I’m sure many of you have seen the next patch changes to paladins. They are as followed for the next patch;
Eye For An Eye: This talent now deals 5/10% of the critical strike damage taken by the paladin back at the attacker.
Hand of Freedom: The base duration of this buff has been reduced from 10 seconds to 6 seconds.
These are obviously PvP nerfs and the Eye for an Eye nerf hurts, but it isn’t something that will make or break games for the skilled players. However, I do feel the Hand of Freedom nerf will hit home with a lot of top players. Luckly, they nerfed the duration and not the CD. Most of us should be thankful for that. Just make sure that you make best use of your 6 seconds from now on. The 10 let us be semi-careless at times.
On the bright side, we aren’t the only ones getting nerfed;
Warlocks got hit with;
Chaos Bolt: This spell no longer ignores damage reduction effects of the target.
It’s ok to point and laugh at the next Warlock you see. This really helps us in the end, I kinda feel for them though, thier 51 point talent seems to be loosing its shine.
I think Blizzard did a good job with this patch. The minor changes are good, and while it hurts, paladins do need a nerf in pvp, and I think this time they did a decent job making sure to not go overboard with it.
Song of the week or month or however often I need to update;
“I Own You” By Shinedown
-Slayton
Megaphone here. Gonna bust a Megaphone and jack this post because I can. Updating from my phone right now - totally have been in Cali for those of you who wonder why there hasn’t been streaming / news posts by me. Will be back and writing in a couple of days, yay!
Too lazy to change text color. You’ll take black and like it.
May 26th, 2009 - 10:31 pm
I disagree about the nerf being needed for Ret paladins. The nerf was needed for it on others though. I’d much rather see it changed to “Hand of Freedom now lasts 6 seconds when cast on other players”. With this change I feel we will need either a snare or a gap closer on a shorter cooldown. Especially once the changes to our burst setup change we will require something like this.
May 26th, 2009 - 11:20 pm
For me it depends what class/spec I’m fighting. I don’t often use the whole duration, but having to use it more sparingly with the change means I have to possibly factor in an additional cooldown to use it before another ability. Worse, it’s not quite as guaranteed to get you to target like a charge or a strong snare would.
WAIT FERRARRO IS A GOAT?
May 27th, 2009 - 3:22 am
So far we’ve suffered quite a few nerfs since the launch and even before of the season although i agree with some of them, like the exorcism one and perhaps the Hand of Reckoning(Totems and players immune) might have been a decent idea, the replenishment one to stomp down on retribution/discipline(Although currently Priest/Rogue dominate from 1000 to 2800 on bloodlust EU at least) i think warlocks shouldn’t really complain much as my partner and i have both suffered quite high crits from Chaos bolt and only last night while wearing myself somewhere around 700 resillience took a 9k conflagerate.I feel that this might not be the best idea, nerfing Eye for an eye because other classes crit -themselves- too hard on is a bit unfair considering i’ve noticed no real nerf incoming for any of the classes, and Juggernaut nerf has had 0 result, while warriors deserve to be more useful i doubt their current burst is really all that fair. Oh well, guess we’ll see how everything goes.
May 27th, 2009 - 8:18 am
Awww… poor Ferraro. I have pie for you. I hope it makes you feel better.
May 27th, 2009 - 9:28 am
From my perspective, the eye for an eye change doesn’t really hurt arenas. It’s added dps, but it’s not like you’re getting crit often. I doubt you’d win if you were regularly crit. So I agree with slayton’s take, however the nerf pretty much relegates e4ae to “if you have nothing better to spend the points on” type talent. It’s useless for pve, and I think highly overvalued in pvp now (3 point talent being too much).
Looking at the HoF nerf, I am completely, totally and utterly opposed to this. I think it’s complete bullroar. What would I like to see to make this change more reasonable? A decrease in the cd, from 25 sec, to 15 maybe. I think that’s fair. Perhaps remove the imp HoF altogether, or else make it increases the duration and cd of HoF to 10/20 respectively. Another idea is to make baseline, HoF removes stuns, and divine purpose makes the paladin immune to stuns for the duration of HoF (keeping in mind this is with the current 25 sec cd). One of those two solutions. I’m not a high up arena ret paladin, but just my experiences playing ret in WG, bgs, and limited arena… we’re kited so damn easily it’s ridiculous if we don’t have HoF off cd.
I just see paladins getting wrecked even easier. Is 4 sec going to make that big of a difference? I dunno. It’s just garbage given the shear amount of snares in this game and dmg potential. I’m snare free for 6 sec! wooo! Oh damn, I’m getting bursted, time to stop and heal, oh crap, now I’m snared, and now I’m dead. It’s aggravating.
GC says all the time “we know your class, we designed it” however I don’t think they know how it plays. They may know the class, and have intended for talents/items/enchants/glyphs etc. to do one thing, but until you actually play the class I don’t think you have a firm understanding. Not saying the devs are idiots, I’m just saying to say “we don’t need to play what we design” is a weak argument from someone that wants to encourage discussion. And I repeat, this is not a “zomg blizz doesn’t play paladin they have no clue” post.
May 27th, 2009 - 4:41 pm
Lol. L O fucking L. Yeah, I got out of this game at the right time. Nerfing freedom AGAIN?! AGAIN?!?! With no compensation AGAIN?!
There is no defending this nerf. None. Hell, there’s no defending Blizzard from this point on. They are long past the boundary of acceptable when it comes to how they have handled paladins. Up, down, hotfix, large nerf, tiny buff, wait a few patches, we are working on it, working as intended bullshit.
I wish with all my heart that another game would come along that was truly better than wow, and rip the vast, and I mean VAST, majority of players out of it, so that blizzard would finally suffer for it’s mishandling of it’s own game.
