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*Ding Ding* Winner? Paladin bullets

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Jayded
#0 - Dec. 8, 2008, 10:03 p.m.
Blizzard Post
• Judgment of the Wise, even combined with Divine Plea do not allow for the full use of Utility spells, not to be confused with mindless spamming of all buttons, in PVP environment. It appears to be returning 5-10% less mana then optimal.

• The expectations of Repentance and Hammer of Justice, both being short range and 1 minute CD, are too high to fill Gap Closer, Spell Interrupt, and Crowd Control and Stun jobs at the same time.

• Retribution Paladins using UD damage glyphs are doing considerably less damage to the Undead NPCs they are specialized to fight then other respective DPS and Hybrid DPS classes. Seems incorrect and raises the question about the Ret Paladins DPS on mobs he / she are not specialized to fight against.

• Paladins are having to rely on inefficient AOE spells to single target DPS and Mob Type specific spells to pad damage numbers and are still falling short of peers.

• 30 seconds shared cool down on Divine Shield and Avenging Wrath seem overly punitive considering both the new 50% damage reduction on Divine Shield and the fact that there are other ways to prevent them from being used together such as having them overwrite each other.

• Judgment spell does not seem to work 100% of the time, occasionally failing to do damage, apply a debuff, return mana or activate replenishment while consuming the spell cost, GCD and putting the ability on cool down.

• Art of War heals are still resetting the swing timer. They fixed this for Enh Shamans during Beta and they don't have a 3.8 swing speed like Paladins do... this is a huge problem for us. I think the same reasoning for fixing it for Enh applies to Ret and the problem hurts us much more because we use 2handers.

• Sacred Shield isn't scaling with Sheath of Light. Seems to scale with Holy Guidance and Touched by the Light. 500 damage absorb shield is kind of a waste of mana for an already mana starved spec.

Thank you for reading.

[edit] Added 2 extra bullets by E.
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Ghostcrawler
#15 - Dec. 10, 2008, 8:15 p.m.
Blizzard Post
Q u o t e:
• Judgment of the Wise, even combined with Divine Plea do not allow for the full use of Utility spells, not to be confused with mindless spamming of all buttons, in PVP environment. It appears to be returning 5-10% less mana then optimal.


I've commented a lot on paladin mana issues (though perhaps not recently). Suffice to say we understand the concerns and are evaluating whether we think it's a problem or caused by some players having a different expectation for the class than we do.

Q u o t e:
• The expectations of Repentance and Hammer of Justice, both being short range and 1 minute CD, are too high to fill Gap Closer, Spell Interrupt, and Crowd Control and Stun jobs at the same time.


They aren't necessarily intended to. We don't necessarily go down a list and try to make sure every spec has equal access to every mechanic. It makes the classes more interesting to have strengths and weaknesses. That hinges on the spec being viable of course. I know plenty of Ret paladins claim they aren't viable in PvE or PvP, but we would probably disagree with that.

Please don't mininterpet that to mean we are putting the tree in a freezer and never touching it again. We have a lot of ideas we still want to explore.

Q u o t e:
• Retribution Paladins using UD damage glyphs are doing considerably less damage to the Undead NPCs they are specialized to fight then other respective DPS and Hybrid DPS classes. Seems incorrect and raises the question about the Ret Paladins DPS on mobs he / she are not specialized to fight against.


I am hesistant to push paladins too much farther into that UNDEAD KILLAR! role. It tends to make them OP when fighting undead and weak when fighting anything else if you push them too far in that direction.

Q u o t e:
• Paladins are having to rely on inefficient AOE spells to single target DPS and Mob Type specific spells to pad damage numbers and are still falling short of peers.


Are you refering specifically to Consecrate? There is a continuum between "I can't use any of my spells or I'll have no mana" and "I can unload with everything and never worry about mana." We have to evaluate these arguments very carefully because a lot of paladins (a lot of any class) will claim they are too near the former just because they want to be near the latter. It is something we are looking into.

Q u o t e:
• 30 seconds shared cool down on Divine Shield and Avenging Wrath seem overly punitive considering both the new 50% damage reduction on Divine Shield and the fact that there are other ways to prevent them from being used together such as having them overwrite each other.


We don't think overwriting each other solves the problem. There isn't a choice there -- I can go purely offensive and then if I get into trouble, a very powerful defense is available. We chose the cooldown very specifically so that you have to pick one or the other for a given situation.

Q u o t e:
• Judgment spell does not seem to work 100% of the time, occasionally failing to do damage, apply a debuff, return mana or activate replenishment while consuming the spell cost, GCD and putting the ability on cool down.


Yes, this is a known bug. I know it is painful to paladin players, but we haven't yet been able to figure out exactly what situations cause it to fail.