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Retribution paladin DPS broken after realm restarts [Updated]
According to several reports, including the official forums, World of Logs, and several of our own staff, retribution paladins are experiencing a bug after tonight's rolling realm restarts. The bug has retribution paladins dealing several times their normal damage, with new records on World of Logs easily exceeding 100,000 DPS on any given Dragon Soul encounter. The bug appears to be related to Seal of Truth, as it's dealing over 60% of the affected ret paladins' damage, vastly dwarfing all other sources. The bug seems to be affecting PvP and PvE, as there are many reports of retribution paladins being nigh unstoppable in Battlegrounds tonight. One group of retribution paladins toppled Lord Rhyolith in under 15 seconds. There has been no official word from Blizzard just yet on these developments, although we can be sure that there will be a change deployed to fix this bug as early as possible. Reminder from the editors: Do keep in mind that abusing things like this is considered exploitation. Blizzard does have the right to ban you for abusing this if you're using it to bypass content à la our old friend Karatechop. Don't make Blizzard's job harder, and don't risk your account. Update 10:00 a.m. EST Blizzard is aware of the problem and is looking for a way to solve it. They also issue the same warning we did -- don't exploit this. Zarhym -- Ret Paladin DPS Bug We're aware of this issue and looking into it right now. It's likely we won't have further updates for you until we're back in the office in the morning PST. Just as a reminder from the Terms of Use: C. Rules Related to Game Play. (i) Using or exploiting errors in design, features which have not been documented, and/or "program bugs" to gain access that is otherwise not available, or to obtain a competitive advantage over other players. source
The Light and How to Swing It: Ret tips from the healer
With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. At least, he usually does. But Gregg's a little pre-occupied this week. Therefore, Matt Low will be stepping in temporarily to handle some retribution goodness! No one expected me to write this column. And I mean no one. What does a healing priest know about dealing damage? When I was approached to fill in for Gregg this week, the first word that came to my mind was "Seriously?" But that's all in the past now. You poor guys are stuck with me this week! Anyway, yes, I do happen to have a paladin which I use to smash stuff with. Contrary to popular belief, I don't play a healer 24 hours, 7 days a week. I have to try to relax and de-stress myself after a long raid of hard healing. What better way to do that then swing a Justicebringer around? Now, I've been a healer for a long time so when I made the choice to go straight into retribution, I approached the class (and role) with a certain mentality. You see, there are a few things that annoy me when I was healing on my priest whenever there were ret paladins in the raid. I was determined to not be that ret pally.
WoW Rookie: Leveling a paladin tank
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. For links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's, visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide. Want to level your paladin as a tank? You got it! Before the Dungeon Finder tool was launched in December, finding level-appropriate instance groups was well nigh impossible. Occasional knots of newborn death knights might putter about in a favorite Burning Crusade instance to scoop up some gear. The rest of the pre-Northrend instances remained ghost towns, populated only by speed-running level 80s who were farming or running low-level buddies through some quick levels. But the Dungeon Finder has re-invigorated the instances of Azeroth, Outland and beyond. What does that mean for leveling players? If you love to play in groups and instances or if you're looking ahead to raiding and want to lay down your skill base now, you can.
Vindication hotfixed, no longer affects Stam or Int
A hotfix is in the works for the Retribution Paladin talent Vindication. When the fix goes live ("as early as this afternoon"), Vindication will no longer reduce the Intellect or Stamina of affected targets. It will continue to reduce Agility, Spirit, and Strength. As usual, tooltips will not immediately update to reflect this change; the tooltips will be incorrect until they can be fixed in a content patch. Bornakk says this fix was put in place to address Retribution paladins being "very prominent" in PvP, "especially in the lower Arena brackets," without hurting Ret PvE DPS. Nerfing a class based on performance in lower brackets seems a little weird to me, but whatever. We did have some rumblings that something like this was coming - a PvP nerf that doesn't affect PvE. This certainly covers those bases. It leaves Vindication a pretty lackluster talent, though. Will you still keep it in your talent spec?
