Ret Ideas

[Welk]

After listening to the outcries from the ret community in response to the most recent incomplete patch notes i decided to post a few ideas for funsies.

Mana - With the loss of SA, ret mana return has nearly disappeared. We're talking OOM after a handful of "rotations". It has been noted via blue posts the planned way to restore mana return is via JotW. The problem here is, the amount returned from said talent would need to be roughly 22% in order to return the same amount of mana (assuming the mob has absolutely no aoe) gained from pre SA nerf. Keep in mind that on fights such as this (think pathwerk) we were already struggling to keep up mana. This puts even more dependency on an ability that is already first and foremost in the minds of ret pallys. One idea that came to mind was not to buff JotW but to give crusader strike the same mana return. This would allow us to gain small bursts of mana multiple times in our "rotation" without certian fears: if we are silenced we can still crusader strike to get mana, if disarmed can still judge to get mana, and would ultimately give CS the added affect ret's have been looking for since the loss of judgement refresh.

Damage - It has been recorded that Ret dps in ptr is laughable at best. "Rock bottom" would best describe it. There are several easy ways to repair this, the first and most obvious is allowing vengeance to stack 5 times. I know this idea was tried out once and rejected but that was before other classes recieved the buffs they currently have on ptr. 6% increased total damage would most certainly help us contend with the others classes in the "2nd bucket" of dps. Another idea, one that would help us establish an actual rotation, is moving the holy talent purifying power to the top 1, 2 or 3 tiers. It has been admited that the goal was to get rets to move into the other trees but frankly there has been no reason to, on the ptr, outside of the str bonus in prot. Something like 17 talents are left over with no further talents to increase dps. Allowing rets to attain purifying power easily would establish a rotation, increase sustained dps, and slightly help our mana issues. 3 birds with 1 stone ;p.

SoB Glyph - I need not list the problem here but i do still have a suggestion. There have been many many recent forums asking for sob recoil to be abolished after the loss of SA. Yes, the idea is to do higher damage than our other seals at the expense of health but with the above problems (like our damage already being low while using our most deadly seal) it just seems like more of a liability than an asset. The recoil has gotten to be pretty hard hitting with plenty of room to go at the current rate of gear growth. An idea that came to mind is: rather than put SA increase on the glyph (which we all know wont be used by anyone) why not make the glyph eliminate or reduce SoB recoil?

Talents - It has also been announced that the current paladin talent trees are incomplete. Prot seems to have been taken care of and holy is virtualy, now, without complaints. Ret is still lacking on a fairly big level. Yes, we would love to just throw all our talents into the one tree and walk away happily out dps'ing the world, but that is a far reach from the current state. I failed here to even form concrete ideas, just things that would be nice. An added affect on CS would be lovely, something to buff the damage from RV perhaps. Others have suggested moving into the holy tree for things like improved int but honestly with the way ret pallys are geared what good would that possibly do? We have very good talents to help in pvp but again, this post was designed for the ret paladin raider. Anyways, i posted these ideas in the hopes of getting some sort of response that would hint at the direction ret paladins are to be carried (hopeful that direction is not "to the ground).

[Ghul]

dunno what to say other than: dude you have critically hit the nail on the head!

the idea of crusaderstrike giving mana back is also totally neat and shouldnt be a problem pve and pvp-wise because it is just a managain and not an +whateverdamage-debuff dot or even ms. so this would totally work out as a mainaregain, brilliant!
i also totally agree with the other points and also think that the ret-tree is incomplete and there has to be something getting added, also crosspeccing into prot or holy would be nice. from a logical standpoint out i would go for the holytree cause ret does holydamage-->holytree!

keep it up man!

[Ghâzh]

SoB Glyph - I need not list the problem here but i do still have a suggestion. There have been many many recent forums asking for sob recoil to be abolished after the loss of SA. Yes, the idea is to do higher damage than our other seals at the expense of health but with the above problems (like our damage already being low while using our most deadly seal) it just seems like more of a liability than an asset. The recoil has gotten to be pretty hard hitting with plenty of room to go at the current rate of gear growth. An idea that came to mind is: rather than put SA increase on the glyph (which we all know wont be used by anyone) why not make the glyph eliminate or reduce SoB recoil?

SoB itself is a problem. It's sort of trying to balance retri pvp damage because in most cases you don't want to be self damaging yourself so you'll end up using Seal of Command instead. Now, SoC won't do nearly as big crits as SoB so it tunes down retri burst. If they made SoB glyph reducing recoil that would just buff our pvp "burstiness" as we would most likely choose SoB over SoC.

