Bowing to the Inevitable

I like heal. I like to melee. Hence I rolled a paladin.

It seemed so simple back then. But now, if I go Holy, I heal but I never melee. If I go Retribution or Protection, I melee but never heal. I've spent the last few months bouncing from spec to spec, trying to find something that captured a happy medium.

That medium does not exist anymore. So I need to choose: heal, tank, or dps?

The plain truth is that I am not willing to put in the effort to get the gear required to make Protection or Retribution good enough. I'm still crushable in my tanking set, despite it being half epics. My Retribution gear is terrible, and I'm doing as much damage as the tanks (though, admittedly, that's because I can't stop myself from throwing heals).

And I'm not willing to run instance after instance to get the gear necessary to bring these two specs up to the level of an average tank or dps.

Quite honestly, I'm a liability to my guild when I am Protection or Retribution. They won't care that much, but I care. So I've respecced back to Holy (my preferred 47/14/0), and I'm planning on staying Holy unless significant changes are made to Protection/Retribution.

Ah well. Healing is boring, but it's necessary, and I'm pretty good at it. On the plus side, I completed my set of T4 Gloves (I have all 3 different T4 Gloves), so I have 2/5 Holy T4 now.

Avoidance Macro

For a paladin tank interested in raid tanking, the overriding question is "Am I uncrushable?" It's usually a lot of work to calculate it, especially if you want to factor in buffs. Luckily, Raymond of Nazjatar has come up with a nifty macro that calculates your current avoidance for you:

/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage("Need 102.4 combined avoidance. Currently at:",0.8,0.8,1)
/script DEFAULT_CHAT_FRAME:AddMessage(GetDodgeChance()+GetBlockChance() + GetParryChance() +5+(GetCombatRatingBonus(CR_DEFENSE_SKILL) + 20)*0.04,1,0.5,0)

It's very useful when trying to build a gear set when raid tanking. The only thing to note is that in the line:

(GetCombatRatingBonus(CR_DEFENSE_SKILL) + 20)

The + 20 assumes you have 5/5 Anticipation. If you don't, you have to change this line to reflect how much defense you are getting from Anticipation (0 - 20).

(Snagged from the WoW Paladin forums. Stuff like this makes wading through all the Ret/Holy sniping worthwhile.)

Edit: Added some spaces so the macro will wrap properly in Firefox. You may have to remove some spaces if it is over the macro character limit.

Edit: Changed GetCombatRating call to GetCombatRatingBonus call. Shortens the macro slightly.

Edit: Also, you have to activate Holy Shield before using this to get results with Holy Shield. Otherwise you'll look 30-35% worse than you really are.

Example of Prot Gear Problem

Here's an example of the problem I have with paladin tanking gear, and what actually prompted me to make my last post.

I have two tanking boots: [Flesh Beast's Metal Greaves], from Mana Tombs; and [Boots of Righteous Fortitude], from Heroic Sethekk Halls.

[Boots of Righteous Fortitude] are gorgeous tanking boots, and above all they are paladin tanking boots. Yet if I was going to tank Karazhan, I'd wear [Flesh Beast's Metal Greaves] because they bring me much closer to uncrushability.

This seems wrong to me. Game mechanics should not make me choose an almost total downgrade. If the mechanics do so, the mechanics are flawed.

You can see the same problem with Righteous Armor. It's actually a really good tanking set, except that it fails the uncrushability test. If paladins didn't need to become uncrushable, there's a decent argument that Righteous Armor would be the paladin tanking set of choice for a raider just starting Karazhan.

(Well, there might be better pieces overall, but people wouldn't laugh at you for trying to tank in it. Unless you're in the Raid and Dungeons Forums. Then you'd get laughed at for not having epics.)

Protection Tree Tweaks

Here's a stab at some tweaks that I think would improve the Protection Tree and tanking for paladins:

http://talents.unleashedgaming.net/?p=vt&i=24738

In my opinion the need and effort involved in getting to an uncrushable state warps the class in many ways. For example, you simply cannot evaluate a lot of paladin tank gear as you would not wear it solely because of uncrushability.

We don't really know how a paladin raid tank would perform in true paladin tank gear. This is because if she was in true paladin tank gear, she would be crushable, and thus pointless. Similarly, a talent such as Redoubt is useless after uncrushability is achieved.

So I solve the problem Gordian-Knot-style, and simply fold uncrushability into Shield Specialization (additionally reduces chance of crushing blow by 5/10/15%).

Additionally, Blessing of Sanctuary is removed, and Kings moved into its position. With the smaller raid size, there are not really enough paladins to put all required blessings up, and Sanctuary is usually dropped. Kings is a good blessing, but not necessary in 10-man content, and only one paladin in 25-man content needs it.

I added a Fear Immunity, Blessing of Courage, into the 11-point slot, making it reasonably accessible to all specs. It's a short duration blessing, modelled after Blessing of Freedom.

The final change was to swap Weapon Expertise for a talent that returns mana when blocking. Because we are paladins, it is extended to return mana to the entire party. Seems in theme, but makes us different than warriors, as a paladin tank would more likely be put in a caster group.

We retain our strengths of being really good on fast attack or AoE fights, but we still have our weaknesses of lower health and damage mitigation than warriors.

We also get a lot more freedom to gear up. Basically, I'm tired of wearing warrior tanking gear, and would really like to wear paladin tanking gear.

Edit: Hmm. It appears that the talent tree site is down. Hopefully the description above is enough for people get the idea.

/roll Loot Rules

On Skywall, the standard loot rules for Bind-on-Pickup items is pass when the loot roll comes up, and then manually use /roll to determine who gets the item afterwards. This seems a little odd at first. Why pass if you're just going to manually use the same process afterwards?

I think the reason we do this is that the standard loot roll does't really correspond to how we think of items. The standard Need/Greed basically has two options:

1. I need the item.
2. I don't need the item.

I don't think this correctly matches our thinking about loot, and as such, we ignore the automated system and manually roll afterwards.

In reality, I think there are 3 basic reactions to loot, not 2:

1. I will use the item all the time.
2. I will use the item some of the time.
3. I will not use the item.

We don't explicitly say so, but when we manually roll afterwards, we take the all/some of the time division into account.

For example, say [Hourglass of the Unraveller] dropped in Black Morass. It's a really nice trinket for my Retribution gear, and I wouldn't mind having it. But I don't really want to take the item from a rogue. So I pass, and wait to see if the rogue expresses interest before rolling.

(If I was an active Retribution paladin, this would be different, and I would roll against a rogue for it. I'm talking as a Holy Paladin who may or may not spec Retribution one day.)

Under Need/Greed, no option really fits. If I Need, and I win it over the rogue, that's a bad result. If I Greed, and a mage wins it, that's a bad result too. So we pass and roll it out manually.

Under the three option system, it's much more obvious. Rogue picks the first option (use all the time), I pick the second option (use some of the time), and mage picks the third option (never use it). So the rogue gets it, but I get it if he doesn't need it.

Knowing that this more closely matches how we think about loot rules, I think there are a couple changes that could be made to speed up loot distribution. For example, rather than manually doing need/greed rolls, you could use three steps, rather than making people guess if the "all the time" people will roll.

Or you could use the automatic Need/Greed loot window. Need if you will use all the time, Greed if you will use some of the time, and Pass if you never use it. If everyone passes, an enchanter scoops up the item and shards are passed out at the end of the run.

This could easily be adapted to any instance where you use /roll, such as Karazhan. You could even implement a 1 upgrade per run rule by saying that once you win something, you can only hit Greed from then on, ensuring that someone who hasn't won something can hit Need and guarantee a win.

Crafting

Crafting in WoW is good for:

1. Making decent gear for your main character to supplement quests and drops. Personally, I like wearing gear that my toon has crafted.
2. Making good gear for alts.
3. Making specific valued pieces for friends and guildmates.
4. Making consumables to buff you.
5. Having something to do other than quest and kill. Collecting recipes and advancing your crafting skill is fun.

Crafting in WoW is not good for:

1. Making money by selling crafted gear to other people.

I think a lot of the people who have problems with the crafting in WoW had visions of, say, becoming an weaponsmith, and selling the weapons for large amounts of profit. But the simple truth is that crafting gear is not a good path to riches.

And the reason for this is straight supply and demand. It is very easy to become a crafter, and thus are a lot of crafters in WoW. Almost everyone has at least one crafting profession. This quickly forces the margin for crafting to a very low point. If I have materials for something, and you charge 100g to combine them, I can very easily find someone who will do it for much cheaper.

As well, you can get gear from quests and instances, so crafting isn't specifically necessary. Also gear doesn't degrade, so there's never any repeat business. If player X buys a Sword of Doom, she's never going to buy another Sword of Doom, only a Sword of Greater Doom.

Realistically, the only way you can make good money from a crafting profession is to have an extremely rare recipe that is highly valued. In the old days, this would include epics like the Lionheart Helm.

Blizzard has tried to build a little bit of margin into crafting in TBC, most notably with Primal Nethers. Primal Nethers are bind-on-pickup, so if you want an item that needs one, you need to find a crafter with the recipe AND a nether she is willing to part with. That imposed scarcity allows the crafter to increase her margins on crafted goods.

If you want to earn money using professions, the best thing to do is focus on items that are used up. This includes consumables and raw materials used in crafting. After all, if everyone is a crafter, everyone is going to need materials. Supply and demand.

Now, is this situation good? Would it be better to make it so fewer people are able to craft, allowing them to actually make money from their profession?

Personally, I like the existing system of crafting. It's very solo friendly--until you hit the Primal Nether stage--and I like being able to make gear to supplement my quest gear. I can live with not being able to make a profit via crafting.

Rating Karazhan, Part III

(See Part I, Part II.)

