Did some math and even with the Art of War change, you on average without seal/judgement talent get 5-6 rotations before you oom.
While the Art of War change was a step in the right direction, a real flow issue still exists. You have a few choices. Best option is still not running Art of War, maintaining Guardian and having mana throughout a boss encounter or more than a few mob packs. Option two is to run Art of War and just not judgement, really worsening the damage and paladin damage is already really bad. Option 3 just just running it like normal, OOM after 6 rotations which is fairly quick and then dropping off entirely.
Crusader strike does not provide enough mana. You still hemorrhage about 280 per rotation and with a mana pool slightly above 1400 (this is without any intellect gear) you will oom very fast. If people say āWell you need better itemizationā I would say two things. Part one is blizzard would need to put in that itemization. Part two is that if its all itemization that would mean that its gated behind gear that you have to really piece together to get. By doing this, you create the only dps class that has to gear itself out before it can be useful. Any other class can still do damage and improve/scale when they get gear. Ret has to sacrifice a damage rune for damage and then falls behind anyways just to make up for the critical issue. No other class has that issue where they have to sacrifice damage in order to continue to play.
Ways we could fix this is a couple of ways. We dont need to implement all but we need to do something.
Crusader Strike increase mana generation to like 10%.
Create a book to have judgement cast replenish
Create a book that makes seals not become consumed on judgement cast. That would solve a good chunk of the issue.
Put Guardian on another slot.
Create a book that makes Exorcism cast on all and or revamp that ability to do something else.
These are just a few ideas. They dont need to be made or all implemented but the flow of paladin still isnt where it needs to be. Its gotten better but I just can not see switching out of Art of War because we do not have the gear to benefit using it unless you are doing a 1v1 pvp duel and even then most will just walk away from paladins. People will main slot Guardian and even with Guardian I have noticed that you still possess an ability to OOM. a 2h paladin sword will not work.
These runes seem to be meant for lvl 60 play with T2 gear in mind as that is the only thing that possesses the itemization needed to properly utilize the runes. Considering we just started p2 and this is going to last for months, A lot of people will not roll ret and just reroll to other more resource efficient classes.
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That is a lot of words, do you drink mana pot on CD?
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Even with Mana pot, you still will have issues with resource management. Not only that but you take away your ability to use other potions like nature/fire/frost which can cause issues with survivability. No other class would have to do that either. Seems like very bad mechanics to require a use of pot chugging just to circumvent the poor implementation of abilities for a class spec.
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Well those can be drank 2 minutes before the fight since they last 1h.
In Era quite a few classes have to drink resource potions to optimize their rotations throughout fights. Especially healers, basically always drink mana pots on CDs (they also eat dark runes to have double bonus mana since diff cd).
Not having enough resources to be āoptimalā is pretty standard vanilla design.
Now, I donāt know how bad it is for ret at the moment. But I generally think it is better for classes to struggle and have to manage resources as opposed to always having enough.
At least youāre not a mage having to sit down all the time, i hear they are also upset.
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Well the issue is the extremely quick OOMing. 6 rotations. You can do that in a flash just about.
For potions lets minmax that for a second.
You take your resist pot of choice and then pull the engagement. You then burn through your entire mana pool and the fight isnt over. You have two options. You can drink the mana pot and put your thing on a 2m+ cd or survive and keep that open for possible another pot. Stuff happens and if you take a mana pot and cant redo another resist or the phase changes to a different element (like frost to nature ect) and you are now locked out for that fight/phase and have no option for consume. Not a good look.
You can take the mana pot and you will still empty it out after a couple more rotations. Then you still have that 2m+ timer. Hopefully it will be dead by then but with ret you can burn through mana extremely fast if you seal then judgement then seal again. thats already 250 of your mana done in a blink and thats 1/6ish of your mana pool spent.
Well you want to drink the mana pot ASAP, so you hope is that the fight last enough for 2 potions. Chug the first one as soon as you use the average mana it will refill (you can frontload mana heavy spells). Then maybe you get a second one depending on the encounter.
If you are worried about dying you are still a paladin and can bubble up, you can bubble + bandage if you are low as well
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The point im trying to make is that we would be the only dps class that would have to chug that hard and even with chugging it still wouldnt do enough. Greater mana potion is 700-900mp gain. At max with a drain of 280 per rotation you will get 3.2 out of it. a rotation takes about 10 seconds to come back online so it buys you 30 seconds and you are left with 1.5 minutes of oom for the rest of the fight.
