So given the nature of what runes we have seen and what we do know about our Spell Damage coeffs for our abilities ive seen Rets show concern that our damage won’t be enough due to the runes only going into holy damage abilities for the most part without enough “umph” behind it. If this is the case and the math does check out would the solution then to be “buff spell power coeffs” across the board for Paladin abilities?
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i certainly wouldnt mind that.
I dont play shockadin myself, but i’d happy to see that a playstyle enjoyed by others is no longer a meme style.
I feel like paladins will be fine next phase because most of your damage is based of weapon damage and so the SP will just give your holy spells a bit more scaling.
No. This is how you break it, not fix it.
Exorcism has a coefficient of ~42.9%.
Seal of Command with a 2H, is ~29% is 20%, or 29% of your Holy spell damage.
Judgment of Command is ~20% ~42.9%.
This means, if you have 1000 spell damage, Exorcism gets ~429 damage added, SoC procs get ~290 ~200(~290 if it’s 1000 Holy spell damage) damage added, JoC gets ~200 ~429 damage added. (Thank you to Tira for providing the correct numbers where my sleep-deprived brain typed the incorrect numbers.)
These are your only source of Holy damage that benefit from spell damage(Seal of Righteousness does as well, but you’re not using that over SoC, so we’re not mentioning it right now) while speccing as Ret at level 40. The problem isn’t the coefficients; the problem lies in that the vast majority of your damage will be physical, very little will be Holy, and Holy damage is a small percentage of Ret’s damage profile, by which I mean the amount of Holy damage they’ll do on a fight is a small fraction of their total damage. Especially when factoring Crusader Strike and Divine Storm as well.
You can’t just “buff spell dam coeffs” for SoC or Exo for two different reasons:
- SoC is designed to scale primarily with your weapon damage, not your spell damage or even AP. That having been said, it’s supposed to be an impactful proc, not a devastating proc, like rolling Windfury strikes in 2005. If you increase the spell damage coefficient significantly, you have a situation where you can then stack spell damage to the point where you’ll hit like a wet noodle with a white hit, but when SoC procs it cleaves your enemy atwain. You could say “But I’m not gonna stack spell dam, I’m gonna use str/agi gear and just take Sheath of Light!”, but you can only speak for yourself, not others.
- Exorcism is a base spell, not a talent. Increasing the spell damage coefficient on Exorcism doesn’t just increase the damage for Ret; it increases the damage for all paladins. If you increase the spell damage coefficient significantly, you’re at a point where a healer Holy paladin can take a massive chunk out of your life bar with one cast of Exorcism, with how little +healing gear there seems to be, in comparison to gear that gives +spell dam and healing. It can essentially become a “Delete Scrub” button on a 15 second CD.
I honestly think the best thing they could do for paladins, that want to play ret as they currently do, but get a real benefit from Sheath of Light, is to change Crusader Strike and Divine Storm - be it the runes themselves, or an additional rune that will do this - to be like the Final Verdict talent in WoD for Templar’s Verdict. It reduces the base damage of the ability, but it changes all the physical damage to Holy damage. Since both of these abilities are based off weapon damage, they’ll still primarily scale with your weapon and your AP, but you could double dip a little bit with Sheath of Light if they added a spell damage coefficient when these abilities are doing Holy damage instead of physical damage.
Not to mention more of a reason to take Sanctity Aura, more benefit from Judgment of the Crusader, Vengeance, the fact that Holy damage isn’t mitigated by armor and there isn’t specific Holy damage resistance in the game, etc.
EDIT: If I have incorrect information here(as in if I typed wrong coefficients or wrong spells available to deep ret at 40 or something like that), please inform me and I’ll check later; far too tired to stay up and read my post to make sure I got everything 100% accurate.
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I was thinking about this myself after the fact and that indeed would work imo.
Getting a Templar’s Verdict/Holy Strike ability would do wonders here and something to augment Divine Storm/CS to be “Holystrike” damage. That mechanic on retail is very interesting and would benefit us greatly here. Which is where something like Sheath of Light would truly shine w/o having to screw with coeffs.
The other take I could have is later phases deep into 60 is the potential to gain more talent points or ways to get talents you normally couldnt reach ie: Deep Ret getting Holy Shock.
Adding to this i could see a “Hand of Light” rune that has a way to do this interaction changing Melee into Holystrike hits.
While you get exorcism right, the other two are wrong.
Judgement of command has the same coefficient as exorcism, which is the same as all instant cast damaging abilities.
All SoC procs however (1h or 2h), are 20% spellpower coefficient, or 29% HOLY power coefficient, meaning it gets more value out of holy power than regular spellpower.
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Ehh Priest, Shaman, and especially Druid healers can all do good damage. Nothing wrong with Holy hitting a tad harder, no one is asking for it to be like starsurge with a 1 to 1 sp coefficient.
They would need to take 3+ runes to do damage that instead could have been healing/support runes. Not to mention it seems like they are trying to make Shockadins a thing rather than only Ret as a DPS spec to make them more like Shaman with 4 specs. I don’t see the issue with making them more in line with the other healers who can take their own damage options.
Something I like as you get more use out of being a Hybrid as a shockadin and it would probably help Alliance with their lack of healers in battlegrounds atm.
