Gaining Holy Power

Crusader Strike is our main Holy Power generator, giving us a Holy Power charge each time we use it. It becomes available at level one for all specs, so we can start generating power straight away. If we get talents to bring down the cooldown to three seconds, as Ghostcrawler said we will be alternating between Crusader Strike and one other ability every time. Building up three Holy Power will be very quick, so we get easy access to our strong new attacks.

Divine Purpose is a talent that gives a 40% chance to leave up one Holy Power after using one of our dps abilities that consume Holy Power. This means one less Crusader Strike is needed to get to the maximum of three Holy Power. So we get to use our more powerful strikes sooner, and it adds some interactivity to our rotation.

Using Holy Power

Inquisition is a damage buff to our Holy damage of 30%. It lasts 10 seconds per point of Holy Power we have and consumes those points. It is probably something that needs to stay up as much as possible. So fueling it with three stacks of Holy Power gives us the most easily sustainable Inquisition buff.

Templar’s Verdict is the signature Retribution ability that you get for picking the tree at level 10. It does a percentage of weapon damage, scaling with the amount of Holy Power consumed. It is a strong single target attack and should be your primary Holy Power ability in boss fights. Templar’s Verdict also has a rather steep mana cost of 20% of base mana. This forces you to rotate in Judgements as well, to make sure you do not run out. Generally you might use this when you already have the Inquisition buff and are attacking one enemy.

Divine Storm in Cataclysm is different than it is on the live servers now. While it is still a talent, it is basically an AoE version of Templar’s Verdict. It also consumes Holy Power and scales with it and weapon damage. It still does strike multiple targets and has a (small) healing component. Since both Divine Storm and Templar’s Verdict consume your Holy Power stacks, Divine Storm will no longer be a part of single target rotations. Instead it will substitute in for Templar’s Verdict in AoE trash packs.

Word of Glory takes over from the instant Flash of Light that Art of War used to give us. It provides Ret with a healing tool that does not take a cast time, so it does not stop us from attacking, and it is also free, so it does not leave us mana starved. It does consume our Holy Power, so it is one less attack, or some time without Inquisition up. However if a heal is really needed, you will still be able to provide it. Word of Glory does not trigger Divine Purpose.

A bit of both

Zealotry is currently our final talent. It requires and consumes three stacks of Holy Power, but allows each of our Crusader Strikes to generate three instead of one Holy Power for a short while. We become very powerful during this phase, but will also burn through mana fast. It is a strong cooldown for when we need high DPS, and is an interesting one at that, rather than just buffing a stat. Expect to use this when maximum face smashing is desired.

Those are currently all the Holy Power-related abilities Retribution has access to. It is a fun new toolbox that will boost our damage in a few ways, and even gives us some healing flexibility. All in all, it looks like just what Ret needs to spice things up.

This means it is very unlikely to be a good idea to equip one non-plate piece. Maybe if you have a number of better mail, leather, or cloth pieces, it is still an improvement, but it needs to offset a large amount of Intellect or Strength now.

Besides the free stats, the main advantage of this is that it become clearer what gear belongs to what class. I think this is a good thing. You can focus your itemization on your own armor class now. Trying to accomplish this was a goal of the developers, and luckily they use a healthy chunk of stats to persuade you.

Holy plate

The problem with itemization for Paladins is spellpower plate, which is the only gear itemized for only one spec. We share some of our, but are the only tree where no one else can wear out actual armor pieces. There has been debate about whether it is ok to snatch up mail pieces now, and while I try to be careful not to hoard gear that is a bigger improvement for others, the fact is they are often simply better, usually by giving more haste.

Armor specialization means this will likely end, which should be a benefit to everyone. The thing is, the developers now need to provide especially Holy Paladins with good enough gear to have choices to gear up. Having only one piece of gear to choose from per slot is boring, but having a bunch of suboptimal pieces will cause us to have to choose between two bads: badly itemized gear, or 5% less intellect.

The developers know this though. Even though Holy Paladins have the comforting feeling nobody else is able to touch their gear, more specs will have less competition now. I hope this means Holy will get to choose from the stats they need on their own gear now, and have nice off-set pieces besides tier 11.

