my everything else blog... » nerf

New pally changes in 3.1

petewood — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:39:56 +0000

I don’t have a lot of time to comment on these changes at the moment, but here they are, from mmo-champion.

All paladins auras had their range extended from 30 yards to 40 yards.
Holy

Sacred Shield now cannot be on more than one target at any one time.
Infusion of Light no longer has a chance to reduce the casting time of Holy Light, but increases the the critical chance of your next Holy Light by 10/20% instead.

Protection

Hand of Sacrifice now lasts 12 sec or until the caster has transfered 100% of their maximum health.
Targets affected by Divine Shield, Hand of Protection or Divine Protection can no longer be affected by any of these spell for 2 minutes. (Down from 3 minutes)
Divine Sacrifice *New Talent* (Tier 3) – 30% of all damage taken by party or raid members within 30 yards is redirected to the Paladin (up to a maximum of 150% of the Paladin’s health). Instant, 2 min cooldown.

Edit: There is a badass new tanking enchant coming down the pike as well -

Enchanting

Enchant Weapon – Blade Ward *New Enchant* – Permanently enchants a weapon to sometimes grant Blade Warding when striking an enemy. Blade Warding increases your parry rating by 200 and inflicts 600 to 800 damage on your next parry. Effect can stack up to 5 times and lasts 10 sec. This enchantment requires the wielder is at least level 75.

Ghetto hearthing removed in 3.1

petewood — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 13:27:31 +0000

Ghetto hearthing has been removed from the game, at least in the current PTR build of patch 3.1 (source).

Ghetto hearthing can best be described as temporarily grouping with someone, going into an instance and then leaving the group. The effect of leaving the group is that you are hearthed (to where your hearthstone is set) after one minute of not leaving the instance. Players used this technique if they went to a city, needed to get back to another zone (like Shattrath or Dalaran) and their hearthstone was on cooldown.

This was basically a free hearth, granted you could find an instance to make it usable. Orgrimmar is a great example since RFC is located there.

For example, if your hearthstone was set to Dalaran and is currently on CD. You are in Dalaran but need to buy something from the auction house. You could take a portal from Dalaran to Orgrimmar and do what you need to do from there. Now your somewhat “stuck” in Orgrimmar since your hearth is on CD. In order to “ghetto-hearth” and get back to Dalaran, you would need to group with someone (random person, guildy, friend, whatever), run into RFC (which is located in Org) and then leave group. The effect of this is that you would get a message box that pops up that basically tells you to GTFO or be ported to Dalaran.

The new change on the PTR will still port you out of the instance you are in but instead of sending you to the location where your hearthstone is set, you will be ported to the nearest graveyard – leaving you stuck in the zone you didn’t want to be in.

Announced 3.1 pally changes

petewood — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 14:02:49 +0000

The announced changes seem to be prot-pally related, for the most part (source).

Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins.

Blessing of Kings being a baseline talent is AWESOME. This is something the pally community has been raving about for ages.

Exorcism – this spell now causes damage to all types of enemy targets. However, it always critical strikes undead or demon targets. This change should make sure paladin damage doesn’t drop when going from Naxxramas to later tiers of content.

Exorcism being used in my normal rotation? Currently, Exorcism only works on the undead. I think I’ll need more mana for that!

Shield of the Templar now causes your Avenger’s Shield and Shield of the Righteousness to silence targets for 3 sec. The old damage bonus of this talent has been folded into Holy Shield, Avenger’s Shield, and Shield of the Righteousness.

Shield of the Templar causing Avengers Shield AND Shield of the Righteous to cause a 3s silence? That sounds OP to me, even if it is prot pally only. My guess is that the CD on SotR will be increased a bit.

Ardent Defender, Improved Hammer of Justice, One-Handed Weapon Specialization and more have had their ranks reduced.

Very nice change. My 5/58/8 (or the most popular 5/60/6) will have at least 9 talent points freed up (giving back 5 from kings and 4/5 from the 2H weapon specialization). Will the tree be given MORE bloat or will prot pally’s be able dabble more in the ret tree for some added damage (and therefore threat)?

