Regarding the new nerfs

Classes Paladin
1

I just wanna thank Blizzard for the nerfs.

I appreciate the developers’ hard work to suppress the joy retribution paladins may feel by taking a viable role in a raid. We’ve gatherd data, made videos, given hundreds of posts of feedback. And nothing. Absolutely nothing has been answered. Why can’t you guys reach out?

We’ve had unique tools removed though.

  • We don’t bring the best damage

  • We aren’t ranged

  • We bring no unique buff, you missed out on making Exorcism unique and useful in raid

  • We don’t protect our friends with our auras, we need ret-aura to keep up in dmg

  • We don’t bring any area buffs to protect the raid, like aura-mastery

  • You nerfed our raid healing debuff with 50%, thank god for that. It’s almost as if we could’ve seen a spot for us in a raid because we bring that. Nope - can’t have that.

  • Warriors are better Paladins the Paladins. They can protect the raid with a shout, - charge their friends to reduce their damage, and at the same time do much more dmg.

  • A DK can protect their friends and raid with an AoE bubble

  • A rogue can reduce the cooldowns of his party and friends

  • A Windwalker boost the physical dmg with 5%

  • A Demon Hunter boosts the magical dmg by 5%

  • A Shaman brings melee buffs

And now the paladin? Well.

HOLY brings the blessing of summer, unique as heck and super useful
PROT brings anti-magic BOP - game breaking.
That is SUPERgood design and exciting! I really appreciate it!

Why can’t RET bring anything unique like that?

SO WHAT IS IT WE BRING TO A RAID? HELLO?

But hey

Destruction got buffed. Thats.
Thats… .good. Nice.
They’ve suffered for years.

12 Likes
2

basicly all we get in DF is much worse version of SL… GG blizzard you outdone yourselves again :smiley:

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3

Agreed 10chars

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4

It’s really simple. The devs have a different view than the community on what Paladins should be. Therefore any communication only results in more animosity.

And not to play the devils advocate, but most specs don’t bring anything unique. The only ones that comes to mind is Holy/Prot, Blood (AoE grip), Enhancement (WF totem), and that’s it? I think i might be missing one or two.

Believe it or not, but that is exactly why it was nerfed. JoL was doing rather significant healing. Saw a VOD of a Prot Pala doing ~25-30k hps while off tanking during raid testing. Almost doubling the HPS of the Holy paladin in the group.

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I respect your observation, thanks for that.

But it still doesn’t answer the question:

  • What is the design for retri paladins
  • Why do I feel like I cant support my team, but I can in ANY other spec
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6

Ret will rise again! There is still hope!

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To be a meme. Sadly i am actually half serious. I am sure you have seen some of Blizzard’s funny “jokes” on the expense of Paladins. Like the Punctured Voodoo Doll from vanilla Zul’Gurub that had the flavor text (paraphrasing) “Resembles a Paladin, or possibly a little girl”. While for every other class it was just “Resembles a [Class].”
Paladin NPC’s in WotLK called “Faserol” (faceroll) and “Isimode” (easy mode).
And it’s not just old stuff either. Uther had a line in HotS in which he said (paraphrasing) “Retribution is not the path of the Paladin”.

Not to mention that a lot of the top dogs at Blizzard back during the development of OG WoW outright detested Paladins. Tigole (Jeff Kaplan), Furor (Alex Afrasiabi), and Kalgan (Tom Chilton) were openly so. Seriously, just go look up their history. It’s insane that some of these guys were even hired in the first place.

Edit: While it has been a long time since those guys ran the show. I don’t think Blizzard’s views on Paladins, and Ret in particular, has changed. Because i saw a chart someone posted over in the US forums that tallied up and averaged every specs performance of the last couple of expansions. Ret was at the very bottom, by a significant margin.

Edit2: Was Eu beta Paladin thread actually. Here is the chart. Courtesy of Cutelady

But you can. It’s just that Ret’s utility either has a huge opportunity cost (resources) or is very niche. But you are getting a combat ress in DF. Which is nothing to scoff at.
That said i would probably not invite a Ret to my groups even if they were top tier since the spec revolves a lot around wasting utility for more damage, or letting your party members take a lot of damage. And i would imagine a lot of Paladins are going to abuse that fact to the max.

I mean, what other class is rewarded for wasting their utility and letting their team mate die? Only Ret with Ret Aura+CR, and BoS+Recompense+DT. Also Shield of Vengeance, lulz.

No offence, but Ret is such a trash spec regardless whether or not they do top dps. Which at the moment is looking to be true.

1 Like
8

Lets not forget the lore itself of paladins. Who are/were the top paladins and where are they now?

Most are dead, got corrupted or went on to become something else, in some cases all 3.

