Friday, July 18, 2008

New Talents

Yes, I have seen the new paladin talents.

No, I'm not at liberty to comment on all of them yet - I want the beta to extend a bit and I see what else they do to them.

However...

  • They gave us Mental Quickness v2 (Sheath of Light).
  • Gave us another strike (Divine Storm), which whirlwinds and heals allies.
  • Got rid of Blessing of Salvation and made all the tactical blessings become non-blessings so they wouldn't overwrite actual blessings.
  • Gave us all sorts of crazy damage stacking talents (The Art of War, Righteous Vengeance).
  • Got rid of Sanctity Aura and folded the improved version into Retribution Aura, in addition to giving Ret Aura an additional talent to add haste to it.
  • Got rid of Judgement of the Crusader and made its improvement talent affect all debuff Judgements (I had long thought this was a good idea!).
  • Buffed Improved Hammer of Justice (hellooooooooo PvP fun!).
  • Got rid of Precision.
  • Got rid of Sanctified Judgement for some crazy raid mana-return talent.
  • Gave the faction seals to the other faction under different names.
  • Moved Divine Strength to tier 1 protection tree and bumped it up to 15% at 5/5.
  • Repentance eligible targets expanded, and duration extended (1 minute in PvE, 10 seconds in PvP).
... and a whole host of other stuff.

Siha has a good list of all changes to date. MMO Champion has the latest updated talent calculator. Rohan, as always, has some good thoughts on the changes thus far.

My overall impression? Optimistic for retribution, hopeful for protection, and happy I'm not a healer.

My biggest concern? Mana return for retribution. No Sanctified Judgement? A new strike to drain my mana? How will I keep myself with a full blue rage bar?

My second biggest concern? Threat. No Blessing of Salvation has me worried. I'm going to have to hope our protection buddies become huge threat monsters, 'cuz I think I'm going to be riding their asses.

Sample PvP spec - Sample PvE spec

I'm going to look so totally noobtacular with a 0/5/66 spec for PvE, but jebus monkey balls, would you look at the bottom of the ret tree now?

Hopefully a few weeks down the road I'll hear how some of the beta paladins are faring and what else gets changed, and I can put together an actual reaction of all of this.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

oh, I'll be a threat monster all right...I'm ballparking it at 20-50% more TPS on pre-expansion patch day, and it's going to skyrocket in the expansion itself

Suicidal Zebra said...

Yep, I'm going to make a concerted effort to comment on the talents at some point on the weekend. Right now I think it's enough to 'Post Without Comment' ;). That said, the one major concern I have for all Pally specs right now is mana, most especially for Holy and Ret.

And posted by flyingtoastr/Dazanna on EJ, there's this pic which makes me lolol:

http://i33.tinypic.com/25hfv47.jpg

Shwitz44 said...

F'in a, JoBlood hit for over 7k with all those new talents active?

/rubs hands together

Gimme Seal of the Martyr and new talents! NAO!

Unknown said...

<- Morendin
even without salvation, I'll be able to hold threat off your monster judgements/divine storms, since I'll have ~1200 Spellpower with Touched by the Light, 15% stronger seals/judgements, the ability to seal weave with 100% proc SoV, Hammer of the Righteous, and JoCru folded into my abilites.
What I'm really looking forward to is Shield of Righteousness at 75 though...even if 'high threat' means a static bonus, BV will give .63 TPS, at a cheaper statpoint cost than Spellpower. If high threat is a 25-50% multiplier...holy crap that's a lot of threat.