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

Patch 3.0.3 News and Changes Compiled

PTR 3.0.3 News Compiled

• New / Updated Glyphs
  
• Class Changes
• Retribution Paladin Nerfs
• Hunter Aspect / Pet Changes

Recent Blue Posts

• Ghostcrawler on Dots, Glyphs, Balance and More

Dual Spec Information

As a few people have pointed out, hardcore raiding guilds already respec in between bosses. All it takes is a little bit of patience, gold and maybe a warlock. The new feature just takes some of the busy work out of it by remembering say what spell you had on button 2 or button 3.

What the new feature really is supposed to do is let you change your mind. Oh, I was going to PvP tonight but now my buddies want to do Naxx 10 instead. I can flip on the fly instead of having to run back to Org or IF to respec and get summoned.

Very skilled or “into it” dps players absolutely can maximize their trash or boss dps through their spec. In fact, you hear a lot that certain talents aren’t good for bosses because they do things like improve your down time, AE or survivability. But all of those things can be great for fast clears. Players also sometimes say (silly) things like how they only care about how they perform on a boss. But if you want to do something like the LK equivalent of a ZA fast clear for the bear mount, you need to be fast across the board, not just on the 4 bosses. Players wipe on trash too.

We’re not going to make crazy fights where we expect the entire raid to respec into something weird. That was even asked at Blizzcon and the guy in charge of all of the boss design said simply “No” in reply. If we can’t assume you have a warrior or druid tanking, then we can’t assume you have a mage with an obscure talent build or 12 healers or something else abnormal.

Having to run to town to respec all the time between two common specs was a burden, just like pots and drums were a burden. Very few players enjoyed having to farm consumables for their raid night. (Though to be fair, some did). Players may have enjoyed the advantage those consumables might have given them, but of course they forget that the encounters were designed around the expectation that the group was chain potting and doing drum rotations. The encounters should be of similar difficulty, with the major change being that you don’t have to farm (as much).

Likewise, I understand that some players like having to commit to a talent spec at least for the night. Those players may feel that this is a “catering to the casuals” decision, but it’s one we think is right for the game. The different needs, for example, of PvE and PvP combat were putting a lot of constraints on the design of talent trees. Every talent needed to be very useful in both modes, which also tended to make them overbudget. That’s not the only reason for the feature, but it’s still a good one.

We won’t let you change specs within an Arena or BG, nor will we let you do it in combat of any kind. When the feature is fleshed out more, we’ll let you know more details.

Living Bomb Change

We still like Living Bomb. We realize not everyone does, and that’s cool. Not every spell or ability in the game is going to appeal to everyone and players are constantly re-designing spells into something they’d rather see.

However, we do think the mana cost on Living Bomb is too high, and we’ll be lowering it to something more like Arcane Explosion.

Restoration Shaman Mana Longevity

Teams stacking all dps do seem like they might be too dominant at the moment. We’re going to keep an eye on it for a little longer, but it is something we’re concerned about. One of the things I like about Arena is that healing strategy and tactics are a really big deal (vs. say BGs where it’s more about just killing stuff).

Enhancement Shaman DPS Changes

Right now, Enhancement dps is very high. If we changed say UR, we’d have to also nerf Enhancement dps to make up for the extra talent points you’d get to spend. It is something we want to take a look at, but there are also classes and specs right now whose dps is too low that need more attention.

Titans Grip, 12% Miss Rate

It should be fixed before Lich King itself goes live. That depends a little on what other issues crop up over the next few days that need more urgent attention. But the plan is to get all of those changes out soon.

Warlock Demonologist Changes

The Felguard magic damage reduction now extends to Holy. I believe this was hotfixed yesterday.

Typically we don’t change Holy resistance (which this is not), but it’s consistent with other damage reduction abilities (which this is) to reduce all magic damage. This should help warlocks stand up to paladins in particular in PvP.

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

Daily Blue and PTR Changes Wrap Up

The past few days have been a whirlwind of class changes and blue posts. Make sure you haven’t missed any of the past few days worth of updates.

Daily Blue Wrap Up

• Mage Mana Longevity Buffed
• Death Knight Changes
• Feral Druid Changes
• Hunter Arena WotLK Discussions
• Protection Paladin Buffs, Ret Paladin Nerfs
• Resto Shaman Changes and Spirit Wolves Buffed

Other Important Posts

• WotLK PvP Changes
• Patch 3.0.2 – Build 9038 Class Changes
• WotLK Profession Perks and Bonuses Summary
• WotLK Enchanting Guide

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.

Season 4 End Date Announced!

This afternoon Tigole calmed the fears of many players who thought they were going to lose their Brutal Gladiator titles to triple Retribution Paladin teams by announcing that the end of Season 4 would happen on the day that the 3.0 Patch hits live servers.

We’ve reevaluated certain aspects of how the arena system and current arena season will be affected during both the next content patch, and the launch of Wrath of the Lich King. For starters, the current arena season will end in respect to the ladder upon the release of our next major patch. What this means is, we’ll be taking a snapshot of the current season’s ladder just before the realms are taken down for patch maintenance, and our normal process will commence to determine who is eligible for the end-of-season rewards.

