[Ret] Judgment?

[Requital]

Well then I am dumbfounded why they changed it when the repercussions to Ret are... less-than-desirable. If they're so dead-set on it being considered a spell, maybe they could just make Ret not able to be silenced OR get something in return for being silenced - and make a couple other adjustments like Judgment still proccing the Seals (except Justice).

That is the exact reason for this thread, compiling as much data to present to Blizzard in a coherent fashion and hope they listen so we don't start mop is worst shape than cata.

[Deathgoose]

Well then I am dumbfounded why they changed it when the repercussions to Ret are... less-than-desirable. If they're so dead-set on it being considered a spell, maybe they could just make Ret not able to be silenced OR get something in return for being silenced - and make a couple other adjustments like Judgment still proccing the Seals (except Justice).

It doesn't just affect Ret, it also affects Prot, which is my main spec, with Ret being my off spec.

Granted, the amount of bosses that silence isn't huge, but since Prot's CS/HotW CD is no longer 3s but is at the 4.5 (before Haste) like Ret, and with Blizz's emphasis on tanking being more active mitigation, having one of our main HP generating abilities potentially locked out because of some silences is quite a step back for us.

It is also something that, unless I am mistake, is not an issue for the other 3 current tanks. (I don't know jack about Monks, since I will wait until live to worry about them)

[Palatinus]

Well then I am dumbfounded why they changed it when the repercussions to Ret are... less-than-desirable. If they're so dead-set on it being considered a spell, maybe they could just make Ret not able to be silenced OR get something in return for being silenced - and make a couple other adjustments like Judgment still proccing the Seals (except Justice).

Are we playing the same game?

Paladins don't get compensation for nerfs, at best they will get nerfed more. Might wanna check another class out (coughmagecough) if you want buffs when you get 'nerfs'

[Holtzmann]

Assuming not everybody is following Requital's advice to ignore me...

Let me present what I think is a fairly reasonable re-creation of what the developers' thought process regarding Judgment, Censure and Seal of Truth was:

1 - On Live, Censure is a ramp-up mechanic. Once it's fully stacked, Judgments hit for a lot more damage and attacks also deal extra weapon damage as unmitigated holy damage. If only melee attacks were able to proc Censure, the ramp-up would be too slow. The obvious solution is to allow more things to proc Censure. In come Judgment and other non-melee attacks to plug that hole.

2 - On Live, Judgment is propped up by a bunch of secondary effects and procs, including Censure, Divine Purpose, Communion (Replenishment), Long Arm of the Law, Judgments of the Pure and probably other things I missed out here. Without those things, Judgment would be pretty damn underwhelming. It's also plagued by inconsistent damage scaling if you are using different Seals. The idea in Mists it to move towards more streamlined, easier to understand and calculate mechanics, and a more active resource management system. For that, Exorcism and Judgment become Holy Power generators. Judgment loses all the mandatory bells and whistles that affected/were affected by it before and now scales independently from Seals. In exchange, it can be used to proc three different optional talents.

3 - Using Censure as a ramp-up mechanic becomes superfluous as Paladins already have Holy Power build up and Inquisition uptime to throttle their damage (Holy Avenger and similars notwithstanding). The extra damage dealt from attacking a target with Censure stacked is transferred to Seal of Truth instead. Censure is left in place as a smaller but still relevant ramp-up to reward sticking to a single target (and to make Seal of Truth better than Justice in PvE, keep on reading). Given it's not vital to stack Censure as quickly as possible anymore to reach your full damage modifier potential, and that Judgment isn't affected by it anymore, it gets reverted to melee attacks only (Crusader Strike, Templar's Verdict, auto-attacks).

As a personal criticism, I think this should have been done in Cataclysm, not Mists.

4 - Seal of Justice is intended to be useful in PvP and Seal of Truth in PvE. The 50% snare would be already powerful in Cataclysm, but the sheer amount of damage lost by not running Truth (due to its interactions with Judgment and Censure stacking) would still cause controversy. To solve that issue, the difference in damage between the two seals must be reasonably small, with Justice trading off damage for utility. Justice deals marginally more base damage than Truth, but Truth compensates with Censure. Since Judgment damage does not depend on Censure stacks anymore, Ret Paladins don't lose out nearly as much single-target damage in exchange for a passive melee snare.


