Why change twist pally rotation now?

In Development Season of Discovery Patch 1.15.7 PTR
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Reposting this in the PTR channel.

I want to ask this as nicely as I can, nerfs and balancing are understandable but why change a tier set in such a way that the rotation changes? The twist pally rotation has been a lot of fun and if the damage was too severe was there no other way to balance this? I have been having a lot of fun with this rotation and it just feels weird to change it now in the last phase of SOD.

10 Likes
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Agree. This is bad for long term retention. It’s not about damage, it’s about a smooth rotation.

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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.

1 Like
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Just commenting to show support. These changes seem heavy handed and like they weren’t thought out fully. I’ll likely unsubscribe after the first clear of the new raid if these go live.

I don’t know how to change what character I’m posting from. But my main is the Paladin Hatecraft (formerly known as Lovecraft before the forced transfer) on Crusader Strike.

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I agree - the 4pc T2 change is a real bummer. The current seal twist rotation is so smooth and I don’t really have the desire to learn/play a much clunkier version.

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Naxx has been peak twisting. These changes as a baseline just don’t feel good on the PTR, and adds to the list of ret seeming to be clunky/rough to play in P8:

  • Requires Feral Druid, or lose 20% of your damage.
  • Judgment is a clunky part of our rotation now, given balancing T4 buff uptime, and trying to fit it in with every other twist.
  • T4 Requires unintuitive gameplay where you’re avoiding twisting at certain spots so you can maintain set bonus buffs with higher uptime. It’s like warrior T1 6pc avoiding pressing intuitive damage buttons, for the sake of maintaining buffs.
  • Our progression damage is just absolutely slammed.
  • Entirely reliant on 2 piece to do damage at all.
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Insane changes a week out from the FINAL phase of the season completely gutting the fundamental rotations and gameplay of almost every ret spec. Certainly is one way of wrapping things up and making people stop playing sooner and pushing them onto other versions of the game.

3 Likes
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I welcome and expected damage nerfs, but wrecking the flow of an engaging and fun playstyle seems unnecessary

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Paladin
Retribution
Tier 1 6-piece / Soul of the Sealbearer now reduces the damage of Seal of Command, Righteousness, and Martyrdom by 45% (was 15%)
The Tier 4 2-piece bonus now increases holy damage by 10% per stack of Holy Power (was 20%)
The Tier 4 6-piece bonus now increases attack power by 15% per Holy Power consumed (was 10%)

devs pls

1 Like
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Ya, changes to the rotation this late make no sense at all. There’s better ways to nerf a class than completely gutting the rotation in what has been the best version of the spec to date. But, classic Blizzard to just throw a million nerfs at a spec and then slowly revert those changes over weeks while they lose players.

1 Like
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Crazy if these nerfs go through twisting gameplay peaked in Naxx.

Please don’t go through with this, leave judgement as a 3 second CD.

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Someone in the other thread mentioned that maybe swapping the t2 4pc and 6pc set bonuses would maintain twists playstyle, while being too deep for stacking to go after it. Personally this sounds like a good idea, and since they just swapped hunter and shaman set bonuses around, this should be an easy fix for the devs to do so Twisting Paladins can maintain their playstyle.