Pally Changes on the PTR.Follow

Ret got some buffs to overall DPS.


Skills
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)
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%)

Source


Edited, Dec 11th 2008 9:54am by RuenBahamut

And SoV stacking to 5, on long fights, that might be quite the DPS increase.

The JoW I think overall will be an increase in mana returned for Retribution paladins since Ret generally has base mana pretty close to max mana. We needz more mana!

I don't think that'll matter to holy paladins though, because they're not swinging at mobs right? Its an overall nerf though for everyone else that got mana from it.


Edited, Dec 11th 2008 2:28pm by digitalcraft

Yeah, i came to that conclusion too, Zep. The hidden cooldown on SoC still kills it pretty much no matter what.

Just PvP, I think, as it doesn't hurt you and offers high burst damage.

The libram and HoW changes are very nice. The old libram was extremely meh.

Actually, all of those changes are nice.

um, no, they're not changing righteous defense... but if you read ruen's post we're getting a SECOND taunt that is single target, 30 yards, and deals holy damage... 2 taunts.. one multi-target... one deals damage... can we say OP lol. and they're both gonna be baseline, so any pally can use them.

and to whoever asked for more stam, blizz is already giving prot palies 2% more stam in this patch it seems. that'l bring us up to a total of 14% bonus stam before kings. how much more can you really ask for? lol.

and the FoL and HL glyphs are awesome for healing pallies. the old HL one was nice enough as it was. the old FoL one definitely needed a change and this is an awesome one.

all in all, WotLK was good for pallies... this patch is just icing on the cake :-D

oh, and SoB/tM back up to 27%... i'm just about in heaven here lol.


edit: my apologies to bsgnitro.. apparently ruen didn't include the new taunt. its up on mmo-champion and I thought I saw it when I skimmed the OP here... either way, they are giving us a new taunt. Hand of something or other....

Edited, Dec 13th 2008 4:23pm by toolofjesus

That kind of blows. I liked the FoL hot. It takes a bit of getting used to but I liked it over all. Ahh well all things change. ._.

I guess the old glyph would have been okay for prot and ret, but it was terrible for holy. The new glyph is now super sexy for holy. I love the changes for holy this time.

That holy light glyph changes is awesome as is the change to judgement of light. With sacred shield and beacon we now have several tools to deal with AOE damage.

The judgement of wisdom change is a bit of a nerf for holy but tolerable since it is very helpful for prot and ret.

It is nice to get a little bit of a damage boost for questing and farming. I wonder how much damage that taunt will do. Sadly, with my miniscule block rating, I use shield of righteousness while questing. Every little bit helps.

High end Holy pallies (i.e. if you've cleared naxx twice) have been stacking int and using Holy Light as a main spell, instead of flash of light. The fact is that at around 25k mana, and 45% HL crit rate (fully buffed) a paladin can sustain a HL spam for over 6 minutes, which is about the limit on fights your raid is geared for. This makes flash of light only used to top people off, with holy shock used as a filler instead. Some pallies were actually picking up the old flash glyph to give them a HoT, and while the feedback I've read about that isn't overwhelming, some people did enjoy it.

Anyway, can't wait for the rest of the changes. Blizzard has said that ret is much lower on dps than intended, even with the hybrid tax, so this is their first step. Good thing they didn't knee-jerk buff us like they did to nerf us. /sarcasm

I wouldn't say it's OP. Right now it's extremely difficult for a paladin at range to pull a single target out of a group of mobs (ie. swapping underlings on Razuvius fight). Prot warriors have a Taunt and Intervene...now we'll be on par with them.

Well gives Paladins a Taunt that can be cast on a mob not one to only aid a friend. With a 30 range it will be a good pulling tool for Ret.

Another one that hopefully is fixed in the patch was the judgement bug that caused judgements of the wise to stop giving mana back. source

My guild tried 4 Horsemen for the first time this last weekend and the flaw of not having a single target taunt became very apparent. I was tanking Thane, our Warrior had Baron, and I bet you can guess what happened when we tried to switch targets ... The Warrior taunted first, so when I taunted I got both bosses. That made a huge mess out of everything. Could easily be avoided by having me taunt first, but what about with 2 Paladin tanks?

Sooooo happy we'll finally get a single target Taunt. Even more so after that debacle >.<