Ahh, Nightbane. Hmm, I thought Blizzard said that Fear was going to be less important in TBC. Quite honestly, I don't really understand Blizzard and Fear. As far as I know, you need a warrior tank, or a dwarf/draenai priest, or two shaman to even have a reasonable chance of beating this fight. I just don't understand that logic. Sometimes I wonder if there's some other way of dealing with Fear that Blizzard thinks we should use.

Personally, I think boss Fears should work more like Intimidation: everyone except the main tank gets feared. That would make Fear-based fights much easier to deal with without raid-stacking, and make non-warrior tanks/non-dwarf priests more viable.

Aside from that, Nightbane is an okay fight. There's nothing really interesting in the fight, it's all about the tank breaking Fears, picking up Nightbane when he lands, and being topped off before Fear. In many ways, it's a very tank-healer-centric, old-school fight.

Final Grade - Nightbane: C+

In general, Karazhan is a pretty good instance, with a nice mixture of fights and bosses, along with some superb voice-acting. I'd say that it was better than Molten Core or AQ20, on par with Zul'Gurub, but worse than Blackwing Lair. (This being the extent of my pre-TBC raid experience.) However, it does suffer from three significant flaws.

First off, the instance is rather large, and thus the trash is excessive. Just running from the side door to Aran's room takes forever, and that's after you've killed all the trash. The entire instance pretty much needs to be thinned out.

Second, a lot of the fights are very biased toward ranged groups. Maiden, Curator, Prince, and Nightbane for example. In particular, I really wish that Blizzard would stop using chaining spells that do more damage to people near each other. Those alone make melee even more difficult than it already is.

Would Curator really be that much harder if the Astral Flares did a straight lightning bolt instead of a chain lightning? The melee dps already have to chase them down, and this would make having an extra rogue/shaman/paladin/warrior much less hurtful.

Third, the instance really lacks a solid epic capstone fight. MC was a very weak instance, but the presentation of Ragnaros was superb. Summoning him for the first time was awesome, and truly felt epic. Ossiran the Unscarred, Hakkar the Soulflayer, and Nefarian were all awesome end boss fights that finished off the instance with a bang.

I don't even know who the end boss of Karazhan is. It's possibly Prince Malchezzar, even though I have no idea what he's doing in Kara. Maybe it's Nightbane, given that it is a dragon fight, which is only accessible after a questline. Compounding the issue is that my guild beat Prince first, then Nightbane, and finally Netherspite.

Karazhan starts out really strong, but it ends in a whimper. However, overall it is a decent raid instance, and the individual boss fights are fairly strong. It's more the connections between bosses which are missing. Regardless, I'm really looking forward to the next raid instance.

Final Grade - Karazhan: B

Ranking of Boss Fights (best to worst):

A+: Moroes
A: Shade of Aran, Chess Event
B+: Curator, Prince Malchezzar
B: Attumen the Huntsman, Opera, Netherspite
B-: Terestian Illhoof
C+: Nightbane
C: Maiden of Virtue

Rating Karazhan, Part II

(See Part I.)

Terestian Illhoof is a decent fight. About the only knock against it is that the Demonic Chains do a bit too much damage. If your raid runs a little dps-light, and one of your dps gets sacrificed, it's a bit dicey as to if the person will survive. As well, it's fairly hard to get a heal off in time to keep the sacrificed person up. To be honest, it might be better if the Demonic Chains had more health, but did less DPS. It would make that portion of the fight a little more forgiving.

Final Grade - Terestian Illhoof: B-

Shade of Aran is a crazy fight. Fights where you can go all out are always fun. The silence around him is a bit annoying for paladins, as it means you cannot melee-heal. However, the new Blizzard mechanic is great. It's amusing to make the ranged people run around like the melee people normally have to do.

The voice-acting in this fight is superb, and adds a great deal to the atmosphere for this fight.

The only problem with Shade is that the ending part with the elementals can get too chaotic, especially if you don't have a warlock. But that's a small quibble for such a unique and engaging fight. It's a hard fight, mind you, but lots of fun.

Final Grade - Shade of Aran: A

The Chess event is a very nice breather. It's fun, and relatively easy, and provides a great change of pace. For some reason, I like controlling the pawns.

I'm gravely disappointed that Medivh cheats, though. What's the world coming to when you can't trust an evil undead wizard to play fair in a game of chess?

Final Grade - Chess Event: A

Netherspite is also a very interesting fight. The portals and beams are an interesting mechanic. I haven't actually been in on a kill for Netherspite yet, but from what I've seen it's a good fight.

Edit: Killed Netherspite tonight. I think my rating stands.

Final Grade - Netherspite: B

Prince Malchezzar (and the legions he commands) is a complicated fight to grade. On the one hand, it's a well done fight with interesting mechanics. In particular, the random element of infernals makes the strategy for this fight more dynamic than most.

The problem with this fight is that I don't think raiders deal with randomness very well. In the ideal case, when you lose a fight, it should have been because you made a mistake, or did not execute correctly, and you should know that you did not execute correctly. In contrast, when you wipe on Prince, the most common phrase you will hear is that the raid had bad luck.

Which is not true. It is not bad luck, but failure of strategy that leads to most Prince wipes. However, the link between failure of strategy and the wipe itself is hard to see. Most people only see the proximate cause of the wipe ("We wiped because an infernal landed on us"), and don't see the underlying strategic flaw ("We didn't move the raid to a safer position early").

This disconnect often shows up in DPS fights which lack a timer to make the lack of DPS obvious. Instead, the proximate cause of the wipe is healers running out of mana, and so that's where the blame falls.

The inability of the Prince fight to make clear the true reason the raid wiped is its deepest flaw. Which is a pity, because in a lot of other respects it is a very well designed fight.

Final Grade - Prince Malchezzar: B+

Still to come: Nightbane, and the overall grade for Karazhan.

Rating Karazhan, Part I

I think it's a good time to take a look back at Karazhan and evaluate it. I've done almost all of the fights inside (haven't been in on a Netherspite kill yet). I'm not going to describe the fights here, but you can take a look at the WoWWiki Karazhan page for full descriptions if you want.

First, let's look at the trash. I'm not a fan of the trash in Karazhan. I think respawns are silly, and there's too much trash in general. In particular, the trash from Curator to Shade of Aran really needs to be thinned out. For the most part, the trash is at a reasonable difficulty level. The major exceptions are the spell shade packs. Maybe my raid hasn't discovered the secret to dealing with them, but we get absolutely wrecked by them every week.

Final Grade - Trash: D

Attumen the Huntsman is a solid introductory fight. It's a relatively simple tank-and-spank fight that has a couple of phases and is a good length. It's a very good first raid fight that serves as a check to see if your guild is ready for rading.

Final Grade - Attumen the Huntsman: B

Moroes is one of my favorite fights. It is the first complex fight, and is a solid test of your guild's coordination. About the only negatives is that it can be hard if you don't have a priest, hunter or paladin to crowd control, and it gets a lot easier with 2 priests. But it's still doable with stunlocking, kiting, or even just tanking everything.

It's a fight where a lot of different strategies can work, but in the end just comes down to the skill of your raid. As for difficulty, I think it is well placed, especially with the vanishes to give your raid a breather, and allow healers to catch up.

Downing Moroes for the first time feels like a significant accomplishment arising from skillful execution, which is what the best raid fights do.

Final Grade - Moroes: A+

Maiden of Virtue is a decent fight. The layout of the fight with the pillars is well done, and the fight is very different. It seems to be much easier if you have a paladin in the group, and does require you to be quick with cleanses. However, I'm a fan of Blessing of Sacrifice, and I always enjoy fights where I get to use it.

The big knock against this fight is that--like several fights in Karazhan--it is biased against melee-heavy raids. It's still doable, but realistically if you have more than 3 melee, it's painful.

As well, I think that Maiden does slightly too much damage. For some reason, I die an awful lot on this fight, which is odd for its placement in the zone. Like tonight I took a Holy Fire, cleansed it, then got hit by Repentance and died before I had a chance to heal. Maybe we aren't using Dampen Magic enough. I do think that the Holy Fire damage could be toned down slightly.

Final Grade - Maiden of Virtue: C

The opera events are really well done. All the fights are reasonably interesting and amusing. After the difficulty of Romulo and Julianne was brought in line with the other two fights, all three fights are roughly the same quality.

Running around as Little Red Riding Hood, and being chased by the Big Bad Wolf is hilarious. I'm not really too sure what else to say. The fights are tuned well, and I look forward to Opera when we do Karazhan. At the same time, there's nothing amazing about any of the fights either. Solid raiding fare.

Final Grade - Opera Events: B

The Curator is another very good fight. It's the first real test of your DPS, and one of the best places to make them step and be accountable. To be quite honest, in a lot of pre-TBC content, tanks and healers carried the DPS. I'm very happy to see TBC making the DPS visibly responsible for wipes.

As with Maiden, this fight punishes melee-heavy groups. It's still doable, but puts extra stress on your healers. That's really about the only negative for this fight.

I love the voice acting for Curator, as well. It's very different from your typical raid fight, and is a nice change of pace.

Final Grade - The Curator: B+

I'll cover the remaining bosses next post. One thing about Karazhan I've noticed is that it really likes a balanced raid. One of each class plus a DPS off-tank is pretty much the ideal setup for going through Kara from start to end. In fact, the more your raid deviates from this setup, the harder many fights in Kara become.

The Negative Effects of Durability

In most games, durability is an advantage. Items with a high durability last longer than items with lower durability, and thus are more valuable. This makes intuitive sense.

In WoW, however, high durability is actually a disadvantage. It seems counter-intuitive, but looking at game mechanics quickly shows why. The most common form of item damage is the 10% durability loss from death. However, the cost to repair an item is based on per point of durability lost. An item with higher durability loses more points for each death, and thus costs more to repair for each death.

