f13.net

http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/12/09/the-great-hunter-nerf-of-2008/

Main stuff:

# Steady Shot – now only gains 10% of attack power as damage (down from 20%).
# Volley – reduced the damage by about 30% for all ranks.
# Readiness - no longer affects the cooldown of Bestial Wrath.
# Deterrence – has been completely overhauled. It now allows you to deflect 100% of incoming melee or spell damage for 5 seconds, but prevents you from attacking while active. You still must be facing the attacker to deflect the damage (this is a limitation we are trying and might end up removing). 60 sec cooldown.
# Kill Shot – cooldown reduced to 15 sec (from 35 sec).
# Kindred Spirits – now only grants 3/6/9/12/15% pet damage.
# Serpent's Swiftness – now only grants 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack speed to pet.
# All hunter pet abilities with a cooldown longer than 30 sec have been moved off the global cooldown.
# Growl - threat generation increased by 20% (same for Voidwalker Torment).
# Call of the Wild – now benefits only the hunter and his or her pet.
# Rake and Scorpid Poison – slightly nerfed to bring them into line with other pet abilities.
# Spirit Strike – reduced the period on the dot so it will work better with Longevity.
# Improved Tracking – now benefits damage to all included creature types as long as you are tracking one of them. You don't have to swap around what you are tracking as much.
# Aspect of the Wild – now raid-wide.

I am so completely not surprised by the volley nerf. I'm guessing hurricane gets it soon too. Get ready moonkins!  :drill:

And then CoH is getting it.

Also wild growth is on the 6 second cooldown plan like CoH.

I'm a little more interested in how the AE damage thing will shake out, really - it seems to me from where I sit (tanking) that volley and hurricane are the dominant AE things, but we don't have a mage or warlock at 80 yet so I don't know how they're stacking up. The word is AE damage is too high across the board, which makes me think that maybe the elemental AE damage changes they've talked about will get put off in favor of nerfing everything else.

Just more reason to Typhoon  :oh_i_see:

I would not be surpised at all if hurricane gets nerfed a bit. Its hilariously better than it was in TBC especially speced fully for it. Also before it had a one minute cool down and now there is no cool down. I would expect the talent to get chopped from 50% damage boost to 25% damage boost and the base damage lowered a bit.

As long as the knockback on thunderstorm is not affected by anything, I'm happy.


I love knock back skills.

The thing I expect to get nerfed on Hurricane is the Attack Speed Debuff. The Top rank has a 50% decrease, it's a pretty huge damage decrease on the tank when a bunch of crap is attacking.

Mage is a little weak if the two I've run with are any indication. They were always way behind both me and the 'lock on damage meters when we were AOEing stuff.   Part of it is that everyone hates that fucking explosion/ knockback thing, so mages are back to spamming Arcane explo or Blizzard instead of having 2 ae abilities at once.   Lock seems to be doing just fine what with being able to seed and hellfire.   DKs will be getting nerfed at some point because, my god D&D + Unholy blight + Pestilence/ BB is fucking awesome.

AE WILL get nerfed, becuase it's just ungodly right now.  There is no CC in instances, round shit up and nuke it down.  It's too easy and fun, so it must be changed.  I see it coming and that's why I've tried running Heroics as often as possible.  Farm badges now while it's easy.

As for the hunter stuff, yeah, no surprise here. S'why I stopped playing one. They're awesome for a short while, then get nerfed into line and continually suffer in any 1v1 pvp vs the same effort in any other class.  I'm tired of it.

I'm always happy when hunters get nerfed.

Because I love playing a hunter.

Now, hopefully, a nice big chunk of the retards who love playing a hunter will all go running to Death Knight.

It's long past time that some other class got the "designated dumbass" label. Yeah, I know, rogues. Still not assumed to be as disastrously moronic as the average hunter. Much less *elf hunter.

Well, most people knew this was coming with hunter dps being so out of control atm.  I've seen numerous WWS reports with hunters sustaining well over 5k dps, and not with best of the best in every slot type gear either.  I see they're really trying to tone down the pets which was needed for BM with them pushing towards 2k dps with raid buffs.  

