Class Achievements

I was thinking about the fact that new paladins don't need to do the Charger questline any more. Instead, they can learn the Charger spell at level 61. I completely understand why Blizzard is doing this, as it's pretty hard to get a group at level 60 to do the instances. And yet, it seems a little bit sad. Getting a charger was a rite of passage for a paladin in the old days.

I was thinking of a reward to encourage paladins to do the Charger questline anyways, and it occurred to me that it would make a good Achievement. And then I thought we could take it a little further. What if there was an Achievement for each class, with the reward being a title, and each Achievement required a whole bunch of requirements that really represented the class as a whole. And of course, completing the Achievement nets you a very nice class-specific title.

For example, for the Alliance Paladins, I would have requirements like :

• Completing the Redemption questline
• Obtaining Verigan's Fist
• Rescuing the Charger from Deathknight Darkreaver
• Completing Tirion Fordring's questline in EPL
• Do that level 50 quest, and the one involving Uther's Tomb
• Exalted with the Argent Dawn
• Exalted with the Argent Crusade
• Probably some other paladin-ish questline in Wrath
• Clear all the 5-man dungeons which involve the Scourge (including Razorfen Downs!)

Completing this Achievement would be a good way of handing out a title like "Knight of the Silver Hand" or "Blood Knight" for the Blood Elves. (Obviously the Blood Elves would have a few different quests than Alliance.)

You could do something similar for all classes. For warlocks, you could require the charger questline, the various demon questlines (including the infernal and doomguard). Druids would require Cenarion Circle and Cenarion Expedition rep. I wouldn't require anything from raids or heroics though, which is kind of sad as it rules out Benediction and and Rhok'delar for priests and hunters. But I think this achievement would be something that would interest a lot of casual players, and should be involved, but accessible.

Heh, I'll issue a challenge to the other classes to list what would be a good set of requirements for their class (either in the comments, or on your own site).

An Alternative to Flash of Light

In the comments to the previous post on Flash of Light, Bob asks:

I would agree with you if it wasn't for one thing. What could you give paladins instead of designing the class around FoL, that the other healers don't have?

I would probably buff Seal of Light heavily. Something like this:

Seal of Light
14% of base mana
Instant cast
Fills the Paladin with divine light for 2 min, healing up to 5 friendly party or raid members for [A * AP * WS + B * SPH * WS] with each melee attack. Only one Seal can be active on the Paladin at any one time.

Unleashing this Seal's energy will heal the friendly party or raid member with the highest threat for [C * AP + D * SPH] over 20 sec. (Does not stack. A, B, C, D are values such that the ability is balanced and worthwhile)

Effectively, meleeing with Seal of Light takes over the mundane maintenance healing that we use Flash of Light for. We use the Judgement to maintain a solid HoT on the tank with duration matching the duration of the Judgement effect. We have Holy Shock, Sacred Shield, and Holy Light for responsive healing. I'm not really sure where Beacon of Light would fit in.

Actually, it might be interesting to use Beacon of Light like a focus target. If you cast Beacon on someone, your Judgement of Light HoT automatically targets them, and maybe something similar happens with Holy Shock (Shock hits the enemy and heals the Beacon target). Beacon would have to go much lower in the tree though.

Essentially a normal paladin would have somewhat undirected healing, but a Holy paladin would be able to focus her healing through Beacon of Light. I'd have to think about it a bit more, but I think there are some possibilities with this scheme. It fits nicely with our niche as a single-target, tank healer. Effectively we're duplicating WAR's defensive target scheme on a small level. It's not a true defensive target, but it would be enough to get some of the same style as the warrior priest mechanics (which I've praised in the past).

WotLK Death Knight Finale

A while back, I mentioned how the first thing you should do in Wrath is play through the Death Knight opening. A number of paladins mentioned in the comments that they felt uncomfortable playing as the bad guy, or doing some of the evil things the death knight chain requires, such as torturing people, or killing civilians.

I understand that point of view, and luckily, Invisusira has has made a movie of the Death Knight ending sequence.

It's a must-watch for any paladins who are not going to play the Death Knight. It's pretty much the same as the finale event, only edited slightly and with added music (the music actually adds a great deal to the video).

It goes without saying that this is full of spoilers.

