Hi people. I have a possible dummy quest. Seal of Crusader says:
Fills the Paladin with the spirit of a crusader for 30 sec, granting 326 melee attack power. The Paladin also attacks 40% faster, but deals less damage with each attack. Only one Seal can be active on the Paladin at any one time.
Unleashing this Seal’s energy will judge an enemy for 10 sec, increasing Holy damage taken by up to 20. Your melee strikes will refresh the spell’s duration. Only one Judgement per Paladin can be active at any one time.
I know it make very clear that the increase holy damage is up to 20. Howevery, anyone knows what limits that?
For instance: I use Seal of Crusader, Judement and then, Seal of Righteousness.
Seal of Righteousness say:
Fills the Paladin with holy spirit for 30 sec, granting each melee attack an additional 1 to 4 Holy damage. Slower weapons cause more Holy damage per swing. Only one Seal can be active on the Paladin at any one time.
In this case, my target will not takes additional 21 to 24 holy damage (20 from Seal of Crusader and 1 to 4 from Seal of Righteousness). In fact, it seems to take 6 to 7 extra holy damage (from average 2.5 to average 6.5 extra damage).
Each spell in the game has a coeffecient, which determines what % of your +spell damage gets added to it. Judgment of the Crusader simply adds spell power (up to 20) like gear. Since Seal of Righteousness has a coeffecient of 10% you’ll only get a damage increase of 2 out of the possible 20 JoC provides.
So in your example, anyone who has Holy specific skills that actually scale with Spell Power would get that amount added to their skill. Since very few spells actually have a 100% coefficient, you wouldn’t actually see a full additional 20 damage from the ability. Like so:
https://classic.wowhead.com/spell=10934/smite
Smite, Rank 8, 71.4% SP coefficient.
A Priest with 100 SP, and no talents, would hit between 455.4 and 500.4 Holy Damage per cast of Smite.
That same Priest attacking your example debuff would instead hit between 469.68 and 514.68 Holy Damage per cast of Smite.
So the mystery of Judgment of the Crusader is to merely treat it like free Spell Power that only works for Holy skills that actually scale with Spell Power.
That last bit is the other tricky thing. A few Paladin skills definitely deal Holy damage… but they don’t scale with Spell Power.
Seal of Righteousness does scale with Spell Power, albeit very very slowly, at 10%. So your 1 to 4 with a bonus of 20 SP would therefore be hits between 3 to 6.
The damage from Seal of Righteousness is mostly static and scales with your weapon’s speed. Slower weapons get the 3-4 and faster weapons get 1-2. In addition, the coefficient is 10% spell power for one handed (faster weapons) and 12.5% for two handed (slower weapons). The holy attack bonus also changes with your level to 2-8 I think.
So the trick is that Seal of the Crusader does not flat increase your damage, but it increase your Spell Power for holy damage, increasing damage accordingly.
Yup. Take the coefficient of the holy damage ability being used, and that is the % of JotC debuff you will gain in damage.
Some abilities scale differently with plain spellpower, and holy spellpower though. Seal of command, for example, has 20% SP scaling, yet 29% holy SP scaling, meaning it gets more value from JotC than it would spellpower of an equal amount.
SoR coefficients are usually 10% for 1h, and 12.5% for 2h, although rank 3 has much higher scaling for some reason, but then it goes back down.
Also keep in mind that JoR/SoR is based on spell hit and spell crit, rather than melee hit and melee crit. Judgments won’t register as a “miss” when they miss, but a full resist. This is just one of the many strange things about paladin offensive abilities - prot and ret were designed on drugs, without a doubt.
Seems convoluted, but it makes sense that they’d design paladins offensive abilities in that they’d require a bit of everything, which in turn makes it more difficult to gear and stack certain stats.
Also don’t forget, seal of righteousness coefficient depends on wether you have a 2handed weap or a 1handed weap. So if you’re seal of righteousness you’ll always get better dps if your weapon has a quicker attack speed, the quicker the better. A 2Hander with a 2.0 or 2.1 attack speed really shines with SoR.
It makes sense only under the context of gear existing to support it, which there really doesn’t until P5. Around AQ was the time Blizzard started to give non-healing hybrids a fair place in the endgame. It’s a bit rough before then. Given that HL and FoL are hardcasts, being able to play pally as a hybrid just does not work.
I imagine paladins would’ve had an entirely different perception if they functioned more like WC3 paladins, with healing abilities being strong instant casts with semi-short CD’s rather than spammable hard-casts. Only then could I see them fulfilling the “melee support” role in full, as their T1 suggests their intention.
Paladin gearing in Vanilla is a disjointed nightmare if you plan to stick to the armor type that you should be wearing - Plate. That is one reason why I decided to shelf my Human Paladin at 34 in Classic & just recreate a new Dreanei one if TBC Classic ever launches. I had forgotten what a pain they were back in the Vanilla days on my old 60 Paladin at the time. Paladins didn’t pull themselves together as a class until TBC, so the only reason to play one in Vanilla/Classic is out of pure stubbornness & sheer love for the idea/spirit of the class.
Yeah it’s a real shame that vanilla got cut short for the burning crusade expansion, seems the Soulforge and AQ set were their early attempt to offer some options with sets having both melee crit and spell damage on it…as well as some Mp5 as I recall, wish we could have gotten more
Some abilities are actually 1 for 1 for sp dmg and gear or even 2 for 1.
Yes a Paladin has to mix a little this and that.
If ret.
Ppl keep stack AP but if you’re built right and gear right you want sp dmg. Going for higher proc % on certain wpns because it stacks 1 for 1, also try out chilly(it’s good), and your talent to reflect sp crit stacks with sp dmg as well.
Paladin tank and Rets are more so for ppl that theory craft/itemization sim/test.
A lot of time goes into it and gold. You can make a lot of gold as well when you figure it out. Shaman and Paladin are very op in PvP if done right.