I'm guessing frostfire mages will see a slight nerf in the near future as they're not far behind hunters and rogues seem to need some love.  Personally I think it's pretty ironic how hunters and rogues have completely flip flopped raid viability from pre-BC to now.  Neither has a ton of utility to bring (edit: hunters are lot better now with raid buffs in each spec but dps is still priority); pre-BC hunter dps was very weak compared to other dps classes by the time AQ and Naxx were out but got raid spots thanks to tranq shot, now hunters are the dps kings while rogue dps is struggling but they have a tranq shot equivalent in the new antiseptic poison and even a misdirection equivalent of sorts in tricks of the trade.  Glad I'm not playing a rogue atm, I'd be hard pressed to justify my spot in a raid.  Blizzards love of making non-mele friendly fights typically means there's only room for a select few mele dps and once raid content stops being pushover easy (T8 and/or T9 mabey?) I can see them possibly losing their spot to any other mele dps if something isn't done.  They're near the bottom of the mele dps barrel and every other mele dps offers some sort of significant utility/buffage or superior dps.

I think a somewhat problematic issue may arise with the new raid wide buffs and having them not stack.  Obviously it was designed that way to allow lots of flexiblity in raid composition for 10 man content, but with only a few classes providing alll the buffs you need, every spot left to fill after you have the buffs covered is gonna be purely dps(or threat/mitigation/hps/etc.)  based and certain classes look like they could get the shaft thanks to how their new talents turned out.

Actually the new priest spell mind sear is pound for pound some of the highest dps aoe out there, it's like a pulsing seed of corruption, every hit per mob is crittable, benefits from almost all shadow talents and has VERY high dmg coefficient.

It's not unsual for my mindsear to be critting regularly for 2200 every pulse which is one per sec.

So yeah spriests might get a nerf but i swear to god they had better not take this away from me...we've waited so long for a good aoe...so long...

Fear not. There have to be people playing priests for them to be nerfed.  It's why Druids got away with so much. Until folks started rolling them in large numbers, that is.


I felt the same way for a long, long time.  (In fact, it's hard to find a person who hates hunters more than another hunter. ;)  ) Then I rolled a different class (lock) and PVP'd with it for a bit.  The amount of effort I had to put forth to do well was so much less than as a hunter I was disgusted with the class and gave-up. Fuck, I even had inferior gear when compared to my hunter and I was raping face.

Blizz doesn't have clue one what to do with the class as a whole and I'm tired of waiting on them to figure it the fuck out.  Particularly when most of the competent, informative hunter community posts are greeted with stupid shit like, "Well hunters want EVERYTHING off the GCD." (Which they've gone and done anyway.)  :oh_i_see:

I await the day when the next big MMOG realizes that pet classes can't be tuned, and shouldn't be included in their game.

They can.

It's allowing the player to have their own attacks and abilities on top of their pets' that things get tricky to balance.

Ya, because entire zone WWS reports where a hunter can volley non-stop are a reason to nerf steady shot.

They should have just put a 10 or 15 second cooldown on volley so it can't be chain cast, or made it not get the full benefit of the crit bonus from Mortal Shots. The no-cooldown instead of 60sec was probably a little much after they boosted the dmg on it.

But oh well, my work schedule means that I wont be able to even know what stuff is like until after the nerf anyway.

Nerfing deterrence is dumb, just give us our damn dodge back and put it back in the survival tree. The readiness thing is understandable I guess. I like the kill shot change as 35 seconds was pretty retarded, though I bet the shot gets nerfed as mine already crits for 13k+

Add stealth and CC.  Particularly if the game has PvP.

Good.  I was getting tired of hunters sitting at spots one and two in twenty-five man raids wearing 76-79 blues getting 5K+ DPS while my fully 80 epic rogue was in third place with *only* 3.5KDPS.

Seriously, nerf them in to the ground.

wah wah

Nerf everything but ret pallies!  :awesome_for_real:

Why do some people in dps classes who raid get happy when other DPS get nerfed? Are you that retarded? It's one thing if you're not raiding and you can't get in because nobody will take your low-dps-ass, but being actively upset at the people are #1 who are pumping up your overall DPS towards the win?

Honestly, if a person actually said something like that to me as a raid leader, I doubt I'd keep them very long.

Most raid leaders are Hunters these days.

Nah, most raid leaders are protection warriors, and we're too busy worrying about the other 3 tanks stealing our jorbs to worry about what the DPS slap fight of the week is.

Probably for the same reason you said retarded shit like, "Good, Pallies can heal or GTFO."

Yeah, expecting somebody to actually try to spec for a job that's needed instead of going into the 80% pool of DPS. That's completely insane. You caught me.