Smart Heals

There's some interesting discussion on the new Blizzard healing forums. One new line of debate I'm seeing recently is the effect of "smart" heals such as Chain Heal, Circle of Light, and Wild Growth. Each of these spells are multiple target spells, but the server chooses some or all of the targets. And the choice is not random. Instead, the server usually chooses the targets with the lowest health, maximizing the spell's effectiveness.

Unlike direct heals, where the target has to be chosen a few seconds in advance of the spell landing, the smart heals choose their targets at the time of the heal, making them perfectly reactive. What this means is that these spells tend to have much less overheal than spells which require human targeting. As any paladin can attest, our overhealing skyrocketed in TBC, to the point where seeing 50%-60% overheal is common.

It's very possible that because of their high effectiveness, smart heals are a better choice than most other heals, in any situation which does not require large direct heals. As well, a great deal of the skill in healing involves proper target selection, choosing the right person to heal at the right time. Perfect smart heals controlled by the server negate a lot of that skill.

One interesting suggestion I've seen is to give the various smart heals the Beacon of Light treatment. Essentially, the smart components would only work off the effective healing done to the selected target, not the raw healing. If you cast Circle of Healing on a full health target, it does nothing, just as if you had cast a direct heal on that target.

This would once again make target selection more important, and weight healing back towards the direct single-target spells. You can't just spam Chain Heal and expect the server to do perfect bounces, you have to direct your healing to where it is needed.

On Flash of Light

Ghostcrawler posts:

The paladin has been designed around Flash of Light, just like the shaman was designed around Chain Heal. We didn't want to completely change what these classes were all about, in part because a lot of players like them as they are. We figured players who gravitate towards wanting lots of different kinds of heals can play the druid or priest. Players who want to have relatively few spells and can then focus on cooldowns, trinkets or the like can play the paladin or shaman. We think it would be dangerous for paladins to pick up Lich King and find their class had completely changed.

Sigh.

Flash of Light represents everything that is wrong with the Paladin healer. Cleric. Clothadin. Healbot. Boring. 2-button spam. Standing at the back of the raid. Completely changing the playstyle from levelling. Not hitting things with a giant hammer.

I wrote this in 2006, two and a half years ago, and it still applies today:

Flash of Light is the real problem with the paladin class. A single cast of FoL heals for a trivial amount, but at a trivial cost. This means that a paladin generally casts multiple FoLs in quick succession to actually do anything. I've heard Flash of Light described as a "channelled heal-over-time spell." And this is precisely what it is. The paladin stands there and channels her mana into the tank's health bar.

The problem is that if you are channelling, you cannot do anything else. And the essence of a paladin is doing multiple things at once! The mechanics of Flash of Light cut across the very grain of paladin playstyle. So remove Flash of Light in its entirety. Soloing will not miss it. PvP will not miss it. And PvE will be better for its absence.

If you really want to fix paladin healing, to make it more enjoyable, I believe that Flash of Light will have to be removed or drastically changed. I find it really disheartening that not only does Blizzard not see this, but they have deliberately designed the class around Flash of Light.

Protection 11-Point Idea

Glorious Charge
Requires 10 points in Protection Talents
5% of base mana
8 - 25 yd range
30s cooldown
Causes you to charge an enemy. All party or raid members within 45 yards become immune to Fear effects for 10* seconds.

Glyph of Glorious Charge
Minor Glyph
You may use Glorious Charge while mounted on a Paladin Warhorse or Charger. If you do, the target is stunned for 2 seconds. After the charge, you dismount and the battle is finished on foot.

I'm pretty sure everyone can see what I'm going for. Lots of paladin flavour, a gap closer, but no real stun/damage like the warrior or druid variant (unless you're mounted, and really, getting hit with a mounted charge is probably worth a small stun). Also, this would require lots of gold particle effects for the charge blur.

The Fear immunity might be funny. Imagine a raid fight like Nightbane where a Holy paladin charges in right before the boss casts the Fear.

* 10 seconds might be a little high. But you get the idea. The Paladin is inspiring her comrades by charging in, and the buff to friends, rather than a debuff to the enemy, reflects that. Also, anti-fear is decent in that it prevents an immediate Fear from completely negating the Charge.