May 27th, 2009 - 5:34 pm
They >had< to nerf survivability support in one way or another. Paladins are amazing in PvP right now, too amazing. Though PvP is quite imbalanced at the moment they are getting closer on their BC status.
This game is good. Saying something needs to come along that is “Better” isn’t as easy as it sounds. You may have 1 or 2 good ideas on how to improve this game, but a better game needs hundreds, something that hasn’t been easily tackled by people like warhammer, who promised to do so, but failed.
I understand frustration, but, take a break from the game, play other games, come back, and appreciate what this is.
After you do that, remember it still is a game. It’s up to you on how to take that in.
May 27th, 2009 - 7:05 pm
every patch its a nerf, next patch we will be throwning paper airplanes instead of HOW.
May 27th, 2009 - 7:22 pm
Statistics don’t bear out that rets are ‘amazing’. Still more dks rogues and warrs in 2k+ arena.
Just sayin’
May 27th, 2009 - 9:15 pm
To quote GC:
“Furthermore, we think part of the reason some players, especially casters, feel like they are dying so quickly in PvP is because they can’t use their crowd control abilities without them getting quickly removed. Freedom was a big part of that.”
This particular comment really aggravates me. What do they consider pvp? Is GC talking about arenas here, or BGs/WG? I do not believe you can fault a paladin’s HoF to the lack of CC or the lack of being able to apply CC in BGs and WG. So let’s look at arenas.
In 5s the teams are large enough that if you have a shaman or priest dispeling/grounding totem or snaring opponents themselves, I don’t think you can narrow it down to HoF being op in 5s. It’s also likely to get dispelled. So then we should look at 3’s. To my knowledge, and maybe I’m wrong here, but RMP is dominating 3’s as per usual. So.. I guess HoF is holding back counter comps? Because apparently it’s doing nothing against RMP. A comp which to my knowledge, does well on CC and dmg.
So.. it’s 2s. Well, I don’t see how you can say it’s OP in 2’s when a mage can probably get his/her CC off. I suppose the only two classes it affects in 2s is hunter/shaman? Shaman can purge and FS kite us, hunters just scatter shot us in a trap and follow that up with a dispel. I think it’s just purge garbage the change. Like I said, I don’t arena at a high end, however I don’t think this game is designed around the “uber guilds” or arena teams. Unless it’s designed one way for pve, and another for pvp (meaning who they cater to, players, casuals, or hardcores).
And to clarify, it’s not that this change is going to fundamentally break the game. It’s just going to severely impact and limit, imo, a paladin’s ability in pvp given that we have no range closer, we have no snare, and I don’t know about you, but repentance usually gets broken or eaten by a grounding totem/cloak of shadows because as soon as a player gets away from you, they pretty much know it’s coming since we have no other abilities to hit them with.
I do not see the reasoning for it. If GC wants to say the problem with casters is having their CC removed, then why not make CC’s shorter duration and undispellable. Priests can remove 2 magic effects at the same time in one cd. I think that’s ridiculous. Fears and dots and sheep/ice shards or magic debuffs can be significantly more difficult to keep up with a priest around. I hope priests are next on the nerf list, seeing as priest rogue is a significant comp in the 2’s bracket and probably a huge reason cc is difficult to keep up.
Pure, utter, garbage. I hear healing is getting out of control in pvp, so maybe a flat out -10% effective healing by paladins only will fix it. If GC’s concern as stated in his post is true, then the change and reasoning behind it is shortsighted and weak. If more changes are coming to other classes to decrease their effectiveness against cc then this change could make sense. But as it stands, pure garbage and illogical imo.
May 28th, 2009 - 4:18 am
What we lacked in a gap closer we adjusted with the talents we had, HoF was a huge part of that especially with spell slingers, Now you think it was tough to kill mages before this nerf, wait till this goes live. a lot can happen in 4 seconds in arena.
May 28th, 2009 - 10:36 am
really dont like the last part of GCs post….
“To be honest, we’re concerned the duration is still too long.”
May 29th, 2009 - 3:26 pm
# jd
May 27th, 2009 - 7:05 pm
every patch its a nerf, next patch we will be throwning paper airplanes instead of HOW.
@jd
Jd has spoken. Amen.
Pew pew dps 
Either way..I’m celebrating getting two pieces of T8.5 (legs and helm) in one night
May 29th, 2009 - 3:34 pm
rofl. gratz on the gear =D
May 29th, 2009 - 4:32 pm
And as for the nerf…
I wanted to make my ret spec workable with PvP and PvE, so I was only going to pick either Vindication or E4E. I decided to go with Vindication instead of E4E. Turns out that was a good decision after this nerf. *whew*
May 30th, 2009 - 5:33 am
While I understand that many of my ret brethren are PvPers, I on a personal on note am a PvE player. GC said something about ideas for a new combat system for ret. I would like to see what the devs have come up with. It will most likely be a huge disappointment, so I’m keeping my expectations low.
And I’d guess the it’d be patch 3.2 or 3.3 when it’s implemented :/ If implemented at all
May 30th, 2009 - 12:03 pm
@Earendil
Pretty sure it’ll be the next xpac and not coming in a content patch. I could be wrong, but I have a feeling making our combat system more involved is too big a change when there are other issues they have to work on. Afterall, as unfun as the combat system is, or lollerkeyboardface as it is, you cannot deny that it’s at the very least viable.
So they can either work on balancing stuff and making other classes useful, or spend time fixing ret. Pretty sure they’re not going to be fixing us until the next xpac. Could be wrong though…
May 30th, 2009 - 12:59 pm
Sorry but, what happened to Ferraro’s website?