You really can't figure that out?  It might have something to do with feeling like your contribution to the raid can be improved upon by ditching you and getting another character with better DPS.

First of all, if one class is doing obvious (and by that I mean 5% ahead of anybody else) dps, they will get nerfed. The hunters knew it was coming, as did we all. That doesn't mean you have to be like "Yeah, fuck THOSE guys on my team." Second, leaders/healers hate when dps get so fucking focused on the meters that I watch them fuck up the important stuff like, "hey don't stand in that glowing shit on the ground." A good leader is never going to replace you because you're in the middle of the pack on DPS meters.

The only type of DPS the leaders care about is the overall number needed to get the job done. Beyond that, there are the DPS who are obviously way below or not in the ballpark, retarded, or can't respond to basic commands. Those get booted. The only kinds of RLs that would fill a raid with only hunters because they were jacked up are the Elitistic Jerk types.

If you wanted to keep a DPS job, my advice would be to worry less about the meters and more about your survivability/utility/taking pressure off your healers.

Pallies are low on the healer desirability list right now. I can't say the same thing for their place on the tanking or DPSing desirability list.

They could be dead last on the healer desirability list. People are still short of healers and would take them for a spot, I assure you. As for tanking, yes they are without a doubt the best AE tanks. However, in a 25 man you need 3 tanks and how many healers?

1.  Nor do you have to be like "Good, Pallies can heal or GTFO."  Seriously, these statements are closer than you think.

2.  Who said anything about the LEADERS?  You wanted to know why people are pissed off about other characters outperforming them and being glad when they are nerfed.  It's pretty obvious why this would be so: Bruised Egos and Envy.

The whole 'debate' began with you bitching about Prot Paladins, stealing your jorb even.  :oh_i_see:

I didn't say it wasn't obvious. I asked why they were so HAPPY about it, and are they really that short-sighted and retarded. From what I'm gathering the answer is an astounding yes, which explains why people hate raiders. Fuck the team, it's all about me. I do what I want, GTFO of my way. Give me my loots, now.

To be honest, I don't raid with people like that, which makes me happy. If they exist en masse in the game, I'm glad we've weeded them out.

Meh, the prot pallies don't bother me much anymore. They have their place, and most of them do a good job at it. They aren't going to take the place of every tank in every raid, but they are pretty badass in 5 mans. With the changes to all classes, every one of the tanks has a chance at AE tanking. Also, tanks don't have their jobs stolen. You create your own job through your leadership skills.

EDIT: That's also not to say that if a raid needs one more healer and I've got 2 pally tanks and a ret pally whining to get in, I'm not going to /sigh.

It's all about the team, as long as the warrior tanks  :oh_i_see:


<Insert "Warriors don't have a Holy Tree" argument here>


<Insert "It's fine as long as *I* get to play my desired spec" defense here>


Repeat x20, lock thread.

I don't care if I MT. I've lead many runs as the OT with pallies and druids. My point was once you get your ego out of the way your team might actually do pretty well.

So is it safe to assume you have a Holy Priest(paladin resto etc) alt ready to go at all times too?


Or does the Heal Tax only apply to those with respec capabilities.

Yeah it does. It's not a tax, either. If you hate healing, don't do it. I'm not saying that OMG BE HEALING ALL THE TIME. I'm saying don't whine about not getting into the raid when you refuse to even consider paying 50g to spec over. If there are 6 healers and 25 DPS signing up, the first player willing to respec is going to get your spot. If the raid was full on tanks, I wouldn't bitch to that Raid Leader. I'd go make my own raid.

Do I think every leader and tank needs to have a healer alt in the wings so they can have that opinion? No. I have one toon, and I'm fine with everybody else having one toon. I hate alts and I'm not really into leveling. I picked what I wanted to play as my main, the same as everyone else. It's ridiculous to expect that people should be a jack of all trades across all toons before they can ask somebody to try healing if they aren't getting into a raid.

Ret paladins have replenishment, and can judge Light or Wisdom, plus put out competitive DPS.  Why must they respec holy again?

Oh right, because putting an onus on someone else to respec, plus waste bag/bank space on offspec gear isn't your problem.

You're a real humanitarian, you are.

Threads like this remind me why WoW has destroyed more guilds than any game I have seen.  This game is so solo focused that it amazes me that people still manage to group up to complete content.  Or maybe it is just the guilds doing the hardest content that attract those types of players and the "rest" of the player base gets along just fine.  In any case, as soon as these arguments start turning into spreadsheets I just lose interest.