That's what I think the Developers were thinking when they made the changes they did to the Paladin Seal toolbox, both in PvE and PvP. With that in mind...

5 - The developers don't want Paladins to be running around with a DoT in PvP unless they spec into Burden of Guilt for the snare, and even then they don't want Censure to be applied at range. Censure is there to give you more damage for when you manage to stick to a target long enough, not to allow you to annoy stealthers from thirty yards away. And given defensive dispels are removing all relevant debuffs in a single swoop, a team who wanted to reduce the damage done by a Paladin using the current Seal of Truth would simply need to cast one dispel to wipe out the full stack of Censure.

6 - Judgment being affected by silence mechanics is by design. While it's a nerf to damage and Holy Power generation when a Retribution Paladin is silenced while Judgment is off cooldown or close to it, it seems the devs think that particular drawback is compensated by the expanded Paladin toolkit in PvP. AKA, most of the talents we'll get to pick from. One should never look at an ability by itself, in a vacuum. Its power is relative to the entire skill set of the class, and as Malthanis pointed out Paladins are getting a bunch more toys to play with.

7 - This system is easier to balance. The damage of a single skill isn't interlocked with a bunch of modifiers from other skills or passives, meaning that if an ability is doing too much or too little damage, it can be changed with a lot less potential for massively screwing things up. I wouldn't be surprised to see Censure used as a variable for balancing PvE damage without upsetting PvP damage.

And that's more or less how I think things are meant to be. I happen to agree with that model. It seems most people in this thread disagree. Well, all I can ask is for constructive criticism to be presented, and flames to sent to /dev/null.

It doesn't just affect Ret, it also affects Prot, which is my main spec, with Ret being my off spec.

Granted, the amount of bosses that silence isn't huge, but since Prot's CS/HotW CD is no longer 3s but is at the 4.5 (before Haste) like Ret, and with Blizz's emphasis on tanking being more active mitigation, having one of our main HP generating abilities potentially locked out because of some silences is quite a step back for us.

It is also something that, unless I am mistake, is not an issue for the other 3 current tanks. (I don't know jack about Monks, since I will wait until live to worry about them)

I'm working from memory here, but the last time I played them in the Beta, Bears, Warriors and Death Knights didn't get to generate their tanking resources in any meaningful way if they weren't in range of an enemy (flight/shielded phase, for example), unless using a cooldown. Protection Paladins don't have an HP-infusing cooldown, but they have more meaningful resource generation at range baked into their basic rotation (specially if they pick Sanctified Wrath). And again, if you are trying to generate as many resources as you can, the likelihood of the silence hitting while Judgment is on cooldown increases and so the delay will be even less pronounced. Given cooldowns keep on ticking even as you are silenced, a 3-second blanket silence on the raid means little when you still have 2 seconds to go on Judgment (unless that silence comes very shortly before a big burst of damage, in which case that's some mean design).

But you have a valid point: it's going to be annoying to fight bosses with frequent AoE silences. Thankfully, there don't seem to be a lot of those lately.

[Fredzilla]

These following thoughts are in no specific order relative to your points, Holtzmann.

Censure hasn't been dispellable for quite awhile.

I don't see what Burden of Guilt has to do with a DoT, since it is solely a snare.

Why should the ability to kill more than half of our holy power generators with a silence be by design? What other melee has to worry about that (oh, right, none of them)?

There is nothing difficult about balancing judgment in regards to its effects on/with SoT, considering they did just that in 4.3 with no real problems whatsoever.

The fact that it does holy damage hardly matters. Boss resistances have been completely inconsequential in raids for years, and resistances in pvp are worthless now considering everyone who does some specific school of damage has spell pen to ignore any amount of resistance their targets might have.

We're a melee class and even with judgment as a melee attack we are still down at the bottom of melee classes with chances to proc things off melee attacks.

If you're popping zeal/aw before you have 5 stacks on the boss, you're doing it wrong.

Not wanting us "annoying stealthers from 30 yards away" is a fairly moot point as well, since any stealther who can manage to get a 4-digit arena rating is going to have stealthed long before you can judge them.