I also think the whole point of seal of blood is gone if they reduce the self damage. Seal that's supposed to damage yourself would end up being pretty much same as SoC, only doing bigger crits while not being so random and having a weird side effect. Now than the SA is out of our reach the whole seal feels lame. They could just remove it and slightly change SoC, maybe add two glyphs other boosting it's usefulness in terms of pve and other in pvp.

That'd of course be a nerf to our sustained pve damage and they would have to make it up other way. Other possibility could be to just make SoC look clearly better in pvp without buffing its damage, give it some utility that you would not want to miss no matter what. Then remove the recoil from SoB, reduce it's damage abit and make a glyph to f.ex give us some passive expertise which wouldn't benefit you in pvp environment.

The whole thing is problematic :/ No matter what you do you're in danger to change things too much in good or bad way. If they leave it like it is now, SoB becomes just bad design which is even worse.

[belfpala]

The whole thing is problematic :/ No matter what you do you're in danger to change things too much in good or bad way. If they leave it like it is now, SoB becomes just bad design which is even worse.

Agreed, it is problematic. We need either a seal that does more damage in pve (like blood) with a drawback for pvp. Or we need other abilities to do damage in pve that are difficult to use in pvp (without having a higher damage seal). Or we simply need Command to be more attractive than it is for pvp.

Not sure how to accomplish either of the latter if blood recoil is removed.

SoB Glyph - [ . . . ]

I posted this elsewhere, but here it is again:

Glyph of Seal of Blood
Minor Glyph
When zoned into a 5, 10, 25, or 40 player instance, your Seal of Blood no longer damages you.

Talents - [ . . . ]

I still want some kind of improved Consecration talent deep in ret (or even not so deep, so prot can get it). Make the ticks able to crit or something. ::shrug::

[Elementium]

Eh, I say buff SoR and delete SoB/SoM. as for talents there's a few bases that haven't been touched for ret yet, we could get expertise, haste, or armor pen from a talent. I'd say it would even be nice if the prot talant for Stamina and Expertise were lowered down so we could dip into it (would be especially nice if they reworked SoB/SoM to keep the health reduction but was still useful somehow).

I just hope blizzard pulls through. I don't feel like the few months we've been on par has done the paladin class justice for all the crap we took.

[Slimjimjr]

SoB Glyph - I need not list the problem here but i do still have a suggestion. There have been many many recent forums asking for sob recoil to be abolished after the loss of SA. Yes, the idea is to do higher damage than our other seals at the expense of health but with the above problems (like our damage already being low while using our most deadly seal) it just seems like more of a liability than an asset. The recoil has gotten to be pretty hard hitting with plenty of room to go at the current rate of gear growth. An idea that came to mind is: rather than put SA increase on the glyph (which we all know wont be used by anyone) why not make the glyph eliminate or reduce SoB recoil?

As has most likely already been said, this would more than like make it too powerful for pvp. But something that came to mind after reading this that might be a salution would be: first, if it already doesn't, make Sacred Shield absorb the damage from SoB/SoM recoil - second, make the glyph cause you melee swings (or one or more special attacks) refresh the durtion of Sacred Shield when SoB/SoM is active. This way the the recoil could be deminish without completely removing the "flava" of the seal and not make it too powerful for pvp as SS could still be dispelled.

Also i think SoC needs a buff in the utility department (as i think has been mentioned) to make it THE pvp seal. Something like a slow or selfheal or whatever so that pvp dmg can be kept seperate from pve (for the most part cuz we all know someone will find a way to exploit) and one doesn't suffer from the other. Seeing how bare the ret tree is right now, there is plenty of room for improvements here and there, but is it can be challenge in the name of balance.

Edit: I had an idea come to me bout SoC. How bout adding a talent or adding to an existing talent that increase resilience rating by a small amount (4 or 5%) while SoC is active. I can see how that might become too powerful but just throwing it out there.

[Agathon]

Well since no serious ret uses SoComm for pvp i think they dont need to worry about making it "too good" because it needs a really huge buff to be used a again and not beeing called "Seal of the Casino" anymore...

Making it like a weaker version of crippling poison or add 20% healreduction would obviously be the way to go...

[ShinKosh]

Everyone is coming up with the same idea about making the Glyph of Seal of Blood remove recoil damage but why should we have to sacrifice a whole glyph to be viable? I dont know what it should do tbh but the removal of the recoil damage should be a normal thing.

As for PvP, with the nerf to Imp HoJ, our only reiliable interrput I'm hoping there will be a new fancy thing added, either like MS or like the new UA for warriors. Several people have said Crusader Strike should have had a Spell Breaker effect and this was laughed off as over powered.

Now warriors get it. Win.

[meliancill]

im playing the ptr as of now and i can tell you that SoR ( even though it kills me to say this ) is righ at doing more damage than SoB. its quite sad but properly geared SoR ( 4200 ap wich most well geared rets are at self buffed ) is doing 650 damage ( for a wepon hit ) and 1815 judgments. while SoB is doing 550 a wepon hit and 1790 judgments. the only diffrence is SoR cant crit on wepon attacks but SoB can.

