Intelligence versus Twitch

One of the things that annoys me is that somehow a lot of people have gotten it in there head that twitch reflexes are the same as intelligent play or skill.  What I am referring to is the new retribution paladin "rotation" versus the old "rotation".

In the wrath era of retribution paladin (pre 4.01) a ret knew what they were going to be casting when.  They knew their priority and as things came off cool down they hit the highest priority spell for that situation.  The were procs to a point and there were some times when your priorities changed mid fight but it was fairly straight forward.

In the cataclysm era of retribution (post 4.01) a ret has no idea what they will be casting from one second to the next.  The framework is built around a proc system more than anything else.  The "rotation" as I previously discussed is basically hit you CS until you have 3 HoPo then TV.  You throw fillers in empty GCD's based on priority.  But, the largest effect you will have on your DPS is by watching your procs.  If HoL procs hit TV.  If AoW procs hit Exorcism.  If DP procs an extra HoPo point that pushes you to 3 then hit TV.  Why not just set up Power Auras to flash a big 4 (provided thats where your TV is bound) if your HoPo >= 3 or if HoL = true?  Then set up another that flashes a big 5 (again provided your Exor is bound there) if AoW = true.

I am not trying to complain about the new "rotation" I am just saying that hitting a button when something flashes on your screen does not equal skill or intelligence.  If it did, would that make a mouse that successfully hits a button to get food when a bell rings intelligent or skillful?

A look to the future

I have been holding off on this since I really don't know how to say anything about the changes without sounding like whining.  So, I will post my opinions on each thing as I see them:
New Paladin Spells
Blinding Shield (level 81): Causes damage and blinds all nearby targets. This effect might end up only damaging those facing the paladin’s shield, in a manner similar to Eadric the Pure's ability Radiance in Trial of the Champion. The Holy tree will have a talent to increase the damage and critical strike chance, while the Protection tree will have a talent to make this spell instant cast. 2-second base cast time. Requires a shield. 
Opinion:
meh.  While this may be interesting to some of the protection paladins out there it is another http://www.wowhead.com/spell=53600 (useless to me)

Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration. 

Opinion:

meh.  If as a retribution paladin I need to be a healing stream totem I think the battle is already lost.  Add to that the fact that I am GCD limited, my burst nerfed and and health pools that supposedly will be increased significantly more than damage output I think this just gets thrown in the Holy bag of tricks.

Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears). 

Opinion:

Looks interesting.  We get a pet.  (I don't care that they say its not a pet, it is)  16.7% uptime DoT.  We'll see how the damage works out.  I will call this a buff
Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

• Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely. 

Opinion:

Bad (for ret paladins).  Read above about GCD starvation.  Or at best meh.

• Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons. 

Opinion:

Bad (for ret and prot paladins).  We already have problems if we are fighting someone who is halfway decent at kiting.  From what blizzard said before the above listed effect is for holy paladins.  rets and prots lose the magic debuff removal.  Unlike the other classes that are losing something in their non-healing specs paladins get no coresponding buffs or additions.

• Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes. 

Opinion:

meh.  speeds up starting of BG's, arenas, instances or raids.  Caters to whiny bitches who either don't know their class enough to know which would benefit them more or are so greedy they want both.  You whined enough to get http://www.wowhead.com/spell=20217 baseline so, take it and shut up.

• Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.

Opinion:

meh.  If a ret needs this you're screwed anyway.
New Talents and Talent Changes

• We want to ease off the defensive capabilities of Retribution and Holy paladins slightly. We think the powerful paladin defenses have been one of the things holding Retribution paladins back, especially in Arenas. One change we’re considering is lowering Divine Shield’s duration by a couple of seconds. Having said that, Retribution does pretty well in Battlegrounds, and Battlegrounds will be a much bigger focus in Cataclysm since they can provide the best PvP rewards. Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem.

Opinion:

Bad!  Personally I think the rated battleground thing as it has been described so far is stupid.  I really don't want to see another place for the moron elitist raiders to take their large groups of script following cattle to get better rewards as an improvement for the game.  But, I digress.  Lowering the DS duration is bad for all paladins.

• We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either doing decent burst damage, or just being good at staying alive.

Opinion:

Bad.  We already play whack a mole.  Now you want to add a line to the whack a mole table.  And make it one that if you hit the wrong one a boot comes out of the front of the game and kicks you in the nuts.  /sarcasm THANKS!  /sarcasm off. Ok now one question I have is how else does anyone win at PvP?  the whole freaking point is the either out last your opponent or to burst them down before they burst you down.  Is blizzard going to make a chess board to PvP in?

• We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don’t feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.

Opinion:

Good.  Now I can cast SS while I am preparing for arenas.

• We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains the expensive, fast heal and Holy Light is the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light will be changed to work with Flash of Light. We like the ability, but want paladins to use it intelligently and not be constantly healing for twice as much.

Opinion:

Meh.  Not holy.

• Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.

Opinion:

Meh at best.  Bad in reality.  Holy paladins should be different from other healers.  They wear plate for craps sake.  Why not just make 3 stats Damage, Healing and Protection?  that way I dont have to think at all when choosing gear.

• Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we're looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.

Opinion:

Meh.  Not tanking anymore.  Though I will say they really don't like paladins to be better at anything do they?

• Holy Shield will no longer have charges. It will be designed to improve block chance while active, and will continue to provide a small amount of damage and threat.

Opinion:

Meh.  Or bad as it sounds like they are lowering the damage/threat on this core paladin tank ability.
Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses 

this is already a wall of text so, suffice it to say a whole big pile of meh.  Bonuses to what ever stat they want us to focus on.  Ok thanks for the creativity.  /sarcasm off.

