P8 Ret Paladin PTR Changes 4/1/25

In Development Season of Discovery Patch 1.15.7 PTR
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Hello,

Yesterday we saw changes for ret paladin tier 2 and tier 1 set bonuses.

While I can acknowledge that there WAS justification for nerfing ret DPS numbers to be more in line with other classes as well as balancing the 3 main playstyles to be similar in performance to each other, the way it was achieved feels overhanded and unnecessary.

Regarding the t2 4pc change: This absolutely guts the rhythmic play style of seal twisting as well as being a significant nerf to stacking (who also received a direct 35% nerf to their sealbearer tier bonus). The results of these changes actively hinder/hurt two playstyles and how they feel and play, and make them more clunky as a result.

The t2 2pc bonus is understandable as it is just a reduction of numbers. Lowering our dps output by adjusting the numbers is fine!

But doing a drastic change to a rotation that has been built upon and improved for several phases that essentially kills the way that build is played seems too much.

I would like to see more thought into this from the devs.

t2 4pc 5sec judgement reduction is critical for the twist playstyle, and is critical for stacking as well.

You can nerf the damage of the judgements/double judge instead without affecting the CD reduction, achieving the same result (less dps) without murdering a playstyle and thus making the game less enjoyable/fun for others.

I believe all playstyles (exo, stack, twist) should be viable and fun to play. With this change they’re all viable, but not necessarily all fun.

And we play to have fun, right? I don’t need to be top dps. I want to enjoy the gameplay though, which I will not if these changes go live.

A lot of pallies consider SoD pally to be one of the most fun iterations of paladin, and I’d agree. It was fun because we had and were given the ability to play these different playstyles and experiment, on the experimental seasonal server that is SoD. This goes against the spirit of SoD in that regard.

Which is a true bummer because I have been very hyped for Phase 8 and what you all have come up with, and instead am now incredibly demotivated from returning next phase.

Paladin
*The Tier 1 6-piece bonus now reduces the damage of Seal of Command, Righteousness, and Martyrdom by 35% (was 15%)
*The Tier 2 2-piece bonus now increases the damage of your damaging Judgements by 5% (was 20%)
*The Tier 2 4-piece bonus now reduces the cooldown of your Judgements by 2sec (was 5sec)
*Righteous Vengeance now deals 30% of the critical damage of abilities that proc it (was 50%)

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Lets just be honest here, you and other paladins enjoyed it because your burst was way overtuned and you could 1-2 shot people. You had your “time in the sprinkler” and needed to be brought back down.

Also, why would you want to be tied to old set bonuses? There are going to be 4 tiers of gear yet you think you should have the same OP burst by stacking every single one of them?

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  1. I’m talking strictly PVE. PVP balance, lmao imagine caring about that in classic.
  2. They nerfed PVP burst for stack and twist by nerfing seal stack damage, and limiting templar rune to 1h only. This means that the primary “one shot pvp build” consisting of combining 6pc t1 + Templar is not usable without a 1h, and does significantly less damage, and reverting t2 4pc judgement change would not reverse those changes.
  3. With the change to 4pc t2 it affects the entire flow of how twist is played in PVE. It drastically changes the rotation. The rotation is what is fun. Not “one shotting ppl in pvp”
  4. It’s not that we necessarily want to be tied to old set bonuses, but as ret paladin is built off a class and spec that were completely unviable in vanilla and baseline spells/talents the only way they’ve been able to make us viable and scale us is with set bonuses. Other classes already were viable or had a solid baseline to build off of with runes.
  5. Our playstyles existence is directly tied to these old set bonuses. By removing them or nerfing them to try to push us to new tier, they’re effectively killing those playstyles and rotations without a viable alternative.
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Also, another question. Why do you feel like you should get basically 5 different specs for one class? You can tank, heal, and dps. And within dps you have 3 different playstyles, almost 4 with quasi-shockadin. Why? Seems a bit much to ask for all of the above.

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The devs gave us three distinct playstyles and have supported and built on top of them for multiple phases, until now. They could’ve killed any number of playstyles if the intent was to only have and support one or two variants.

The devs gave us three playstyles, so maybe direct that question to them?

To support it for multiple phases then suddenly make a drastic change in the very last phase of SoD just feels like a rug pull, and I don’t believe you’re arguing in good faith anyways. PVP Burst should and was addressed. PVE class balance should and was addressed.

But both came on top of changes that affected our rotation. It is possible to nerf DPS/damage output (both pve and pvp), and yes pvp burst without negatively affecting the playstyles, which is my point.

I don’t and haven’t disagreed with nerfs to our damage output. My issue arises from the changes being heavy handed and doing more than just lowering our burst and dmg output.

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Heavy handed nerfs are extremely frustrating, I get it. As a mage what they did to the tier 3 set bonuses is almost criminal. However, we both need to see the new sims and find out the new current end result. The last sims had pallies on top by a large margin.

