Apparently on the current PTR, Hand of Reckoning cannot be used on players. Or totems.
Um, cool? Guess exorcism can maybe fill the niche, though it’s fairly pricey.
I’ve been playing around with the Paladin talent calculator on MMO-Champion in light of the ongoing changes. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far, 49/22/0 Holy for 2s (would switch to a beacon build for 3s).
I glyphed HS/FoL/Salv, but that last one is a bit contentious – Turn Evil would be one alternative, but that probably depends a lot on the metagame. I’m also pretty attached to the HoJ glyph. For minors I went wisdom/wise/kings, you could conceivably swap kings for sense undead for gibbing lock/dk pets, but that’s pretty damn marginal either way. I wish the might glyph was a mana cost one instead of duration, since I find myself recasting that a lot versus some teams (basically any team with offensive dispell on a cooldown, especially hunter teams where protecting HoFreedom is important).
I’ll probably get into arguments about Light’s Grace again; I know a lot of people hate it for 2s. I’ll see how I feel once I get a chance to play with it on live, I might end up swapping those points to Blessed Life if I feel like I really don’t need LG at all.
Unrelated: updated cutoff graphs for Reckoning 2v2 and Reckoning 3v3.
As a follow-up to my last post, here are some statistics for my other 2v2 – a DK/Paladin team with Saucyminx.
Total games played: 483 (286 wins, 197 losses, ratio: 0.592)
Death Knight/Rogue => 6 0 6 1.000 282.33
Death Knight/Warrior => 4 0 4 1.000 202.00
Mage/Warlock => 3 0 3 1.000 132.67
Druid/Warrior => 3 0 3 1.000 217.00
Hunter/Warrior => 2 0 2 1.000 265.00
Priest/Warrior => 2 0 2 1.000 169.50
Druid/Warlock => 1 0 1 1.000 637.00
Warrior/Warrior => 1 0 1 1.000 183.00
Mage/Warrior => 1 0 1 1.000 252.00
Death Knight/Druid => 17 1 18 0.944 181.06
Druid/Mage => 11 1 12 0.917 227.67
Death Knight/Mage => 5 1 6 0.833 198.50
Mage/Mage => 4 1 5 0.800 282.00
Paladin/Warrior => 19 6 25 0.760 434.92
Priest/Warlock => 6 2 8 0.750 329.00
Paladin/Shaman => 3 1 4 0.750 361.25
Death Knight/Hunter => 3 1 4 0.750 132.00
Paladin/Rogue => 11 4 15 0.733 303.13
Druid/Paladin => 11 4 15 0.733 277.73
Mage/Priest => 5 2 7 0.714 510.14
Druid/Shaman => 7 3 10 0.700 394.30
Hunter/Paladin => 6 3 9 0.667 215.33
Hunter/Shaman => 4 2 6 0.667 350.83
Hunter/Priest => 4 2 6 0.667 244.67
Druid/Hunter => 8 5 13 0.615 194.69
Death Knight/Shaman => 3 2 5 0.600 261.60
Druid/Rogue => 13 9 22 0.591 203.55
Mage/Rogue => 25 19 44 0.568 174.80
Priest/Rogue => 21 18 39 0.538 278.62
Death Knight/Paladin => 39 39 78 0.500 235.38
Mage/Paladin => 8 10 18 0.444 189.83
Paladin/Warlock => 8 10 18 0.444 346.11
Paladin/Paladin => 3 4 7 0.429 260.71
Death Knight/Priest => 6 9 15 0.400 266.80
Shaman/Warrior => 3 5 8 0.375 239.25
Paladin/Priest => 3 5 8 0.375 270.88
Shaman/Warlock => 2 5 7 0.286 294.29
Rogue/Shaman => 5 14 19 0.263 282.42
Hunter/Mage => 0 3 3 0.000 221.00
Rogue/Warlock => 0 2 2 0.000 309.50
Druid/Priest => 0 2 2 0.000 211.00
Druid/Druid => 0 1 1 0.000 228.00
Death Knight/Death Knight => 0 1 1 0.000 136.00
Here’s the individual class breakdown:
Warrior => 35 11 46 0.761 338.04
Druid => 71 26 97 0.732 237.60
Hunter => 27 16 43 0.628 227.05
Mage => 62 37 99 0.626 215.40
Death Knight => 83 54 137 0.606 228.36
Paladin => 111 86 197 0.563 279.03
Rogue => 81 66 147 0.551 239.87
Priest => 47 40 87 0.540 292.72
Warlock => 20 19 39 0.513 322.46
Shaman => 27 32 59 0.458 307.47
And finally, by arena:
Blade's Edge Arena => 79 45 124 0.637 245.93
Dalaran Sewers => 52 33 85 0.612 260.46
Nagrand Arena => 50 33 83 0.602 310.23
Ruins of Lordaeron => 67 49 116 0.578 254.07
The Ring of Valor => 38 37 75 0.507 236.37
It’s interesting to constrast this with rogue/shaman – this team is much stronger on BEM (Orgrimmar still sucks!) and much much stronger against Warrior teams in general. Shaman teams seem to be the hardest for us, though my rogue/shaman has around a 0.5 ratio versus dk/paladin so I think that’s definitely something we can work on. Our record versus mirrors of exactly 0.500 is pretty amusing.
