Paladin Cataclysm Class Talent Changes

Don’t forget to check out the other class changes as well.

• Shaman
• Rogue
• Mage
• Druid
• Priest
• Warrior
• Paladin
• Hunter
• Death Knight
• Warlock

Paladin Cataclysm Talent Preview

In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm we’ll be making several changes to class talents and abilities across the board. While this list only outlines some of our plans for the paladin class, we want to give you a look at the new high-level abilities and an overview of how the new Mastery system will work with each talent spec.

New Paladin Spells

Blinding Shield (level 81): Causes damage and blinds all nearby targets. This effect might end up only damaging those facing the paladin’s shield, in a manner similar to Eadric the Pure’s ability Radiance in Trial of the Champion. The Holy tree will have a talent to increase the damage and critical strike chance, while the Protection tree will have a talent to make this spell instant cast. 2-second base cast time. Requires a shield.

Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.

Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).

Next you will find a list of some of the paladin spell and ability changes, followed by our intentions for improving each talent tree for the release of Cataclysm. There will be further changes, but those revealed below should offer some insight into our goals.

Changes to Abilities and Mechanics

• Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.
• Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.
• Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes.
• Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.

New Talents and Talent Changes

• We want to ease off the defensive capabilities of Retribution and Holy paladins slightly. We think the powerful paladin defenses have been one of the things holding Retribution paladins back, especially in Arenas. One change we’re considering is lowering Divine Shield’s duration by a couple of seconds. Having said that, Retribution does pretty well in Battlegrounds, and Battlegrounds will be a much bigger focus in Cataclysm since they can provide the best PvP rewards. Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem.
• We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either doing decent burst damage, or just being good at staying alive.
• We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don’t feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.
• We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains the expensive, fast heal and Holy Light is the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light will be changed to work with Flash of Light. We like the ability, but want paladins to use it intelligently and not be constantly healing for twice as much.
• Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.
• Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we’re looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.
• Holy Shield will no longer have charges. It will be designed to improve block chance while active, and will continue to provide a small amount of damage and threat.

Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses

Holy
Healing
Meditation
Critical Healing Effect

Protection
Damage Reduction
Vengeance
Block Amount

Retribution
Melee Damage
Melee Critical Damage
Holy Damage

Meditation: This is the spirit-to-mana conversion that the priest, druid, and shaman healers also share.

Vengeance: This is the damage-received-to-attack-power conversion that all tanks share.

Critical Healing Effect: When the paladin gets a crit on a heal, it will heal for more.

Block Amount: We want to keep the kit of the paladin as a tank who blocks a lot. So by contrast, the warrior tank will sometimes get critical blocks, but the paladin will absorb more damage with normal blocks.

Holy Damage: Any attack that does Holy damage will have its damage increased.

This concludes this Cataclysm preview for the paladin class. The development of these changes will continue to evolve in the coming months. Please be sure to provide any feedback and thoughts you might have on what was covered here.

Additional Clarification

Here’s a bit more clarification on some of these changes. Also, please keep in mind that this is merely a preview and we’ll still have more to go in testing up to and including any other changes that aren’t listed here in the preview.

We’ve updated the Flash of Light reference to make it a bit more clear in the original post as follows.

Flash of Light remains a fast heal, but will be more expensive to justify the cast speed. Holy Light will be the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light needs to be changed so that its benefit is letting the paladin heal two targets at once, not letting the paladin get two heals for the mana cost of one. It’s intended to save GCDs and targeting time, not mana.

In addition we’re changing the paladin heal design to match that of the other healers. Holy Light is the middle heal. It’s very efficient, but not particularly fast and doesn’t have a lot of throughput. Flash of Light will be the faster heal that costs more mana. (Currently paladins sort of flip the model around by having a fast, efficient heal.) Holy paladins can talent into an additional heal that is like a giant Holy Light. It might take three of these big heals (or two crits) to get a tank from death’s door back to 100% health.

