Seals and JudgementsFollow

am i wrong in suggesting the seal and judgement system is dead? i'm not talking about the dmg and effects resulting from it, but rather the whole concept. where once it was as unique as combo pts and the runic system, it has been thrown to the backseat as nothing more than gimmicky side effects.

seals. nothing more than a pre-fight weapon enchant/buff. not much of a selection to make, nothing dynamic about it. in 3.2 this will be even more obvious as they are tailoring each seal for 1 specific task.

judgements. where once this was our pride and joy is now an afterthought. healers hardly use it. tanks use it sparingly. dps uses it as mana regen. its pvp is a glorified hamstring.


here's an update on the lameness of the upcoming SoV:

as Ret, i get to use my auto-attack to stack my auto-seal.

my time is up in September, just when the patch turns Ret into Arms, minus the burst. /cheers

Healers "hardly use" judgements? You're as bad as every dual-spec fail healer I've ever run with. They just refuse to judge, ever.

Judgement has little to do with damage and everything to do with a 15% haste boost.

what they should have done is probably increase the base benefit of ALL judgements to include some of the talented aspects.

imagine base JoL also having the haste effect. or JoJ also having the attack speed debuff. or base JoW with Replenishment. etc etc. then judgements might have more meaning to the class rather than a talented side-effect.

right now, i see myself sometimes judging justice on a boss, but not because i think he's gonna run away from me.


edit: btw, a 10s CD spell used only once a minute, if used at all...i would call that hardly used.

Edited, Jul 28th 2009 12:38am by tommyguns

One thing they have done to a lot of classes in Wotlk is make them deeper than 1 button dps, which is effectively what TBC dpsing was about for a lot of classes (Most notably warlocks and hunters). Ret pally dps rotations in wotlk were still pretty lewl. The changes are gonna mix it up a bit.


The change to duration of seals back in tbc was great. The change to the judgements even better. Where before up time on judgments meant nothing for a raid, now you want light and wisdom up 90% since the passive healing and mana regen really effects the raid. While it still boils down to pressing a button every x amount of seconds to keep a buff/debuff on a boss, it is still a much more solid and mandatory than it was in TBC for raiding.

I honestly don't know what you expect. Ret pally dps rotation is becoming a little more interesting, they are losing burst at the expense of sustained pve dps. Prot pallies are getting buffed to hell. If you are Ret or Prot this patch is good for you (Unless you were ret and counted on massive burst to win arenas), the only ones that should be crying are holy paladins (who will actually have to keep judgements up more now, thank you very much)

There is a blue post on it and something at MMO championabout it. It actually brought the dps down a bit from where it was in 3.2 before, so we will have to wait and see what blizz ends upd eciding

zeidrich and Redcape over at elitistjerks have done new tests every time the ptr build has been updated. The current one is marked as retail, here's how ret works:

The Seal of Vengeance/Corruption dots, Blood Corruption and whatever the alliance dot is called are only applied from white melee hits, nothing else. Not crusader strike, or divine storm. This would be terrible for ret dps on its own, because any kind of target swapping (80% of bosses in ulduar) would destroy our dps what with a ~15 second ramp up time to get the full stack rolling. However:

When it's stacked to 5, white hits, yellow hits, even judgements proc a kind of seperate SoV hit which is 33% (38 with seals of the pure) of weapon damage as holy, which crits double like a melee hit. This is additional, distinct damage to the dot and the attack that procced it. Furthermore, all attacks made while Blood Corruption is *partially stacked* will result in a partial seal proc. 6.66% weapon damage as additional holy at 1 stack, 13.5% at 2 stacks and so on. The judgement at 5 stacks is reported to be absolutely ungodly, almost like old-style judgement of blood.

This basically means that seal of vengeance is inferior than seal of righteousness (not command, more on that in a moment) before roughly 12 seconds and greater at all points after that, assuming a single target. Seal of vengeance as mentioned before will not proc from divine storm however, so where does that leave our AoE? Well, nerfed basically. Not hugely, because you may have noticed that consecration was the workhorse ability there anyway. Rets will however be forced to swap seals accordingly during and between fights.

