#0 - Sept. 21, 2008, 4:15 a.m.
The burst needs to be addressed in order to fix the class.
Main burst sources for retri are:
- high-damage random procs (Seal of Command, Eye for an Eye)
- instant attacks on long cooldowns that deal loads of damage (Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, Judgement while under effect of Seal of Command, Hammer of Wrath)
- improvements of those attacks that increase their critical chance / damage multiplier (Fanaticism, Righteous Vengeance, Sanctified Wrath)
- stacking multipliers on damage done (Avenging Wrath, Sanctified Wrath)
- abilities that incapacitate opponent, making him unable to counteract paladin (Repentance, Hammer of Justice, Improved Hammer of Justice)
As you can see, half the Retribution tree is revolving around interweaving instant big attacks and random procs and making them hurt. This leads to a "threshold effect": either you have enough burst damage to take down an opponent quickly (3-shot on ptr), or your burst ends somewhere halfways through opponent's life, is mitigated by resilience and healed off (on live and level 80 pvp). The bad thing about threshold effect is that the class becomes very susceptible to nerfs - any nerfs will be based around threshold low enough to stop paladins killing most of other players, and will hurt pve and pvp ability drastically.
Having several huge-hitting abilities on separate cooldowns does not address burst potential of those attacks combined at the beginning of combat.
Having only few options, but hard-hitting, rather than few smaller abilities, leads to burst potential. It is bad design.
Having heavy-hitting abilities on random proc feels like playing a casino: I feel lucky, I feel lucky, I want so much it would proc now! There is no skill involved and outcome of an encounter does not really depend on the player.
Now if I was making a sustained dps class, I would stay away from instant attacks with damage based on 2-handed weapon. It seems the game designers feel the same way as they put Crusader Strike into deep ret tier, make it bland and mess around 10 sec cooldown. Instead I would use on-next-hit attacks, attacks that deal fixed amount of damage scaling with your favored stats, attacks with fixed damage against several opponents, damage over time effects (well, all other melee dps classes are doing). Any instant attack based on weapon damage should be looking like "deals 45% of weapon damage + X holy damage" — you should take into account that dps paladin will always wield a 2 hander, all of them being slow and heavy. Seal of Crusader should be changed to deal 20% weapon damage on each swing. Seal of Blood could remain where it is, making it higher risk/higher reward choice compared to Seal of Crusader in PvP and a proper upgrade at high level in PvE. Make half of new abilities baseline so levelling a paladin is not so much auto-attack and afk.
Now, with on-next-hit attacks and instant strikes not tied to 2-hander weapon damage it is safer to increase crit chance / crit damage multiplier, use guaranteed crit, create holy vulnerability debuffs etc. It is not that easy to make them unbalancing hurtful.
And last but not the least, as sustained dps is not what wins in PvP, we could get some real PvP utility in place of lost burst.