Currently on live, Beacon of Light is a tool that allows paladins to target more than just the main tank. In Cataclysm if it just doubles their healing, it is going to be overpowered. We have two ways we might handle this and we’ll experiment to see which feels better. The first is that Beacon only works on some heals, such as Flash of Light or Holy Light (but not the big one). An alternative idea is that Beacon increases the mana cost of a heal cast on a beaconed target, since you’re essentially getting a double heal. Under this model, Beacon itself would cost no mana.

Also on the live realms currently, paladins have huge mana pools and massive throughput. The trade-off is that they are excellent single target healers and much weaker in other roles. We want paladins to be slightly more interchangeable with other healers. In Cataclysm, you should be able to have a Holy priest on the tank and a Holy paladin on the raid. We’re not sure we’ll back off of the current healing roles completely, but we definitely want to add more breadth to those whose roles are currently too narrow.

As for the Guardian of Ancient Kings. First, it’s important to understand that this is not a pet nor does it have a pet bar associated with it. Second, it’s also not meant to last for very long. So, it’s not a pet in the traditional sense. It’s a friend in need when you need it, but not a permanent companion.

Source

Ret Paladin PvP Nerf Incoming

Well, there’s no easy way to say it without enraging the fury of paladin community…but, here’s round 2 of the paladin PvP nerfs.

Retribution Paladin 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.

Seal & Judgement Damage Reduced

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.

Source: Blizzard – Ghostcrawler

Retribution Paladin Nerf Confirmed

Yesterday’s retribution paladin discussion on the forums was further clarified this evening with the following nerfs being confirmed by ghostcrawler.

As I stated yesterday, we are happy with Ret’s PvE damage and sustatined damage in PvP, but were concerned that the burst damage in PvP could be too high. We discussed this for literally hours yesterday, which was certainly not the first time we have discussed the issue. Thus I hope these changes are not perceived as a knee-jerk reaction, but I am sure that will depend a great deal on which class you play.

Divine Storm — the damage was changed from Holy to Physical. As you know, Holy damage is almost never mitigated and this talent could pack a lot into a very short time. This is a nerf to the ability’s damage. This change is now active on Live.

Repentance — this ability now lasts for only 6 seconds in PvP (down from 10). Obviously this is also a nerf. This change is also active on Live.

Art of War — now affects all damage done by Judgements, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm (instead of critical strike damage). Net dps should be about the same but less bursty. This change will be made before Nov 13.

Righteous Vengeance — now applies a dot affect similar to Deep Wounds (instead of critical strike damage). This ends up being a significant buff to the ability to make up for the damage lost to Divine Storm, but is also less bursty. This change will be made before Nov 13. EDIT: The dot will NOT break Repentance.

Glyph of Crusader Strike — now reduces mana cost (instead of increased damage on stunned targets.) We thought paladins could stack too much damage vs. stunned targets. This change will be made before Nov 13.

We also fixed a bug with Seal and Judgement of Light that could sometimes result in too much healing.

In our tests, Retribution dps remains the same over longer periods of time, but they can’t do quite so much damage in the initial few seconds of a PvP encounter.

I know Ret pallies feel a little picked on since we’ve made this mistake before of having them come out the gate too strong and then had to correct them. For that I do apologize. It’s a difficult spec to balance since part of its design is to have large crits and stuns, which have obvious PvP implications. We are pretty confident this will not nerf pallies into the ground as I facetiously promised yesterday, but if we overdid it, we’ll be happy to back off some of the changes.

On the other hand, maybe we’ll see fewer BGs with 20 paladins on the opposing side and can get some reasonable feedback on all the other classes in the game.

EDIT: To clairfy the new dot will not break Repentance.

Retribution Paladin Nerfs Incoming

There’s no denying that retribution paladins are insanely overpowered and fortunately (or unfortunately depending…) the nerf stick was officially confirmed earlier this evening. While there are some needed changes to the class to bring its DPS in line with us mere mortals, it isn’t sounding like there are going to be massive wide sweeping changes

Since these threads seem to be proliferating, I figure’d I’d just start a new one. Here is a quick Q&A.

