Paladin

I think the real issue is that in fights without raid-wide AoE, 10% of nothing is nothing. You can artificially inflate that through Seal/Judge Blood/Martyr which is the only Seal/Judgment escaping the heavy nerf bat which may be what Blizz wants but how effective that is is raid dependent; pallies will need HoTs and/or some other kind of maintenance if they do it.

My guess is that once they see how these recent changes perform they'll buff what they feel are 'core abilities' again and adjust spell costs of both core and non-core abilities to reflect how they want ret pallies to DPS. (Hey it worked on rogues, /shiv.) Prot will always have infinite mana through SA+BoSanc and holy has a large enough mana pool that this shouldn't be much of an issue for them.

Also, Tarja said something about using hunter gear for PvE. Besides that fact that hunter gear will never have strength, by account of the stat weightings he posted it's unlikely that the AP and limited int hunter gear will have will be useful for ret paladins unless it's a full tier and a half above the pallies current gear. Shaman gear would be a better choice if it had int but I don't think it will either. Either way Blizz really doesn't want that.

I have no doubt that ret will be a great PvE spec when all is said and done... As for PvP/Arenas well, not so confident. I'm sure Blizz wants it to work and they'll try to do so but it wouldn't be the first time that a class has only had one spec to PvP with. At least level 80 PvP/Arena play is at least 2-3 months off.

Well I think you can certainly say that Ret is DEFINITELY not OP anymore. My Brutallus DPS went from 3100 down to 1985. I think it's actually not quite as bad as those numbers indicate, since I was still adjusting to how DPS would work with the new mana mechanics and didn't have a chance to get a feel for it on test dummies like before 3.0 came out. But people can sure as hell stop talking about Ret being OP now, because it obviously isn't.

The good news is that I was still near full mana almost the entire time (since I didn't use consecrate/exorcism), and certainly could've woven in some consecrates to increase that DPS number.

The bad news is that I think the real reason why I was still near full mana the whole time is that Neifirst was actually onto something when he thought that JoW sure seemed like it hadn't been nerfed (as opposed to ON something, like the case usually is ) It turns out that JoW is actually giving back FOUR times as much mana as it is supposed to. The tooltip was changed to indicate a nerf of returning 1% max mana, but it was actually never changed and it's still giving 2%. Also, for some reason it's proccing at approximately double the rate that it's supposed to (my proc rate was around 85%, I've even seen WWS reports from Paladins raiding tonight who had proc rates OVER 100%).

So will I really continue to be able to DPS at max capacity with 15% JotW, without going OOM in 3 minutes? Or is a bugged JoW the only reason why I was even able to reach 2k DPS? Hard to say yet, we'll have to see

Actually, even pre-3.0 where Int could basically be ignored on gear (mp5 was SO much better than Int before all of these X% of total mana regen mechanics), Hunter gear (and for that matter, Rogue gear) was usually a slight upgrade to the equivalent ILVL Warrior/Ret gear, in terms of Ret Paladin DPS. This was because Hunter/Rogue gear gets AP, Crit, Agi, and then possibly 1 more DPS stat like hit/haste/armorpen, where Warrior gear just gets Str, Crit and then 1 more stat. So the Hunter/Rogue gear gets the same itemization points spread into 3-4 stats instead of dumped into 2-3, which means you'll get more total DPS stats, making up for the fact that AP isn't optimal compared to Str. Now throw in the fact that Intellect is a VERY good DPS stat, so Hunter gear will have 4-5 stats compared to Warrior gear's 2-3, I doubt it'll be that close.

What spec would that be? Don't say Holy, they might be even worse off than Ret

Hey, I'll have you know all my highs are completely natural! Which really just means I have no excuse, so, uh, nevermind.

More news for Paladins, guess they're done with everyone else?

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...00&pageNo=8#152

Some explanation, some talk of PvP, some talk of buffs in the form of shortened judgment cooldowns, nothing promised until they know more.

baleted!

Mana draining is being looked at for PvP. There's a balance that needs to be struck between making it a viable tactic and preventing it from being a perfect counter-comp to any 'blue-bar' teams.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...o=1&sid=2000#10

After the most recent rounds of nerfs that hit Paladins pretty hard they're getting some lovin'. Hot, dirty lovin'.

Divine Shield and Avenging Wrath triggering Forbearance is confirmed as just a bandaid until they can simply link the two with a shared 30 seconds cooldown. Previously, Paladins in PvP would pop both bubble and wings, hit HoJ and mow their target down with instant attacks not affected by bubble.

At some point DS and RF will be made mutually exclusive and share a cooldown (much like a mages Dragon's Breath and Cone of Cold). Hitting one will put the other on a shortened cooldown so that you can't have both up at the same time. The attack speed penalty while under bubble will also be removed and reworked to a flat reduction in damage you can deal.

Mana drains are also being changed to a percentage of mana rather than a flat amount.

That should bring PvP closer to being in line.

For PvE sustained damage they're considering letting Vengeance stack back up to 5 again (instead of its current 3) but you'll have to spend more points in it. And there's also the idea of letting Crusader Strike have a secondary effect (since it can no longer refresh all judgements).

The mana drain change is in the next patch, the DS/AW change is coming but they don't know when. The rest needs testing before they know exactly what they'll do and how much of it.

In case anyone hasn't seen it yet, the Paladin Judgement bug has been pinpointed so hopefully there will be a fix at some point soon.

Pally Judgement fix should be live when the servers come back up.

In 3.0.8 JoL will no longer cause threat to compensate for some of the random behavior that it's threat has on occasion produced.

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.h...geNo=2&sid=1#39