Exorcism can no longer be used on players
As an unannounced change in this morning's patch 3.1.1, Exorcism can no longer be used against players. The stated rationale for this change not being announced ahead of time was that they were "trying to get the tooltip changed at the same time to reduce confusion," which doesn't quite seem to hold water for me - wouldn't it be less confusing to tell the players, and not leave them to find out for themselves the next time they tried to PvP? Anyway, that's a relatively minor issue. Recall that in patch 3.1, Exorcism was changed to be usable on all targets, and to automatically crit against demons and undead (before, it could only be used against demons and undead). Evidently Blizzard feels that it's just too much burst damage for Ret pallies in PvP, especially given that it means they can start up their combos from range. Edit: Just to clarify, the functionality of Exorcism in PvE is unchanged. Ghostcrawler also promises that they're working on making Pally DPS "more interesting and also less bursty" instead of just using all your skills on cooldown, and that once they figure out how to do that, you'll be able to Exorcise other players again. He gives Conflagrate, Brain Freeze, Rip, Overpower, and Arcane Blast as examples of the kind of more interesting mechanics they might be going for. He invites feedback on ways to make Pally DPS more reactive, so go make your thoughts known in the thread if you have any ideas.
Paladin changes in WoW Patch 3.1 PTR build 9733
A new build was pushed to the patch 3.1 PTR yesterday, and while the list of changes wasn't huge, there are a few significant ones for paladins: Seal of the Martyr/Seal of Blood now add 48% of weapon damage, up from 22%, to all your melee attacks as holy damage. However, the Judgment was changed from 16% of AP + 25% of spell power + 26% of minimum weapon damage to 11% AP + 18% SP + 26% min weapon damage. In other words, the bonus damage per attack was roughly doubled, while the coefficients of AP and SP on the judgment were cut by 30% (approximately). The general expectation is that this will keep overall damage pretty much the same, while reducing burst damage. This makes the seal play a bit differently in PvP – it's no longer going to hit like a truck when you judge, but you'll get more consistent damage out of it (edited). A benefit of the change is that you won't see quite as big hits on your health when you judge the seal: more survivability in PvE, which is something the blues have shown concern about with respect to this seal. There was one other change: a new talent called Divine Guardian was added, at tier 4 in the Protection tree. Note that this is not the same as the old Divine Guardian, which was reworked and renamed Divine Sacrifice. I do really like the icon, so I'm glad they're reusing it, but the naming is slightly confusing. Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.
Changes coming to Paladins in patch 3.1
As I'm sure you've seen already, Eyonix dropped more class changes, Paladins being amongst this latest batch. Not many Holy changes, only minor Ret changes, but a whole crapload of Protection changes. Delicious, delicious Protection changes. A lot of the Protection changes serve a dual purpose- the changes are pretty good steps toward making Protection Paladins PvP-viable like Protection Warriors are becoming, but those same changes make the tree even stronger in PvE than it already is. It's beautiful. Blessing of Kings – this spell is now a base ability trainable by all paladins. This is very, very awesome. It's a wonder this didn't happen earlier, actually. I think many of us expected this to happen back in the Wrath beta, but instead it was turned into a 5 point talent in the Protection tree. The unanswered question is whether or not we'll get the full 5 talent points baseline, or if we'll still need to spent talent points to improve it. Personally, I'm going to assume we'll get the 10% BoK baseline, it's the only way this would even remotely make sense.
Replenishment is mandatory and other buff discussion from Ghostcrawler
One of the major overhauls heading from Burning Crusade into Wrath of the Lich King was the consolidation of buffs and debuffs. In an attempt to keep raid groups from thinking they had to bring one specific class to get one specific buff or debuff, Blizzard switched some spells up, gave buffs to more classes, and made them unstackable, the result being that one can take one of a certain handful of class and specs to get the buff or debuff they desire, in theory giving a raid more choice about who they bring. Still, the buffs and debuffs remain, and Ghostcrawler has been having some pretty interesting discussions about them in the past few days. To start with, he came out and said it pretty plainly: Replenishment is Mandatory. Blizzard will balance fights under the assumption you have Replenishment much as they do under the assumption you have a tank. In the short term, this means your raid is probably going to want to find a Shadow Priest, Retribution Paladin, or Survival Hunter if they haven't already.