Strangely I did not see any nerf in that list that would make me too upset.  Then again my hunter probably sucked in the DPS charts.  By the time I get around to this Xpack it will probably be changed again anyway.

The best way to improve your raid DPS is to replace your rogues with hunters. So yeah, I can see why a rogue would want them nerfed. Actually he shouldn't even be 3rd either, his mages have some explaining to do.

You don't have to do shit. Enjoy your time as ret if you like. Have all the fun you want. Just don't cry about not getting into raids if you're competing against 20 other DPS, and you refuse to heal when they are short.

I'm not making you do anything. I'm trying to impress upon you the overwhelming imbalance of DPS/Healing in the game, and that those willing to adapt will succeed. Is it fair? No, but get a fucking helmet. 80% of the game is DPS.

You mean just like those paladins who picked their paladins so they could play like a paladin and smack people in the face with a giant hammer instead of a priest in plate? You're not helping your case here.

IMO if you want to tell people they need to heal and 'put their ego to the side', you should put your money where your damn mouth is.

Because you say so? Sorry chief, but your unrealitic opinions on how holier-than-thou I have to be before I can ask a hybrid to consider a respec in order to help the team don't matter to me. You don't run with my runs, but we do fine doing just that. More often than not people will post what specs they are and what they can respec to. We have good players who think about the goal and not about just themselves. I'll run and have run in any job that my warrior can do. Others try to do that with their classes as well.

You picked a class that has the option of healing, it's a very likely possibility you'll get asked to heal. So what? Do it if you want, don't do it if you don't want. You can only take so many ret pallies and feral druids before it becomes ridiculous. At some point, you have to find a healer, and if they won't respec you go hunting for one.

/shrug

I have a resto druid alt (and an elemental shaman for the times when we need a dpser - it happens) that I play when we need it for the raid to go off precisely because I think making other people play something they don't want to without being willing to do it yourself makes you kind of a dick. But hey, if you're happy.

The only reason I'm playing my hunter now is because pve is fun.

Pvp on hunters is broken.

Or maybe I just completely suck.

All I know is that I used to be able to be competitive in battlegrounds, and have a shot at killing at least half the classes out there.  Now?  Equally geared, unless I'm facing a healing spec (and then only maybe I have a shot), I can't kill shit.

I don't understand it.  BM Hunters are too strong in pve, but everybody's bitch in pvp.

You can probably chalk that one up to the fact that mobs are too stupid to attack the hunter and not the pet, whereas players quickly jump all over the hunter. That would be my guess anyway. Also resilience and junk. Roots, stuns, and snares. IDK.

Anything that survived on keeping distance is pretty much broken currently. No PvP armor and everyone's damage going up to 11 has reverted things back to a pre-TBC era of 'balance' except everyone has 15 ways to close distance and interrupt now.

Very few ranged specs are having any real success, mostly they just try to get inside the safety of the turret slot on a siege vehicle and cast from there.

So, just to keep score, I have to keep a full set of healing gear, and a full set of ret gear, not to mention gem and enchant both, plus store consumables for two specs.  On top of this, I get to spring for 100g to respec any time the raid is short of healers.  Because, you know, once the damn raid is over, I'm going right back to ret so I can do dailies and whatnot.

You get to tank, and you don't have to roll a healer alt.

That about sum it up?

I'm sure you have no idea why this is unfair.

As for the "good luck not getting into raids", I guess I'd better cancel my invite to Naxx this weekend.  As ret.  Damn the luck.


You don't have to tell me about the lack of healers and tanks in WoW, I've been bitching/laughing about it for years now.  Very little warms my heart more than "Group looking for healer+tank then GTG!"  Or my personal favorite, joining a group with paladin+warrior and finding out, you guessed it, "Group looking for healer+tank then GTG!"  The situation is so ridiculously out of control that I didn't even bother with instances while leveling, other than a very early Nexus run, and an extremely abortive attempt at Old Kingdoms that resulted in 8+ wipes and only getting 2 bosses down.

So yeah.  I'm all too aware there's a dire lack of healers.  Unlike you, I don't place the blame on players, but rather on Blizzard.  If they'd make it so heal/tank specs could solo somewhat on par with DPS specs, there'd be less issue.  If healing and tanking were lower stress jobs, yes JOBS, in an entertainment, then perhaps there'd be more people tanking and healing.  Instead, people'd rather do something relatively low stress like push buttons in the correct order to DPS down a mob, while maintaining a minimal amount of situational awareness.