Seal of righteousness vs command:

It's pretty simple. Command has been nerfed extremely heavily, the judgement is both much weaker and no longer crits stunned targets automatically. Unlike righteousness, the seal itself can crit and scales better with weapon damage and raid buffs however. Because Seals of the Pure is an important dps talent now, Seal of Righteousness will outdo command on short duration trash, especially if you are expertise capped from gear and can take glyph of seal of righteousness over the 10 expertise vengeance glyph.

Edit: If you can think of a situation where you're dpsing 4 targets for a signifigant amount of time, the fact Command seals can crit will probably pull it ahead slightly. There are no fights like that though. On kologarn you'll still want seal of vengeance for the massive single target burst it can push out at 5 stacks.

We're pretty boned on emalon. Target switching every 30 seconds is fine, if you're applying corruption to each target. The supercharged add wont live long enough to stack it, but might live just long enough to let emalons dot fall off.





Edited, Jul 31st 2009 3:02am by ArtemisEnteri

I'm concerned about the loss of Martyr, but as with all these things I think we need to wait and see. I don't have a character on the PTR to make any outlandish statements that DPS is going to be nerfed, but I am concerned.

Using what seal?

mana is the resource of power, like energy, rage, and runic power.

back in the day, when you started a pally, you would ask: "ok, what do i need to know?" the reply would always be: "you need to learn how to use seals and judgements"

a rogue, learn combos. a warlock, learn curses and curse rotation. a DK, learn runes. a hunter, learn your pets. a sham, learn totems.

i remember back in MC on Rags fights, the raid leader would request i switch to JoW halfway through the fight so range could mana up. now, who gives a ****. the whole system is now an afterthought...just another attack.

Ummmmmm..... revisionist history is revisionist and simplified to the point that it is hard to give it an honest response but I will try.


While seals and judgments are obviously a class defining characteristic since no other class has it, it has also been extremely basic, straightforward, elementary and more importantly tedious part of being a paladin, in the past. In fact it is safe to say that in Vanilla wow and TBC for the most part that judgments played next to no role in raiding. That was partly due to a couple factors, Ret paladins didn't raid, Prot paladins were only needed for a few fights, and Holy Paladins could ignore seals/judgments all together.

If anything the argument could be made that WotLK has been extremely favourable not only to paladins but to one of our basic, least complicated tools. Increasing Seal time to 30min was a boon for Prot and Ret paladins since having to reapply a buff every 30 seconds cut into dps/threat rotation and was just tedious. With the introduction of JotPure and glyphs holy paladins now need to factor seals/glyphs into how they play. Also with 3.2 that takes on a bigger role now that there will be a change of Ret applying JoW and Holy hopefully doing JoL. JoL and JoW are mandatory for raids now, this wasn't the case in TBC or Vanilla WoW, at all.

The depth of a paladin has never been, and should never be seals and judgements. Spec specific spells, Hand of type spells, cleanse all while doing what you are supposed to be doing without and fumbling for buttons is more of what being a paladin is about. That and bubble hearth. You are getting worked up over something that never was, about things that haven't yet happened, and making really out there leaps of logic, in other words you are being Tommyguns. Don't panic, enjoy the game.

Ah, the good old days where you would cast a seal and auto-attack for its duration.

I agree that Judgements of the Wise (15% mana return on judgement) is fail, but I don't see how they could change it without seriously gimping Retribution Paladins. As a Retardin, you go through your mana pool very fast since you judge and heal so much and have less base mana regen to back it up.

An alternative would be to remove the mana cost on everything except heals, but somehow, I don't think so.

I'm someone who despite playing one, tends to hate most ret paladins i meet. The crying in trade and on various forums is sweet indeed. It took me a little while to figure out exactly how everything works next patch, everyone else on my server is still at the "but how do i click on seal of blood?" stage.