f13.net

Since I started playing WoW again, one of the little side-benefits is a growing collection of useless emblems, which I'm turning into useful BoA stuff. I realize all the 1 to 80 stuff will be replaced by 1-85 stuff in Cata, but to be honest -- I have the badges NOW and aside from a mage and a Death Knight, all my alts are in the high teens, low twenties. By the time they hit 81, I'll be able to get them 1 to 85 BoA gear if I want.

So having first outfitted my mage (who was in her 40s) and gotten her to Outland, I was doing my Paladin next -- kinda thinking I wanted to learn to tank a bit. So I have the plate chest and shoulders (the str/stamina stuff) and paired it with a Crusder-enchanted +spellpower 1h mace, figuring that's a pretty good mix, since if I want to play tank the shield seems important.

So I dig out my 19 paladin, throw the gear on, curse briefly that it's 19 and not 20 so I can't get a mount yet, and then train up a bunch of spells I mysteriously don't have. (I haven't touched the pally for so long it's probably from an old revamp. Or maybe I didn't have the money. Anyways).

And now I have a bewildering array of blessings, seals, auras, judgements, and other 'crap' that I can't figure out how to even organize, much less use effectively. I can only thank God that it's only level 19, and I'm not stuck with a level 40 or so and have even more crap I don't remember.

So any basic advice? What to use with what? What the hell a 'judgement' is and why it's related to seals?

Helps when you read completely. Edited to say lose the spellpower 1hander and get a nice slow damage one. You might be best farming the AH for blues early on and ignore BoA 1handers. The thrash blade BoA is good, though, if you don't want to spend gold. Until you get true tanking 1handers, run the big damage--and always in PvP. Really, weapon enchants don't really mean all that much to protection, but I'd run crusader like everything else. It boosts damage--both physical and holy--and block rating. It also heals you quite a bit at lower levels. Past 60, well, by then you should be able to figure out what's good and what isn't so good. When you can run real enchants get mongoose or accuracy, depending on what you need (I actually run lifeward, but this is on a dedicated heroic protectadin built entirely around block value--I don't trust PuG healers and with good reason).

Since you're starting out there only one imbue (shaman talking here...) worth anything and that's Seal of Command. If you don't want to go ret early on, then just run Seal of Righteousness and don't look back (at least not until you hit the ret tree--then get SoC). Auras are a bit of a judgement call, but I run ret when grinding or in PvP, and the armor one when grouped. Judgements, again, they're kinda situational, but judgement of light is my default. I'll run judgement of wisdom if low on mana. For PvP, it's all about judgement of justice. Can't have rogues running away from you after all. Essentially all a judgement does is nuke whatever has a seal on it and apply an effect. Light is a heal, wisdom is mana recovery, and justice is a snare (or root in PvE, sorta--keeps shit from running). Blessing should ALWAYS be sanctuary--when you get it. Otherwise, King's.

Your rotation is the 969 thing, but you'll find lots of stuff won't live long and you won't have that many abilities early on. Essentially, it's keep your HS (when you get it) up, and keep your target judged. Stuns and consecrate are there when needed. Mana recovery is always going to be an issue, but it goes up and down as you level. Killing groups is where it's out for efficiency. Ride around on your mount, gather stuff up, kill the hell out of it when you get knocked off or feel you're pushing your luck.

 

Also don't get too used to any of that because it is changing again in a couple months. Bye bye 9 6 9.

The one big thing is, spellpower mace = healing paladins only. Tanking paladins use regular weapons now. You will really be holding yourself back if you try to use that, people will drop group as soon as they see it (hell I would drop group and usually I will give just about anyone a chance) etc. etc.

That's the other thing. I keep going back and forth on whether I want to tank or not. *shrug*. I can always send it to my shaman, who I am planning to make a healer.

There are two semi obscure mods that I find really help on my paladin.

Seal Bar (http://wow.curse.com/downloads/wow-addons/details/seal-bar.aspx), its old, and no one updates it any more, but I think thats the version that still works. Although I doubt it will next patch. Anyway, that just puts a stance like bar for your Seals.

The one is great. Although I usually turn off everything except the buffing wheel. I just dont need a million buffs on my bars, and Pally Power is hard to adjust on the fly.
Hadar's Holy Hope. (http://www.wowinterface.com/downloads/info7617-HadarsHolyHope.html)

Protection is more fun to level with than holy either way. If you Reject tanking, you should level as ret. This may also change in Cataclysm, but as it stands right now, unless you plan on living inside instances only and doing NOTHING ELSE EVER, holy is excruciatingly boring.