No doubt I'll be pushed to go back into healing at some point, if for no other reason than heal plate apparently rains from the sky in Wrath.  I can hardly contain my enthusiasm.  Hooray for single target healing in an AE environment.   :awesome_for_real:

I never said it was fair. In fact I think I said that not 5 posts ago. Being mad at Blizzard is pointless though. You can make due with the reality of the situation while advocating something better, or you can be bitter and remove yourself from that aspect of the game. I choose the former. I hope they make healing so much fun that every player in the game would want to give it a shot, but I'm not going to stop organizing raids until they figure that part out. Hell, I wish it was like Diablo where healers and tanks didn't exist, and we could all beat everything down with impunity.

That's not the game we signed on for though.

Blizzard has crafted a game that requires tank+healer+3x dps, on average, to advance.  They've done this three times now: Vanilla, BC, and again with Wrath.  I think it's safe to blame them for building a game with intentional cockblocks such as "80% of the playerbase likes to play DPS, let's make it so 20% have to play tank, 20% have to play healer.  That all adds up to 100%, right?"  Safe to say, it's their fault.

Hell, their new tank/dps class has blown up in their face, just as everyone knew it would.  Finding a tank DK is probably as difficult as finding a holy paladin.

It continues to be hilarious how everyone else has to "suck it up" while he was right there bitching up a storm when Druids and Paladins were putting warriors on the back-burner for a while in BC due to mitigation or AOE tanking ability.  Now that warriors were given better AOE tanking and druids mit was nerfed, it's funny how the tune changes.


I rolled a DK to tank initially.  Then I discovered what a stone cold bitch it is tanking with a 2hder when we can't stack parry, Dodge or Def because then wars could as well, overpowering them.  Whoopsie, Blizz forgot the tanking/ mit talents to make up for the lack of a shield on the new tank class.  IBF and Bone Shield go a long way towards helping, but they only help reduce the problem, they don't eliminate it.

Nah, there are way more tank DK's then Holy Paladins.


Way, waaaay more.



Also of note to DK Tanks: http://blue.mmo-champion.com/28/13393389855-upcoming-death-knight-changes.html

My god the about of bitter tears in this thread is enough to fill a lake of anguish.

I will say though that it doesn't matter how fin you make tanks or healers, people will always gravitate towards dps. Now you could make a game where you have neither tanks nor healers or give everyone all those abilities but then things tend to feel bland.

Also i guarantee even if every single player had the same heal button, only 30% would ever want to use it.

They could implement a game where the damage isn't so high that it's required for 20-33% of your players have their eyes glued to a UI tracking debuffs, buffs, dead people, and healthbars that are going down.  While focusing on removing debuffs, re-applying buffs, ressing people who stood in fire, and making sure that healthbars go back up.  All while trying to not stand in fire yourself.  Oh, and not run out of mana while you're at it.

Good times, good times.

Or, you know, not so much.

People gravitate towards self sufficiency and usefulness. That just happens to be DPS most of the time.

Now that they made all the tank specs fun to play and able to solo without hating life, there are a lot more tanks to go around. 3 out of 4 tank class/specs are even viable in PvP now.


Once they make healing a non-Bitch job, and self sufficient, you'll see a lot more of those too.

The healers I know who PuG are reporting tons of DKs trying to tank. They aren't reporting a ton succeeding but I put that up to lack of experience mostly. The new changes will help them a lot.

And tanks are fixed. Protection warrior is borderline overpowered solo now. I cruised to 80 wearing tank gear in defensive stance the whole time, and soloed most of the group 3 or less quests I came across without much trouble at all. It is just healers (and I know a couple people who say holy priest is fine to solo with vs one who says it sucks, so not even all healers) that blow to solo with. Once that is fixed for real, then I think more people will be wiling to heal and play healers.

As it is we don't really have trouble with tanks OR healers in our guild. We just have trouble with widely disparate leveling speed.  :oh_i_see:

Screw you rage user, I still have mana woes :(

I used to think I was quite good for soloing on my holy priest, until I duo-ed an equally geared rogue friend to do some rep grinding and mobs that took me 20s+ to kill he would 3-shot in a few seconds. Still, it's not unbearably slow, and the changes to spirit regen and spellpower made things a lot more bearable. Back when healing gear only added to healing, and mana regen was weak, priests sucked balls, now it's not awful. My efficiency is nothing close to a hunter, or lock, or rogue, but I play the class I enjoy, and achieve enough for my ends.

