Someone Explain the Ret paladin 4.3 changes to me, and why it will "fix" Ret.

[Wildberry]

Hi, I was the one who posted the thread "do ret paladins really suck?" some people there say that 4.3 will fix ret, being only 37 I don't know what exactly the patch notes mean, so would anyone mind explaining to a noob pally what exactly is happening to ret in 4.3?

[terrahero]

Hi, I was the one who posted the thread "do ret paladins really suck?" some people there say that 4.3 will fix ret, being only 37 I don't know what exactly the patch notes mean, so would anyone mind explaining to a noob pally what exactly is happening to ret in 4.3?

The patch thus far will not fix Ret. It will not change anything as far as pve goes, besides a blunt dps buff of debatable weigth. Ret is even more dependent on procs, and no less dependent on cooldowns whatsoever. And in pvp its a big slap with the nerfhammer where it just got that much harder to actually kill something.

Hammer of Wrath will no longer get a massive crit boost so overall HoW will deal less damage. And to compensate attacks based on weapondamage have been increased a bit, among these is Templar's Verdict. But since you hardly use HoW, even during cooldowns, this nerf will not make your cooldown-burst any less. During Heroism itll even make it stronger, making you more based on cooldowns, because you didnt even use HoW at all during this phase.

Templar's Verdict is one of the abilities where the dps compensation is made, and TV as a finisher is for a large part based on a completely random proc. So indirectly the highly random Divine Purpose is going to play an even bigger part in your dps. Making Ret more desperate for procs.

[JayJay09]

2p bonus baseline, HoW always useable substituting HW and gives a hot that heals 6% max hp over 3 seconds, a 10/20/30/40/50% slow from SoT depending on the stacks, HoW crit boost against targets lower than 20%, wings immune to dispell but only provide 12% dmg bonus, crusader strike gets a 3 times stackable effect lasting 30 seconds and increasing crit chance against that target by 5/10/15%, cs cooldown is back to 3 seconds, templars verdicts lowers the cooldown on wog by 2 seconds, sacred shield is an on demand effect and additionally frees from fear and makes immune to fear as long as it is up. Long arm of the law always gives the speed boost and you cannot be slowed while it is active. It frees from slows but not from roots. Divine Purpose procs from every second HoW and can only be used for WoG or Inquisition.

/ret fixed

[Reith]

2p bonus baseline, HoW always useable substituting HW and gives a hot that heals 6% max hp over 3 seconds, a 10/20/30/40/50% slow from SoT depending on the stacks, HoW crit boost against targets lower than 20%, wings immune to dispell but only provide 12% dmg bonus, crusader strike gets a 3 times stackable effect lasting 30 seconds and increasing crit chance against that target by 5/10/15%, cs cooldown is back to 3 seconds, templars verdicts lowers the cooldown on wog by 2 seconds, sacred shield is an on demand effect and additionally frees from fear and making immune to fear as long as it is up. Long arm of the law always gives the speed boost and you cannot be slowed while it is active. It frees from slows but not from roots. Divine Purpose procs from every second HoW and can only be used for WoG or Inquisition.

/ret fixed

That would make Ret OP, not balanced - so not fixed.

[JayJay09]

That would make Ret OP, not balanced - so not fixed.

It'd be only by the numbers then. They can be corrected. But it would make ret feel complete once in a time.

[Deleted]

It'd be only by the numbers then. They can be corrected. But it would make ret feel complete once in a time.

You're taking a lot of working tools from other classes, and I can see why. But you are not taking anything away from Ret in return, and this ''one man army'' paladin it would create WOULD be overpowered. if not because of damage, because of insane utlity and defensives. I'm a ret paladin myself, so even though I would welcome being OP, I know it shouldn't happen.

[Nillo]

The patch thus far will not fix Ret. It will not change anything as far as pve goes, besides a blunt dps buff of debatable weigth. Ret is even more dependent on procs, and no less dependent on cooldowns whatsoever. And in pvp its a big slap with the nerfhammer where it just got that much harder to actually kill something.

Hammer of Wrath will no longer get a massive crit boost so overall HoW will deal less damage. And to compensate attacks based on weapondamage have been increased a bit, among these is Templar's Verdict. But since you hardly use HoW, even during cooldowns, this nerf will not make your cooldown-burst any less. During Heroism itll even make it stronger, making you more based on cooldowns, because you didnt even use HoW at all during this phase.

Templar's Verdict is one of the abilities where the dps compensation is made, and TV as a finisher is for a large part based on a completely random proc. So indirectly the highly random Divine Purpose is going to play an even bigger part in your dps. Making Ret more desperate for procs.

