3 Tree Paladin Changes for 3.2Follow

Not the best gear, but you can still get the second tier down. So 2's will become less competitive and scrubs like me will actually have better access to gear than we did before. The weapon thing remains a serious issue though. With each passing season that they refuse to make lower tier PVP weapons available, those who don't raid are going to get farther and father behind in the arms race until it's impossible to compete with those who're higher up. Teddy says not though, so probably I'm just QQing cause I like to blame my fail on Blizz.

I agree this is going to make prot healers too good not to nerf. A cheat death every 2 minutes that I don't even have to push? I'm already silly hard to kill when I'm specced into prot, and it's not false modesty when I say, I'm not that good. There's just a crapton of margin for error in that spec. You can get like 3 more spoonfuls of ice cream before you even have to respond to an attack.

If seals of the pure is left alone, the ret changes are a decently large pve increase. Christ alone knows how we're supposed to kill a healer with seal of command and a gimped little judgement though. The resilience changes also spring to mind.

Good luck staying on a healer long enough to stack corruption. If it isn't just summarily dispelled.

The impression I got is that SoV will be the new PvE DPS seal, since it gains a massive damage boost when it's stacked to 5 (33% of weapon damage on every hit, as well as the DoT and the Judgment.) SoComm will be the PvP seal, with overall less damage than SoB. To be honest, SoB's PvP damage was quite ridiculous.

I'll still be using SoV for tanking. In fact, the change to SoV is a massive threat buff.



It's a damage reduction, yes, but it's on a four second cooldown. We will be hitting that **** all the time.



I don't like it either. Not only does it decrease in availability as your opponent's gear increases in quality, it's also unreliable. In terms of PvE, we can't rely on it being up any more.



Running with glyphed SoB recently has meant that I haven't run out of mana in PvP for a long time. Since they're altering the SoComm glyph to be similar (8% mana return on judgment) I don't think we'll have mana issues. Especially not with Divine Plea.

Unless you let a priest mana burn you for like, thirty seconds, in which case you probably shouldn't be doing Arena.

The situation is nowhere near as bad as you're making it out to be.



Well...don't worry?

Seriously. PvP hasn't been balanced around battlegrounds for a loooong time. And paladins do better in battlegrounds. Less coherency on the other side, and more bad players with bad gear.

My honest opinion? It's a scrub spec. And I say that with all love for it. There's no question Holy is more versatile. Having to stand still to cast is never good, and even worse at higher levels of play where people know how to keep you interrupted all the time. But Holy is harder to play. The Prot spec is a matter of, literally, standing there and casting heals on yourself and others until all the opponents are dead. It's like running Underbog. Okay, occasionally there's a little ouch you need to move out of, but really you can get by with much less situational awareness, and without managing your mana at all. But that's in battlegrounds, world PVP, and lower level arena, where not everyone is well geared (I can easily live through all the kidney shots a crappily geared rogue wants to throw at me, but a good one can still beat me no problem) or skilled at interrupts. I don't think it's as viable when you're a really good person playing other really good people.




Honestly one of the reasons I've come to like the spec is because arena is my least favorite form of PVP, and the survivability elsewhere, where you do get focused more, is more of a benefit. But I generally do better keeping people alive as Prot than I did with the 32/39 hybrid. Yes, holy shock is nice, but 10k flash of lights crits are even better. The hybrid build lacks the big heals you need if someone's health starts getting away from you. I was still gemming for resil the last time I used that spec though, so if I focused more on spellpower I could probably do better.


I agree that deep Holy is probably the best build for those who can play it well. But for me, it's very hard to manage mana with that spec in arena, particularly when it's a mana race against, say, a tree, and it's only about to get harder.



Edit: I also meant to respond to this:


I can do okay against two. I can't kill them, but between the aforementioned aura mastery, stuns, shield, etc., I can almost always live long enough for someone else to come along and get at least one of them off me, even if I can't get a lot of flashes off. Sometimes it's a good thing; it keeps them distracted (getting more and more pissed I won't die) while someone else can claim a node, run away with a flag, grab a vehicle, whatever. But again, that is not against people with Furious weapons. Three can kill me pretty much every time, unless I get help right away. One is funny though; it doesn't matter much what I do as long as I survive long enough to laugh while they kill themselves on my ret aura.



Edited, Jun 19th 2009 8:44am by teacake

Yea, I have to agree that this is a pretty uneducated statement. I have a DK who offspec's tank and tends to kite Zombie Chow during Gluth when he's along for Naxx. He pushes near 38k health, and that's not even geared through 10-man Ulduar. 38k health is not a lot of health in this day and age for most tanks. By the time you're outgearing 10-man Naxx, you should be in the mid-30k range buffed with little effort.