For example, take two items: blue boots with 50 durability, and epic boots with 100 durability. Let's say it costs 10 silver to repair one point of durability. After one death, the blue boots lose 5 points of durability, and the epic boots lose 10. It costs 50 silver to repair the blue boots, and 1 gold to repair the epic boots. Having lower durability was actually an advantage for the blue boots, which just does not seem right.

And this has a startling amount of ramifications, especially in the endgame.

First, gear with higher item levels tends to have higher durability. That means that as your gear gets better and better, your repair costs increase. Because the raid dungeons do not drop increased amounts of cash, it means that the amount of gold needed to support raiding increases as gear gets better.

This is a big problem for healers and tanks. As a character levels, the rate of gold farmed continues to increase, allowing them to keep pace with their increased costs. At 70, though, this changes.

For DPS, the rate of gold farmed continues to increase as new gear is gained, allowing the DPS to match the increase in repair costs. However, for healers and tanks, the new gear does not help increase the rate of gold farmed, meaning that they have to farm for longer periods of time to keep up with the increasing durability on their gear.

Secondly, the increasing repair costs leads to higher cost of death, which leads to more risk-averse behaviour. When a single wipe costs 5g or more, a healer or tank is less likely to engage in risky actions like joining pick-up groups. This is bad for the game as a whole, as it works best when people are actually willing to do things, to take the risk of dying.

The solution is to change the repair mechanic. Rather than repairing on a per-durability-point basis, repair costs should be done on a fixed percentage base (by level). It should always cost the same for a level 70 to repair from 0% to 100%.

To return to the above example, if costs 5 gold to repair from 0% to 100%, both the blue boots and the epic boots cost 50 silver. So for a healer or tank, it takes them the same amount of time to farm for gold to support their new gear.

(The DPS ends up with more free time, and possibly more money as a result, but I don't really see that as game-breaking. At least not as game-breaking as forcing the healers/tanks to farm for continously longer periods of time. Besides, the rogues and hunters already avoid half the wipes anyways.)

This way there is symmetry between the percentage loss when dying, and the percentage gain when repairing. Costs are now fixed, and no longer require increased farming time. Durability is once again an advantage as--not counting deaths--an item with high durability will last longer and not cost as much to repair.

Rogue Joke

From Cephas of Twisting Nether:

Jesus: "I can offer you eternal Salvation."
Disciples: "Can I get Might or Kings instead?"

Retribution Respec

After the last post about making money, I tried out Auctioneer and Enchantrix. Talk about information overload! I quickly gave up on AH trading and instead respecced to Retribution (20/0/41).

Retribution is a lot of fun! Four digit crits are awesome. Probably not that amazing to any DPS readers, but as a paladin, it's funny to see. As well, Retribution is very gratifying on a visceral level. Your charcter does special attack animation, giant numbers pop up, your hands start glowing white, and there's sound effects. I was gleefully killing stuff all over Blade's Edge at first.

It is a lot more mana-intensive than I expected. I've always viewed Retribution as fairly mana-efficient, but it can be very mana-hungry. However, this is mostly judging Command. In fact, if you use Seal of Command (Rank 1) and don't judge, you can get 95% of the damage and greatly reduce your mana usage. I'm contemplating macroing SoC so I can left-click for Rank 1, and right-click for max rank.

I also totally understand the comments about threat now. I only went on one instance run as Retribution, but I had to be very careful about threat, even with one of our main Kara tanks tanking.

(It was a pretty weird run. Normal Shattered Halls with Prot Warrior, Feral Druid in bear, Retribution Paladin, Rogue, and Priest. We didn't really use crowd control but just tanked and killed everything. We probably outgear the instance at this point.)

I wasn't even doing that much damage. I was hovering at about 70% of the rogue's damage, though that was with tossing a few heals here and there. But I'd start attacking and then I hit a 2K Crusader Strike crit, 2K white damage crit, and 2K SoC crit--all at the same time--and the mob would be attacking me. Good thing I wear plate.

Between Retribution and selling off a lot of the enchanting materials and primals I had accumulated, I managed to increase my gold levels substantially. I'm still a long way off from the epic flying mount, but I'm in a much better position than before the weekend.

I'm not entirely sure if I'm going to stay Retribution. My healing is okay, but I'm missing Blessing of Kings. I would like to try out in a raid, just to see how things work. Quite honestly, for a 25-man raid, having at least one Retribution Paladin is probably a good idea. For a 10-man, though, I'm not really sure.

Melee and Terestian Illhoof

There are certain fights where paladin meleeing just works out perfectly. One such fight is Terestian Illhoof in Karazhan.

I'm usually assigned to heal the warlock who is killing the imps. What I try to do is drop Consecration every so often to help her out. But this leads to mana problems, and I usually end up having to drink a mana potion or stop the consecrations.

So last night I tried a different strategy. I put Judgement of Wisdom on Illhoof, and melee'd with Seal of Wisdom, healing the warlock as necessary. It worked spectacularly well. I was able to consecrate every 8 seconds, keep the warlock up, add a little bit of melee damage, and end the fight with over 30% mana. I think the fight went a bit faster and much smoother than normal.

In retrospect, I probably should have used Seal of the Crusader for a bit more damage and a bit less regen, but I was really concerned about mana from our previous experiences with him.

Money

The thing I find hardest about being Holy is making money. I like Holy fine when I'm raiding, but solo it's just painful. I also have a tendency to die a lot when soloing, which adds more repair bills, wiping out any profit I'm making.

As a result of this and gemming/enchanting/upgrading gear, my gold total has been steadily going downwards. I'm now hovering around 100g, which is pretty low for Outlands. At this rate, my epic mount is years away.

So, the question is: how do I earn gold?

I'm trying the daily quests, but so far the Skettis fire-bombing eggs is the only one I can do with any regularity. On the others, it takes forever as Holy, and is terribly boring.

Grinding, again, I can't stand with this spec. I'm not a fan of it at the best of times, but Holy just seems so boring, and each fight takes so long.

I tried mining, circling the map looking for ore, but it seems fairly hard to find, or perhaps I was following someone else who was mining.

I wish I had an 70 dps alt, but my closest ally alts are in their 20s and I'm a slow leveller.

Any suggestions for what would be a good way to earn gold?

Helm Update

In the end, I went for the T4 Holy helm.

It will probably be the most useful for the next little while, given that I'm still Holy specced. As well, I did get a really nice weapon, and I should balance it out with some healing gear.

Finally, my previous healing helm was [Mask of Inner Fire], which is more a shaman DPS helm. Not to mention that it looks like Catwoman's mask, meaning the T4 Helm is a big upgrade in the style department.

I also got Exalted with the Shat'ari faction over the weekend, and picked up [Gavel of Pure Light]. My healing set is doing pretty well now. I'm trying to find someone with the Spellsurge enchant, but failing that I'll put +81 healing on it.

Second-worst Quest in the Game!

Adversarial Blood is a terribly designed quest. In all of WoW, only the Silithus Field Duty quests are worse.

Basically, it's a group quest where you need to summon and kill 4 bosses, and loot a quest item off each boss. This is the sequence of stuff that you need to do:

1. Kill living arakkoa until you get 6 Shadow Dust (25% drop rate).
2. Use the Shadow Dust to get a potion that lets you see invisible dead arakkoa for 15 minutes.
3. Kill dead arakkoa until you get 10 Time-Lost Scrolls (~50% drop rate). These arakkoa are actually pretty tough, and you'll have to deal with the living arakkoa at the same time.
4. Use 10 Scrolls to summon a boss.
5. Repeat 4 times.

This isn't all that bad, especially if you're in a group.

Until you realize that the boss only drops one quest item for the entire group, and you have repeat the above process for each person. This is insane.

As a general rule of thumb, if you have a Group quest to kill a boss, you should let the group complete it together. This way, everyone gets the quests together, works together, completes them together, and is rewarded together. Shared accomplishment is the key.

Quests where you have to repeat the quest for each person in the group are not fun!

Heck, the only reason the Silithus quests are worse is that you couldn't set it up so that everyone was at least on the same quest. Instead, half the group would be working on a quest that they did not have.

Group quests are all well and good, but you need to be able to work on and finish them as a group!

Prince Dead, Loot, and a Dilemma

My raid downed Prince Malchezzar (and the Legions he commands) today. It was my first Prince kill, and the second Prince kill for the guild.

It's a neat fight, but I find some of the other raiders' reaction to it very puzzling and, to be honest, a bit frustrating. First a description:

Imagine a grid. Malchezzar is tanked in one of the squares on the edge of the grid, and the raid sets up in an adjacent square to dps him. Every so often an infernal will fall down and occupy a square, making it uninhabitable, and unable to be moved through. The square the infernal falls on is essentially random.

(There's also some other stuff involving enfeebles dropping people to 1 health, very fast attacks leading to crushes, and flying axes, but it's not really relevant to my issue.)

The problem is that the raid often insists on staying in the same squares, and hoping that no infernals hit the two key squares. Which is crazy. Every time we did that, infernals would box us in, and then when one did land on a crucial square, we would be unable to move to a safe pair of squares.

Of course, every time this happened, people would say that it was just bad luck, that if only the infernals had come down on different squares we would have been fine. But just because a fight has a random element, doesn't mean that you can't come up with a strategy to deal with that random element.

If you wipe over and over to the same thing, it is no longer bad luck, but bad strategy.

In any case, we eventually started moving more, shifting the Prince early, and keeping the number of escape squares high. And it worked. One dead Prince.

Then he dropped loot: [Helm of the Fallen Champion], [Gorehowl], and [Ruby Drape of the Mysticant].

We have no shamans and so the rogue and I roll off for the Helm and I win! Yay, Tier 4! Up next is [Gorehowl].

RL: Roll Need
*crickets*
RL: Roll for toy
*crickets*
Me: Umm, I'll take it no one else wants, but doesn't warrior tank want it?
Warrior: Nah, not interested.

So I have a random [Gorehowl]! Woot! I feel kind of bad about winning the T4 now, but I really wasn't expecting the lack of interest in the axe.

