Y'know, it's always a pleasure to watch Ghostcrawler take a post like this and totally OWN it.

My only concern is that the SoV change will hurt paladins far more than you think.

Most of the parses/theorycrafting I've seen on these forums and elsewhere show a net loss on most of the fights.

My other concern is that we are now being compared to rogues/kitties who have relatively high setup times. The issue I have with that is that even with this high setup time, both classes do extremely good damage consistently. From what I have observed and understand, their damage is balanced around the fact that they will frequently be mobile or switching targets. It hasn't seemed to hurt either one of these classes too much in Ulduar. I would add shadow priests and a few other classes with setup times, but they either do mediocre damage anyway (rarely topping the meters) or have damage that varies so much on different bosses that it's clearly not properly balanced.

redit: post is poorly worded, too lazy to change it but you should get the idea.

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Q u o t e:


AHAHA! Says the Lock, the highest burst damage class in the game. We only bring pure burst damage into PvP. We dont even have a GOOD gap closer! We should be allowed a good amount of burst since we have no other PvP utility other then that.

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There's a significant difference. Even with warlock burst our representation is in the pooper. Your class with it's burst and toolset rose to dominate this entire expansion, just behind and about equal to DK's.

Most warlocks agree destruction burst is stupid and should be nerfed. But destruction burst is the only thing propping our class up right now. Without it there simply wouldn't be warlocks in PvP.

Warlocks don't have cake to take away, so we cry less when we don't get a slice. Nerfing paladins on the other hand is like trying to take a fish away from a cat.

Blood

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Q u o t e:
Players didn't seem to particularly like it. It felt like a liability in PvE

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Any PVE Ret with Half a brain Loved Blood. I would take Blood back in a heart beat over "the new dps seal"

Blood dmg was canceled out with Judgement of Light and Sacred shield.

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Q u o t e:
We do try and make sure we know what we're doing when we ever buff a very over-represented spec or nerf a very under-represented spec.

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Balance druids says HI to you GC.

We want our random starfire and stafall stuns back please. Your decision to "nerf" an under-represented spec based on "we don't want you to think how to use your spells, we made it just for dps so use it as that!" is silly. Let us decide how to use it. What harm does it do when an under-represented spec gets a useful 51 pt talent?

The 3.2 lifebloom changes. You want to nerf resto? Fine, do it in their talent. Remove lifebloom from receiving the 20% bonus in empowered rejuvination. Why do you nerf RESTO druid by nerfing the BASE spell and its coefficient? Balance druids need heals to stand a chance and lifebloom is our main PvP heal.

So you either don't know what you are doing (that's fine, people make mistakes) or simply want to further nerf under-represented specs.

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Q u o t e:
Blood



Any PVE Ret with Half a brain Loved Blood. I would take Blood back in a heart beat over "the new dps seal"

Blood dmg was canceled out with Judgement of Light and Sacred shield.

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PVP ret loves blood too. Nothing like tossing out a judgement when a poly is incoming to break that stupid sheep.

I think people have to move away from pretending these paladin reactions are PvP tears. Some are, no doubt.

But, honestly, I just cannot get over the auto-attack thing.

Seriously. Auto-attacking. Say it out loud, let it roll around on your tongue. Maybe in the grand objective sense warriors rely on auto-attacking to fuel their resource bar and other attacks, but it certainly does not feel that way when you are playing as one. I'm not trying to harp too much on this, but just imagine you're doing a presentation in your class for videogame design and you say "now this character first has to auto-attack the boss for about 15 seconds before its attacks deal normal damage." Auto-attack. Like an abyss or a vacuum, my mind reels in horror.

GC, I need you to walk through a fight, on Freya as ret, and tell me what you think our numbers will look like.

First, all the trash. There is no chance your uptime will be 15 seconds on any mob in order to stack a full dot. So, you are required to use a sub optimal seal, and the best option you have is seal of the Righteous. It cannot crit, it constitutes a massive DPS loss, but it's better than the ability that's supposed to be the best thing you've got. (which is kind of like asking fire mages to spam frost bolts unless they can stack scorch for 15 seconds *per mob*, but I digress)

So, trash is done. Meters come up, raid leader mocks you as lolret, but you sally on, confident in the buff you've been promised.

You engage Freya. within seconds, adds begin spawning. Hurray!! it's the big oak tree. You stand and attack him, waiting until you stack five. Sadly, at 3, the tree spawns. You *MUST* burn it down immediately. You used to be able to contribute in a very real way at this point, but sadly, your overnerfed instant attacks don't do much harm at all anymore, since they have been tuned to work with seal damage. So, you switch back to tree guy, get two stacks, and he goes down.

congratulations, you have done very poor dps, and everyone else is carrying you.

