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.

Update

I have some opinions on the upcoming changes to the paladin class but, I am gathering my thoughts before I post them so for now I will just post about the status of my toons.
Total gold 70K
Paladin 80 wowhead GS in PvP 2758
Lock 80 wowhead GS 2067
DK 80 wowhead GS 1749
Hunter 80 wowhead GS 1468
Rogue 60
Mage 38
Priest 30
Warrior 23
Druid 20

Still working on my PvP gear for the paladin.

Hmm... What to say

Well, for those who read this, I have decided to start writing here again. (In case this post didn't clue you in).

As far as a status update i have been working on PvP on the paladin and gearing the alts in PvP and PvE. I currently have 3 80's (Paladin, Warlock and Death Knight) 78 Hunter, 52 Rogue, 38 Mage, 30 Priest, 23 Warrior and a 20 Druid. I don't have a shaman because I want to make a goblin shaman when Cataclysm comes out.

I have also been working on making gold. I have around 60K spread out on my toons and all 4 of my toons that can fly have epic flying.

As you may see from my armory I have been building my PvP set (you might not see since I don't pay attention to whether i log out in PvP gear or PvP gear). I currently am missing 2 pieces of gear that i can get at my rating (~1100). I only fight on my 5's team currently because I haven't found 1 or 2 people who have my same mentality for arenas and a similar schedule. I am able to get the 5's because my guild decided they wanted to work on arenas for gear. I want to get a good 3's team going so I can see how good I am at PvP compared to how good I think I am.

Well, that's all for now.

Ulduar, ToC and a new tool

On Tuesday we went to Ulduar and we did H-ToC 5-man Tuesday and Wednesday. I learned how to make the Wowhead pop up things.

My guild leader logged on on Friday around 9:30 Pm or so on Tuesday and after running H-ToC realized we had 11 80's on line so he started the invites for Ulduar. I personally have never been and I don't really know if the guild had run it before or not. I volunteered to drop out to allow the other person to go but, the guild leader asked me to stay. The other reason I was willing to drop was due to knowing the it would take an hour or more to get the run started. I was right. Around 11PM or so we finally roll into Ulduar. While the people who know what to do explain everything we run around killing the adds and column things. The first fight is explained and here we go. One shot on Flame Leviathan, one shot on Razorscale and two shot on Deconstructor. Might of the Leviathan drops and I win the roll. Very nice replacement for my Collar of Dissolution. Both the other bosses dropped something that would have been an improvement but, I passed on one since it was a minor improvement and I had just one the neck piece and lost the roll on the other piece. Overall a 14.5 DPS increase. Every bit helps right?

On Wednesday we ran H-ToC 5-man and The Edge of Ruin finally dropped. Which is a large improvement of my Wraith Spear. Around 100-150 DPS increase depending on what you go by.

In case you haven't noticed I figured out (read: finally looked up on wowhead) how to make the pop things when you link something from wowhead.

I still plan on making a list of improvements to get. I just haven't had time to do it yet.

Dailies Heroics and other games

It's been a week since I posted anything but, in all fairness I did not get much time in game due to personal life and a birthday (not mine) during the weekend. Since I last posted I have done dailies, ran some heroics and starting calculating to figure out what gear I can get based off of maxdps and rawr. I also have to limit the gear based on not doing any raids.

As far as dailies go I have dropped the fishing and cooking dailies to cut my daily time consumption down. So, I am left with tournament and venom hide dailies. I am still only champion for 2 cities so I am stuck doing the dailies to get those valiant seals and the starter champion seal dallies. Venom hide dallies are still boring after you do each one once. I still have over two weeks until I am get the new mount and 12 days until I get the Crusader title.

I have gotten in some heroics which showed me that I need to work on my gear since I was out DPS'd on a couple PUG's by both the other DPS. I did get Legplates of Relentless Onslaught from H ToC 5-man. Very nice upgrade over Legplates of Bloody Reprisal

With 3.2 out now I realize I have to evaluate my gear to see what I can improve on without counting on any raids. That means maybe one or two drops from regular ToC 5-man, H-ToC 5-man and badge gear. Luckily both my gear BiS sources allow for filtering based off source. Unfortunately neither of their filters work great. So, I am currently compiling a list of BiS for a retribution paladin without going into a raid. Then I will figure out the change in DPS for each piece to figure out what to buy first. Of course this is all while trying to do H-ToC 5-man as often as possible and adding the daily heroic in when possible and then adding as many other heroics on top of that whenever I can.

Now in other news I am trying out the new Champions Online game here and there. I think that as far as character customization goes the game is incredible. I took way to long in designing my toon. When I got in the game it seemed fairly straight forward for someone who has played MMO's. The interface seems fairly simple. As far as combat goes I am not sure as I only got through the first dozen or so quests. I only have three abilities: block, short range attack and long range attack. I hope that more depth comes into play as I progress. My main concern for this game has to do with the payment model. They are going for a subscription AND micro transaction model. From everything I have heard they are sticking with the 15 USD and adding MT's. I don't see this game as being worth more than any other game to start with. I personally think that the game will have problems picking up people when they want more money than games that have years of development behind them. Well, that is enough non WoW related news.

Personal patch results

After trying out the new battleground, five-man and some dailies (including the new mount quest-line) I am kind of underwhelmed.

 

It does seem like the DPS drop wasn't as bad as I had feared.  This is probably due to the last minute change to the SoCor to make the damage actually ramp.  Though I did notice an overall DPS drop in all fights but extended boss fights.  The PvP burst loss does hurt though I still can handle most people.

 

The new five-man has some interesting mechanics in it though I think a little more time could have been spent on the scenery.  It is only one room.  It was cool the first time I went in and the announcer guy called out my name and went through his little speech.  But, the third time and beyond I was just wishing he would skip it.  The drops are good but, overall most of the dungeons in Northrend, outlands and even the old world had more thought put into them.

 

I will say the new battleground is pretty fun to play.  The new idea of launching or dropping into the enemy keep is pretty neat.  The different capture points for different vehicles and resources are interesting.  I should probably read about the idea behind the battleground to get a better idea of what is going on though.

 

I am currently champion for 2 cities (Org and Silvermoon) and working on UC.  The dailies are starting to wear on me though so I am not sure if I will get the crusader title.  I have the ambassador title already so all I need is the valiant seals and the argent crusade rep.  I wish there was some other way to build up those things.  We will see if I make it the 14 more days it is going to take.

 

I am currently two days into the path for getting the venomhide mount.  That is annoying to have to go back to ungoro, silithis or tanaris to quest those.  I found a short cut in sholozar basin in that waygate thing.  I just go through that jump down the mountain and ride over to the flight point or southern ungoro to do the daily.  Not sure if that waygate thing works for everyone or not.  But, it is worth a try to save the run from CoT (the first short cut I tried) to, at the closest, western tanaris but possibly farther.

 

In case anyone is wondering I have not set foot in a raid since my return to the game.  My guild went once or twice but I didn't have the block of time to commit to a raid.  Maybe someday.  Until then I will just continue heroics and dailies.

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.