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