Altitis

Being away and with little playtime to try out things has some advantages, I don’t get to react to strings of nerfs + partial reversals as they happen.

I got some playtime on my paladin (now Ret with the blue honour PvP set), and did some Shattered Sun dailies. And currently, despite the nerfs already live (and before the rest to come), from a pure solo PvP standpoint, the changes definitely feel good. Stuff dies a lot faster than before 3.0.2.

PvP? Haven’t had a chance to do more than one single AV, and I don’t think there’s any justification for me to start playing pretend DPS. Healing remains an extremely rare commodity in BGs, my PvP healing set is half season 1 and half season 2 kit from back in the day, I’ve only started to use some of the Ret healing toys a bit in the mix. In other words, I haven’t had a chance to experience that so badly decried uberness which has led to this uncessant string of nerfs.

That being said, what this past month has, again, amply demonstrated, is that Blizzard still has no clue about the paladin class. The sequence of “Ret is fine, stop QQing” leading to “it’s a bit too high, we’ll tweak a bit” followed by the implementation of “To the Ground, Baby”, a modification to the TTGB nerf, and now the backtracking on Avenging Wrath / Bubble / Forebearance, combined with the dramatic side effects on prot threat generation and holy solo-ability, shows a team of class designers in total disarray.

There is no plan, there is no coherent vision, there is also no consistent message and there is ample evidence of QA (including player testing on the beta and the test realms) being a shameful mess.

Ghostcrawler, initially applauded for a new approach to dev / player communication, is seeing his credibility dropping week after week.

An example, when he answers the forum question “How do you come about your decisions and numbers to boost or nerf paladin class related abilities?” with the following gem, illustrates that we’ve moved from open communication to defensive PR bullshit:

“We do very extensive testing on all aspects of combat balance. Remember, as a large company we have access to testing capabilities far beyond that of the average player. As developers of the game, we also have access to a large number of tools that we don’t make public.”

Sorry, Ghostcrawler. When 3.0.2 went live, you first told us Ret was fine, then perhaps slightly too strong in PvP, then massively too strong in PvP and PvE and again still too strong in both aspects (oh and we don’t know how to handle burst damage sorry but in another couple of months we’ll revert a lot of the nerfs because contrary to what we’re saying now Ret won’t be scaling well at level 80 beyond Naxx). I’m not questioning the reality of the class’ balance state, I’m simply unable to reconcile the evolution of your claims with the notion that you do extensive testing.

Or perhaps you’re simply unable to interpret the results.

The final nail on the Paladin class designers’ coffin is this gem hidden in the announcement of the next nerf (they said to the ground, after all):

“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.”

Hello, Blizzard, ever heard of stunlocking? For four years, you have nerfed every other class who had the capability to kill another player while they were unable to respond. Never has stunlocking been touched. If rogues are to be the exception, fine, but you could start being open about it, and cut the crap like shown in the post above. As a former warlock main who’s had chain fear nerfed time and time again, I’m getting really tired of this.

That being said, since Blizzard has no clue, there are extremely smart bloggers out here who’ve come up with many suggestions to diminish the frontloaded burst potential of a Retadin in PvP without affecting PvE damage on longer fights nor holy / protadins.

The first, repeated often, is to stop seals proccing on special attacks (and adjust damage accordingly to make up for it). Almost every Retribution paladin who has given some thoughts to the matter recommends the same thing.

Blessing of Kings’ Rohan, perhaps the smartest of us all, has an extremely well thought out post with a whole set of measures to fix the issues. While I encourage you to read the whole thing for yourself, here’s the TL;DR version:

“Have Judgement, Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, and Consecration share a 3 second cooldown (in addition to their normal individual cooldown).

1. 1. Change Judgement as follows:
      1. Increase cooldown to 12s.
      2. Increase damage by 20%.
      3. Change Improved Judgements to increase damage by 10/20%.
      4. Increase the duration of the debuff to 30s.
   2. Change Divine Storm as follows:
      1. Increase cooldown to 12s.
      2. Make it do Holy damage once again.
   3. Remove Seal procs from specials, and tune abilities upwards as appropriate.“

If the burst frontloading is the issue, address the frontloading. What Blizzard is currently doing is lessening the value of every talent point invested in Ret more and more. They should make up their mind. If they want a holy-based burst class in the game, they should fix the frontloading. If  not, they’ll have to rethink the holy-based burst aspect from scratch. Either way, this is the fourth time they’re messing up the class in the same amount of years. Whatever they’re doing, it’s not working.

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With time and many tweaks and adjustments, the WotLK beta has wrought many changes from the initial beta outlook. As we get closer to patch 3.x and its class overhauls, I took a long, hard look at the current state of the healadin.

