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.
All in all, the tree is impressive in its current state but my primary concern is our 31 point talent. Please tell me it’s a typo that it has a 30 minute cooldown, Blizzard. Please, oh please.
Regardless, let’s get a discussion going about all this. Certainly there are quite a few interesting concepts at play here. The introduction of Holy Power offers a new form of “control” of Retribution’s burst output and the introduction of a 10 second CD interrupt now offers us the opportunity of doing more than pumping out damage in hopes we get some RNG before that clutch heal lands.
UPDATES
The following list of updates on the above information:
- - Heart of the Crusader has been cut
- - Judgements of the Wise has been altered and is now only one talent point and only provides the 40% replenishment effect
- - With the above two changes, that means the third tier of our talent tree only has three total points available so expect a new talent or two
- - With the removal of Judgements of the Wise as a talent, Protection and Retribution Paladins will now passively gain mana back on Judgements equivalent to what 3/3 Judgements of the Wise would have provided.
Feel free to drop on over to the Damage Dealing forums (seemingly the only forum Blizzard reads and responds to) and support my post on a concern we have for Retribution in Cataclysm:
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=26249254970&postId=262467628056&sid=1#0
July 21st, 2010 - 1:39 pm
GC posted a bit after the trees went up; Heart of the Crusader will soon be gone, and Judgements of the Wise will be reduced to a 1 point talent to give Judgements the Replenishment effect. Ret & prot Paladins will get mana back passively on every Judgement used. Factoring all that in and assuming Sactified Ret is supposed to be 1 point, we should have 5-6 extra points to dump in other trees like say, oh, Seals of the Pure and that haste talent at the top of Holy.
Losing the heal option on Art of War sucks bad, though.
July 21st, 2010 - 1:47 pm
New Vengeance add +healing not + holy dmg like it used so it indeed was changed ^^
Also someone on forum said that Wrath of the Lightbringer reduce AW CD by 1 min so 1 min AW <3
July 21st, 2010 - 2:26 pm
Here is my review on my beta ret.
Also, AW is still a 2 minute cooldown. Wrath of the lightbringer seems to do nothing much but the crit stuff.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=26227283162&sid=1
July 21st, 2010 - 3:12 pm
Losing the heal from AoW is fine, you’re trading that for the holy power heal that costs no mana. You have to consider if we had both the hp heal and constant AoW fol…we’d be unkillable, a good change imo it will make ret pvp rotations much more dependent on a players style rather than what is available.
As for the 31 point talent, it definanlty is awesome the numbers just need to be tweaked. As it is, its a total IWIN button every half of an hour. Imagine this, Crusader strike is on a 2 sec cd now due to talents. Crusader Strike -> Inquisition -> CS ->Judge ->CS-> FILLER ->CS
At this point you have inquisition up and 3 stacks of hp with a judgement on the target.
Hoj->Wings/Trinkets->Zealotry->CS->3point Templars Verdict->CS->TV->CS->TV and over, and over and over.
Completely unbalanced, and only good once every 30 minutes. I expect the duration to be cut down to 10 seconds or so and the cd reduced to like 5 minutes. Then I would say this is one hell of a 31 pointer.
The rest of the changes gave me instant wood, and I’m 100% playing this ret in the xpac. Kudos to Blizzard.
July 21st, 2010 - 3:57 pm
hmmm….im liking this “holy power” thing, its gonna be nice to actually have to pay attention again. and zealotry better not be 30 min…thats just silly
July 21st, 2010 - 4:15 pm
There’s a lot more information of relevance to discuss…
Zealotry is 99% a typo, I’d assume it has a 3 minute cooldown, which seems about right for it’s effectiveness.
Art of War lost its healing component because Word of Glory fills the same role as the current FoL choice, although the cost is higher. Spending Holy Power to heal rather than Temp’s Verdict will take more thought than spamming instant FoL’s whenever Exo’s on CD and some health would be nice.