Wow.... the way you got to that conclusion ignoring every other ability that scales with weapon damage is just amazing.

[zcks]

You're taking a lot of working tools from other classes, and I can see why. But you are not taking anything away from Ret in return

Something allot of people don't seem to notice however is that ret has a very anemic/small toolkit compared to other melee specs. This means it cannot really be fixed by simply trading off abilities because your still left with a small melee toolkit.
The same is true of prots toolkit albeit to a lesser extent, to make matters worse they share allot of the same tools so you cannot easily change one without adverse effects on the other.

What needs to happen is 3 things.

1: A stance/presence/form system, the design team & the management team have both admitted such a mechanic is a necessity for any class capable of filling 2 or more roles. The management team just refuses to let the design team implement one because they insist "Paladins must remain different", however if its implemented right with some forethought & time for fine tuning it could feel unique.

2: An expansion of the melee toolkit for ret & prot, after tie some of the moves into the stances so that each stance boosts/empowers some abilities relevant to the particular role. This allows for flexibility of role but in a balanced way so that each of the classes specs are neither OP or crap.

3: GC, Kalgan & their hand picked management team to get hit by a buss because At this point it's fairly obvious the problem with the design process is them.
Every time they have announced class changes they have always scheduled paladins last to be worked on leading to them being rushed even when by their own admission they require more work then many other classes, refused to give the design team permission to do what they say is a necessity (even when the management team agrees it would be best for balance) & otherwise done things to hamper their design process & development of the class. Their can only be 2 reasons for this,
A: they don't give a flying f#uck about what shape ret is in.
B: they are letting their personal preferences from their days playing Everquest get in the way of their better judgment as game designers & business men.

[Deleted]

Wow.... the way you got to that conclusion ignoring every other ability that scales with weapon damage is just amazing.

Hes actually right on the money.

[Shelly]

There's at least one popular theorycrafting link out there that shows a pretty massive boost to dps.

But here's how it will at least help ret, nothing will "fix" ret unless we go with a pretty major redesign.

1. Increased AP - this is an across the board buff to all melee classes. So everyone can expect at least a minor dps increase. For ret this means every single attack we have will be going up, from holy wrath and exorcism to judgements and even word of glory.

2. Two Piece T13, judging will now give you a charge of holy power. This is a pretty big "help"/"fix." While it doesn't help out with all the randomness it will at least allow for Ret to gain HP at a better sustained rate and will move judging up on our priority as well.

3. Increasing the amount of damage 2-handed spec gives. This is a bonus to every single weapon attack we have, so harder templars, auto-attacks and crusader's strikes.

4. We'll also get harder hitting judgements from the seal of truth change.

All that combined with gear scaling should put us on a much better footing. Now some of the changes, especially the HoW change are definitely a nerf to PvP, but many of them are offfset by the increased sustained damage. Just without a more effective closer paladins are still going to be kited like crazy.

[Adhal-Blackrock]

Wow.... the way you got to that conclusion ignoring every other ability that scales with weapon damage is just amazing.

^this

white damage, cs and tv are all effected by the 2h weapon damage, Judgement hits harder (about equal to cs but no HoL effect) and the 10% ap bonus is pretty big (1500+ ap bonus for me).

While we do still rely on DP procs, our dependency is not really increased any.

Does 4.3 solve any of our problems? not really.

Does it give us a fairly nice DPS boost? Yes.

Its just they typical Blizz bandaid fix. though I can see by Jayjays post if they listened to everything people said it could be a lot worse. We don't need to be faceroll again, we need to have mechanics that are not clunky and favor skill over RNG.

[Talen]

What needs to happen is 3 things.

Yes.

1: A stance/presence/form system, the design team & the management team have both admitted such a mechanic is a necessity for any class capable of filling 2 or more roles.

Needed, necessary and mandatory. So long as Blizzard wants the class to have some degree of viability in off spec roles, role separation via stances is a MUST. No if, ands or buts. This needs to happen - its an important balancing tool for any hybrid in ANY game and its beyond belief Paladins never got one. The only viable alternative is to drop any possibility of off-spec roles entirely with uber-specialisation instead of hybridism - things like being unable to cast healing spells because 100% mana isn't enough.

2: An expansion of the melee toolkit for ret & prot, after tie some of the moves into the stances so that each stance boosts/empowers some abilities relevant to the particular role. This allows for flexibility of role but in a balanced way so that each of the classes specs are neither OP or crap.

This also needs to happen. Too many tools are duplicated or overloaded with secondary effects, you have basic tools assigned to the talent trees insteda of baseline. I know why they did it this way - they don't want Holy to have a melee toolkit. However, that would be much less of an issue with a stance system. You move the combat moves from the talent trees baseline and you have a decent selection of melee abilities, with the ability to drop or rework some of them for other roles. You also have more hooks for secondary effects and can unload some abilities. You'd probably need some more to provide the basic functionality for tanking but the core would be there.


