Hello Nerf ForestFollow

Blizzard just uprooted every tree in the Nerf Forest and dropped them on our heads. Have you seen the newest round of nerfs? And this isn't just to retribution.

Here are the new changes(off the Oboards):

1) Judgements of the Wise: Mana gained reduced from 33% to 15% of base mana. We spent many hours arriving at this number. For example, we did a lot of Patchwerk fights, watching the mana bar to see when and if it ever went down. In BGs, we were seeing paladins able to go from target to target without pausing even when unleashing all of their attacks. While we don't want you to go OOM in a few seconds, we don't want you to ignore the mana bar either. Mana is not rage -- warriors can't typically start a battle with a full bar.

2) Judgement of Wisdom: mana gained reduced to 1% of maximum mana and proc frequency cut by 50%. This ability was flat out better than Vampiric Touch when the mana provided between the two really needs to be close in order for the decision between Shadow priest and Retribution paladin to be a real one.

3) Judgement and Seals: Damage reduced by 20%. This is the major damage adjustment -- a lot of damage was coming from these. We do realize this hurts Holy and Protection as well, and that is something for which we are prepared to offer compensation (particularly if it hurts Protection's threat generation).

4) Hammer of Wrath: Now can’t be used until the target is below 20% health. Our rule of thumb is that core "Execute-style" abilities work at 20% and talented abilities work at 35% health. We originally had Hammer at 35% based on some other limitations of the spell.

5) Art of War: Increased damage bonus to Judgements, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm. I'll report back on the exact numbers here when we've settled on them.



20% cut to ALL judgments and seals. Ouch. Are we really that far ahead? I mean my rogue is better equipped than my paladin and surprise surprise, she does more dps. I ran kara yesterday with my paladin, and today with my rogue, and my rogue was quite a bit higher. Also, my rogue never runs out of energy during a fight. Now paladins have to worry about that.

What are they comparing paladins to, honestly? Previous version? Because previous version sucked.

I ran reg Shadow Labs on my pally tonight. Having only been 70 for less than a week with my pally and having invested most of my time since then grinding for gold towards epic flight, most of my armor consists of level 60-63 blues. My axe is the 2h axe from Ikiss in reg Sethekk. My only epic are my engineering goggles. I posted 730 dps over the course of the run. The protection pally was second on the damage meter. 3rd was a warrior dual wielding 2 handers...and he was a full 200k damage below me by the time it was all said and done.

Pre-3.0.2, a fresh 70 in underleveled quest/dungeon blues would be lucky...very, very lucky...to run a steady 500 dps in a level 70 dungeon. I've run Kara with people who were adequately geared to be in the raid who struggled to push 600 dps.

The trouble is, I've been doing mostly PUG dungeons and my (now former) guildies are all T5/badge geared, so I don't really have much of a reference to go by in terms of what an equally geared player behind another class with a competent rotation would be able to do, so I can't really say just how obscene my numbers were.

It's all moot now, though...I leveled ret because it was quick and easy compared to prot. I just respecced prot last night and will be running reg dungeons from now until the expansion to get geared as prot, and will be leveling my pally through Northrend as prot. I've already got a T5/badge feral druid that I'll be taking through Northrend first, so having a dedicated tank toon waiting in the wings gathering rested xp should be ok. Even with the nerfs, tank-specced leveling will be easier now than it ever was.

Having run a bunch of heroics and raids lately, i'm prepared to pour tabasco on my helment and eat it down. Ret is op. With t4-t5 equivalent gear, I'm ALWAYS on top of the damage meters and I NEVER go oom. So I think these nerfs are fine. When I'm out-dpsing a T6 rogue by 100+, there's something wrong.

And effing finally, they're getting to the root of the opness...judgments of the wise. And even with the JoW nerf, there may actually be reason to USE it; I always judged light because I had no need of mana regen with judgements of the wise giving so much mana back.

The way I see it, is we need one or the other. Either our mana pool needs to limit us but we do slightly better dps while we have it, or we need rogue-like energy and then take our damage down a bit.

And they're still not dealing with the fundamental issue that everyone is complaining about is what annoys me the most. The problem is we have a bunch of talents to increase crit rate, and increase crit damage. Why do an across the board nerf to our damage? Why not take out our increased crit chance?

I mean look at this: A fully talented ret paladin gets:

+3% from heart of the crusader
+5% from conviction
+3% from sanctified seals
+25% for judgments from fanaticism
+50% for hammer of wrath

Why not just change fanaticism instead of nerfing the ability? Make it increase attack speed or something.


Also, as to the mana bar: Yes it is true that straight out DPSing, your mana bar does not limit you. That *could* be ok though, rogues can go forever, warriors can go forever.

It does limit you if you're trying to help with healing for sure though. Throwing a heal now and again and you can maintain your dps, but if you have to do more than a few holy lights, your mana bar will be lacking. You can't spam heal like a healer paladin does. I think that's a fine system.

I'm ok with them reducing our damage if they think we're out of line, but I feel they're going about it in all the wrong ways. They intentionally made all the talents to be a 'bursty' class, then they're complaining about us being too bursty and nerfing all the nonbursty things. Hmm.

Edited, Oct 27th 2008 10:38am by digitalcraft

It's weird how Blizz seems to swing wildly like this. From arguably OP at 70 (but not as much at 80) to "I cut your balls off and mailed them to Peru, I hope you understand".

It really sounds bad but I have not played it yet so I guess I can't speculate to much. In some ways I liked being an uderdog as Ret before 3.0. Then 3.0 made everyone into a Ret hater for the other reason. Hopefully they can find a happy balance for us becuase out of all my alts I was planning to take my Ret to 80 first. We shall see I guess.