In addition, Holy Shock is back to a skill rather than a talent, and it build’s Holy Power. Dunno if that’s going to remain after testing, but it gives Ret another instant heal, another ranged attack, and another way besides CS to build HP.
Conviction increases Damage and Healing. It’s no longer restricted to Holy and Physical damage. That buffs all of our healing effects and random stuff like engineering bombs and weapon/trinket procs. It’s a pretty massive change to just be ignored.
You’ll still want 2 points in Sanc Wrath for the additional 30s cd redux on Avenging Wrath.
It would be safe to assume that Sanctified Retribution is still bugged as a 3 point talent, and is meant to be only one point. I’m also not guessing that talent will remain as-is when Cata goes live; it remaining bugged in this build suggests that they haven’t taken a look at it. Ret aura is boring, always has been, and you only take the effect for the passive damage increase to the raid, something I wouldn’t place a bet on surviving to 4.0 anyway.
July 21st, 2010 - 5:39 pm
hmm these changes are pretty juicy. I’m going to hold my excitement until the second or the third official patch in Cata.
July 21st, 2010 - 7:09 pm
Damage, damage, and more damage.
At least our rotations are a bit more complex, but nevertheless it’s still damage talents across the board.
I don’t want this to be another repeat of 3.0.
WTB Gap Closer and possibility of an improved snare effect added to JoJ.
July 21st, 2010 - 7:20 pm
Holy Power reeks of a last-minute idea with poor implementation that sounds fun at first. That’s about par for paladin design.
Holy Power will make Ret work very similar to rogues from classic WoW, which were notorious for being bot-like. The Improved Crusader Strike talent reduces the cooldown, so presumably it’s spammable. So now Ret has Sinister Strike (CS), Slice and Dice (Inquisition), and Eviscerate (Templar’s Verdict). Hope your fingers don’t go numb!
It’s at least a little more interesting in PvP with Word of Glory (the holy power based heal), but because you can only generate holy power from attacking in melee and are pretty screwed when you aren’t, it will be exceedingly frustrating.
Also, talent trees will be seeing another big iteration in the next beta build. Many talents have been changed or removed internally already (check for Ghostcrawler posts).
July 21st, 2010 - 10:21 pm
Holy Power reeks of awesome and win.
July 21st, 2010 - 10:34 pm
Uhm…. Judgement of the wise did change to 40% mana over 10 seconds.
All in all it looks very promising though i like the idea of holy power, but at the same time if we are going to become a class again that depends on such heals they should be available to us when we need them.
Like Exedore said it will become frustrating.
And when i read that i thought to myself if I am really so desperate at that point and moment what could we do?!?!
OH!!!! I KNOW IT how bout we go on our knees and make a “Divine Plea” which will now instantly generate 3stacks of holy power. For some reason i feel like that makes perfect sense haha, instead of mana over time give us an instant 3 stack of Holy power when we use “Divine Plea”
I feel like this makes perfect sense, who likes the idea?
July 21st, 2010 - 11:46 pm
It’s a definite start to make the class more dynamic from 1 to 80+. That’s all I’ve been asking for quite some time.
July 22nd, 2010 - 12:29 am
@ Doublecross
I don’t think we’re going to have any trouble generating holy power, considering we’ll be pumping it out via crusader strike, zealotry, and possibly melee swings/holy shock.
July 22nd, 2010 - 12:29 am
LOL, I saw the description to Templar’s verdict and chuckled as I said to my self, “Oh man thats gonna get nerfed…”
sigh…
July 22nd, 2010 - 12:47 am
Hmmm, tinkering about. I think most of us can come up with a PvP spec already. The one I created is assuming that Zealotry isn’t really 30 min. (oh god plz dont be)
July 22nd, 2010 - 4:43 am
@Meracalis
Holy Shock is confirmed by Ghostcrawler to be the Holy spec lvl 10 bonus ability. It’s no longer available for all paladins.