The protection that resilience provides comes in four flavours:

1. It reduces incoming damage from player attacks. It does this at 2% per 1% resilience.
2. It reduces the chance you get crit by a player. This is reduced straight up by your resilience percentage.
3. It reduces the critical strike bonus of those attacks that do crit. By 2.2% per 1% resilience.
4. It reduces the effects of mana drains. Also by 2.2% per 1% resilience.

Now adding all these things together make you a much tougher cookie in PvP. This is why gearing up to get some resilience is very important in PvP. I have yet to grab a load of it on my gear, in order to really feel the effects. But after running a bunch of battlegrounds without resilience, I can tell you, you go down a lot faster than even some clothies.

Resilience rating converts to a percentage at 94.3 rating for 1%. PvP gear that you can get with your spare Triumph emblems gets you started with some resilience, but you want to collect a fair bit of it. Getting 20% damage reduction on a non-critting ball of flame means you have more chance to run up and beat someone to pulp.

One last thing: resilience is useless in PvE, since it only works against attacks from other players. That is why it is the most important way of distinguishing PvP gear from PvE gear. You generally do not want to wear PvP gear to a dungeon or raid, since the resilience could also be crit or strength, which is useful in those fights. Only wear resilience gear if your alternative is something like a green quest item from Borean Tundra.

Also see WoWWiki about resilience, although it may not be entirely up-to-date.

Options versus choices

In the current trees there are simply bad talents. Sure, you can choose these, but doing so is a bad thing. Since you generally do not want bad things, this is not really a choice, just the illusion of choice. You have the option of picking them, but you should not. There is something to be said for filtering out good players by their talent spec, but on the other hand, the skills involved with this are not so much playing WoW, as using spreadsheets and reading forums. I can understand why Blizzard wants to move away from this.

For those of us who do not fall into the trap of bad talents, we might be left with a choice between “functional” talents (dps/healing) and utility talents. Again this is not really a choice, as you will always want the best spec for your role, so the one that does the most dps or provides the most healing. Tanks may be able to shift between threat and survivability, but that is it.

Choice in Cataclysm

In order for there to be real choice, not just options, there have to be multiple right answers. Not bad ones versus good ones, or optimal ones versus sub-optimal ones. In those cases one will always win out. There are two ways this might be achieved: either make it so there are truly multiple optimal solutions, or by ensuring there are is no optimal solution.

Creating multiple optimal solutions within one tree would be very difficult. Ghostcrawler has claimed that balancing this would be hard, and theorycrafters would always be able to find a single “best” spec, meaning it just boils down to there being one optimal solution, and thus no choice.

With a tree that contains no optimal solutions means there are fewer “functional” talents than required to fill out the tree. This is the design Blizzard is shooting for in Cataclysm. It is actually achieved by doing two things: having fewer than 31 possible talent points that make you stronger in your role, and forcing you to spend 31 talent points in one tree. This means that the functional talent points are a given, and grabbing half of two trees is out (fewer options), but it also mean that every optimal build has points remaining to be spent on utility talents. Talents you can choose to customize your playstyle preferences.

So if the question is do the Cataclysm trees give us choices to make while speccing, the answer is they should. But they do so not by giving us multiple optimal builds within a tree, but by making a limited optimal build that is required to be fleshed out with utility talents. These utility talents are the choices we can make. Or at least that is what the design seems to be.

Having fewer options is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as there are still enough choices. Real choices that allow us to personalize our characters. It will be difficult for the Dev team to get this right, but it is nice to see they are trying.

An instant mana-free heal: Word of Glory
A buff to increase holy damage done: Inquisition
A massive physical melee attack for Retribution paladins: Templar’s Verdict
Holy Shield’s duration is now extended by Holy Power
Divine Storm’s damage is now increased by Holy Power

The most interesting for Holy is Word of Glory. Since mana is supposed to matter a lot in Cataclysm, a free heal is really nice. Also it is instant, meaning it keeps us mobile and arrives at a target fast. We will probably be trading off small Words of Glory when we need to spread the love, while saving up for a big one for heavier healing. This is assuming Word of Glory does indeed scale with Holy Power built up, but this is most likely. Holy does not seem to get much from the other abilities, so I am hoping we get something else from Holy Power actually.