So, to wit:

Replace the 1handed heirloom with something else (what am I looking for, in terms of stats? +str, +stam? I guess tanking paladins don't really need much +spellpower, +int, and +mp5. But "bigger hits" (thus, slower weapon) is what I'm aiming for). Crusader or Fiery is probably an okay enchant, still.

Spec wise, should I be looking at Prot talent spec, right? Any "must have" talents? I know I'm only 19, but the paladin mechanics are a bit confusing after letting this one lie fallow so long. Also, I'm a blacksmith on that one -- don't know what's helpful there in the higher levels.

Keep in mind, a lot of what Shrike says is going to change next patch, ether tomorrow (unlikely) or the 12th (very likely). Seals are changing, Judgements are changing, some auras are changing, and Paladins are getting combo points.

I would recommend just using http://www.wowhead.com/item=48716/venerable-mass-of-mcgowan for leveling tanking stuff assuming you have the spare badges. Paladins benefit from using a slow weapon at least right now, and there isn't anything much out there as far as tanking weapons for leveling characters.

I have a personal bias towards using dps weapons for tanking though, some people will argue you pick survivability over all else at all times. (Which I would agree with most of the time, but I like to dedicate that one gear slot towards improved dps/threat. A few hundred extra dps matters no matter where in the raid it comes from.)

That's what I used on my paladin.  Don't take reckoning with it.  Waste of fucking time.

Yeah, you might just want to let the paladin lie around until the patch happens and people figure the new way out.  :oh_i_see:

But for the 1h weapon, str/sta would be what you'd like, although I think the thrash blade only has sta, but it's still going to be pretty good for your purposes. Although you never have Wintergrasp, right? So you probably aren't going to buy that anyway.

Babblebabblebabble.

Yeah, because I was thinking that's what I needed on my paladin.  Combo points.   :oh_i_see:

I am ALL FOR the combo points, personally.

I know nothing about the expansion changes, so all of my comments are for current.

Healing:  So many other classes do it, I stopped working on gear for healing on my pally.
Ret:  All around good spec to use for levelling and eventually dailies, etc.  Strength is what you gem then there are different schools on expertise/armor pen/ crit, but mostly just get STR.
Tank:  Extremely easy tank class.  Great for getting fast queues into dungeons to get pretty much any set of gear you want.  Gem Def until you hit 540 (uncrushable) and then stack Stam.  Realistically, once you have your 540, you can start replacing gear/weapons to boost your damage as appropriate.  Watch your hps though.  For heroics you'll probably want to be 30k or higher.

I personally have different sets ready for tanking. 
1.  All out highest avoidance, mitigation, hps, etc.  Usually start here to determine what the group make-up is.
2.  High def/hps/avoidance but with a dps weapon.   Cases where the healers is struggling, but I'm also having trouble keeping agro off that 10k dps DK.
3.  Balanced set.  540 def, 30k+ hps and all the rest towards dps.  Healing is good enough to keep me up, but higher dps helps drop MOBs faster to get through the instances quicker.

You can do that with a Ret/Prot dual talent tree because the gear can be mixed and matched.  Holy set?  Not so much.

Cata will probably be out before you get to the gemiming and heroic bit.  I suggest just going Ret and blow through everything with strength and crit.  Level as fast as you can.  It is pretty easy mode.

Hell right now the talk is Oct. 12 for the 4.0.1 patch to hit live, where we get all the new mechanics and crap. I would probably wait for that before I put any kind of real effort into a new character since it just means relearning everything anyway.

 :ye_gods:

Guess I should start seriously looking at the changes...

Yes, you should.

Keep in mind that is just a rumored date but it seems pretty plausible. The last PTR patch was very minor and is labeled "Release".

Dammit. I'm going to be busy relearning my hunter.

Oh well, at least the bulk of my gear is "obvious Hunter stuff" if not outright badge equipment. Hopefully whatever the fuck my new stat allotment needs to be under the "focus system" won't have me too badly misgeared.

I don't like the whole 'mana for hunters' system, but I like learning an entirely new system with gear that may or may not be adequate even less.

Eh, the only difference is you won't need int, and if your grown up hunter has hunter set shit on, that's all going to be rejiggered to reflect that.

