Because my heart belongs to Retribution, I'll only comment on the changes that affect Ret.
New Paladin Spells
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.
If this is an instant cast ability, Ret might utilize this to provide more solo survivability or extra party or raid healing. That's probably not the intent behind it, but it reads like an extra panic button.
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).
This is a neat ability, if a little ill-defined. Ideally I hope for a talent in Ret that makes the guardian permanent; having a vengeful guardian angel at your side would be tops, but since it's billed as a Gargoyle-like cooldown I won't hold my breath.
Changes to Abilities and Mechanics
• 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.
Finally. Low-level paladins have an extra button to press until their spec of choice kicks in; Ret now kicks in at level 1. The new talent in its place is icing on the cake.
• Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.
Ret nerf, as outlined in the Dispel preview posted a few weeks back (defensive magic debuff is Holy only). Sucks for solo and PvP, but not too big a deal in PvE group content.
• 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.
Love it. Buffing Wisdom as Ret is annoying; Holy does it better, Shaman's Manaspring Totem overwrites it (leading to people complaining that I'm not buffing it at all), and it gets confusing when buffing hybrid groups. Hoping Greater Blessing spells are changed to buff all raid members in range and not on a class-by-class basis.
• Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.
Did not expect this. In addition to another heal, this might give Ret another button to push as part of our rotation, depending on damage and mana efficiency issues. Could the Shockadin return under the banner of Retribution?
New Talents and Talent Changes
• We want to ease off the defensive capabilities of Retribution and Holy paladins slightly. We think the powerful paladin defenses have been one of the things holding Retribution paladins back, especially in Arenas. One change we’re considering is lowering Divine Shield’s duration by a couple of seconds. Having said that, Retribution does pretty well in Battlegrounds, and Battlegrounds will be a much bigger focus in Cataclysm since they can provide the best PvP rewards. Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem.
Now we get into speculation territory. In Vanilla and most of BC, the common bargaining posture for Ret buffs was giving up some or all of our shields. It seems Blizzard got the memo on that one. Still, they admit this might be a non-change, depending on Paladins' performance in Battlegrounds.
• We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either doing decent burst damage, or just being good at staying alive.
Giving Ret a deeper DPS mechanic and PvP utility are talking points that have been repeated since release, and are repeated here as something to look forward to with no indication what these changes may be. It's disappointing they had to be repeated in this preview.
• We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don’t feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.
The 30 minute Sacred Shield duration buff will probably be confined to the Holy tree, otherwise Ret will have no reason not to buff themselves with SS.
Mastery Passive Talent Tree Bonuses
Retribution
• Melee Damage
• Melee Critical Damage
• Holy Damage
Holy Damage: Any attack that does Holy damage will have its damage increased.
Concise, to the point, and a little boring. I was hoping for a new and interesting Mastery mechanic similar to that of Shadow Priests' and Balance Druids', but no such luck.
Ret burst at the beginning of WotLK was insane and Blizzard has since tried to nerf our burst while increasing our sustained DPS. The Paladin community rebelled, as they saw Ret as finally being viable after spending almost four years as a joke. I felt that our burst was way too crazy - it was incredibly easy to kill yourself from Seal of Blood's backlash damage just DPSing normally - but my solution was probably a little too simple. Virtually every talent in our tree added crit strike or critical damage to our abilities; Judgement alone had something like a 50% increased critical strike chance. Why couldn't some of the crit be throttled down or eliminated?
Currently Ret is in a good position in PvE, but a variable PvP position; it performs well in Battlegrounds and lower-ranking Arena matches, but underperforms at high end PvP. The Paladin community has been asking for years now for an interrupt and/or a gap closer, and have been summarily ignored mostly due to our variable perception of being too strong or too hard to kill. Ret's domination of 3.0 until Arena Season 4 reinforced the perception that Paladin was overtuned. Resilience didn’t exactly fix it, as had been promised, but the constant tuning down led to our current situation where Ret is fairly ineffective against most healers and targets with more than a few hundred Resilience.
In a vacuum, this preview is lackluster due to its lack of detail on important Paladin issues. However, I believe that work on Paladin can begin in earnest once it's taken out of this vacuum and placed in actual play with the myriad of other changes coming with Cataclysm.
No comments:
Post a Comment