Mandatory glyph to fix a broken mechanic?

We looked at a lot of Ret parses and picked a Judgements of the Wise number that would make up for the loss of Spiritual Attunement mana.

If you don't have mana problems on Live, you shouldn't have them in 3.1. However if you do, you can get the Blood glyph.

Q u o t e:
Instead of Glyphs changing how abilities work in interesting ways that aren't mandatory, they have become mandatory fixes to abilities/mechanics that should be baseline changes anyway.

I always find this kind of comment slightly amusing, no insult intended. It's the same thing players tend to say about talents. If it's a good talent or glyph, then it is mandatory. If it is a bad talent or glyph, then it is just bad.

Think about it. If none of your glyphs provided much of a dps increase, then you would see all these threads saying "Our glyphs aren't interesting. I can run with no glyphs and do exactly the same as I do with glyphs."

We want glyphs to be good. We want you to feel like you can't take glyph A because glyph B is also really good. There is a reason you have so few glyph slots. What you will find over time is that more and more of your glyphs feel mandatory and you will have to make very hard choices (as with talents).

Were you running OOM on fights where SA wasn't a factor, like say Patchwerk?

I shouldn't have said SA isn't a factor on Patchwerk. I should have said it's a trivial factor on Patchwerk.

Unless you are doing something unusual, SA probably accounts for 5% of your Patch mana while Judgements of the Wise is like 45%. On Sapphiron, SA is probably 30% while Wise is 30%. Those numbers are based on my (gin-soaked) memory and they will vary depending on your raid buffs, but we have been looking at them a lot lately, so I believe they are close.

With the 3.1 change to Wise, you will have more consistent mana regardless of whether you are fighting a boss that does tons of raid damage. If the number is too low, we can buff it, but we still want you to have to e.g. use Divine Plea and care about Wisdom and other raid buffs being up. Some players seem to be doing fine without the Blood glyph and without the T7 set bonus, which is consistent with our research, but ideally we'd like to see some more PTR tests.

Q u o t e:
Are you getting this using Seal of Command or Blood?

Blood. Otherwise there should be no SA on Patch at all.

This is the problem we are trying to fix, that mana return varies enormously depending on whether the raid does a lot of AE. That makes it hard to balance both the encounters and the class.

To answer some discussion above, it isn't our intent that Ret paladins gear for mana. Their damage is balanced around the assumption that they don't.

The numbers I came up with yesterday were not for a paladin who dives in the slime. Not every guild is doing that. Since some of you seem to be having mana problems while doing about the exact same things other paladins are doing who do not have mana problems, we need to figure out why.

Q u o t e:
GC, are we ever going to get some kind of feedback on all of the posts for the recoil on Blood/Martyr. I think it's the only thing really hanging out there that we would really love an answer on. If you can make a note to pop into the one of the threads on the subject, I'll send you a case of gin. :)

We're not going to pull the recoil from Blood, at least not right now. While it did play nice with Spiritual Attunement, it is also an important balancing tool to keep Ret PvP under control. And it's one of those things that makes paladins play a little differently, which is worth preserving at a time when so many players are worried about class homogenization.

One thing we have talked about doing is shifting some of the damage from the Judgement to the Seal. Basically your dps would stay the same, but those big crits would be less scary at hurting yourself. This has the added bonus of reducing PvP burst a little more.

We don't think Rets are going to be sat out for raids (even Algalon) because of the self-damage. Guilds are using them now while testing Ulduar hard modes. If it gets to be the case, we can easily scale back the self damage done.

Remember, if you are very low on health, you don't have to hit that button. You do have an alternative until you get healed up again. Yes it will hurt your dps for a time, but classes have to make decisions like that all the time. Ask a mage or hunter that has to sacrifice personal dps for mana gain.

Q u o t e:
It seems odd to claim that the recoil on Blood is being retained for PvP balancing purposes, since as has been mentioned and noted, it does not serve that purpose.

It hurts you when you use it in PvP. That helps us balance. (Though realize you are also kind of saying the recoil isn't scary enough for you to stop using it in PvP, which makes it harder to explain why it is such a liability in PvE -- but that's really beside the point.)

We might consider putting a cap on it.