wowPaladin.org

We didn’t work on paladins a lot for this patch. Any changes you’re seeing are likely because a designer was monkeying around with mechanics and numbers a little bit trying to come up with something he or she liked. Whenever you see just a few subtle changes, particularly if they are undocumented, it is more likely experimentation than anything else.

When we start to discuss next steps for the paladins, I promise to drop by and lay a few on you. But if I don’t post anything, it’s because I don’t know anything new.

A lot of spells seem to be broken for several different classes.

I know it sucks (and honestly it sucks for us too, because we won’t get the quality of feedback we’re looking for), but these things happen. We can’t rigorously test a beta build for weeks and weeks like we would a retail patch or the data will be hopelessly out of date. At this stage in development, a lot of stuff is going into the game every day, and sometimes bugs crop up.

We’ll see if it’s possible to get any of this hotfixed.

No, no, no, paladins aren’t done. Look at the recent (mostly happy) reactions to the hunter and warrior changes. That is what we hope to accomplish for every single class.

I can’t give you an answer you will like on Vengeance yet. It is a problematic talent because it represents a huge potential (but not a gaurantee) for dps.

Many (though not all) talents are balanced around a 1% to maybe 1.5% dps increase per talent point. With a 3 stack of Vengeance, that’s a 15% dps increase when it’s up for 5 talent points. And it’s up a lot, but not all the time, and to make matters worse, it tends to be up more as gear gets better and better. That’s a really hard thing to balance around. The death knight has the same problem, by the way, though the paladin is doing Holy damage which is very hard to resist. There are plenty of talents, many of them new, for different classes that provide way too much at the moment for their cost, but we will get them all into shape.

We tried a 2 stack to decrease the burst potential a little, but I don’t think it ended up being very fun. Building up a stack is supposed to be a stack, and 2 is just a puny stack. Maybe we’ll try a 3 stack of 3% each — we don’t know for sure yet. Maybe we’ll decide it’s okay at 3 stacks and just live with retadins being bursty sometimes.

However, I do promise that if Vengeance contributes less to your total dps, we’ll make up for it in other ways. We haven’t done that yet because our goal was to see how Venegeance felt at fewer stacks, not to balance ret dps. You’re absolutely right that we decreased your dps across the board without compensating you. That’s going to happen in a beta unfortunately. Was you dps too high and needed to come down or are you now non-viable as a class with this change? Nobody at Blizzard could really answer that with confidence because we haven’t done a numbers pass yet.

I hope that answers some of your questions. From a selfish perspective though, this thread is more helpful to us when you provide feedback than if it’s a blue QA forum. I read all the threads, but any time I take to respond is less time I’m working on the game. :)

I meant that we can’t assume Vengeance is up 100% of the time so we can’t assume paladins will always have that 15% boost. Yet if we balance them without that 15% (or we try and estimate it at something like 5 or 10%), we’ll start to run into trouble when paladins with lots of +crit do manage to keep it up all the time. And if it really is up all the time, is that interesting an ability anyway?

As to the death knight, we only gave them that talent to mirror the paladin one and catch a hint of the “anti-paladin” vibe. Whatever treatment Vengeance ends up, Bloody Vengeance will almost certainly get as well.

I agree there are several things driving Retribution to be bursty. To some degree, bursts can be fun. We all like seeing a crit with a big number flying up. But we’d probably all agree that there comes a point where you feel like you’re just rolling a dice — maybe I’ll do crazy dps on my next few hits and maybe I won’t. I think we can stabilize Retribution a little bit while still letting you see some big numbers sometime and have very competitive dps.

I am going to be away from a keyboard for a bit, but I still plan on reading the thread. Don’t feel unloved. :(