However, whether you'd need to link abilities specifically into the stances, or lock moves out, depend on the nature of the stance system.

3: GC, Kalgan & their hand picked management team to get hit by a buss because

I'd have gone with better integration of HP myself. I still (currently) like the idea of an energy system, with an increase in the number of pips to 5. Let SoB give CS a 1s GCD, and you get 5 CS>>1 Finisher in 6.5s for Ret, 9s for Prot and Holy. That sounds right and it provides a mechanism to control burst for melee and Finishing moves. Get rid of DP, get rid of/rework Inq (as is) and reliance on SoT as HP provides the ramp up mechanic, rework AoW and Zealotry and AW (e.g. AW affects only Holy damage?) and you have the basis of a decent system, with room in the trees for specialist signature moves. Take damage away from auto attack if you need to.

Most of this is in place already. At least, the underpinnings.

EJL

[Deleted]

simplest easiest and quickest fix to ret damg short term -> make HoW same as shadow word death.

long term reword holy power as ret is the only spec that actualy relised upon holy power to do it's job, holy/prot can skip holypower and stil do about 75% ret can only do about 50%

[terrahero]

Wow.... the way you got to that conclusion ignoring every other ability that scales with weapon damage is just amazing.

If you actually read my post you'll notice several times how i am refering to TV as "one of the abilities" and "among the weaponbased abilites that got increased".

But the simple truth is, if TV becomes a harder hitting ability. DiP becomes a harder hitting proc. And relative numbers dont stick very well in this case. Losing 10% dmg on 100 damage-done from poor procs or 8% on 200 damage done. "yay relative i lost a smaller portion of my total damage". Yes, but the damage you missed out on due to badluck got 60% larger. Going from 10 to 16.

In other words, fluctuation might be relatively smaller, but because we're talking larger numbers here you would actually lose more dps with badprocs then you'd lose now. Instead of dropping from 24k to 21k you might now drop from 30k to 26.5k. Or vica versa gain from 24k to 27k and 30k to 33.5k. The numbers are relatively closer together in the 30k scenario, but your dps is actually influenced greater nonetheless.

And i think that example is actually very close to as the proc reliance doesnt change by alot, only slightly, but it changes in the wrong direction.

[Sandraudiga]

There's at least one popular theorycrafting link out there that shows a pretty massive boost to dps.

But here's how it will at least help ret, nothing will "fix" ret unless we go with a pretty major redesign.

1. Increased AP - this is an across the board buff to all melee classes. So everyone can expect at least a minor dps increase. For ret this means every single attack we have will be going up, from holy wrath and exorcism to judgements and even word of glory.
Not a ret pally fix, nor does it affect ret spec in any way.

2. Two Piece T13, judging will now give you a charge of holy power. This is a pretty big "help"/"fix." While it doesn't help out with all the randomness it will at least allow for Ret to gain HP at a better sustained rate and will move judging up on our priority as well.
Requiring a set bonus to fix a spec sets a VERY bad precedence.

3. Increasing the amount of damage 2-handed spec gives. This is a bonus to every single weapon attack we have, so harder templars, auto-attacks and crusader's strikes.
A nice, but small, boost but doesn't fix anything about the spec itself. We will still be the lowest dps class.

4. We'll also get harder hitting judgements from the seal of truth change.
Boosting a limp 2 minute noodle into a limp cannelloni noodle also doesn't fix anything about the spec other than a small dps increase.

All that combined with gear scaling should put us on a much better footing. Now some of the changes, especially the HoW change are definitely a nerf to PvP, but many of them are offfset by the increased sustained damage. Just without a more effective closer paladins are still going to be kited like crazy.
A small increase in sustained pve damage, with a massive pvp nerf without touching RNG and CD dependence. These are both actually more pronounced.

Quotes not counting for character count ftl.

[Hottie4Hire]

To anyone that thinks this makes us more reliant on CD's is just basically wrong. Yes, the gap between good luck and bad luck in dps is actually going to be higher. That's true. However, base damage without procs also goes up. You can expect to be much more competitive this time around. If you have good luck, you'll just do better. If you have bad luck you won't be stuck at the bottom of the meters.

Obviously you're arguing that the highest potential is what it should always be. Sucks that isn't the case. There's no reasonable way to change that right now.

[terrahero]

To anyone that thinks this makes us more reliant on CD's is just basically wrong. Yes, the gap between good luck and bad luck in dps is actually going to be higher. That's true. However, base damage without procs also goes up. You can expect to be much more competitive this time around. If you have good luck, you'll just do better. If you have bad luck you won't be stuck at the bottom of the meters.