Encryped Text: One Rogue's take on Season 5
Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we discuss the new Arena Season 5.Like many of my siblings of the shadows, I play WoW in both the PvP and PvE environments. As a guild leader, it is my responsibility to organize raid groups and to lead my team to victory (and the associated purple loot). While keeping up Hunger for Blood & Slice and Dice & Rupture up may seem interesting for others; after a while the raid DPS grind wears away at my soul. I was not born to be a number-crunching math machine. I am a Horde assassin at heart: born to taste the blood of my Warchief's enemies!I have been flexing my PvP muscles in the new Lake Wintergrasp and Strand of the Ancients battlegrounds, though I find myself sitting in a turret or catapult fairly often. The arena has always been my true love. It was what brought me back to WoW for TBC, and it is what tempted me to level in Northrend for the next installment. With Season 5 now officially underway, my week has consisted of the most bloodthirsty battles I have ever been a part of. So go buy your Hateful Gladiator's Band of Triumph (best initial upgrade with no rating requirement) and read on!
The truth about Ret fixes
Rumors and unsubstantiated news have been floating through the ether like confetti since last night, when Ghostcrawler predicted Ret was going to be nerfed. Today he's finally out and said what they've hotfixed in and what's coming in the future: Nerfs: Divine Storm now does physical damage instead of holy (live). Repentance down to 6 seconds in PvP (from 10, live). Buff: Righteous Vengeance now applies a DoT "similar to Deep Wounds" instead of upping crit damage. GC calls it "a significant buff to the ability to make up for the damage lost to Divine Storm, but is also less bursty." The DoT will not break Repentance. (coming before Wrath) Update: "It should end up at something like 10% of the crit damage each tick for 4 ticks of 2 seconds each (+40% and 8 sec total)." Neutral: Art of War improves damage done by Judgments, Crusader Strike, and Divine storm, instead of upping crit rate. GC says "net dps should be about the same but less bursty" (coming before Wrath). Glyph of Crusader Strike now reduces mana cost, since the devs felt pallies were able to do too much damage on stunned targets (coming before Wrath). Fixed a bug with Seal and Judgment of Light that would result in too much healing. Technically a nerf, but since it's a bug fix I can't really put it in that category. (live) Overall, GC assures us that sustained Ret DPS remains the same as before this storm of changes; it's just less bursty at the front end of a PvP fight. He also says "if we overdid it, we'll be happy to back off some of the changes," so we'll just have to see how it works out, I suppose. One more thing. This isn't directly a Paladin change, but it will primarly affect Paladins, I think: the damage reduction Warlocks get from having their Felguard out with Master Demonologist is being extended to include Holy.
Divine Storm now less divine
As promised, it looks like Retribution has been nerfed, through a hotfix. The substance of the nerf is as follows: Divine Storm now does physical damage, not Holy. This means, among other things, it's mitigated by armor, which should obviously cut its damage significantly against certain classes. Many people have noticed a similarity between this sequence of events and something that happened back when 2.0 was released, right before Burning Crusade. Divine Storm is the 51-point Retribution talent. The 41-point Ret talent, Crusader Strike, was pretty overpowered at level 60, so Blizz nerfed it, only to have to buff it back up later in the expansion. The Divine Storm nerf is, similarly, in the context of level 70 balance. At level 80, where much of the Wrath balance testing has been done, Divine Storm may well have fit right in. Is an un-nerf coming when Wrath is released? Paladins can only hope. Update: I am also told that they may have reduced the health/mana returned from Judgment of Light and Judgment of Wisdom by 50%, and reduced the damage of Judgment of Command by 25%. There still isn't a blue post that I can find about any of this, so it's hard to confirm -- can anyone confirm/deny the Judgment changes? [thanks, Nyttyn]
Ret to be nerfed "to the ground"
Now Ret pallies, don't panic. Ghostcrawler was joking in that quote, but it was too good not to use for a headline. As most people have figured out by now, Retribution's damage post-patch, especially in PvP, is a little overpowered. GC says that Blizz is worried specifically about the burst damage potential, and the fact that it's Holy damage, which resistances typically do not affect. It took them a while to diagnose this particular balance issue, because there was a bug with weapon equipping; now that that's fixed, Blizz is in a much better position to figure exactly what needs to be done. GC also says that they think Ret DPS is good in PvE right now. They want to make sure that sustained PvE damage is not negatively impacted, and they don't want to over-nerf PvP either. That said, there are going to be some changes soon, "perhaps even hotfixes." I doubt anyone is very surprised. How would you adjust the situation, dear readers?
