2.2 Patch Notes on the PTRFollow

Paladins

Blessing of Freedom cooldown increased to 25 seconds.

Blessing of Protection: This spell can no longer be cast on others when stunned. It can only be cast on self (to break the stun) under those circumstances.

Blessing of Kings, Light, Might, Salvation, Sanctuary and Wisdom increased to 10 minutes.

Blessing of Sacrifice now has a 1-minute cooldown.

Consecration will now properly hit large creatures.

Greater Blessing of Kings, Light, Might, Salvation, Sanctuary and Wisdom increased to 30 minutes.

Guardian's Favor now increases duration of Blessing of Freedom by 2/4 seconds.

Eye for an Eye: This ability can now trigger while the Paladin is sitting.

Hammer of Wrath cast time reduced to .5 seconds, global cooldown reduced to .5 seconds.

Illumination: Paladins will now correctly gain mana from this ability if they sit down to drink right after a healing crit, and receiving mana from this ability will no longer cause a Paladin who is sitting to stand up.

Judgement: The Judgement spells will no longer cause triggered effects to go off twice.

Redoubt: This ability can now trigger while the Paladin is sitting.

Reckoning: This ability can now trigger while the Paladin is sitting.

Righteous Defense: In some cases this ability would fail to work properly when the Paladin casting it had just been crowd controlled by a creature. That is now fixed.

Seal of Righteousness: The tooltip for this ability has been improved. It now displays a different number for one-handed weapons and two-handed weapons, and adjusts to the speed of your current weapon. It displays a single number, rather than a range of numbers for different handedness and speeds.

Seal of Vengeance: The damage from this ability will now stack properly when two different characters are applying Seal of Vengeance effects to a target.

Seal of Vengeance duration increased to 15 seconds. In addition, when Seal of Vengeance strikes a target that already has 5 applications you will cause instant Holy damage.

Dual nerfs to Blessing of Freedom sucks hard. As if we weren't having a hard enough time with casters as is from the lack of ranged options, now our primary method of dealing with snares/roots is going to be up less frequently and for a shorter amount of time if you have Guardian's Favor. Not really sure what they're thinking here, BoF was hardly over-effective as it is now.

Our normal Blessings are doubling in duration. Words can not express the joy. Nothing that shouldn't have been done ages ago.

Seal of Vengeance change makes a great Seal even better. Not much else you can say about this.

One last note: Blizzard is limiting the duration of almost every CC effect to a universal 10 seconds in PvP. I noticed immediately that Wyvern Sting failed to make the list for this nerf, but that may have been an error on their part. I've not really bothered to run through the rest of them in my head and see what else, if anything, may have escaped.

In any case, every class' primary method seems to have been hit by this. Freezing Trap, Polymorph, Fear (not that this will make a huge difference as it still doesn't address the issue of chaining or the ridiculous resistance to breaking on damage), Entangling Roots (which is practically a joke; you're lucky if this lasts five), Sap, etc.

I'm sure there will be much whining and gnashing of teeth, but I doubt there will be a shift of any great magnitude in PvP balance. If anything, this will just make it harder or impossible for certain classes with CC to solo two opponents.

Edited, Jul 18th 2007 3:45am by Gaudion

The BoF nerf will sting in PvP, but the buff to blessings is huge. I LOVE that greater blessings will be 30 mins. I think I hear, "Rebuff Pally buffs, plz" about 10 times a raid. Now it'll only be 5. It always rubbed my fur the wrong way that almost every other raid buff (AI, Mark, etc) was an hour while ours were 15 mins. Now it's /celebrate.

I also like the SoV buff and will be interested to see how much Holy damage it does. I assume +spell dmg will affect it, so being able to enact more damage on the enemy before judging it will make it a more viable offensive seal. Can't wait to compare those numbers to SoR.

BoSac cooldown is interesting and I wonder what the reasoning behind it was. The only time I've leaned heavily on it was during the Maiden fight in Karazan, so the minute CD may or may not adjust the tactics of that a little. I could see if it was intended to limit the PvP option, I suppose.

And yea, the decreased HoW cast time is amazing.

BoSac is the biggest PvP nerf imo.

I would basically cast that every 15 seconds on a teamate to keep myself from being CCd, and now thats gonna be much more difficult.