It's either direct Hunter set gear (Triumph or Frost badge stuff), direct hunter rewards (Ashen Verdict Ring), or stuff that is OBVIOUSLY hunter itemized -- mail with +agility, +AP, +int on it. You know, not the sort of thing Shamans are accidentally going to put on.

The only ones I'm worried about are my weapons -- they're just stat sticks for Hunters, so I've got an ICC axe (drops off the blood beast guy, I think) and Liar's Tongue. Those aren't hunter specific, but without checking more closely into the hunter changes I'm going to guess +agilily, +AP, +hit and all that will still be important stuff.

Enhance shaman/hunter itemization is actually exactly the same now (and will be after the expansion as well). So, all the +int is going to come off of that gear and turn into something else (not sure what, I haven't been paying attention to the gear revamps much.)

Any 2h weapon that is AP/agi/etc is going to stay roughly the same, as those are already itemized with hunters (and sometimes feral druids) in mind. AP is going away too but will turn into agility probably on weapons like that.

What, are enhancement shamans going to stop using mana in Cataclysm? How are they going to itemize the same if shamans are still casters?

I think they are receiving spellpower from attack power like Ret pallies.

They're not "casters" really. They don't use caster gear now and never have (enhance spec that is). They are still going to be using mana, but their mechanics don't require them to increase the size of their mana pool at all, so +int isn't useful. Much like ret pallies that way.

EDIT:



Speccing enhance will get you those two primary skills which should mean that mana management and spell scaling aren't big issues, particularly when you add Shamanistic Rage into the equation.

So is there anyone who's happy about the patch? All I've heard is how fucked everything is in it, and how unbalanced, and how hard it is to do anything useful, and so forth. There was supposed to be a magic numbers pass that would miraculously fix everything at some point, but I haven't exactly heard any sighs of relief on the forums as yet.

So far this whole thing just looks like "We thought talent trees were getting too long, so we decided to break the game! Whee! Class balance was probably better than at any previous point, but fuck it we're starting over!"

Paladins sound like a complete mess. They don't know what the hell to do with the class, they never have, and they probably never will. I'll give it a shot when the patch comes out, but if I don't like it I'm skipping Cata and just letting the account expire. They've done nothing to grab my attention with this one. All I know about the 81-85 content is that there's some underwater zone at some point, and something something Twilight something Deathwing. (Rawr, Deathwing! I'm so badass! Please care about me and what's going on now that Arthas is dead and the WC3 story is finally over!) Nothing I'm chomping at the bit to get into.

Also, I'm just waiting for the shoe to drop on the next batch of Real ID facebook bullshit. You know it's coming.

Most of it is 'someone moved my cheese' rage. There are real balance problems to be sure, but they'll get fixed, Blizzard has a pretty solid history in that regard imo.

Also, the next shoe to drop on Real ID was being allowed to opt out of it without doing parental control bullshit.

Yeah, that already happened earlier this week.




You can now opt out completely.

Or just opt out of your name showing in friends of friends, or just opt out of the Facebook bit (or both).

Hey, I actually get that reference!  Good book.

Anyway, yeah a lot of it is just "Omg I have to relearn my whole class AGAIN" rage.  I don't think any class is remaining untouched as far as having to relearn major portions of their shit.  Hunters, DKs, & Pallies all got big overhauls on their resources which mean nearly everything you've learned about playing your class to this point is gone.

Pally rage is understandable because it's the, what, 6th time and they're significantly different AGAIN.  From what I played around with on test it's all quality of life improvements, though. Consolidated seals and blessings, a new resource to manage to remove some of the randomness and provide more button pushing.   Really, you don't even have to wait for Cata to check it out, just create a test realm copy and check it out there.

The suck part of this all is something Sjofn mentioned earlier.  The talent and skill revamp means you don't get a goodie every level anymore.  Talents are spread out to every few levels and skills are still every other early on, eventually going away because ranks have been removed.  It means you eventually DO run into a grind of nothing but leveling for long periods with no rewards.  They've gone backwards here and it's something that might bite them in the ass long-term as hordes of new goblins and worgen discover there's no cookies in their skinner dispenser anymore.

I'm not really psyched for the changes as a DK; it feels like another huge nerf. On top of that, the cries of difficulty holding aggro has me really worried. I want the patch to hit because I want to see HOW bad it'll be.