[ShinKosh]

Tell me your taking the piss?

You're saying the new Ret dps seal is a holy one with a glyph spent on it?

[Astray]

About Seals:

Having a glyph that takes away Martyrs/Bloods Self-damage is a bad idea.
Making Righteousness do more damage that Martyr/Blood is also a bad idea.

The reason is:
Wheres the point in having different seals if there are no differences?

Seal of Righteousness is the Holy-Pally Seal, so they should make it scale better of spell power instead of attack power.
Seal of Vengeance/Corruption if for tanking. All this need is improved damage while 5 Stacks are on the target. 5(!!!) Holy damage per hit is useless.
Seal of Command is the PvP-Seal. So this should be more about Randomness and Burst. The Chance to procc should be halfed and the damage doubled.
Seal of the Martys/Blood is the PvE Seal. It does damage at the cost of the paladins own life. It should be enough damage to make it unreasonable to use in PvP and not too much too heal while in groups.
The problem here is: the seals damage is almost nothing, the judgement is a lot and too bursty. They could change this, so that the selfdamage from the seal is a bit more and the judgements a bit less and maybe build in some "cannot exceed 20% of the paladins life"
The penalty itself should remain, its what makes the seal special.

[Chmur]

You're saying the new Ret dps seal is a holy one with a glyph spent on it?

Yes.

[iktankniet]

im playing the ptr as of now and i can tell you that SoR ( even though it kills me to say this ) is righ at doing more damage than SoB. its quite sad but properly geared SoR ( 4200 ap wich most well geared rets are at self buffed ) is doing 650 damage ( for a wepon hit ) and 1815 judgments. while SoB is doing 550 a wepon hit and 1790 judgments. the only diffrence is SoR cant crit on wepon attacks but SoB can.

how is SoR raidbuffed? still better then SoB? might be that the scaling isnt as good of SoR

and still we have to wait what will happen with the SoB glyph

i agree with the poster about the seals

[meliancill]

im just telling you whats on the ptr. if you say im wrong you spend 2 hours downloading it and test it yourself.

[ShinKosh]

Yes.

Nooooooooooooooooooo!!

*drops to knees, Planet of the Apes style*

[ShinKosh]

As for all this SoB for PvE and SoC for PvP, I still want SoC to be the actual Ret seal and Blood to be the getto dps seal. It's a talent after all

And SoB shouldn't do recoil damage, not with SA being removed. That was the whole point of it.

[Ghâzh]

Well since no serious ret uses SoComm for pvp i think they dont need to worry about making it "too good" because it needs a really huge buff to be used a again and not beeing called "Seal of the Casino" anymore...

Not quite true, I don't know where on earth are you getting this from. Retri paladins in pvp with SoB are like a paper.

I personally like SoC at least with my 2v2 combo. The fact that it's a quarenteed crit against stunned targets makes it superior compared to SoB. And if you're not playing with a healer I'm sure you don't wanna be killing yourself with the recoil (up to 2,5-3k from crits).

[Agathon]

well okay without a healer maybe...but for statistics:

http://www.sk-gaming.com/arena/playe...ll/23/all/all/

out of the first 10 ranked rets armory worked in my case on 9 and 7 of them did not even skill SoComm and for the rest its unclear if they actual use it....so this is where on earth iam getting this from...pure damn statistics

The fact that it's a quarenteed crit against stunned targets makes it superior compared to SoB.

still its significantly less dps....it has been discussed to death.

[Chmur]

Nooooooooooooooooooo!!

*drops to knees, Planet of the Apes style*

Yes. Redcape modeled it according to PTR, it's on EJ ret thread, page 94ish. However, I doubt that will go live as it is. See, SoB damage was so high because of the recoil rendering it unusable in pvp (in theory, haha) and I doubt they'd go live such devastating thing as SoR / SoV, because the consequence in arena play would be endless. As well, if you add some talent decluttering, 5 pointer in prot to increase healing done / received, buffed JotW the outcome of such equation is very strong arena support class, very hard to beat retadin. So, there ya go, I really don't think it will go live as it is. Or, in the worst case, it will go live and we will suffer brainless hotfixes for next two weeks, doing irreversible damage to our class and what's left from our once-so-fun gameplay.

However, it's current PTR tc showing this.

[ShinKosh]

Or, in the worst case, it will go live and we will suffer brainless hotfixes for next two weeks, doing irreversible damage to our class and what's left from our once-so-fun gameplay.

Come on man, when have we ever been hotfixed in such a game breaking way that hurts us so badly. At least Divine Storm is still holy damage.

*cries*