We don’t nerf anyone due to public outcry. If we did, there would probably be 1-2 classes left that were even PvP viable. :) At most seeing a lot of QQ about one class might get us to look at the numbers to see if there is any truth to the matter. However I will say that in this case there were so many people telling us the same thing that it’s hard to come up with an explanation for how they can all be wrong and some of the Ret paladins be right. (I say “some” because several Ret paladins admit they were killing stuff to fast.)

We collect a lot of data from both Beta and the live servers, and Ret paladins were killing people very quickly and often, especialy at level 70. Even after the nerfs, they are still very good at 70.

It’s never fun to nerf anyone and we know the boards are going to be on fire for several days when we do it. It’s our fault that the imbalance existed in the first place and we needed to take steps to correct it. Players are understandably nervous about the new world order with all of the changes we’ve made to classes and combat. Most of them, I am confident, want to see balance problems fixed quickly.

As I stated yesterday, we are happy with Ret’s PvE damage and sustatined damage in PvP, but were concerned that the burst damage in PvP could be too high. We discussed this for literally hours yesterday, which was certainly not the first time we have discussed the issue. Thus I hope these changes are not perceived as a knee-jerk reaction, but I am sure that will depend a great deal on which class you play. :)

Divine Storm — the damage was changed from Holy to Physical. As you know, Holy damage is almost never mitigated and this talent could pack a lot into a very short time. This is a nerf to the ability’s damage. This change is now active on Live.

Repentance — this ability now lasts for only 6 seconds in PvP (down from 10). Obviously this is also a nerf. This change is also active on Live.

Art of War — now affects all damage done by Judgements, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm (instead of critical strike damage). Net dps should be about the same but less bursty. This change will be made before Nov 13.

Righteous Vengeance — now applies a dot affect similar to Deep Wounds (instead of critical strike damage). This ends up being a significant buff to the ability to make up for the damage lost to Divine Storm, but is also less bursty. This change will be made before Nov 13. EDIT: The dot will NOT break Repentance.

Glyph of Crusader Strike — now reduces mana cost (instead of increased damage on stunned targets.) We thought paladins could stack too much damage vs. stunned targets. This change will be made before Nov 13.

We also fixed a bug with Seal and Judgement of Light that could sometimes result in too much healing.

In our tests, Retribution dps remains the same over longer periods of time, but they can’t do quite so much damage in the initial few seconds of a PvP encounter.

I know Ret pallies feel a little picked on since we’ve made this mistake before of having them come out the gate too strong and then had to correct them. For that I do apologize. It’s a difficult spec to balance since part of its design is to have large crits and stuns, which have obvious PvP implications. We are pretty confident this will not nerf pallies into the ground as I facetiously promised yesterday, but if we overdid it, we’ll be happy to back off some of the changes.

On the other hand, maybe we’ll see fewer BGs with 20 paladins on the opposing side and can get some reasonable feedback on all the other classes in the game.

To clarify the new dot will not break Repentance.

Repentence will be changed not to break on the new Righteous Vengeance dot.

Art of War was NOT majorly buffed. The damage should remain the same over time, but fewer gigantic crits. It will be something like +4 / 8% damage (instead of +10 / 20% crit), which should be the same overall assuming a crit rate of around 40%.

Righteous Vengeance was majorly buffed to make up for the Divine Storm nerf. It should end up at something like 10% of the crit damage each tick for 4 ticks of 2 seconds each (+40% and 8 sec total).

Infusion of Light — now affects Flash of Light or Holy Light. Flash of Light is reduced to 0 cast time with 2 ranks, meaning that if you’re running around and get a Holy Shock crit, you can also Flash without stopping.

Righteous Defense — cooldown lowered to 8 sec. It had been 10 sec recently and is 15 sec on live.

Infusion of Light — now affects Flash of Light or Holy Light. Flash of Light is reduced to 0 cast time with 2 ranks, meaning that if you’re running around and get a Holy Shock crit, you can also Flash without stopping.

Judgements of the Pure — haste benefit now up to 15% with 5 ranks (was 10%).

Enlightened Judgements — range benefit is now 30 yards with 2 ranks (was 20). This means you can judge or heal from the same range without having to run around so much.

Bacon of Light — no change here, but I can never miss an opportunity to call it Bacon.

We test a lot of different ways. We test characters alone, self buffed and raid buffed. We do very controlled tests and we do tests where we just tell a skilled player to go nuts and we do actual raids. We get a lot of information from outside Blizzard as well, but you asked about how we test.

It’s difficult to know exactly when a tank is going to end using their cooldowns. Sometimes it’s probably fine to spam them and other times they need to be saved for a very specific situation. Which abilities you use is also determined by what classes are present in the rest of your group. That’s just another reason to gather a large body of data.

We think the paladin and warrior are pretty close now. I do have some concerns about eventual scaling problems now that block is so good. Critical Block may end up letting warriors bypass paladins eventually, but that will be a few raid tiers from now, so we’ll have plenty of time to evaluate the situation and make adjustments if necessary.

You’re still going to have a hard time convincing me that 2% mitigation difference will determine which class everyone uses for their MT. Consider:

1) You’re going to have a hard time even knowing what that number is. Unless a few really eloquent theorycrafters manage to convince the entire raiding community, most of the time you’re going to have to rely on actual raid data to make decisions, and that kind of variance is going to be really hard to detect.

2) Every boss is different. Mitigation deltas may be miniscule on a slow-hitting boss but noticeable on a fast-hitting boss for instance.

3) A difference likes 2% assumes both tanks have the best gear possible for their slot. Gear can make a very big difference in mitigation, yet you tend to see guilds stick with their MT for a long time. You don’t suddenly drop your guy when someone with a better shield and 10% more mitigation comes along. Why? Because your guy’s loyalty, dependability, knowledge or sense of humor is more important than that 10% difference.