In Legion what did they do other then to show pure incompetence by blindly charging in first instead of holding the line for the rest to come and get decimated against demons they should be fairly strong against (even tho no gameplay actually shows that).

The lore of paladins has gotten to a point that it matches the gameplay, its a joke class in every aspect. The fall of a paladin is often more glorious then what the paladin ever was!.. Not Tirion tho, he just gave some speeches and then died a boring death, a paladin to the end.

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9

You bring:

  • A Brez
  • A BoP
  • The best immune spell in the game
  • Off-healing
  • A poison and disease dispell
  • Blessing of sacrifice
  • Aura of Devotion and Concentration (3% passive DR on the whole raid is OP)

I’ve known many paladins who were sick of being taxed in damage because they had Group utility. Now, you have the opportunity if you feel like you want to do damage to do it, and if you want to prioritize having group utilities, you can do it. You have the tools, it’s your choice to have it or not.

I can see the same pattern in the warrior tree. You’ll have to sacrifice output to support if it’s needed. Shaman as some of the best support talents away from output talents too. It’s an intentional choice.

As for the recent nerfs, like all they did recently, it was to put pretty much everyone on a more even foot. Paladins did too much AOE damage for a decent balance. The same can be said about DH and Prot War. They did got nerfed 4 times each since the start of balancing. Before complaining about damage nerf, you should wait to see the full picture.

But if you complain about the tree design, yes, i’m with you, there is so few new things aside from the return of Exorcism, it’s not really appealing or exciting. But Ret Paladin is one of the specs who did not lost very much from past expansions (or got it back in SL). You kept your artifact power after Legion, where most got it back just now.

Warriors and DK’s need to sacrifice damage output or personnal defensive talents in order to pick those talents too.

The outlay rogue talent had been removed and replaced by a pretty useless talent, so they don’t reduce CD of their party (5-man group) anymore.

Windwalkers and DH 5% are nice but the 3% damage reduction of Devotion Aura is far more usefull overall. I hear the argument that you wont use it because you need to say in Ret Aura, but still 3% DR willl ever be more usefull than a 4 seconds of Seraphim when someone dies or get hit for 50% of their heal, which happens in raid mostly when the group get a very massive hit. Most of the time you will use Def CD or personnal heals on those seraphim procs. Furthermore, since it procs maximum once every 30 sec, it meeans that your uptime will never be high.

As for Shamans… well i dont have any defense on that, but they need support stuff as much as you do.

1 Like
10

Thanks for a great point of view, I appreciate it

11

why everyone talks like pve was the only content in wow?

Then again paladin could see more changes in pvp like a gap closer and stronger defensives.

wheelchair out.

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As hes mainly asking for ret from what i gather, all of those are brought by prot and holy aswell + they have specc unique utility aswell, rets dont. The aura will be a dps loss for the Ret to use.

Off-healing is a trap utility mainly becuase everyone has selfhealing abilities and deff CDs to buy time for healers to do their job. So for off-healing to be of any import both the healers in the group and the player in need must have screwed up at the same time.

The tax is by far much larger for a Ret, Do less dmg to get cleanse, do less dmg to use dev aura, do les dmg to get BoP, do less dmg to use WoG and so it goes on… btw only aura is group/raid utility, rest are single targets deminishing their use much more.

The usual case in nearly every single expansion is that during Beta Rets are over the top on dmg, they have bagan to tune that down but more nerfs are sure to happen and we will probably end up at the same spot we are in now or lower, never above. This is sure to happen during the course of Pre-patch.

Look at mages general tree, there is like one talent that increases the overall dmg of the mage in their rotaton. The rest is defence, selfhealing, CC, CC, CC, mobility oh and more CC. There are some at the very end of the tree that can be counted as choises

They get to choose between CC’s… well no scratch that they can get all the CC nodes, there is no cost they have to lose to get anything. They dont have to specc into sheep, they just have it, same with food table and blink. Im actually supprised they have to specc into Remove curse.

We on the other hand have to specc into turn evil… have you seen that spell ever used over the last 18 years? Its hardly even used in pvp for DK and Lock pets! And its still a casted spell!

Why i brought mages tree into this is because they have a true hybrid general tree, they get to choose spells from all speccs as theirs have a clear identity!

Paladins have none of that, the general tree is just the basic toolset all paladins have. Wings never felt ret specific as it was a base talent for the whole class since it came. Same wth BoP, hammer of wrath, hammer of justice and every other spell. It might have been in the ret spellbook but it was for all paladins.

The only abilities that have been Ret specific in the past are our attacks like Crusader strike, Divine Storm and Templars Verdict.

And here is a banger… The others dont need to specc into Crusader Strike, but we need to specc into cleanse, BoP, Wings etc. Rets got nothing and lost much of the little we had.

