Patch 3.0.2 and my pally
Blizzard released patch 3.0.2 for WoW yesterday and am I glad that I finally started leveling my paladin again!!
The servers were all supposed to be up at 5pm EST yesterday but there were lots of issues from what I’ve read. I had family stuff to do so I didn’t notice any problems until I started trying to log in around 8pm. The servers were up and down last night for about an 80 minutes. They finally stabilized at around 9:20PM. I spent all of the time last night trying to update my add-ons and find replacements for the ones that are no longer supported.
I had to replace Bartender3 with Bartender4 since the former is not being supported any more. I was never able to get a usable bar mod working since I couldn’t figure out how to move the damn toolbars in Bartender4. I got frustrated and just wanted to play and see how OP my ret pally was now.
I finally gave up and went back to the default UI toolbars but I know that was a waste of time since I would never use them. I was able to get onto the WoW forums this morning and see that I wasn’t the only person unable to figure out how to move those bars. Here is how you do it, in case anybody happens upon this post (source):
Type /bt to bring up the options panel. In the upper left corner, check box to lock/unlock.
Now for the pally changes that I did notice. My spellpower is insanely high! In my ret gear, with only AP and Strength being my stats of choice, I have 470 spellpower. I might have one piece of gear with +spellpower on it and it would be very low. The increase in spellpower is a result of the fact that paladin spellpower now scales with stamina. 30% of a paladin’s stamina is converted into spell power.
My small heal, pre-patch, was healing for 400ish. It now heals for 1100ish! One of my small heals crit for over 1600 last night! Then I started testing my big heals. Pre-patch, they were healing for 1900-2000. It now heals for 3k+ and I had one crit for 4600! There is a new talent for ret paladins called Sheath of Light. Rank 3 of this spell’s tooltip reads as
Increases your spell power by an amount equal to 30% of your attack power and your critical healing spells heal the target for 60% of the healed amount over 12 seconds.
Now that I’ll be rolling with improved blessing of might (with talents), my attack power is now closer to 1500. Basically, this creates a HoT for paladins for heals that crit! This is awesome for healing as a retribution paladin! I could heal instances as ret now! My healing is awesome now, even better than it was as holy.
Pre-patch, I would roll with Sanctity Aura (which adds 10% holy damage). That aura was removed in this patch. Now that it is gone, I’ll be rolling with retribution aura. Pre-patch, retribution aura hit a mob for 26 holy damage whenever they hit me (melee). There is a talent to increase the damage from retribution aura by 50% for 2 talent points called improved retribution aura. Pre-patch, that was laughable and generally not taken (26 * 1.5 = 39, not a big increase). Retribution aura was buffed greatly and now reflects 62 damage. Talented, it reflects 93 holy damage (62 * 1.5 = 93)! That is a huge increase! I put the 2 talent points in improved retribution aura.
I haven’t been able to test it out yet, but from what I’ve read on the forums, consecrate is ticking for a LOT more now. I read that it was ticking for about 200 (my pre-patch consecrate was ticking for about 69)! I can’t wait to test out all of my offensive capabilities soon!!