Retribution Utility Idea

It's 1 AM, and I had an interesting idea for Retribution PvP utility. We'll see if it's any good in the morning.

Guilt
Rank 0/2
Requires 1 point in Crusader Strike
Requires 45 points in Retribution talents
Gives the Paladin's Crusader Strikes a 50/100% chance to increase the target's Global Cooldown by an additional 100% for the next 30 seconds. Stacks up to 5 times.

Effectively, hit the target once with CS, and her GCD becomes 3s (2s for Rogue/Cat), 2 hits for 4.5s, etc., all the way up to 5 hits for 9s. (Assuming zero Haste, of course)

It's something that no other class can do. It messes with tempo, slows the fight down, and is anti-burst. It hurts instants more than spells with cast times. Yet at the same time, it doesn't affect a specific individual spell, only how often you can cast spells. It sort of becomes a counter to the Haste stat.

I have no idea how this would work with mobs. It's probably a PvP-only thing.

Thoughts? Would this actually be worthwhile in PvP, or should I get more sleep?

So What Went Wrong?

Blizzard is never, ever going to tell us exactly why paladin development for WotLK unfolded as it did. Currently, Ghostcrawler is publicly blaming it on some bug with weapon switching. But I don't think that's the real story. There's too many other factors in play. So this is my speculation as to how Blizzard got into this position. Note that I have zero evidence that any of this is real, just what happened in Beta/Live, and my gut feeling as a somewhat experienced paladin.

For PvP, at the beginning of WotLK, I think Blizzard made the design decision that a Ret Paladin would be high burst, but very immobile. Essentially, it would be very hard for her to get inside melee range, and she would be pretty easily kited. However, if you let a Ret paladin catch up to you, she would be able to unload and burst you down.

The reason I think this is what happened is that none of the current Ret burst is surprising. It doesn't take a genius to see that Ret was going to try to run up to someone and hit all the buttons in a row. It's not like a Frost Mage's Shatter Combo, which revolves around getting off an instant Ice Lance while a Frostbolt is still in flight. That's an example of something which is tricky, and can be unexpected if you're not an expert with the class. There's no way that any person reasonably familiar with Retribution could fail to predict Hammer of Justice -> Judgement of Command -> Divine Storm -> Crusader Strike. It's not clever or something which takes mad skill, it's obvious.

Second, consider the initial Art of War talent on Beta. It gave CS a chance to double the damage of the next Judgement. The immediate combo with the old Judgement of Command, and the resulting *eight-fold* damage on a stun-crit comes to mind. As I commented in July, when I first got into the Beta:

Sometimes I really don't understand Blizzard. Back in March, they said they were worried about Paladin burst damage. Fast forward to the WotLK Beta, and we see the following two talents: [Righteous Vengeance, Art of War].

The existence of the original Art of War--and the crit damage increasing talents like Righteous Vengeance--says to me that either: no one at Blizzard plays a Retribution paladin (entirely possible); or paladins were deliberately being given higher burst in the initial WotLK design.

So in Beta, Blizzard toned down the worst excesses of burst, but left the design of "immobile + high burst" alone. Then they released it to Live, and immediately the vast majority of the populace made it clear that this was an unacceptable design decision. The outcry forced Blizzard to scrap the "immobile + high burst" concept, and just hotfix Retribution down to a nominal level.

So that's my theory for PvP. It is my explanation of why Blizzard is just going nuts with hotfixes. That's not a rational response to a few bugs or missing the damage target slightly. If that had been the case, Blizzard would have just shipped fixes in Patch 3.0.3. It's the reaction to realizing that the entire design concept was seriously flawed and needs to be scrapped.

For PvE, I think the original spreadsheet/model that Blizzard used to come up with initial damage numbers had a significant error. My guess is that the model didn't account for Seal procs from specials.

The reason I think this is the case is that Blizzard has consistently focused on Seal/Judgement damage when nerfing Ret's sustained damage. This is despite the fact that Seal/Judgement nerfs hurt the other specs, especially Holy, even harder. Blizzard went to a lot of trouble to make it easier for healers to solo, and I really don't understand why they targeted the paladin mechanic that is most important to the healing spec (and levelling characters). Last time around, Blizzard was willing to do things like play with cooldowns. If Ret's damage was too high, I would have expected Blizzard to target the Ret-specific abilities like Crusader Strike and Divine Storm. Decrease damage, or increase cooldowns. Change Ret damage increasing talents to do something else. But they didn't really touch CS/DS until the Live hotfixes.

