And here are the Ret changesFollow

No, the thread is referring to changes to the paladin class, specifically the ret talent build. There's more to the game than PvP, and if you scream too hard about a class/spec being too OP in PvP, their PvE performance suffers.



3.75% is trivial. It's also trivial to people in your group. 33% of base mana can be significant, but you'll still go OOM if you're using everything in your ******* for a prolonged period of time. Especially if you're tossing out spot heals/cleansing/etc.

The point, since you seem to have missed it, is that ret paladins without JotW are horribly mana inefficient. That's why, pre 3.0.2, leveling a ret pally meant putting 21 points into holy...so that you could actually heal between fights without having to sit and drink after every two encounters. The purpose wasn't to promote combat rotations or recommended specs...it was to illustrate the lackluster mana management that is at the core of a ret paladin and to illustrate why JotW is not only balanced, but necessary. At 70, my JotW returns just shy of 1k mana every 8 seconds. Within that span of time, I can burn upwards of 1500 mana. More if I'm fighting groups of demons/undead. With a mana pool hovering around the 4-4.5k mark, you can see how the mana return from JotW is not going to prolong a standard combat rotation indefinately, and the focus right now is on boosting classes through PvE content, not tweaking them for "balanced" PvP play.

In addition, the classes are "balanced" around expansion content. They're "balanced" around the idea of PvP at level 80. It would be a waste of development time for Blizzard to try and tweak balance for 70 PvP when it's all going to be obsolete in less than a month. Anyone screaming that they need to be balanced for level 70 PvP needs to give their head a shake. Arena season 4 is over. Maintaining a rating at this point is more or less moot, since the S3/4 gear people would pick up with it will be obsolete come Season 5. Whether it's a ret pally or a pair of mages bursting you down in a BG, you're still going to die...a lot.

I'm in favor of the changes to ret that have been made and are pending. While it's fun as hell to obliterate mobs while doing dailies before my Judgement cooldown is up, it's not necessary. From a PvE standpoint, I have no problem with ret damage being spread out instead of so much of it coming up front.

What I haven't got much use for is the QQ crew working themselves into a frothing rage over the preliminary performance of classes that have been adjusted with the expansion in mind. Level 70 in Northrend is going to be rather simple for most people heading into the expansion, but from what I'm hearing out of beta, the difficulty is ramped up rather quickly and the 'OP' performance of the classes now will put them on an adequate footing in latter WotLK content, but by no means breezing through the way everyone is cruising through TBC now. When enough people are at 80 and have the extra 10 talents spent in "utility" trees, then Blizzard can take a serious look at who is doing what and what results they are getting by doing so. At that point, balance will become a reasonable objective. Right now, it's fruitless for Blizzard to try for balance, it's pointless for players to expect it, and moronic to QQ over.



Have you read Gaudion's posts? He's next in line for the crown of the obnoxious, condescending kingdom of QQdale, and he's ******** about something that will have absolutely no purpose or meaning come Nov. 13th. The only thing worse than ******** about something that's not important is ******** about something that hasn't even happened yet, so I'm giving him a little credit that he's not going to QQ about what he thinks is going to happen at level 80.


Edited, Oct 24th 2008 12:26am by AureliusSir

Have you even read my posts before rating them down? The fact is that you are arguing against many of the forum's predominant ret posters (particularly Tommyguns) who probably know far more about the class than you do. As for 3.75% mana being insignificant, in a 6 minute raid fight (PvE mana is the issue right?) thats 4 x 6 x 3.75 or 90. If you think that having almost your entire mana pool refunded to you in a fight is insignificant in PvE I'd again like to figure out what class you're playing exactly.

hey, i pretty much solo'd Netherspite last night. wanna see? godmode

ty for your opinion... thankfully blizz doesn't agree with you. get to max lvl, join a raid and tell me why you'd bring a plate dps if he can't keep up with the mage in dps... now that buffs don't stack, we bring nothing unique... wait you might be a pvp'er... when you duel a mage how much does your mail/plate armor mitigate his fireballs, etc? pretty sure my plate armor reduces it by somewhere in the neighborhood of 0%. oops. so a mage/pally duel would be really fair if they can kite us, their spells aren't mitigated and to top it off we catch up and slap them on the hand with the tiny dps our plate armor should warrant, right? sure sounds fair to me.

