OK. So we’re getting a new raid – the Firelands. We might even be getting a second new raid in patch 4.1, which some theorize is the War of the Ancients raid. My main, a Paladin, is finally going to see Divine Storm add holy power, which should solidify our ability to put out competitive AOE numbers. These changes and a host of others don’t excite me near as much as a pair of little changes for rogues. Did I say little? I meant supermassiveomgforpvpfuntimes.
Category: Class
Daily Thoughts: Ret Gets Buffed in Patch 4.0.6
The above chart was featured in a WoW insider Scattered Shots article, you can see the full article HERE.
Notice retribution at the very bottom of the raiding dps specs. Now, this doesn’t include the traditionally low raiding performance “pvp” specs such as subtlety rogues, but ret pallies are still easily 25% below the top performing dps spec and also lower than the next lowest by almost 1,000 dps. Naturally, I’d love to run around topping the meters, but balance at least is much preferred to the current state of affairs. Did we paladins despair though? Of course not! We knew at some point the useless mastery would be reforged into something we wanted, at least a little, and boost our dps. Blizzard, in their infinite wisdom (is always wisdom when they’re buffing your class right?), also buffed our bread and butter attack, Crusader Strike. Check out the paladin class changes.
Paladins
- The mana costs of Blessing of Might and Blessing of Kings have been increased by approximately 217%, making them roughly equal to the cost of Mark of the Wild.
- Crusader Strike weapon damage percent has been increased to 135%, up from 115%.
- Divine Plea now lasts for 9 seconds, down from 15. It grants 4% mana per tick, instead of 2%, for a total of 12% mana, up from 10%.
Talent specializations
Retribution
- Divine Purpose: The chance for applicable abilities to generate Holy Power has been reduced to 7/15%, down from 20/40%, but instead of generating 1 Holy Power, the next applicable ability used consumes no Holy Power and acts as if the paladin has 3 Holy Power.
- Hand of Light (Mastery): A percentage of the damage done by Templar’s Verdict, Crusader Strike, and Divine Storm is done as additional Holy damage.
- Repentance is no longer broken from damage done by Censure (Seal of Truth).
- Glyphs
- Glyph of Divine Plea now adds 6% mana, for a total of 18% over 9 seconds.
The two biggest changes we have here are the 20% more base damage to crusader strike and our mastery changing. Mastery is now a passive holy damage buff to key attacks and our old Divine Purpose talent has become the same as what Mastery was. Depending on what this percentage ends up being, we could see a very significant boost to damage. This mastery also gives blizzard an easy knob from which to tune our DPS if it’s ever too low or too high. Holy paladins are also probably a little excited about the slight buff to divine plea which provides an extra 2% mana (3% talented) over a shorter time span.
I’m really excited to see ret damage come up to par with our other dps pals and for the first time was considering copying my toon over to a test realm to see the changes first hand before they went live, alas, the page isn’t currently loading. Maybe there’s a bunch of other enthused paladins clogging up the internet.
The rest of the 4.0.6 patch notes can be viewed HERE.
Daily Thoughts: The Cataclysm Paladin
I’ve spent a lot of posts recently talking about zones (and yes I’m still going to do that Twilight Highlands review at some point), factions, and other such things and not much time on the actual playing my class. The big changes specifically to Paladins in cataclysm (if you don’t count Holy Power from 4.0.3) are the new spells:
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Inquisition (81)
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Holy Radiance (83)
Inquisition is our new self buff. It increases all holy damage by 30%. Retribution gets a talent that extends the duration of this buff to 10 seconds per Holy Power used to trigger it. This is meant to be kept up as much as possible similar to Slice and Dice for combat rogues and is a pretty significant DPS loss if not used.. Holy Radiance is pretty much making us a moving healing stream totem, and does an AOE heal to nearby targets. I haven’t got much play testing with this spell, as I’m running ret main now, but I really haven’t heard anything too exciting about from those doing Holy main spec. Finally, Guardian of Ancient Kings is amazing. This buff has a long (5m) cooldown, but skyrockets a ret paladins DPS when used. From what I hear from the other specs, it seems it’s a better friend to ret than the other uses. Each spec gets a specific purpose, one for taking, extra heals for holy and more damage for ret. Follow me after the break for some more…
Daily Thoughts: Fear the Reaper
Yes, fear the reaper. My rogue hit 78 last night and although he isn’t the one-shotting-everything-that-moves powerhouse that he was through most of the leveling process, he is still a stealthy ninja-like force to be reckoned with. I can top the meters in instances in my combat spec, but what I really want to focus on today is the fun of the subtlety spec and the new PVP brackets.