Breakfast topic: Problem paradigms
My main is a resto Shaman, but I've been spending my spare time either leveling a Rogue or gearing up my Ret Paladin. It is a completely different experience. I've spent hours in the battlegrounds and have managed to earn the honor for the Merciless Gladiator's Greatsword. Thus far is has been a real challenge for me. I have a harder time with the Paladin than the Rogue. In the battlegrounds my first reaction when I see someone going down is to heal them. I do drop an emergency heal here and a bubble there, I know that my heals are generally crummy. I should just keep swinging my sword and leave the healing to the healers. With the Rogue, there is no option for healing, so I just keep Slicing and Dicing away through the levels. On top of that, I'm used to trying to get away from my opponent, not trying to stay on top of them. The whole paradigm shift has been difficult for me, but I've learned a lot from it. How do you feel when you play something totally different from your main?
Hybrid Theory: What can I do?
Welcome to another installment of Hybrid Theory, wherein columnist Alex Ziebart assures the world that he does not, in fact, hate Retribution Paladins. In fact, he raids with a Retribution Paladin. Really. He does. Pinky swear. Let's face it, folks. A lot of raid leaders have very little idea what they're doing when they're brand new to the raiding thing. I was there once, too. Until you have some experience in the 25-man raids, you have very little idea how group synergy works or anything of that sort. As a hybrid, especially one specced in a tree other than your healing tree, this could cause you some issues when looking to break into raiding from the ground level, rather than filling a gap in an existing raid that generally knows what's what.You will most likely find that you'll need to sell yourself to raid leaders. What can you bring to the table? What can you do that a mage can't? What can you do that a rogue can't? The answer: Quite a bit! First thing to keep in mind, though, is that as a hybrid, you will probably not do as much damage as the other DPS classes in the raid. Healing specced, you will keep up just fine. Damage specced? Well, you won't keep up on every encounter. That's okay though. You don't need to. Why? Because you specifically allow those other classes to meet their maximum potential.I'll go through each of the damage specs one by one. Tanks, healers, sorry. You come next week. I'm writing a column, not a novel!
Hybrid Theory: What's a hybrid? v2.0
Hybrid Theory returns under the banner of column-newb Alex Ziebart. Incredibly biased opinions await you. If you are reading this, you have already been made a victim of his inability to create interesting graphics. No World of Warcraft players were harmed in the creation of the previous image, though that does not mean it won't hurt you.When I decided on my topic for today, I was mighty excited. A fire raged within me, and my fingers flew over the keyboard as soon as I sat down at the computer. My first column! Awesome! Yes! About three paragraphs in, I realized I should probably make sure my predecessor, Jason Lotito, hadn't done the topic yet. Unfortunately, he did. Fortunately, I completely disagree with what he said in every possible way.Perfect.What is a hybrid class? The basic answer is pretty simple: A class with multiple viable roles. Paladins, Druids and Shaman are obvious examples of a hybrid class. If you disagree with the fact that they're hybrids, you must be playing the wrong game. Holy, Retribution, Protection. Feral, Balance, Restoration. Elemental, Enhancement, Restoration. All of them are viable specs, especially in raiding. As fun as it is to mock Retribution Paladins, even they have a place in the end-game.Basically, Shamadruidins are hybrids. Don't try to argue that they aren't because you will lose.
Retribution gets passive threat reduction!
I don't think I've ever used an exclamation point in a headline before, but this deserves it. It appears that Paladins' Retribution tree will be getting some passive threat reduction, as of patch 2.3. Posted just recently in the official forums by Eyonix:After further patch testing and some serious discussion, we've decided to add threat reduction deep in the paladin's retribution tree. As a result, fanaticism will now reduce threat caused by all actions by 6/12/18/24/30%, in addition to its current effect of course.How does that sound? 30% passive threat retribution seems pretty darned solid to me. Let's hear it for Blizzard -- looks like they do listen to what their customers want after all.