And warlocks are horrible >:(
I’ve been thinking recently about re-gemming for survivability on my Holy Paladin, since I’m only at about 550 resilience in my current gear. It’s not every fight that I feel like I need it, but I’m pretty happy with my throughput (healing is only really a problem if I get CCd or school-locked) and mana usage. I have about 18.5k mana and either JotW or drinking (depending on the comp) in concert with Divine Plea mean we very rarely lose on mana to a team that isn’t aggressively mana burning.
(The deadly libram will also be a great throughput upgrade, I just wanted to replace all my blues first!)
So, as always, let’s go to the Armory and see what high-rated Paladins are doing. My sample this time around is Paladins from the top 200 2v2 teams on Reckoning, and I’ve only included people wearing pvp gear (medallion or human with >100 resil) at the time of the survey. I’ve also explicitly excluded meta gems since there isn’t really any contention there: int + manarestore all the way.
Here’s the initial results. I’m assuming the strength gems are from people caught in their ret gear (but still as holy spec), but I didn’t actually look them up. I’ve also excluded the quality of the gems, since it didn’t really seem important for my purposes. The data set consists of 75 characters between ~2750 and ~2140, with 784 total gems.
Intellect => 149 | 20.93%
Spell Power => 113 | 15.87%
Resilience Rating => 96 | 13.48%
Spell Power and Intellect => 54 | 07.58%
Spell Power and Resilience Rating => 51 | 07.16%
Spell Power and Stamina => 49 | 06.88%
Resilience Rating and Stamina => 44 | 06.18%
Spell Power and Critical Strike Rating => 41 | 05.76%
Intellect and Stamina => 29 | 04.07%
Critical Strike Rating => 19 | 02.67%
Stamina => 18 | 02.53%
Spell Power and Mana every 5 seconds => 18 | 02.53%
Intellect and Mana every 5 seconds => 10 | 01.40%
Haste Rating => 5 | 00.70%
Critical Strike Rating and Stamina => 5 | 00.70%
Spell Power and Haste Rating => 3 | 00.42%
Strength => 2 | 00.28%
Strength and Stamina => 2 | 00.28%
Hit Rating => 2 | 00.28%
Haste Rating and Mana every 5 seconds => 1 | 00.14%
Strength and Critical Strike Rating => 1 | 00.14%
We can do some basic categorization of the gems, too. I’ve divided them into throughput (spell power, crit, haste), longevity (intellect, mp5), utility (hit rating) and defense (stamina, resilience). I realise these categories aren’t entirely accurate because most paladin stats affect multiple areas (for example, via Illumination), but it’s a good starting point.
throughput => 181 | 25.42%
longevity => 159 | 22.33%
defense => 158 | 22.19%
defense/throughput => 105 | 14.75%
longevity/throughput => 73 | 10.25%
defense/longevity => 29 | 04.07%
other => 2 | 00.28%
utility => 2 | 00.28%
defense/other => 2 | 00.28%
other/throughput => 1 | 00.14%
Then maybe it’s useful to see totals for each category, if you count a “pure gem” as 2 points for its category and the hybrid gems for 1 point in each:
throughput => 541 | 37.99%
defense => 452 | 31.74%
longevity => 420 | 29.49%
other => 7 | 00.49%
utility => 4 | 00.28%
From looking at that it seems most people are balancing their gemming across the three major categories, and browsing through the individual results seems to support that. Let’s see one last view over the data, since this is starting to get long.
This table contains a row for each paladin, with a column for each of the three major categories defined above – the cells show what proportion of that paladin’s total gems are used on that category. Hybrid gems are split across both categories as in the previous report, and strength/hit gems are ignored although they do still count in the totals.