On Beta, Blizzard kept adjusting Seal damage down, saying that Seal damage was too high. To me, that implies that the damage from Crusader Strike and Divine Storm was meeting their expectations, but Seal damage was consistently higher than they predicted. That implies that their model wasn't predicting Seal damage correctly, and the most obvious explanation is that it didn't account for the procs from specials. That's the major change from TBC (other than the change to AP + SP scaling, which is much easier to check and much more likely to have been the first data to be compared).

This is all speculation. I don't know if any of this is real. But the paladin class is not a very complicated class. There's no feedback loop like warriors and Rage. There's no complex mechanics like Combo-Point generation. In fact, if you look at the other classes, Blizzard was mostly in the right neighbourhood most of the time, barring crazy bugs. They've been much more surgical with the other classes than paladins. To me, that says that the spreadsheet/models were pretty accurate. The biggest change I can remember is the warriors losing Heroic Leap because it was too buggy, and the top end of Fury being shuffled around. And that's in a completely different league than getting the damage numbers wrong.

Paladins are very straightforward and unsurprising, and I really would have expected Blizzard to nail the paladin numbers from the very start, both in PvP and PvE. That they didn't, in my opinion, points to deeper underlying causes than mere weapon-switching bugs on the Beta server.

Edit: Additional proof for the PvP side of things. Ghostcrawler is now posting on the forums that Blizzard is considering giving Retribution some form of utility like a snare or interrupt. This is a 180-degree change from Blizzard's previous stance on Retribution, and further indication that their design for Ret is now completely different than in Beta.

What the Hell?

In the four-year history of the game, has any other class been balanced by multiple hotfixes to the Live servers? Actually, has there even been any other non-bug-related hotfixes, just for class balance?

Seriously, Blizzard, this is a breakdown of your design and development procedures of monumental proportions.

A Retribution Solution

Current Retribution Rotation

Retribution is in a bit of a mess at the moment. It is very close to being good, but there are two intertwined problems, one with PvP, and one with PvE. I think it might be worthwhile to take a step back, and look at the issues again.

For reference, here is a graph of what the first 20s of a Retribution rotation looks like:


The PvP Problem

To see the PvP problem, look at the area marked "PvP Burst". See how tightly compacted the abilities are. In the space of 4.5s, a Ret paladin gets two auto-swings, all three special attacks, and any assorted seal procs. This is a large amount of burst, and always occurs at the beginning of the rotation.

If you look at the rest of the rotation, you can see how spread out the abilities become. There's lots of empty Global Cooldowns or wasted space. This part of the rotation is much less bursty than those first few seconds. A lot of Ret's problems with burst in PvP would go away if those first 5 seconds looked more like the remaining 15s.

The PvE Problem

The PvE problem is a little more subtle. See the Empty GCDs in the rotation? Retribution is balanced around those GCDs remaining empty, and not contributing any damage. If those Empty GCDs contributed extra damage, the damage of the main abilities has to be lowered in order to keep the total DPS the same.

Taken too far, you end up where Death Knights are. Death Knights get a Strike every GCD, but each Strike only hits for 50% weapon damage. Which is a bit odd for a 2H weapon class, in my opinion. 2H Weapons should hit hard, but hit slowly, which is the model for Retribution Paladins.

Those Empty GCDs are also useful for tossing paladin utility spells, like re-Sealing, Flash of Light, Cleanse, or the various Hand spells. As well, against Undead, Exorcism can be used, emphasizing the Paladin's prowess against the Undead. Finally at the end of the fight, those GCDs are needed for burning down the enemy with Hammer of Wrath .

The main problem here is Consecration. If a Ret paladin can use an Empty GCD for Consecration, they've increased their DPS. Blizzard wants to avoid having to water down the main abilities, so they are trying to prevent Consecration from being used. The current tactic is to try and restrict the Ret paladin's mana, so that the paladin cannot cast Consecration without worrying about running dry.

