Spooncraft

Unbelievably long post on all things Paladin. We got A LOT of attention over the weekend. We’re getting nerfs to retribution again and at the same time Blizzard is fully aware of all the glaring issues with Protection and Holy suffering from the nerfs.

Yeah this is somewhat crazy but it’s a good read.

Holy paladin potential AE healing spell
Just say for sake of argument that anything remotely like Circle of Healing is off the table. Just pretend we said that it goes against the vision of the paladin class or whatever to ever AE heal (that’s not true, but just roll with me here). Now then, what is the one healing spell you would want added to your repertoire? (src)

Retribution Paladin
We LOVE Ret paladins. Seriously. We made a ton of changes to the spec that we wouldn’t have done if we didn’t care what happened to the class. When we did Naxx tests and people brought Ret paladins, it was great. Even before they became overpowered, there were several posts by Ret pallies saying how they liked the changes to their class (so I don’t think it was just an issue that they were rolling over everyone that made them fun).

Sadly, you were overpowered by a considerable margin in both PvE and PvP. That was our fault (mine really) and not anything the community did. Most Ret pallies actually seem to agree they were OP and only argue with the magnitude of the nerfs. (src)

Abilities uptime and mana cost
You should be able to spam Consecrate if you use Divine Plea. This is what we, and I believe others, have found. You should be able to use Divine Storm, Crusader Strike and a Judgement without Divine Plea and keep mana up almost indefinitely. (src)

Hurray even MORE Retribution nerfs!
I’m attempting to post this early since the Ret community felt totally surprised last time.

We are looking at some way of making Avenging Wrath and Divine Shield mutually exclusive. This may be through Forbearance, if we can reduce the Forbearance duration through a hotfix. The bubble is intended as a defensive measure. Yet bubble+wings currently is used a lot in BGs and Arenas and helps contribute to the feeling of being destroyed by a Retribution paladin while you are unable to respond.

My apologies to the Ret paladins who already feel picked on. We are really trying hard to not overdo anything but even the last round of pretty severe nerfs didn’t seem to do enough to Ret’s dominance of PvP.

We are also sympathetic to the notion that if Ret can’t do insane burst damage, that the spec might need other tools to be viable in PvP. We’re exploring this now, possibly though the missing 11-point Prot talent, possibly through other avenues. We’ll let you know when we’ve made a decision here.

I don’t know exactly when this change will go live, but I didn’t want you to return from trick-or-treating and be shocked that we didn’t announce it, since that seemed to cause a lot of damage with the last nerf.

I’ll leave this post unlocked for now, assuming the responses stay intelligent and we don’t get too much flaming or trolling.

NOTE: The hotfix will be on Live and the beta.

We lowered Seal and Judgement damage, changed Divine Storm (earlier) and changed Hammer of Wrath. Those all should have lowered PvP burst damage, and they did.

The JotW nerf was done because a paladin could use all their buttons quickly then go on to another opponent with no down time. On bosses in PvE, they could hit every button that was up and still have mana left to be very high on healing meters. So we do think the mana regen was too generous in both PvP and PvE cases. (src)

Holy & Protection DPS
We are concerned that Holy and Protection may have lost too much dps as “collateral damage” from the Ret nerfs. It is something we’re working on now, though I do believe Holy dps is still a lot better than it was in BC. Healers will always level more slowly than dps specs since using your abilities may keep you alive but doesn’t always kill stuff faster. (src)

Retribution - Developer Q&A (src)
1) Do you really think we’ll use AW now other than select PvE encounters?
We understand that AW will be used much, much less than it is now in Arenas. That wasn’t the intention, but we felt we needed to counter the standard winged bubble opening move that so many paladins were doing. If this change actually seems to make a difference (because to be honest despite the number of nerfs we’ve done to Ret, they were still overpowered) than we’ll consider other ways of getting the same effect that don’t involve Forbearance.

2) Why is it that you’re so hot to balance out a class that has been a joke for 2+ years for two weeks of playtime when PvE progression and arena rankings are now all but meaningless?
We can’t let one spec run around killing everyone just because they were underpowered before. I expect you’d be just as frustrated as other classes if it was Elemental shammies or Feral druids dominating everyone in PvP. Where Ret’s history did come into play is we originally tried relatively small nerfs originally (though the paladin community didn’t perceive them as such at the time). In retrospect, being gentle there didn’t do you guys any favors because then we just had to come back two more times with big nerfs.

3) Where were our desperately needed hot fix buffs for the past two years? Is this new insta-balance stance going to swing both ways?
We made a lot of big changes to classes for LK and we need to able to adjust them as needed. I honestly wasn’t doing this job for the past two years, so I’m not in a position to comment on why certain decisions were made the way they were. I have faith they were made for good reasons, but I just can’t share them with you because I don’t know. I will say that the perception around Blizzard was that the Ret paladin situation was very severe. I don’t want to understate it. It was considered one of the most egregious balance problems we’ve had in some time.

4) Where were the desperately needed nerfs to certain classes in arena for the past two season?
See above.

5) Will problems such as lack of MS debuffs, interrupts, distance closing, and susceptibility to mana burns/silences be addressed?
Mana burns - yes.

