TO THE GROUND BABY

[Jasena]

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...00&pageNo=1

Reading carefully between the lines, I sense further nerfs are incoming for Ret Pallies. And I quote from Ghostcrawler as of yesterday. "We are really trying hard to not overdo anything but even the last round of pretty severe nerfs didn't seem to do enough to Ret's dominance of PvP"

Any further nerfs to the retribution tree will most CERTAINLY cause collateral damage to Prot and Holy as well.

The Paladin class has been slammed already, and any further nerfs will pretty much render us impotent at level 80. I'll be honest, you can count me in the camp who thought Ret was a bit overpowered and could use a small tweak. I never in a million years expected an almost 50% damage reduction with further nerfs on the way.

As of right now, Jasena's dps is horrid. I have two weapons at my disposal. Seal of Blood, and Holy Shock. Pretty much everything else has been nerfed. We were discussing this a bit last night before I logged off. And unfortunately was unable to finish an interesting conversation.

SoB is NOT practical for soloing (due to it's life drain) I've found it to be useful in raid situations where I'm not taking damage and can judge until my heart is content. (yes, I'm thinking of you Thaladred.) *cringes hearing V say "your too close Jasena" lol.

Holy pallies are already handicapped and with the nerf to JoTW and the potion sickness, and more nerfs incoming, I'm not sure how we are going to be able to handel high endurance fights. Fights that require movement already push us to the very limit. and fights with raid wide damage still suck. (Malacrass) Beacon of Light is a BAND-AID.

Any thoughts from others? V, I'd love to see your thoughts on this!

Edited November 1, 2008 by Jasena

[Waldonnis]

I don't think you should read so much between the lines. There are several things that could be done that certainly wouldn't splash over onto holy or protection (GC's favourite phrase with DKs was "we have lots of knobs we can turn", and it applies here as well). Bear in mind, this isn't pure ret vs. pure prot vs. pure holy...there were and are several hybrid (but ret-heavy) specs that are working too well, one of which resulted in the JoTW change in beta to base mana. Prior to that, there was a hybrid holy/ret build that literally was incapable of running out of mana in PvP/Arena (and even PvE). This is the kind of situation that needs to be avoided and, although it seems like a change like the JotW change back then was a class nerf, it wasn't...it still provided something that ret needed while not wholly overpowering one specific spec.

It's a complicated situation and I don't envy the class designers at all on this one. On one hand, ret continues to suffer from mana problems in all aspects of gameplay at 80 with plate itemisation (or leather, which is frequently better itemised...same with warriors). On the other, you have a class that has an insane amount of burst damage under certain circumstances that needs to be toned down. So how would you accomplish toning things down while buffing mana...but without allowing the newfound mana push damage back up? Also, ret paladins *should* be effective enough at healing to handle main-helaing normal non-raid instances, so one would have to preserve that as well (which means making sure mana is suitable, as well as "healing tools" being available that don't suck and fit with the spec. It sucks as a problem to deal with. Let's hope they cherry-pick rather than just killing an ant with an A-bomb, so to speak.

Also, holy has many more tools at their disposal than you give them credit for in normal solo PvE. The base judgment array certainly makes for most of it, along with holy shock, but it's grossly inefficient on single-targets. The real strength in holy solo'ing isn't against one mob...it's against several at once, an area that ret isn't as good at. They burst down a single target, we whittle away many at once. In fact, I rarely use holy shock at all during solo times unless I'm only dealing with a single mob and have no hopes of pulling more at once. Ordinarily, I prefer to grab 4-6 of them at once...why use some 15% of my mana on one mob when I can use 40% on six?

On the subject of judgments in PvE raiding, there are times and places...and honestly, it's a waste of mana to judge the advisors when facing Kael'thas. They die insanely fast now and there is enough time for mana regen so that even a wisdom judgment would be wasteful (light is arguable, but I doubt any of our healers are having problems since there's little-to-no AoE damage).

When to judge vs. when not to judge is really more of a science than it appears to be when it comes to raiding and holy paladins, and ultimately boils down to three factors: TTL of the mob(s)/duration of the fight, incoming damage to the raid, and raid composition. A somewhat side-line concern of mobility also comes into question, e.g. can you be in range to refresh your judgment (frequently not, but it's also why Thaladred is a waste even if he lived longer). If you can't, then you'll end up judging again, which leads to more mana, GCD, etc.

As for our conversation last night, Kadi and I were on TS talking specifically about solo'ing a 5-man boss. In those cases, you already have a 73 mob beating on you...do you really need additional incoming damage from blood? Not to mention that we're far from crit-immune and don't have sanctuary, so any holy attempting that will almost be required to judge wisdom just due to the length of the fight.

Now on to the holy side. Honestly, the changes weren't nearly as bad as they looked on paper. In fact, they're quite fun once you get used to them and work them into how you heal. Infusion of Light saved Kargoch's bacon in ZA last night after a really badly-timed silence, for instance (pure luck, but it made it exciting...and gives me a reason to not choose haste over crit now). While I would LOVE the original Bacon of Light back (from beta...when it actually worked), the new Bacon is actually incredibly useful and lets me not have to stress out as much on thrash-happy bosses. I've also found it fantastic for keeping my own butt alive on bosses like Malacrass (Bacon on me, heal everyone else) which just means one less person to heal and removes me from my standard "me > tanks > everyone else" priority list. Could we use some changes? Sure...but there are still 10 more talent points coming, some of which will really round out at least my build quite nicely by adding crit and helping my "solo/PvP abilities".

Oh, side note: I stand where I do for Kael for a very, very specific tactical reason. If *anyone* gets closer, it obliterates that part of the strategy and we end up with a much more difficult-to-position Thaladred. If you insist on judging, do it as he walks by or away from you...not at you...and NEVER get closer than I'm standing to him in the beginning.

Edited November 1, 2008 by Waldonnis

[Kadi]

The other part of the conversation, other than 5-mans, that I was having with Waldy was in relation to what I was doing at the time, which is trying to solo the Headless Horseman. He hits like a truck, and something like SEal of Blood would have put me further behind on having me try to keep myself healed up between consecrate ticks, and judgement/holy shock cooldowns.

That attempt last night did renew my interest in playing Holy. I plan to play around with it a bit more, both on live and Beta, to see if that feeling will hold.