret paladin alive to keep judgements and JotW up. If healers fail at keeping the ret alive then later in the fight it is a wipe because they don't have the mana from JotW. But this ignores the spike damage coinciding with judgement damage, which is yet another random element in an encounter, and I thought Blizzard was moving away from this kind of arbitrary nonsense. On encounters like Gluth you know better than to judge blood when a decimate is pending, and it isn't a big deal, but I understand that far more complex encounters will be on offer in Uludar.

You're forgetting shadow priests with SW:D, but that is still not even close to what we have. Not to mention both warlocks and shadow priests DPS at range, meaning they don't have to worry about cleave mechanics and other such things.

GCs latest response on the SoB issue gave me the impression that they have failed to find a solution for the issue yet, and it's too late in the PTR to implement any big changes.

With the removal of baseline SA the recoil of SoB has lost all acceptable reasons for it's existence. It has failed to reach the other target besides indirectly granting us mana, which is making it unattractive for PvP. It is being used by the most succesful Arena Retadins over SoC in all situations, as very few of them even spend a talent point on it.

This should be proof enough that (self-)damage isn't enough of a knob to tune SoB vs. SoC with: Either SoB needs to take some utility away from us, or SoC needs to grant additional utility. The latter one would be the more logical choice, obviously.

Additionally SW:D has fallen out of favor for Shadowpriests leaving us with just warlocks who have smaller losses less frequently and have an alternative source of on demand mana regen in their highest dps spec.

Also, even if we could sustain a mana pool without JoW (say if JotW is massively buffed), you will still be judging wisdom if you're the only Ret in the raid, because the rest of the DPS in your raid isn't going to appreciate losing a massive source of mana regen just so that you can do some minor heals to yourself.

I agree Rammurg. I would love to have a statement of why the recoil exists. As someone mentioned earlier it just "fit" with a blood knight when it first came out. Turns out it became the best dps seal and happened to work very well with SA so they made it open to alliance.

But now that SA doesn't exist... what is the reason the recoil is there? I think our best presumption is to limit its use in PvP. If that's the case... a potential fix could be: "While Seal of Blood is active, you take an additional X% dmg from other players". Doesn't mess up PvE, and still presents a downside for PvP (if that's what they want).

Essentially it comes to this:

According to GC, Hard Modes are balanced "on the edge of knife." If that's the case, would you rather take DPS X that does 5k dps, or DPS Y that does 5k dps and requires additional healing and could randomly kill themselves?

I feel with Blizzard's stance of "Bring the player, not the class," this situation shouldn't exist.... yet it does.


I just hope Blizz does something better than a glyph, but I'll take what I can get. (I'm not thrilled about our glyph options... but that's another post for another time)

Chances are that your highest DPS rotation in that case is to simply stick with SoC for the whole fight. So, no, no need to rebalance mana costs around seal swapping every other Judgement.


How "unacceptable" is SOC (or even SoR) DPS? This is the "floor" on our DPS on a given fight if the JoB recoil is too high. (Or, we can model the DPS drop from delaying JoB occasionally/frequently) Is it a 10% drop? A 3% drop? WTF is "unacceptable"/"viable"? Define it and get some numbers and theorycrafting back into this thread.

The flood of "I am outraged that GC would say this" posts are adding nothing at this point. This isn't a "vent my frustrations at Blizzard's game design" thread. Show some numbers, or vent elsewhere.

I was reading this thread and thinking of what the core of this issue is. Essentially its the fact that ret paladins are a 2 handed dps class in both the raid and pvp environments with only one tree controlling our melee dps spec. Any two handed melee spec is going to have more burst damage then a dual wield spec (at least if they are going to be worthwhile). We also use mana which brings its own issues, but these can not be insurmountable as enhance shaman seem to be much better off here then us.

At the moment we have very strange mechanics compared to other melee dps. They seem to be outdated, as the design team is showing by removing SA. I don't believe its been done before but what if they worked two talent choices into the ret tree, or the ret and prot tree that were mutually exclusive? "Requires X talent points, and cannot be chosen if talent x is chosen"

Is there a way to balance our seals by forcing a selection of one of these talents for pvp and one for pve? Sure its different, maybe strange, but we're ret... We should be used to being odd by now.

Nicely said I've had a hard time sifting through this thread lately with all the "this sucks" commentary.