The problem here is that there is not a lot of room to maneuver. If Retribution doesn't have enough mana for Consecration, they also have trouble being able to cast the non-damage spells, and it's very easy to lose mana from a mistake. That's hurts the flexibility of Retribution, which makes a paladin a paladin. If they have too much mana, they start casting Consecration regularly, and end up with higher DPS than they should.

A Solution

So can we kill two birds with one stone? I think we can. Here is my suggestion:

1. Have Judgement, Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, and Consecration share a 3 second cooldown (in addition to their normal individual cooldown).


2. Change Judgement as follows:
   1. Increase cooldown to 12s.
   2. Increase damage by 20%.
   3. Change Improved Judgements to increase damage by 10/20%.
   4. Increase the duration of the debuff to 30s.
   
   
3. Change Divine Storm as follows:
   1. Increase cooldown to 12s.
   2. Make it do Holy damage once again.
   
   
4. Remove Seal procs from specials, and tune abilities upwards as appropriate. (Not really necessary, but I may as well throw it in.)

The new Retribution rotation would look like:



Note how the problem with PvP burst goes away. Each individual ability hits like a truck, but you can't string a whole bunch of abilities together in a row. The Retribution Paladin hits bone-crushingly hard, but hits slowly, as is appropriate for a 2H class.

For PvE, there's no room to cast Consecration in the basic rotation because of the shared 3s cooldown. You'd have to kick out a Crusader Strike. That means Consecration becomes more appropriate for AoE situations, as it is meant to be. Overall dps remains roughly the same, once abilities are tuned to match the new cooldowns. However, there are still tons of Empty GCDs for the paladin to cast utility spells, Exorcism, or Hammer of Wrath. Judgements of the Wise can be tuned a little higher, giving a Retribution paladin room to breathe, without the danger of contributing additional damage.

Essentially, what we are doing here is creating a Retribution Global Cooldown. The normal Global Cooldown is the limit on how much damage can be dealt in the shortest amount of time. By basically doubling that cooldown for Ret paladin special attacks, we space out the damage, allowing the individual damage abilities to remain powerful, while still leaving room for the utility spells that make a paladin a paladin.

Finally, I don't think this would be very hard to implement. There's no new major mechanics. It's just fiddling with cooldowns and damage. This makes it far more feasible to be implemented before or just after Wrath of the Lich King.

Speaking of Plagues...

I came home tonight to find fire trucks and people milling around outside my apartment building. Now this isn't an uncommon experience. For some reason, we often have false alarms. The building gets evacuated, the fire trucks come, they leave after half an hour, and we go back in. But this time was different.

I notice people still in their apartments, and ask a neighbour what is going on. It turns out that there was some sort of gas in the common areas that was causing people's throats to hurt! Something like mace or pepper spray, or something worse. The poor owner of the building was running around praying it wasn't a meth lab.

Ambulances start arriving, and they segregate the people who were inside the building, and put them in a quarantined area. Then the HAZMAT teams and police show up!

The rest of the story is pretty boring, and mostly involves me standing around watching what's going on. After several hours, they let people back in. I'm still not sure what exactly happened.

At least there were no zombies.

Update: The police are saying that it was pepper spray.

Zombies

So the Zombie Plague is now over. It was an interesting experience, both on the servers and watching the reaction to it. First off, you have to admire an event where the healers can grief people with Cleanse or Cure Disease.

I think the people who are expecting their daily routine to be untouched are demanding too much. Do you really expect auctioneers, battlemasters, etc. to continue business as usual in the face of an invasion? I remember the first time the Naxx event was done, many people complained because it did not have an impact on the world.

However, I wonder how much of the outcry was because the zombies were other players? We roll on PvE servers specifically to get away from being affected by other players. If the zombie plague had been entirely NPC-driven, would people have complained as loudly?

It's sort of similar to Sons of Arugal or Mor'Ladim. They definitely affect your questing routine. But it's just part of the game, and not another player deliberately making life difficult for you. I wonder if that has an impact on the psychology of the event. Would PvE players be more understanding of the disruption in their routine if it wasn't driven by other players?

But then again, if the event was pure-NPC, we wouldn't have been able to turn into zombies, which was pretty cool. Maybe if player zombies couldn't attack unflagged people, that would have gone over better.

