Hail

Tharvolde here and I’ve got some more goodies for you that MMO-champion has clarified for us. Please refer to this post for the previous batch of updates as this post will build from that as a foundation.  Here is the latest talent tree for your clicking pleasure:  http://www.wowtal.com/#k=.9q4.paladin

1. - Zealotry is now confirmed as a 2 minute cooldown (this is VERY good news and now makes it a viable, quality 31 point talent for us) but only lasts 15 seconds (down from 30).
2. - Divine Purpose has returned as a talent with two ranks and causes your Divine Storm, Templar’s Verdict and Inquisition abilities to have a 40% chance of generating Holy Power.
3. - Judgements of the Wise has been removed and is now called “Communion”. Since the main part of JotW is now passive for all Prot and Ret Paladins, Communion is a single point that causes the Retadin’s Judgements to replenish 1% of maximum mana every 5 seconds for up to 10 party or raid members.
4. - Swift Retribution, in addition to increasing melee and ranged attack speed by 20%, now also increases damage done by anyone affected by any of your auras by 3%
5. - Seal of Vengance/Corruption has been renamed to Seal of Truth and seems to work in the same way although a bit more streamlined. For each application of Censure (the new name for the SoV/SoC DoT) damage done by your Judgement is increased by 10%.
6. - Seals of Retribution now named Seals of Command but hasn’t changed in effect.
7. - Divine Storm is now a talent again but in the third tier. (yes you read that correctly so I’ll say it again). Divine Storm is now a talent again but in the third tier. What this actual means is that it is taking over for Templar’s Verdict and, I would be willing to bet (although I haven’t seen confirmation on this yet) that Templar’s Verdict is going to be taking Divine Storm’s previous place as a granted Ret ability at level 10!
8. - Inquiry of Faith is a new tier 6 talent that increases the periodic damage of Seal of Truth by 20/40/60%.
9. - Acts of Sacrifice is a new tier 6 talent that reduces the cooldown and mana cost of Hand of Freedom and Hand of Salvation (yes Hand of Salvation) by 10/20%
10. - Selfless Healer is a new tier 5 talent that increases the effectiveness of your Word of Glory (our instant heal that consumes Holy Power) by 30/60% when used to heal others
11. - Improved Judgement no longer reduces the cooldown of Judgement by 1 second per point.
12. - Sanctity of Battle no longer reduces the cooldown of Exorcism.
13. NEW UPDATE Haste now affects Censure (the DoT from Seal of Truth) and the replenishment effect of Communion

In looking at the talents and the abilities list for Retribution I can’t help but get excited at the clear intention of each tree that Blizzard is finally admitting to. What I mean is that now, more than ever in the past, it really seems to me that Holy is tailored towards healing, Protection towards defense and Retribution towards offense. Yet with this in mind, the early talents of each tree provide improvements in those very areas for the main spec. Here’s what I mean:

Let’s say we run a Retribution build that includes 2/2 Selfless Healer. Under this build, our Word of Glory would be quite effective as an instant heal. Now let’s presume we want to continue down this path so we opt for a 10/0/31 build. We wouldn’t even have to go 10 in Holy and we’d be able to increase the effectiveness of Word of Glory, when cast on someone else, by 60 + 6 + 30 = 96%. The implication of this is that, based on our spec of going at least 7 in Holy for our secondary tree, we now have an instant cast, mana-free heal that is doubled in effectiveness (when cast on someone else) and THEN increased further by Holy Power at the time of casting. To me, this sounds like one possible “Retmed” spec wherein Ret would sacrifice a bit of damage for the ability to really put out a heal at a clutch situation.

Moving on, it is also apparent (for the moment), that Blizzard wishes to continue with the trend of SoV vs SoR in that SoV does better damage at 5 stacks but that SoR does more right out of the gate. The interesting piece here, though, is that Retribution now has some talents directly tied to Seal of Truth (SoV) so it will be interesting to see if your auto-attack is still the only way to apply a stack of Censure (Corruption/Vengeance). Personally I would like to see them move SoR towards a primarily spell power-based formula and make it the preferred DPS seal for Holy while making SoT attractive for Retribution. The way to do this, of course, is to allow SoT to stack quicker than it would with auto-attacks.