Correction: if you are the only Paladin in the raid, you will be judging Wisdom. If you have two Paladins in the raid, then the Retridin should judge Light and the other should judge Wisdom. Even the 33% uptime a Holy Paladin has when judging the bare minimum required for the haste buff is enough to keep us going.

But it may not be enough for everyone else who uses mana, or even for us with our reduced mana generation. Wisdom is almost always the most important Judgement to have up because while JoL can provide significant healing over time, it doesn't provide the burst healing which keeps people alive at critical moments. JoW does provide significant additional DPS to every mana user in the raid. I'd say the only way you can get away without JoW is if you have a prot paladin to keep JoW up. I'd much rather have 100% JoW and 33% JoL uptime in my raid than the reverse.

edit: Zurm I absolutely agree and in my personal case I make sure everyone but me is judging Wisdom as well as having a Prot Paladin around nearly 100% of the time, enabling me to use JoL for the stronger heals. It's certainly noticeable and helpful. But in the theoretical situation where you have only 1 paladin in raid, I would certainly prefer wisdom be up 100% of the time, and adjusting to anything encounter specific. For instance on Ignis, I might Judge Light when he casts Flame Jets(having both JoW and JoL in easy reach for switching when necessary) allowing JoL to be put to good use while still keeping JoW up most of the time.

As for mana concerns, I really think they might be a bit more pronounced for DPS as we move forward. The loss of BoW/Mana Spring overlap will hurt certain people and I know from playing my hunter that without JoW and BoW mana can certainly be a concern there. I know it's an issue for Ret and at the worst it allows Warlocks greater DPS by virtue of fewer lifetaps. I don't think the situation is as cut and dry as "Only healers are stressed for mana" because even if DPS has recourse to mana regeneration abilities, maximizing DPS will require JoW, and JoL will seldom allow healers to ignore most significant raid damage. Going back to Ignis since he's recent, I don't think the healers can afford to ignore or deprioritize fast-attacking players due to higher JoL healing. JoL might be useful in some places but it's not on the same level as JoW for raid power, in my mind at least.

To add to what Malleus said, Ulduar (especially the hard mode fights) is not "LOLEZMODE" Naxx. The healing actually helps the healers quite a bit on some fights (Deconstructor and Ignis are the first that come to mind). On any fight with moderate to high AoE damage, it is my opinion that a retribution paladin's first priority is JoL. Most of those fights require movement that prevent you from using consecrate that often anyway, which greatly helps the mana situation.

While true, Light DOES allow healers to save mana from topping people off on fights like Ignis, allowing them to go longer. Mana is actually an issue for healers from my experience in ulduar, and if you look at healing meters you'll see you do quite a significant amount of healing with JoL, not to mention as a ret paladin you are still providing the raid with replenishment either way.

Gotta say I'm very disappointed by GC's post. The one thing he's usually good at is sounding sincere as opposed to the common blue bs/dismissive/clueless responses.

It's not the fact that he's disagreeing with "what we want", it's the fact that the reasons given and logic is completely useless.

"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."

No offense, but what? Is this really GC or is it April fool's yet?

What kind of argument is "you take less damage than a tank"? A tank has dedicated healers, a tanks whole purpose in life (role/gear/spec/play style) is to soak up damage so others don't have to. You know it's a lost cause when they start comparing our self damage to the damage intake of tanks to make it look less serious.
And it's frequently the case that I do actually have a higher damage intake than the OTs over the course of a raid.

Also what does "self damage crits are less powerful than AoE fire" have to do with anything? This is bordering on the ridiculous. This has nothing to do with anything.

I have a hard time taking the above seriously.

And here's the punch line:

All of the above is irrelevant. No one, except completely clueless people are even still arguing the statistic damage over time as their main complaint (and repeatedly derailing from the real problem at hand in the process). Sure no one likes it, but this is a minor issue compared to the real problem which is:

3k-5k self damage every 7 seconds *combined with* RSTA (random boss abilities cannot be avoided/timed with "skill") or heavy AoE can easily lead to suicide through JoB spikes.

It's not as elementary as "you took damage, switch to SoC" as random damage can hit at any time and take you low enough for you to kill yourself. This is also taking into account that hard mode encounters will mean you won't be at 100% health all the time to begin with (yes, despite JoL and PoM) as is with current joke content.


If they think this is acceptable, then we can agree to disagree, but coming with the reasoning above is really a poor choice of communication.