Divine Purpose (lvl 10 Ret passive) is supposed to a chance at grant holy power generation from melee attacks, but it’s unsure what that chance is.
However, the problem with that is that it still requires the ret paladin to be in melee for an extended time for it to start being useful. That’s a really poor design for PvP unless we have a way to stay glued to a target for a long time like a rogue.
July 22nd, 2010 - 5:16 am
Solution: Add a new ability counter to Templar’s Verdict that snares the target based on Holy Power. Something to the tune of 1 second per Holy Power. Make it at range and perhaps require that Judgement be applied to the target.
July 22nd, 2010 - 5:28 am
The talents look nice (except the Zealotry). I like the idea of folding SoCommand into SoR, but it will mean nothing if SoV still procs on auto-attacks (did they change it?)
BUT, even with all the exiting news, I am still expecting 3.0 all over again.
Our mobility, as far as I know, is still messed up and forberance is still there – They said they were going to look into it, but given Blizzard’s design in the past, they are just end up fixing Zealotry’s cooldown and making it proc forberance (or making us unable to use bubble, AW, etc, shortly after it).
I hope they look into all this problems, but I am waiting for the worse
July 22nd, 2010 - 7:22 am
They could have done worse. PVE harder rotation changes might pay off *IF* the single target damage is comparable to other classes. Though it seems annoying to have to deal with getting 5 stacks of SoV then getting 3 stacks of holy power then using the buff; then keeping that buff up, then switching targets…at least they admitted they might have to make it easier.
At least they cant claim ignorance in balancing the damage since divine storm wont be used all the time, maybe not even consecration.
But at the moment, why would anyone want to play ret in pvp? The BS excuse of them wanting it to be our weakness isnt cutting it. Stun, fear, disarm, silence, root/slow when freedom gets instantly dispelled – seems like enough weaknesses to me since a lot of our “utility” talents have had things removed. It also sucks that you cant even get all the damage talents and pursuit of justice.
You’d be better off being holy in pvp with the new heals, healing a different class that actually has the skills they need to be successful.
July 22nd, 2010 - 9:29 am
bla bla rotations , bla bla new fancy Cataclysm names for spells and talents.
Shock will probably need some macros to ajust the targets , cuz it’ll be used for healing ONLY ..
Where is my Freedom remove gayness
Where is my disspel mechanics , idk if i can spellinterrupt a frostmage , wen he can poly-reset me , or just kite the crap out of me , with no freedom and no disspell. Or some random Spraist or Warlock to dot my ass while feared.
The holy powa better be stacking on the palladin(and has to stack tons per second ) , and not on the target , cuz wen u vanish ,iceblock , disspell , ressist ,deflect it … the fun ends. From what i’ve seen pvp it’s one foot in the grave for me.
As for PvE and raiding , as paladins aways were and will be , 1-2-3 back to 1 rotations.
There were some nice thingies to see aswell , but that holy powa just seems to be the new big deal for rets , and they will not be able to do anything flashy without it..
The most awesome thing i see here is that Rets finally will have to think while bashing keys. The new mechanics , and spells will full the gaps on my casting bars, trough it’s sad i wouln’t be able to play on my pally using my Chillstream gamepad
.
P.s. At least i can be a holycow
July 22nd, 2010 - 5:35 pm
Ghostcrawler stated that Holy Power will get its own resource bar, like runes for a DK or whatever. It’s just displayed as a stacking buff atm because the art assests aren’t ready.
July 22nd, 2010 - 7:01 pm
New build. Update faster, Tharvolde!
July 22nd, 2010 - 7:21 pm
New build looks a lot better. Still hate the idea of holy gargoyle and think it should be removed. Talent trees are starting to look better.
July 22nd, 2010 - 7:38 pm
http://www.wowtal.com/#k=.9q4.paladin
Looking much better. 2 minute cooldown on zealotry.