Distance closing and interrupts - we are considering giving Ret or paladins in general some new utility to make up for all the nerfs we have made to their damage. It will almost certanly not be MS though. You can find a thread where I recently attempted to explain why we don’t want to give out more MS debuffs.

I haven’t heard a lot of silence complaints from paladins recently (more than normal I mean). Is this a new problem? Care to elaborate?

Ghostcrawler - I’m not understanding why the winged bubble move was such a big deal? Bubble in and of itself is overpowered, but that’s OK because it’s on a 5 minute cooldown. It sort of seems like it’s possible that you’re letting people’s anecdotes guide this decision.
The problem was that the cooldown was irrelevant. The paladin could wing + bubble, then go in with a stun, DS, CS, JoC and maybe Consecrate, all within a few GCDs. If the poor sap on the receiving end was below 35% (now 20%), which was likely, he would get hammered as well. If somehow the target was still alive after all that, or had an ally, the paladin usually had enough mana to heal himself to full. Then, even if the battle was over, the paladin had enough mana to just go on to the next target (minus bubble). In Arenas this didn’t matter of course, because with a death that early, the match is usually decided. This strategy was the entire PvP problem with Ret in a nutshell. It didn’t take a lot of skill and was impossible to counter. Most other classes can’t open with that many abilities at once (ignoring the bubble defense and healing potential). Players complain about rogues stun-locking them, but at least that takes some skill from the rogue to do things in the right order and usually requires an element of surprise.

Tons of explanation about the nerfs
See the post

More Retribution Q&A … (src)
So my question to you would be, has it been discussed between the developers about our mana regeneration, and if it would be at all possible to have it scale?
It’s not clear to me why your mana needs to scale. Your spells don’t keep increasing their cost as your gear increases, and in fact your damage does increase as your gear improves. Caster mana increases with gear, but whatever item budget they are spending on Int, you get to spend on other stats, such as Strength.

As I’ve said though, we do think we will change mana drains to a percent so that they aren’t strictly more effective against classes with smaller mana pools.

I know you’ve been busy reading, but has something like this been considered? I’m sure you realize how we feel about Divine Storm being more or less just like a warriors whirlwind and why we are petitioning for this to go back to holy damage.
If Divine Storm went back to Holy, its damage would have to drop by a lot to compensate (maybe 40% or so). There are some design advantages to having it stay physical. For example, an Arena team can send a plate wearer to fight the Ret pally since Divine Storm will do less damage to that person.

Ultimately, we would like to have the spell feel more different from Whirlwind, but understand that our first priority was just to get paladin damage under control.

My final question and then I’ll let you get back to working on the class, has to do with Righteous Vengence.
You’re going to have to explain a little more what you mean about it being resisted often and doubly affected by resilience. Maybe someone else explains it in this forum and I’ll see it soon. When crits are prevented from resilience, they typically do not prevent secondary effects that would have been a result of that crit. It’s physical damage IIRC, so it shouldn’t be resisted or dispelled at all, but I’ll look into that. Ultimately though we wanted this talent mostly for PvE utility, so you shouldn’t expect us to buff it a lot for PvP purposes.

51 Pointers are broadly situational. I don’t think it’s totally fair to expect something other out of Divine Storm.
This is true, and Divine Storm is less situational than a lot of the 51 point talents.

41pt better than 51pt… what?
We don’t inflate the value of deeper talents. If the bottom talents were always the best there would never be any reason to take less than 51 points in a tree.

The core rotation should be sustainable without requiring the use of JoW. JoW should be for mana regen above and beyond that core rotation. It’s bad enough in PvP that judgements don’t return mana when they are absorbed. Now we essentially have to use JoW in PvP because of that limitation to JotW which means we’re no longer choosing between extra mana or stopping a runner: we’re choosing between necessary mana to function and stopping a runner.

I really don’t see a lot of paladins judging Wisdom in PvP. Unless you are being mana drained a ton (which as I mentioned is something we do plan on fixing) I don’t understand how you can be going out of mana while fighting someone. Now if you blow a lot of mana, you may have to pause in between fights. Most mana-using classes have to do that.

There is still a lot of debate on these forums about how long a paladin can go before running on fumes. So far a lot of players are finding results similar to ours, and I think some (though not all) who do claim to have trouble are being disingenuous in hopes of getting it buffed. But we’ll keep watching to see what happens. If we reach the point where Ret paladins are just getting slaughtered in PvP then we’ll know we went way too far. I don’t see that happening yet though.

GC will delete anything that makes him look bad, post something were he contradicted himself in and it will get deleted. he only leaves messeges that benefit him. Trick me once, shame on you, trick me twice GC then shame on me
This is just name calling as far as I can tell. The only posts that get deleted are those that violate the forum terms of use. Players catch me in contradictions all the time — I tend to type fast so that I can respond to as many posts as possible. Life goes on. In any case, it doesn’t really matter what was said in the past. Ret paladins were broken and we had to fix them. As I have said dozens of times, we don’t like nerfing classes but we still have to do it when necessary.