4) Don’t forget player skill has a huge role in here too. I’ve done Archimonde with an MT that couldn’t stance dance to save his life. But despite that er… handicap, the group is on M’uru or something now. Yeah I know, everyone has antecdotes. The moral of my story is that if a tank who can’t use his cooldowns can make it to Sunwell, surely the tank with 2% less mit can. If min-maxing tumped all, they would have dumped him.

5) Paladins and druid tanks are already tanking a lot of content in BC, and that’s in spite of the current design (i.e. the BC version, not the LK one) that warriors are the best single boss tanks. And, in spite of things like crushing blows. And, in spite of the difficulties druids and paladins had getting gear. If they can tank already when they’re supposed to be OTs, then they should probably be great when we are actively trying to make them MTs.

I am aware of the sites you mention and the various threads across the Internet. I am in communication with great tanks all the time. One of the problems we face is that each tank tends to conclude they are the worst — they’re nervous the community will fixate on one as the best, which is totally understandable. The numbers in WoW are very complicated — if they were simple, much of the depth and theorycrafting wouldn’t exist. Unfortunately, that also means it’s easy to look at data and come to different conclusions, or even generate different data. Procs, reactionary abilities and cooldowns can change things dramatically. You can’t assume they’re always up but you can’t ignore them either.

I think the BoSanc argument does hold some water, and that’s something we’re going to look at. I’m specifically refering to the case where the paladin is the eternal OT because he can also buff the warrior MT.

I’m saying the former. We aren’t designing the paladin to be purposely inferior. But because their abilities are so different, I’m also not naive enough to say that their survivability will be the same in all situations. Promising 100% the same stats with the same gear for every fight would be silly. I’m promising it will be close enough that you can use any of the 4 classes as your MT (assuming they’re a good player).

I totally agree with this. But things are rarely “clear” in this game. Is it clear what class did the best dps in BC? Was it clear what class was the best healer? If you change small assumptions in your calculations (maybe a proc isn’t up as much as you think) then you get different numbers. On the other hand, I think the numbers *were* pretty clear that warriors were better tanks than paladins in most of end-game BC, but despite that, there were still a lot of paladin tanks.

I agree the WoW community can be surprisingly conservative in adapting to new paradigms. But that’s not a great reason to give anyone the edge. It didn’t take very long at all for players to realize that Protadins were head and shoulders above other tanks for running 5-mans, especially say Shattered Halls. Shadow Priests went from lol to mandatory in between Naxx and Karazhan. Some guilds will keep a warrior as their MT because they like that player in that role. But not all will. I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see a lot of changes in guild structure (it happened in BC) because the raiding landscape is so different now. You can choose to skip 25-player content completely and still go against the Lich King. A lot of players assume that the perception will be the 25s where the big boys play and the 10s are the kiddie pool, but I’m not so sure that’s going to happen.

I still think you guys are putting too much faith in your theorycrafting. There is just no way to produce precise and accurate numbers down to fractions of a percent. You have to make assumptions about e.g. how often Shield Block is up, and effects of things like Ardent Defender, and rate of incoming damage (which varies hugely from boss to boss). Change any of those assumptions and the results change.

Good math is essential in theorycrafting, but so are good statistics. When you are coming up with estimates like this, what you are really coming up with is a number plus or minus some amount of variance. In this case (and in most theorycrafting experiments) the variance is very large. Imagine your result is actually something like “Our calculations suggest that paladin mitigation is 3% lower than warrior mitigation, plus or minus 10%.” In other words, it could be anywhere from 13% low to 7% high. I’m not doubting your math here. I’m just saying don’t be so convinced that your calculations reflect reality. That’s why we call it theorycrafting and not fact. Make sense?

(By the way, all of this applies to us too. We have the resources to do some very extensive testing, but sometimes the results turn out different when the changes go live. Players figure out a different rotation that changes everything. Or some obscure trinket or set bonus we forgot about makes a mediocre ability crazy good.)

We do test with and without Blessing of Sanctuary, and with and without lots of other raid buffs. It is a big puzzle with a lot of variables. :)

We like Blessing of Sanctuary as a buff you can put on anyone. However, we might do something like let it benefit the paladin more than other targets. (Self buffing gives a better result than buffing someone else.) Or we might just add more paladin mitigation somewhere else in the tree. That all assumes you are deficient. If 2-5% makes a big difference for you (I don’t think it will make that much of a difference, but for sake of argument), then buffing paladins 2-5% when they didn’t need it could also make the other tanks non-starters. We’ll keep testing it.

Okay, here is one change you don’t have.

Shield of the Templar now also reduces all damage taken by 1/2/3%.

Critical Block is something we’re still keeping our eye on. I’m not going to promise a paladin version, but it’s totally something we’ll consider if paladin blocking starts to fall behind.

Whoever said it, yes it’s absolutely going to be a challenge trying to get parity among 4 classes with totally different mechanics, and in some sense the warrior to paladin comparison is the easy one. :) But we don’t like having only one MT class, and we don’t like giving everyone very similar gear, talents and abilities to tank, and we don’t like the situation where you need a different tank for every fight because they all excell at certain types of encounters and suck at others. So the option we’re left with is to have 4 who are different but relatively equal.

Holy

• Divine Plea - You gain 25% of your total mana over 15 sec, but the amount healed by your spells is reduced by 20%. (Down from 100%)

Glyphs

• Glyph of Flash of Light - Your Flash of Light heals for 50% less initially, but also heals for 140% of its initial effect over 12 sec. (Down from 15 seconds)
• Glyph of Holy Light - Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 10 yds (up from 5 yds) of the initial target.