I've found healing in heroics fairly tough at the start. I think in part I got a tad complacent towards the end of TBC because I was well enough geared that stuff like mana became trivial. With the semi-gimpy DPSers I seem to end up teaming, fights are longer though, and there's a lot more dispersed damage, so I have to work harder. It's satisfying when it's done though.

As a healer I can assure you that tanks cause the least of my complaints these days, and the class really doesn't matter (dedicated DK tanks are fine, if a little different to other tanks). Bad DPS are the source of the majority of my woes, and there are oh so many of them.

Back in the olden days when I played WoW, I tried a bit of healing and tanking.  But if anyone in your group dies (even because of their own idiocy) or anyone pulls agro (because they used all their cooldowns within the first 20 sec of a fight) then everyone screams at YOU as the healer or tank. 

Screw that.  I went back to DPS, where even if I am lower on the charts, nobody screams at me if there is a wipe.  That's why people like DPS- less idiots screaming at you for their own failings, and/or its easier to hide your own incompetence (I'm fully willing to admit that I could have been fucking terrible and all the abuse was deserved, but I'd rather have fun and fail then feel bad and fail). 

Tanks are fixed, DPS has been fine, MOST healers are okay now (though the leveling speed difference in a mana bound and non mana bound class is HUGE)

Holy Paladins? Still fucked.

But really, leveling speed and solo pve efficiency are lame for healers right now. Both of us have gone lolghettoenhance gear to level the ele and resto shaman.

As for DK tanks: gearing them and learning to use the cooldowns right is key. My DK was going to be a tank, but uh.. we apparently have too many tanks   :ye_gods: I know I'm supposed to be leveling the priest though :P

Prot warrior soloing has been fixed since 2.2 or 2.3, we just never talked about how effective dual wielding with devastate was.

When I group up with one of my guilds holy priests for dailies, they typically do about half the damage I do as a prot warrior.  They're better than they used to be, but still nothing compared to even a bad soloing class like warrior, much less a good one like warlock.
It's much easier to blame the retarded DPS for wipes than it used to.  Best examples are the entire Ahn'kahet instance and Eck who is only in Gundrak on heroic.

Nah, swapping into DPS gear and dual weidling wasn't "fixed" it was a work around.

Being able to level in defensive stance, using your tank gear, and it being fun and viable. That's fixed.

I'd just like to mention that in last night's "everyone is still leveling so let's do ZA lol" run, there were four paladins.

One was prot.
Two were holy.
I was the only ret.

Life was good.  :oh_i_see:

Oh and I whooped the two rogues around my level for DPS. Granted we're all horrible newbs and they were probably doing something unimaginably stupid, but still. Being a ret pally has never been better.

Rogues kinda suck at DPS these days <3

But a ret pally handed me my ass for dps in freaking level 76 gear last night in heroic strat by about 200 dps on average. I'm blaming all the undead or something, but really it was just divine storm on the damned zombies.

Well, the nerf is needed. I dont run a damage meter, but I am a 72 hunter, my friend was a 78 frost mage, and my brother was a 79 enhance shaman

The damage totals for the instance were not even close.

I had 1.2 million damage total , and 500,000 with my pet

I think the mage hit a million, and the shammy hit 800,000

That is me with 6 less levels, and I pretty much did as much damage as them combined. One of the big differences is I don't have to do much besides a single frost trap, and my other crowd control (my pet) does damage at the same time. The mage has been crying about the fact that I never have to worry about threat either. Wah wah! :)

Strat is just bad for figuring anything out. The masses of insta-dying zombie adds screws up the meters something fierce unless you're running something like WWS that can break things down by fight (I need to get that going at some point so I can see individual boss fights.)

Tanks solo pretty well now, really. Leveling solo as a healer still blows, though. Especially if you're a paladin.  :awesome_for_real:

God, I am so fucking bitter about how fucked holy paladins are right now, it's not even funny. I don't know why it fills me with so much rage, but it finally got me to quit mine completely.

I switched my paladin from holy to ret around level 73.  I was fairly unamused after playing ret for a few days. There simply was no comparison between the two specs in terms of dps, ability to grind, etc.  The biggest change was seals, I was able to switch from seal/judge wisdom while holy, to seal of blood, judge light, and never run out of mana as ret.  The worst part is Blizzard has acknowledged that holy got fucked by the nerfs to ret, but they haven't bothered to go back and do anything to boost holy since then.  So far as I know.

