Cataclysm Paladin Changes

• Narcosleepy · 04/06/10, 7:50 PM

With the upcoming changes being announced keep the following guidelines in mind when posting. This is the place to discuss these changes only.

Failure to do so will result in an automatic infraction.

Do not merely link blue post information without any useful contribution of your own.
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Do not suggest what you think Blizzard should do. Neither we nor Blizzard care about your great idea.
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Do remember that all normal rules apply.
Do remember that these are proposed changes and subject to fine tuning and/or complete overhaul.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Cataclysm Class Preview: Paladin

Originally Posted by Nethaera

In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm we’ll be making several changes to class talents and abilities across the board. While this list only outlines some of our plans for the paladin class, we want to give you a look at the new high-level abilities and an overview of how the new Mastery system will work with each talent spec.

New Paladin Spells

Blinding Shield (level 81): Causes damage and blinds all nearby targets. This effect might end up only damaging those facing the paladin’s shield, in a manner similar to Eadric the Pure's ability Radiance in Trial of the Champion. The Holy tree will have a talent to increase the damage and critical strike chance, while the Protection tree will have a talent to make this spell instant cast. 2-second base cast time. Requires a shield.

Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.

Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).

Next you will find a list of some of the paladin spell and ability changes, followed by our intentions for improving each talent tree for the release of Cataclysm. There will be further changes, but those revealed below should offer some insight into our goals.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

* Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.

* Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.

* Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes.

* Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.
New Talents and Talent Changes

* We want to ease off the defensive capabilities of Retribution and Holy paladins slightly. We think the powerful paladin defenses have been one of the things holding Retribution paladins back, especially in Arenas. One change we’re considering is lowering Divine Shield’s duration by a couple of seconds. Having said that, Retribution does pretty well in Battlegrounds, and Battlegrounds will be a much bigger focus in Cataclysm since they can provide the best PvP rewards. Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem.

* We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either doing decent burst damage, or just being good at staying alive.

* We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don’t feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.

* We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains the expensive, fast heal and Holy Light is the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light will be changed to work with Flash of Light. We like the ability, but want paladins to use it intelligently and not be constantly healing for twice as much.

* Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.

* Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we're looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.

* Holy Shield will no longer have charges. It will be designed to improve block chance while active, and will continue to provide a small amount of damage and threat.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Holy
Healing
Meditation
Critical Healing Effect

Protection
Damage Reduction
Vengeance
Block Amount

Retribution
Melee Damage
Melee Critical Damage
Holy Damage

Meditation: This is the spirit-to-mana conversion that the priest, druid, and shaman healers also share.

Vengeance: This is the damage-received-to-attack-power conversion that all tanks share.
Critical Healing Effect: When the paladin gets a crit on a heal, it will heal for more.
Block Amount: We want to keep the kit of the paladin as a tank who blocks a lot. So by contrast, the warrior tank will sometimes get critical blocks, but the paladin will absorb more damage with normal blocks.

Holy Damage: Any attack that does Holy damage will have its damage increased.

This concludes this Cataclysm preview for the paladin class. The development of these changes will continue to evolve in the coming months. Please be sure to provide any feedback and thoughts you might have on what was covered here.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Cataclysm Class Preview: Paladin

Originally Posted by Nethaera

Here's a bit more clarification on some of these changes. Also, please keep in mind that this is merely a preview and we'll still have more to go in testing up to and including any other changes that aren't listed here in the preview.

We've updated the Flash of Light reference to make it a bit more clear in the original post as follows.

Flash of Light remains a fast heal, but will be more expensive to justify the cast speed. Holy Light will be the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light needs to be changed so that its benefit is letting the paladin heal two targets at once, not letting the paladin get two heals for the mana cost of one. It’s intended to save GCDs and targeting time, not mana.

In addition we’re changing the paladin heal design to match that of the other healers. Holy Light is the middle heal. It’s very efficient, but not particularly fast and doesn’t have a lot of throughput. Flash of Light will be the faster heal that costs more mana. (Currently paladins sort of flip the model around by having a fast, efficient heal.) Holy paladins can talent into an additional heal that is like a giant Holy Light. It might take three of these big heals (or two crits) to get a tank from death’s door back to 100% health.