BoSac nerf affects two things:

1) Maiden fight in Kara. Repentance is on a 25 second cool down but she doesn't burn it right away so 1 minute cool down on BoSac means you are cutting it close. The fight is easily doable without BoSac though, just have to have healers move into aoe before repentance goes off. Not a big worry.

2) PvP. BoSac was key to avoiding Sap/Sheep also Charm in arena. Big part of our ******* in being effective healers. This will definitely hurt us, not a HUGE devastating hit but definitely a pain in the ***. Would have been nice to see bosalv last a little longer with the addition of the huge cooldown.

BoF double hit is full of suck, if it was just one of the two I could dig it, but both is down right oppressive. Before it only had 4 second cool down (16s duration with 20 second cooldown), now it will be 11 second cool down, for a PVP ability like BoF that is too long.


As someone in the main forum said, at least they buffed sitting.

Have you done arena as a 40/20 Holy/Prot Paladin? Especially with a MS warrior? BoF is right up there with FoL as one of our biggest tools.

That HoW buff would be awesome in boss fights lol. I remember back in MC and Ony and stuff at sub 20% or whatever. All the hammers go flying up.

I dunno how much MP pallies have at the end of boss fights at 70, but back then i always had tons to spare.

edit: Also, and i just thought of this, i wonder what would happen if they changed all +healing items to +holy. effecting all holy spells including damage.

Edited, Jul 18th 2007 11:07am by KTurner

It would never happen because too many of us would die of /joy! Seriously, I think it would be OP simply because the healing numbers for Combat Medics (for example), if translated into sheer Holy power (HS etc), would be huge. Can you image a 5.5k HS crit? The cries for the nerf bat would no doubt follow soon after.

But a pally can dream, right?

Actually for BoF, there was a triple nerf. They changed the graphics of BoP and BoF once again.

For BoF, the rotating circle that appears for a few seconds after you cast it in the current animation now stays on for the full duration of the spell. Therefore, it looks like there's a giant yellow crosshair focused on whoever has BoF up.

For BoP, the little shield with wings thing that appears on your head for a few seconds after it is cast also stays on for the full duration. You can now see a big giant disco ball on someone's head when BoP is cast on them.

This means that there is now a big and obvious 'PURGE/DISPELL ME!!!' sign hanging on you / your target's head when you BoF/BoP them. I have no idea what Blizzard must have been thinking when they decided to make the graphics even more obvious... =/

The added damage on hit proc after 5 stacks for SoV is pathetic. People with +200 spell damage are seeing 3 dmg procs. People with 800 to 1000 spell dmg are seeing 20 to 28 dmg procs.

Edited, Jul 18th 2007 2:42pm by Hlddennin

Who's to say the pally spelldmg coefficients would have to remain the same? :P I think they could make it work, and solve alot of problems with gearing and lack of DPS in ret.

omg. smite > mind blast.

here's a question: if a Holy pally took Eye for Eye and just spammed FoL, would he pwn all casters?

One more thing not mentioned in the original post:

They added two new shields in the Arena gear. One for Spell Damage and another one for Healing. I'm eager to see the stats on those. :D

Why, thank you. :)
Those shields are awesome.

That's the only info I had, and I'm not playing on the PTR so cut me some slack here. :P

Hlddennin corrected me on the pitiful damage dealt so yeah, no big deal there.

What gets to me though, is that SoB is still as useless as ever and since SoB and SoV have existed, SoV has seen many changes to make sure it works well and is effective while SoB is left in the dust, having no real use.

No tank will really use it to benefit from Spiritual Attunement. Had a friend try it with physical tank gear and he couldn't hold aggro. SoR with some +SpellDmg is still better because SpellDmg will affect all of a Prot Pally's tanking tool while SoB is just one tiny thing.

Retro Pallies will keep SoC for burst damage and they already burn their mana rather fast so they won't go spending some on healing themselves too. (From what I heard, SoC damage is too high in comparison to even use SoB anyway)

Holy Pallies are out of question, no physical stats and all makes SoB ultra useless.

Like I said in my first post, I just wish they had gone with the same kind of thing they gave Shammies: Different names, same ability.

Edited, Jul 20th 2007 10:20am by Selverein