But anyways, this leads to the dilemma of what I should do with the T4 Helm. I currently have the T4 Protection gloves and the T4 Retribution gloves (from a raid when there was no other paladins/rogues/shamans). And I'm also currently Holy Spec and mainly healing in raids.

I'm still kind of interesting in tanking, and I do have a decent tank set built up where the T4 Protection Helm would slot nicely. But I don't think my guild needs me as a tank anytime soon. I could get the T4 Holy Helm, but then I would end up with 3 pieces, each from a different set, and that just seems silly to me. But Retribution is tempting me, and I would have [Gorehowl] to smash faces with.

I really have no idea which helm to pick.

Raiding and Recruiting

Tobold is sure that the raiding population is in decline. I am not sure I agree with his assessment, and he does not really provide any sort of proof that this is the case.

First of all, it's still fairly early in the life of TBC. People are still levelling and working on 5-mans and all the non-raiding content. Raiders are used to devouring content, so it may not seem like a lot, but there's a lot to do.

Secondly, I'm not sure that the actual number of people raiding is decreasing. Judging by the Guild Progression sticky on my Realm forums, I would say that there's at least the same number of people raiding as there were pre-TBC. The only difference is that they are spread across three or four times as many guilds.

However, one thing that is not in doubt is that existing raiding guilds are having troubles recruiting. All raiding guilds suffer from turnover, but there used to be a constant stream of new recruits that would make up for it.

What I think is happening is that people are not leaving their levelling guilds. Pre-TBC, your average levelling guild would maybe get up to 10 level 60s. They wouldn't be able to do anything however. A few would quit the game, a few would reroll alts, and a few would apply to the raiding guilds.

But now, that group of 10 70s will attempt Karazhan. Maybe they won't do very well, or proceed at a much slower pace than the raiding guilds are used to, but it's preferrable to having to leave your friends in the levelling guild.

But the downside of this is that a significant source of recruits for the raiding guilds has dried up. And raiders see people leaving their guilds through natural attrition, and no new players joining, and so complain that there is something wrong with TBC content. That raiding is dying.

But it's possible that raiding is healthy, and may become more popular than ever before.

In any case, what should a raiding guild do for recruitment? My only real thought is to conduct recruitment on a guild level. Allying with a guild that is doing one run of Karazhan could probably net enough people to do the 25-mans.

I think that before we can substantively conclude that "raiding is dying", we need more solid proof. It's possible that raiding is indeed dying, but it is also very possible that the situation I have outlined above is correct, and raiding is healthy. It also accounts for the perception by raiders that raiding is dying.

Goal for the Paladin Class?

There are a lot of posts on blogs and forums--including this one--arguing for "fixes" to the paladin class, and changes to the various talent trees or spells.

Rather than spelling out specific changes we'd like to see, let's look at it from another angle. What is the goal for Blizzard? What should a successful paladin class look like?

Here's my definition of success for the paladin class:

Everyone expects a Holy paladin to melee.

If whatever changes Blizzard makes results in this, I will regard those changes as successful. If the changes do not result in this, those changes will be unsuccessful in my view.

For those of you who would like to see changes for the class, what are your criteria for success?

Specs and Fun

It's interesting how much difference your choice of spec makes. Not just in terms of effectiveness, but also in terms of playstyle and fun.

Holy is boring me out of my skull. It's fine when I'm in a group, but is terrible when soloing. Judge/Seal every 10s, Holy Shock every 15s. Attacking only one mob at a time. I'm so looking forward to going back to Protection or Retribution.

I've also run into this same situation with a Rogue. I rolled a Rogue to act as a farming alt for Coriel, but I didn't like the way it was playing and abandoned it at level 20. Up till then I had been speccing into Assassination, with an eye on getting Mutilate.

I was thinking about picking the rogue up again, and I realize that what I didn't like about the rogue was that it moved so slowly while in stealth. I was avoiding stealth because of this, pulling with a gun, and generally not playing a rogue effectively.

So I looked at the Rogue trees, and noticed that there's a talent in Subtlety that increases your speed in stealth. One respec to Subtlety later, and my rogue is fun again, and I stealth all the time.

2.1 Focus Macro Update

Patch 2.1 apparently changed how conditionals are handled, so here is an updated version of the focus macro I posted a while back:

#showtooltip spell
/clearfocus [target=focus, dead][button:3]
/focus [button:1/3, target=focus, noexists]
/cast [button:1/3, target=focus][button:2] spell

Patch 2.1 Impressions

Or the alternate title: Why Coriel Will Never Get an Epic Flying Mount.

So with patch 2.1 out, I decided to respec. I was having a really hard time choosing between 0/49/12 with the new Improved Holy Shield, or 0/19/42 as discussed in the previous post. In the end I decided to try out Retribution.

I respec, which costs me 35g. I accidentally assign the very first talent point to Improved Devotion Aura instead of Redoubt, ruining the build. So I respec again, 40g.

The build is really nice for soloing, questing, and killing single mobs. Even with my pathetic Ret gear, stuff was dying really fast. I really like the new Vengeance. I only have around 15% crit, but I was achieving perma-Vengeance easily (well, on elites and mobs that actually took some time to kill). The build is less survivable though, especially when taking on groups of mobs.

As well, the new debuff timers are pretty spiffy. Very nice for reapplying debuffs. I can't wait to see them on my warlock.

Right before Karazhan, one of the officers contacted me and told me that two of our healers would not be able to make raids for the next little while, and would I mind respeccing. I went back to Stormwind and respecced quickly to 50/11/0, 45g. Ironically, I ended up speccing Improved Devotion Aura. I wasn't expecting to spec to Holy, so I didn't have a good build in mind and ended up tossing 5 points in Improved Seal of Righteousness. I completely forgot about Improved Blessing of Might, which is my standard use for the extra 5 points when going Holy.

Heh, I'll probably end up respeccing Holy again, but this is sufficient for now.

I healbotted the raid. (Yay, #1 on the healing meters. Boo, #1 on the overhealing - 18%, I'm out of practice.) It's really hard to tell the actual effect of the Illumination nerf with the new spec and improved gear.

I must say that healing is surprisingly more fun when giant green numbers are popping up over the heads of other people. It's feedback that you are affecting the actual game, and not just the interface.

I'm not too thrilled by the new "greying out" of buttons. I very often have the mob as my main target, then press the button (while the previous heal is casting), then choose my target for heal. I find it's a good tactic for melee-healing, and for watching what the boss is doing and who he is targeting. But it means that a lot of buttons are always greyed out, which is silly.

Other than that, I think the Blizzard raid UI is finally up to a decent standard, with the introduction of Main Tank windows, and showing people's targets. I'm probably going to ditch sRaidframes/oRA2/CTRaidAssist, and just use the default UI.

I haven't had much of a chance to check out the new quests. I'm looking forward to those, but right now all the early areas are so crowded.

Retribution Off-tank Build

First, let's make the assumption that there is a warrior or druid MT, and the paladin is the OT. Would a build like 0/19/42 be better than the standard full protection build?

Retribution OT Build: 0/19/42

(Switch points from Anticipation to Precision once you have the necessary defence from gear.)

The big difference is that the Ret paladin is not going to be crush immune, but the Warrior/Druid MT is the one going to be handling the bosses and worrying about crushes. Combined with decent tanking gear, this build is more than sufficient to handle all non-73 mobs.

And once tanking duties are finished or not necessary, this build can pull out a 2H and add significantly more damage. If the paladin is in a DPS group, they can even switch to Sanctity Aura and boost everyone's damage.

(Just to be clear, if you are tanking anything during the fight, you are wearing tank gear, not Retribution gear.)

I don't think that this build will be sufficient to MT anything, but given that most groups already have a warrior (or druid) MT available, this build might be a more useful OT build than a Protection build.

You could also do a similar build but go Holy. However I don't think it would work as well, due to limited mana and +healing in tank gear. As well, if a normal 10-man has 2 tanks/3 healers/5 dps, one tank fights would be better off as 1 tank/3 healers/6 dps, rather than 1 tank/4 healers/5 dps.

The increased damage Retribution brings synergizes well with generating threat as an OT. This build would also bring 3% crit for the raid, allowing you to get the increased threat from Judgement of the Crusader at the same time, and Sanctity Aura for the DPS group.

I'm seriously considering respeccing to this build. I'm generally last on the tanking depth charts for my guild, so I never actually need to main-tank. This would make it a lot easier to maintain threat right behind the main tank, as well as be more useful in a fight like Shade of Aran.

The biggest thing stopping me from respeccing is 5-man play. Would this build be enough to tank a 5-man, or what other role would I take up? I am leery of a Ret paladin's viability in an actual DPS slot, at least with the gear I have. (Let's put it this way: I think I have less than 1000 AP in my DPS gear.)

Musings on Spell Damage

Something about the way +spell damage and healing works has always struck me as wrong.

In the current system, the amount of bonus an individual spell gets is given by a coefficient which is related to the cast time of the spell. Specifically, it's cast time divided by 3.5. This means that all spells get the same benefit from +spell damage over time. You get the same benefit from spamming Flash of Light for 15s as you would for spamming Holy Light.

And that seems wrong to me. Holy Light is the more powerful spell. It should get a bigger boost than Flash of Light. Indeed, the fact that both spells benefit equally from spell damage makes Flash of Light the better spell, in a way. It's cheaper to get the benefit of spell damage with Flash of Light.

Take a look at Blessing of Light. Blessing of Light gives a small bonus to FoL, and a much larger bonus to HL. This feels right. There should be an advantage to using the more powerful spell.

I think that rather than using cast time to determine the coefficient, a different metric should be used. To me, the best measure would be the amount of mana spent per second while casting the spell.

If you spam HL, you are spending 840 mana every 2.5s, or 336 mana/s.
If you spam FoL, you are spending 180 mana every 1.5s, or 120 mana/s.