Other than that, the event seemed well done. About the only thing I would change is to remove repair costs if you are transformed into a zombie.

Some Questions for Ghostcrawler

This was originally posted on the paladin forums. It was deleted. Ghostcrawler's original post can be found here.

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

Unlike seemingly everyone else, I'm fine with this. The numbers work out very nicely for PvE DPS. The basic rotation is sustainable indefinitely, there's room for a few minor utility spells, and the Burn mode with Hammer of Wrath lasts for about 1 minute, which is solid.

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

Could you tell us what the actual mechanics of Judgement of Wisdom are meant to be? So far on Beta we've seen:

- 2% gain, 100% proc, 4s cooldown per person
- 2% gain, 100% proc, 4s cooldown per raid
- 2% gain, 100% proc, no cooldown (I think Wis/Light are like this on Live)
- 1% gain, 50% proc, no cooldown?

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

Why are you so insistent on having Seals proc off special attacks?

Almost every nerf you've made to Ret has had this change at the heart. We were perfectly happy in TBC with Crusader Strike and Judgement not proccing Seals. So far, this change has led to:

- significant nerfs to Seals/Judgments
- hurt Holy soloing and levelling, as Holy doesn't get extra Seal procs
- an increase in the magnitude of burst damage
- random chance of complete silliness with Seal of Command
- lackluster Retribution abilities, because they have to pay an invisible "Seal Tax"
-- Crusader Strike is now worse than Mortal Strike, and MS is easier to get
-- Divine Storm is now Whirlwind with a small heal, only Whirlwind is baseline, and DS is 51-points

Seriously, if you removed Seal procs off specials, that would give you some room to tune Ret without affecting Holy/Prot, and maybe even make our special abilities more exciting and paladin-like, rather than being poor copies of Warrior abilities.

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

Here's the thing. Why do you have so much trouble with Retribution paladins? We went through this exact same thing in TBC, when you nuked Crusader Strike, and we didn't recover until that change was reverted (and we got threat reduction in 2.3). That's where all the forum angst is coming from. We've been through this scenario before, and it didn't end happily for us. Why do you think it will be different this time around?

We're a relatively simple class. Almost all of our talents are straight damage increasing talents (which is another issue entirely). Vengeance has full uptime very quickly. We don't have feedback loops like Rage, or complex mechanics to model like Combo-point generation. The most complicated part of our class is the internal cooldown on Seal of Command. Other-wise it's pretty much wait for the cooldown to finish, hit ability, and wait for the next ability to come off cooldown.

I'm rather worried that you can't seem to model our damage properly. Of all the classes in the game, I would imagine you would be able to predict Retribution damage with extreme precision. Yet it seems to be the class who's damage you have the most trouble predicting.

Retribution Mana Constraints

The JotW nerf makes the Ret numbers pretty interesting. Let's start by defining some terms for PvE:

• Basic Rotation: Seal, Judgement, Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, Divine Plea (use all when cooldowns are up)


• Burn Rotation: Basic Rotation + Hammer of Wrath


• Minor Spells: Flash of Light, Hand spells, Avenging Wrath, Hammer of Justice, Exorcism, Repentance


• Major Spells: Consecration, Holy Light

Unbuffed, a Ret paladin can sustain the Basic Rotation forever. However, any other spells cast come out of her mana bar.

(This assumes that the paladin takes Benediction and the Crusader Strike glyph. The Crusader Strike glyph is pretty much the second-best glyph now.)

Raid-buffed, a Ret paladin can sustain the Basic Rotation plus about 1 Minor Spell every 20 seconds.

The Burn Rotation, on the other hand, can only be sustained for one minute. After that, the paladin will be out of mana. Any Major spells cast, or extra Minor spells, further reduce the amount of time the paladin can stay in Burn mode.

Essentially, a ret paladin will stick to the Basic Rotation all the time--maybe tossing one or two Minor spells every so often--while maintaining 100% mana, until the boss drops to 20% health. Then the Ret paladin switches to Burn mode, and has one minute to kill the boss or run dry.

The largest effect of the JotW nerf is to ensure that the Ret paladin will almost never cast Major spells like Consecration or Holy Light.