Teams and ratings will not be wiped at that time, and will carry forward allowing players to earn points each week (and buy gear) until the launch of the expansion on November 13th. Almost immediately before Wrath of the Lich King releases, all arena teams as well as ratings will be wiped and arena charter NPCs disabled.

So there you have it, no need to worry.

WotLK Retribution Paladin Guide

So I’ve lately been reading a lot how retribution paladins are going to be in wotlk, and it’s looking pretty awesome. I recently got my very own beta test key as well, so I’m able to test S3 geared retribution paladin in wotlk already…my thoughts so far? Awesome!

First, after reading of patch notes of beta and some forums I felt like we were just lacking something. We had more nuke, but no interrupt, no stuns, no mortal effect, and no slow effect. But after a bit of testing it feels like the class is balanced properly and working as intended.

In many ways the vary definition of what a ret paladin is is changing. It’s not just like a warrior copy like it’s been during Buring Crusade, but it’s actually hybrid like it was before TBC. Critical strike rating is now spellcrit and crit, that means if you have ~35% melee crit, you also have ~35% crit with spells, which is once again awesome. We also get more spellpower from talents, that means heals are much more effective than at the currently are. I’m able to get 6k healing crits with holy light really often, putting retribution paladins on about the same heal to damage scale of elemental shamans.

Additionally, since mana regen will be much better in expansion, we’re not completely out of mana after one or two holy light.

I want to be able to heal if I have mana pool, and that’s definitely what they’re aiming for. We are supporting dps, not main dps in PVP for example. The class is much more apt at performing a viable role as a support and situational DPS as opposed the main insta-gib style current retribution paladins have to assume.

Some retribution paladins may not like the way retribution is going to work in PVP but personally I think it’s a great idea. Taking hybrids back to hybrids in wotlk adds a whole new level of depth and strategy for PvP.
Below I’ve written a small guide of some of the big changes coming for paladins in wrath of the lich king.

• Blessing of Might, it’s getting a huge buff, and retribution tier 1 “BoM boosting talent” is getting buffed as well.
• Conviction, (Currently 5% melee crit), Is now boosted to 5% crit with all spells and attacks. (Melee, healing and offensive spells!)
• Eye for an Eye, now reflects 20% of damage from all critical hits you take, instead of 30% from just spell critical hits you take.
• Sheath of light, “Increases your spell power by an amount equal to 10/20/30% of your attack power and your critical healing spells heal the target for 20% of the healed amount over 12 seconds.”
• Repentance, so called combat sap now. Lasts for 1 min, 1 min cooldown, pretty awesome instance utility.
• Sanctified wrath, PALADIN EXECUTE! 50% more crit for hammer of wrath, and 1 min less cool down on Avenging wrath. Additionally adds some kind of “offensive damage reduction” effect for Avenging Wrath.
• The Art of War, haven’t been able to test this yet, but it says your hand of freedom spell has 100% chance to remove stun effect. Not sure if it means you’re immune to stun while it’s active (Which would be ultimate support in PVP), but even if it only removes stun effects when you cast it on someone, it’s huge deal. As an additional effect it also reduces the damage you take by 3%.
• Righteous vengeance, more burst, right. 25% Increased critical strike damage bonus for your judgements and this new aoe spell, Divine storm. People are complaining of this, when paladins are able to get huge crits with judgements, so I could believe they’ll nerf this or replace it with something.
• Divine storm, awesome AoE for soloing and maybe for instancing, together with concentration it’s awesome. It also heals you and your party for 20% of the amount of the total damage you’ve done, so I could imagine like 4 retri paladins + healer doing instances aoe’ing anything they need to kill. I’ve tested this and it’s really nice if you pull like +5 creatures into same spot and kill them without any problems.

Monday’s Must-See Movies

I decided to start a new segment here on ZugGaming, something that will hopefully become permanent in the weeks to come. This will be a bit where I tell you guys what WoW movies came out in the last week that are notable in some way. They can be funny, skillful, or just plain entertaining. If you have any suggestions of things I should check out, just drop a line in the comment section.

Magehancement 2100+

The first must-see movie is about two guys from Shattered Halls – US, playing a rather unorthodox comp. They are a frost mage and enhancement shaman combo playing at the 2100+ rating level. You’ll get to see them fight some of the toughest compositions while the mage carries the shaman to victory! Ok, the shaman helps out some too. While this certianly isn’t a comp you will want to choose for easy-mode shoulders, the two classes work well together with some great communication and a good sense of awareness. The video was recorded in full 1680×1050 resolution so if you download the full version it may run slowly on an older machine. However, it is worth downloading because the author puts in some helpful commentary in the bottom of the screen that may be hard to see if you don’t have the full resolution copy.

Stream or Download Now!

WotLK: The Power of Retribution

The infamous Serennia recently released a new Paladin expansion preview video, featuring some of the current class imbalances that the Retribution Paladin holds. Blue posters have kept the community settled down so far with promises of rebalancing before the expansion goes live but in it’s current state, retribution can be fun to watch. In this lengthy 33 minute video Serennia does a mix of solo and duo 5 man content while PvPing and recording some monster crits. The music isn’t bad for those who are fans of techno remixes; the second track was done personally by rogue hero and part-time DJ Isolee.

Stream or Download Now!