~chron

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s Vindication nerf, Blizz has now hotfixed in a change to stuns that have an interrupt component so that the school lockout only applies to mobs. It’s continuing the path of separate effects for PvE and PvP which I still generally approve of. They should definitely have an easier time balancing both aspects of the game this way.

BUT. This particular change is awful. Before abilities like HoJ worked kind of like a mage’s counterspell – you could stun whenever and that would prevent your target from casting, but it was dispellable or trinketable or even blinkable by a mage. If you were prepared to wait and catch someone while casting you would get a (shorter) full school lockout which is much more devestating. Especially since nobody usually wants to trinket a stun they’re already half-way through.

You can hammer a mage’s arcane school to prevent a blink, his frost school to prevent a block (this never actually happens) or hammer a holy paladin’s heal to prevent divine shield. EDIT: HoJ cyclone = caster form no barkskin.

It was an interesting choice, and now that interesting choice is gone.

chronic Paladin

Quoth Bornakk:

We are in the process of completing a hotfix that could go live as early as this afternoon that will make the Paladin talent Vindication no longer reduce Intelligence or Stamina from the target it is applied to. The talent will continue to reduce Agility, Spirit, and Strength as it currently does. We felt this change will help balance the ability out, especially in the lower arena brackets where they are very prominent, while not being a negative impact on a Retribution Paladin’s PvE dps.

Once this hotfix is live, the tooltip will be incorrect until we can update it in the next content patch.

Fantastic change, people on AJ (and pretty much everywhere else I guess) have long been calling for this as a simple first step to balancing ret paladins without breaking them in PvE. That’s around 4500 more health I’ll have in an average HoJ, could easily be the difference between life and death.

It was always a ridiculous idea for a talent really. Sanity finally prevails!

chronic Paladin

At the beginning of the season I was somewhat pessimistic about the direction they were going with holy arena. I won’t argue that the paladins of season 5 were balanced, but the aggressive style and CC options made for some very entertaining gameplay.

After having had a few weeks to play some live games, though, I’m pretty satisfied with what turned out to be very even-handed changes to paladin healing. Paladins haven’t disappeared from SK, they still have a number of viable comps to run. Blizzard didn’t outright kill any of the specs, quite the opposite – as far as I know this is the first season that paladins have had a viable healing spec in every tree.

The old repentance spec of S5 has become 32/0/39. Since you can’t feasibly get Infusion of Light with any of the nice ret stuff, you push even deeper into ret to pick up Art of War and Fanatacism, which means you get an instant FoL on your judgement crits (instead of HS crits) and your judgements crit at a reasonable rate. Some people take Seal of Command for the guaranteed crit versus stunned targets, but I haven’t found it that useful.

You still get the ret utility you know and love – most importantly Divine Purpose and Repentance; but Sanctified Retribution is also a lot stronger without the specific aura requirement. Judgements of the Wise has actually been buffed and now returns a huge amount of mana (25% of base) every judge. Pursuit of Justice and Vindication are both still amazing.

The deep holy alternative has become 49/22/0. The protection talents they’ve changed up in 3.1 are amazing, with Divinity and Improved Devotion Aura increasing your healing substantially and Stoicism + Improved Righteous Fury increasing your survivability noticeably. Having a second Sac in the form of Divine Sacrifice is absolutely amazing, and makes a lot of double DPS or CC-heavy compositions a ton easier.

This also gives you the throughput talents in deep holy, such as Judgements of the Pure, Holy Guidance, Infusion, and Light’s Grace. Enlightened Judgements (increasing range to 40 yards) is also pretty useful now that Judgement is your only real way to keep people in combat or snipe totems. This spec feels a lot like the TBC paladin – you do have to drink, but it’s usually possible to set up opportunities to do so. 40 second HoJ is nice but doesn’t give you nearly as much CC potential as repentance does.

