Ah, it's here!

My question is mainly if there are any solid plans to make Ret less faceroll-ish. Ghostcrawler mentioned something along the lines a while ago, and I don't think I'm the only one who's interested to see if anything will change.

One of the largest problems with Retribution is not that it does too much damage, but that doing such damage takes no particular skill, as far as PvP goes. Where PvE is concerned, Retribution is 'clunky'. There are too many cooldowns that need to be watched, too many global cooldowns that clash, and the fact that even slight latency has an impact on your performance.

There have been a number of suggestions that propose a debuff stacking system (similar to how Death Knights work I guess), although rather than the runes and runic power employed by Deathknights that give their strikes a soft cooldown, for us it would likely have to be a hard cooldown.

I'll give the issue a bit of thought over dinner and see if I can come up with anything myself. :o

Are you planning on improving the way paladins buff? When we are three paladins in my raid, I (the protection paladin) wants to give myself blessing of Sancturary, The retribution paladin wants blessing of might and the holy paladins wants to give himself blessing of wisdom.
The problem is, that I want blessing of kings too, but I can only get a 10-min version of that from the other paladins. Another problem is that it takes a lot of time (and more effort than it takes for a priest or mage) to buff the whole raid.

I think this is a frustrating element for the paladin buffing. A suggestion on a solution would be to make normal blessings last 30 min. If it would be possible to buff the entire raid with one click of a button.

Maybe introduce a spell that will rebless all raid memebers with a 30-min version of the blessing that was last applied to them.

I'll be back with more :)

---

Q u o t e:
Ah, it's here!

My question is mainly if there are any solid plans to make Ret less faceroll-ish. Ghostcrawler mentioned something along the lines a while ago, and I don't think I'm the only one who's interested to see if anything will change.

---

This. It's really all there is to say

Hots or Group-Heal. Is there a chance to get any someday?
Healing while killing trash groups in 25 man again all the druid hots and priest grp heals is soooo frustrating. I always have 80% overheal. Heal Paladins can go afk while the raid is doing trash. It´s no difference :/
And i just wanna have, you know ,a little bit more choices which Healspell i use.
And not only spamming HL and sometimes Holy shock. A new healspell would be great:>

With the upcoming changes to the way Retribution does damage, will Protection see a few changes also? Protection at the moment usually consists of Divine Plea -> run at boss -> spam abilities. It's pretty much like retribution, apart from that you can use a 'rotation' (969) to make sure that you can press a button every GCD.

--

Will the upcoming Retribution changes affect PvP? Currently, retri relies pretty much on burst in pvp. We have a long cooldown stun/interrupt. We have an incapicate; we have no abilities to close a gap (apart from running faster than the opponent), we have no Mortal Strike, we have no snare, we have no short-cooldown interrupt. The more resilience the opponent has, the less powerful burst becomes, which is Retribution's main ability.

Any way to make casting blessings a lot less painful?

Say, I'm doing Ulduar 10 with my guild, and there's just me and a protection paladin. He'll want BoS and BoK, and I'll want BoK and BoM. Naturally, we can't both get greater blessings, and there's another problem with me as a lolret having improved BoM, so if I wanted to have that one, I'll have to buff myself with BoM and him with BoK, and he'll have to buff me with BoK and himself with BoS. Not to mention how there are other classes, say we have a single paladin in raid and we got a druid who wants BoM (or BoK or whatever) and a druid who wants BoW, once again, the Greater Blessings idea fails here.


*NOTE: That was my question. Here's a possible suggestion on how to fix it.*


I know this is about questions, but I thought I'd post this idea over here, and I apologize if it's off topic, I know there's a suggestion forum and I'll be on my way over there as soon as I post this. Seeing how this topic is about asking questions, I'm going to assume it's going to be read by Blizzard representatives, so I'm going to post it, and hope for the best.

This idea isn't mine originally, I just saw it somewhere on this forum. Whoever came up with it - awesome work. Though I think I expanded a bit on it, but meh. The idea still stands.

Paladins should get new type of spells, closely tied to the blessings. They'd be called Altars.

Altar of Might - it would create an item on the ground, similar to mage's table or warlock's soulwell or priest's lightwell. Everyone who clicked on that item would get themselves buffed with the highest rank of Blessing of Might the paladin who created the Altar has. It would also work with talents, of course, so an Altar of Might from a paladin with Imp. BoM would be better than an Altar of Might from a paladin without it.

Same story with Altar of Kings, Altar of Wisdom and Altar of Sanctuary (Seeing how Blessing of Sanctuary is a talent, it would be available only to characters with that talent, just like it is with Greater Blessing of Sanctuary.).