Getting a "bunch more toys to play with" is hardly a good argument for changing judgment, since a lot of said toys can very easily come at the cost of not having something we already have in our toolkit now (Oh, you want speed of light? Ok, well you lose both speed boosts you have on live now. You want a ranged snare? Too bad, you don't get repent, etc.)

[Boogieknight]

Since this is now a spell, what's the hit cap necessary for it to land? Melee hit or spell hit? Please, Dear God, tell me I don't have to shoot for 16% hit to land Judgment for Holy Power.

[Tullkas]

6 - Judgment being affected by silence mechanics is by design. While it's a nerf to damage and Holy Power generation when a Retribution Paladin is silenced while Judgment is off cooldown or close to it, it seems the devs think that particular drawback is compensated by the expanded Paladin toolkit in PvP. AKA, most of the talents we'll get to pick from. One should never look at an ability by itself, in a vacuum. Its power is relative to the entire skill set of the class, and as Malthanis pointed out Paladins are getting a bunch more toys to play with.

I dont have a problem with a new design and rly dont care about censure but in this point I think you are missing one thing. Judgment (specially in PvP) is a spell which is significantly boosted and made a key ability by several talents. Making it a spell suspectible to silence and lockout (interrupt) is not only problem on damage output and holy power generation level, its also totally gimping those talents that lot of PvPers will take. Also dont think about this whole thing as a Ret problem - it affects all 3 specs. I plan to take all 3 Judgment booster talents for holy PvP for example and as a caster I will be silenced and interrupted lot more. It looks to me like the old problem with Seal/Judge system in vanilla wow where seal was purged before you could judge it. Destroying essential part of combat system by simple click is not really wise thing.

What I read on blizzard post is that they just made it a spell to make it more simple to understand or easier to handle in game systems. This looks to me like they didnt think of all the consequences (pvp especially as they did many times before) and its good that ppl gives them the feedback and points out the potential issues with this. I dont see why anyone would spend so much time and effort as I see in this thread to prove how Blizzard mean it or how Blizzard is right

[Deleted]

Since this is now a spell, what's the hit cap necessary for it to land? Melee hit or spell hit? Please, Dear God, tell me I don't have to shoot for 16% hit to land Judgment for Holy Power.

That was my immediate thought as well, given that it's a pretty big jump in +hit required just to hit cap that single ability.

[Divineknight13]

its complete bullcrap what they are doing to paladins in mop ... judgement being a spell again ... sick so now garrote/cs/moonkin light beam/lock cs/strang and any other spell lock or silence stops our gap closer yet again .... might as well give every class in wow nova cs and ice lance so they can just auto win ....

[Holtzmann]

@Fredzilla, thanks! I'll go through your reply in order:

Censure hasn't been dispellable for quite awhile.
Fair enough, my mistake. I wrote this thing at 2 AM (you can probably tell) and forgot Censure was undispellable.

I don't see what Burden of Guilt has to do with a DoT, since it is solely a snare.
I guess I didn't word myself clearly there. The idea is that Blizzard intends for us to use Seal of Justice for our snaring needs. Those picking Burden of Guilt would be able to run Seal of Truth, which does provide a DoT in the form of Censure.

Why should the ability to kill more than half of our holy power generators with a silence be by design? What other melee has to worry about that (oh, right, none of them)?
Technically, other melee have it rougher simply by being at range. Retribution Paladins can build at least some resources at range in the form of Exorcism every 15 seconds and Judgment every <6 seconds. A silence will disrupt that, but all it does is delay your Holy Power generation and some of your damage for a couple of seconds, depending on whether the abilities are on cooldown or not. Getting silenced when you have both Exorcism and Judgment ready is indeed serious, but much less so if you have already used both abilities. Meanwhile, Enhancement Shaman can't build up Maelstrom Weapon stacks at all at range, unless they're burning a DPS cooldown on it.

Getting silenced would be disastrous if our resource generation was tied to abilities that don't have a cooldown. But Exorcism and Judgment have cooldowns that are longer than the average silence in PvP. If they manage to land a blanket silence on you before you can use either HP generator, then you might be in trouble, and if they are able to constantly silence you when Exorcism and Judgment are (almost) ready, then I'd say they'd have to be fairly skilled to track all those timers (or is using an add-on, which is another thing I don't agree with Blizzard on). So while it's very much an inconvenience, it's probably not going to be the end of the world. At least not for Retribution, Holy is another issue.