Along the lines of my previous thought, something very interesting to point out is that Seals of the Pure is now first tier in Holy and still provides up to 9% casting and melee haste after a successful Judgement. Think about this for a moment. Grab Swift Retribution, throw on a little bit of haste gear and take 3/3 Seals of the Pure and what do you have? Well, you’d have 29% melee haste by default from talents and then as much as you can muster from gear. What would the implications of this be for Seal of Truth if our swing timer was cut down to something obscene like 2.0 seconds per swing? Interesting. Interesting indeed.

Anyway, I think I’ve chewed on enough tonight so I’m going to call it for the moment but don’t expect me to be away long. I’ll be back rather soon with more thoughts and considerations. For now, post your thoughts in the comments. I’m very happy right now. So happy that I just wanna say:

For those interested, if the current beta patch were to go live as-is, my build would probably be of the following variety: Tharvolde’s Build

Hail

Tharvolde here and back with the latest on Retribution in Cataclysm. Surely by now you understand I’m never in a hurry to get “breaking news” up on this site as there are other sites that are well-equipped for this sort of thing (such as having data miners on-site to mine patches and present information prior to most people even having the patch download). Instead, I like to sit back for a couple days and take things in before I comment. In the spirit of discussion, let’s get some conversation going regarding the latest Cataclysm Beta patch that was deployed yesterday. Quite a few Retribution changes were introduced to our talent tree so let me walk through it with you now:

Here is the latest talent tree: Talent Tree

• - Eye for an Eye now sends 30% damage back to the caster on 5/10% of attacks. So instead of 10% damage back on every critical strike made against you, we now have a 5/10% chance to reflect 30% damage back on any attacks. This makes me feel bad for anyone with lots of haste or anyone dual-wielding.




• - Rule of Law (NEW) - 5/10/15% crit chance on Holy Light and Crusader Strike Small but powerful talent. 15% critical strike chance on one of our main abilities is very good - especially for first tier and 3 points.




• - Crusade now increases the damage and healing of Crusader Strike, Hammer of the Righteous, Templar’s Verdict and Holy Shock by 10/20/30% So now Crusader Strike can truly be an attack with two lines of effectiveness: single target threat building for Protection and single target damage for Retribution.




• - Improved Judgement now increases the damage of Judgement by 5/10/15% and reduces the cooldown by 1/2/3%. With 7 second Judgements being talented now we may see the 4pc bonus of Scaled PvP gear change to something along the lines of a reduction in CD on another ability or an increase in damage on, say, Crusader Strike




• - Conviction (NEW) - Vengeance 2.0 with no changes. This is just a name and position change for Vengeance as Vengeance is now the name of a Protection Mastery.




• - Pursuit of Justice has had its disarm reduction portion of the talent removed. Well that sucks but given the slowing of PvP in Cataclysm and Blizzard’s desire to stop the arms race between classes I think this makes sense.




• - Heart of the Crusader is identical to its last incarnation but now only costs 1 talent point. Weeeeeee!




• - Sanctity of Battle has been changed to increase the damage of Exorcism by 10/20% and reduces its cooldown by 3/6 seconds The first part of this talent can already be found in a Glyph of perhaps Glyph of Exorcism will be changed or going away as well. The second part makes i such that Retribution will have a slight bit more ranged flexibility.




• - Templar’s Verdict (NEW) - An instant weapon attack that causes a percentage of weapon damage. Consumes all applications of Holy Power to increase damage dealt. 225% Weapon Damage at 3 Holy Power. This promises to be our main “nuke” if you will. I can already hear the cries of fallen enemies slain by back-to-back crit Judgement and Templar’s Verdict with 3 Holy Power!




• - Judgements of the Wise - no change This is the same talent we have now.