Guarded by the Light – no longer reduces the mana cost of shield spells, but now has a 50/100% chance to refresh Divine Plea duration.

So now there is a 100% chance to keep Divine Plea going every time I hit someone/something with my shield? Why do prot pally’s need spiritual attunement anymore?!

Judgements of the Just – now also reduces the cooldown of Hammer of Justice by 10/20 seconds and increases the duration of the Seal of Justice stun effect by 0.5/1 second.

This drops the CD of Hammer of Justice to 30seconds in itself, but there is another talent in the prot tree that further reduces the HoJ cooldown by 30s (for 3 talent points – but, with 3.1, will be only 1 talent point). This effectively gives pallys a 10second interrupt/stun. This seems overpowered (especially in PvP) to me and leaves me wondering what kind of nerfs HoJ will receive.

The only other change mentioned regarding pally’s is a huge nerf to Divine Plea. It’s impact on healing is being increase from a 20% reduction to 50%. The duration and cooldown remain the same however (source).

Since paladins rely less on Spirit as a mana-regeneration stat, we have to address them in other ways. We don’t want to change Illumination or Replenishment. However, we are going to increase the healing penalty on Divine Plea from 20% to 50%. Divine Plea was originally intended to help Protection and Retribution paladins stay full on mana. It should be a decision for Holy paladins, not something that is automatically used every cooldown.
In addition, we are also changing the way Spiritual Attunement works. In situations with a large amount of outgoing raid damage, as well as in PvP, this passive ability was responsible for more mana regeneration than we would like. We want to keep the necessary benefit it grants to tanking Protection paladins, while making it less powerful for Holy paladins in PvP or raid encounters with a lot of group damage.

3.0.8 Paladin changes on the PTR

petewood — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 14:29:23 +0000

This is a big-time buff patch for ret pallys. Below are the patch notes. The only nerf I see is noted in red below. This change should really only effect Holy paladins since they are the only spec that should be stacking int (and therefore, their max mana is not the same and their base mana).

Protection

* Divine Protection The penalty has been removed.
* Divine Shield The penalty has been changed so that all damage done is reduced by 50% in place of an attack speed penalty.
* Hand of Protection now Cannot be targeted on players who have used Avenging Wrath within the last 30 sec sec.
* Avenging Wrath now Cannot be used within 30 sec sec. of being the target of Divine Shield, Divine Protection, or Hand of Protection.

Retribution

* Judgement of Wisdom now give each attack a chance to restore 2% of the attacker’s base mana. (Old – 1% of the attacker’s maximum mana) *NERF to Holy pallys*
* Judgement of Light now also procs from ranged attacks.
* Seal of Blood now deals 27% of normal weapon damage. (up from 22%)
* Seal of the Martyr now deals 27% of normal weapon damage. (up from 22%)

Talents
Retribution

* Seal of Command now Gives the Paladin a chance to deal {0.45*Min Weap Damage+0.45*0.23*SpellPower} to {0.45*Max Weap Damage+0.45*0.23*SpellPower} additional Holy damage. (Old – Didn’t scale with Spell Power)
* Vengeance now stacks up to 5 times. (Up from 3)

Holy

* Judgements of the Pure now Increases the damage done by your Seal and Judgement spells by 5/10/15/20/25%, and your Judgement spells increase your casting and melee haste by 3/6/9/12/15% for 1 min.

Protection

* Sacred Duty no longer reduces the attack speed penalty on Divine Shield and Divine Protection. Rank 2 now increases total stamina by 8%. (Up from 6%)

The Glyph of Holy Light was buffed as well:

Glyph of Holy Light — Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 10 20 yards (up from 5 yards) of the initial target. (yay!!)