I don't think anyone here was saying ret should do less dps than other dps classes. that's an outdated argument. even gaud was only saying our burst damage+survivability is too much. I understand him to be argueing more that we should be less survivable not that we should do less overall dps.

at 36 duelling a twink 29 ret pally you WILL get your backside handed to you... ret has always been very strong in pvp at 29, 39, and 49. only past that has it equalized a bit. at 70 you have to pop all your cooldowns to have a chance at 3 second kills... its really not like you can kill over and over and over at 3 seconds per kill... i'm not saying doing it once with cooldowns is necessarly balanced, but as a kitable class its not as OP as people make it out to be....

anyway, save yourself some embarrassment and don't use outdated arguments like 'utility' class or wearing plate armor... my gf rogue has better survival in leather gear without abilities just based on dodge from stacking agility... all classes have different ways of dealing with damage. ours is just the brute force way.

QQ = Cry/whine, etc...

1) Don't ***** about your karma, and don't assume you know who is impacting your karma.

2) It doesn't matter how much mana is being refunded if you're going OOM. That's the point, but from your approach/perspective I'm assuming you lack the raid experience to know that it doesn't matter if you're getting mana back...if you're using it faster than it's being returned, you're going to go OOM. With the one pot restriction in fights, you're going to need a return over time of some sort to keep going or mana issues alone will begin to restrict your dps. Since WotLK raids are still being tweaked, it's impossible to say what kind of mana issues are going to pop up and consequently, it's impossible to say that the return over time of JotW is too much. I can tell you straight up that I can easily start to get low mana warnings in PvE fights already.

Please don't talk like ret paladins are the only class/spec that get mana returns. Any class that uses mana has some form of mana return right now, so unless you're going to do a cross-class comparison, it's sort of a futile argument. Do the math. How many mana pots could you chug in 6 minutes? Now that you'll only be able to use one, and that one use would best be used judiciously instead of as soon as you can use it without wasting part of the benefit, does it not make sense that the entire group would benefit from a small return over time?

So you're arguing the benefits of a trivial personal increase over time in PvP, and overlooking all of the components that come into play in PvE...are you trying to present a rational argument here, or are you just typing the first thing that comes to mind and hoping it's not too easy to poke holes in it?

And frankly, I don't particularly care who the most experienced posters are when they're using their understanding of previous game mechanics to assess how current changes are going to affect future performance. That's the whole point. There's absolutely no benefit to complaining about our performance when we've been adjusted for content that the vast majority of us don't even have access to. Wait and see.

I personally can live with the ret pallys shields, LoH and other abilities. It is still the burst damage that is crazy. In AV last night I tried my full PvP gear (350 resil or so) or full tanking gear (halfway through Hyjal & BT) and repeatedly got smashed in under 5 seconds by ret pallys. I don't think I saw a ret pally die unless he had 3 people on him.

As a feral druid from pre-BC who is used to being underpowered (pre-BC PvP & PvE and BC in PvP) and as also having a 70 ret alt myself I hope you guys don't get nuked into oblivion, but there is definitely still some balancing that needs to be done. In every BG last night it was all ret-pallys in the top of the charts.

Enjoy it while it lasts (like I did my early BC bear before nerfs) but things ARE going to change.




Edit: BTW - this was all in Bear form. I don't know how geared these ret pallys all were, but with it being FotM and so many Pallys having respecced, I find it hard to believe they could ALL have been T6/S4.



Edited, Oct 24th 2008 11:48pm by RareBeast

Gaudion - you hit the nail on the head.

Pallies in pvp have traditionally occupied a niche, where they get everyone targeted on them, and then bubble. This posed a quandary to their opponents because pallies nonetheless did enough dps they couldn't be ignored. It was reasonable - pallies were specialists at survivability and tactical disruption, and/or exceptionally rugged healers. But with the current patch, that same class is cranking out serious dps and even better survivability.

I recognize that ret pallies needed a minor boost in pve. But now in pvp they have the best of both worlds: survivability *and* burst dps. Since you have to kill a pally three times in a row, you need triple dps just to have a 50/50 chance. Oh, and they can run faster, stun at range, shrug off slowing effects...