As a holy pally I can not run out of mana while soloing, and I did my very best to do so. Take on four to six scourge invaders (I didn't get a good look) and an elite at a Necropolis summoning site, all at the same time? Yup. Did I die? Nope. Did I run out of mana? Nope. Did I have to blow all my cool downs? Nope, lay on hands was it (I even forgot to pop Avenging Wrath). This was in a hodge-podge mix of Kara, ZA and PVP gear that is my solo set. I didn't stop after that either. Paladins need a mana regeneration nerf. I'm going to miss it, but we really do need it.

i need to adjust my position on the state of Ret:

i spent a good portion of tonight in 3v3 arena around 1600. we were Arms, Holy Pally, and Ret. alot of classes have too many tricks and neutrallization abilities.

i had a druid that would do a 5 yd knockback every 20 sec then cyclone our healer, repeat. then you have the 1 stack wound poison, stunlockin, shadowsteppin, vanishin, evasion rogue.

im not so bent on Ret's burst dmg anymore. when we can catch em we should be able to unload. i will make a recommendation to drop Repentence to 30s if they choose to nerf our burst.

btw, Holy sucks in arena.

The 1-stack wound poison change is actually a massive nerf. Consider Abolish Poison.

On ret:

What the ************



I'll accept that nerfing JotW is justified if Blizzard's getting numbers to prove it, but going from 33% to 15% is overkill. You will now be steadily running OOM while doing a standard damage rotation. At 33% the mana return was slightly over what you consumed in a single rotation; now it's less than half that. I get the "mana is not rage" comment, but let's be fcking serious here. Warriors don't run out of rage mid-fight and suddenly stop generating it. Rogues never run dry on energy doing a standard rotation. My 2v2 partner is a DPS warrior and he says all he needs is one or two crits at the start to get the ball rolling and afterwards he may as well not need the rage bar on his screen for all it matters.



I get that shadow priests need some love, but see above. Reducing our mana efficiency is a flat-out PvE sustainability nerf, which is totally fcked up considering that that vast majority of complaints about ret pallies are from PvP. I've seen our hunter's DPS stats and they have nothing to worry about unless they're literally slamming their face on the keyboard instead of doing a rotation.



This is just...what. What is this. I'm not full-time ret, not even after the patch. I'm a tankadin who genuinely enjoys tanking and this is a flat-out 20% nerf to my threat generation. I don't give a **** about our raid DPS. Have you seen prot warriors lately? They're topping damage in heroics and coming up third or fourth in 25mans. I'm already having to wrestle with the guild's warrior tanks for threat and now it's going to be like I'm doing it with my shoelaces tied together.

The Hammer of Wrath change I saw coming ages ago. The Art of War change is old news. But this is seriously fcking retarded. Especially considering what GC said about "surgical" changes. This is the opposite of surgical. I feel like Blizzard bought us a dress, took us out to dinner, gave us flowers and compliments and then tied us down and jacked off on our face.

hardly. while gettin stunlocked, you look for the heal button before the cleanse. 1-stack is pretty much an always on thing.

Re: Ret.

if you have played Ret for more than a year then you are used to the tug-of-war Blizz plays with spells and talents for this class. they were re-designed, re-classified, and ***************** Ret was found OP. now Blizz must sink them to build them back up again by 2010. Beta testing and internal data does not apply to Ret pallies...it takes lots of trial and error...and error.

took em 4 yrs to fix the judgement system that they knew was bunk. now they must work overtime to get the class/spec to a place where they aren't handicapped for the new expansion. guess what, typical Blizz. we WILL be handicapped for WotLK. then we will begiven odd buffs when most players reach lvl 80.

Blizz is good at making a crappy dinner and saying "It's good if you just scrape off the burnt part."

RE: Judgements of the Wise.

you will see this post in the future:
"Judgements of the Wise: Mana gained changed from 15% of base mana to 15% of total mana. We spent many hours arriving at this number. This will allow for more control over mana regen." -GC

Well GC did say that rets will be 'Nerfed to the ground baby'

Since then we have had some 20 odd nerfs, most of which hit hard or really hard.

@ tommyguns: It wont make any difference if it's changed from 15% of base to 15% of total. Since retribution paladins are supposed to share gear with warriors as all drops are being homogenised so many classes can use em. I don't know about you, but taking off all my +intellect gear (ie, all of my gear) leaves me with less than 4k mana. So, at level 80 we're gonna be facing off against 5 minute raid boss fights with probably not even 5k mana, getting back....maybe 450 mana every time we judge. That'll be fun!

No way. The JotW nerf is live. I get 443 mana back from every judgement. Out of a 7k pool.

Judgement costs 147 mana, Crusader Strike 236. Divine Storm 354. I guess if you keep Seal of Wisdom up you can *just* maintain a static mana level doing nothing but those 3, but the loss of Blood/the Martyr hurts dps terribly.

actually it will make a difference. a pretty substantial one. Kings and Arcane Brilliance will both boost our Intellect in raids withought even gearing for it. right there we'll get a noticeable boost in mana return if its max mana instead of base mana. secondly if its based on max mana a few pieces of hunter gear can boost the mana return with only a small sacrifice of dps stats. I still would rather see this boosted back to 20% rather than 15% though.

also the mana return at 70 should be 590 now not 450. 3933 base mana at 70 should give 590. and with a base mana of 5599 based on my premade we should be getting 840 mana back at 80. very low numbers eiter way... a glyph to boost this would even be an acceptable fix...