Honestly, I don't think it's that bad a scheme (for PvE, anyways). I've never really liked Consecrate being part of the regular rotation. It's an AoE spell, and should be reserved for AoE situations.

Something I Did Not Know

Every 20% drunk you are, creatures appear one level lower than they actually are.

Hilarious! An elegant way to model poor judgement.

To The Ground!

So when Ghostcrawler said Ret paladins were being nerfed "TO THE GROUND", apparently he wasn't joking:

- 20% damage cut to Seals and Judgements across the board. (Honestly, this is the second time, what is wrong with the Blizzard paladin spreadsheets?)
- Judgements of the Wise has been cut by 55% (33% of base mana returned to 15% of base mana)
- Seal of Light's healing has been cut by 45% (Not really sure why this happened.)
- Judgement of Wisdom has been dropped from 2% mana return to 1%
- Judgement of Light's healing has been cut by 45%
- Divine Storm doesn't deal holy damage anymore

We did get some buffs:

- Righteous Vengeance gives 40% extra damage as a dot on a Crit Judgement or Divine Storm instead of increasing the Crit damage bonus
- Art of War increases CS/DS/Judge damage by 5/10% (up from 4/8)
- Blessing of Might (Rank 8 ) and Greater Blessing of Might (Rank 3) now increase AP by 306. (Up from 305. This sounds funny, but is actually useful to prevent Battleshout from overriding the Might buff.)

Kind of honestly, you have to wonder what went wrong with the initial Ret design that they overshot the mark so badly. Heh, I think the original model probably assumed that Seals only procced on auto-attacks. (Note to Blizzard: Seals proccing on specials is still a bad idea. Look at how badly you've had to neuter our abilities to keep it in check.) I feel bad for Holy or new paladins who have to solo.

Still, it's a tradition that Blizzard screws up Retribution 2 weeks before launch, and WotLK appears to be adhering to that policy.

Non-Combat Pet Macro

From Free Candy For Everyone, a nice macro to pull out a random non-combat pet:

/script CallCompanion("CRITTER", random(1, GetNumCompanions("CRITTER")))

Paladin Glyphs: Major Retribution and Minor

Retribution

1. Glyph of Judgement - 10% more damage for your best ability? Yes, please.

2. Glyph of Seal of Command - This increases SoC from 7 ppm to 8.4 ppm. If you have a 3.6 speed weapon, it will bring it up to a 50% chance to proc. Math-wise, this puts it just under Seal of Blood. So it's a very good choice if you can't afford the self-damage from Blood. On the other hand, if you never actually use Command, this is a bit of a waste.

3. Glyph of Avenging Wrath - This will significantly increase your damage during the last bit of a fight. Pop wings, get a Bloodlust, and go to town with Hammer of Wrath.

Glyph of Consecration - A lot of paladins like using Consecration in the dead space in the paladin rotation. This gives you a couple more ticks of Consecration damage.

Glyph of Crusader Strike - This is being changed to mana reduction. Pretty pointless with the current state of Judgements of the Wise.

Glyph of Exorcism - Situationally useful, depending on the specific upcoming encounters.

Glyph of Flash of Light - If you plan on using Art of War to cast instant Flash of Lights, this might a good glyph. You won't be spamming FoL, so the HoT will have time to tick. Of course, currently an instant-FoL resets the swing timer, so this is a bad idea in PvE.

Glyph of Hammer of Justice - Solid PvP glyph. Not that useful in PvE.

Glyph of Hammer of Wrath - Again, another PvP glyph.

Glyph of Seal of Blood - With Judgements of the Wise, you don't really need more mana.

Glyph of Turn Evil - I'm not really sure what you would do with this glyph. It might be funny in PvP against Warlocks (especially Demonology ones).

Minor

Glyph of Blessing of Kings - Mana reduction on a buff isn't that useful.

Glyph of Blessing of Might - Good for soloing for all three specs. Don't forget that Seal and Judgement of Righteousness improve with AP, making Might a good buff for a solo Holy paladin.

Glyph of Blessing of Wisdom - Decent for soloing, though I'd probably prefer Might.

Glyph of Divinity - Good for a Holy paladin. Combos well with Glyph of Divinity. Though all specs can and should use Lay on Hands.