Eyeballing that says that HL should get about 3 times the benefit in spell damage that FoL gets (on a per second basis). Intuitively, that seems reasonable to me. HL is our power spell, represented by its higher cost, and it seems right that our powerful spells should get more benefit from spell damage.

Blessing of Light tracks this ratio. BoL grants HL roughly 3 times the benefit it gives to FoL.

Because benefit is not linked to cost, +spell damage biases the caster towards cheaper spells. Restoring the link between benefit and cost will make using more powerful spells more attractive.

Old Posts About Hybrids

In light of the current discussions about hybrids, I'd like to point to a couple of my older posts. These were written back in December, after patch 2.0, but before TBC actually came out.

• Nefarian and the Hybrid Paladin



• The Price of Specialization

I think they sum up a lot of how I am feeling about the paladin now.

Relative Power Level of Fluid and Modal Hybrids

Kaziel posts a response to my previous post about fluid and modal hybrids:

Fluid hybrids cannot be equal power to single purpose classes, for game balance. In raids, underpowered classes or specs would (and are) shunned. Balanced fluid hybrids would never see endgame except in limited circumstances. Making hybrids modal allows them to be brought up to similar or equal power as a single purpose class without disturbing game balance too much, thus allowing them a place in endgame.

Here's the problem with this statement: being a hybrid (regardless of type) is in itself an advantage. If a modal hybrid was as good as a pure class, why would you bring the pure class? And if the pure class is better, why would you bring a hybrid?

If the hybrid is fluid, the fluidity is the reason you bring the hybrid. Sure the paladin may be a worse tank than the warrior, but she can off-tank an add, and after the add is killed, can help heal the warrior through the enrage. Fluid hybrids allow a raid group to adapt to multiple stage fights better and more smoothly because the hybrids can take a different role during each stage.

But if the hybrid is modal, she is a tank for the entire fight, and after the add is killed, becomes pretty much useless. In this case, why take the hybrid tank at all? Why not just take another warrior?

WoW sidesteps this problem a little bit by re-defining the pure classes (warrior, priests) as hybrids, thus allowing them to drag the other hybrid power levels up. But there is still a lot of sentiment that "priests should be the best healers". But if this was the case, why would you bring paladins? If priests are the best healers, modal healing paladins cannot tank, cannot dps, and would have worse healing than a priest.

1. Modal hybrids must be equal to pure classes at the given role, else the pure class will be preferred over the hybrid for that role.
2. But if they are equal at the given role, the hybrid is better because it is a hybrid, and offers additional options for the player.

This is a paradox. Blizzard has resolved it by redefining all tanking and healing classes as hybrids. Paladin healing can be as good as priest healing, because priests are modal hybrids and can become DPS.

A fluid hybrid does not need to be as good as the pure class. But they do need to be good enough to perform their part. And that is where historically that WoW has failed. Allowing hybrids to be good enough to, say, off-tank a mob while still retaining their fluidity to help heal after the mob is dead.

And the reason this is so, as most people pointed out in the previous post is because of gear.

Hybrid Theory: Fluid vs Modal

This post is inspired by a thread on the WoW forums. Unfortunately, I can't find that thread anymore. I really should start bookmarking good threads.

Imagine you have a DPS warrior in a lower level instance. Suddenly the tank goes down. What do you do?

You swap in a shield, taunt, and take over tanking. You probably aren't as good as the tank, but you can substitute well enough to finish the fight.

In this case, you are acting as a "fluid" hybrid, able to switch from one role to another while in the same fight.

The other extreme type of hybrid is a "modal" hybrid. A modal hybrid can switch from one role to the other, but not in the same fight.

A lot of people roll hybrids because they want to be fluid hybrids. To be able to equip a shield and take up tanking if the tank gets into trouble. To be able to drop back and support the healers. But, increasingly WoW hybrids are becoming modal hybrids. Your paladin can be a healer for this fight, or a tank, but you have to choose before the fight starts.

Indeed, the fluid hybrid disappears totally at endgame. All that's left is modal hybrids.

I think this theory goes to the heart of my current dissatisfaction with the paladin class. I rolled and played as a fluid hybrid, especially in 5-mans. But now, hybrids are almost entirely modal. For this instance run, I am a pure tank. For this boss fight, I am a pure healer.

The interesting question becomes why have hybrids in WoW gone almost entirely over the modal side?

Quick Background on WoW Combat

This is in response to a couple of comments to earlier posts. It's a quick, simple explanation of how the hit table works in WoW. It should provide enough background for the previous few tanking posts. I posted this as a response on the WoW forums. If you want additional information, check out the tanking guide Fortifications by Ciderhelm.
---
Imagine that everytime the mob swings at you, there is a table of possible results and a number from 1 to 100 is rolled. The number rolled is matched to the table entry, and that entry is the result of the attack. For example, a simple combat table might look like:

Roll Result
----- ------------
41-100 Hit
26-40 Crush (150% damage)
21-25 Critical (200% damage)
16-20 Block
11-15 Parry
06-10 Dodge
01-05 Miss

This is basically what happens in WoW when a mob attacks you. As you increase your defensive stats, the chances of each event change. If you have 490 Defense, criticals disappear from the table. As the block/parry/dodge/miss entries grow, they "push off" the upper entries.

So after getting a lot of tanking gear, the table might look like this:

Roll Result
----- ------------
91-100 Crush (150% damage)
51-90 Block
31-50 Parry
11-30 Dodge
01-10 Miss

Notice how hits have been pushed off the table entirely? And now you only have a 10% chance to get crushed?

If you got 10% more block/parry/dodge/miss, crushes would be pushed off the table entirely. You'd still take damage, because you take damage everytime you block. But you wouldn't take non-blocked hits, crushes, or criticals.

Because crushes are the last things to be pushed off the table, achieving this state is called being "uncrushable".

Best Lore Post Ever!

From Sylan of Gilneas, on the WoW paladin forums:

Lore changes. Evolves.

After Uther died Paladins lost their confidence. Paladins realized that they were mortal. Vulnerable. This fear has pervaded since Uther's demise and shows up in every aspect of the Paladin class to this very day. In fact, Paladins are so shaken that even their god-mode bubbles have begun to falter. At first Paladin lost their ability to use both bubbles back to back but as time went on things got worse. Priest learned of how shaken the Paladin faith was and learned to twist their magic to the point that they are now able to completely remove the god-mode bubble.

It is rumored that Uther's death may also cause Paladins to lose some of their ability to regenerate mana.

It's all in the lore if you know where to look.

Wow. That explains so much!

Musings on Tanking and Paladins

There are four essential tanking stats, or groups of stats:

1. Avoidance
2. Mitigation
3. Health
4. Threat

Of these, the top three are the most important. They are what separate a "tank" class from a dps class. After all, there's a reason we don't let the mages tank. While Threat is important, a tank is the class which can deal with incoming damage in the best manner.

Initially, Avoidance is the most important of the top three stats. Avoidance is the route to eliminating Criticals and Crushing Blows. However, once Criticals and Crushing Blows have been eliminated, Avoidance becomes much less vital.

This is because pure Avoidance (miss/dodge/parry) is probability-based. Raid fights are long, with many attacks. It is highly probable that a tank will take an unlucky streak of hits at some point during the fight. A tank needs to be prepared for the worst case scenario. Unless you have 100% pure Avoidance, Murphy's Law will inevitably bite you.

Now looking at these three categories, it immediately jumps out that--unless something significantly changes--paladin tanking will always be an inferior option for raid boss tanking.

Why? Because paladins are inferior to warriors in all three important stat categories.

For Avoidance, warriors have Shield Block, which allows them to eliminate Crushing Blows much faster than paladins can with Holy Shield. This also has the additional effect of allowing a warrior to reduce the importance of Avoidance earlier, and get an additional lead in the other two important categories.

For Mitigation, warriors have 10% melee mitigation from Defensive Stance, versus 6% from Improved Righteous Fury. They have 16% spell mitigation, while a paladin only has 10%. Finally, because so much of a paladin's Avoidance is gear-based, a paladin loses a significant amount of Avoidance when switching into resistance gear. A warrior loses far less Avoidance because her Avoidance is an innate ability.

For Health, a warrior simply has more base Health than a paladin. Additionally, while the paladin is still gearing for Avoidance, a warrior tank can start gearing for Health, and increase her lead over the paladin.

Even Threat is not a clear-cut victory for the paladin. The paladin is a clear winner in AoE Threat, but warriors can actually put out a significant amount of single target threat. I am not yet willing to judge that paladin single-target threat is better than for warriors. For AoE or front-loaded threat, paladin threat is superior.

It is interesting to compare druid tanking with warrior tanking. Druids are clearly inferior in Avoidance, as they cannot parry or block. But they have superior Health. And Mitigation is close to a draw, as druids do have much higher armor, but no innate Defensive stance. Because druids are actually competative with warriors in two of the three categories, they are a reasonable alternative to warriors.

There is one situation where paladin tanking can be superior to warrior tanking. A fast attacking boss can eliminate the warrior's Avoidance advantage, giving the paladin superior Avoidance for a portion of the fight. However a warrior still has superior Mitigation and Health.

Finally, paladins require a fifth stat: Mana. Unlike warriors and druids, paladins need a stat unrelated to the true tanking stat categories to fuel their offensive and defensive abilities. Because of this, paladin tank gear will always be inferior to warrior tank gear as some of the total item budget must go to the fifth stat, reducing the amount available for the true tanking stat categories.

It is my conclusion that--for cutting edge content--paladins will always be sub-optimal tanks compared to warriors and druids. Paladins are inferior to warriors in the three most important stat categories, at best have a slight advantage in the fourth category, and--unlike the other tanks--require a fifth stat category in order to function.

Tanking Itemization

I've been working my way towards uncrushability, and it's pretty hard going. I'm currently 13.44% away. And it's not like I have bad gear. For the most part, my gear is pretty decent. It would be good enough for off-tanking if I was a warrior.

