Upcoming changes
We’ve got a few patches headed our way. Tomorrow, we are supposedly getting patch 3.0.9. This brings about a few class changes, some spell changes, and a few other minor things.
Now me being a paladin, I am greatly looking forward to 30-minute seals. I don’t know why this wasn’t changed back when shaman weapon imbues were lengthened.
When this came up, it made me think, why haven’t they made Righteous Fury undispellable? I think the largest reason is the position of Improved Righteous Fury in the protection talent tree. Its way too low for the benefit it gives. Making this undispellable would allow ret to have a permanent 6% damage reduction, since they will already be deep in prot for Imp HoJ.
The next patch to head our way, will likely be 3.1. Dev’s have already started releasing information about this patch. Lots of class changes, some bigger things have been announced. Replenishment has been given to more classes. I agree with Josh about the effects this has on raids. In my opinion, if Blizzard makes a buff “mandatory”, it should just be scrapped and baked in, like Blessing of Salvation was, and hopefully with 3.1 Blessing of Sanctuary. If I’m throwing together a 10 man for Ulduar, and I somehow, don’t have one of the 4 classes that give Replenishment in my optimal set up, I’m going to have to bench one of my good raiders simply to fill a buff slot. This goes against Blizzard’s “bring the player, not the class” mentality of Wrath of the Lich King.
Additionally in 3.1, Blizzard has announced Dual Specializations will be delivered. From what has been said by dev’s this will give you two talent specs that are your “permanent specs” and you can switch between these freely, in town and more than likely in the “prep time” for PvP matches. Now they have said it won’t be free out of town, but not prohibitively expensive, since people could just port/summon out of the instance and back to town.
You can’t dodge the nerfbat!
Rohan (BoK) and Cathmor (E4aE) have both commented on the incoming nerfs to paladin seals and retribution talents.
First and foremost I will say that retribution in it’s current state is fucking OP. While ret was in dire need of some nerfs, these nerfs were a little uncalled for. The stem of the problem is that ret has a few high burst instant attacks, and every other talent just increased their dps.
I know Blizzard’s “vision” for the paladin is very bursty, but their actual implementation fails.
TBC ret dps was sub-par. Fact. Post 3.0 the tables have turned. Sustained PvE dps is a little higher than most classes, but the issue is that in PvP they can dump all their normal dps abilities in a matter of seconds, all while keeping the opponent stunned. Now that would lead us to believe that whatever changes they made in 3.0 were the culprits.
However, they instead nerf class-wide abilities, our seal and judgements. They were hit hard in the most recent beta push, which will likely go live in a week or two. This hurts everybody, holy can’t solo as effectively, and it’s a protection DPS (and therefore TPS) hit.
In my opinion, the major culprit in this problem is Sheath of Light. It increases spell power by 30% of their attack power, and crit heals place a HoT on their target for 60% of the crit. The intent behind this is to make non-holy paladin (prot has something very similar), more capable healers in a pinch. However, it’s +straight spell power. This, along with all paladin spells having AP and SP coefficients, makes them extremely powerful. If Sheath was changed to only boost healing spell power, that would fix most of retribution’s scaling problems.