I do agree with your idea about CS and DS.
lack of healers… what?
every single pvp matchup ive been in has had alliance healers in it and a few pallies offhealing.
you got nothing but healing on alliance side.
you crazy.
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Classic has fairly consistent spell power coefficients based on the cast time, and function of the spell. Whether it’s AoE, a DoT, etc. Few spells venture far from the formula and I can’t see this being an exception.
Ret shouldn’t get any buffs until they fix the obvious. Melee attacks should trigger Seals and Wild Strikes like they do for other melee attacks on other melee classes.
Once you see where they are after that, you can make adjustments. Maybe they’re too strong and only CS, but not DS should be able to proc. Maybe they’re too weak and need some other adjustments to CS damage and cooldown.
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I wish I’ve been doing random battlegrounds on and off all day and I got a single game with 3 priests and we ended up being stuck with a premade.
The majority of my games have been 0-1 healers with few Pally’s around for offhealing other than myself, spent more time healing than I would like today considering I’m ret. Other than a single game I played today that was 0 main healers on both teams it’s been 2-3 priest every game Horde side and far more balanced druids for offheals than druids/pally I’ve seen Alliance side.
Lots of warriors and rogues today on the alliance from what I noticed.
We both could just be unlucky if you are seeing that many healers outside of premades.
either way.
all changing the coefficients would do would create unkillable healers who also do TRUCK LOADS OF DAMAGE on a short cooldown.
heck the sacred shield thing is gonna unbalance pally healers to a very large degree . just wait.
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That’s the thing, if they want to do decent damage they give up the shield as they will need to take art of war and get in melee for Sheath of Light and HS/Exo procs and will want to go with ret gear over SP if they want to do decent damage even then. That might change with a spell power coeff change but without it you go ret gear to get more damage as Holy even with all the runes for the spells.
I also find healers are not unkillable in SoD, unless like 3 are stacked and supporting one another… We do so much damage now and it will only get more crazy in P2 with all the old favorites getting more damage, CC, and coming online.
As for the shield thankfully for Horde it should not really be a huge issue. You have two classes that can easily purge it off the pally. I do find it a bit much if you get the 500 shield at lvl 40 and it’s not scaled with levels like other spells.
Well in regard to AoW this also brings up the mana issue it would cause vs Guarded by the Light.
Which then the damn thing should probably increase Exorcism/Holy Shock damage and Exorcism’s mana cost is reduced to 0.
Paladin isent a caster dps so why would it have nukes that hit as hard as a mage? we already got wrath paladin in classic so not sure what more people want, exo wont be hiting as hard as a starsurge obviously and it would be broken if they buffed the coeffs while keeping things like art of war in the game
They buffed martyr and CS mana return to 5%, so mana isent going to be a issue at all with aow
I hope it isnt with Martyr after the buff because if you are using Divine Storm it sure as hell will be.
People need to stop taking ptr changes as granted to be committed to live.
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True, though its the potential of the changes that can spark discussion and thoughts about the matter.
Besides no lie here, i think unless that big potential to Martyr is the case that Divine Storm + Guarded will do more because Mana issues are a massive thing. Also too many of us love Command.
Yea Ima bit concerned myself but I hope Blizz see’s what can be done in the future for Ret Paladins and maybe even add some runes were not aware from with the data mine stuff we all saw on wowhead. Who knows though what Blizz has planned and Ima keep my expectations low but have high hopes towards the end of SOD overall to see what they were thinking. I think the shockadin stuff is cool and maybe its really good come end phase. I do hope for more burst for Rets to at least keep up or have a good place with damage for raid overall. The one thing I just want back is twisting if they ever plan to do so with SoC & Martyrdom, or just make Martyrdom do more damage cause its pretty lackluster compared to DS atm.
Once again who knows what they plan on doing but im excited for the future, (im tryna be at least lol).
Thank you for correcting me there. I pulled up the spell damage coefficient list I have and I definitely see these are right. I see SoR has slightly different coefficients between 1H and 2H(10% vs 12.5%). I also thought I typed that SoC is 20% spell damage or 29% Holy damage, so I must’ve been more out of it than I thought. Will edit my post to reflect this.
I don’t have an issue with Holy hitting harder. My issue with directly increasing the spell damage coefficient is that if the intention is to increase ret damage this way, to a point that Exorcism in particular would get a significant damage increase every time you pressed the button versus its current coefficient, paladins that aren’t running Sheath of Light and ignoring spell damage on gear, and are instead stacking spell damage, a higher coefficient would lead to this being a potentially MASSIVE burst for paladins, when that’s not the reason for the buff.
It doesn’t help that currently, there’s a lot of gear that will give you spell damage (“increases damage and healing done” gear) and a lot less that gives +healing, to the point where you can heal pretty closely to a dedicated healer with very little gear that doesn’t increase spell damage as well. A holy paladin in PvP would be a very effective healer still while demolishing enemies with Exorcism.
I wouldn’t mind a way for it to be more valuable each cast for ret, but I don’t think buffing the spell damage coefficient is the right way. Maybe a rune that gives better scaling when you have Sanctity Aura on or something, so you’d need to invest at least 21 points in Retribution for it to be usable. Maybe something that amplifies spell damage when Vengeance is active, so you’d need at least 26 points in Retribution for it to do anything, and 30 points to get the full effect. I’m sure there are other ways to improve spell damage for ret without turning spells into stuff that’s easily cheesable for holy.
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