And I don’t like it.

Admittedly, it is hard to make any truly informed decision from outside the beta – the latest changes for instance are still not final, nor does reading patch notes or second-hand accounts really give a feel of how the new trees will actually play.

That being said, from the looks of things, the hopes I had been harbouring to see an evolution of the healadin playstyle seem to have been in vain.

Due to a combination of factors which include mana cost adjustments, the nerf to the Infusion of Light talent and the addition of the admittingly interesting Sacred Shield spell, complex and more varied healing cast rotations which include Holy Shock appear to be, again, on the backburner compared to using our TBC single trick, spamming Flash of Light. Granted, on longer fights you’ll be keeping Sacred Shield up every 30 seconds (Woo! Sacred Shield is the new Seals) for variety, and if you spec all the 51 points in holy you’ll even get the option of keeping Beacon of Light up every minute.

But from where I’m sitting, it looks like the Wrath healadin will be, again, mostly a FoL-bot. So much for versatile and more interesting gameplay.

Not to mention that the Infusion of Light “adjustment” just killed, again, any semblance of 2v2 and 3v3 arena mobility for the holy paladin, one of the biggest issues holding the class back and keeping its number massively under-represented in those two brackets.

On the other hand, you can spec into a solid protection tree, said to provide much more damage (and hence solo viability) in Wrath than TBC, or an extremely sexy reborn Retribution tree which doesn’t just provide better DPS than ever before (OK, let’s cross our fingers, between patch 2.0.1 and TBC go-live Retribution was massive, too) but also pretty solid healing capabilities with the Art of War and Sheath of Light talents. Add to this that you can actually spec up to 5/5 Illumination in holy with 51 points in Retribution for off-healing or 5-men main healing, and you have (as it currently stands) not merely a good, non-gimped, non-laughingstock spec but you have something even more invaluable to many paladin players.

The realization, at last, of the Paladin vision of old: the dream of a holy warrior who can both smite his enemies and keep his allies alive, by staying in the thick of battle. And that alone is heavy enough in the paladin player psyche, especially among those players who stuck to the class through 4 years of disappointment and clericking for the lack of alternatives, to make the Wrath Healadin, as it stands now, the least attractive spec to come.

Caveat Emptor: As mentioned in the beginning, I’m merely theorycrafting. Actual results, in the beta or after a couple of additional adjustments, may change between now and level 80.

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As quoted by MMO Champion, the almost-standard staple of warlock talent builds, putting 5 points into improved corruption to make the bloody spell instant, has been changed. Corruption becomes instant as a base spell, and the talent boosts its damage.

Further, Ruin will get swapped around with Devastation, and become a 5-point talent for the same effect, allowing people to include it in 51-point builds if they want to.

It’s about damn time, if you ask me. That being said, and still beeing the Blizzard cheerleading optimistic PR-Gobbler that I am, I am still really happy about that entire review philosophy they have for wrath to put stuff which has become must-have talents back into base abilities.

How well they will deliver on the promise to provide us with talent trees providing multiple and open choices remains to be seen, but I like the whole approach, even if they could have done this same exercise in 2006 already. But hey, better late than never (critics will of course counter with too little too late, but I wish them happiness in WAR).

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I probably should have known better. I actually used to.

With the latest beta build, DK tanking talents appear again to spread across all three trees. Again, not much of an issue in general (except that now you actually will have to make some choices as currently not every single of them can be picked anymore), just that with the rate of changes, the class is currently too unstable to try and predict much about it.

As I said: I should probably have known better. I actually used to.

That being said, on the paladin front, not only do current tanking and healing specs look very interesting, it also appears even lower level gameplay may be smoother, making leveling another one a more interesting prospect than before. Looking forward to that aspect – provided it doesn’t get nerfed until live.

As others have noted, class-specific glyphs (inscriptions) have been introduced. See the same MMO-Champion link as above for all details, but some of these just sound too good to remain untouched.

To wit, some of the pallie glyphs:

• Glyph of Blessing of Might – Your Blessing of Might also grants offensive spell power equal to 10% of the attack power it grants.
• Glyph of Holy Light – Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 5 of the initial target.
• Glyph of Blessing of Wisdom – Your Blessing of Wisdom causes your target to also regenerate health at the same rate as mana.

These three appear pretty much quite powerful.
Or Shammies?

• Glyph – Chain Heal 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) – Your Chain Heal heals 1 additional target.
• Glyph – Healing Wave 01 (Shaman) (Class: Shaman) – Your Healing Wave also heals you for 20% of the healing effect when you heal someone else.

Can you say battle healer?

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Looking through recent Blue posts, here are a few interesting tidbits regarding Tank design for Wrath.

