Monday, October 20, 2008

Enough with the QQing, and I actually mean Ret Paladins this time

This rant is in response to the second and third comment made on this post on Suicidal Zebra's blog:

The change to the aura bonus would have probably been done anyway, so I really dont see what your getting at there. Any other class with a similar buff gets a3% percent damage increase, we were getting 2%. That means there would be a reason to stack a different class from the perspective of buffing the group, which is what Blizz was trying to avoid with the expansion.

Avenging Wrath got simultaneously nerfed and buffed. As it was before, the only spec that benefitted from it was Ret. Prot may have had it hot keyed as an additional threat generator. Holy had no reason at all to use it unless they were soloing. The way it is now is far more beneficial to Paladins as a class. Also keep in mind that Ret comes with passive healing now via Divine Storm, which means that you benefit the group even more when you pop Wings by increasing your DPS and taking just a little more of the load off of the healers.

Sanctity Aura was kinda crappy compared to what we have now. The talented Ret buffs are far more useful to the group and Ret Aura is fantastic for tanks as a passive threat generator. Compare that to Sanc Aura which only helped Holy Priest damage (when was the last time you saw that?) and Paladin Holy damage (ie only you because Ret Pallies would rarely get more than one spot). And, by moving Sanctified Retribution up to 3%, that means you are only losing out on 9% of your previous damage buff. Actually probably less then that since that 1% applies to everything and everyone, not just your personal Holy damage, which was probably not even 50% of your overall damage, unless you were fighting undead or demons. And don't forget that Crusade got buffed to add 3% extra damage to all targets plus an additional 3% damage to Humanoids, Demons, Undead, and Elementals. So really, how much of a DPS increase were you getting out of Sanc Aura? Was it enough to outweigh the additional passive DPS you provide yourself and/or the tank through reflective damage? I would be willing to bet Sanc Aura was giving you far was less then you think it was.

Also keep in mind that the remaining 6% of holy damage is more then made up for by Sheath of Light increasing your spell power by 30% of your AP, AND most of our spells scale with AP and SP now instead of just SP or AP. So now our spells and attacks just got even more powerful. Combine that with 3% haste from Ret Aura as well. So tell us again why you would think that we got screwed by losing Sanc Aura?

And what about our buff to mana efficiency? I was hitting every single damage ability I could in Kara almost all the time. I had to drink 8 times through the whole run. Judgements of the Wise in itself is a huge buff to our DPS. No mana means no CS, no DS, no Holy Wrath, no Exorcism, and no Judgement. Not to mention the fact that we gained a ton of mana efficiency by only needing to up our Seals every two minutes, and we no longer have to worry about SotC, effectively eliminating and seal twisting that was needed to increase DPS.

The Vengeance nerf kinda sucked, but it frees up two points. And honestly, we are more then fine on DPS. I am still wearing mostly blues. I ran Kara today and not only topped the meters for DPS, but topped the meters for overall damage at ~19.8%. The next closest for DPS was a very very well geared Cat Druid at ~17.5% overall damage. Knowing that, its hard to make a case that we are doing bad. If the roles were to be reversed at level 80, I would still be fine with that.
So, Mr. Anonymous, I really fail to see why you are making it out like we are getting screwed at this point and already saying "GG for paladins." There is nothing to support the idea that we are going to be useless in WotLK. Far from it considering that once we get more comfortable with cooldowns and rotations, we will be able to spot heal while dpsing, providing even more utility to a group.

So lets summerize the Ret changes:
1) Double to Triple DPS
2) 3% Damage/Haste Aura
3) 3% Extra Damage (Crusade)
4) Better passive threat generation for the tank
5) Easier gear selection
6) Better healing output and capability
7) CC for 1 minute on a 1 minute cooldown on five different mob types
8) Passive group mana regen
9) Passive group healing
10) 3 instant cast AOE spells
11) Talented +50% crit to HoW, usable on mobs below 35% health now, instant cast
12) Better scalabilty with gear
13) Nearly infinite mana, even with a base mana pool.