There is nothing difficult about balancing judgment in regards to its effects on/with SoT, considering they did just that in 4.3 with no real problems whatsoever.
My point is that you could not balance Judgment with Seal of Truth on against the other Seals. Judgment with five stacks of Censure hit far harder than any Judgment cast with any other Seal. If that hadn't been changed, people running Seal of Justice would lose a lot of potential DPS. Also, on the PvE balance angle, having Judgment and Seal of Truth independent from each other gives the developers more things to tweak without having to worry about side-effects. On Live those changes can be made using all those passive talents that boost Judgment damage for Retribution. In Mists, we don't have those. If you want to change Judgment damage for Retribution alone with Censure stacks still affecting it, you would have to come up with a new passive to justify it, because Judgment is the same for all specs. As it should be.

The fact that it does holy damage hardly matters. Boss resistances have been completely inconsequential in raids for years, and resistances in pvp are worthless now considering everyone who does some specific school of damage has spell pen to ignore any amount of resistance their targets might have.
Again, I blame this one on writing while late at night. I didn't mean to specify Holy damage, I meant to say it was Magic damage and so unmitigated by armor. That's an important factor in both PvP and PvE.

We're a melee class and even with judgment as a melee attack we are still down at the bottom of melee classes with chances to proc things off melee attacks.
That is a fair concern, I think. Although a lot of procs nowadays are normalized so classes that attack more quickly than others won't have an advantage, you still get a Gurthalak effect with some items. That's something interesting to bring up in the Beta forums.

If you're popping zeal/aw before you have 5 stacks on the boss, you're doing it wrong.
On Live? Certainly. Having five stacks of Censure on something boosts your damage by a non-trivial amount. On Mists, not so much. While you'd want to have five stacks up so Avenging Wrath would also boost the DoT damage, there shouldn't be any reason to hold back until you have full Censure to hit Holy Avenger.

Not wanting us "annoying stealthers from 30 yards away" is a fairly moot point as well, since any stealther who can manage to get a 4-digit arena rating is going to have stealthed long before you can judge them.
Tell that to the folks in this very thread who say they rely on Judgment to fight Rogues! I talking about them!

Getting a "bunch more toys to play with" is hardly a good argument for changing judgment, since a lot of said toys can very easily come at the cost of not having something we already have in our toolkit now (Oh, you want speed of light? Ok, well you lose both speed boosts you have on live now. You want a ranged snare? Too bad, you don't get repent, etc.)
Even in that situation I would say you have more things to do in Mists as opposed to Live, it's not like other classes/specs don't have to go through that as well. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth in the Mage forums, for example. And even if you can't use all those things at the same time, they add a layer of complexity to fighting a Retribution Paladin (or any other class/spec, really) because you can't tell what someone is going to have straight away. That might not be an advantage to us, specifically, but it is a good thing.

I dont have a problem with a new design and rly dont care about censure but in this point I think you are missing one thing. Judgment (specially in PvP) is a spell which is significantly boosted and made a key ability by several talents. Making it a spell suspectible to silence and lockout (interrupt) is not only problem on damage output and holy power generation level, its also totally gimping those talents that lot of PvPers will take. Also dont think about this whole thing as a Ret problem - it affects all 3 specs. I plan to take all 3 Judgment booster talents for holy PvP for example and as a caster I will be silenced and interrupted lot more. It looks to me like the old problem with Seal/Judge system in vanilla wow where seal was purged before you could judge it. Destroying essential part of combat system by simple click is not really wise thing.

What I read on blizzard post is that they just made it a spell to make it more simple to understand or easier to handle in game systems. This looks to me like they didnt think of all the consequences (pvp especially as they did many times before) and its good that ppl gives them the feedback and points out the potential issues with this. I dont see why anyone would spend so much time and effort as I see in this thread to prove how Blizzard mean it or how Blizzard is right

I didn't make that post to justify Blizzard's decisions or to say they're right. I was just outlining what I think was their reasoning behind the changes. Thankfully, at least Judgment being affected by silences is a very simple thing to solve if it does turn out to be a problem. It's a strictly PvP problem (PvE silences being pretty much irrelevant).

