26 February, 2006

Holy is too good; why this is evidence of failure.

When 1.10 is released, will it prove that the 1.9 actually is a failure? You tell me. This guy is on to something:
Holy Tree makes you a plenty good healer, infact holy does everything

Better Heals
Better Damage
Better Aggro

Holy has everything, it's time to pay attention to the other two trees
The talent review has did not achieve the basic task of balancing all trees to make them equally attractive. 1.10 sets this in stone.

Protection is in shambles -- I only know of a single on my server Paladin who has gone up all the way to Holy Shield. It wasn't a good idea to nerf Holy Shield (they actually increased the mana cost of it at the start of 1.9 test), then move it two tiers higher in Protection to then nerf it again. Hello? Paladins aren't stupid.

Attempting now to bring back spell damage co-efficiency on it as well as slightly lowering the mana cost isn't going to accomplish anything. Protection still sucks ass, and I stand by that sentiment. Sorry if I am being harsh, but that's the truth. You gutted Protection and there's no reason to go any higher than Blessing of Kings anymore.

Retribution was supposed to be the best tree for damage, but now with the up-and-coming changes in 1.10 Holy will see increase in power to actually let you do a Holy Shock crit every two minutes. That's guaranteed ranged burst damage or burst healing.

What's that? Holy gets the best control of their damage, ranged, as well as it being the most versatile (healing)?

The standard build for every Paladin in 1.10 will be the following:
- 11 points in Retribution for Seal of Command.
- 31 points in Holy for Holy Shock.
Whereas the remaining talent points scattered around (personally I will get Guardian's Favor).

It simply is the most powerful build build available. The only thing I it would lack in comparison to the two other main builds is that you lose crowd control due to lack of Repentance (and another opportunity for burst damage with JoC) and shield abilities due to lack of Holy Shield. But if you raid a lot (like me) it doesn't matter anyway, since Repentance isn't working on raid bosses and you're not going to tank them anyway.

I know 1.10 hasn't been released yet, but still, this is just ridiculous. Seems to me they achieved the complete opposite of what the talent review was sought out to do: they've actually homogenized the builds available. Hopefully (I'm not kidding) I am wrong on this. But so far it seems to me this is inevitable for 1.10.

9 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This certainly does make Holy the "perfect" tree.

Healing, as well as the new GUARNTEED Holy Shock crit... Paladins might as well all just be healadins because now they can get the most dependable healing AND damage from the same tree.

I know that I, personally, will be speccing as the Head of this site does...

31/x/11 (at least)

Time to stack those +spell crit items that I so wisely rolled on.

10:26 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

31/0/20 for me, so I can get Holy Shock and still get all 5 points into Conviction and Eye for an Eye.

To get any of the "good stuff" in Protection requires that you blow at least 5 points on crappy stuff, effectively neutering you on points to spend in retribution.

By "good stuff" in protection, I'm of course referring to Imp. HoJ, Imp. ConAura, BoK, Guardians Favor, and maybe Reckoning - though I've never been a big fan of this talent.

10:34 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Reckoning is still the deadlyest talent for pvp.
if you know how to use it.

12:31 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Holy shock critting off of divine favor is nice, but let's not overstate it's ability. By critting holy shock you are basically getting 200 extra damage every 2 minutes. For those scoring at home, that isn't much of a DPS increase (It's about 3~DPS). You get a lot more through retribution.

Holy is not overpowered compared to other classes talents (I have a 60 rogue).

The arguement about retribution not having more control is a valid one. Protection sucks, but has our best pvp skill hannds down (reckoning).

They do need to do some more work on the trees, retribution is uninspired and not controllable, protection is just borked. That doesn't mean holy is overpowered though.

2:20 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The point is that in comparison to the other trees, Holy is the only tree to go.

I personally am a damage Paladin (21/0/30 with a lot of STR and crit gear (and 4K of mana for those Cleric wannabes who complain)), but I may go 31/0/20 to get more damage.

7:02 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

The nice thing about Holy shock crits is that if a horde decides to go toe to toe with me and then runs at 25% or 30%, then he's going to die if I get a crit. If I can force a crit every thirty seconds then I can drop it twice in a fight. I'm going to post on the boards a little bit later and see if I can suggest it's range be increased to let us use it to heal the tanks but it would definitly have offensive uses at range.

8:10 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

New post by Eyonix:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.aspx?FN=wow-paladin&T=892607&P=1

I'm past analysing these posts to any great extent, i'll just note the tidbits:

* Want to improve Paladin tanking in 5, 10, 15 and 20-man instances. Tools are pretty close to the requirement for this in their opinion.

* Holy Shield generated +20% threat since 1.09, but was undocumented.

* Righteous Fury was not generating the correct amount of threat with all skills (most noteably Retribution Aura... a Ret. Tree talent :|). 1.10 should make this skill more effective in generating threat (but no mention as to whether RF was under-generating or over-generating threat with other skills).

* Possible further changes to Prot for those that want to tank (with the proviso that there will be no taunts or similar abilities, nor a wish to boost abilities to the level of Druids) over the next few patches.


One has to wonder if the recent complaints have forced Blizzards hand in this, or whether they genuinely had this in mind for a while. I also still maintain that aggro generation was not an issue before 1.09, and that itemisation and aggro recovery are much more important to any tweaks that may be made to RF and HS at this stage. That said, I won't look a gift horse in the mouth.


(I wish I had a Blog so I could make long and involved posts like Mastgrr :D).

12:41 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Protection was the pvp spec of choice. Repentence + Reckoning was probably too good. It was a disguised nerf.

There's still hope though. Eyonix just made a post on the pally forum. Here's a quote:

"We're taking a pass at all threat generating abilities, and it's likely that players will see some mathematical improvements to abilities over the course of the next few patches. In addition, we're in the process of reviewing the Protection tree with plans to make it more appealing for players choosing to follow the protection path. "

2:45 AM  
Blogger Platoxia said...

I disagree with the cookie cutter build that you promote. While Retribution is good for PVP, it is highly dependant on what gear you have. With the wrong gear, you can do just as much damage with a sword and board as you can with a slow 2 hander if you spec Ret. Also, I recently did some testing and determined that, as things stand now, using the SOC judgments for damage is actually more mana intensive than Holy Shock...and the damage is about the same.

I am curently 31/20...but would be 20/31 if I could just get the free heal in Holy while spec'd this way. Alas, the way it is set up now you are one ponit short from being able to achieve this.

6:30 PM  

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