Retribution in PvP
On utility, the designers did agree that if we were going to keep hurting Ret’s burst dps, which is a big thing they brought to a team, that we needed to give them some kind of tool to make up for it. We’re not sure whether that will be a snare or interrupt or whatever, but the feedback on forums like this one will certainly help determine it. I am surprised to hear you say you don’t have a lot of control, because I think that is the perception of a lot of classes on the receiving ends of your stuns.

Mana, rage and energy are different mechanics. Yeah, duh, I know, but hear me out. To a class with mana seeing players with a resource that never runs out can seem amazing. But the flip side of that is you start a battle with a full bar. A rogue (or druid) does too, but their bar goes dry in 2-3 hits while yours can last for a long time and pack a lot of hits into a short period. Rage can come back for a warrior (or druid) but they start with none and use a lot of it on every swing. Each of them has their advantages and disadvantages and I think we’ve done a pretty good job overall of preventing any one of them from dominating either PvP or PvE. (src)

Holy Paladins Q&A (src)
Aura Mastery - This needs to be removed and made baseline, Holy paladins need a new 11 point talent.
A little bit of explanation wouldn’t hurt when you make claims like this. Typically we don’t like to turn good talents into baseline abilities. That either leaves you with mediocre talents or the next tier of good talents (that you ask to be turned into core abilities).

Illumination - Needs a buff, mana return back to 100%? At least 75%
There was a time not too long ago where Holy paladins just didn’t run out of mana. This was not good for the game.

Holy paladins are still locked down too easy in pvp and bring nothing special to aid the group, whats being done to fix this?
This is a little vague for me to be able to address your concerns. I do think there may be something to the issue that Arena teams want a healer with some offensive capabilities as well, even if that means Mass Dispel.

We are close to no longer being the best single target healer. Other classes are catching up and paladins are being removed from raids.
I haven’t seen any evidence that paladins are being removed from raids in LK. In BC, that started to happen because healers needed to move a lot and raids required a ton of AE heals which didn’t play into paladin strengths. We chilled down those elements as well as giving paladins more tools for those situations (such as Infusion of Light and Beacon of Light).

Beacon of Light - Is horrible in its current state, at least lower the mana cost, make it work on overhealing, and make it last longer.
I have seen an awful lot of paladins who really like Beacon. Since you sound like someone who is active in the community, I would imagine you know this, so it surprises me you would state that Beacon is horrible as if it were an accepted fact. You’re at least going to have to offer some more evidence.

Judgements of the Pure - Worst 5 point talent ever made. Its so deep in the holy tree and all it dose is give 15% haste? Not worth it at all.
Before we buffed Pure, I think it was underpowered. We hesitated because we saw some player calculations that it could have been decent even in its own form. Now in its new form, we feel like it is pretty potent. If it has a disadvantage, it’s that it might invalidate some of the earlier Holy talents.

JUDGING IN COMBAT ISN’T FUN. Its very annoying, mobs are taken down way to fast to even bother, this would only work on bosses.
Part of the reason we did this was because a complaint we heard from Holy paladins was they wanted more buttons to push than just FoL and HL. Judging seemed like a natural fit since it was already part of the paladin repetoire. This perplexes me a little since you then ask for new healing spells down below. Perhaps you or someone else could elaborate? (Having 40 yard ranged Judgements is pretty nice too.)

Holy Guidance - Every other tree has a similar talent but there’s is 3 points, gives more spell power AND has a secondary effect!! Why do Holy paladins have such a horrible version!
It’s difficult to just directly compare talents between two different classes or specs. We can take a look at this one in particular though.

NO NEW HEALING SPELLS? ok in BC i could settle for no new spells but now in wrath its just plain stupid.
Sorry, we disagree. We don’t want to just keep adding new rotational spells every expansion or classes are going to end up with just too many buttons — some specs are dangerously close to that already. Instead we added some more situational heals. The paladin has been designed around Flash of Light, just like the shaman was designed around Chain Heal. We didn’t want to completely change what these classes were all about, in part because a lot of players like them as they are. We figured players who gravitate towards wanting lots of different kinds of heals can play the druid or priest. Players who want to have relatively few spells and can then focus on cooldowns, trinkets or the like can play the paladin or shaman. We think it would be dangerous for paladins to pick up Lich King and find their class had completely changed.

But we did make some major changes to specs like the Prot warrior and Shadow priest. If there are enough Holy paladins who think the spec is fundamentally broken and not fun, then that’s something on which we’d like to see more discussion from you guys. Just remember not everyone automatically agrees with you. ~end

Missing 11-point Prot talent
We’re not sure if we’re going to do this or not. If we do it (make an 11-point Prot talent that is attractive to Ret) it would be for these reasons:

– It would be cooler if the talent was something fun for Prot and not something they “need” to tank.
– In our experience, Ret paladins who PvP often go down into Prot anyway to get Imp Hammer of Justice.
– I suggested we might offer Ret more PvP utility since we are stripping some of the burst damage, so PvE Retadins might not want this ability anyway.
– We wouldn’t want this talent to be something Prot would never get and Ret would always get. If anything we need to err on the side of something Prot definitely wants. (src)