So instead of getting back approximatly 900 mana per judement, I’m getting back approximately 400 mana! After reading the forums this morning, I noticed that people are saying that ALL of the proposed nerfs were hotfixed last night yet none of the buffs were implemented!

To be honest, I didn’t mind the nerfs. So what I actually went out of mana once – I’m supposed to! Every other class does. Mana is not infinite in this game. My experience with this nerf is only based on doing dailies and not instances or arena. From what I’ve read, being a paladin in arena now is just about impossible due to going out of mana so quickly. I’ll try out the instancing part next so I can make my own decision.

So far, I’m still using my paladin as my main and the game is still fun. Maybe that will change if I get booted from an instance group as ret.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.0.2, arena, hotfix, nerf, pally, patch, ret

First off, rank 3 of Judgements of the Wise (JoTW) reads as:

Your Judgement spells have a 100% chance to grant the Replenishment effect to up to 10 party or raid members mana regeneration equal to 0.25% of their maximum mana per second, and to immediately grant you 33% of your base mana.

For my level 70 paladin, every judgement immediately returned approximately 975 mana plus about 13-14 mana per second from the replenishment spell. The nerf on this talent reduces the amount of mana returned from 33% to 15%! That’s a huge drop!

The second nerf that I’m gonna bitch about is the 20% reduction to seal damage. Losing 20% of my damage from one of my staple spells is a huge decrease to my dps! This has adverse ramifications not only to retribution paladins, but to holy paladins trying to solo their dailies and also for the amount of threat produced by the protection paladins tanking bosses.

I am hopeful that these reductions will be changed but I’m not optimistic about it. The are bullshit changes.

I’m not ready to say that I’m quitting the paladin class altogether but that is only because I want to try out whatever changes make it to the live servers. If I deem the nerfs too severe, then I’ll either quit playing my paladin altogether (and switch to either my hunter or my warlock) or I’ll stop playing WoW completely.

It is a shame that Blizzard gave these amazing buffs to the ret tree and then removed them within a month of the 3.0.2 patch release. All of the changes have been available to the WotLK beta testers for months now. I don’t understand how these changes were allowed to go live and then dramatically nerfed between the 3.0.2 patch and the release of Wrath of the Lich King.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.0.2, holy, nerf, pally, patch, protection, ret, seals

As I stated yesterday, we are happy with Ret’s PvE damage and sustatined damage in PvP, but were concerned that the burst damage in PvP could be too high. We discussed this for literally hours yesterday, which was certainly not the first time we have discussed the issue. Thus I hope these changes are not perceived as a knee-jerk reaction, but I am sure that will depend a great deal on which class you play.
Divine Storm — the damage was changed from Holy to Physical. As you know, Holy damage is almost never mitigated and this talent could pack a lot into a very short time. This is a nerf to the ability’s damage. This change is now active on Live.
Repentence — this ability now lasts for only 6 seconds in PvP (down from 10). Obviously this is also a nerf. This change is also active on Live.
Art of War — now affects all damage done by Judgements, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm (instead of critical strike damage). Net dps should be about the same but less bursty. This change will be made before Nov 13.
Righteous Vengeance — now applies a dot affect similar to Deep Wounds (instead of critical strike damage). This ends up being a significant buff to the ability to make up for the damage lost to Divine Storm, but is also less bursty. This change will be made before Nov 13.
Glyph of Crusader Strike — now reduces mana cost (instead of increased damage on stunned targets.) We thought paladins could stack too much damage vs. stunned targets. This change will be made before Nov 13.
We also fixed a bug with Seal and Judgement of Light that could sometimes result in too much healing.
In our tests, Retribution dps remains the same over longer periods of time, but they can’t do quite so much damage in the initial few seconds of a PvP encounter.
I know Ret pallies feel a little picked on since we’ve made this mistake before of having them come out the gate too strong and then had to correct them. For that I do apologize. It’s a difficult spec to balance since part of its design is to have large crits and stuns, which have obvious PvP implications. We are pretty confident this will not nerf pallies into the ground as I facetiously promised yesterday, but if we overdid it, we’ll be happy to back off some of the changes.
On the other hand, maybe we’ll see fewer BGs with 20 paladins on the opposing side and can get some reasonable feedback on all the other classes in the game.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.0.2, nerf, pally, patch

The standard holy damage dealt by Judgement spells is 20% of attack power plus 32% of spell power; some seals may increase this amount (source).

Judgement of Light restores is 18% of the casting paladin’s current attack power plus 18% of the paladin’s current spell power. The effect cannot trigger more than once every 4 seconds.

Judgement of Wisdom restores 2% of the attacker’s total mana. The effect cannot trigger more than once every 4 seconds.

Judgement of Justice will no longer prevent Fear effects, but will only prevent NPCs from fleeing (e.g. at low health).

For example, if you have Seal of Command up it stays up for 2 mins. During those 2 mins, you still have “chance to proc” Seal of Command. If you judge with Judgement of Wisdom, it will put a wisdom debuff on the target and judge for the damage of Seal of Command.  If you have Seal of Blood up, each swing you do for 2 mins will do damage to you and the mob. If you judge with Judgement of Light, it will put a light debuff on him, and judge him for the damage of Seal of Blood.

There is now a talent in the retribution tree, called Judgements of the Wise that replenishes mana when you judge a target.  If fully talented, this occurs every time you judge!

With the new changes, a retribution paladin should never run out of mana or health, unless your taking on a lot of mobs all at once! When I played this morning, I had a bad pull of 5 mobs and 3 were casters. When I killed them all, I had 43% health and 48% mana! Ret pally’s should have very little downtime while grinding now!

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.0.2, judgments, pally, seals

Holy paladins should still be stacking spellpower, but protection and retribution paladins should be stacking strength.

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.0.2, ap, attack power, pally, ret, sp, spellpower

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!!

© petewood for my everything else blog..., 2008. | Permalink
Post tags: 3.0.2, addons, bartender3, bartender4, forums, op, pally, patch, ret