Now, PvE design is iterative. PvP design is doubly so. PvP balance is also exponentially more difficult than PvE balance. Blizzard doesn't like changing class mechanics in PvE, but they have shown to be very willing to change PvP mechanics during expansions. Why? Because as much as awesome PvPers join the Beta and give their opinions, you can't balance the game based on conjecture, you need to actually have boots on the ground testing the mechanics. The amount of PvP going on in the Beta, at all skill levels, is not enough for a good idea of what the interactions between the classes are. That's why at the beginning of an expansion there are always a couple specs that are described by the community as being massively overpowered (and I'm not talking about Mages here): PvP design and balance cannot be preemptive, it needs to react to changes in the metagame as well as players get used to their and their opponents' class abilities and develop new strategies. For PvE, those strategies are already datamined and simmed. In PvP, not as much.

[soamazzing]

you cant seriously believe the crap your raining down on us in this thread... This must be the most elaborate troll ever. I think requital has covered the main reasons why this simply can not happen. You have given excuses why its ok to nerf one of the most important abilities we have.

[Fredzilla]

"My point is that you could not balance Judgment with Seal of Truth on against the other Seals. Judgment with five stacks of Censure hit far harder than any Judgment cast with any other Seal. If that hadn't been changed, people running Seal of Justice would lose a lot of potential DPS. Also, on the PvE balance angle, having Judgment and Seal of Truth independent from each other gives the developers more things to tweak without having to worry about side-effects. On Live those changes can be made using all those passive talents that boost Judgment damage for Retribution. In Mists, we don't have those. If you want to change Judgment damage for Retribution alone with Censure stacks still affecting it, you would have to come up with a new passive to justify it, because Judgment is the same for all specs. As it should be."

In PvE, balancing judgment around other seals hardly matters since the only time you ever use any other seal (SoR) is purely for AoE, in which judgment takes a massive backseat to other abilities anyway. In PvP it also wouldn't matter that much since the idea for everyone ever is that in some cases you trade damage (SoT/Judgment w/ Censure) for utility (SoJ, and no other seal is really applicable to PvP). The fact that judgment with 5 stacks of Censure did/does/might do a lot more damage than judgment with SoJ up is in no way a problem. Knowing how blizzard is about ret pallies, they would never even dream of giving us something with damage AND utility.

[fears]

Just ignore him guys, his post history dictates he's stirring up other threads for no reason or just to boost his post count.

[Malthanis]

In PvE, balancing judgment around other seals hardly matters since the only time you ever use any other seal (SoR) is purely for AoE, in which judgment takes a massive backseat to other abilities anyway. In PvP it also wouldn't matter that much since the idea for everyone ever is that in some cases you trade damage (SoT/Judgment w/ Censure) for utility (SoJ, and no other seal is really applicable to PvP). The fact that judgment with 5 stacks of Censure did/does/might do a lot more damage than judgment with SoJ up is in no way a problem. Knowing how blizzard is about ret pallies, they would never even dream of giving us something with damage AND utility.

It's far more likely that they stripped out the massive number of effects tied to Judgment (and a great deal of people have complained about Judgment being overloaded before), in order to provide a simple, elegant solution in the form of a ranged resource generator. Specifically, removing Judgment's damage boost from Censure stacks makes it so the damage loss from using SoJustice is not so great (another thing that people complained a great deal about).

While it may not apply to gameplay, removing Judgment scaling with Seals altogether is better on the balance end of things (which Holtz mentioned). Now devs don't have to look at multiple spells and how they interact with each other in order to affect Ret damage (either up or down) when they look specifically at Judgment.

Just ignore him guys, his post history dictates he's stirring up other threads for no reason or just to boost his post count.

Continued posts like this (from anybody) will receive infractions. If you want to counter him, do it with logic and reasoning, not rallying a mob to ignore him.

[Estragenlol]

Continued posts like this (from anybody) will receive infractions. If you want to counter him, do it with logic and reasoning, not rallying a mob to ignore him.