For Retribution there are some more opportunities there. Do you use Inquisition to buff damage, use the increased damage from Divine Storm, or use this beauty:

Templar’s Verdict: An instant weapon attack that causes a percentage of weapon damage. Consumes all applications of Holy Power to increase damage dealt:
1 Holy Power: 55% Weapon Damage
2 Holy Power: 125% Weapon Damage
3 Holy Power: 225% Weapon Damage

It will be interesting to see how this all makes the priority queue more interesting. I am expecting a Ret Pally to want to keep up Inquisition, make use of the increased Divine Storm damage whenever possible, and finish off with Templar’s Verdict only when the Inquisition buff is not about to fall off. This would seem to be the way in which all the abilities are relevant.

All in all this sure freshens Paladins up in Cataclysm, giving us some new toys to play with. There was more in the Developer Chat, that I plan to comment on soon, but Holy Power sure was the coolest thing.

Now if you are looking for a new weapon outside of raiding and have the gold lying around, I can really recommend dropping the gold for a Battered Hilt. The reason: the quest line. It is quite amazing, and definitely one of my favourites so far. One of the coolest aspects (and this might be a bit of a spoiler) is that you get to go to the Sunwell, which was previously only accessible as part of the last raid of BC. Since I barely managed to get to 70 before WotLK was released this was a lot of fun for me. Other than there is the fun laundry business in Dalaran.

The most awkward bit of the questline is the part where you have to go into Halls of Reflection, without actually doing the instance. I felt a bit bad about forcing a whole group to go through the motions just for my sword, while it is a tad hard to do it alone without just the right setup. Even though you can use Uther as a tank, as a melee class I found I was not able to do enough damage to get credit for the kill, while staying out of the whirlwind. In the end I asked a guildy to tank it for me while healing him, and it was a breeze.

The sword itself looks quite nice and has good stats as a healer sword. I have not really looked into it as a dps sword, but the stats seem to be ok for that as well.

Just make sure you do not pay too much for it: watch your auction house for a while to see the price range for a hilt. That, or just get lucky with a drop.

But in order to really get going, I wanted to change my spec to a real PvP build. Now it is not horrible different from a PvE build. You still want to go all the way down to Divine Storm, which is nice when some enemies are bunched up, there are just some subtle change in the talents you pick up in Retribution.For instance I did not grab Vengeance, since it is more of a sustained dps talent.

My off-tree talents are a bit different. For PvE you might go Aura Mastery or Divine Sacrifice/Guardian. My PvE spec included Aura Mastery, but for PvP I wanted to take more of a personal survivability build. To that end I picked up the PvP talents low in the Holy and Protection trees, such as Unyielding Faith and Stoicism. Along with that I took Improved Righteous Fury for the damage reduction, since threat does not matter.

While the changes are mostly defensive, there is some offense in there with the Seals of the Pure (which was in my PvE spec, but is now used for stronger Judgments using Seal of Righteousness). Also I decided to see if Eye for an Eye is worth it. Since I end up getting critted quite a bit (thanks to my lack of PvP gear with resilience), I hope my enemies will feel at least some of my pain.

My glyphs are also aimed either at improving my Seal and Judgment damage, or my crowd control.

All this has lead me to go for the following spec, to which I will be making changes as I go along.

Part of the reason I’m not too fond of PvP is that I suck at it. Horribly. I’m king at getting myself killed and not doing nearly enough damage to anyone else. I did kind of stay alive as Holy in BGs , with Beacon on me, but in the end I felt I had to smash face in order to really have fun in PvP.

But now that I’ve seen a lot of the PvE content, and I find myself not having time to raid the whole of ICC (that was one of the reasons to love ToC, it doesn’t take more than one night), I figured it was time for something else. My plan is to change my off-specfrom PvE Ret to PvP Ret, keeping my Holy PvE spec for doing dungeons and the occasional raid. I have some emblems of Triumph lying around anyway to get me started, and will just do a bunch of random BGs and see where that takes me.

