To the ground baby!

[JohnnieRat]

[blizzard]Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)
Hello paladins,

Sorry we didn't get a chance to pre-announce these changes before the data were pushed to the beta. I won't try to sugarcoat it -- these are nerfs.

As I tried to explain before, we concluded a couple of weeks ago that Retribution was doing too much damage in PvP. We tried to nerf the burst damage through the previous changes to Divine Storm etc. Unfortunately, those changes didn't prove sufficient. Not only were paladins still destroying other classes in PvP, but we also found their PvE damage, even at level 80, was too high. Many classes were concluding they were too weak based on comparing their numbers to paladin numbers (and to be fair, hunters and in some cases mages and warriors).

Here are the new changes:

1) Judgements of the Wise: Mana gained reduced from 33% to 15% of base mana. We spent many hours arriving at this number. For example, we did a lot of Patchwerk fights, watching the mana bar to see when and if it ever went down. In BGs, we were seeing paladins able to go from target to target without pausing even when unleashing all of their attacks. While we don't want you to go OOM in a few seconds, we don't want you to ignore the mana bar either. Mana is not rage -- warriors can't typically start a battle with a full bar.

2) Judgement of Wisdom: mana gained reduced to 1% of maximum mana and proc frequency cut by 50%. This ability was flat out better than Vampiric Touch when the mana provided between the two really needs to be close in order for the decision between Shadow priest and Retribution paladin to be a real one.

3) Judgement and Seals: Damage reduced by 20%. This is the major damage adjustment -- a lot of damage was coming from these. We do realize this hurts Holy and Protection as well, and that is something for which we are prepared to offer compensation (particularly if it hurts Protection's threat generation).

4) Hammer of Wrath: Now can’t be used until the target is below 20% health. Our rule of thumb is that core "Execute-style" abilities work at 20% and talented abilities work at 35% health. We originally had Hammer at 35% based on some other limitations of the spell.

5) Art of War: Increased damage bonus to Judgements, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm. I'll report back on the exact numbers here when we've settled on them.

I also want to add that the token Blessing of Might change wasn't intended as a joke -- it is designed so that Battle Shouts won't cancel the longer and more expensive Blessing of Might in a group setting.

These seem like pretty severe nerfs, but that was the intention. It is difficult for some players to ever be truly objective with issues surrounding their class, but in this case we felt Ret was severely overpowered. This was not in the realm of small tweaks to fix (though we did try originally). We overhauled the paladin class for Lich King, so it is unfortunate but not too surprising that the numbers for the dps spec require a lot of iteration. The mistake is ours, not the fault of the player base or beta testers.

Nerfing a spec or class is never fun. It means that our initial estimates of numbers were off and we know that the community is going to react negatively (to put it mildly). But we have to try and keep the game in a relatively balanced state and that is going to mean making decisions that are unpopular sometimes. If you need to blame someone for the nerfs, blame me.

As always, if we over-compensated, we'll adjust the numbers again. But as I said, our initial round of nerfs wasn't sufficient. Lest you fear that Lich King is upon as and you won't see any additional changes, that is not our point of view. We changed a lot in the game and we need to be able to rectify problems. I would expect early patches or even hotfixes to deal with class or balance problems, and hopefully these will slow down as we get closer to major content releases. But nothing is off the table after we ship, down to rearchitecting talent trees if we think that is called for. This isn't to suggest we aren't happy with the state of the game. Rather, my word that we will continue to iterate on problem areas as they come up.

I also want to stress that we do not make balance decisions based on the QQ of other classes. At most, if there is a pretty vocal outcry that will encourage us to rerun the numbers to see if something is amiss. As vocal, and sometimes passionate and even logical as forum posts can be, they represent a fraction of the entire fanbase and it would be foolish for us to clobber one group of players solely based on the whining from another group.

Go ahead and vent if you have to. We won't delete posts or ban posters in this thread unless they are overly offensive. We do ask that you not launch a thousand other threads so that other paladin issues can still be discussed. Likewise, we have no problem with other classes engaging in the discussion but outright gloating or trolling will be frowned upon.

And I do apologize for putting you through this. [/blizzard]

This might be the largest nerf I've ever seen.

