Blizzard removed the wrong Seal

[grimmhammer]

No, I'm not talking about Seal of Blood.

With the release of patch 3.0, Seal of the Crusader was removed because it was a DPS seal that was always going to be second to seals that added holy damage to attacks. However, it has become ever more apparent that the Seal that should have been retired is Seal of Justice.

In TBC, SoTC was impotent as a DPS seal because it was operating in an environment with only one on-demand attack (Crusader Strike).

See, the seal provided a heavy AP boost, a heavy haste boost, a decrease in auto-attack weapon damage, and an increase in Crusader Strike damage. (because it was not linked to the haste buff, it received no damage reduction, but did gain the extra attack power.

Things have changed since then, possibly most important is that all seals have judgments that deal damage. This was the major short-coming of SoTC; it didn't scale with it's Judgment debuff, and its Judgment dealt no damage on cast.

If the seal were still in existence today, this is what it would provide: a good DPS increase in auto-attack damage, a decrease in auto-attack burst, an increase in Crusader Strike damage, Divine Storm damage, Exorcism damage, Consecration damage, Righteous Vengeance damage, Judgment damage, HoW damage, and even healing.

What really strikes me about the list above is that it is an unbelievably more balanced combination of damage increases in a PvP setting than Seals like Blood and Righteousness were / are.

The major problems that have arisen in balancing Paladin burst in PvP have been caused by a system that deals burst damage by hitting enemies repeatedly with medium damage strikes that come simultaneously in clusters.

(Auto-attack + CS + SoB/SoR + SoB/SoR all at the exact same time)

This makes a Seal like Crusader the perfect 'tuning knob' (GC's new favorite PvP metaphor) for Retribution PvP damage.

It would organize Ret's damage dealing in paced, high-damage strikes, complimented by auto-attacks with lower burst but higher sustained damage.

All that would need to be done to make this Seal "the" PvP seal of choice would be to gut the Seal that should have been removed (Seal of Justice) and turn it into this:

Grants the Paladin AP equal to [600+.20*AP] and increases your melee attack speed by 40%, but each attack deals less damage. Unleashing this seal's energy will cause damage = to [1 + 0.25 * SPH + 0.16 * AP] / [(1 + 0.25 * SPH + 0.16 * AP)/Weapon speed]

and then add this to fanaticism:

While your Seal of Justice is active, your melee attacks increase your run-speed by 3/6/10% for 20 seconds. This effect does not stack with other movement speed increasing effects. Stacks up to 3 times.


Or even alternatively, a snare effect (although I personally prefer the +speed).

This would mean that Paladins in PvP would have the option to choose a Seal that better allows them to stay in melee range at the cost of their highest burst potential, as well as giving Ret a physical DPS seal for fights like Lady Deathwhisper's adds, and opening up new gearing possibilities with Armor Penetration (yes, I know it's going bye-bye, but 10 or so % armor penetration would be a very cool glyph for the seal).

[EDIT]: Forgot to mention two other good PvP attributes of this seal: It would mean less unresistable, un-mitigated by armor damage for a melee DPS spec, and it would mean Paladin PvP builds could be more viable without placing 5 points in holy.

[Copain]

Is it that big of deal? Pally DPS is fine as it is. I did like attack speed, but it wasn't super great.

[grimmhammer]

Is it that big of deal? Pally DPS is fine as it is. I did like attack speed, but it wasn't super great.

I don't know, I suppose not. I personally think it would be more balanced in PvP, as I stated above, and I think it provides a more interesting option in Seal choice than what we have currently which is: "Highest +holy damage, but you have to stack a dot" or "medium +holy damage that can't be parried/dodged/missed but it can't crit" or "low + holy damage but it hits three targets"

The current three are very limited in application, and while SoC and SoV are both used in PvE, SoR is effectively the only PvP seal.

If SoTC existed as I posted, it would be used on kite-classes, but SoR would still be used on melee fights.

[Deleted]

I loved Seal of the Martyr. The only actual decent seal. Good times.

[lillendal]

I wouldn't mind a new PvP seal. A little tired of Righteousness and its inadequacy, and your idea looks pretty neat, however, PoJ is good enough, so don't really need the run-speed bonus.

Also, as stated above, Ret PvE is FINE.

edit: also misses martyr.

[grimmhammer]

I wouldn't mind a new PvP seal. A little tired of Righteousness and its inadequacy, and your idea looks pretty neat, however, PoJ is good enough, so don't really need the run-speed bonus.

Also, as stated above, Ret PvE is FINE.

edit: also misses martyr.

I'm not pretending that SoTC would increase Ret DPS in PvE, because it really wouldn't except in a fight in which the mob is resistant to magic damage. I think it only makes sense to have the option of a physical DPS seal as Retribution.

[Styria]

I loved Seal of the Martyr. The only actual decent seal. Good times.

a prot pally told me the seal sucked because it made it harder for the healers to keep him up. :

R.I.P. SoM/SoB

[Shelly]

You do know that one of the reasons they removed it is that it just would scale extremely poorly over a 2-minute fight right?

So if it buffed you to 40% more damage for your first attack while it was up and you auto-attack once every 3-seconds, then in 14 seconds you are back to 100% damage and it's all downhill from there.

So you'd have to refresh the seal once every 14 seconds on yourself, probably adding a /cancel-aura to it as well.

That's just not fun.

[BDF]

Burst is a very strong utility pve and pvp, but especially so in the latter. What makes you think this seal would get used any more than Seal of Justice does now?

[Styria]

Burst is a very strong utility pve and pvp, but especially so in the latter. What makes you think this seal would get used any more than Seal of Justice does now?

because it's only somewhat useless. not completely useless.

[grimmhammer]

You do know that one of the reasons they removed it is that it just would scale extremely poorly over a 2-minute fight right?