But wait! More adds. This time, it's the big group of flowers. You used to be able to contrubute here by first being respectable at AOE, and then decent initial burst damage when you seperated. Now, you switch back to seal of the Righteous, you do lackluster damage at both, and we move on. The Raid continues to have to carry you.

Finally, the three lashers. Here, you *might* get your stacks on one of them. but they have to go down at the same time, so you're forced to swap back and forth between two of them. Now your stack time doubles or triples. It never gets to 5. You are stuck in lackluster mode.

Finally, the waves are all down, little thanks to you, and you jump on freya! Boooyah! You can get 5 stacks.

Except, the tree keeps spawning, and you never manage to get them up.


This is what ret will look like - not fun.

I'm sorry PVP is so broken. I'm sorry people can't learn to kite us. I'm sorry that we have initial burst. I am sick of the devs kicking the crap out of PvE, and you are truly avoiding adressing this very real issue with your boss fights.

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Q u o t e:
To be fair, a lot of classes have the same problems. If anything, we are adding more ramp up time to more classes as a way of toning down PvP burst. The Feral druid who has to peel off of Hodir at 4 cps in order to free an NPC is going to be pretty frustrated too.

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Wrong. No class sets up using auto attacks with ~3.5 speed weapons. If that druid really has to switch, he can use Savage Roar and then switch. This isn't even a valid comparison because Savage Roar is a self buff. When Savage Roar and Slice and Dice are limited to the current target, then you can make the comparison. Until then, don't.

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Q u o t e:


If you havent noticed nearly EVERY Paladin in Arena is Holy right? Also the SoV nerf isnt even about PvP.

P.S.
Nice PvP gear you got there. Can tell you can understand the issue.

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Your first statement is an exaggeration. It's basically true, but false in that you insist there are no ret paladins in PvP. They are still very potent.

Your second makes you seem like an idiot, as my PvP set is in the bank. I have a full deadly+furious and all the offset items I have the rating for. My armory shows clearly that I actually use that PvP gear, too.

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Q u o t e:

We needed to nerf Ret pretty hard for PvP reasons. Some of you just aren't going to accept that change was needed, and I suspect it would take several long threads to convince you otherwise, so I'm not going to spend a great deal of effort in this thread trying to do so. I know it is frustrating that we have had to nerf Ret so many times this expansion. It is frustrating for us too. We keep trying to not overdo it and we keep underdoing it.

We did make the changes with some longer-term changes in mind to get Ret to be less about huge upfront attacks that will hopefully give Ret players some more intersting options with regard to Seals and special attacks. We're not there yet, but we have changed paladins dramatically for LK and it's going to take some time.

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I'm quoting this because it centers on the point where things begin to get hazy. Which is really the problem for some of us, and I'd like the honest feed back as a developer. You were nice enough to us in the Beta, so I'm hoping you'll throw us a small bone at the heart of the issue.

Ret is being nerfed for PvP reasons. Which I can even agree with. The design idea behind Ret DPS has remained to 2 handers with a hard kick for our damage. It's not a bad idea to strive for, and I certain understand the concept behind it given lore and the PC games concerning Paladins. It's a natural ideal, and many of us are very attracted to it. Especially now that it's functional (for the most part).

My question is simply this: What is the desire of the design team to help ease collision of burst-designed DPS not under performing in PvE and way over performing in PvP? Now I'm not asking you for mathmatics and for specifics. You guys at the office are well known for not sharing the pie until it's almost finished, and that's perfectly fine. I can understand why.

What I'm hoping for is more of a hope for that stretch. How to allow the two to be seperate but respectfully equal. Allowing for good-played Paladins to see higher Arena rankings, and at the same time allowing PvE the ability to be a bit higher on the raid DPS. Now I realize nothing you could say will be specific, I get that, but I'm hoping you respond with something to give us a clearer understanding of how to make the two play differently enough that it's possible not to teeter-totter them against each other.

In Beta I advocated a DW for Ret to allow for PvE difference, and I understood the reasons you didn't want to. Just now that I see the same issue coming up again I begin to wonder if there isn't some significant glyph/talent alterations that could be your focal point from here on to nail down the right way to exist in either one, but not both at the same time.

I appreciate any time you give to what I said, and I'd love to hear your thoughts. I think it'd help out a lot of the sky-falling that goes on around here about it.