[Geos]

That sucks. Pallies get good, lasts a week, and BAM! nerf bat.

[Rocknlock]

Figured it was comming. Ah well, time to put my time into something else.

[JohnnieRat]

The "token boost to BoM" was literally a 1 more AP buff. How can they possibly claim that it wasn't intended as a joke to rub the nerf club (bat isn't large enough to describe this) in our face.

[Geos]

Reminds me of poking a corpse with a stick.

[Trismus]

This does seem excessive.



Then again, I also think mace stun in its original form was balanced.

[khader]

The "token boost to BoM" was literally a 1 more AP buff. How can they possibly claim that it wasn't intended as a joke to rub the nerf club (bat isn't large enough to describe this) in our face.

It does get around the stacking issues with Battle Shout which is 305.  Be rather messy having Battle Shout replacing the BoM buff - but we know how this goes already....

[capnpop]

Then again, I also think mace stun in its original form was balanced.

hahahahahahahahahaha, cos mace stun = skill, am i rite?

[Arcdelad]

come on pallies...seriously...did you honestly feel your superiority was fair? blizz brings up some GREAT points above - they are fair IMO...

case in point: rockn's pally, with crap gear (no offense rock - i love ya lol) and GEM SLOTS NOT FILLED goes into a 5 man run where I tanked and almost, almost out-dpses PANZER, who is epiced to the hilt and doing some great damage these days post patch....

I dont think the mistake is nerfing you guys...I think the mistake was ever making you that powerful to start with...

[JohnnieRat]

A nerf was inevitable, this is true. But is nerfing essentially every facet of the ret class necessary? A 20% damage reduction on one of our core abilities is ridiculous. Making our mana regen abilities be 25% as effective as they are now, a little extreme.

Some of the things that are changing are not nerfs but hidden buffs. a 20% bonus to crit damage (on special abilities) being changed to a 10% boost (to yellow hits)is not a nerf until you have over 50% crit chance. It's actually a huge buff to rets with sub par crit chance.

There are some nerfs that I can see though
  - Lowering the thresh-hold of HoW back to 20% makes sense. I don't know why it got boosted to 35% in the first place now that it's instant.
  - Instead of lowering the damage by a flat % of judgements, lower the base amount and make it scale better. I can see how people are pissed at getting facerolled by Rets in blue quest gear but it is sort of expected that one in full S3/4 is going to make you his prison girlfriend.
  -  They already nerfed Divine Storm to being physical rather than holy damage and it shows in PvP against the obvious classes (O noes! I can't faceroll other ret pallies as fast?). In PvE it doesn't really matter since bosses are sundered to 0 armor anyways for the most part. In all fairness, DS was hitting a bit hard lol. But at least the healing co-efficient is getting a 5% boost which is a sall help to our raid utility, i guess.

We are getting a huge buff that no one talks about though
* Rightous Vengeance: When we crit with a yellow strike, it puts a NASTY dot for 40% of whatever we just hit over 8 seconds... So basically we get an a free 200 or so tick DoT constantly.

[Rocknlock]

I'd at least wish they'd leave judgement of the wise alone. I don't see how mana return is looked at as being OP'd. Also any instance run with no cc, a ret pally will have a lot of added dmg from consecration and divine storm, so that might have played into our run arc. Besides hard hitting judgements and never running oom, I don't think ret has changed that much. DS and crusader strike are both kind of weak imo. So making our judgements and seals just as weak now puts the "lol" back in front of the ret pally name.
Kinda funny I haven't seen any posts about hunter, boomin, or rogue nerfs yet.

[un4]

That's because rogues arn't OP.

Shadow Dance, anyone?

[Arcdelad]

they really need to nerf BE pallies metrosexuality....i think the big reasons people are bitching is becuase not only are you getting pounded by this twirling light show making weird noises, but after he kills you he uses your shield as a mirror to check and make sure his armani suit isnt wrinkled and that the fight didnt move any of his carefully sculpted hair...

[Rocknlock]

Yeah, rogues doin 2k+ dps like the hunters and boomkins while the locks mages shadow priests, feral druids etc are sitting back 500-1000 dps short...aren't OP'd.

[Arcdelad]

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=05lJUBlErfs