While this isn’t the holy pallys answer for an AoE heal, it’s better than it was. The old glyph, effecting everybody within 5 yards, barely covered other melee. If melee dps are positioned where they should be (behind or to the side of a mob), then that put them out of the 5 yard range of the glyph (generally speaking of course, that would vary by boss encounter). The buff to 10 yards makes this a must have glyph for all holy paladins.

Edit (12/15/08): Two other glyph changes were announced on mmo-champion.com:

Glyph of Flash of Light - Your Flash of Light has an additional 5% critical strike chance. (Old – Your Flash of Light heals for 50% less initially, but also heals for 140% of its inital effect over 12 sec.)
Glyph of Hammer of Wrath – Reduces the cost of Hammer of Wrath by 100%. (Old – Increases the range on Hammer of Wrath by 5 yards.)

My opinion on the upcoming paladin changes

petewood — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 12:42:42 +0000

Divine Shield: Penalty changed so that all damage done is reduced by 50% instead of a attack speed penalty.

1) Divine Protection no longer causes an attack penalty. Divine Shield‘s penalty was changed to 50% less damage done by the paladin.

This is fine in my opinion. I’ve always thought it was too OP to bubble and run into a group and still be able to DPS completely.

2) Sacred Duty: This Protection talent no longer affects the attack penalty of Divine Shield and Divine Protection, but grants additional bonus Stamina.

Yay – more stamina! How could this ever be wrong, good change. This already provides prot pally’s with 6% more stam, I’m guessing they might buff that number to around 10%.

3) Avenging Wrath, Divine Shield, Divine Protection, and Hand of Protection have a shared, 30-second cooldown. The Forbearance effect is no longer triggered by Avenging Wrath.

While it’s nice to see that Avenging Wrath no longer causes forbearance, having all of these spells share a cooldown with Hand of Protection is bad. Paladins lose a lot of utility if this change goes live!

4) Judgement of Wisdom now returns a percentage of base mana instead of a percentage of max mana.

This is a HUGE nerf for Holy paladins, since they are the only pally’s that gear with intellect. For prot and ret paladins, base mana = max mana.

5) All mana drain effects now return a percentage of max enemy mana (making mana drains less punishing to paladins and other characters without large mana pools.)

This is a superb change for all of the mana-based classes with a low amount of mana *cough*ret pally*cough*. This is a PvP change.

6) Judgements of the Pure: This Holy talent now increases the damage done by Seals and Judgements.

This is a good change – I hope it significantly increases the damage by seals and judgements. This will help holy paladins solo and level much better.

7) All paladins receive a single-target taunt (name TBD) as a base ability.

This if f***ing awesome!! This is something that paladin tanks have been asking for for a very long time!

So for all of the changes going in, whenever they do go in, there is one major nerf (#4), one minor nerf (#3) and a slew of buffs!

Paladin hotfixed (again)

petewood — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 13:10:21 +0000

So the paladin’s were hot-nerfed again. This time, the developers made Avenging Wrath cause Forbearance again. The forbearence debuff was removed in patch 3.0.2 (and now re-added). I don’t feel that this was a horrible nerf though. The was another PvP nerf.

Paladins were able to use Divine Shield and then pop their wings (i.e. cast Avenging Wrath), run into a crowd and bust up some ass while being invincible for 12 seconds.

Ghostcrawler tried to soften the blow a little by pre-warning the pallies in the official forums. Too bad he only gave the class a few hours notice before the hotfix was applied to the live realms.

Paladin hotfixed, again

petewood — Tue, 28 Oct 2008 11:55:58 +0000

I logged in this morning to do my Isle dailies and noticed after the first few fights that I was out of mana! I’ve never had this problem before on my paladin, since the 3.0.2 patch anyways. I ate/drank and got all of my health and mana back and started paying attention to the numbers floating around my screen. It seems that the latest round of pally nerfs were hotfixed last night!

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.

What’s the big deal with ret pally nerfs?!

petewood — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 15:20:06 +0000

I won’t hit on them all, I’ll only do two that I think are the largest issues.