Because nobody that thinks this change is bad has used logic and reasoning throughout this thread. We're the ones who are giving baseless opinions and not giving actual real scenarios at how this cripples all the Paladin specs in both PvE and PvP.

Right. Right?

[fears]

@Malthanis; I just felt when person A and person B meet a brick wall that both sides of the arguement become a moot point. Ignoring someone is better then carrying on pointlessly so it was merely a suggestion. As a function of this website I presented the option for people like myself who were getting aggravated by his posting. If you want to infract me do so but I violated no rules offering a peaceful resolution in the ignore function. "Just ignore him guys" doesn't harbor negativity or mob mentality unless thats your point of view, nor is it a command to people in this thread to do my bidding as I doubt anyone is that mindless. I was actually trying to maintain peace and curb things before it could potentially turn into an issue. I know we dont see eye to eye and I try to make a concious effort to not do anything to offend you.

@Requital; While I realize you ruffle feathers around here I don't think I've ever seen you do anything to hurt this class and I've always respected your input on rotations, and the hours you spend outside of the game helping people with Clc code and your hands on mentality towards preserving the class as a whole.

@Estra; I appreciate your numbers from your testing and anything you can do to help so Blizzard doesn't make us useless for another expansions first tier

Look, discussion doesn't end when both sides present their points. You consider the information presented by the other side, then either concede a point or make a rebuttal (backed up with information, of course). So instead of just saying 'ignore him' (which is very much trolling, as it can cause problems), read his points, consider them, and post back. I also don't hate you, for what that's worth. - Malthanis

[Tangra]

Ret and Prot probably need a passive that reduces silence duration by 50% (and possibly some protection against haste reduction effects as well, due to Sanctity of Battle). As far as judgement mechanics, we really need a way to keep Censure up at range so we are not punished every time there is any target switching or air phases, the spec doesn't need such a weakness as it is already fairly average in it's efficacy. They can do what ever they want to judgement as long as they address these issues in some other way.

[Elovan]

I understand if you only wanted to end the arguing and insults on both sides, but ignoring one side isn't the answer, it takes two sides to have a discussion, otherwise the thread becomes stagnant and nothing of value comes out. It is possible to have both sides without aggravation, and I think the last few posts have accomplished this, so if we can continue in the same vein all is well.

As for the matter on hand, I agree with whoever it was that posted above that there are two separate issues to be discussed, and we shouldn't let one issue affect our discussion on the other. On the one side, we have Judgment's interaction with Censure. The two biggest things this change affects is multi-dotting and ramp-up time. A slightly longer ramp-up on Censure stacks, whose relevance to our active abilities was lessened by it no longer increasing Judgment's damage, is balanced in my opinion by Judgment granting a charge of Holy Power, which affects ramp up throughout the entire fight by increasing the flow of Holy Power. Multi-dotting, while a nice source of extra damage and does add some complexity to the spec, ultimately doesn't fit the flavor of the class, and some of the complexity is retained through the glyph of Double Jeopardy, which still encourages you to Judge multiple targets. All in all, I believe Judgment not stacking Censure really isn't a big deal.

Judgment being susceptible to silence is a different beast all together, mostly affecting pvp (silences in pve are few and far inbetween). It's important to consider not only the ability itself, but also talents that are linked to Judgment. Judgment deals damage, generates Holy Power, and has the potential to increase our movement speed, snare our opponent, and stack a buff that allows us to cast a free instant Flash of Light with a power bonus if used on our teammates. Most silences last 3 seconds, a few last longer. Judgment has a 6 second cd. A player randomly silencing you probably won't be able to delay Judgment for the full duration of the Silence. However, a skilled team will more likely be able to lock you out of Judgment during critical moments, preventing you from being able to put pressure on an opponent or getting away and help support your allies with heals. If you're going up against a team loaded with silences though, maybe a better option would be to take advantage of the ability to change talents pre-fight and not front-load an ability you may potentially be locked out of (the relative value of those other talents is another discussion). As far as I'm aware, rogues are the only other melee class that can generate their resource at range, and they have to talent for both the generator and spender (Shuriken Toss and Deadly Throw). Having our ranged generator baseline is a huge bonus to resource generation other melee don't have. Ultimately, there are a lot of variables that affect this change, and I personally will reserve judgment on it until more testing has been done with the change and more concrete feedback is given.

