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Tharvolde here and I’ve got a few Paladin changes for you revealed as part of the recently announced start of the closed beta testing period for Cataclysm.  Stay tuned and I will update this post with said changes as they are discovered:

Update @ 9:41AM EST on 7/1/10

So I literally stayed up until 3:30AM last night despite the fact I had to be in the office at 9.  I did this because the beta patch rolled out yesterday in the early evening and I was antsy for what Paladin changes were to be revealed given this fact partnered with an NDA lift.  So in short, here are your Retribution changes for the initial beta patch:

- none

That’s correct.  There is nothing we didn’t already know about with respect to the Retribution tree that came out of the beta patch.  As a result, I’ll just list out ALL of the Paladin changes for the patch that could in some way affect a Retribution Paladin who goes at least 51 points into the tree so you can at least have something to chew on in the mean time:

1) (Protection T5) Blessing of Sanctuary has been removed and now has been replaced with just “Sanctuary” which is a passive version of the blessing minus the stamina and strength component.  It reduces all damage taken by 3% and causes your blocks, dodges and parries to regenerate some mana

2) (Holy T2) Divine Intellect now increases both intellect and spirit by 1/2/3/4/5%

3) (Holy T4) Sanctified Light has been changed to now increase the critical strike chance of your Judgements and Holy Shock by 5/10/15%.

The above changes (particularly those in the Holy tree) do offer some interesting build opportunities for Cataclysm should Blizzard continue down that path.  As we well know, many Retadin go at least 5 points into Holy anyway for 5/5 Seals of the Pure.  Many also grab 2/2 Unyielding Faith.  With Holy Shock now being baseline and (from what I can tell) being a decent, instant cast, ranged nuke at the Retadin’s disposal it may be attractive to run a build such as 18/7/51 which would get you 3/3 Sanctified Light (15% Judgement and Holy Shock crit), 2/2 Unyielding Faith and some extra intellect and spirit (which will be more substantial of an enhancement than it is today given the inflation of statistics at level 85 compared to level 80) while still allowing you at least 5/5 Divine Strength and 2/2 Guardian’s Favor from Protection.

At first glance, the above changes (although only a few and certainly belonging to trees early in development), it seems that Blizzard may be aiming to have Ret builds with Holy as your secondary tree as more “offensive” while Ret builds with Protection as your secondary tree as more “defensive”.  Granted this is generally how it is today but it certainly seems they are pushing this even further with Cataclysm.  I for one am looking forward to having 33% increased Judgement critical strike chance from talents alone.

No doubt time will tell on this but for now we at least have something to chew on.

UPDATED:  6/29/10 @ 12:03PM EST

Hello, all!

Tharvolde here and I have a small request: I need you to trust me.  I need you to trust me because I have some information to share with you regarding Paladins in Cataclysm but I’m not going to site my sources as not to throw them under the proverbial bus.  If you can trust me, then enjoy the following couple updates on Paladins (nothing HUGE but interesting nonetheless!):

1) Consecration appears to be changing from a spell you cast and forget about to a spell you can control a bit.  Apparently Blizzard is adding a status bar specifically for Consecration.  Blizzard likened this status bar to that of Shamans’ totems.  Consecration now lasts 10 seconds (up from eight) but, due to the new status bar, can be cancelled at any time

2) The base statistics for Paladins at level 80 have been increased across the board.  Base health at level 80 (your health if you were naked and untalented) is now 11,091 (up from 8804).  Almost every single possible stat has been increased across the board for the Paladin in similar fashion although the health change is the largest.

As I stated, these are nothing HUGE per se but they are certainly interesting.  Regarding the second update above, I should note that no other class received a similar buff.

Update

Here are a couple new updates to share with the community.  No doubt to some this will be old news but to many will probably be new:

- Vindication has been changed from reducing attack power to instead reducing all physical damage done by 5/10% (good!)

- Blessing of Wisdom and Blessing of Might have officially be combined into one Blessing and are percent-based now instead of using flat amounts.

- Divine Storm now officially hit unlimited targets yet remains as the 51 point talent.  No word yet on increasing its single-target viability via some means.

- Swift Retribution has officially been changed from 1/2/3% haste for anyone receiving your aura to 7/14/20% ranged and melee haste for anyone receiving your aura.

- All resistance auras have officially been combined into a single aura.  This aura now improves resistance to Fire, Frost and Shadow damage.