My over all opinion is somewhere between this sucks and meh.  Probably closer to sucking.  They want to reduce the protective nature of ret in PvP but add to their utility?  Added some healing and prot crap that i don't want to use.  I really wish that someone at blizzard actually played retribution in PvP.  If they do then they should not purposefully gut the tools that we use and stop adding stuff that has little to no use for us.


Well, there you have it.

Patch Day Yay

Not much going on with me.  Real life has me busy so, I haven't gotten much time in game.  What I have been doing is some Wintergrasp, BG's and the occasional heroic.  One of the things I have found is that while Ret Pally burst is significant there are definitely classes out there with more.  I was running around with a warlock friend and saw some impressive burst coming from his destruction spec.  80 elites dying before I could get to them to hit them once.  Some PvP battles where I target someone and as I close the gap I see one-half to three-quarters of their life go away.  I am not saying that warlocks should have less DPS then paladins but, that was fairly impressive.  My gear is Naxx-10 purples and his is mostly blues a couple greens and a purple or two.

 

My thoughts on the retribution changes are not good.  I personally think that it is a significant nerf.  Yeah if you do the numbers it looks like a minor bump to over all DPS but that is only if you look at the math without actually paying attention to how we do our DPS.  If all I did was CS until the mob was dead then yes my DPS would go up.  If I actually hit every mob 6 or more times with a white damage swing my DPS would go up.  But guess what.  That's not how I fight.  In PvE I use rotations based on the situation (none of which involve using just CS and white damage for 20+ seconds.)  In PvP I pretty much use the top three damage dealers since mobility makes it fairly hard to maintain a long rotation.  Actually calling it a rotation is misleading.  Retribution paladins use a FCFS with different attacks having different priorities.  JoW, CS, DS, Cons, Exor and HoW are the main attacks.  All of these have cooldowns that prevent spamming the one that does the most damage.  So I pick whichever attack is off cooldown that is the higher priority.

 

Ok where I see the biggest problem is in PvP.  Right now I can unload on someone and if they are a scrub they die in the initial unload.  If they are decently geared they can fight me.  Chances are if they are any good and have decent gear they will stop me sometime in the initial unload and root/cc me or engage me in melee.  Then because my sustained DPS isn't nearly what I unloaded with and I have no gap closer I need that heavy hitting CS to do anything near the damage I need to in order to compete. Now they lower the damage of CS and drop the cooldown.  How does that help me at all in PvP?  It doesn't.  It hurts.

 

Now for PvE well, CS has a lower CD with a lower damage %.  The net change would be positive.  But, wait we have to figure out how to fit that into our rotation/FCFS priority.  Cooldown clashes are going to be a big problem.

 

In PvE I will miss the SoB and its judgments a lot.  I will have to play around with SoCrap and SoComplete crap to see which sucks less for my DPS.  I foresee everyone toping me on the DPS meter now.  I will also more than likely have to respec in order to get something worthwhile out of SoCrap.  (side note:  5 stacks really!?!)

 

In PvP I will miss CS having good damage.  I will also miss a judgement that does good damage.  Now I get to run around and chase classes with countless gap openers (snares or teleports) or stand toe to with others in plate with my now almost completely melee arsenal being mitigated by his armor.  This will be fun.

 

Oh yeah, I also really like the fact that since blizzard can't manage to balance 2v2 they make it pointless to play.  I really think the developers need to come back from the unnamed new blizzard game and work on the one that we are still paying for.

 

Well, they did make a new BG with little lore and no faction.  I guess making up a new faction is too hard for them.  Great I get to go get owned in a new place like I did when I was in quest greens fighting in AV for the first time.

 

While I understand that at times a class needs to be nerfed due to being too powerful.  I really don't see that rets were that overpowered.  Not enough so to totally kill our burst and give us little to no additional sustained DPS.  I have read MANY posts on the results from PTR and the sustained DPS on a target dummy went up marginally while burst went down tremendously.  I thought rets carried large slow two-handers for a reason.

 

I guess blizzard wants us to reroll.  Screw them, the only class they made that I like is the retribution paladin.  It is the only class that can be self sufficient other than the druid.  I don't like cows (except to eat) or playing alliance (except to beat on).  I guess I will just suffer through the craptastic DPS and wait for someone at blizzard to actually play a ret.

Damage meters

OK, quick post on my opinion of DPS numbers and the importance of these numbers. While the fact that these numbers are relative to specific fights and roles in these fights should be recognized. Also, it should be noted that group composition will have varying effects on the end result of DPS for a given fight. Example: moonkin aura, retribution aura … These numbers do have importance in that if the group doesn’t have enough DPS they will not finish a fight. All of the little sayings being passed around are true to some extent. If a healer dies it’s the tank’s fault. If a tank dies it’s the healer’s fault. If a DPS dies it’s the DPS’s fault. The exceptions are important as well. If melee DPS dies on a boss that does AoE or in a fight where the boss will strike the person in melee with the most HP whose fault is it? If the tank dies because the healer ran out of mana whose fault is it?

While healers and tanks don’t like seeing the damage meters being flashed up, since they are not high on them, the numbers are still important to let people know where they stand in comparison to the rest of the raid/party. Attention should be paid on whether the DPS in question has other duties assigned (sheep, trap or banish to name a few.) But, the blanket DPS numbers are not important comments or the sarcastic “oh that’s important” remarks are just as unproductive as rubbing people’s noses in their lower DPS numbers