Regarding my other classes, I haven't found any for whom the patch feels "cool". Mut Rogues and Destro Locks have been generally left alone; Prot Pallies don't look substantially worse; Arcane Mages seem to have some new mana management mechanic. Balance Druids are getting a new Eclipse mechanic that at least feels interesting (or, felt interesting when my Goblin Shaman had it in WAR).

The elemental shaman changes are nice, from my puttering around with them on the PTR.

What the fuck are they doing to Pallies this time? Jesus Christ.

Probably not much use as advice or anything, but I've just been powerlevelling my 62 Pally up through the 60s and to 71 or 72 now with my wife's mage destroying everything in his path, and occasionally dropping kings, a heal, and spamming some cons and crusader strike for fun. I figure after 2 years off, and similarly to what I said about my hunter in another thread, the need to relearn the class, just to need to relearn it again a couple weeks later just made mindless powerlevelling my main choice of things to do with my pallydin.

We still have mana. Just in Cata it'll be a pally-sized pool, instead of the oversized one we have now. So in Cata we can't spam (lesser) healing wave to save the tank's dumb ass when he overpulls and the dedicated healer drops group.

Well, that sounds, um.. great to remove a bit of get-out-of-jail utility from the class.

You mean like cleansing totem?

Don't remind me. Instead we get a magic decurse. Gee. Be still my heart. And in other news, rogues still have poison.

Lots of stuff; here's what I remember off the top of my head.

Seal consolidation.. wis/light combined into the same seal.  Command is a talent that affects other seals not a new seal.  Crusader Strike is a baseline skill. 
Blessings; Sanctuary is gone, now a talent that just works on the pally tank.
New resource called "Holy Power" that builds up on attacks like rogue combo points. (Max of 5) You release charges to do specialty strikes & heals.
Holy Shield isn't an active skill anymore but a passive one that works off of SoR or Inquisition

http://www.mmo-champion.com/content/1670-Paladin-Cataclysm

Wait, Shaman get a magic debuff removal?

WHY COULD THEY NOT HAVE PUT THAT IN WHEN WE WERE IN BWL WORKING ON CHROMAGGUS?!?!

From looking at the changes, it seems they are making ret paladins in to rogues (hello combo points), and enh shaman in to wotlk ret paladins.  :ye_gods:

Judgement anyone?

Blessing of Might and Blessing of Wisdom have also been combined, so there are now only 2 blessings to juggle.

[deadpan] yay

I thought it was a pretty cool change, but I haven't really played a paladin since BC.

WotLK made me finally quit my paladin mostly (still got her to 80 and I still dust her off once in a while) and I heart the changes coming. I feel that way every time they change paladins, though. I have a hard time breaking up with the paladin. Baby, we can work it out.

What are those bruises? Did you fall down the stairs?

I am totally meh about my ret/prot paladin.  I dunno, I'll probably like the changes for holy.  Almost anything would be an improvement.

The Prot Paladin feels nice to me, but I don't like the Ret Paladin, feels too much like a Rogue. I'm not a rogue person. Haven't tried Holy, but I can't see how it could be worse then what it is in wrath, like shit, you get at least 5 or 6 REAL LIFE HEAL SPELLS in cata.  :grin:


Of course healing in general is pretty much as fucked as lots of people feared it would be right now.

Ok, went to go do this last night.  The official website is terrible for details.  I got nothing from it.  The link it provides to the forums is really convenient until you get there and are faced with literally hundreds of pages of posts.  I don't have time to sift down through all that to find what I care about.

Anyone have a link to a good summary of the forum-library for the next update?

The EJ Class Mechanics forums (http://elitistjerks.com/forums.php) usually have a good run down thread for each spec and class.

Wowhead also has a big Cataclysm guide (http://cata.wowhead.com/guide=cataclysm) that breaks down things in a higher level way than the minutia that the EJ theorycrafters will deal with.

Thanks.  I'll check them out.

I'm caught somewhat between the proverbial rock and a hardplace.  I casually played my pally as ret with a gearscore of around 4500.  My offspec was prot and that gear is shameful, maybe 3200 gearscore?

With these changes that came through (I'm not doomcasting, I swear..) I'm having a real problem with either spec.  Soloing around as ret and I'm taking entirely too much damage compared to what I used to be as ret, not to mention it's taking longer to kill things with this new rotation.  I don't have the gear to switch over to prot at this point, but even when I did I'm getting my ass handed to me by more than 2 mobs at a time.  Before patch I could easily take 7+ mobs as prot...