Which brings us to the dark horse of the collection, 20/51/0 deep protection. It sounds crazy until you actually look at the control possibilities and raw healing power of the available at the bottom of the tree. You get a 20 second HoJ (!) along with a 3 second silence and a daze on your Avenger’s Shield (30 second cooldown), which also increases your damage contribution. You get undispellable Divine Plea that refreshes on melee hits. You get a bunch of free stamina from talents like Sacred Duty (and some passive defenses like Ardent Defender) and then you convert that stamina into spellpower via Touched by the Light. You end up with a huge amount of spellpower, and although your crit is lower than the ret subspec when you do crit you’re looking at 8.5k flashes (10k+ on a warlock or mutilate rogue!).

The huge downside to the prot spec is, of course, the complete lack of any sort of instant healing. The new Aura Mastery helps here, and part of it is just adapting to the playstyle, but it’s a limitation and it makes the spec a lot weaker when you’re tanking a melee who can interrupt. Which, in a way, is also a lot like TBC!

I hear actual ret and prot paladins aren’t doing too badly, either.

chronic Arena, Paladin Arena, Paladin, prot, pvp, specs, talents, World of Warcraft

Dresorull has posted patch notes for the upcoming changes in 3.1.2, there’s some minor rebalancing of priests and destruction warlocks.

Penance cooldown is going back up, maim is an actual stun (maybe?) and innervate is getting a pretty decent PvP buff. Most importantly from a rogue POV, they’re removing spammable blood boil!

I mentioned in my last post about paladin glyphs that using Glyph of Turn Evil was basically a metagame choice. Since then, I’ve seen maybe two death knights in arena, and not many more warlocks, so I think it’s time to retire it in favor of something more exciting.

So, as usual, it may be educational to see what everyone else is doing…

(Reckoning 2v2, top 200 teams)

Today I’m defining “holy paladins” as paladins who have holy shock and at least one point in unyielding faith which should hopefully narrow it down to PvP healing specs only. I’m not going to worry about deep prot healing specs, at least… not yet.

Here’s the same chart run against the infamous Bloodlust battlegroup:

Note that the top 200 teams actually goes right down to about 2k rating at the moment, so a lot of these people are probably not superstars.

chronic Data Mining, Paladin 3.1.2, Arena, gchart, glyphs, graphs, Paladin, pvp

It’s looking pretty certain that the new arena season will begin tonight, we’ve had confirmation both from the in-game goblins and the blues. Good thing too, jousting can only entertain one for so long!

For my rogue I’m going to be playing more or less the same spec to start the season; prep/mutilate. Despite neither rogues nor shaman getting any significant changes I’m still pretty excited about the prospects. Both classes got some amazing glyphs (ES in particular is crazy) and most of the specs that were giving us problems (largely overtuned bs like holy, shadowfrost and survival) are going to be significantly more beatable. There’s enough small changes (tremor totem, PPM poisons, etc) and metagame shifts that I’m pretty sure rogue/shaman is going to be a competitive comp this season. And hey: deadly throw missile speed increased!

I think my rogue play has come a long way over the last few months and continues to improve. I’m by no means a top-tier player but the necessities of season 5 have taught me a lot about pooling and burst damage, about cooldown management, about positioning and control, and about opponent prediction and foresight. One thing I would really like to do for S6 is learn to play Shadowdance at a competitive level – Az and I talked about playing elemental/shd (or possibly elemental/cb+shs) since there’s some fairly strong elemental improvements in 3.1. I don’t know how well it would work, but it might be fun!

My other goal for this season is to forge a strong 3s team. It looks like Obs is planning on gearing his warlock this time round so RLS would be a possibility. Endarl also mentioned wanting to play rogue rogue priest. I played mercenary on a few different teams in S5 but I vastly prefer playing with the people I know well. Of course it helps that they’re all pretty good players ;)

For my paladin, I’m still lamenting the loss of Divine Purpose and Repentance from my build; the wotlk playstyle for holy has been significantly more aggressive and both of them were interesting buttons that increased the skill cap of the class substantially. I’m not really looking forward to returning to the TBC style of pillaring and FoL spam, but Divine Sacrifice and Aura Mastery are both very nice talents and I’m willing to give oldschool holy/prot a chance.

Endarl says the arms changes herald the return of paladin/warrior, which is probably just wishful thinking on his part because he plays with a betrayer warrior. I’m excited to see how the metagame for this season turns out!

chronic Arena, Paladin, Rogue