Holy Wrath

Lead Encounter Designer Daelo’s words pretty much provides the context of this change. He mentioned that this change will affect the difficulty of the Anub’arak encounter in the Trial of the Crusader and that he didn’t want 5 paladins with the Holy Wrath glyph to be the “right way” to defeat him. Since Anub’arak was just killed recently, it’s implied that this hotfix is mainly in response to the recent kill.

While it is a creative way to abuse a spell to kill a boss, it certainly doesn’t look right to be able to kill Anab’arak by keeping him stunned with paladins rotating their Holy Wraths on him.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Thrym in Crystalsong Forest

A few days ago, I was in Crystalsong Forest doing one of those Argent Tournament daily quests involving that zone. As I was peacefully roaming around the forest, I spotted a very unusual sight! What was Thrymm The Hope Ender doing out of his territory? Apparently this level 80 Blood Elf paladin kited Thrym over to the Crystalsong Forest (as seen in the image above)! I stuck around for a while watching this paladin kick his ass but left before he took him down. I looked at both their health bars and made the conclusion that the paladin would eventually take him out.

I never really noticed it before but I realized that that path that Thrym patrols in Zul’drak actually leads to the eastern edge of Crystalsong where you’ll see a set of stairs. This is the only path I can see that this paladin took to kite him into the forest.

Have any of you seen Thrym kited into Crystalsong too?

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Past Me

In those days I really couldn’t see myself playing a healer. I did try to level a dwarf priest in the hope of probably getting to try it out but in those days my real intention of leveling that priest was the melt some face as a shadow priest. Well it didn’t work out and I eventually deleted that character. Things are different now. I played a Holy Paladin as a main for the latter half of the Burning Crusade expansion and I currently play a Restoration Druid, with my paladin still holy and somewhere between shelved and “played very sparingly”. I still plan to level that pally to 80 sometime though.

I now consider healing something I’m pretty comfortable with and it’s also a nice change of pace especially if you don’t want to worry about rotations, kill targets, dealing with adds or doing enough dps. In trash encounters, healing is actually quite relaxing. The thought I had last week was this. When I was being convinced to level a priest, I was actually choosing between a priest that I still had to make or a level 21 troll shaman that I had made and played to that level sometime before and shelved. I realized that no matter what I choose it would eventually be a healer if and when it got to level 80. In fact somehow deep inside I feel like leveling both and by doing that I would have all four healing classes that already are or should be healers.

This reminds of that quest Chromie gives to go to the Bronze Dragonshrine. If I could go back in time to the Vanilla WoW days and tell myself of my current situation favoring healers, I wonder if if Past Me would believe Current Me.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

argent tournament weapons

I already marked my holy paladin as the next alt I’m going to level to 80, which I will do once my warlock gets geared decently to run at least heroics and maybe even Naxx acceptably. Already excited about the prospect of getting a cool epic weapon for my holy paladin when she gets to 80, I started looking for the weapon I’ll get from the Argent Tournament. I was quite disappointed to find out that there was no real obvious option for them. The obvious choice would be spell power mace with some haste or crit and maybe some mp5. What they have as far as a healing weapon is concerned is the spell power dagger which is a wrong fit for holy paladins for 2 reasons, they can’t use daggers and it has spirit and no crit. i realized that the best fit from the weapons is the Blade of the Keening Banshee for the Horde or the Gnomeregan Bonechopper for the Alliance which is really a dps caster weapon since it has some +hit.

After giving it some thought, it seems that Elemental and Restoration Shamans don’t really have a perfect fit either as far as Argent Tournament weapons are concerned. It’s quite sad that these specs are left out. I mean it’s understandable to limit the weapons that drop from a boss because a big loot table especially when it comes to catering to specialized gear like spell power plate means that if that specific spec has no representation in a raid, it just goes to waste. But I don’t see the problem when it comes to vendors like in the Argent Tournament.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Paladin

For Holy Paladins, they talked about the mp5 stat as well as the changes they made to Beacon of Light and Sacred Shield/Flash of Light. While mp5 benefits all paladin specs, the Holy paladin is the spec where it probably would have the most impact. But for now mp5 seems to be quite an undervalued and overlooked stat compared to crit, spell power or intellect. They’re making mp5 more beneficial for all classes by increasing the mp5 values on gear by 25%. They did mention something about collapsing spirit and mp5 in the future (since spirit is pretty much junk for paladins and shamans) but that will have to be done carefully. Instead of collapsing both stats maybe they can approach the problem the way they made spirit more useful for classes like mages and warlocks – adding a bonus to something based on your spirit.