This is just for rotations too. We havent even touchedā¦TOUCHED utility yet. Offhealing, purify, bubble, blessing of freedom. That means if we wanted to use any utility we would be far more of a deficit unless we ignore half of our class. At that point might as well roll warrior or Melee Hunter.
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If dps get unlimited mana pools, then healers should to!!!
Not unlimited but reasonable. I can understand going OOM but not instantly. Every other dps has longer staying power for their mana. Considering that a class that cant build intel for their dps has to rely on mana it should last longer. Hunters are the same but last far longer and have a book that solves that issue. Not a rune, but a book.
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Ok Im dumb idiot not knowing how to optimally play this game but Im glad Im not the only one who felt that Art of War doesnt feel viable for Ret despite the better damage output solely because I kept running out of mana too much.
With Guarded by Light, I can keep doing my full rotation without worrying about mana and to me that feels a lot fun and better than the latter.
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Exactly, if mana equals dpsā¦ wouldnt you want to use the rune that allows you to manage mana better?
Almost kinda like choices matter in an rpg kinda of feel?
Best case scenario for art of war damage is you judge seal of crusader, reseal command, exorcism, get a crit ds and another exorcism, crit cs and another exorcism. Thatās 850 mp, the mp gained from greater mp pot, in 6 gcd and a ret in full prebis will have 1900 mp with raid buffs.
Sounds like itās time for Seal of the Martyr 
Well then you lose out on one of your most critical damage abilities, Divine Storm.
Lets say you do run martyr. So now you replace command. That talent point will not be well spent anywhere else either.
So its either waste the talent point and lose out on damage just to get more mana orā¦lose out on damage by taking a mana generating rune that will give you more damage in the longrun by having staying power.
There just isnt a better option.
Well you jokers probably all play with blessing of might instead of wisdom too. Even on the classic ret paladin you ALWAYS want wisdom running.
And obviously you will run into mana troubles on the SOD paladin during leveling. Why do you expect anything else? The class already had mana issues before getting your weird retail abilities.
I never played SOD and this is obvious. Have some foresight.
On level 60 this will even out and your overpowered meta clown class will oneshot absolutely everything. Like here (tbc prepatch) but even worse:
20 mp5 will not offset the rapid expenditure of mana for rotations. Also you have never played SoD so your knowledge of the subject matter pertaining to this particular instance is lacking.
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Yea just ignore the rest of what i said Einstein.
You play a class that already struggled with mana without any use abilities in a version of the game that added multiple use abilities to it and you expect it to not run into mana management issues.
Very smart. Lots of foresight. I definitely need to play SOD to know thisā¦
No actually i couldve told you this months before SOD launched. Its completely obvious.
worlds least obnoxious paladin
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Paladinās problem is entirely that all itās runes provide some of the worst anti-synergy iāve ever actually seen.
- Crusader strike and DS donāt interact at all with our core ability, seals
- exorcism shares a slot with all of our utility abilities
- guarded by the light is our only mana sustain option, but it completely guts our heals
- art of war is literally useless without locking us into picking exorcism
- infusion of light is literally useless unless youāre bottomed out in holy, and even then, literally has no function for the holy treeās primary purpose of healing
- Sheath of lightās biggest value is pumping heals, since the seals we have that scale on spellpower only function on our white hits, unless you wanna further lock yourself into taking exorcism, but it forces a healer to sit in melee, and stop healing to hit an enemy every minute to maintain the buff, since we have no real instant casts of value
- Sacred shield provides our target a hot upon being crit healed, but its non stacking, so a lot of the bonus healing just overlaps from it.
People here be legit dedicating 3 rune slots to making one spell (exorcism) become a half viable dps ability, and then wondering why weāre falling behind, while every other class gets completely new things for all their rune slots.
I think the only rune that we got that was actually half decent this phase, was Enlightened Judgements, because it got rid of our need to spell hit cap through itemization, and (hopefully) is lining up a long arm of the law rune, and possibly TBC judgement of justice to finally give us a gap closer and a snare that has some value, but currently as it is, itās incredibly mediocre, becasue we just donāt need that much hit, and 30 yard judgements donāt really have any value with the current judgements we have available.
Absolutely none of what we currently have carries on the classic paladin theme, and it all just looks like a bunch of puzzle pieces from different puzzle sets that donāt fit together in the slightest.
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That is also exactly correct. Thank you for this post!
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