[Tangra]

I understand if you only wanted to end the arguing and insults on both sides, but ignoring one side isn't the answer, it takes two sides to have a discussion, otherwise the thread becomes stagnant and nothing of value comes out. It is possible to have both sides without aggravation, and I think the last few posts have accomplished this, so if we can continue in the same vein all is well.

As for the matter on hand, I agree with whoever it was that posted above that there are two separate issues to be discussed, and we shouldn't let one issue affect our discussion on the other. On the one side, we have Judgment's interaction with Censure. The two biggest things this change affects is multi-dotting and ramp-up time. A slightly longer ramp-up on Censure stacks, whose relevance to our active abilities was lessened by it no longer increasing Judgment's damage, is balanced in my opinion by Judgment granting a charge of Holy Power, which affects ramp up throughout the entire fight by increasing the flow of Holy Power. Multi-dotting, while a nice source of extra damage and does add some complexity to the spec, ultimately doesn't fit the flavor of the class, and some of the complexity is retained through the glyph of Double Jeopardy, which still encourages you to Judge multiple targets. All in all, I believe Judgment not stacking Censure really isn't a big deal.

Judgment being susceptible to silence is a different beast all together, mostly affecting pvp (silences in pve are few and far inbetween). It's important to consider not only the ability itself, but also talents that are linked to Judgment. Judgment deals damage, generates Holy Power, and has the potential to increase our movement speed, snare our opponent, and stack a buff that allows us to cast a free instant Flash of Light with a power bonus if used on our teammates. Most silences last 3 seconds, a few last longer. Judgment has a 6 second cd. A player randomly silencing you probably won't be able to delay Judgment for the full duration of the Silence. However, a skilled team will more likely be able to lock you out of Judgment during critical moments, preventing you from being able to put pressure on an opponent or getting away and help support your allies with heals. If you're going up against a team loaded with silences though, maybe a better option would be to take advantage of the ability to change talents pre-fight and not front-load an ability you may potentially be locked out of (the relative value of those other talents is another discussion). As far as I'm aware, rogues are the only other melee class that can generate their resource at range, and they have to talent for both the generator and spender (Shuriken Toss and Deadly Throw). Having our ranged generator baseline is a huge bonus to resource generation other melee don't have. Ultimately, there are a lot of variables that affect this change, and I personally will reserve judgment on it until more testing has been done with the change and more concrete feedback is given.

You make some good points, however, I think that what has a lot of people very annoyed is that this nerf to ranged Censure stacking, and being silenced out of judgement, don't seem to be intentional. In other words, as far as I gather, we took two significant nerfs simply because Blizzard was doing some "house cleaning" and cleaned up Judgement mechanics without, seemingly, thinking of the consequences. Unintentional nerfs are about the most annoying thing I can think of in this game, so many people need a clearer acknowledgement from Blizzard that they actually considered these consequences and didn't just incidentally nerf the spec.

People have reason to be suspicious since this has happened before. For example, in 4.3 Ret and Prot almost completely lost the use of Holy Radiance, and this happened because of changes meant completely for Holy Paladins that had nothing to do with Ret and Prot. As pathetic as Holy Radiance was, it was Ret's only raid cooldown, and at least somewhat closed the gap between Ret and the healing brought by other hybrids such as Shadow Priests.

[Requital]

Continued posts like this (from anybody) will receive infractions. If you want to counter him, do it with logic and reasoning, not rallying a mob to ignore him.

There is no point in having a discussion with this guy none at all, We have given real results and he just babbles about why it is ok to change yet seems to know pretty much nothing about Ret PvP and very little about PvE so actually yes when one side presents information in a discussion that isn't relevant it actually is best to ignore them. We have proven everything that needs to be proven while he continues to post nonsense. He has no logic and his reasoning makes no sense what so ever.

I'm done with this thread, I compiled a list of all the related problems and I'll be presenting it in the feedback thread thank you for the help from those that were helpful you know who you are or aren't in this case.

---------- Post added 2012-07-26 at 09:13 PM ----------

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It's cool Fears you are dead on in this case and most if not all agree with you.