Tsarducci - 3 of us were pounding away on a pally and I swear to you he bubbled over and over like I've never seen pre-patch. I din't time exactly how long it lasted but it certainly felt like three minutes. The only reason we 3 survived (and barely) is that the pally frequently switched targets for no good reason, allowing us to heal up.

Did you even play a ret pally pre-patch? The only way I ever even got a kill in was because people were ignoring me.

Edited, Oct 24th 2008 11:54pm by zepoodle

Feral Druid. I've killed Durn the Hungerer by myself twice now.

this has been buggin me and i didnt want to reply to it but: you need to ween yourself off off of bubble. you just spent alot of time outlining how to duel Ret vs others. then you claim this is BG strategy. bubble should be a) used offensively or b) used to cap/return flag or get/hold a node.

use some friggin cleanse and heals once in a while too. i had a hunter(Tellana-Coilfang) try to kite me. i FoL'd til she was oom, while mana regening off her pet. i did an S3 lock(Wildane-Zang) while he waited for me outside a hut, no bubble, just heals and cleanse while i took out pet then lock.

I am not saying that's how I fight, but in general this is how normally it goes. of course every ret has their style but in general i think that's probably how it comes out. and you can't cap flags with bubble.



is this before patch or after patch? cause before patch, most ret would not live on hunter and lock of same gear as them. felhunter's silence and lock's fear and death coil vs ret's one trinket 5min/2min and 1 hr bubble. and it depends on what type of lock ret is playing against. vs aff. lock, cleanse can cost u your life. vs. sl/sl lock, a tad hard to kill. I personally use repentenance and sleep lock and nail felhunter, then stun lock and continue with felhunter, then use gnomish trinket to turn him into chicken when he cast fear. and nail him with bubble after. but if bubble is down and so is my 5min chicken trinket, i don't win on same gear lock. after patch still goes the same way, but at least with bubble on, ret can kill lock with burst dmg. honestly speaking, without bubble and loh, have you been able to kill a lock same gear as you? even if you have, is it 50-50? i am sure the odds are in lock's favor unless lock is stupid.

now for hunter, bm hunter pop out their talent so immune to our stun and repentance. between their ice trap, pet and arcane shot, we get no chance unless you see him first and get in close range, even then a good hunter always get distance between us and himself. now different spec hunter also works the same way except u can stun, but u get silenced or scatter shot. without bubble, we don't last, even with bubble, arcane shot takes bubble away. pre patch, same gear hunter, you can't outheal yourself against their mana. post patch difference story, but if he sees you first from his range, odds are he will get you. odds of most ret winning same gear hunter pre patch less than 50-50.

pre-patch: i am not saying we r bad, but i am saying without cooldown we r very bad. you don't see other classes have to rely on their cooldown like we do.
all i am saying is finally after patch, we are equal with other class, so why the need to nerf us more?

I got to go with Aurelius on this one. This statement goes against the good common sense of raiding in general for any dmg dealer class who can heal. As a ret on raid, I sometimes see myself tossing a heal on myself especially if I am in danger zone on health and so is the tank, healers' priority is tank first. Not to mention Raid, I have helped out healers on heroics with healing when situation calls for it. As a druid, there has been time where I pop from my cat form and do tranquality and innervate healer, sometimes even put a hot before going back catform. You can't just focus on dps, if situation calls for it, you need to help with heals a tad. In fact there has even been time where I have to shift out of bear tanking form during tanking to do a rebirth for a potion or self hot quick. As long as you got the timing good, it's all good. In raid, one dead person = a loss of dps for the raid. I have played a lot of raids, I have played as holy/ret/prot on pally, combat sword on rogue, and resto/moonkin/feral on druid. I tanked as bear and I also tanked as moonkin up to kara including all heroics except crypt. Been to every raid, except sunwell. Sadly, we only do sunwell trash mobs. And in all of my raid experiences, I have seen a few dps helping out with heals when need to. After raid is not about who get the best dps/heal, it's about finishing it successfully without wipes or one-two most wipes due to mishaps.