Admittedly, I could stand to get a better belt and shoulders. But it looks like I'm going to have to respec into Retribution and try my best to pick up the +5% Holy Shield block Libram. That will still put me at 3.44% away, but there are several incremental updates I could hope to get.

Half the problem with gearing a paladin is that paladin gear is almost always inferior to warrior gear. And that makes sense when you look at the categories of stats on gear.

For warriors:

1. Avoidance (defence/dodge/parry/block rating)
2. Mitigation (armor/block value)
3. Stamina
4. Threat (strength/block value)

For paladins:

1. Avoidance (defence/dodge/parry/block rating)
2. Mitigation (armor/block value)
3. Stamina
4. Threat (spell dmg)
5. Mana (intellect/mp5)

Paladins have five categories that item budgets are allocated towards, rather than just four. It makes sense that the paladin totals will be lower than warrior gear for the categories which the two classes share.

However, we also need so much more mitigation to reach uncrushability that we basically just take items with the highest Avoidance (when first building a raid tanking set). Which is warrior gear.

I think paladin tanking itemization could be tweaked a little bit. What I would like to see is:

1. Avoidance - equal to warrior gear
2. Mitigation - higher armor, less block value
3. Stamina - equal to warrior gear
4. Threat - about half the budget allocated to warrior threat
5. Mana - about half the budget allocated to warrior threat

That's how I would build paladin tanking gear. I'll try and find some iLevel values and show a demonstration.

Another option might be a talent that converted Intellect into Avoidance. Perhaps it could replace Weapon Expertise up in the top of the Protection tree.

Focus Macro

I came across a good focus macro for crowd control on the forums, and I can't find the post again. So I'm recording it here so I can reference it later.

#showtooltip spell
/clearfocus [target=focus, dead][button:3]
/focus [button:1/3, target=focus, noexists]
/cast [button:1/3, target=focus][button:2] spell

If you left-click the icon, the macro will cast the spell on your current focus (without changing your current target). If your focus is dead or doesn't exist, the macro will set your focus to your current target and cast the spell on it.

If you right-click the icon, the macro will cast the spell on your current target, ignoring your focus.

If you middle-click the icon, the macro will switch your focus to your current target and cast the spell on it.

Basically, this macro allows you to designate a target as your focus, and always have your crowd control spells work on that target. So you don't need to find your target before re-sheeping or whatever CC you are using. It should have a decent amount of flexibility with regards to CC'ing a different target in the middle of a fight.

The only paladin spell I'm using it for is Turn Undead. I imagine it will be a lot more useful on my warlock.

Edit: Patch 2.1 has apparently changed how conditionals are handled. I've edited the macro above.

Gems

I've been inspecting people outside of Karazhan, and I have noticed that there appear to be three types of raiders. At least, three types when it comes to all-important question of how to socket your gear.

Type A: One Gem To Rule Them All

This person is fixated on one type of gem, and filled all their sockets with that type. They don't seem to care about socket bonuses at all. Classic examples are tanks who fill every gem slot with blue +stamina gems, or mages/warlocks who go for red +spell damage gems.

This type of player is occasionally seen on the WoW forums complaining that the sockets on gear are not the "correct" type.

Type B: Let's Match Colours

This person puts a pure blue gem in a blue socket, a pure red gem in a red socket, and a pure yellow gem in a yellow socket. They always make sure they have their socket bonuses.

Type C: Multi-colour Gems For The Win

This person uses a lot of multiple colored gems, getting lots of smaller bonuses. They'll still get their socket bonuses, but often get some effect from a socket colour not available on that piece of gear. For example, if there are blue/yellow sockets, they may go for red/blue and red/yellow gems.

---

I'm a Type B person myself. I like getting my socket bonuses, and there's usually one gem in each color that I like. Multi-colour just seems like too much work for me, and for some reason isn't as pleasing to my eye as matching a red gem to a red socket. For example, all my red/yellow/blue tanking sockets are +8 dodge/+8 defense/+12 stamina.

So what type of gem person are you?

Two Views of Loot

There are basically two philosophies of loot that determines a lot of guild attitudes, rules and restrictions. I find that you can generally trace "why" a guild has the rules it has to which attitude is more prevalent.

Loot as Reward: Under this view, loot is the reward for putting in the hard work, the carrot at the end of the line. Getting an epic weapon, or completing your set of armor is a goal in and of itself.

Loot as Investment: Under this view, loot is a means to an end. Getting better loot makes your character more able to take on new challenges.

Guilds that emphasize Loot as Investment tend to have more restrictions on loot distribution. Class restrictions, or officer-assigned loot are common hallmarks of this philosophy.

Guilds that put more weight on Loot as Reward tend towards less restrictions, and more free DKP systems.

So which view is correct? Half the problem is that both views are correct. Loot is reward and investment. Indeed, you can even argue that some pieces tend more towards one side than another (class sets versus non-class sets, for example).

However, a lot of times you get problems when two people with different underlying philosophies clash. When one class takes an item which would be "better suited" for another class.

But there are a fair number of raiders who are in it mostly for the loot, for the reward aspect. (Witness all the complaining about TBC raid loot on the forums.) Gearing up to beat newer challenges is merely a way to get better loot. Even though it's not considered polite to say that. They'll mouth words like "overcoming new challenges" to get into the guild. In my opinion, there's nothing wrong with being motivated by loot, so long as you aren't disruptive about it. It's a fact that people like to make their characters more and more powerful and can see that as an end unto itself.

Overemphasizing loot as investment demoralizes a lot of people, and can make them feel like they aren't getting enough reward.

I think that a guild who is looking at setting up rules needs to take a strong look at which philosophy it is inclined to, and set up their rules to acknowledge that. However, different rules can reward different philosophies.

For example, under Officer-loot systems, the guild is the investor who makes decisions. Under a normal DKP system, the individual player is the one who invests in their character. Both can use the loot as investment philosophy, but on different levels. But only one can really accomodate the loot as reward philosophy as well.

I also don't think that one philosophy is better than the other. Different people are motivated by both in different degrees, and ignoring human nature is a quick route to failure. How people act upon that motivation is the important part.

Edit: I'm not really happy with this post. It doesn't really convey the sense of how *important* these philosophies are. Decision points such as "Gearing up the main tank first", or whether to have an "A Team" for Karazhan, or many other of the questions facing guilds have their roots in the differences between these two philosophies.

First Impressions: Lord of the Rings Online

I decided to check out the open beta (World Tour) of Lord of the Rings Online. Here are some thoughts. Keep in mind that I didn't get very far, only about level 6, and my computer is at the low end of the scale, which may account for a lot of my impressions.

If I had to sum up my LotRO impressions in a single word, it would be: drab.

Seriously, the entire colour scheme is greens and browns, and not even vibrant greens and browns, but this faded, dull look. Maybe it shouldn't be fully cartoony like WoW, but everyone doesn't need be dressed in brown. Primary colours are good.

LotRO generally lacks that veneer of polish that separates great games from the rest. It's a lot of small things, the way icons are really hard to tell apart. ( A pink arm on a red background is really hard to distinguish. Whatever happened to contrast?) Or the fact that a couple of UI elements overlap each other.

Also, it shouldn't be this hard to make an attractive character. If I'm making a female elf, I would like her to look like Liv Tyler, not Hugo Weaving. (Though Orlando Bloom is a reasonable option.) Character generation has a thousand different combinations, but it was so much work to make something that didn't look stupid.

This extends to animations. Watching people move in this game is painful. Most people look like they are skating on the grass.

Mechanics-wise, it seems okay. Very similar to WoW and other games. I tried a Captain, Minstrel, and Defender for a bit. The minstrel was pretty interesting, but pulling out a lute and strumming for half a second in the middle of combat was really weird.

I played the captain the most. It's a sort of combination of paladin and hunter. I really liked the shouts you could cast upon defeating an opponent. The biggest thing that bothered me was the sound my captain made when doing one of her warcries. Unfortunately, that was the ability I used to pull mobs, so I heard it at the beginning of every fight.

There were a couple of nice touches, the way quest goals changed as you completed them. For example, if you had to kill 10 boars, after you killed them the goal displayed on screen was "return to questgiver". Additionally, being able to click on the quest tracked on screen and open up the quest log was very useful.

As well, the way they use instances and zones is really intriguing. For example, you have to defending the starting town from an attack, and there are two zones: a pre-attack zone and a post-attack zone. After you do the attack quest, you end up in the post-attack zone, which looks just like the pre-attack zone. Each zone contains all the people at that stage of the game. Pretty clever, imo.

All in all, it seemed like a decent game, but really lacking in polish. I stopped playing after my captain hit level 6, mostly because the colour scheme depressed me, and I was having a hard time telling icons apart. I guess I really prefer the more colourful, "unrealistic" games.

Completely Weird Paladin Melee Idea

I saw a post on the Paladin boards discussing what would happen if Crushing Blows could not be pushed off the table. The obvious answer is tanking would become Bear country, as only Druids would be able to survive bosses.

For background, raid bosses have a 15% chance to deal a Crushing Blow, which does 150% of normal damage. If your total dodge/parry/block/opponent's miss chance is greater than 100%, you cannot be crushed. This relatively easy for a warrior to accomplish with Shield Block(+75% block), but much harder for a paladin with Holy Shield (+30% block). We do have Redoubt, which is another 30%, but that cannot be triggered reliably.

There are currently three ways to deal with Crushing Blows:

1. Not get hit by them. Dodge/Parry/Block.

2. Have so much armor that most of the damage is mitigated.

3. Have so much health that your healers have enough time to restore your health to full. This usually requires more healing.

Warriors and Paladins utilize the first strategy, while Druids use a combination of the second and third.

But as I was thinking about the problem, it occurs to me that there is a fourth strategy, just one that isn't used in WoW.