The Summary:

• They haven’t yet a clear notion how threat handling / management will happen at level 80
• They want to keep each tank with its own specialty but improve overall viability (ie blurring the difference between classes)
• They want to make it perfectly possible and viable to raid without any one definite cookie-cutter tank spec
• They want to look at any formerly “must have” talents and integrate most of these into core mechanics to foster more varied spec… flavours instead of one single cookie-cutter approach.

Generic:

It’s almost impossible at this stage to talk about which class can generate the most threat or has the most survivability at level 80. There are no level 80 characters in beta, and we haven’t done our own testing yet. We want to come up with mechanics we like, then we get the numbers in good shape. I’m not saying don’t talk about it — it’s very useful when someone can point out a potential problem, particularly if it’s one we hadn’t thought of. Yes, that happens–a shock, I know. Just don’t slip down the slope from there by declaring the class dead or breaking out the slaps to the face.

There are 4 tanks in WoW. They all are intended to tank 5-player, 10-player and 25-player instances. They all have their specialties, and the warrior specialty will probably remain as the best tank for single, hard-hitting bosses. But if you only have a death knight for that encounter, or you bring a warrior to a fight with a bunch of adds, you’ll still be able to get purps. This is a slight change in philosophy for us, but one we feel is necessary in a world with 10 classes and several specs getting a boost to raid viability.
(Source)

I also acknowledge that hit and expertise are great threat stats, and expertise can offer a little mitigation to boot. The point I was trying to make is that putting strength on tanking gear solves a lot of problems in the game — it can improve dps and threat (and mitigation if we build the talents correctly) without us having to worry about whether plate-wearing tanks are already capped in some other stat. Defense means something different for warriors and paladins than it does for death knights, and unless we build different gear for each class we can’t count on defense as always being desirable above everything else. The last thing we want is for some classes to feel that they don’t have access to the gear to do their jobs properly. (Source)

I know there is a tradition in BC of a prot warrior MT with perhaps another prot warrior or a paladin as OT. If we do our jobs right, there will be some gouprs that run feral MTs with unholy DK OTs in Lich King raids. Crazy, I know, but in the BWL days it was 5 prot warriors tanking, so we’ve already come a long way. (Source)

Warrior:

AE tanking is hard for warriors. This tends to mean that pugs in particular would rather have a paladin tank just for the consistency. I agree this feels broken. We think we can make it easier for warriors to AE tank, especially in 5-player instances, without displacing the paladin as the best AE tank. At the moment we are considering increasing Thunder Clap to 5 targets. We’ll see how that feels.

The old Shield Block wasn’t fun. We think we can make the new one fun. Numbers are the easiest thing to tweak if that’s all that’s called for. So we tend to focus on mechanics at this stage in development. Once we like the mechanics, we can massage the numbers. (Source)

Warriors need to be better AE tanks without eclipsing paladins. Thunder Clap is a good place to address that problem. If Shockwave becomes the ultimate tanking ability than we’re concerned nobody would want to run a 5-player dungeon without it. That’s not the goal. We don’t want to hand out Consecrate to every tank, but we want you to be able to tank groups better. (Source)

Druid:

The design is for bears to be viable, end-game main tanks. The design is for cats to be viable, end-game melee dps. In both cases you are going to need the right talents, good gear, skill and companions who can back you up — I don’t mean to imply raiding will be easy.

If you want to do a little tanking and dps, you probably won’t be as optimal at either, though you’ll probably always be better at switching between the two than other classes. In order to be as good at tanking as the other classes, you might have to give up a few talents that maximize your dps, and vice versa. This is a good thing — it lets you choose to actually be a main tank.
Don’t worry about your bears. The armor and other changes were done to fix itemization issues, not to nerf druids. You’ve already gotten the ability to drink pots in bear form and benefit from weapon enchants and windfury. We have plenty of knobs to turn to make sure you can do your job even better than you could in LK. (Source)

Paladin:

Like I promised, the paladin changes were more sweeping than most changes. As such, it’s going to take us some time to go through a second pass on the abilities and get everything polished up enough to evaluate the shiny, new paladin. I expect we’ll be a lot more active on this forum when that happens. (Source)

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In the newest Beta build, it appears that Blizzard decided to reshuffle tanking talents. Where previously these were scattered over the lower tiers of all three trees, we now find them only in Frost and Unholy.

With that change, it looks like we’re going a bit back from “no talent tree is dedicated to one role”, as blood seems to become firmly the soloing tree (which it already was, according to people who actually play one in beta).

For more, check out the new trees here. And as pointed out by world of raids, at the time of this writing, the trees have a couple of bugs left.

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From a first look at the paladin spells from 70-80 as displayed on MMO Champion, I was struck by the jump in mana costs for the new two ranks for both Flash of Light and Holy Light.