Also, every paladin would be able to create as many Altars as he has different Blessings, but you wouldn't be able to get buffs from all the Altars from a single paladin. So, if the same paladin put Altar of Kings and Altar of Might, and you got the Might buff, getting the Kings buff would unbuff Might from you and give you Kings only.

Why should I work like this? Here, to make an example. Let's say a raid has three paladins, one of each spec: Holy paladin with Imp. BoW, ret paladin with Imp. BoM and prot paladin with BoS. In a situation like this, every one of them would be able to put down the altar for their "basic" blessing, and an additional one for Kings. So then, all the tanks could click on holy's BoK, prot's BoS and ret's BoM, all the lolrets, enhancement shamans and hunters could get holy's BoW, prot's BoK and ret's BoM, etc.

1.) Paladins need a serious spell interrupt, or the removal of their current really really poor one and given some kind of anti-magic-shell style low CD magic defence. At the moment interrupting as a paladin is really not-fun. Your interrupt is on a huge cooldown (comparatively), and it's stuck on the GCD. Leading to moments where "Yeah shield of righteousness crit! Oh damn GCD is on and the mob is casting..". It just makes you feel useless.

2.) Tanking paladins need some extra kind of cooldown, but you've acknowledged this. Any hints of what kind of thing you're going for?

3.) Retribution is intensely boring to play. I'm nearly always protection spec but I go ret for Vezax as we cheese it with out DK tank keeping the boss in place, and ret is seriously dull in raids. That said it is conversely immense fun in solo play as you feel like a questing crusader, always ready to smash evil and such. I think if you overhaul ret, please dont give it anything combopoint-esque (e.g. stacking a dot and then doing a big finisher). It would ruin the feel of the class.

4.) Holy. I've never played holy properly because I have a geared resto shaman alt, but from what i can tell, I'd hate it. Being pigeonholed into "You can heal the tank, but priests and druids will drop excrement over your attempts to raid heal" is really, really lame. I can't believe blizzard evened out tanks but left healers in such a rediculous state - priests can do everything well, and nothing badly. There is almost no downside to taking only priest healers, compared to taking only paladin healers, it's stupid and punishes players for a bad design. We're all here for the pursuit of enjoyment, why is healing treated so differently?

5.) Reckoning. This talent is utter garbage, on the order of 16tps per point. This is pretty pathetic when you consider that tank threat is in the order of 7-10 thousand tps. Is there any indication of this talent being evaluated?

6.) Blessing of Sanctuary - it feels clunky and annoying since it was changed to just mana regen. Will there be some kind of changed? Perhaps split the effects with the 3% damage reduction baked into auras, and have the mana regen effect left there as a passive buff for the paladin since we are the only class there. Again these are just ideas, any insight into this would be fantastic.

7.) Divine Sacrafice - This ability is nice in theory, but when you do the math, it will oneshot absolutely anyone on any serious raid damage unless you keep divine shield up for the duration. For example on ignis' flame jets, ostensibly quite light raid damage, the total damage would instantly kill me unless I keep up divine shield, effectively putting this ability on a 4 minute cooldown (5 as non-prot spec). Are there any further thoughts being put into this talent?

8.) I absolutely love prot's divine plea refresh-on-melee ability now. Much love! <3

Give Holy Palas a Chain Heal skill , like the Shaman's have .

---

Q u o t e:
One of the largest problems with Retribution is not that it does too much damage, but that doing such damage takes no particular skill, as far as PvP goes. Where PvE is concerned, Retribution is 'clunky'. There are too many cooldowns that need to be watched, too many global cooldowns that clash, and the fact that even slight latency has an impact on your performance.

---

Agreed .

---

Q u o t e:
Will the upcoming Retribution changes affect PvP? Currently, retri relies pretty much on burst in pvp. We have a long cooldown stun/interrupt. We have an incapicate; we have no abilities to close a gap (apart from running faster than the opponent), we have no Mortal Strike, we have no snare, we have no short-cooldown interrupt. The more resilience the opponent has, the less powerful burst becomes, which is Retribution's main ability.

---

The cooldowns of Hammer of Justice and Repentance are too high I think .
Hammer of Justice should have more range without using the glyph .
Retri Palas should have a sap-a-like skill .

My comments are from the standpoint of a raiding prot paladin halfway through Ulduar-25/towards the end of Ulduar-10, but also generally in charge of leading the other paladins. I ought to stress that I'm actually pretty satisfied with where my part of the class is right now (and my biggest complaint - needing an extra tanking cooldown - appears to be being addressed). Nevertheless, I've got quite a few questions; not really huge issues, but they are things that nag at me and I'd love to see cleared up.

