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

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

Vindication tooltip

One of the changes is coming in the form of a hotfix concerning the Paladin Retribution talent Vindication. Thankfully it’s a PvP change that doesn’t have a big change in PvE since Vindication is mostly a PvP spec talent. As it is now, Vindication reduces all the attributes of the paladin’s target by a certain amount. The hotfix will change it to reduce all attributes except Stamina and Intellect.

According to CM Bornakk, one of the reasons this change is being is because players who face Ret Pallies in the Arena pretty much automatically get handicapped by having their health points reduced at the start of the fight, something that could be powerfully annoying in a PvP setting especially in Arena. I imagine though that the stamina reduction that Ret pallies give would be at least a bit useful for leveling Paladins out there

I’m sure a lot of PvP-ing ret pallies are mad about this because one of the biggest PvP advantage of this talent was taken away. To make things worse, it seems like while this talent would still have some use against the melee classes like Warriors, Rogues and Death Knights it doesn’t do much to affect the caster classes/specs. But comes to think of it, before this change it probably didn’t anyway aside from the intellect reduction. There’s a suggestion to make this talent reduce spell power and attack power instead but I don’t know how powerful that will be.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

If you’ve been doing some PvP and you’re Exorcism skill isn’t working, this is not a bug. There’s nothing wrong with your game or your interface. As the “Blues” in the forums would say, this is working as intended.

paladin using exorcism

Ghostcrawler came out with quite a lengthy post earlier about this matter and he said that they changed the Exorcism skill with patch 3.1.1 so that it wouldn’t work on players anymore and they didn’t have time to inform us all about this ahead of time. Their excuse is that they weren’t sure if they could get the tooltip changes up in time and changing the spell without changing the tooltip would just cause some confusion. Ghostcrawler insists that this isn’t a stealth nerf although I think that Blizzard should have at least said that they were thinking of making the change so as not to surprise a lot of people with the sudden change.

Obviously if you’re just concerned with PvE then this change doesn’t concern you at all, but for all those people who do a lot of PvP this change is a big deal especially since the new season of the Arena Tournament just started. Blizzard felt that using Exorcism in PvP the way things are now provides a certain mechanic to Paladins that they thought is quite overpowered. The good news is that Blizzard is seriously considering implementing new ideas to change the way paladins do their damage so that they will be less dependent on cooldowns and would make paladin damage less bursty and more interesting. Once they do this they do plan to remove Exorcism’s limitation on players. In the meantime, a lot of paladins are shedding tears on this matter.

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

While this change might not really affect Prot paladins too much, it’s a change that got Retribution paladins quite mad. It was one source of mana for them (after all healers don’t just heal tanks) and it also made Seal of Blood less useful, especially since the SoB glyph made SA more effective. Without SA, Seal of Blood/Martyr’s backlash damage is just some annoying thing healers have to worry about instead of giving healers some incentive for healing them since the pally would get more mana back.. Ghostcrawler came out to mention that they might buff the talent Judgements of The Wise to make up for this.

Spiritual Attunement is a great mechanic for a tanking paladin who needs the mana and gets it from taking damage.

For other paladins it just complicates balance. On Patchwerk you get no mana from it as Holy / Ret and on Sartharion it gives you just a ton of mana. So you’re either bone dry on one fight or drowning in mana on another, totally depending on raid damage.

The best knob we have for tweaking Ret mana return is to up Judgements of the Wise from 15% to 20% or whatever it needs to be. (Holy has Illumination.) source

A 5% benefit increase from JotW probably won’t cut it as far as making up for the SA loss is concerned. I’ve heard about ret paladins having mana trouble even with SA at their disposal. There are more changes coming for sure since they’ll have to tweak the SoB glyph to make up for the SA removal. Hopefully a change to SoB itself will also be in the works so healers won’t need to worry much and hopefully a more reliable mana regen mechanic too. Knowing Bliz though, We have reason to be quite pessimistic.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