Glyph of Sense Undead - A solid glyph for Ret and Prot paladins. There should be plenty of Undead in Northrend.

Glyph of the Wise - Another good glyph for a Holy paladin. Remember that Holy will have a Seal up and will be judging and re-sealing. This works very nicely with the Glyph of Seal of Wisdom.

Paladin Glyphs: Major Holy and Protection

Background

Glyphs are items made by the Inscription profession. Each glyph modifies one of your spells, changing it slightly. At 80, you can have 3 Major Glyphs and 3 Minor Glyphs. Major Glyphs are powerful, while Minor Glyphs tend to be cosmetic.

Glyphs need to be applied near a Lexicon of Power. This can be found in the major cities near the Inscription trainer. Essentially, you have to return to a city to change Glyphs, so you can't change them in the field. However, I think they will rapidly become fairly cheap, so re-glyphing might be something you do before you head out to an instance for the night.

Here's a listing of what I think the top 3 major glyphs are for Holy and Protection at level 80, and some comments on the others. I'll cover Retribution and Minor glyphs in another post.

Holy

1. Glyph of Seal of Light - You need a Seal up to get the haste from Judgements of the Pure. This improves your healing by 5%, making it very powerful, especially on shorter fights.

2. Glyph of Seal of Wisdom - Like Light above, but for longer fights. It's an interesting decision if you should take both of the Seal glyphs, because you can only use one at a time. But it makes you a bit more flexible for different fights.

3. Glyph of Holy Light - This can do a fair amount of splash healing, helping a traditional paladin weakness.

Glyph of Cleansing - Mana reduction is always useful, but not very exciting.

Glyph of Divinity - Lay on Hands doesn't drain your mana anymore, and only has 20 min cooldown. So it's a very useful spell, and this glyph makes it even more useful. You get to drop a large instant emergency heal, and you get a fair bit of mana back.

Glyph of Flash of Light - This glyph is currently terrible. The HoT does not stack, so you severely hurt your tank-healing capabilities. It might be decent if you were raid-healing, but given that Glyphs are permanent, it's really hard to see this being useful. Perhaps a Ret build (with Art of War) or a levelling build would consider it, but it's pretty much a waste otherwise.

Glyph of Seal of Righteousness - Might be good for soloing, but in an instance you will be using a glyphed Light or Wisdom.

Protection

1. Glyph of Righteous Defense - Having taunts miss usually ends very badly.

2. Glyph of Seal of Vengeance - Vengeance is a solid seal for Protection, and reducing boss dodge and parry rates by 2.5% is very nice.

3. Glyph of Avenger's Shield - This glyph is a bit of a toss-up. I think it will become more useful as you move into raiding, and precise pulling and having large initial threat becomes more important. However, you might prefer building threat on multiple mobs in the 5-man dungeons. As well, 100% more damage makes it more feasible to toss AS on every cooldown, just to build threat.

Glyph of Consecration - This glyph does increase damage per cast of Consecration. However, Protection has a very smooth rotation with an 8-9s Consecration cooldown, and this glyph spoils that rotation. Still, if you're very comfortable with managing your abilities as they come off cooldowns, this might be a good choice for you.

Glyph of Exorcism - Gives you another spell interrupt, which is something we lack. However, this is very specific and may depend greatly on what instance you are planning to run.

Glyph of Judgement - Extra damage and threat from one of your main abilities is always good.

Glyph of Seal of Righteousness - I think most Protection paladins will be using a glyphed Vengeance on bosses, but this could be decent for trash.

Glyph of Spiritual Attunement - You shouldn't need this glyph, as regular SA and Blessing of Sanctuary will provide enough mana. But keep it in mind if you do find you have mana problems.

70 Hunter!

My third 70: a draenei hunter named Corissa, and her pet ravager, Fluffy. I believe the technical term in the hunter community is FO'SHIZZLE!

(Yeah, I don't know what it means either, but it seems appropriate.)

I tamed Fluffy at level 10, and it's been my only pet all the way up to level 70 (aside from temp pets tamed for skills). It's interesting how some hunters focus on one pet, and others collect many different pets. I'm full Beastmaster, because that was the only spec where my pet could actually hold aggro, but I have no desire to get any exotic pets.