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

More paladin nerfs incoming

petewood — Mon, 27 Oct 2008 12:52:23 +0000

I normally don’t give a damn about incoming changes, so long as the class is still fun to play but this latest batch is a killer in my opinion. From the forums, here is the nerf post (source).

I know many of you asked good questions before the posts hit their limit. I am not convinced that my answering many of these questions would calm anyone down, but I’ll give it a shot. If not, when the paladin community has gotten it all out of their system, I’ll still be here.

Also realize that there are probably a couple hundred questions at this point and I can’t answer them all. Here are a few common themes:

I thought we were supposed to be bursty?
Yes, that’s the design. It’s also a tough design to nail because if you’re too bursty the opponent doesn’t even get to respond.

You reviewed our class last because you don’t care.
We overhauled the entire class. We rebuilt the way Seals and Judgements work, and by and large it’s a good change. Paladins got a lot of attention for Lich King. your response suggests to me that the correct way to balance the game in the future is to make a class terrible early on and then buff it so that players are happy and excited instead of fuming and disappointed. Trajectory is everything.

I thought you didn’t want us to run out of mana.
We didn’t want you to run out of mana in three hits, especially in a sustained dps fight. What we don’t want is for a paladin to kill someone and move on to the next enemy without losing any mana. I’m a little surprised so many people deny this was going on or that it was a problem.

We think we have your mana in a good place now, but mana is one of those aspects of the game that requires a lot of adjustment and there are many classes right now who would still like us to further review how mana is working for their class. If you’re running out of mana too fast, believe me, we’ll hear about it and we’ll adjust it if we weren’t “surgical” enough this time around.

But we don’t care about Battlegrounds.
A lot of people do care. And if you don’t care about them right now, I’ll warrant that’s because they don’t offer the rewards that Arenas or raiding do. This is something we want to address in the future.

Again, though, we think Ret was out of line in several situations. Other classes are OP in some situations too, and we have either recently nerfed them or are still discussing how we want to address those classes as well.

Look at all the other classes in here laughing at us.
Well, they’re jerks. Many of them probably suspect they are OP too and have so far escaped the nerfbat. So far. We want Retribution to be a dangerous class to go up against. We don’t want to see BGs with 30 Retadins on one side, which is actually something we were seeing. Yeah, I know it sucks that people say Lolet. It sucks when people say huntards too. That doesn’t drive people away from playing either class. We’re always going to have some amount of competition in this game, either directly in PvP or the damage race in PvE. If I can read 1200 angry posts from Ret pallies today, you can blow off some inane gloating from warlocks or warriors. We delete the trolling comments when we see them.

Why didn’t we compensate Holy and Protection first?
We want Holy to have better dps than it did in BC, but that’s a secondary consideration compared to them being good at healing (which we believe they are). We are also still committed to Protection being able to tank anything that a warrior can. Consider that the boss armor changes hurts warrior threat more than it does paladin threat. The net result should hopefully come out equal. So far I’m not aware of a boss fight in the game where a paladin MT struggles. As I said, though, this is something we’re working on right now.

Why did I describe our initial attempts to nerf Ret as surgical?
Because that’s what we tried to do. In retrospect, we were so worried about nerfing Ret too much that we ended up not fixing the problem. We should have done more sweeping changes initially.

Why did we say Ret was fine for so long?
Because we didn’t want to have to nerf the spec. Ret players were having fun. We thought and hoped that some well publicized bugs were to blame for the excess damage. As I’ve said, if I wait to post until we’re absolutely 100% certain, you’re just not going to get as many posts. Many posters have said they appreciate getting occasional developer communication and insight. But that is going to come with some risk that things are going to change. As I said, I’ll caveat it more in the future.

That you’re somehow paying to beta test the game.
First, I don’t really think we’ll ever get game balance to a state where 90% of you would say “Yes, it’s perfect! Don’t touch a thing!” Second, it’s an MMO. Things change. The game evolves. We are always going to be changing things on our end as well. Players would be just as happy as not enough changes as some of you are with too many changes.