Obviously you're arguing that the highest potential is what it should always be. Sucks that isn't the case. There's no reasonable way to change that right now.

Considering we got another lovely boost to cooldowns in out T13, turning Zealotry into a mini-AW on top of its current effect. Additionally the nerf to HoW is suppose to bring down our cooldown dps. But consider this, how many times do you actually use HoW during cooldowns? Because its simply got a lower priority then CS and TV. So any Divine Purpose procs will push HoW back.

To illustrate.
-CS (0.0) -> TV (1.5) -> Filler (3.0), if no DiP proc, that would be HoW.
-CS (4.5) -> TV ( 6.0) -> Filler (7.5), if no DiP proc that would be HoW. Except when the last filler was HoW, then something else because HoW is on cooldown till 9.0sec.
-CS (9.0) -> TV (10.5) -> Filler (12), if no DiP proc then its HoW. Unless the last filler was HoW then its still on cd.
-CS (13.5) -> TV (15) -> Filler (16.5), if no DiP proc then HoW. Unless last filler was HoW.
-CS (18) -> TV (19.5) -> Filler (21) AW ended 1sec ago, cannot use HoW anymore at this point.

And during a full on cooldown rage with Heroism and everything you dont use HoW at all, because you are to busy spamming nothing but CS and TV.

In the best case you use 2x HoW during a typical cooldown phase, if you get alot of DiP procs you can drop to 1 or none at all. And if your chaining DiP procs so you end up unable to use your 3 holy power before CS is back up you simply delay CS reducing the likelyhood of using HoW aswell.

So the nerf to HoW has barely dropped our cooldown dps. But, with the buff to 2h weapon spec we'll see CS and TV deal more damage. And those just happen to be the two abilities you push out more then anything during cooldowns. So the cooldown contribution will not go down, infact i'd expect it to go up even.
Our dps without cooldowns will be higher, but with cooldowns itll be pushed further. And these cooldowns will still have the same drastic impact on your overall dps as before, if not even a little more. All you can say now is "my dps doesnt suck so bad anymore when i dont have my cooldowns". Wich is nice and all, but impact to your overall dps is still significantly dictated by cooldowns. And that is one of the things Blizzard needs to adress. And with HoW nerf they tried to adress this issue, but it was simply a swing and a miss. Wich leads me to question how much insight Blizzard actually has in their own class design.

All we can take solace in with these changes is that our dps will be higher. But as far as clunky mechanics and poor class design, things are worst off. For me, personally, i want a class that has proper working mechanics and actually had some thought aswell as effort put into its design.
But ofcourse if all you care about is how high you get on the meters, regardless of how clunky the class is, then 4.3 will bring you great joy. To me its just a consolation prize, beter then nothing. And does not excuse Blizzard for taking "dropping the ball" to a whole new level.

[Lucetia]

Hi, I was the one who posted the thread "do ret paladins really suck?" some people there say that 4.3 will fix ret, being only 37 I don't know what exactly the patch notes mean, so would anyone mind explaining to a noob pally what exactly is happening to ret in 4.3?

Basically it means that Hammer of Wrath will crit less. So to "compensate" for some of this damage they boosted Judgement. When you dps with Seal of Truth you put up stacks that go up to 5. For each stack up your judgement did 10% extra damage per stack. Now in this patch it will do 20% extra damage per stack.

The other big change was 2 hand specialization. What this means is as long as you have a 2 Hander equipped (which you should) your damage is boosted by 25% instead of 20% that it currently is. Theoretically this is a 5% overall boost in damage. The other change is that Blessing of Might now gives you 20% AP boost instead of 10%. So if you have 2000 base AP then you get 400 extra AP instead of the current 200 AP.

As far as I know this is all the changes, but I could be wrong.

[zcks]

The changes won't really fix anything, they will slightly boost the damage ret does but will do nothing about the dependence on procs & RNG.


The 2 piece bonus from t13 gear will slightly speed up holy power generation though, however it still does nothing to solve the RNG of divine purpose, the RNG & melee requirements of the art of war, the gap closing problems the spec has in pvp or the dispel issues the spec has in pvp.


They did also kind of nerf ret in pvp by reducing the crit granted by sanctified wrath, on live its one of the few reasons to bring a ret paladin to ranked pvp & its mostly negated by offensive dispels as is but since the crit reduction its more or less useless.

[Deleted]

Quotes not counting for character count ftl.

dude, ret paladins currently sim just below demo locks, as the second highest class. and i'm talking about the PTR sim, not the live sim.