We are making a change to these spells so that their benefits are exclusive in patch 3.1.0. The buffs will be equivalent, but will no longer stack. Mana Spring will affect the entire raid instead of just the shaman’s party. We felt that both paladins and shamans brought too many unique buffs to a group. Additionally, we have been trying to tone down mana regeneration in large groups, and were concerned raids would feel the need to stack paladins or especially shaman to have enough Mana Spring totems. We have also been trying to get more benefits out of the party and into the raid, and Mana Spring previously was still a party only buff. With this change, if there is only one paladin, he or she can bring Blessing of Kings while the shaman offers Mana Spring. If there are two paladins and the second offers Blessing of Wisdom, then the shaman can offer healing or cleansing with their water totem instead. source

So with this change, Blizzard killed two birds with one stone by making Mana Spring Totem a raid wide buff but also nerfed mana regen by making it not stack with Blessing of Wisdom. This announcement seems bitter-sweet since it comes at a cost. My understanding is that holy paladins who spec into imp BoW will make it better than mana spring totem so this will further reduce it’s effective ness since it won’t stack on those people who have the imp version of BoW. In a way it allows flexibility between the buffs that both classes provide but overall it just doesn’t come out right.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

The latest patch build not only has a bunch of changes (both buffs and nerfs) to existing abilities but it also has a few new abilities/talents as well, further increasing the count of new stuff in this patch. This is mainly a result of the drastic changes that is happening many talent trees, with certain talents reducing in ranks and even moving up and down and even going poof or baseline. Below are the new skills/talents that came with the latest patch build.

Priests

Body and Soul (Holy tree talent) – When you cast Power Word: Shield, you increase the target’s movement speed by 30/60% for 4 sec, and you have a 50% chance when you cast Abolish Disease on yourself to also cleanse 1 poison effect in addition to diseases.

This talent isn’t really great but I guess it’s one of those talents where it’s nice to know you have it if you want to use it. The movement speed bonus for shielded targets could be useful in certain occasions like when you need to move fast past the annoying mobs between Heigan the Unclean and Loatheb in Naxx. The dispel bonus isn’t really a big deal since it only worked on yourself. It also doesn’t help that it’s a bit deep down the holy tree.

Paladin

Divine Sacrifice (Protection tree) – 30% of all damage taken by party or raid members within 30 yards is redirected to the Paladin (up to a maximum of 150% of the Paladin’s health). Instant, 2 min cooldown

I never got why Divine Guardian did what it did since the only way I could think it was useful is if you’re an off tank or a holy or ret pally. I mean who bubbles while tanking? Guess that’s why it was changed to enhance this new talent.Tthis makes sense since you don’t need to bubble and you can help your raid in some AoE encounters by taking a bit more of a beating to ease the load on others. You’re already taking a beating anyway so there might be times when taking a bit more to help out can be useful.

Warrior

Shattering Throw (baseline skill) – Throws your weapon at the enemy causing [ 50% of AP + 12 ] damage (based on attack power), reducing the armor on the target by 20% for 10 sec, and removing any invulnerabilities. 25 Rage, 30 yd range, 1.5 sec cast, 5 min cooldown

Does Iceblock and pally bubble annoy you in PvP? Well once every 5 minutes, this is every warriors answer to both those abilities. If I’m not mistaken, the priest mass dispel ability was the only one that could take those out but now warriors can too. I guess the armor reduction of this ability could also help in both PvE and PvP but the real gem of this new skill is the invulnerability removal.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Ghostcrawler came up with more details about this nerf in a post in the official forums. Based on what he wrote, there’s some cause for celebration since the nerfs don’t seem to be as bad as we all thought. I won’t go into detail with what he says but if you want to see the details then you can go ahead and read his post. The long and short of what he wrote is this:

Mana regen while not casting will be reduced by 40%

Mana regen while casting remains unchanged.

Talents that provide mana regen while casting (spirit tap, arcane meditation etc) will be increased by 67%

Paladins will have their Divine Plea healing penalty reduced to -50% and spiritual attunement mana gains decreased for non tanks.

It’s still sad for us healers to see our regen get nerfed but as you can see from the details, it’s not as bad as we thought. Sure we won’t be able to take much advantage of those big regen ticks when we’re not casting but at least the regen while casting still remains the same. In fights where we’re constantly casting our heals, this nerf won’t make a difference.

Post from: WOW Obsessed