Q: Is Ret OP?
A: Perhaps. We think Ret’s dps isn’t abnormally high in PvE, and may not even be high in PvP over the course of a long fight. Where we are worried is how much damage Ret can do up front. It’s also Holy damage, which isn’t a big deal when you’re considering a fully sundered mob, but can turn into a lot of damage in PvP.

Q: Are we going to nerf Ret?
A: TO THE GROUND BABY. Okay, not really, but sometimes I can’t resist. We’ll see how much that quote comes back to haunt me. We will probably be making some changes soon, perhaps even hotfixes. We want to be very surgical about what we do. We don’t want to overdo it, and we don’t want to hurt their sustained PvE damage. When we’ve decided, I’ll make sure you all know.

Q: Why did it take us this long to admit there was a problem when EVERYONE knew about it?
A: A couple of weeks ago there were some bugs with weapon equipping that caused some problems that of course were being exploited. We didn’t want to nerf Ret TO THE GROUND BABY only to discover that the weapon problem was causing 90% of it.

Q: Enough about Ret. Unholy death knights are worse!
A: That wasn’t a question, but we think we have Unholy in a better place now. We made some changes to a few deep talents (that the DK community is already aware of, so don’t fret) to get Unholy’s dps more in line. Also, you aren’t going to see any PvP DKs for a long time, so we need to focus on paladins for now.

Q: Hi. Thanks for the update. While you’re here, can I ask you all these other offtopic questions about paladins or the game in general?
A: …

Source: Blizzard Forums

Protection Paladin Buffs and Retribution Paladin Nerfs

Minor buffs to protection paladins, nothing too major though. The biggest and most unknown changes are going to be centered around retribution. There’s no denying that ret is currently out of control, so it’s definitely going to get beat with the nerf stick. I’m very interested to see what type of changes Blizzard has in store for the class, it’d be a real shame to see retribution nerfed back to nothing.

The ret changes will likely be introduced in the build following PTR 9038.

Blessing of Sanctuary
We like Blessing of Sanctuary as a buff you can put on anyone. However, we might do something like let it benefit the paladin more than other targets. (Self buffing gives a better result than buffing someone else.) Or we might just add more paladin mitigation somewhere else in the tree. That all assumes you are deficient. If 2-5% makes a big difference for you (I don’t think it will make that much of a difference, but for sake of argument), then buffing paladins 2-5% when they didn’t need it could also make the other tanks non-starters. We’ll keep testing it.

Shield of the Templar
Okay, here is one change you don’t have. Shield of the Templar now also reduces all damage taken by 1/2/3%.

Critical Block
Critical Block is something we’re still keeping our eye on. I’m not going to promise a paladin version, but it’s totally something we’ll consider if paladin blocking starts to fall behind.

Whoever said it, yes it’s absolutely going to be a challenge trying to get parity among 4 classes with totally different mechanics, and in some sense the warrior to paladin comparison is the easy one. But we don’t like having only one MT class, and we don’t like giving everyone very similar gear, talents and abilities to tank, and we don’t like the situation where you need a different tank for every fight because they all excell at certain types of encounters and suck at others. So the option we’re left with is to have 4 who are different but relatively equal.

Retribution paladins
I can’t imagine too many people think that DKs (Unholy I presume) and Ret Pallys are balanced. We won’t leave things like that.

WotLK Paladin / Shaman Glyph Changes

A few glyphs changes for paladins and shamans in the most recent beta update, build 9038. I like the paladin changes, though the 100 yards on a holy light seems a bit excessive. I would not be surprised to see this reduced to a more reasonable the 30-60 yard range.

The shaman changes on the other hand are flat out horrible. 3 or 4 minutes off the elemental totems are not going to convince any shaman to take these glyphs. There really is no situation where you can say…”yes, If only I had that extra 4 minutes off the totem…” If these glyphs were buffed to a 10 minute reduction or changed from major to a minor glyph you could make a case for them, otherwise I just don’t see any way you’d choose these over other glyphs.