2 Likes
13

Do you think any Warrior will ever pick Berserker’s rage in PVE, outside of some very niche use on a specific fight, I could say the same of Intimidating shout, Intervene and Stormbolt. Even Shockwave for tank is pretty sure to never be picked ever. Every one of those represent one or more talent point picked from pure damage output or mobility to put in utilities when needed.

That’s exactly the same thing for Pala to expect. Dont expect to have all your utilities in every encounter, you’ll have to spec dance between having them or having more throughput.

As for the fact Holy and Prot brings one more utility each than you, fine. I think it’s stupid that Blessing of Spellwarding got put back in the Prot tree. But to be fair, no ret really wants to use Blessing of seasons.

In the end, the goal of this game in PVE is to kill bosses, not to parse against others. I think that’s exactly the point Blizz want to put forward with DF. Most classes need to sacrifice something in order to get their more specific utilities/defensive. Don’t expect a cookie-cutter build for every single encounter this expac. The talent tree is not designed for that, neither have the intention of being that. If it does, it just failed it’s goal.

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Here is the thing, its not needed to get further down the line, same with everything else you mentioned.

If a Holy pala wants to get Rebuke he MUST take Fist of justice (2 points) and even greater Judgment (tbh dont know if thats wanted for Holy or not), if he wants Cleanse he MUST take Blinding light or Repentance. There is no choise here for paladins, there is for warriors however.

Warriors can bypass all the pvp stuff if they want, Paladins cant. And what mobility choises must Warriors lose out on to do more dmg?

And on mobility,

  • Warriors dont need to specc into charge.
  • Leap: 45 sec CD and does dmg VS Pala Steed 45 sec CD lasting 3 sec at 100%
  • Bounding stride: 15 sec CD reduction and 70% speed for 3 sec VS 1 sec extra of steed
  • Double time: 1 extra charge and 3 sc CD reduction VS Cavalier: 1 extra charge

Do you see a pattern here? Warriors constantly get 2 things for ever single talent spent, and in larger quantities aswell.

Their tree is thought out, pathing is decent, points dont feel like they are thrown away for minimal gain.

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15

While i understand and agree with you on the mobility power gain per point side of your argumentation, as i see it, this whole discussion is more about the Fact Ret Paladin is loosing too many Utility spells if he wants to focus on damage, resulting in a less appealing spec in regard of group composition building, and a ‘‘Lack’’ of utility, especially compared to its two other specs.

As i see it, the class tree of Paladins clearly needs a rework, especially in regards of it’s pathing.

  • Swapping Cleanse Toxins and the choice node Repentance/Blinding Light would allow a better chance of Cleanse Toxins to be picked, especially in Raid environment.
  • Blessing of Spellwarding should return in the Class tree to help Ret Pally.
  • Cavalier Talents are clearly too weak
  • Turn Evil should be removed from the tree or be entirely merged in Repentance.

But in regard of pure utility spells, the Paladin does not lack tools and does not need to sacrifice more points than other classes to get his utility spells, outside of Cleanse Toxins.

You did not understood my point here. I said that in order to pick Utility spells, Warrior need to either lose damage or mobility. I used the warrior as an example, but pretty much every spec and class is in this case. Any tree that as not this in it’s design is a tree that fails it’s goal.

As for the default class spells, charge was needed to be default because of rage generation in the first levels. A warrior whitout it does just not feel good. On the other side, all paladins got Divine Shield by default, when the warrior does not have any defensive out of his talents. It’s a matter of class fantasy, one is more mobile, the other can avoid deadly damage with it’s defensive spell, but is less mobile.

Yes, Paladin will probably lack mobility and i hope Blizz will do something about it fast, but it does not lack utilities or reasons to be picked in a group on a class design standpoint. What will result in ret paladins being picked or not is going to be Damage Balancing. And for now, paladins are not last in that regard.

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Lets be honnest here, the “utility” a paladin has today is the same/less then we had in vanilla… not more. Did that earn spots for Ret in raids? It really didnt untill we got a real DPS rotation in WotlK and it was borderline OP even tho how simple and sh**y it was.

We have not gotten a single thing utility wise since (give or take 1 single expansion with Devotion aura). So unless Rets are at WotlK lvl of dmg, we wont be sought after.

Care to give an example? I dont play a warrior so i cant really tell whats an important sacrifice a warrior must make to get the utility nodes.

This the same as blink for Mages, Sprint for Rogues, Deaths Advance (and deathgrip) for DKs, Fel rush for DH, Travel form for Druids, Roll for Monks, Disengage and Aspect for Hunters, Ghost wolf for Shamans and Hover for Evokers?