I am very upset about the changes to Holy. Looking at them, I can't really figure out exactly what they were trying to accomplish. Are we raid healers? MT healers? Or a jack of all trades master of none type? I can't make a final judgement until I play with the changes, but they don't look fun or exciting.

The Beacon of light change is amazing, but looks OP. I like it, but it makes any careful consideration of overhealing on someone not beaconed to be a non-issue. We can just randomly cast any big heal, knowing that it will transfer to the Beacon. Kind of mindless, and seems contrary to what blizzard has stated they want to do as far as making pally healing more interesting.

The Flash of Light HoT seems almost useless in my opinion. Only working on the SS target makes it kind of useless for raid healing, and the actual amount healed will be much less than a single HL, so I can't see a FL,HL,HL,HL... then refresh FL rotation being viable. I'll have to see it in action to really get the feel of it.

Illumination nerf. OMG. This changes everthing about how we gear and prioritze stats, as well as our ability to hand out big heals for long periods of time. Mp5 serves one purpose-mana regen. It brings nothing else to the table. Crit gives the benefit of mana regen as well as bigger healing. I always felt good about stacking lots of crit because it Brought so much. Mp5-bleh. Less crit means less healing. I never really cared about the overhealing aspect of the big heals. So what if we overheal? There were many times that nice HL crit really came in handy. I like the relationship that crit and mana regen have. It felt like a nice balance and a good synergy. Mp5 on the other hand, relates to nothing. It's feels like an after-thought. It doesn't relate to any talents at all. It's just there, all on it's own, quietly working on it's one assigned task, while the rest of the team works together.

Reducing Divine Intellect combined with the Illumination nerf is just a kick in the head. One or the other I can live with. But Both? 5% less intellect means less mana, crit, and spellpower. It also affects Holy Guidance, reducing our spellpower even further. Not sure how much, exactly, since I'm bad with math, but the reduction is there.

Of course, these are just proposed changes, and may not survive beyond the PTR in their current form. If they do, they might not be too bad. It's hard to tell without actually testing it firsthand. I don't mind changes. Some deviation from the standard playstyle can be good and refreshing. I just hope this doesn't break things. If it does, blizzard won't leave us alone, I'm sure, and will try to fix things down the road, but it might be tough for a while.

I've never played another healing class, so I can't really comment on how they deal with healing. Maybe they are more exciting. Maybe we have it easy in comparison. I really like paladin healing. Healing itself is extremely fun and challenging, and after spending a lot of time as a pure DPS class, I find it much more dynamic and rewarding.

The FoL-SS buff is just a Ret buff for Art of War heals.



It's more of a fix. For a DoT that had to stack to 5 the DoT part is still equvalent to SoB with only autoattack. As soon as you add extra swings (be it crusader strike or any form of haste effect) you get more damage from SoB, and SoB is not DoT and doesn't need to build up a stack. This change corrects that so that SoV doesn't lag behind the other seals when you add instant attacks and additional swings into the formula.

Which pretty much also means that at the moment said "huge threat boost" can be obrained by using SoB instead of SoV.



You didn't seem to read it correctly.



To do the same dps (from CS) as before you have to use it every 4 seconds now. That's a nerf and a big one.

Notice what he said it accomplishes? GCD collisions between CS and other abilities. When CS is up you will have to wait longer because you're waiting for the GCD, and/or using CS so often will delay your other abilities because of the amount of GCD you're causing from it.

Btw, it doesn't make you push more buttons, it just makes you push one button more times, to do the same thing.



So what does CS really do now? Well, if you are a machinelike robot with zero lag and zero reaction time delay, carefully exactly spending every CS gcd every 4 sec does:

If you have a 3.5 speed weapon... 66% weapon haste would completely replace the effect. For a 3.7 speed weapon it's 70% haste.

Weapon haste is immune to reaction time, lag, and GCD consumption so weapon haste would actually be far superior. IRL lag and reaction time as well as other effects would probably make it be in practice more of an equivalent to have 30% to 50% weapon haste varying on who you fight against.

It is BG, I think Blizzard stopped even considering BG when it came to balance about 26 months ago.

SoR was actually used for tanking often back in BC, that was when SoV was "chance on hit".

And did you read the change to SoC? That's basically turning SoC into SoR.

Would this make it better than Seal of Command

33% weapon damage vs 36% but you get the DOT from Seal of Vengeance and Seal of Corruption....??

This was some of the most fun i've ever had in pvp. Teaming up with a resto shaman and a MS warrior. Getting onto a healer and watching them simply disappear.