4. Prevent the mob from making Crushing Blows. This could happen through the use of a debuff. As an analogy, you can prevent mobs from casting spells through the use of a Silence debuff.

And naturally--since I am a paladin--my thoughts turned to using this idea to keep paladins in melee.

My idea revolves around Vindication. Make Vindication baseline, proc more reliably, (with a reduced debuff) and also have it reduce the chance of Crushing Blows by 15%.

So now having paladins in melee is very useful, as they keep the tank from getting crushed.

A paladin tank can easily keep herself from being crushed, but she has lower health than a warrior to compensate.

A druid tank can simply soak the crushes, the way they do now, relying on their armor and health.

A warrior tank, without paladin support, would be in a bad position. I would suggest some mechanism to remove Crushing Blows, only keeping it more onerous than a paladin's Vindication. Perhaps a debuff that they have to stack like Sunder (-5% per application), but which costs rage, causes minimal threat, and must be reapplied.

This way each of the classes have a slightly different twist on tanking. Rather than being strictly inferior in mitigation to warriors, Paladins have less health, but are immune to crushes. Warriors have better health and mitigation, but their crush immunity is clumsy. Druids have the most health and armor, but get crushed all the time.

And having a paladin--regardless of spec--in melee is always a good idea.

Spirit and Fun

The discussion about Illumination has me thinking about mana regeneration in WoW. Paladins have spell crit, Warlocks have Lifetap, but what do priests/mages/druids have? They have Spirit.

Part of the reason that there is so much conflict over regen and endurance is that, quite frankly, Spirit is a terrible stat and mechanic. Spirit is widely considered the worst stat in the game, and gear with Spirit is generally regarded as much less valuable than gear without it.

The problem with Spirit is that it violates what I will call Coriel's First Law of Design:

Doing stuff is fun.
Not doing stuff is not fun.

Mana regeneration via Spirit is governed by something called the Five Second Rule (FSR). The FSR states that you only get mana back after you have gone five seconds without casting a spell, and you only get mana until you cast another spell.

So not only do you have to do nothing to regenerate mana, you have to spend 5s doing nothing with no benefit before you even start regenerating mana. And 5s can be an eternity, especially for a healer.

Contrast this with Illumination or Lifetap. Illumination rewards the paladin for casting heals. With Lifetap, the warlock is actively controlling her mana regen. In both cases the player is actively doing something worthwhile to improve their play. They are not standing around doing nothing.

Spirit is so bad that we actually have a second stat which governs mana regeneration: mana/5s or mp5. Both stats return mana to the player, they just differ in how they do so. Mp5 returns mana at a continous rate, even if the player is casting a spell. Mp5 is widely regarded as superior to Spirit because it works all the time. A player with mp5 can actively play the game, and not just wait around.

The fact that we have two stats which basically do the same thing is a really bad sign. It's a clear indication that the original stat mechanic was deeply and fundamentally flawed.

It's probably really late in the game's lifecycle to change this, but I think that Spirit should do the same thing as mp5. Return mana to the caster at a continuous rate during combat, and return heath/mana at a higher rate outside of combat. All items with mp5 should be converted to Spirit, and all talents that allow mana regeneration while casting should be reworked to provide bonus regeneration.

At one fell swoop we eliminate a stat, simplifying gear choices, and make Spirit a valued stat once again. As well, priests, druids, and mages get a method of mana regen which can be counted upon and which lets them be active players having fun, while still getting the benefit.

My Illumination Fix

Here's how I would solve the paladin endurance healing problem, without altering Illumination:

1. Replace Sanctified Light, Holy Power, and Divine Illumination with new talents not aimed at saving mana. High level holy talents should encourage the paladin to spend mana, not save it.

Heh, since the priests seem to dislike their 41-pt Holy talent, Circle of Healing, let's swap it with Divine Illumination. That would give healing paladins a significant tool to help them act as main healers in 5-mans. Maybe even reduce its power, drop it down to 31 pts, and move a pumped up Holy Shock to 41 pts.

This change right here removes -11% cost from Holy Light, and -5% cost from Flash of Light, as well as the extra mana savings every couple of minutes from Divine Illumination.

2. For all the +heal gear with +spell crit, replace +spell crit with the equivalent mana/5s. Tthe vast majority of gear like this is paladin set gear, so it shouldn't have very much impact on the other healing classes.

These two changes should be more than enough to keep Illumination in check. Basically, they just reverse the decisions made in patch 1.9, and return paladin healing to the older, more balanced state.

Illumination

Description

After getting a critical effect from your Flash of Light, Holy Shock or Holy Light spell, gives a 100% chance to gain mana equal to the base cost of the spell.

This talent is the heart of the paladin Holy tree. But there are a lot of misconceptions as to what it does, or its real effect on a paladin.

The best way to think about Illumination is that it reduces the average cost of Flash of Light, Holy Shock, or Holy Light by the paladin's spell crit. If you have 10% spell crit, your healing spells are essentially 10% cheaper.

This is a very powerful ability, especially as it is open ended.

Background

Before patch 1.9, Blizzard was very careful to keep Illumination in check. It was very hard to get spell crit for paladins. For example, the quest reward [Eye of the Beast] specifically excluded paladins from using it.

Paladins highly valued items such as [Azuresong Mageblade], because spell crit was much harder to come by for them than it was for the other classes.

Then, in patch 1.9 and the paladin review, Blizzard did an about-face. They decided to embrace spell crit as a "feature" of the paladin class. Other healers went for spirit or mp5, paladin healers would go for spell crit, and that the hallmark of paladin healing would be efficiency. We got talents that increased our spell crit, and our itemization began to feature spell crit.

I think that time has shown that this was a bad decision.

As a result of our new talents and itemization, we have been able to stack spell crit to significant levels. 30% or higher spell crit is not unheard of, and that translates into healing spells which are 30% cheaper, which makes our efficiency insane compared to the other healing classes.

Current situation

The proposed nerf to Illumination cuts the amount of mana returned in half. So if you have 10% spell crit, your healing spells are on average 5% cheaper.

The problem with Illumination isn't Illumination itself, it's that Blizzard let paladins have too easy access to spell crit. But cutting Illumination in half devalues all the items out there with spell crit. Which is pretty much all our healing gear (PvP, Tier gear).

To illustrate this, look at the paladin Holy tree. We have a talent Sanctified Light, which increases the crit strike chance of Holy Light by 6% for 3 points. That talent effectively reads "The cost of your Holy Light spell is reduced by 6%". Which is a pretty decent talent for 3 points, and more or less in line with other classes' cost reducing talents.

Under the nerf, it reads "The cost of your Holy Light spell is reduced by 3%". Which is not that good. I would say that is not worth 3 talent points. The same thing occurs with Holy Power. 5 points for 5% cost reduction is decent. 5 points for 2.5% cost reduction is not.

Conclusion

Paladin healing endurance needed to be reigned in. But I don't think nerfing Illumination is the correct way to do it. This problem is primarily a problem because of the changes wrought in 1.9, and the resulting itemization. Those are the problems that should be fixed. Hitting Illumination is a band-aid fix, and has many ramifications. One of them is that this change pretty much shatters the top part of the Holy tree.

To be honest, paladin healing needs a proper overhaul. It manages to simultaneously be too good, and not good enough. Once again, I chalk this up to a lack of vision on the part of the Blizzard devs, or a lack of being able to communicate that vision. Watching these changes, you get a real sense that Blizzard doesn't know what it wants the paladin to be, and is just running around slapping band-aids on the class, trying to keep it from breaking.

Patch 2.1 Paladin changes (minus Illumination)

This is a quick run down of the upcoming paladin changes in patch 2.1. I'm saving the biggest change--the change to Illumination--for another post.

"Ardent Defender" (Protection) now reduces damage taken by 6-30% when below 35% health.

Good change. It's now far more likely that Ardent Defender will actually kick in and prevent some damage. Previously, if a tank got to 20% and took a hit, it was quite likely he'd die anyways, regardless of the damage reduction.

"Avenger's Shield" no longer has a minimum range. It may be used on any target within 30 yards.

"Avenger's Shield": The damage portion of this ability will now be applied even if the victim is immune to snare.

A fairly minor buff, but useful all the same. May even make pulling after a rogue sap easier. Rogue saps, someone pulls normally, and paladin uses Avenger's Shield when the mobs reach the group. Also more useful in PvP.

"Divine Shield": This ability no longer removes or prevents the "Weakened Soul" debuff.

"Eye for an Eye": Some spells did not trigger "Eye for an Eye" correctly. That has been fixed.

Fixed some data errors that caused "Seal of Command" and "Seal of Blood" to generate more threat than intended.

"Forbearance": It is no longer possible to use a macro to gain the benefit of "Avenging Wrath" and "Divine Shield" at the same time.

"Greater Blessing of Kings": The cost for this blessing is now twice the cost of "Blessing of Kings", instead of a fixed cost of 150.

"Greater Blessing of Sanctuary 2": The range on this spell was incorrectly set to 30 yards. It has been changed to 40 yards.

"Greater Blessing of Wisdom 3": The range on this spell was incorrectly set to 30 yards. It has been changed to 40 yards.

Bugfixes. No real effect on the paladin.

"Hammer of Wrath": Rank 4, damage increased.

More HoW damage is always good.

"Improved Seal of Righteousness": The percentage increase in damage from this talent is now applied after all bonuses from items and effects which increase your spell damage.

This change makes ImpSoR actually worthwhile, especially for a Holy paladin looking to increase her damage without getting Seal of Command. I'm not really sure that a tank would get this, but it is an option.

Actually, a 10/41/10 build might be interesting. I'll have to think about this.

New Protection Talent added: "Improved Holy Shield", 2 ranks: Increases damage caused by "Holy Shield" by 10/20% and increases the number of charges of "Holy Shield" by 2/4.