Using a quick spreadsheet to compare and calculate evolution in healing per mana (HPM) for the new ranks, this is what I came up with:

As you can see, there is a sharp drop in mana efficiency, in particular for the former one-trick pony casters using FoL for their bread and butter healing. The ranks are, of course, FoL 5 to 9 and HL 9 to 13, respectively.

The graph appears to be spelling the end of the healadin as the game’s mana efficiency caster (though in all fairness I haven’t looked at what happens with the other healers so far), but this is, actually, not the whole picture.

If we work under the assumption that the MMO-Champion numbers are correct AND final (which might be something of a stretch, see below), we will start having to take the paladin’s third heal into account. Indeed, in Wrath, Holy Shock moves from a lackluster and highly inefficient heal on a 15 seconds cooldown to something much more useable running on a 6 seconds cooldown instead – a tool which could very well become a standart element in any healadin’s spell rotation, moreso since with the appropriate talents, a crit Holy Shock will accordingly make the next Holy Light spell instant. Or, to put it differently, if a paladin suddenly needs to step up his heals in an emergency, within one single GCD he can drop a crit HS followed by a max rank Holy Light for almost 7.5k raw healing done – before even factoring in spellpower.

Here’s the graph with Holy Shock included. While it looks very good for the new and improved Shock, there’s one big caveat which makes the whole thing look a bit, well, fishy to me. The last three ranks (HS 5 to 7) are all listed with 650 mana cost.

Which seems odd, to say the least.

Nonetheless, healadins were lacking any serious Oh Crap! tools in their arsenal in TBC. The transformation of Holy Shock, with the added talent to make a crit HS followed up with an instant HL as described above, when properly geared, may very well top off any tank who just moved from normal operations into the realm of “incoming wipe risk”.

Most definitely something worth watching out for.

EDIT: the graphs should now look less like something my 3-year old daughter made in a hurry

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Unless you have been removed from the news cycle, you already know these two important tidbits of information:

• The Wrath Beta has started
• The NDA has been lifted.

In other words, any proposed changes are now public, in the open, and up for legit discussion.

To kick this off, a few highlights from the beta patch notes (first edition):

Maths get Nerfed

Less stats to cope with: 

 While theorycrafting is fun, there’s a point when the amount of maths you need to evaluate your gear upgrade paths gets in the way of things, and simplifying these by removing some stats is a good move in my book. The first change will benefit all classes who today combine melee and magic to a certain point, like hunters, paladins, druids and shamans for instance. The Spellpower change is a no-brainer too: healers won’t have to build a separate gear set for damage anymore.

Hunter Love

Several hunter changes which should rejoice all pet maniacs everywhere, among others:

While I haven’t taken a hunter up high enough to be able to fully measure the amplitude of all the other changes, the above are no-brainers. Finally completing unique abilities for all pet families is something which hunters were waiting for since patch 1.7… and that was 3 years ago. Loyalty won’t be missed. Auto-levelling new tamed pets within 5 levels of the hunter? This has to go live. It just has. Bite and Claw made equal? Again, no-brainer. Min-maxing had killed Bite-only pets in TBC. Welcome back, I say.

Paladin Sanctification… and Cursing

Again, way too many changes to list them all. Here are a couple of chosen few:

 Lovely start here… except that a longer daze effect on Avenger’s shield gives indisciplined DPS more time to rip aggro off a pull before it even reaches the paladin.

Blessings renamed into Hands… Mmkay.

I don’t like the sound of this change one bit. Salvation was pretty much a cast & forget blessing. Now part of the responsibility of personal aggro management gets shifted from the DPS to the paladins. I can already hear the arguments after a wipe. Instead of fostering personal discipline, the bad DPS will just blame it on a paladin too busy to cast a hand to shed the extra aggro they shouldn’t have gotten if they had been better players.

Several changes which appear to attempt to foster more hybrid gameplay or talent builds. It remains to be seen how this plays out in practice. I’m skeptical at this point. However, the big Hammer Tossing contests starting when a boss goes below 35% of health are sure to amuse for at least a week or two.

Combat Log changes

• The combat log now differentiates between a spell failure due to resistance and spell failure due to missing the target. Where once both events reported as a resist; a spell missing the target is now reported as a miss.
• Overhealing is now reported in the combat log.
• When a source of damage is entirely prevented (by a shield block, a full resist, or a damage shield like Power Word:Shield, the prevented amount will now be displayed

Lookie, that starts making sense.

As you will have guessed, there are way too many changes to comment them all in a hit & run post like this. There will be more later, but in the meantime, you will of course get class-specific commentary from your favourite class-specific blogs.

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