So if it buffed you to 40% more damage for your first attack while it was up and you auto-attack once every 3-seconds, then in 14 seconds you are back to 100% damage and it's all downhill from there.

So you'd have to refresh the seal once every 14 seconds on yourself, probably adding a /cancel-aura to it as well.

That's just not fun.

That's not how the seal functions, you're misinterpreting the tooltip because of the word 'each'.

Fills the Paladin with the spirit of a crusader for 30 sec, granting X melee attack power. The Paladin also attacks 40% faster, but deals less damage with each attack. Only one Seal can be active on the Paladin at any one time.

'deals less damage with each attack' should be rewritten as 'but your melee attacks deal less damage'.

Or even more specific, 'your auto-attacks deal less damage'.

It doesn't degrade your damage as you attack, it simply lowers the weapon damage of auto-attacks due to normalization with the haste portion.

[grimmhammer]

Burst is a very strong utility pve and pvp, but especially so in the latter. What makes you think this seal would get used any more than Seal of Justice does now?

Because it exchanges some burst for some utility.

[Kairu]

Personally, I'm glad seal of justice stayed, for pvp at least. I can't how many times I've run at a warlock without any method of interrupt up, so I swap to justice and pray for a proc. Lots of times its worked, too.

[zcks]

I loved Seal of the Martyr. The only actual decent seal. Good times.

Really they aught to just reduce all seal damage & give us some more attacks that interact with each other so that we are not considered a faceroll class, the reason we get no respect as a spec is because we don't really have allot of dependence on what order we use our attacks in & because they have no interaction with each other. Sure we have a priority system in what attacks to use first based on whats off cd but even if we don't follow it we can still fill our role decently.

Think about it, with all the changes over the last several months & increases to resilience effect & reduction to healing in pvp our burst is not what it used to be anyway. What we need is more offensive utility not more burst because burst is so hard to balance right when you have a class/spec that can heal & reduce damage as well as we can anyway.

[Guitarn]

I loved Seal of the Martyr. The only actual decent seal. Good times.

It was only "interesting" back when being healed restored your mana. That was a unique class mechanic for replenishing our resource.

However, it was flawed in that it scaled well enough to be cumbersome in nearly every situation.

Therefore, it was not and never would have been decent. What you miss is the massive burst, which I also miss. But the self damage aspect was just terrible and it's fantastic that it finally got removed.

----

SotC was a relic from Vanilla back when it was a different kind of damage seal. All it did was force you to judge it on a target simply for the damage buff before actually dealing damage. This kind of build-up mechanic was replaced with the creation of the new SoV.

Old SotC was useless after it's initial nerf in Vanilla. It was never a "DPS" seal after that. Ever. Do not mistake some interesting flavor for the 10 seconds before you judged it as anything even remotely "dps" oriented.

Seal of Justice is fantastic for it's purpose and I have no idea why you would ever want to remove it.

[grimmhammer]

SotC was a relic from Vanilla back when it was a different kind of damage seal. All it did was force you to judge it on a target simply for the damage buff before actually dealing damage. This kind of build-up mechanic was replaced with the creation of the new SoV.

Old SotC was useless after it's initial nerf in Vanilla. It was never a "DPS" seal after that. Ever. Do not mistake some interesting flavor for the 10 seconds before you judged it as anything even remotely "dps" oriented.

It was never used as a DPS seal because Seal of Command was far more powerful than any other seal, SoTC didn't benefit from JoTC, and using SoTC meant passing up Judgment as another on-demand attack.

I've outlined in my post why I believe that in WoTLK, the Retribution tree would synergize with the seal much better.

Seal of Justice is fantastic for it's purpose and I have no idea why you would ever want to remove it.

It's a terrible mechanic from a PvP standpoint, and most players understand why it will be gone or drastically changed at some point. It's the last mechanic of its kind and the only reason it hasn't been changed yet is because it isn't used very often.

[Derlan]

SotC was for levellin weapon skills!

[Requital]

You are right about them removing the wrong seal but it's Seal of Blood that never should have been removed, DPSing with a tank Seal is stupid and PvPing with a level 1 leveling Seal is just the same.

[Moshy]

SotC was for levellin weapon skills!

This! Leveling my ret pally in BC and any time I got a new weapon that I didn't have skill for I instantly went to blasted lands, got one of the bugged dudes and started wailing on him with SotC :3.

Also: Seal of blood was a stupid mechanic tbh the recoil wasn't actually helping anyone and made another reason to not have ret in a raid though was pretty funny when a tank was using seal of blood for "more threat".

[Guitarn]

]
It was never used as a DPS seal because Seal of Command was far more powerful than any other seal, SoTC didn't benefit from JoTC, and using SoTC meant passing up Judgment as another on-demand attack.

It was never used as a dps seal because it was a terrible dps seal. It's sole purpose after it's initial nerf in Vanilla was simply to put a debuff on the mob.

Before that, it was the ONLY dps seal. It was so retardedly overpowered that it was changed.

]
I've outlined in my post why I believe that in WoTLK, the Retribution tree would synergize with the seal much better.

I think to you it would synergize better, but from my point of view, it would unnecessarily complicate it.

]
It's a terrible mechanic from a PvP standpoint, and most players understand why it will be gone or drastically changed at some point. It's the last mechanic of its kind and the only reason it hasn't been changed yet is because it isn't used very often.

It's quite interesting for pvp holy. It's more than just the flavor SotC was at least. I'll concede that it's uses are more specific than other seals, but it's still a far cry from how useless SotC was.

SotC was for levellin weapon skills!

You've got it!

You are right about them removing the wrong seal but it's Seal of Blood that never should have been removed, DPSing with a tank Seal is stupid and PvPing with a level 1 leveling Seal is just the same.

Learn to change with the times.