The only melee class without a basic mobility talent for some reason and most casters have them aswell.

Also noticed that Warriors learn Pummel aswell and can improve it with talents.

Divine sheild is the eternal anchor that will always drag us down to get anything else, its always the excuse to get anything even tho other classes keeps getting mini-versions of it.

We are entierly built on having that talent yet they deem that it should be counterable while at the same time we have nearly no deff outside it. The heals we have in BGs has a perma MS debuff as soon as we enter, add a bubble popping warrior enemy with another stack of MS debuff for the fun to start!

Been waiting 18 years, not gonna hold my breath.

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On this, i do agree full time, but i think it’s not an excuse but a sad reality. This spell is too strong for the paladin to have anything else to be strong in it’s kit. If i would have been in charge of the tree, it’s the first thing i would have put in the tree as a capstone at the total opposite of DPS talents to let DPS having both more reliable, frequent and out of Forbearance Defensive spells and more mobility without becoming a totally unkillable god. As i see it, this spell was only kind of balanced in Wrath, when it had 50% damage reduction component.

This is pretty much a generic DPS tree you’ll see on most of Arms Warrior. In fury, you technically never pick Thunderclap and it’s upgrade, so you have 2 more points in the middle part, which make them more prone to pick utilities.

As it is right now, an Arm must either:

  • Sacrifice 2 points and remove the first GCD Hit damage component when they apply Rend by using Thunder Clap, and now just use Rend which also reduce the rage spend in that GCD, reducing Tactician proc chance by a lot, resulting in a double dps loss.
  • Sacrifice the 15 sec Heroic leap cooldown reduction for 1 point or Heroic Leap entirely for 2 points.
  • Sacrifice the double charge talent for 1 point.
  • Sacrifice cooldown reduction on Overpower, which is a core part of your rotation (would be as impactful as a talent who would reduce Judgement by 1sec), which is a double dps loss as this spell is used to boost the damage of Mortal strike.
  • Sacrifice a third tier talent point that gives you 1% crit and 5% bonus damage on Execute, for 1 point.

The rest is pretty much mandatory, either for Pathing or because it’s too much of a valuable damage upgrade to be sacrificed. So if you need:

  • A curse, disease or poison personnal dispell, you need 1 point. (and you can’t sacrifice any Heroic Leap Talent due to pathing)
  • An anti-fear cost 1 point, 2 if you need to dispell your group.
  • Your Rallying shout cost 1 point, 2 if you need to have it’s upgrade.
  • Piercing howl, an AOE 70% snare cost 2 points due to pathing.
  • Your Fear cost 1 point.
  • Your Stun cost 1 point.
  • Passive health regen through Pain and Gain or Second Wind cost either 1 or 2 points to help you heals in progress.

Make your choice in order to sacrifice the right thing to get the utility you need on the boss or the dungeon run you are going to do. Do you sacrifice Damage, Mobility, or both in order to help your group?

It’s this choice that makes the Warrior class tree interesting, probably the single best design-wise class tree of all and the best example of what a good tree design is.

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it really is not it is an excuse if it was implemented in today’s game the same exact ability would start with 3min cooldown not 5 and then could be talented down.
Look at Aspect of the turtle even though it has weird interactions it is as strong as bubble.

Paladin is not unkillable inside of Bubble warriors and priests can dispel it completely.
And have been able to for several expansions.

When it had i seem to recall zero counters.

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19

But aspect of the turtle, Iceblock and the Immune of Dh’s are disabling the ability to do any damage while it’s up.

When i was saying that the paladin could be unkillable, it was if Blizz gave them another, more frequent and reliable defensive, which is what Paladin really need. But combine any frequent and reliable defensive (like Ignore pain, as example) with Divine Shield and his regen and the paladin will become unkillable.

As it is, the spec is just too squish outside of his massive Def CD’s, even if he’s in plate. But it seems like the slow glass canon is the identity Blizz is aiming for.

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Could be but never has been, never truly been on top with the lack of so many other tools. Good dmg in Wotlk but no mobility tho nor an interupt. Hard to kill in Cata but no dmg and very long build up for burst, still no mobility. Most mobile in MoP and WoD but mediocre burst and low dmg outside it.

Noticed that steed had a separate CD for the second charge when logging in earlier today so that was a plus… untill it suddenly didnt. Conduits still in effect for now so it lasts for 8.4 sec now, making it a bigger blow when its gone.

Justicars vengance healing seem to be heavily nerfed in pvp but the talent does not state by how much like it usualy does.

Final verdict legendary still works and does more dmg then talented final verdict, also with bigger procc chanse, aslo it does not procc divine storm from Vanquisher’s Hammer (the talent one) but that hardly matters as it will be gone soon, just like the specc itself.

1 Like