• - Seals of Retribution (NEW) - Your damaging Seals now also dael 15% weapon damage each time you swing, and your Seal of Righteousness now hits up to 2 additional targets. I’m not 100% on how I feel about this one. Essentially this means that Seal of Command is gone and that Seal of Righteousness, talented, becomes the old Seal of Command. But Seal of Command is notorious for breaking CC with its, uh, “cleavage”. Now granted you could just say “well then don’t take the talent, Tharvolde. The problem is that 15% extra weapon damage is quite nice on every melee swing. We’ll have to see how this one plays out.




• - Art of War has been altered to no longer include a heal component as instant cast but now gives any melee attack (not just crits) a 30% chance to reduce the cast time of Exorcism by 100%. IMO this is a stupid change. Part of what makes Retribution fun right now is the ability to decide between a reasonable heal and instant damage. Further, I don’t understand the logic behind taking crits out of the equation for Art of War procs. I would estimate that a 30% chance on any melee swing would equal out to roughly the same as a proc on any crit but why make this change in the first place?




• - Improved Crusader Strike (NEW) - It’s back but this time not as a placeholder. This time, it increases the damage of Crusader Strike by 10/20% AND reduces its cooldown by a bugged amount. Wowtal.com is bugged atm for this particular talent so I don’t know exactly how much the CD will be reduced but one thing to point out is that taking 3/3 Crusade and 2/2 Improved Crusader Strike puts us back around 110% for Crusader Strike damage.




• - Rebuke (NEW) - INTERRUPTS SPELLCASTING AND PREVENTS ANY SPELL IN THAT SCHOOL FROM BEING CAST FOR FOUR SECONDS. This is on a mere 10 second cooldown (same as Pummel) and costs almost no mana. Bravo. Five years later and here…. we…. GO!




• - Repentance - No change. This has no change from the current talent.




• - Sanctified Retribution appears to do the same things it does now only to a higher extent and with up to three talent points. The only problem is that WoWtal is bugged for this talent as well so I can’t provide the correct values yet :(.




• - Sanctified Wrath updated such that instead of Hammer of Wrath’s cooldown being halved during Avenging Wrath, now Hammer of Wrath is usable during Avenging Wrath even if the target is not below 20% health. Good change IMO. The way this talent is set up I can see many of us taking only one point since the only thing that improves with the second point is the critical strike chance for Hammer of Wrath.




• - Wrath of the Lightbringer (NEW) - Increases the critical strike chance of your Holy Wrath ability by 25% and reduces the cooldown of Avenging Wrath by 0.5/1 seconds. I think this is actually supposed to read that the cooldown of Avenging Wrath is reduced by 0.5/1 seconds each time you USE Holy Wrath. In either case, this is a PvE talent and probably a rather good one depending on how Cataclysm raids are designed.




• - Righteous Vengeance hasn’t really been changed except that it now includes critical strikes from “Hammer of the Righteous”. Could this be a typo? Even if it is just a typo and they meant “Hammer of Righteousness”, this talent certainly isn’t accessible to someone once they’ve got 31 in Protection. I don’t know of any new abilities by this name we’ve been given so I’m voting this to be a typo and oversight by Blizzard.




• - Swift Retribution now only costs one talent point and increases melee and ranged attack speed by 20% I’m glad this is one talent point now. I’ve never been a fan of dumping three points into a perfectly linear and a bit mediocre upgrade but 20% haste for 1 point is very good. PvErs rejoice!




• - Zealotry (NEW) - Your Crusader Strike generates 3 stacks of Holy Power per strike for the next 30 seconds. Requires 3 stacks of Holy Power to use. Well, there’s a lot to be said about this. First and foremost, this is your new 31 point Retribution talent. Secondly, unless it’s a typo, it has a 30 MINUTE cooldown. If this is truly the case then this has to be the worst 31 point talent in the game. It obviously insinuates that a secondary effect of Crusader Strike will now be the generation of Holy Power but, like I said, if this is truly on a 30 minute cooldown then it is completely worthless to me.