The Enigma Order

oO .. the spotlight over already? that was fast.

Kinda expected. Why not reroll since pallies will never be good

tested it, not that bad, except judgement of the wise and

Righteous Vengeance changed to - When your Judgement and Divine Storm spells deal a critical strike, your target will take 8/16/24/32/40% additional damage over 8 sec.

suck monkey

allow me to savour this moment for a few seconds



AHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAA!

ok that was great, honestly, i don't understand how blizz could make them so OP

guess it's true.... paladins are the easiest class to play for everyone, even the most clueless players... well, once every year atleast

Argent War Horn http://www.wowhead.com/?item=40492 is mega fun.

I can really feel the love of paladins here

they actually nerfed us more

Hello paladins,

Sorry we didn't get a chance to pre-announce these changes before the data were pushed to the beta. I won't try to sugarcoat it -- these are nerfs.

As I tried to explain before, we concluded a couple of weeks ago that Retribution was doing too much damage in PvP. We tried to nerf the burst damage through the previous changes to Divine Storm etc. Unfortunately, those changes didn't prove sufficient. Not only were paladins still destroying other classes in PvP, but we also found their PvE damage, even at level 80, was too high. Many classes were concluding they were too weak based on comparing their numbers to paladin numbers (and to be fair, hunters and in some cases mages and warriors).

Here are the new changes:

1) Judgements of the Wise: Mana gained reduced from 33% to 15% of base mana. We spent many hours arriving at this number. For example, we did a lot of Patchwerk fights, watching the mana bar to see when and if it ever went down. In BGs, we were seeing paladins able to go from target to target without pausing even when unleashing all of their attacks. While we don't want you to go OOM in a few seconds, we don't want you to ignore the mana bar either. Mana is not rage -- warriors can't typically start a battle with a full bar.

2) Judgement of Wisdom: mana gained reduced to 1% of maximum mana and proc frequency cut by 50%. This ability was flat out better than Vampiric Touch when the mana provided between the two really needs to be close in order for the decision between Shadow priest and Retribution paladin to be a real one.

3) Judgement and Seals: Damage reduced by 20%. This is the major damage adjustment -- a lot of damage was coming from these. We do realize this hurts Holy and Protection as well, and that is something for which we are prepared to offer compensation (particularly if it hurts Protection's threat generation).

4) Hammer of Wrath: Now can’t be used until the target is below 20% health. Our rule of thumb is that core "Execute-style" abilities work at 20% and talented abilities work at 35% health. We originally had Hammer at 35% based on some other limitations of the spell.

5) Art of War: Increased damage bonus to Judgements, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm. I'll report back on the exact numbers here when we've settled on them.

I also want to add that the token Blessing of Might change wasn't intended as a joke -- it is designed so that Battle Shouts won't cancel the longer and more expensive Blessing of Might in a group setting.

These seem like pretty severe nerfs, but that was the intention. It is difficult for some players to ever be truly objective with issues surrounding their class, but in this case we felt Ret was severely overpowered. This was not in the realm of small tweaks to fix (though we did try originally). We overhauled the paladin class for Lich King, so it is unfortunate but not too surprising that the numbers for the dps spec require a lot of iteration. The mistake is ours, not the fault of the player base or beta testers.

Nerfing a spec or class is never fun. It means that our initial estimates of numbers were off and we know that the community is going to react negatively (to put it mildly). But we have to try and keep the game in a relatively balanced state and that is going to mean making decisions that are unpopular sometimes. If you need to blame someone for the nerfs, blame me.

As always, if we over-compensated, we'll adjust the numbers again. But as I said, our initial round of nerfs wasn't sufficient. Lest you fear that Lich King is upon as and you won't see any additional changes, that is not our point of view. We changed a lot in the game and we need to be able to rectify problems. I would expect early patches or even hotfixes to deal with class or balance problems, and hopefully these will slow down as we get closer to major content releases. But nothing is off the table after we ship, down to rearchitecting talent trees if we think that is called for. This isn't to suggest we aren't happy with the state of the game. Rather, my word that we will continue to iterate on problem areas as they come up.

I also want to stress that we do not make balance decisions based on the QQ of other classes. At most, if there is a pretty vocal outcry that will encourage us to rerun the numbers to see if something is amiss. As vocal, and sometimes passionate and even logical as forum posts can be, they represent a fraction of the entire fanbase and it would be foolish for us to clobber one group of players solely based on the whining from another group.

Go ahead and vent if you have to. We won't delete posts or ban posters in this thread unless they are overly offensive. We do ask that you not launch a thousand other threads so that other paladin issues can still be discussed. Likewise, we have no problem with other classes engaging in the discussion but outright gloating or trolling will be frowned upon.

And I do apologize for putting you through this.

doesnt make much sense to me, by the looks of damage meters and stuff in raids ret palas arent nr1 dmg meter, i know we are way to op in pvp, but nerfing our mana regen will alsoaffect our pve dps, well i cant say that for sure untill ive tested it, but like the post says if its to big a nerf then they will fix it :L i hope

Did you guys actually have mana problems in PVE Phill?