They changed Sacred Shield so that when Flash of Light is used on a shielded target, the target will also get a HoT worth the 100% of the FoL amount. Beacon of Light was also changed so that the healing it does is now based on total healing done including overheals. They also mentioned that they would consider giving paladins more healing spells down the road.

For Prot pallies, they talked about how they wanted Blessing of Sanctuary to be the main blessing for them, which is why they buffed it making it also give the same amount of stamina bonus as blessing of kings but will not stack with it.

Ghostcrawler said that Ret pally dps is currently too low and they addressed that for 3.2 by redesigning Seal of Vengeance/Corruption so that it will be the go to seal for most fights, especially on boss fights. The spell now does 33% weapon damage as Holy with 5 stacks and crits do double damage while the DoT component of the spell got changed to a melee attack instead of a spell. Seal of Command’s niche would be more for shorter fights like trash mobs in dungeons and in PvP.

For PvP, they’re bringing back the use of Exorcism on player targets but added a 1.5 second cast time. This way Paladins can’t use it on the go as they’re closing out the distance between players. They’ll need to make a decision on when to use it and probably only when it becomes instant cast through Art of War procs. Ghostcrawler also touched on a plan to redo the entire dispelling system wherein one idea would be to give all healers the ability to dispel Magic but to prevent offensive dispelling altogether (so would this mean spells like Spell Steal and Purge would be out?) or at least prevent the dispelling of buffs classes should have like Arcane Intellect.

Lastly, they touched on a plan to make Librams more prominent aesthetically just like quivers for Hunters. They understand that Librams were a big part of the Paladin look especially in Warcraft 3. It’s something they’d like to do in the future but they warned that it could take time, citing that it took them this long to implement the new druid form art.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

seal of blood glyph

A short while back, I remember Ghostcrawler saying that they’ll have to rework the Seal of Blood glyph to give mana back some other way now that Spiritual Attunement is “gone”. Well the new Seal of Blood glyph does exactly that. According to MMO Champion, this is how it is in the PTR:

* Glyph of Seal of Blood — When your Seal of Blood, Seal of the Martyr, Judgement of Blood, or Judgement of the Martyr deals damage to you, you gain 11% of the damage done as mana. (Old – Glyph of Seal of Blood — Your Seal of Blood or Seal of the Martyr increases the mana received from Spiritual Attunement by 10% while active.) source

So they didn’t remove the recoil damage of SoB like a lot of paladins were hoping. So even if all the new changes gives enough mana back to match what SA gave, the presence of the backlash damage will still be a wee bit of an inconvenience for healers but this time without the incentive of giving the pally mana through SA.

Speaking of changes that give paladins more mana back, the idea to buff the initial mana gain effect from using Judgements of the Wise has been included in the PTR, according to MMO Champion, and in fact at a much higher buff than they first mentioned at a refund of 25% base mana instead of 20%.

The final piece of this puzzle to rework the abilities affected by the SA removal as a baseline ability is complete. It’s not what you were hoping for but if you think about it, it looks really decent. You win some, you lose some but it really could have gone a lot worse.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Retribution Paladin

When all that is said and done, Ret’s PvE damage is still probably a little low. Buffing Divine Storm or allowing RV to benefit from Crusader Strike are two possible places to add more damage.

Note that I made no promises. These are all just things we are discussing. The eventual solutions could end up different. source

While this is good news and welcome changes if they are implemented, there are still things that could use some work. As someone who doesn’t really play a Ret pally (holy paladin used to be my main and now it’s an alt I’m levelling), one of the things that hit me is that Seal of Command doesn’t seem to have much use anymore. It may be the greatest thing before you get Seal of Blood/Martyr as a Ret pally but once you do get it, Seal of Command gets pushed out of the spotlight. Maybe PvP is the only place you use SoC and even that I’m not sure. It needs a reworking or maybe even replaced with something else so that players could find more use for it even at higher levels. Of course, Seal of Blood/Martyr is still a big issue for Ret pallies since it just sucks to take damage out of your attacks. I know I’d be pissed if my mage took damage every time he casts a frostbolt or something. I don’t want to say anything more and comment on something I really don’t know much about but all I can say is that it seems like now is a pretty sucky time to be a Ret pally *sigh*

Post from: WOW Obsessed