name throughput longevity defense
Varluneyna 0.33 0.33 0.33
Heimen 0.45 0.35 0.20
Jeuce 0.38 0.50 0.13
Haydee 0.39 0.11 0.50
Unicornica 0.50 0.50 0.00
Wcstyle 0.60 0.10 0.30
Mchaggis 0.45 0.23 0.32
Aiiden 0.44 0.38 0.19
Braves 0.36 0.45 0.18
Gina 0.50 0.22 0.28
Dercas 0.43 0.43 0.14
Mournhold 0.71 0.29 0.00
Beldara 0.39 0.28 0.33
Oryun 0.59 0.14 0.27
Dimarius 0.56 0.44 0.00
Tygrilol 0.50 0.17 0.33
Sasorii 0.38 0.63 0.00
Solidarityx 0.46 0.46 0.08
Ieetoh 0.10 0.00 0.20
Reepent 0.25 0.50 0.25
Harumaru 0.55 0.45 0.00
Magicpie 0.39 0.39 0.22
Pummie 0.44 0.56 0.00
Holynight 0.44 0.33 0.22
Redemptionz 0.44 0.39 0.17
Derreidos 0.41 0.59 0.00
Femaleftw 0.44 0.28 0.28
Diplomacy 0.50 0.50 0.00
Qiu 0.65 0.15 0.20
Gellin 0.45 0.55 0.00
Stylec 0.25 0.50 0.25
Aurog 0.35 0.45 0.20
Kaara 0.40 0.20 0.40
Mcjordie 0.50 0.35 0.15
Arasof 0.50 0.06 0.44
Bubbliciouss 0.61 0.28 0.11
Eskimopally 0.50 0.25 0.25
Zyrxy 0.38 0.50 0.12
Lostprophet 0.56 0.17 0.28
Valefor 0.40 0.35 0.25
Sylvanisa 0.44 0.33 0.22
Luncarn 0.30 0.70 0.00
Feladence 0.50 0.50 0.00
Smokealarm 0.39 0.33 0.28
Ermad 0.28 0.72 0.00
Appocalypse 0.50 0.11 0.39
Macabe 0.38 0.63 0.00
Fiaraa 0.50 0.35 0.15
Trawn 0.56 0.19 0.25
Moomoobeezy 0.38 0.38 0.25
Oculis 0.19 0.56 0.25
Espectrolol 0.50 0.30 0.20
Romulisa 0.50 0.28 0.22
Clint 0.38 0.42 0.21
Kehrsyn 0.40 0.00 0.60
Sayami 0.29 0.71 0.00
Jdubz 0.31 0.38 0.31
Shadgavena 0.55 0.14 0.32
Serjj 0.65 0.25 0.10
Judgmant 0.36 0.64 0.00
Crispybacon 0.30 0.30 0.40
Guli 0.31 0.44 0.25
Annihilacion 0.64 0.36 0.00
Clapton 0.44 0.44 0.11
Zatin 0.44 0.56 0.00
Tranze 0.38 0.63 0.00
Brianlee 0.23 0.77 0.00
Makitoo 0.45 0.55 0.00
Fron 0.64 0.23 0.14
Zenakuu 0.44 0.39 0.17
Duner 0.36 0.64 0.00
Evir 0.78 0.11 0.11
Zorgat 1.00 0.00 0.00
Svendor 0.63 0.38 0.00
Mute 0.60 0.25 0.15
They’re sorted by rating, if you’re wondering.
So, just like Ghostcrawler foretold, resilience and health levels are at the point where you can’t 100-0 somebody in a stun (double-engineering rogue/mage notwithstanding) and games have turned back into 10+ minute outlast (hi feral druid/paladin) where you spend most of the time strafing around Nagrand pillars and drinking. Replace drinking with meleeing pets if you’re a Paladin, I feel like a TBC dreamstate druid sometimes.
There are still some ridiculous outliers in terms of damage (hi hunters) but it looks like Blizzard has identified the most egregious problems and 3.1 has further rebalancing. It seems like they’re actively moving towards a more balanced arena system and I’m pretty happy with the trajectory at the least.
The thing that troubles me the most about the current arena is the amount of matchups that are grossly in favor of one side or the other. There were always rough matchups, even at 70 – I played a lot of holy paladin/warrior in TBC and some comps like ualock/priest were basically impossible if at least one of the opposing players had either a keyboard or mouse installed.
That’s fine, and the nature of the classes mean some comps are always going to be tough – warlocks find rogues difficult, priests find hunters difficult, paladins find warlocks difficult… it’s not exactly rock-paper-scissors but there are advantages and disadvantages there. You can usually make some of it up by partner selection and just playing well.
Playing Holy Paladin/DK at the moment, it seems like the vast majority of our matchups fall into this category. I won’t pretend we have the worst of it by any means; it’s a strong comp, and a lot of the matchups fall in our favor – melee/paladin, melee/druid, dk/shaman (for example) are probably 90/10 to us with perfect play. Even difficult teams like disc/rogue or rogue/mage are probably 70/30 to us with no mistakes. But the flipside of that is ualock/healer, hunter/paladin, shaman/rogue are pretty much impossible no matter what we do.
I guess I’d prefer it if it didn’t feel quite so predestined.