Currently on live, Beacon of Light is a tool that allows paladins to target more than just the main tank. In Cataclysm if it just doubles their healing, it is going to be overpowered. We have two ways we might handle this and we’ll experiment to see which feels better. The first is that Beacon only works on some heals, such as Flash of Light or Holy Light (but not the big one). An alternative idea is that Beacon increases the mana cost of a heal cast on a beaconed target, since you’re essentially getting a double heal. Under this model, Beacon itself would cost no mana.

Also on the live realms currently, paladins have huge mana pools and massive throughput. The trade-off is that they are excellent single target healers and much weaker in other roles. We want paladins to be slightly more interchangeable with other healers. In Cataclysm, you should be able to have a Holy priest on the tank and a Holy paladin on the raid. We’re not sure we’ll back off of the current healing roles completely, but we definitely want to add more breadth to those whose roles are currently too narrow.

As for the Guardian of Ancient Kings. First, it's important to understand that this is not a pet nor does it have a pet bar associated with it. Second, it's also not meant to last for very long. So, it's not a pet in the traditional sense. It's a friend in need when you need it, but not a permanent companion.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> What happened to scaling back aoe threat?

Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler

That new instant attack for prot paladins that does aoe damage and blind? And to be blunt, sounds superior to heroic leap for aoe tanking in every capacity?

That attack could have a 10 min cooldown. I'm pretty sure we didn't specify in the preview, so I'm not sure how you'd decide it's better or worse in any situation. Maybe it has a 5 sec cooldown but we nerfed the threat generation from Holy damage so severely that paladins are utterly dependent on it now. I just don't think we gave you the information necessary to draw that conclusion, and this is partially why we didn't provide that information.

Any elaboration on how you intend to separate the single-target and AoE tanking niches?

I'd be happy with even vague generalizations, though I would understand if you preferred to avoid saying anything that might get used as a forum bludgeon later.

No, it's not really that. We just have a couple of different avenues we're exploring and we didn't want to have say models A, B and C in different large paragraphs. The ideas just need a little more time to bake.

And I'm not entirely sure how you're using "niches" but I am talking about wanting Prot paladins to use slightly different rotations against single targets than against groups. The addition of Crusader Strike (and maybe Holy Shock?) alone start to provide that.

> GC said AOE threat being normalized between tanks > Previews don't make this extremely clear > GC also said the previews are just previews > there must be more coming down the line to make the first two observations align!

Ding. Ding.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Nerfed WW, but Divine Storm is fine?

Originally Posted by Ghostcrawler

Divine Storm will get the Whirlwind treatment (less damage per target but unlimited targets).

The difference is that paladins fit their rotations around cooldowns while warriors do so around a limited resource. So it's entirely possible a paladin will still use DS when other attacks are on cooldown. (It will depend on what exactly the Ret rotation looks like, which we're still developing.) Divine Storm also provides a little healing too, so it's not exactly the same as Whirlwind. We probably wouldn't want to get to the point where Rets feel the need to have their single target spec without DS and the cleave spec with DS. (And without knowing the numbers, it's going to be difficult for any of you to insist that this will or will not happen.)

In general, we don't want buttons that are good against single targets to just be better against groups of targets. It makes rotations too static and makes numbers hard to balance since "cleavey" specs can do so much more damage against tight packs of enemies. Some higher damage is fine. It just too extreme right now.

These are previews, not patch notes. Just because we didn't mention anything doesn't mean there is no chance of it changing.

purgex · 04/12/10, 2:27 AM

The paladin class was still in 'development' when blizzard released fairly in-depth details of the other classes. Paladin Cat. info was released April 16th.

A few things we know so far:

Retribution paladins will give up some defensive abilities in favor of more offense (dps).
Holy paladins (and only holydins) will spec into cleanse magic.
Protection paladins will lose some of their AoE threat-generation.
Every other healing class has received a new heal, in most cases a 'leveling heal'. We can probably hope for something along these lines.
The ability 'Vengeance' will be turned into a (protection) talent tree bonus, along with 'Damage Reduction'.

Edit:

We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains the expensive, fast heal and Holy Light is the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light will be changed to work with Flash of Light. We like the ability, but want paladins to use it intelligently and not be constantly healing for twice as much.