You may also have noticed that we nerfed level 70 raiding and that the level 80 raids are pretty easy compared to our past instances. We wanted to make sure we weren’t shining too harsh a light on balance differences until everyone had plenty of time to get used to the changes — more time than even our large beta can offer. Nobody should get parked at the curb in Naxx, and by the time Ulduar and later instances come on line, I predict we will have made many balance changes.

We don’t believe you because we’ve been at the bottom of the barrel before.
There’s not much I can do to get you to believe me or not. I try to be honest so my words carry some weight, but I also try to joke around a little so you know I don’t take myself too seriously. I don’t know how many other ways to say that it sucks that your PvE wasn’t competitive in BC or that you weren’t a major Arena force. That’s not where we wanted you to end up and not where we want you to end up this time. I’m not going to show you my daily tasks or how I spend my time so that you can oversee my progress and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Sorry. The best thing you can do is point out situations where you’re struggling so we can investigate. Most of you haven’t even had a chance to test with these changes yet.

You’re nerfing paladins because of PvP.
Read my initial post again. Ret PvE dps was also too high.

Our numbers are different from yours.
That’s going to happen. We compare data when we can. I think you’d agree that the game balance would be pretty interesting if we automatically made adjustments whenever anyone suggested them.

You said I wouldn’t get banned.
You’re still going to get banned for explicit language, death threats or the like (thank you very much for those BTW). Try and make your point without resorting to text that will violate the posting regulations. Call me a jerk, if it will make you feel better. It boggles my mind that I actually need to point out that AIDS comments and the like aren’t appropriate. If you’re smart enough to raid or do Arenas on your character, you’re smart enough to know how to make an intelligent post.

Added one more for clarification:

You only tested in Naxx, but paladins do bonus damage against undead.
Yes, we know that. We tested under a lot of different situations with and without undead and with different levels of gear and buffs present. I use Patchwerk as an example a lot because players understand that it is a very simple boss fight in which there is no running around, adds or damage to the raid.

[ Post edited by Ghostcrawler ]

This is supposed to be in the 3.0.3 patch. This round of nerfs effects all three specs of paladins. The amazing mana regeneration of paladins is taking a huge hit. Damage from seals is taking a huge hit. As I state above, I normally don’t get upset about changes but this is bullshit. I’ll wait to see how the changes effect the class AFTER they go live but if it’s as bad as ret paladins were before patch 3.0.2, I’m finished with my paladin and possibly the game.

I’ve been having a lot of fun running instances (regular and heroic) as prot and ret. This list of changes seems like it will suck the fun out of what has turned into my favorite class.

I have a 70 hunter, paladin and warlock. All three classes were hit hard by the end result of the latest patch. I’m leaning towards leveling my warlock to 80 if things don’t work out for the paladin. If I get sick of that, then I’m just going to quit playing the game. I am seriously pissed off about these changes.

My pally is level 70!

petewood — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 11:51:21 +0000

I finally dinged level 70 on my paladin Sunday morning! I had a lot of spell upgrades, including Blessing of Might, Rank 8 and Avenging Wrath! My pally finally has her wings! It seems like I’ll have to wait for boss fights and/or soloing elites to use them though, since I seem to blow through mob too quickly.

I purged about 70% of my addons yesterday as well. A lot of them were mostly fluff that I didn’t need. I still have the most important ones though, Bartender4, FuBar and Perl Classic.

I also got my flying mount for her as well, which is awful slow when you have the epic flyers on two other toons, even with Crusader Aura.

I’ve been running a lot of instances lately and have been amassing rep. I’m not going to bother trying to farm honor for any PvP gear since Wrath will be out on November 13th so I’ve been buying whatever reputation PvP gear I can get. The ret set is called Crusaders Scaled Battlegear. I’ve got two pieces so far, the legs (Crusader’s Scaled Legguards) and the hands (Crusader’s Scaled Gauntlets).

This pally is a lot of fun! Even with the post-3.0.2 nerfs, playing as ret is still much better than pre-3.0.2; we’re still op!