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I don’t mind the nerfs but the change to the 4pc t2 is going to make the class much less fun to play.

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Why not? How does this affect you?

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No one is arguing with the need to pull paladins down to the rest of the pack. Raw damage isn’t the issue here. We’ve generally had it pretty good as paladins in SoD, no denying that.

The problem is the destruction of one of our most beloved playstyles, twisting. We’re just disappointed that they decided to fork the rotation instead of finding better levers to pull us down with.

2p T3.5 would have been a great candidate to nerf % damage increase, for instance.
Nerfing OLD sets and destroying an existing rotation is less than ideal.

I’d also argue from first principles that it’s not in line with the Classic™ ethos – old content/gear should remain relevant for progression in content that’s meant to be evergreen.

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I really think blizzard needs to rethink the tier 2 4 piece changes. Its really hurts the twisting playstyle too much and feels like they are forcing ret players into a playstyle instead of giving us the freedom of all the different builds that have popped up in SOD

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So the issue why they nerfed judicator (t2 4pc) is this. If you nerf the new tier 2pc, you nerf exo, since that “playstyle” only presses a single button, small damage changes hit it the hardest. Why blizzard would want a one button spam playstyle to be on par with situational rotation playstyles is beyond me though.
Now if you keep judicator(t2 4pc) the way it is, the stacking playstyle would never unequip it, even if you add a negative judgement damage modifier to it. I’m pretty sure the t2 nerf was because they wanted people who play the stacking playstyle to be able to use the new tier.

I don’t personally know what the devs were thinking completely destroying the twisting playstyle, when they said that twisting existed as a high skill high reward playstyle. Now the rotation is completely RNG reliant which is something the devs themselves they wanted to avoid in BWL, and its more complicated yet does the same dps almost as hitting exorcism over and over. I really don’t know what goes on internally with the sod dev team and how they came to this conclusion, but from the outside it looks real bad. One of if not the hardest dps rotation in the game now with skip twisting, and even with a legendary, is lower than the class average dps.

I’d hope there are some changes next Tuesday but I highly doubt it since the phase starts next week. We’ll probably be bandaid fixed like every other phase in sod so far once they realize they messed up Paladin dps pretty bad (See phase 1, 2, 3, and 4). But I’m not gonna hold my breath.

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Could not agree more with these comments here - SOD seal twisting has been the most fun I’ve ever had playing WoW and I’m bummed to see that the rotation is going to become clunky and unfun after the 4pc T2 nerf. I am 100% okay with a nerf to overall damage but this is really disappointing. Was hyped for P8 and Ashbringer but this has put a pretty big damper on my excitement…honestly wish we had more time in P7 at this point if Blizz is going to kill the seal twisting rotation in this way.

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Since this thread was posted Seal Stacking received a further 10% dmg reduction. (total 45%). This in addition to losing 3 sec judge may effectively just kill the playstyle completely, while twist is still in the situation described above where our rotation is drastically altered and made more clunky due to loss of t2 4pc judgement reduction.

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Yeah I don’t know anymore. Blizzard clearly has abandoned supporting all these different styles and has one or two visions of what ret pally looks like now and wants us to play their vision. This to me looks like bad design.

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This is a good post and I hope the devs see it and take a second go at the changes. Bringing down damage is fine, but changing the judge cd takes so much fun out of the rotation.

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Incredibly well worded, just about sums up everyone’s thoughts that I’ve seen from the SoD pally discord. Thank you for this post. I’m hoping someone important from blizzard sees it. I think that reverting Judicator nerf would be the biggest thing a lot of us are asking for in order to preserve the playstyle and rotation that many of us have come to know and love. Actively making our rotation clunky and significantly less satisfying is not the way to bring about the balance changes they’re aiming for.

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I agree that the burst damage was quite ridiculous. I don’t PvP a whole lot in SoD anymore. I think that what horde players are looking for is a reduction in frontloaded damage from Ret players but some of these changes just aren’t going to affect that and instead affect our rotation directly (see Judicator nerfs). I’ve heard that some folks would run t1 6pc, t2 2pc, and templar for insane damage between twist/double judge/CS, which in and of itself has since been nerfed, which does translate into PvE changes for Stack players. I think what paladin players are asking for isn’t to keep the same throughput in PvE/PvP, but rather to have our PvE rotations kept intact during the balance changes Blizzard is attempting to make.

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Nobody wants, well the rational ones anyways, pallies to be gutted nor fall on the meters in PvE. However we can all agree, I hope, that the burst was way overtuned and the cause for most of these threads. The real bs started when certain pallies claimed that their newly “discovered” burst was just fine and everybody else needed to L2P, get better gear, and bring consumes for every encounter. If they can figure out a way for you guys to keep your play style, but tone down the burst then I think most of the “other side” would be all for it.

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tell me a shaman main without telling me you’re a shaman main. Get out of here

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Too many words for ya?

Would you have preferred a colorful picture?

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