To me, this looks like they just nerfed holy paladins by 50%.If a tank recieved a 20k heal every 1.3 seconds, now HL spam healing will only heal the tank every 2.6 seconds, halving possible HPS? Perhaps is will be okay in cataclysm to allow a tank not to be topped up 100% of the time? To me it looks like the new beacon will be tuned for arena, less so for PvE.

I wonder if blizzard would have implemented this change if paladins had decided to stack +Haste or +SP gems and enchants

Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.

This looks like holydins will have more reason to stand in melee. Hopefully it heals more than the totem! Note that is has a short (15 second) cooldown, the same as another button that doesn't instantly heal a tank (Judgement). There may be fights where a holydin will skip casting either spell.

Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.

I believe that Holy Shock is more powerful than Exorcism. (Therefore replace it in the ret rotation when it becomes available (or use it when every other dps move is off cooldown, dependent of mana?). Also, Many of you will remember the PvP "Shockadin" from burning crusade.

Retribution paladins will be getting an interupt

Tinwhisker · 04/14/10, 10:26 AM

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Cataclysm Class Preview: Paladin

Three new baseline spells, blessing of Might and Wisdom are being combined, baseline Crusader Strike and Holy Shock, new talented abilities for all specs, and a likely bubble nerf.

Blinding Shield we've seen before but I at least never entertained it as being give to Paladins. Guardian of Ancient Kings feels nice and very useful but we've already seen two pets/minions introduced and later made permanent and I fear that we're starting down a disappointing path here where one Paladin spec may become a pet class.

• Zurm · 04/14/10, 10:44 AM

It will be interesting to see the details for healing hands (cast time, mana cost, power). If it's instant or a very quick cast, it might actually be useful for retribution paladins to use on high damage fights since they'll be able to hit the melee clump quite easily.

Also, as a GCD-capped class, 30 minute sacred shield sounds quite nice.

Havok · 04/14/10, 10:45 AM

* Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.

It appears they might be throwing away the damage portion of Holy Shock.

EDIT:

I'm trying to understand the change to Beacon. Are they saying FoL activates the Beacon effect now?

Raistlin212 · 04/14/10, 10:47 AM

With Holy Shock and Crusader Strike available, us tanks might actually have to think about our rotation mid-faceroll. This does seems like a large number of buffs with minimal nerfs.

shatter · 04/14/10, 10:56 AM

Originally Posted by Tinwhisker

Guardian of Ancient Kings feels nice and very useful but we've already seen two pets/minions introduced and later made permanent and I fear that we're starting down a disappointing path here where one Paladin spec may become a pet class.

Guardian of Ancient Kings feels more like a cooldown, not a pet. They even mention that it's like a guardian spell (think a DK's Gargoyle and not a Ghoul). Having it function differently according to your spec also seems very interesting.

Bonestorm · 04/14/10, 11:08 AM

Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.

Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we're looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.

Sounds like they are trying to get consecrate out of the single target tanking rotation, probably replacing it with crusader strike.

shatter · 04/14/10, 11:15 AM

Originally Posted by Bonestorm

Sounds like they are trying to get consecrate out of the single target tanking rotation, probably replacing it with crusader strike.

To that end, the new Blinding Shield (instant for Prot) could also be an ability designed for multi-mob tanking only - depending on cooldown.

Camaris · 04/14/10, 11:19 AM

Admittedly Healing Hands and the Guardian of Ancient Kings (does anyone have a picture or video of what that WarIII resurrection spell looks like) are still pretty much unknowns at this time, but I am wondering about what this actually means for 'our niche'.

My gut reaction is that by changing Beacon of Light to only work with "expensive, fast" FoL instead of the "go-to" Holy Light, they are actually enforcing the single target healing role more? If that rule would apply to the current game, any Holy Light not cast on a tank would be quite a gamble.

Of course, it says "Beacon of Light will now work with Flash of Light", not strictly that it will NOT work with Holy Light. I'd like some clarification here, because it sounds Beacon will be less useful.

I'm also slightly bemused by the 30-minute Sacred Shield. Maybe I'm doing things wrong, but I change Sacred Shield more frequently than I do Beacon of Light.

nikitabanana · 04/14/10, 11:25 AM

Originally Posted by Bryler

If this odd wording means that FoL will be the only spell that is transfered to the beacon target than paladins will basiclaly remain in the same position they are now. Except instead of spamming HL we will be spamming FoL, and instead of stacking Int we will be stacking SP. It will be TBC all over again...
Basically we will probablly be healing like the Premontion holy paladins do know

Assuming that they plan to make flash of light prohibitively expensive in spam situations, I don't see us spamming it on a tank. What they're going for is paladins only healing one tank target primarily, with their beacon on another tank or some other target (themselves even) where they can then flash of light if the situation turns out to need it - but not constantly spam it.