* Ardent Defender. It bothers me because I can't get out of the mindset that you can get into a state where *being healed* can kill you (34% health, take a small heal (HoT, JoL)-> 36% health, then you take a 40% hit. You'd survive if you hadn't had that heal). It's probably a rare case, but I'm not really comfortable with that thought; are you? On a similar note, it can become worthless on bosses such as Ulduar ones, who almost all hit extremely hard; is this satisfactory?

* Divinity. It's kinda nice on paper, but in practice it seems to get somewhat lost in overheal. I wouldn't mind seeing stats on this, how much effective healing you get from Divinity in (say) an XT fight; I feel it will be low enough to be insignificant. Am I misunderstanding the intention of the talent?

* Block. I like block as a mechanic, I quite like it as a stat on gear - but I always, without fail, look upon it as a *threat* stat with a small defensive bonus rather than a defensive stat with a threat bonus. It's great in that respect, mind! I'm sure our warrior cousins will have a similar sentiment when I ask: Do you have any plans for this?

* Threat. This won't make me popular: I think we have too much! Internally are you thinking that high threat means (comparatively) low survival stats and vice-versa? (It's probably worth noting that DKs probably still have the best survivability and arguably have the weakest threat, which appears to lend some credence to that theory?) As a followon to that, was our Glyph of Salvation intended as a stopgap cooldown at the cost of threat? (I feel it was too high a cost if that was the plan, but I'm not convinced it was)

* Divine Sacrifice. I don't quite get the point of this talent as it is now. We could use it in three situations:
- MT taking damage, pop it (with or without DS/DP) and reduce their damage intake.
- Raid taking damage. Pop it and probably die.
- Raid taking damage. Pop it with Divine Shield and reduce their damage intake.
The confusion stems from the fact that I don't quite see why it changed; It seems to me that the first point is covered by Hand of Sacrifice, the second is too dangerous to be worthwhile, and the third was covered by the original implementation of Divine Sacrifice; as far as I can tell the change doesn't actually change anything other than make it require two GCDs to use rather than one.

* Judgement synergy in raids. Every paladin should want to judge in a raid; holies for their haste buff, ret for the mana, and prot for the attack speed reduction. In Naxx we had a reasonable setup to do so; Ret would judge light because they can keep permanent uptime and have the most effective heals from it; Prot would cover Wisdom because they can maintain permanent uptime, and holy would do justice because the actual debuff from theirs doesn't particularly matter, they just want to maintain their buff. Now, however, they can't do justice at range, which has rather thrown our previous plans. Unfortunately, we can't simplify things down to them-doing-wisdom-prot-doing-justice because that leaves us without permanent uptime on Wisdom, and we can't both do Wisdom because that would knock off JotJ for a period of time which is a no-no. Are there any retools planned to simplify this?

Is Blizzard trying to make Protection PvP viable? with 3.1, DP+AS silence was added, + an improved Sacred Shield for Protection Paladins. Are there going to be more steps in validating Paladin Tanking PvP, As was done with Warrior Tank PvP and Druid Tank PvP?

are there any plans on somewhat altering the holy paladin's place in raids? with the increased aoe damage fights in ulduar there is a clear pattern that the paladins are MT healers only. sure we've had this place for a long time but should a class really be forced like that?

* Are there plans for paladins to get a area heal?
* Are there any plans to give paladins any kind of HoT?

U all now that palaldins have no HOTs well it would be real nice if we could have 1 or 2 to help us heal abit instead of just Holy shock Flash of light and Holy light

---

Q u o t e:
Ah, it's here!

My question is mainly if there are any solid plans to make Ret less faceroll-ish.

One of the largest problems with Retribution is not that it does too much damage, but that doing such damage takes no particular skill, as far as PvP goes. Where PvE is concerned, Retribution is 'clunky'. There are too many cooldowns that need to be watched, too many global cooldowns that clash, and the fact that even slight latency has an impact on your performance.

There have been a number of suggestions that propose a debuff stacking system

---

pretty much summed up my question,
any solid plans to make retri-pallys more skillful to play, with less cooldown spells and spells on the GCD?

Okay, as promised, I'd give some consideration to a solution for Retribution, and here I am.

First of all;

Custom Retribution talent tree that I've put together;

http://www.war-tools.com/t63369.html

Spell and ability changes:

-Judgement of Justice removed and the effect rolled into another talent.
-Seal of the Martyr/Seal of Blood removed. All relevant items, glyphs and set bonuses will be re-worked.
-Seal of Command now has a chance to deal damage equivalent to 45% of your weapon damage + 23% of your spellpower as holy damage. 8.4 PPM base. Glyph of Seal of Command now restores mana equal to 5% of any damage caused by Seal and Judgement of Command.
-Divine Storm is now on a 6 second cooldown, but shares its' cooldown with Crusader Strike, which means you can Crusader Strike when dealing single target DPS, or Divine Storm when in AoE situations.
-New base spell! Crusader's Retribution is a passive skill that deals damage equal to 15% of your attack power plus 15% of your spellpower over 18 seconds and stacking up to 3 times and is applied by using the new 11 point Retribution talent "Holy Strike". Using certain abilities will consume any of your stacks of Crusader's Retribution, instantly dealing damage.