Paladin

• Glyph of Holy Light – Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 100 yds of the initial target. (range changed from 5 to 100 yards)
• Glyph of Flash of Light – Your Flash of Light heals for 50% less initially, but also heals for 140% of its initial effect over 12 sec. (duration changed from 15 to 12 sec)

Shaman

• Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem – Reduces the cooldown of your Fire Elemental Totem by 4 min. (old version was 3 min)
• Glyph of Earth Elemental Totem – Reduces the cooldown of your Earth Elemental Totem by 4 min. (old version was 3 min)

Paladin Macros Guide

Playing a healer in world of warcraft is no easy task, but having a few well placed paladin macros can make your life a whole lot easier. You don’t have to have scores of paladin macros to make a big difference either, a few simple lines of script can really improve your game and your overall ability as a player.

General Paladin Macros

Bubble Hearth

#show Hearthstone
/cast Divine Shield
/use Heartstone

You can use this as an easy spam aka “mashable” button to make bubble hearth escapes.

Judge and Seal Macros

/cast Judgement
/stopcasting
/cast Seal of Light

Just replace “seal of light” with what ever seal you are currently using.

Crusader Aura and Mount Macro

/castsequence !Crusader Aura, Summon Charger

You can also change “summon charger” to the name of any mount if you would like to use a different one. Requires 2 clicks.

Crusader Aura and Flying Mount Macro

/castsequence !Crusader Aura, Merciless Nether Drake

Same functionality as the previous macro except for your flying mount. Change “merciless nether drake” to the name of your desired flying mount. Requires 2 clicks.

Blessing Macros

/cast [modifier:shift] Greater Blessing of Might; Blessing of Might

Simple press the key + shift for a greater blessing or just a regular key press for a single target. Change “blessing of might” to each of desired blessings (wisdom, salvation, etc.).

Holy Paladin Macros

Divine Favor + Holy Light Macro

#show Divine Favor
/cast Divine Favor
/stopcasting
/cast Holy Light

Trinket + Holy Light Macro

#show Holy Light
/use 13
/cast Holy Light

In macro speak the number 13 is your top trinket slot (14 is the bottom trinket), so long as your healing trinket is in that slot then you’re good to go!

Assist Holy Light Heal Macro

/assist
/cast Holy Light

Great macro to have while doing trash, simply target the mobs you are killing and press this macro. It will assist the boss and target the target they are currently attacking.

Assist Flash of Light Heal Macro

/assist
/cast Flash of Light

Same functionality as the previous macro, just for flash of lights.

Mouse Over Holy Light

/cast [target=mouseover,exists] Holy Light

Excellent macro for raiders. This will allow you to heal by just mousing over a target player or by mousing over their raid frame. I absolutely love this macro on my shaman.

Mouse Over Flash of Light

/cast [target=mouseover,exists] Flash of Light

Same functionality as above, just for flash of light.

Mouse Over Clenase

/cast [target=mouseover,exists] Cleanse

Same functionality as above, just for cleanse.

Battlegrounds Spam Healing Macro

/targetfriend [nodead]
/cast [nodead] Flash of Light

This macro will automatically target friendly players near you and cast flash of light, great for battlegrounds like AV where there are so many players around you can’t always immediately tell who is taking damage.

Pretty basic macro that casts divine favor immediatly before your heal. You could change “holy light” to another healing spell, such as flash of light or even holy shock.

Retribution Paladin Macros

Auto Attack + Crusader Strike Macro

/startattack
/cast Crusader Strike

Starts your auto attack in the event your crusader strike is on cool down, a very nice mashable auto attack buttons for retribution paladins.

Judgement of Justice Macro

/cast Seal of Justice
/cast Judgement

One button to stop those kiting classes in arena or PvP. Is also useful for some very specific raid encounters where getting a quick judgement of justice is an issue.

Protection Paladin Macros

Divine Shield Macro

/cancelaura Divine Shield
/cast Divine Shield

Simple macro that allows you to cast bubble to cleanse various debuffs and immediately cancel it so you can begin tanking again.

Righteous Defense Taunt Macro

/cast [help] Righteous Defense; [target=targettarget] Righteous Defense

Turns your righteous defense into a more typical taunt style macro. This macro will assist the boss (which presumably is what you want to righteously defend) and cast righteous defense on that target. Much easier to tab and pull.