- Divine Intervention has been removed from the game

Update

- Crusader Strike now deals 100% weapon damage by default.  The Improved Crusader Strike talent in place of the old Crusader Strike talent still exists and is still just a 10% damage buff to the ability (although this is definitely a placeholder).

(Quoted Blizzard post)

There are a few basic way classes choose what attack to use next. Some classes are limited by resources. If a rogue has 60 energy, she can choose to spend it on attack A or attack B. If attack A hits harder and attack B doesn’t have situational utility, then she’ll use A every time.

A warlock generally isn’t limited by mana within short time scales. A lock’s decisions are more rotational. You want to cast A before you cast B. It’s not that B is bad, just that it becomes more powerful if you do A first. For example, there is little point in casting your first Corruption seconds before the target is about to die.

Paladins have a third model, one more based on prioritization. You aren’t generally limited by mana, and you don’t generally need to do things in a certain order for the mechanics to work, but you do have attacks that you’d rather use when they are available (generally because they hit harder). The decision point comes in because you have a lot of cooldowns, so you can’t just spam your hardest hitting attack over and over again. When your Judgements and Hammer and Crusader Strike are on cooldown, then your choice is probably Divine Storm. (Depending on your gear, DS might even trump CS.) If Divine Storm’s damage went down, then you might prioritize Consecration or Exorcism higher, but you can’t spam those either, so then you’re back to Divine Storm or autoattack. That was my point.

There are things we can do as well to make Divine Storm better at single targets without making it overpowered against groups of targets. Off the top of my head, there are mechanics like the meteor where the damage is divided among the targets. What we are trying to chill out on the warrior, paladin and DK particularly is the “free AE” component. When your AE attacks are balanced against single targets (in the absence of some mechanic like I was suggesting above) then you just get free damage when you can AE as well. This means those classes leap dramatically ahead on meters whenever they are in a situation where they can “cleave.” It also means they aren’t doing anything very differently when faced with groups of mobs over single targets. By contrast the mage might switch to Blizzard or Living Bomb and the rogue has to start using Fan of Knives.

One of the ways we can support more individual abilities on classes is by making them situational. If you use all of your attacks no matter what the situation, then your gameplay tends to get very formulaic and eventually boring. It is also likely to get really complicated if your whole action bar is part of your standard rotation. A better design, we think, is that some abilities get used in AE situations and some get used in single-target situations. There can be overlap, but we’d at least like players to assess the upcoming battle and make some decisions about how to approach it before just going into a tunnel vision button-hitting mode.

Solution: Make CS baseline, put a 1 point 10% dmg to CS buff in its place in the talent tree to replace it.
That is not an announced change. I can understand the frustration of being in a gray area at the moment where you know some information that we have released but much of the details are still under NDA. Unfortunately, if you focus on little tidbits that someone leaked or speculated, then you aren’t going to get the full story. In cases like this we had to put something in the talent tree as temporary filler when we pulled CS. Many of the talent trees have talents that say NYI or just plain don’t do anything. That’s just where we are in the alpha process. If we push data at a stage when someone can’t even talent down a tree then the spec becomes unplayable. As such, we have to make talent tree changes in large chunks at once.

GC - “We are nerfing Divine Storm against single targets because we don’t want AoE abilities to be used against single targets, but we fully expect Divine Storm to continue to be used against single targets.”
More accurate to say that we don’t want single target abilities to get free bonus damage when in groups. That’s not balance-able. For the warrior the solution is to make Whirlwind not cost-effective against single-targets. For the DK, it’s about getting Pestilence back towards a utility role (getting diseases up on groups) and not a massive AE attack. For the paladin, we still want them to use Divine Storm (and you can’t cost-effect a Ret paladin anyway) so the solution will have to be something different.

How about something like having Crusader Strike apply some kind of debuff to the target . Then have Divine Storm hit anyone with that debuff harder. I think that would get its damage up on single targets but keep it lower on groups.
Yep, both this and the tie-in to Judgements are good ideas. We also like the T102P bonus.

UPDATED: 5/7/10 @ 9:13PM EST

Hello my fellow Retadins

It seems that MMO-Champion has given us quite a bit to chew on with the release of the Cataclysm Alpha phase. With this post, I intend to provide everything known to date with regard to Retribution in Cataclysm.

Talent Trees

Note that as of this update, there have not been many changes to the talent trees. As more are implemented, I’ll be sure to capture them here for you.



