Monday, February 9, 2009

30 Minute Seals

A knight of the Silver Hand must have infiltrated Blizzard's Irvine headquarters, because I know they didn't come up with this one on their own. According to MMO Champion, a small patch will be rolled out tomorrow that will increase the duration of all paladin seals to 30 minutes and make them un-dispel-able (which will subsequently change the text on Sanctified Seals - bye bye 2/3 Sanc Seals for PvP specs).

Rejoice, brothers and sisters, as you will no longer have to re-seal mid-fight.

This system makes more intuitive sense to me. I've always thought that sealing a weapon was more of a long-term imbue sort of thing, not a 30 second "this buff will shine brightly and then flame out!" sort of thing like it was originally. 2 minutes was a step in the right direction, and now 30 minutes is just splendiforous.

Here's to you, Mr. Paladin Spy in Irvine!

/raises mug of ale
/takes a swig

6 comments:

Unknown said...

wow are you serious?... it's not april fool, is it?

why are we getting so much love from all the notes ;)

Anonymous said...

1) I'm sure the DPS I've lost to seals falling off is not a very great number, but it's a real number, and this is fabulous news as a result.

2) As stupid as I think Blizzard sometimes is (overnerfing BM Hunters, calling them noobs, etc.), they have really been moving in the right direction overall for some time now. My story:

I rolled Pally (long after WoW launched, but well before BC) because I liked them flavor-wise, being a cheeseball (everyone whose main is a Paladin is a cheeseball at heart), and because I liked the idea of being able to heal myself when I got in trouble (turns out this is a non-issue in WoW, for the most part).

Once I had played a couple dozen levels and started to wake up to the realities of game mechanics (such as the Holy Tree being terrible for soloing), I realized that the class seemed to be designed around micro-managing a bunch of buffs. Which is boring as heck. You put up your aura, your 5-minute blessing, and your 30-second seal, which goes away every time you Judge, so 10 seconds. You've just got auto-attack and Judgment, so really your entire gameplay is refreshing your buffs and hitting your one special attack. Woohoo.

Now seals are going to be longer than blessings, which seems nuts, but nice. AND levelling Pallies are going to get a second attack once Exorcism hits any creature type. That's still ridiculously boring compared to almost any other class's soloing routine, but it's a step in the right direction.

Next they should baseline Crusader Strike, or somehow make it accessible to levelling Paladins. Hitting buttons is more fun than waiting for Judgment to come off cooldown.

Fedaykin98

Anonymous said...

now im gonna forget about them like i do with poisons on my rogue

lol sarcasming

Anonymous said...

No fair, giff 30 minute battle shout.

Anonymous said...

Josh - unrelated, but here's fodder for your thinking, maybe a post about Ret and Hit or something.

I've read your theorycrafting and that at EJs about gearing for STR to the exclusion of Hit, and I'm doing it, and I'm doing well - generally above 3000 DPS, often well above that. But as upgrades have come I have dropped a ton of Hit. Right now I think I have around 170 or so, and whenever I get my T7.5 chest it'll be significantly less than that.

How is it that Hit is so unimportant for us, even though our spell hit cap is higher than our melee hit cap? Hit is critical for a lot of other classes.

I cringe when I look at my Hit Rating, even though I don't cringe at all when I'm #3 on the DPS meters. :P

Fedaykin98

Anonymous said...

I find the problem is not casting it every 90 secs... :D