The general base idea is to set up a rotation of using Holy Strike to stack Crusader's Retribution to 3 stacks, then use Crusader Strike to consume the stacks of Crusader's Retribution for increased damage. In light of the new Holy Strike system, Divine Storm will have a 6 second cooldown, so that in single target situations, the higher damage Crusader Strike can be used, and in AoE situations, Divine Storm can be used (due to its' AoE nature). Using Crusader Strike on a target that is afflicted by Crusader's Retribution will consume any stacks of the debuff and deal instant damage equal to 15 seconds of each stack of Crusader's Retribution. The same is true for Divine Storm, but Divine Storm will deal damage equal to 12 seconds instead of 15.

Please note, there is a gap for new ability at level 64 for Retribution, with the mysterious dissapearance of Seal of Blood/the Martyr.

Constructive feedback, ideas for improvement and whatnot are all welcome.

Edit: Also note that this solution incorporates the much-wanted melee strike into low level gameplay.
I'll probably edit this post again with more ideas.

Read and comment on this post guys has be going on for a wille.. Willy very nice.

http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=8374727724&sid=1

Talent tree link, taked from orginal post: http://www.war-tools.com/t60203.html

I play a ret Pally in Arena, how about give ret pallies some form of spell interrupt, like all other classes have?

Direct to the issue then.


Holy:

Atm holy paladins are on the bottom of Healing done charts, except on very specific fights that our glyph of Holy Light shines on aoe healing. Holy paladins are 1 button unidiretional smashing (holy light), while keeping 3 buffs up looking at some addon counter (sacred shield, beacon and Judgement).

Paladins are going around with 60/70% overhealing, with holy light bombs of over 20k, where every smart heal in the game heals before our heals on the raid, and when the main tank is not taking 20k hits, we are left doing basicaly nothing.

Having a niche of single target healing is OK, but going with 70% overhealing in our task is not realy much fun. And while we can be "bad" in aoe healing for the sake of balance, we should at least have some tool available for it, even if "not awesome" one, that we could use when the need arises, to help a little (no, beacon is not aoe healing).

My question about holy is:

Is there any kind of tool/mechanic that can be added to paladin healing arsenal that actualy heals "smart" or does some buffer healing on raid like priest prayer of mending, or any other button to press besides unidirectional buttons like flash (that we dont use much) or holy light? Sacred shield is boring, glyph of holy light while usefull is also boring, infusion of light is now boring aswell (previous version was much more fun).


Ret:

Short Cooldown dependant strikes were fun in 3.0, now they are just clunky and boring. We put a simple addon to keep track of cooldowns and, well... we press them in a priority system. We unleash ridiculous amounts of damage in the first seconds of a fight and then we drop in sustained damage while doing a "rotation" that little to no skill is required and we cant realy do much to improve our dps besides well... gear.

There is no synergy whatsoever in the "rotation". If we press judgement we get mana, if we press divine storm we get aoe, if we press consecration we get lower on mana. thats it. Abilities dont interconnect, we dont need to keep watch to debuffs on target, we dont need to refresh a dot, we dont need to press 1 ability first to improve the other.


My question is:

Is something realy going to be done to put a little more skill into a proper "rotation" on the ret paladin? I would honestly like to see my dps go up if i do well and increase in sustainability the longer the fight is.
Dont just increase the righteous vengeange dot while decreasing the strikes' damage, that would be uninteresting aswell. Can something be done like destro locks Incinerate->conflagrate synergy, or DKs debuffs' damage increasing synergy, or the warrior overpower proccing? something that we need to keep an eye out in our rotation.


THanks.

Regarding Retribution.

As posted many times before but never answered, Paladin's are the only class without a decent cc/slow/interrupt/ms effect and yet you think our damage is too high, how do you expect us to kill anything or be viable in arena when we can only do normal dmg without any burst and any of this utility?

I can't wait till I see your plans for the combat redesign andI I hope you made something good from it, but what we all know is that you are going to nerf our Burst by a lot.
So when that happends, do we get any cc/slow/interrupt/ms? Since we are the only class without any of them at the moment and we don't have a gap closer + now you nerfed Hand of Freedom there is no way to get close to any decent enemy.

I think most of the Paladin's agree with me if I say, lower our burst by a bit BUT give us something in exchange for it, you can not nerf our only point which makes us this viable in PvP and give us nothing back for it.

And if we look back how Paladin's have been dealed with through all these years I got a bad feeling on how things will work out.