PVP as a Subtlety rogue is fun. Sub is the spec that has always played the way I feel a rogue should. Sub emphasises effectiveness and deadliness from the shadows. We get the +30% to stealth movement speed in sub, which is absolutely essential to not being horribly frustrated trying to catch people in a battleground. Of course, we can’t forget to mention sub’s signature ability: Shadow Step. It is buckets of fun to teleport behind an unsuspecting victim and slash him with Ambush, using the increase damage bonus from SS. Further, SS gives a run speed bonus for a few seconds after it’s used, making it a mini sprint that talents to a 20 second cooldown. Not only does this make Shadow Step a great offensive skill, but it can be used when running away from a large pack of enemies by teleporting to the furthest player and then using the run speed to get away. Hopefully this gives you time for Vanish to come off cooldown. Sub rogues just have such a cool toolbox for pvp play, but they suck at PVE right?
Daily Thoughts: Warrior 4.0.3a
Most warriors know by this point that blizzard, using their mighty nerf hammer, struck furious down the haughty warriors and nerfed their precious damage into oblivion, leaving warriors impotent and senile. Or did they? Check the patch that has sent many a search to this blog (and many others I’m sure, but I don’t have their statistic pages) asking, “fury warrior nerf 4.0.3”. Actually, about 50% of all the search terms used to find my blog since 4.0.3a are in regards to the Great Warrior Nerf of 2010. I must admit, I was even a bit concerned seeing a 17% nerf to most of the fury dps toolkit.
So how demolished was my warrior dps after all? Well…It wasn’t. That’s right, you can put your warrior fears to rest. At least fury ones, I hear arms is pretty bad again, but I don’t play that to test it myself. All in all my damage on a test dummy was between 5-10% lower so yes, a nerf, but not world ending. I saw a lot less of my attacks hitting over 10k, which isn’t surprising. On the other hand, I still topped damage in the 3 heroics I did, pretty much every pull. I have to worry about pulling threat from decently geared tanks still, which makes me happy.
So in short, Fury warriors are OK after all. You might not be quite as much of a beast as before, but don’t think you need to go roll a mage now in order to get a raid slot.
Daily Thoughts: Fury Warrior In RS & ICC
I have to open with this: By the time I finish writing this post, I should have Wrathful Gladiator’s Decapitator . This will not be acquired through any particular PVP skill on the warrior, but through grinding of BG’s, WG, and random heroics. It costs 2550 honor and is the best a warrior can get outside of drops from ICC. Even with resilience wasting a stat for a PVE player, the damage on the weapon and pure attack power (324 AP) is nothing to scoff at. Keep in mind this is the item level 264 version and the 277 version is still only obtainable with rating. Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on that last bit, but I don’t have enough honor points on any toon to attempt to buy the 277 version now.
It’s good to be able to say that Fury Warriors can still do great competitive DPS even with the rage normalization and loss of ArP.
Ruby Sanctum: Halion
Halion is not a friendly fight for a Warriors meters, especially when asked to switch to the physical realm and the twilight realm during the last phase. Fortunately, it is otherwise a pretty easy fight for melee dps. In the first phase, and if you are topside during the third phase, it is a standard dragon tank-n-spank with some fire to not stand in. In the second phase, and if you are in the twilight realm during the third phase, it’s also a standard dragon fight with purple fire to not stand in. Melee gets it easy inside the twilight phase because when the orbs connect their frickin’ laser beam, we can keep dpsing at basically full strength as we move to the side to not be cleft in twain. Also, the trash can be a little bit fun leading up to Halion.
ICC: Hardmodes:
Fury DPS in ICC is pretty much just bloody buckets of fun. With 10k dps on Marrowgar and 12k on Saurfang, I’m able to do very satisfying damage. Keep in mind, I’m not decked out in 25m gear on my warrior. As of this raid he was only using a 251/219 weapon set. Without a ranged slow or easy stun, Fury doesn’t really end up having a “job” during any of the fights in ICC. Interrupt Deathwhisper, deal with the correct adds on Putri, Valinthria, and LK (all same as any dps class really) and do mindless, raging dps. It’s a nice change coming from heals as a main spec. For me, doing dps in a raid is a lot more relaxing than heals for most content. Admittedly, with how ez-mode much of WotLK content is, healing can end up requiring less attention than dps. As for all the hardmodes that we’ve attempted so far, only Putricide has proven difficult. I think we had 4 wipes on him during our first round of attempts. Outside of him, we’ve cleared all bosses in HM except Princes, Sindra, and the big LK. Princes shouldn’t be too much trouble when we get around to them, but so far we haven’t done any attempts.
Today is a good day to be fury, though the future does hold a great many uncertainties. Can we hold back cleave spam on trash in order to not break CC and get our faces smashed in cata instances? Will blizzard nerf us into the ground while they laugh on the yachts? Is that guy named justinbieberz in trade chat really Justin Bieber? The last one easily scares me the most. Only time will tell. For now, keep careless smashing your face into things Fury Warriors, it’s why GC gave you big pointy helmets.