I plan to write some posts about how I fare, and especially how to survive in PvP if I ever manage to figure that out. Hopefully I will learn some moves, and gear up accordingly in order to start enjoying PvP more. For now, at least it gives me something else to do besides running the same dungeons every day.

The change basically comes down to this: 10 and 25 mans will be the same raid (with the same lockout and loot), and heroic modes will be available for bosses in both (again, same lockout, same loot). 25 mans will give more loot per player, but not better loot. So per raid you have one lockout, and better loot only for heroic modes, with more loot for 25 mans. Simple and elegant if you ask me.
In short Blizzard has taken the stances that rather than develop content that dictates how you play, they are asking you to choose a play style (10/25 man, normal/heroic) and use the content they have provided. So no longer is your play style decided by the content , rather it has been turned around. You choose how you play, not Blizzard. I’d say this is an improvement, as it puts the decision of how to play with the player. Simultaneously it still allows Blizzard to provide us with content that most players will be able to see, which means they can pull out more of their resources to make it.

So why is this change needed? The main reasoning behind it seems to be that raiding “difficulty” comes in two dimensions. An idea that came up between Naxx and Ulduar. You can differentiate based on player skill and on raid size. In Naxx the only distinction was based on size, you either ran normal/easy mode/10 man or difficult/heroic/25 man. Not to say that the 25 man was necessarily more difficult, but the argument was, it requires more organization and thus should give better rewards.
In Ulduar the second dimension was added, that of hard modes. In these case it was not just organization, but actual difficulty of the encounter that was used to allow players to get better gear. And this makes sense: if you play a harder game, you should get a better reward.
The question that arises is: if the reward for downing a more difficult boss is better loot, then what should the reward for more organization be? So far it had been better loot. But was this really fair? Now one might argue that 25 man raids were still more difficult, but imagine (for as far as can be measured) normal 25 mans are as hard/easy as normal 10 mans. How is it fair that you get better gear, since you are doing pretty much the same thing? Yet at the same time, there is more organization involved, which should count for something.
The answer Blizzard has provided to this problem is very elegant: more organization should be rewarded with more gear, instead of better gear. This provides some added incentive, but does not reward players more for continuously doing the same within one week.

The main advantage of this is that players are not being forced (actually, they are no longer able) to run the same 25 and 10 man raids in one week in order to keep up with badges. I’ve compared it to watching the same tv show twice in one week. It is boring, and makes no sense. The main reason why it is done, is because after a few 25 man runs you out-gear the 10 man raid and just blow straight through it. Is that what this game should be about? I don’t think so.

One of the arguments against this change has been the question: how do we gear up new guild members? Currently they can be taken through a 10 man raid, get them geared, while still allowing the raiders who take this new member to do the 25 man. This will no longer be possible. Of course it has only been possible since WOTLK, and we can just look back to older expansions to see how it was done: run the previous tier raid. The gear of the previous tier should be a) available through old raids and heroics and b) enough to get you started with both 10 and 25 man raids of the current tier.

Finally I want to address the main problem that has sprung up around the web: why run 25 mans? The main reason should be “because I like it”. You’re playing this game for fun, and if you like downing bosses with 24 other folks, by all means do so. No it will not get you better gear. It will gear you slightly faster because you’re going through some more stress during organization. Do you on the other hand enjoy seeing the content, don’t mind gearing a tad slower, and don’t want the hassle of a big team? Raid 10 mans. Like I said before, decide how you want to play, and play that way. Your reward will mostly be in the joy of playing, not in your gear.
I’ve seen loads of people say they prefer 25 mans, but they are afraid it is no longer worth it. Well, if you enjoy it, it is worth it. And judging by the amount of people, I’d say there’s likely to be at least 24 people who agree with you on your realm.

All in all, I think the new raid model is great: it frees up people to decide for themselves what play style they enjoy. People get rewarded fairly for doing more difficult fights, and still somewhat for more organization. There is no more need to run the same content over and over and over. To conclude, my main hope for this is that it frees the designers up to make some extra content, making the game even more fun in the end.