Overall, we are getting more buffs then we know what to do with. Its easy to focus on the negative, but things are best viewed as a big picture. There is, however, a lot of reason to be concerned. History has a tendency to repeat. However, a tendency is not a guarantee, and right now Blizz is giving some much needed love to the class/spec combo that has always been considered the underdog of WoW.

Something else to keep in mind is that we are supposed to be balanced for level 80. We are ten levels low. The way I am specced, the only two things I get in 10 levels is BoK, which doesn't benefit me unless there is another Pally in the group to give me BoM. I also get Divine Strength, which will help even more with gear scaling and increase my DPS a little by way of an AP and SP increase. Other classes won't be spending 61 points in any one tree though. That means that they can go down far enough to get into the third tier of their tree to get their 11 point talent and fully buff it. Or they may even have points left over for other talents in a third tree.

The thing is, all of that is obvious. Blizz knows it. They also know that we are not going to gain just a bunch of new ablities on our way to 80 that will significantly affect our DPS. I can't believe that Blizz would be too shortsighted to realize that and nerf us "TO THE GROUND BABY!" I just don't see it happening. However, I don't see being #1 dps all the time, now and forever, regardless of gear. That should not be something that carries on to WotLK. If I can make mobs explode into a pile of goo by looking at them cockeyed, well that would make me not want to play more then having things back the way they were. Easy mode is fun for very short periods of time, but not in the long run. If easy games were the epitome of a good time, we would all be playing Minesweeper with one mine on a 10,000 square map.

6 comments:

Vaadren said...

Did some Kara yesterday, and it has really turned into EZ-Mode for a decently geared group. We had a group of mostly veteran Karazhaners, with a few first-timers, and completely cleared the place in several hours. We got too lax, thus doing accidental boss pulls, and still survived. It's fun for once, but like you said, it won't last long. I already missed the challenging nights of Karazhan I used to have.

We'll be like this for a month, then we can all level again and everyone will be happy come lvl 80.

Oh, and I tried the Minesweeper thing a long time ago. The minimum is 10 mines. Doesn't increase the fun factor though.

Dradis said...

lol! Nerf Minesweeper!

Anonymous said...

My name is adacus of suramar.
I love the new ret. We will have a permanent spot in 5 man 10 man and 25 man. our dmg is good and we scale really well. after all the maths our dps will not be = to dmg only classes but it will be within 3% so if you are better at managing your cooldowns "eek skill" you will top the chart over x rouge.
I would like to see not just paladin cooldowns but all cooldowns in the game on timers that are divisible by 3. with the global cooldown at 1.5 seconds and it does not change with haste it would make concecrate not eff up your rotation concecrate would be 9 divine storm 9 crusader strike 6. Judgement ... well just leave that alone 1 point to make it 9. that would give us a solid 9696 rotation for dpsing. with a open slot every repeating 12 seconds. /endwalloftext

Dradis said...

Yeah i would like to see 96969 rotation too, just like prot pallies have. Oh well, at this point I am not complaining about what we have, because it is leaps and bounds better then where we came from.

Chrom said...

Dradis do you use a DPS meter? What do you consider respectable Ret dps? I am in mostly s2 ret gear is there anything in particular in kara that i would benefit from or do you think most of my upgrades would be in ZA or higher?

Dradis said...

Click on my toon's link and you can see what I have. I have just started to get gear out of heroics and Kara, and I am starting to get badges. That being said, I am about half blue, half purple at this point. My last (first hehe) Kara run I did anywhere from 1200DPS in trash to 1400DPS on bosses. Helps that most of the stuff in there was demon or undead.

I would like to see your gear, so if you want to post and armory link, that would be cool. The other thing you can do is look at MaxDPS.com. They are pretty much right on with their gear, but you must look at how ech upgrade will effect you. You don't want to fall below the hit cap.

Oh, and I use Damagemeters for my damage meter. My guild usually runs Recount though, which is where I got my last DPS results. The last time I used Recount, it was buggy. However, that was almost 6 months ago, so they may have improved it by now.

Hope that helps a little!