They fixed holy, holy paladins are just too stupid to know it.

I say this using the logic that holy paladins are apparently too stupid to handle a third healing spell.  :uhrr:

God, a third heal would be so ... overwhelming.  :ye_gods:

I'm not talking about actual healing, I'm talking about killing mobs while doing dailies, questing, etc.  Unless there's secret mobs I can heal to death for xp that I somehow missed.

Kild wasn't actually saying they fixed holy paladins for real, he was riffing on the 'we don't want to make paladin healing too complicated' thing from GC.

The patch build on the PTR changes Judgment of the Pure (45 point talent) to add 25% damage to all seals. Not sure how much that will help holy but at least its some form of bone

It's going to give me another 150 damage every 8 seconds with 1900 spellpower. Yeah.

Personally I don't mind holy paladin soloing. I soloed all of icecrown (barring the arena and 2 other quests) and do my dailies as holy and really you can kill any non-elite over the course of 2-3 holy shocks (12-18 seconds) and you're possibly the best elite soloer in the game. It feels so much better than smite spam on my priest ever did.

Thats +25% to all seal procs, not judgments. Not a huge amount but better than nothing.

Yes. Holy paladins are the only remaining "haha, fuck you" healing class for even grinding dailies. Everything else got the healing->spellpower conversion thing to let them at least Sort Of Nuke, Paladins have.. I don't even know what nuke they have that would use spellpower. Loly Shock?

I recently changed from Ret to Holy to help support my guild in instances/raids.  I was wary that solo'ing and questing would suffer.  However, I found that I can more than hold my own.  I go through MOBs just as quickly as before and have absolutely no problem with mana or health.  My crits for shock, judgements, and shield slam (forget the actual name) are big enough and happen often enough to make up for all the melee loss.  My judgements are cast at 40 yards now so I can actually pull and hit things that fly way way easier.

The Good: Overall, I've been impressed with the build.  I am also a decent healer for our groups given the funcionality of Beacon of Light.  I toss that on the tank.  Then my heals on those around them heal them plus the tank 100%.  Plus, using that other (forgot that name too) power that puts a shield on them blocking 500 hps hits every 6 seconds and raising the crit chance of my flash of light helps a lot. 

Utility:  I throw my wisdom judgement on the main target from 40 yards.  Not only do all of the melee and casters that use mana get mana back in return, but if I crit, my haste goes up 15%.  It happens more than 1/2 the time.  That also puts a debuff on the mob that makes it easier for everyone to crit on it too.

The Bad: I'm pretty much pidgeon-holed.  I'm a healer and decent solo'er.  I'd never be considered for DPS or Tanking without respeccing.  Before, as Ret, I could do a very good job at DPS, and a great job at off-healing or off-tanking (with gear change.)  Ret is a really nice Swiss Army Knife spec and that can be very fun.

My plan now is to stay Holy until I get my Priest up to par for groups.  Then I'll switch back to Ret or Prot depending on what the guild needs.  Once dual spec comes in my Pally will probably be Holy for one and Prot for the other.  I have plenty of other DPS classes to fill that niche.

I was talking about one of my friends who was a raiding holy paladin all through BC, and was finally allowed to spec Ret like he wanted after the buff. He raided all through Sunwell as Ret and loved it. He told me that for WotLK he actually specced to Holy to level from 70 to 80, and loved it. So, I don't know if he is doing something drastically different, but he said Holy is fantastic now.

It's holy shock. That spell hits for over 2k, crits all the damn time, and is now a 6 second cooldown instead of 15. It just tears down the mobs. It also gives you instant FoLs and you can judge and/or seal wisdom at the same time. It makes holy paladin soloing pretty good really. You don't get to spam damage all the time like the others can, but you don't have a cast bar or run out of mana either.

This is all exactly it except I still get to spam damage.  The cooldowns are so quick now that I may have a total of 3-4 seconds of waiting to go through my powers again.  Also remember my hammer ending shot that typically hits for over 1600 damage without crit.  Standard lvl 80 mobs go down after I cycle through two rotations of powers and end with my hammer.  If I have multiple adds, no issue.  If I'm melee'ing, I'm not running out of mana...AT ALL.  I actually prefer Holy for leveling and supporting our raids to Ret.