Possible Retribution improvements
Shamans and paladins have long been in an "evil twin" type relationship, though which one is evil, I couldn't possibly say. Probably both. Anyway, since Enhancement Shaman improvements possibly destined for an upcoming patch were previewed at Blizzcon, it seems only fair that we should see some Retribution Pally buffs as well. And here they are! Crusader Strike cooldown reduced to 6 seconds, from 10. Vengeance duration increased to 30 seconds, from 15. Improved Seal of the Crusader replaced with Sanctified Crusader. Sanctified Crusader replaced with new talent, Sanctified Seals, whose tooltip reads: Increases spell and melee crit by 3% (with 3 pts) reduces the duration sanctified seals. World of Raids notes that this tooltip doesn't entirely make sense and is probably not finished. So what do you think? Do these changes take some of the sting out of the Death Knight, which many see as a slap in the face to Retribution? Note that these changes are still under development; don't count on these making it into the live game intact. Allegedly, they are bound for patch 2.3, which is still a ways off. At the very least, these can be taken as insight into how the devs are thinking about Ret.[via World of Raids]
Another one bites the dust
First Tobold, and now Mastgrr of Paladin Sucks has exited Azeroth.Before you yell at us for saying the sky is falling (again), that's not what we're saying at all. WoW has lasted for a long time for a lot of people-- more than almost any other videogame out there (in some cases, ever). For some people, including this first round of bloggers, it's run its course. Just because they're quitting doesn't mean the end of the world (of Warcraft) is upon us. In fact, it doesn't even mean the blogging is over-- Tobold quit a week and a half ago, and he's still blogging about WoW. My guess is that both bloggers will be back when the next expansion hits.But then again, it's kind of sad that these WoW veterans are stepping out of the game. At least it's productive-- Tobold quit partly because of attunements, and they were lifted the next day. Maybe now that Pally Sucks is RIP, that ret Paladin review will come sooner than we think.
Ret pallies to be improved
Retribution paladins are in strong contention for most ridiculed build in WoW as today. Personally, I'm sure they don't deserve all the scorn that's thrown at them, but it's probably true that Ret is not as strong as many other trees. Well, Blizzard seems to have (finally) noticed this, and they're taking a look at it: Hello again, I just wanted to let you know that the developers have taken part of your suggestions, and are looking into improving the retribution paladin spec. You can probably expect something along the line of more sustained DPS in a raid and more raid utility, but we are not ready to reveal any details. This is still work in progress, so please be patient :)Good news, eh? Or as one forum responder put it: "Hell, it's about time." So if Ret gets more sustained raid DPS and more raid utility, will you be happy with it? What would you change in the tree?
Kalgan on Retribution
Everyone wants to DPS. And if a Paladin wants to DPS, he's likely to look at the Retribution tree. However, that tree has been somewhat de-emphasized as of late; the developers have out and said that the Paladin is a tanking/healing hybrid, and its DPS is meant to be somewhat sub-par. Of course, this implies that Ret is not a very strong talent tree: if Pallies are meant for healing and tanking, it stands to reason that Holy and Prot will probably be stronger trees than Ret.Indeed, many players are currently dissatisfied with the state of Ret, and Kalgan (a.k.a. Tom Chilton, the WoW designer responsible for classes, among other things) recently stopped by the forums to chat about Ret a bit. Here's what he had to say (the responses are scattered through this thread):However, while I don't disagree that there aren't many highly rated ret pallies, it's worth pointing out that there also aren't many highly rated prot warriors, destro locks, balance druids, survival hunters, enhancement shamans, etc. While trying to get each spec to be arena viable in the different formats is a noble goal, the reality is that it isn't an immediate goal for every spec to be optimized for every aspect of the game (arenas, battlegrounds, solo-ing, raiding, heroics, etc). In the case of arenas, it seems to me that getting each class reasonably represented in highly rated teams is a more important goal, and unfortunately the paladin class happens to be somewhat grossly over-represented in this regard. So...there's too many Paladins in arenas, therefore they can't buff Ret, because that would cause even more Paladins? Hm...