Mage / Rogue Vs. Paladin / Warrior 2v2 Arena Strategy

Much like most warrior / healer teams, your opponents will probably have to try harder than you.

Rogue

Get a sap on the warrior and open on the paladin going full out dps to force his bubble. Once he bubbles reset the fight via vanish. If you and your partner are having trouble CC’ing the warrior while forcing the paladin to bubble pop Evasion and Ghostly Strike as needed to avoid unwanted bleed effect when resetting the fight. Kill the paladin, and get away from the warrior if you have to.

Mage

Crowd control the warrior as best as possible with sheeps, frost novas, Rank 1 Frost Bolts(to Frost Bite snare him). These are all able to be cleansed by the pally, so tell your rogue to dodge it up if you’re having trouble controlling the warrior. Assist dps, and once the pally bubbles hit iceblock to reset the fight and wait it out. You decide when you want your rogue to blind, but I recommend while going for a kill on the pally or after killing the pally one of you has to get away.

Looking for more strategies? Check out the complete rogue / mage 2v2 arena strategy guide!

Rogue / Rogue Vs. Paladin / Warlock 2v2 Arena Strategy

This match-up is pretty similar to Warrior / Pally, but much easier in my opinion. The one thing that will get you killed here is if you get chain feared into oblivion by the Warlock, but you two won’t let that happen to you, right?!

Rogue #1

Get a sap on the lock if possible, and pretty much just try to force the pally to bubble. Conserve energy for interrupts. Once the paladin pops bubble you simply Cloak and Vanish to reset the match. Down the paladin after bubble fades.

Rogue #2

You can do one of either things: Get on the lock, or simply force a bubble on the paladin with your partner. Either option is viable, simply do what you and your partner are comfortable.

Rogue / Rogue Vs. Warrior / Paladin 2v2 Arena Strategy

Rogue / Rogue vs. warrior / paladin 2v2 is going to give you a headache, and has a very heavy advantage over you, even if you play 100 percent perfectly you still might get a loss, don’t let this cookie-cutter get you down. There’s two strats you can apply do whichever you feel most comfortable with.

Strategy Number 1

Rogue #1(the one with improved EA)

Bust out on the paladin with your first set of cooldowns, you can do a Cs==>Ks combo, or SnD. Honestly with the huge amount of armor a paladin has, SnD would simply be the better use of points here. Pop Evasion + GS(if the warrior is locking you down) and interrupt as many heals as possible. Hit the warrior with a blind. Once the pally pops bubble run away and reset the fight via vanish(try your best to LoS the warrior during bleed effects so he can’t charge and screw you over. Also keep in mind warriors have a 8 yd. dead zone so stay within that you can evade the intercept) Bandage if you have to, and when you can. Once bubble fades down the paladin.

Rogue #2

Get on the paladin aswell, hit the warrior with a quick sap first. Your choice of opener doesn’t matter as much in this phase of the fight. Pop GS + Evasion(If the warrior focuses on you) and cycle through interrupts with your partner, once the paladin bubble pops get ready to reset the fight. Heal up a bit if you have to, and go in with a garrote opener on the paladin snuff ‘em. Hit the warrior with your blind, during the paly blow-up phase(your partner forced his trinket with his frst blind earlier on in the match).

Strategy Number 2

Rogue #1

Get on the paladin, and manage energy for interrupts. Keep up SnD as it will help damage pressure. Evasion +GS if the warrior gets to you. Once the pally bubbles reset the fight and down him once his bubble is up. Be ready to CC the warrior when going for the kill

Rogue #2

Lockdown the warrior with CS going into KS. Keep him off your partner in anyway you can. Be ready to use Evasion + GS yourself as the warrior might get aggravated and attempt to down you. If the warrior pops his trinket on anything hit him with a blind, and help your partner force the pally bubble. Once the pally’s bubble is up snuff ‘em. Again be ready for a CC train on the warrior when you’re going for a kill on the pally.

Looking for more rogue / rogue action? Check out Scyth’s the full strategy guide, rogue / rogue 2v2 arena strategy!

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