Mojorising wrote:

(im sure we will see a balance druid nerf incomming within few weeks too)

Why? Do we need a nerf?

they still aint nerfing warrior, atm they are the best dmg dealers, one of the best in WotLK, tho I'm sure enrfs will come for us as well. I've also been lurker your WW's reports! Namino, you're doing quite some dmg out there;o 2.5k on brut is pretty fly, tho I still have to see any of your dps warriors do some srs dmg, as they could go up to 5k dps on brut. its like rageo says tho, it really is easier for them to have them op, and then nerfing them, causes less whine than having them terrible, then buffing them to op so all the other classes can whine. this way they usually only get 1 set of whines instead of 2 sets.

also, bit offtopic: really gz on felmyst and a hopefully twins and muru kill:D

Enimusha wrote:

Why? Do we need a nerf?

TO THE GROUND!

Enimusha wrote:

Did you guys actually have mana problems in PVE Phill?

Depends what you mean Eni. If you mean mana problems in TBC, well playing long boss fights was continous chain potting and usually paladins went OOM even with chaining (at least on fight like brutallus before boss health nerf). During trash clear i needed to sit and drink almost after every pull, so i would say we had mana problems in TBC.

After 3.0.2 we didn't got any mana problems because new talent that gave 33% base mana back after every judgement. That was propably bit over, but current nerf is propably going too much out. There's some target dumies test already done and with normal dps rotation paladins go OOM in 1min 40sec if not using any pots or divine plea. That's just way too soon for most of the fight, especially when we can't anymore chain pot.

I don't mind too much about our dps nerfs nor burst nerfs, as i playing PvP is so minor part of my wow experience. However, i'm pretty concerned about these kind of radical changes just two weeks before launch. Similar things happened just before TBC and most of them was reverted around year later, after blizzard finally admitted they had push it too far away. My biggest concern is that, if these have pushed too far again, it will once again take like year before blizzard takes action to fix errors they have made. So that's why i really hope blizzard will be carefull evaluating changes they have now made and be ready take action to fix, for example upcoming mana problems during pve fights, if it's proven fact. Currently i'm waiting more than anything that this fuzz would start to calm dawn and we could start see some actually reports about beta raiding paladins how they can survive during PvE raids, after these changes

Sure you wasnt nr 1 on dmg meter, but you arent supposed to either in the first place

That's not true mojo, as you should know. Blizzard has stated many times that they changed design philosophy in WotLK and they want every class well played be able to top DPS meters. During TBC hybrids had around 75% lower dmg due the fact that they bring nice buffs to raid. Now there's no these special buffs anymore, so classes should have pretty equal dmg. Though well played mage should beat well playd retadin in minor faction for example. That's why i can't see anything going wrong when namino continously beat our dps meter, he's always been pretty good as player. That's why i wouldn't be too sure about seeing any oomkin nerfs going, overall moonkin spec is quite balanced isn't it?


I'm pretty sure you are familiar with these, but at least i found one blue post about class dps in wotlk

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/threa … id=2000#43

Ino wrote:

why not? any class should be able to be nr1, in vanilla and tbc hybrid classes were blanaced to do 75% dmg of other dps classes, now theyve changed it to 100%

i havent seen a single place where blizzard states 100%

In the post von linked they say:

We mean unless you are spec'd for healing or tanking, then your dps should be "close" to another class with the same gear and skill.

further down that post he says:

There are reasons we use mushy words like "close", "subjective" and "viable."

He gives great examples of why your dps should be "close" to the pure classes, but its never mentioned that you should be on the top.
It breaks down to idividual skills in the end, not just spamming a rotation, because there are no limitations on mana for retribution paladins.


When i look over the changes i read:

1) Judgements of the Wise: Mana gained reduced from 33% to 15% of base mana. We spent many hours arriving at this number. For example, we did a lot of Patchwerk fights, watching the mana bar to see when and if it ever went down. In BGs, we were seeing paladins able to go from target to target without pausing even when unleashing all of their attacks. While we don't want you to go OOM in a few seconds, we don't want you to ignore the mana bar either. Mana is not rage -- warriors can't typically start a battle with a full bar.

2) Judgement of Wisdom: mana gained reduced to 1% of maximum mana and proc frequency cut by 50%. This ability was flat out better than Vampiric Touch when the mana provided between the two really needs to be close in order for the decision between Shadow priest and Retribution paladin to be a real one.
Has to do with endless mana. Fair change. this meens palas can still give quite some dmg, but there is now a limit of how long they will be able too.

This is a good change. It atleast give ret palas the same limitations as other mana classes.

3) Judgement and Seals: Damage reduced by 20%. This is the major damage adjustment -- a lot of damage was coming from these. We do realize this hurts Holy and Protection as well, and that is something for which we are prepared to offer compensation (particularly if it hurts Protection's threat generation).

that one hurts. But gearwise it will scale down to other classes.
With my crapgeared pala, i killed lvl 70 mobs close to the rate my druid does. I can fraps it, if you think im making it up

4) Hammer of Wrath: Now can’t be used until the target is below 20% health. Our rule of thumb is that core "Execute-style" abilities work at 20% and talented abilities work at 35% health. We originally had Hammer at 35% based on some other limitations of the spell.

Back to pre-patch execute style. This will lower the chance of dominating other players mobs with 15% Not gamebreaking in anyways, but quite the opposite.

Art of war will get some change they dont have the numbers for yet. 20% more critical dmg as it is now + instant heal. Will be a dps nerf as well.


all this isnt game breaking and doesnt meen ret palas wont be able to do dmg anymore. It meens the dmg will be lowered to fit the gear lvl better than it is now + you wont be able to get going forever.
It doesnt meen you will go oom like everyone seems to think. There are still other classes in raids, exept paladins that have mana regen abilities, so you have to rely more on them, than just be a selfsufficient mana machine. Seems fair to me.