Btw, you'd stack int to gain spellpower in cataclysm. Overall, the changes were fairly logical and make sense when you look at where they want to take healing.

Bryler · 04/14/10, 11:46 AM

Originally Posted by nikitabanana

Assuming that they plan to make flash of light prohibitively expensive in spam situations, I don't see us spamming it on a tank. What they're going for is paladins only healing one tank target primarily, with their beacon on another tank or some other target (themselves even) where they can then flash of light if the situation turns out to need it - but not constantly spam it.

Well spamming 1 tank with beacon on another is exactly what we do now, and spamming a tank with beacon on ourselves is what we did alot of the time when Beacon didn't include overhealing.
If they are planing to increase the cost of FoL so that it costs more mana than HL, then its entierly possible that we will end up stacking spirit and spamming FoL. If FoL continues to have a high crit chance through Sacred Shield procs then mastery could be conisdered our throughput stat.

If we able to stack spirit to the point where FoL won't cause mana problems, I can see no reason to use HL if it doesnt transfer to the beaconed player.
And with enough mastery a FoL crit would probablly hit for the same amount as HL, which would mean that FoL heals for 200% of HL if you include the beacon heal...and thats not even including the HoT.

Although at this point it's all just speculation.

Montegomery · 04/14/10, 11:48 AM

Originally Posted by Bryler

...

Critical Healing Effect...

Really?

By far the most useless mastery bonus i've seen any class/spec receive..

This mastery bonus also supports my theory of FoL spamming. If FoL continues to gain crit from sacred shield then critical healing effect wouldn't be as useless as it is now. In fact this is the only explanation I can think of for giving us a mastery bonus that currently seems so useless.

Don't think about crit healing using the current healing paradigm. Right now any crit heal is, excluding some extreme circumstances, overhealing and generally a complete waste. The aim in Cataclysm is for topping players off to be a thing of the past, meaning that we'll frequently be healing with the goal of pushing a player into a reasonably safe zone rather than making sure they're maxed on health all the time. In these circumstance, critical heals have a high probability of no overheal whatsoever.

Playered · 04/14/10, 12:02 PM

Originally Posted by Camaris

Admittedly Healing Hands and the Guardian of Ancient Kings (does anyone have a picture or video of what that WarIII resurrection spell looks like) are still pretty much unknowns at this time, but I am wondering about what this actually means for 'our niche'.

That was the Guardian associated with the spell in Warcraft 3 - think of it as a generic Tyrael (quick picture from the editor).

Neraya · 04/14/10, 12:21 PM

Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85):
Paladins getting a pet ? /facepalm
The suggestions on the official forums for Wotlk were littered with these and it was shot down each time by a majority consensus of paladins. I can't say I'm really looking forward to this. For a level 85 ability, I'm finding this really underwhelming. How awesome it looks visually, isn't going to change that.

Holy shock:
The wording says HS will be a healing spell for all specs. A nice change, having an instant heal does come in handy. I doubt HS will become a damage spell for all specs, and I hope it remains a (talented?) damage ability for holy. Otoh, making CS available for all specs, also means that maybe Holy doesn't need HS to do damage anymore when doing some soloing.

Divine shield:
If the duration gets reduced, then we'll have to insist on a similar reduction in cast time for hearthstone !! ;-)

"We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. "
Obviously Blizzard hasn't been keeping up with the times. The rotation at current isn't unforgiving at all. Just mash anything off CD, you can even blindly hit any button at random. It doesn't even matter if you mess up and hit the wrong priority ability, overall damage will be very similar. The various simulations have been showing this that it doesn't even matter much what priority you use as all the various priorities end up having very similar DPS within a few percentages of eachother. The only problem with a "weird" rotation is the chance you'll run OOM.
If anything, there currently isn't enough of a difference between a bad, a good and an awesome paladin. The only distinguishing difference between bad/good/awesome at current is making the most of cooldowns such as AW, speed pot etc. Assuming you make it past the "move out of fire" skill of course.