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