Link: Paladin Talent Trees

Key Changes:

• Retribution Tree
• - Crusader Strike talent changed to increase damage done by Crusader Strike by 10% (1pt)
• - Vindication talent changed to reduce physical damage done by target by 5/10% (2pts)
• - Repentance slightly changed to now remove Righteous Vengeance when it lands (1pt)
• - Swift Retribution talent changed to increase melee and ranged haste by 7/14/20% (3pts)
• - Divine Storm talent changed to only do 55% weapon damage but now hits unlimited targets (1pt)
• Protection Tree
• - None at this time
• Holy Tree
• - Beacon of Light changed to only work with Holy Light instead of all heals (1pt)

Now I realize that changes above are underwhelming and even in some cases flat out nerfs to abilities but I’d like to reiterate that the trees are FAR from done (you can expect most of the 1% per point talents to go away completely and be replaced by more interesting things). Take for example that Holy Shock is part of the Holy tree still. This was announced as a baseline ability for all Paladins. This should give you some indication of just how young these trees are yet.

Disclaimer : Everything written in this post is from a pure Retribution point of view!

I’ve seen a lot of sites out there stray away from Paldadin news, and frankly I don’t visit WoW sites to learn my fair share of life lessons. I thought it would be a good idea to keep up the announcement post so a lot of discussion could come out of it, and lots did! I’m extremely proud! To continue the wave of on-topicness, it’s time to update the front page on my take when it comes to the Paladin announcement. Blinding Shields (level 81) :

Blinding Shields (level 81) : Causes damage and blinds all nearby targets. This effect might end up only damaging those facing the paladin’s shield, in a manner similar to Eadric the Pure’s ability Radiance in Trial of the Champion. The Holy tree will have a talent to increase the damage and critical strike chance, while the Protection tree will have a talent to make this spell instant cast. 2-second base cast time. Requires a shield.

Verdict : Thumbs down.

This ability hardly benefits a Retribution Paladin. If you’re facing opponents that fall for a spell with a two second spell cast, then chances are that you’re either charging into a group of fifteen people while joking around, or are trying to annoy your undergeared buddy and make him cry “overpowered!”. On the fipside, I can see a few scenarios where this might come in handy - such as fleeing in terror from an RMP while pole humping or.. charging into a group of 15 people in AV with a healer to “hold them off”. Again though, when was the last time that you were able to cast an entire Holy Light at any point in arena when you had a Rogue and a Mage chasing you down tearing apart your poor armor?

Healing Hands (level 83) : Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.

Verdict : Maybe?

It really depends. Is it going to be as bad as a Feral Druid attempting to heal with his Rejuvination? It might not actually be bad when stacked ontop of Divine Storm healing - we’ll have to see if it even makes a difference (such as forgetting to cast FoL when it gave you that crazy HoT!). I think that they are going to make the spell Fantastic for Holy, and just another button for us to remember to press in the middle of PvPing, if it’s even worth the potential huge % of base mana that it might cost.

Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85) : Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).

Verdict : Not too shabby!

Sure - It’s a glorified Death Knight gargoyle. I still feel that this is just going to be a fun skill to use at all times, and the first of the wave of changes that adapt to the spec that you are! Though it’s only just an idea currently, it’ll be an interesting ability that probably won’t disappoint as long as it adds some damage. Sadly thoug, there isn’t much else to add!

- Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.

- Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.

- Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes.

- Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.

Crusader Strike is a core ability? Yep. Who woulda thunk that auto attacking for 50 levels was an uninteresting way to level up.

It might not seem it from these notes - but defensive Cleansing (taking magic debuffs off of yourself and allies) is going to be taken away from Protection and Retribution Paladins. It’s a bit too early to jump to conclusions and shriek about the nerf train, but if these changes came into the game currently Ret would have suffered a huge slap.

BoM + BoW : Okie dokie?

Holy Shock being a core healing spell might be quite fancy as Retribution, again it depends if we are going to drop down heals that are wet noodles or giant fists of great healing justice.

Final verdict : Meh?

Paladins didn’t get giant bones thrown at them like the other classes have so far. It’s just ideas - a gargoyle, a medeocre heal for Ret (probably), and a nigh-useless blinding ability that is probably more of a parlor trick that’s going to get an overexxagerated amount of zoom-ins in PvP videos. It’s still healthy to discuss changes and voice concerns however! Thoughts?

- Megaphone