So I'm not exactly sure what to do.  Looking at my mage (only lvl 76), he owns in soloing around - he's nearly impossible to kill.  But my 4500gs pally just feels like a shell of what he was. 

Well yeah, that's what happens when an overpowered class gets nerfed.  :grin:
More seriously, Blizzard have already acknowledged that retadin DPS (and other classes/specs) is too low and they're going to 'fix' it.

Playing in the midrange of gear I never felt too powerful, maybe at the topend it was. 

I didn't do horribly in a random dungeon last night.  Last on dps, but not last by much.  Some of that might just be getting familiar with the new rotation.  Here's hoping!

For anyone that plays Ret. Word is that TV and HoW got massively buffed during downtime last night. Reports of 28k+ crits on HoW and TV and 12k+ crits on CS.

I will test it out when I get home and report my findings.

Yeah, I mean a ret paladin could routinely beat as many as a couple of different classes. Not any with range, or any that healed, or any tank types that would just sit there going "Hey is something hitting me?", but there were a couple of melee DPS types that didn't totally tool a ret paladin. Overpowered.

Not to mention that holy paladins are having trouble outhealing a shadow priest in 25 man raids at level 80.  That is 100% awesome, and is sure to guarantee paladins raid spots.

Our Raiding holy Paladin last night was TERRIBLE.

And the guy himself knows how to play.

Ret was fine with the first patch, it's great now (I probably gained ~1k DPS at low gear levels).  It's still funky as all shit to play, but it puts out decent numbers.

Someone had the great idea to tack a 30 second cooldown onto Consecrate, make Hammer of the Righteous the primary threat generator of the Protection rotation, while simultaneously redesigning HotR to scale off of weapon damage rather than weapon DPS in an expansion with exactly one tanking weapon slower than 1.7 speed.  Motherfucker.

Holy is not my forte, but ICC25 hard mode raiding paladins on my server are reporting being outhealed by Leader of the Pack.

Since my DK looks to be ready for primetime, I was eyeing protection paladin stuff today. I do not like what I'm seeing.

I'm thinking my warriors will be getting attention before my pallies. Hunter is intriguing me, though. I think hunter is the weekend project, to be followed by the warriors.

No good reason to use a tanking weapon for tanking IMO, especially now that DPS weapons all gained stamina and tanking weapons did not. I haven't used a tanking weapon for 75% or more of this expansion.

Am I really the only one who didn't mind the new Prot Pally? Compared to the DK who feels nerfed to shit, the Prot Pally felt like an aggro magnet.

No, there isn't a good reason to use a tanking weapon for tanking.  However it just so happened that I had a tanking weapon, and it was more or less optimal for my role.  Now it isn't, because Blizzard made a change that they really did not need to make (HotR calculating from DPS), did not make another change that would have eased the transition (decrease speed on all tanking weapons to ~2.6) and all tanking weapons are now effectively vendor trash while tanks are obliged to fight to obtain gear statted for the agility based classes.

Blizzard with terrible Itemization, news at 11?  :why_so_serious:

On a prot pally, slow weapons were already optimal (for threat) because of the way seal damage was calculated - old HotR didn't make fast weapons better, speed just was irrelevant for it. Unless you needed whatever the +def was on a given weapon or you had one with bonus armor, you should have been using a slow dps weapon already (IMO).

I know Fordel likes the way it plays, but I'm not sure how much of that is "Fordel is in the beta and playing past level 80." I've never played protection a lot on my paladin, not enough to care about the changes one way or the other, anyway.

I still haven't tanked on my DK. I'm being a baby.

Threat wasn't an issue, survivability won the day.  I didn't need to steal a hunter weapon.  Now I do.

Yea, it feels nice, especially since they dropped Protection CrusaderStrike/Hammer to 3 seconds. I feel like I have "enough" buttons to push without it being overly demanding or limiting in either direction.

The biggest hurdle is undoing the previous years worth of 969 muscle memory. That can be annoying since it is just so automatic for most prot paladins at this point. "Is it a boss? AE Pack? 2 Elite Goons? 96969696969696969!!!1!". You'll have to approach different targets differently with the new system. Not terribly differently mind you, but enough so that you can't just fall into one rotation to rule them all.


Otherwise everything seems solid to me, the mastery, the talents, the cooldowns, the glyphs.

Hunters are busy stealing feral druid staves.