World of Warcraft PTR Patch 3.2.2 Paladin changes
In unsurprisingly quick fashion, the Patch 3.2.2 notes went up along with the PTR today, barely two weeks after Patch 3.2 went live. We already knew that this minor patch was on its way, with the special re-tooling of the Onyxia encounter to celebrate the World of Warcraft's fifth Anniversary. What do Paladins get in this minor patch? Expectedly not much, but still more balance fixes brought about by -- wait for it -- Arenas. Alright, admittedly, not everything is caused by Arenas, but the biggest changes are. Let's go through the ones aren't borne from Arenas:
Righteous Fury: The bonus threat from Holy spells caused by this talent has been reduced from 90% to 80%.
First of all, Righteous Fury isn't a talent but a baseline ability, so the patch notes just might be worded weirdly (wouldn't be the first time). Second, the nerf is probably just to bring Paladin tanking threat more in line with other tanks' threat generation. With only a week or so in to Patch 3.2, I'm not certain it was too palpable, but the changes to block value and Judgements must've pushed Protection DPS and consequently TPS a little above the threshold.
Seal of Command: This ability now chains to strike up to 2 additional targets when it is triggered by an attack.
Whoo! An actual buff to Retribution! Who would've thought, right? It's a much needed one, considering how Seal of Command was simply inferior to Seal of Corruption / Vengeance for PvE, particularly with full stacks of the DoT component and Seals of the Pure. The only thing Seal of Command (aka The Seal Formerly Known As Seal Of Blood, or TSFKASB) had was the fact you could pick it up sooner... at the cost of a talent point. So yeah, that kind of sucked.
The change is a DPS boost in PvE and gives Paladins a competitive seal for multi-mob trash. Because Seal of Corruption / Vengeance takes six and a half years, thereabouts, to get going, it was a massive DPS dip for short fights and against groups. The buffed Seal of Command is now an excellent choice for trash pulls, AoE, or both. What this also means is that Retribution Paladins must always be mindful of having the right seal up. Rule of thumb? Long boss fights? Seal of DoT. Trash and lots of mobs? Seal of Command, otherwise now known as Seal of Cleave.
Judgements of the Just: The reduction in cooldown to Hammer of Justice provided by this talent has been reduced to 5/10 seconds instead of 10/20 seconds.
PvP nerf. Don't even think about the interrupt component lost - Protection already has plenty of that. It was just that some juggernaut unkillable Paladin stunning everything silly every 20 freaking seconds is just plain sick. Add to that the fact that Protection was sneakily becoming the PvP healing spec and you've got a problem on your hands.
Touched by the Light: This talent now provides 20/40/60% of the paladin's strength as spell power instead of 10/20/30% of the paladin's stamina.
Protection dominating in PvP isn't so much of a problem as the fact that Protection Paladins dressed in spell power plate (what a silly concept!) were out-healing Holy Paladins. That's just plain wrong. So hey, why not base it off Strength, instead? Tank gear has gobs of it, so it peters out to about the same value for a PvE tank. This was the solution that Ghostcrawler promised that needed to be implemented before Season 7 started.
Nothing much to cry about in this minor patch. Everything is essentially aimed at maintaining the status quo. We can cry just a little bit for the loss of stun-a-thons, but hey, let's throw a party for the sexier Seal of Command!