Blizzard seems to be cementing our role as tanks for multiple mobs or bosses with a fast attack rate. I think many paladins would have preferred our block rate to increase by 10/20% rather than damage (to make us uncrushable). But on the whole, this is a nice buff.

"One-Handed Weapon Specialization"(Protection): Now increases all damage caused by the paladin by 1-5% while a one-handed weapon is equipped.

Decreases the extra damage from auto-attack and Seals, but increases the damage from Holy Shield, Consecration and Judgments. I'm inclined to call this one a wash, maybe even a slight buff.

"Sanctity Aura" now increases all damage caused by affected targets by 1/2% and no longer increases healing done to affected targets.

This is interesting. It boosts Ret paladin damage by 2%, and gets her put into a DPS group instead of a tank group. I'm not sure that this will be enough to really make Retribution raid-viable, but will be interesting to watch.

"Seal of Blood": This seal will no longer cause additional chances for weapon procs to trigger.

"Seal of Righteousness": This seal will no longer cause additional chances for weapon procs to trigger.

"Seal of the Crusader": The rank 7 tooltip has been fixed to read the same as other ranks of this spell.

"Spiritual Attunement": First-aid generated healing will no longer trigger this ability. However, "Lifebloom", "Earth Shield", and "Improved Leader of the Pack" will now trigger it correctly. The tooltip has been adjusted to indicate it only works on healing from spells. It will also now work correctly when you are mounted or sitting.

Bugfixes.

"Spiritual Attunement": Mana is no longer healed if the paladin is at full health.

As predicted, the extra synergy between Holy Paladins and Shadow priests is nerfed. This makes SA pretty much a pure tanking ability, which is what it is intended to be.

"Stoicism" (Protection) should now properly affect all magic effects cast by the Paladin and no longer applies double its intended benefit to "Blessing of Might" and "Blessing of Wisdom".

Whatever.

"Vengeance" (Retribution) now increases Holy and Physical damage by 1/2/3/4/5% for 15 seconds following a critical hit, but the effect now stacks up to 3 times.

A nerf for our burst dps, but a boost for our sustained dps. Early reports from the test server say the Vengeance stack is refreshed each time you crit. It shouldn't be hard for a moderately-geared Retribution paladin to ramp up to perma-Vengeance. Another boost for the raiding paladin.

Vindicator Aesom at Blood Watch will now correctly train a full range of paladin spells.

Good for him.
---
As well, the effect of glancing blows will be reduced, which is another buff to paladins who melee.

So, in conclusion, we mostly have moderate buffs to Protection and Retribution, with a small nerf to Holy paladins. Not counting the Illumination change, I would say that this would be a decent patch from the paladin point of view.

The Illumination change, though, is far more complex, and so I'll save that discussion for another time.

PC Gaming Frustrations

I'm a die-hard PC gamer. My favorite games and even types of games are PC only. I've never really gotten into console games. The last console I owned was the original Nintendo Entertainment System.

But sometimes PC gaming gets really frustrating. Now, I'll admit that my current system is not top-of-the-line. In fact, it's probably closer to bottom-of-the-line by now, especially as it's a laptop. But WoW runs decently on it, so it's okay for my purposes.

In any case, I picked up Jade Empire: Special Edition today. I install it, and run it. The game launches one of those setup utilities where it reports what can go wrong. It reports that my desktop is running at 16-bit and that I have generic monitor drivers, and this may cause a problem. I shrug and launch the game anyways.

The game immediately crashes to the desktop.

I set the desktop to 32-bit and try again. The game crashes again.

So I set out on that time-honored ritual of the PC gamer: updating drivers. I hit up Windows Update, get all the DirectX updates, get new video drivers, new motherboard drivers, new sound drivers, pretty much everything I could find.

The game still crashes to the desktop.

I reinstall the game. It still crashes.

I give up and jump to the Support forums. After perusing threads, and examining logs, it turns out that my video card is below the minimum specifications. Which does suck, but was a reasonable risk given the quality of my computer.

What really annoys me is that this wasn't caught by their setup utility. Rather than giving pointless warnings about bit depth of the desktop, telling me that my video card isn't supported would have been far more useful.

It's getting close to raid time, so I leave Jade Empire to the side and fire up WoW. Ironforge seems a bit laggier than normal, but I chalk that up to random internet chaos. I get to Karazhan, and zone in.

When the fighting starts, my graphics start stuttering like crazy. Thinking something had changed when I updated video card drivers, I turn down all the graphics settings. No help. The game is pretty much unplayable.

I drop from the raid, and try to find older drivers. Finding older drivers turns out to be annoyingly hard. I go to the computer manufacturer's website, but for some reason it isn't working, and keeps timing out when I try to go to the support section.

Eventually, after Googling, I manage to get older drivers from the European site for my computer manufacturer. Installing those returns WoW to normal.

Sometimes gaming on a computer is a giant headache. If I had an XBox, all I have to do is toss the disc in the machine and it would magically work. No fiddling with drivers, or mysterious crashes. And it would cost so much less money.

It's especially ironic that all of this trouble was caused by a game that was originally made for a console.

Shadow Priest Talent Tree

I respecced an alt priest of mine to Shadow today, and was struck at how well designed the priest Shadow tree is. It's a model of efficiency, with hardly any wasted space. There are three different paths in the tree, a levelling build, a pvp build, and an instance build. Each path is different enough from the others, and the point distribution works beautifully when creating each build. I think that the Shadow tree is probably the best designed talent tree in the game.

As well, take a look at the single-point talents (11, 21, 31, 41pts). I think that these talents are often critical to the sucess or failure of a tree. Shadow has Mind Flay, Vampiric Embrace, Shadowform, and Vampiric Touch. These talents are all great, and form the heart of the shadow tree, the core of what it means to be shadow. A Shadow Priest makes full use of all these talents. Having all four single-point talents being awesome is very rare.

In many ways the Priest Holy tree suffers from the exact opposite. Holy Nova, Spirit of Redemption, Lightwell, and Circle of Healing are all "gimmicks", rather than being core parts of the Holy Priest.

For paladin trees, Holy's talents are decent, but not really all that exciting. They aren't as crucial to the Holy tree in the same manner as VE or Shadowform. They are also very independent of each other. Protection has outstanding talents in Holy Shield and Avenger's Shield, but Blessing of Kings and Blessing of Sanctuary contradict each other. You can't use both at the same time. Retribution comes the closest to the Shadow ideal with Seal of Command, Sanctity Aura, and Crusader Strike. However, Repentance falls more into the gimmick spell mode.

None of the paladin trees are as well designed as Shadow though. In particular, they are missing the multiple paths through the tree for the different options. You can't really differentiate between a PvP build and a levelling build, in my opinion. Oddly enough, Retribution probably comes closest to a proper design. Its problem is that the base paladin is too far slanted in the other directions.

Same Old, Same Old

The war between Retribution and Holy continues unabated on the Paladin forums. It's pretty much the same problem that has always existed, though currently the divide is larger ever since paladins superceded Holy priests in raid healing.

It's amusing, in a sad way. The priests are unhappy that paladins are better healers, and the paladins are unhappy that paladins are better healers.

I really hope paladin healing doesn't get nerfed though. I really like being able to act as healer for a 5-man. Having paladins available as primary healers makes running instances so much easier. Perhaps we could stand to be nerfed a bit in raid healing, but any hit is going to make 5-mans harder. I do not want to return to the old days of spending half an hour or more whispering priests and druids to see if they want to come on a run.

I think that there is a deeper problem with paladins. Just take a look at the classes and their current roles:

Hunter - dps
Rogue - dps
Warlock - dps
Mage - dps
Shaman - heal/dps
Priest - heal/dps
Druid - heal/tank/dps
Warrior - tank/dps
Paladin - heal/tank

One of these is not like the others.

And in many ways, this is part of the problem. The fact is that paladins are fundamentally different from all the other classes in the game. If more classes lacked the "dps" part, the game would be designed differently. I've already commented on how the battegrounds are designed for high dps classes, with short respawn timers.

I think part of the problem with paladins is that every other class has a dps component designed and built into it, and paladins really don't. Seal and Auto-attack, and maybe judge every 10s. One real combat move at 41-points in Retribution, almost an afterthought in many ways.

Things That Should Be Nerfed

1. Spiritual Attunement

Right now, SA returns mana even if you are healed at full health. So SA and Vampiric Embrace have gone nuts. I think Blizzard will reign in SA by only applying it to actual healing.

It's actually interesting, because Heal-Over-Time heals don't tick if the target is at full health. So for a paladin, getting a HoT is worse than getting a direct heal, because you'll lose out on some mana.

All in all, SA working with overheals leads to odd behaviour, and I think that SA will get nerfed.

2. Flasks

I think that very powerful temporary buffs are a bad game design concept. The problem is that a raid which is willing to pay the costs for these buffs is significantly more powerful than a raid which isn't willing. And this leads to a dilemma when tuning content.

Should you tune content for the buffed raid, knowing that you are forcing every raid which wants to suceed to pay for the buffs every time they try this content? Or should you tune content for the unbuffed raid, knowing that the buffed raids are going to blow through the content?

It's far easier to just avoid the question and not have powerful temporary buffs. You can tune for permanent buffs, such as gear, because acquiring such buffs/items is a one-time, gradual, process.

In WoW, the major items that exhibit this problematic behaviour are high end alchemy flasks and elixirs. I think that the game would be better off without flasks. Then Blizzard could tune content to a more permanent gear level, and this would make life a lot easier for raid guilds.

Now it would be harsh on alchemists, as their uber-items would no longer exist. I would suggest that they get something more permanent, perhaps very powerful transmutations.

Edit: Here's a random idea. What if alchemists could transmute magical items? You could take a BoP blue and transmute it into a couple BoE greens. Or maybe a lower-level BoE blue. Heh, this idea probably isn't very good, but it's something that isn't in the game yet.

3. Warlocks

Just because.