The most recent Cataclysm Beta build is up and running. Lots of new changes, including the increased level cap to 85. For those of you that don’t know, that is max level for Cataclysm. Also, some sad news for our soloing adventures…Zul’Gurub (ZG) will be removed as a raid instance in Cata.
In this most recent builds, we see some interesting things from Blizzard. They continue to tweak our damage. After reading as much as I could from blue posts and other websites, it appears Rets were just doing too much damage, often topping the damage meters. To scale this down to bring us even with other classes, we got the heavy nerf several builds ago.
Now, it appears they are watching our DPS very carefully, and I fully expect things to be shaken up even more as the Beta trucks along. Here are the relevant notes for Ret Paladins, and you can find the full notes on MMO Champion.
Retribution
- Selfless Healer now has a 50/100% chance to proc, up from 30/60%.
- The Art of War revamped – Your melee attacks have a 7/14/20% chance to reduce the cast time by 100%, reduce mana cost by 60%, and increase damage by 60% of your next Exorcism.
- Pursuit of Justice additional effect – You have a 50/100% chance to gain a charge of Holy Power when struck by a Stun, Fear or Immobilize effect.
Also, from the Holy Tree, we have these changes:
- Divine Plea now let you gain 10% (down from 25%) of your total mana over 15 sec. Cooldown changed to 2 min, up from 1 min.
- Consecration now scales from 22% of AP and 22% of Spell Power, down from 32%.
- Exorcism mana cost changed from 20% base mana (up from 8% of base mana). Cooldown removed.
- Lay on Hands cooldown reduced from 20 min to 10 min.
My Thoughts
Selfless Healer change continues to let me believe we may be functioning as a combat healer in a very, very small role. I’m curious as to how that will play out.
Art of War only reaffirms that Blizzard is really trying to make Exorcism a staple in our DPS rotations. Also, the cooldown on Exorcism has been removed, meaning it can be cast at any time. You can expect Ret Paladins to be playing with Exorcism priorities after an Art of War proc. I am excited about this change.
Pursuit of Justice was a passive talent that increased our movement speed, which helped on fights where we had to do lots of running around. This added effect is a bonus to stack Holy Power. This will be of much more importance in PvP, but it will see small benefits in PvE as well.
Divine Plea is a little discouraging, and I assume Blizz will change this up over time. A meager 10% seems a little low, and though I know we won’t be having many mana concerns, I can’t imagine 10% will be helping us to the point that justifies doubling the cooldown time.
Consecration has fallen out of my favor, and has plummeted even further with the decrease in AP and SP%. I take comfort in that I am not in Beta, so on paper it looks bad, but I am hoping the current state is still powerful, especially at such a high mana cost.
Exorcism, as mentioned above, continues to be changed to fit more into our DPS rotations. At a cost of 20% base mana, it will not be spammable. Yet still, it will be used often, and with this change, I wonder if our mana usage will have to be rethought by Blizz (see Divine Plea).
Lay on Hands to 10 minutes is great. i wonder if its respective glyph will lower that down further, as it currently does on live.
With all these changes I feel like every time a new build is out we are closer to our current state, but obviously that’s a very swallow perception from me.
Blizzard will have atleast 8 to 10 more builds we can look forward to.
i am currently in the beta and i can tell you that i practically never use consecration. only when doing stuff like killing alot of mobs in DM or something like that. my paladin is at 5944GS i know that dosnt say mych but i know what im doing kinda xD and my consecraton only ticks for roughly 200 at level 83. that combined with the high manacost and low damage simply isnt worth spending a global cooldown for. on another note i havnt experienced any mana issues yet and i never go below whatever the spell costs because of a huge manaregen. it only goes low when you start to throw even the smallest heal so you can only afford doing 2 or 3 heals wich are slow and small so that isnt really worth it either unless you are really low onhealth really really low….
author of this you are welcome to contact me on my email if you want info or have specific requests on info from the beta.
you can contact me on my mail “[email protected]”
I’m concerned seriously about Divine Plea since on my tank build it is very useful. Tank pallys actually need mana for tanking and having 0 mana = no threat (since we do threat with holy dmg mostly).
With that in mind, I have no idea if any talent will tweak this, but on paper, it looks like tank pallys will have mana issues unless they can bring their avoidance to 100 % ( and not mitigation ) so that blessing of sanctuary do it’s work on every hit.
I am also in Beta with a lvl 85 pally and crusader strike has become our main spell. We get that at lvl 1 now. So far I have been trying different rotations because FCFS is dead. We now have to use a rotation that can let us last a fight. Along with the new gear the old t10 doesn’t hold up. I been running Tol Barad the new WG PVP area and just to take down some of the lvl 85 NPC’s I have to eat after most every fight or use my healing spells. Going to be interesting to see what the finial Pally rotation will be.
i need to find a good talent tree an a great rotation for my rep pally iam wanting to do pvp an my dps just does not do it