Undocumented 3.1 Info, and a Question.
Just a few things to mention:
1) Art of War no longer seems to reset the swing timer. This means that during any spare global cooldown period in your DPS cycle casting an Art Of War enhanced Flash of Light will no longer result in a drop in DPS.
2) Ret's best pre-raid Libram, the Venture Co. Libram of Retribution, has been nerfed. It now provides a flat +81 damage to Divine Storm, or 'bleh' as I see it. The numbers may mean that the Libram of Furious Blows will be the de-facto entry level raiding libram and the Naxx-25 Libram will remain the best for raiding pre-Ulduar for those not blessed in PvP.
The good news is that the PvP Libram, which blows all others out of the water in PvE, will require a very reasonable 1300 Arena Rating in 3.1 (Season 6). It'll be well worth getting it if you can. Hopefully Ulduar drops and other sources (Emblem turn-ins, PvP rewards etc.) will rectify this awful itemisation gap.
3) Swift Retribution, the 3% haste Tier 9 Ret Talent, now applies this effect to all aura's. The talent joins Sanctified Retribution, Imp. Devotion Aura and Imp. Concentration Aura as effects which boost all aura's. In fact, a 0/18/53 talent spec would allow you to have one aura which boosts all damage by 3%, Haste by 3% and healing by 6%. And that aura could be a resistance aura. Not bad, huh?
4) The Paladin Tier 8 set now comes with a kilt! (or surcoat if you prefer, cassock if you are that way inclined).
from Retpaladin.com Forums.
Both leggings and kilted versions are in the game files, so we don't know which one we'll be lumbered with. I hope that Blizzard are being canny and releasing 4 colour versions with the PTR to surreptitiously gauge player reaction and go with the most popular, and if that's the case the 'white' version probably has the slot nailed down.
Finally, a question. By now you've probably seen the Argent Champion Tabards which will be a feature of the Argent Tourney in 3.1, possibly as a means of championing your home city? I'm rather partial to the Ironforge tabard but for obvious reasons I won't be grabbing it, and of the Horde option I most appreciate the Sen'jin sense of style. Which one do you like, and which will you be sporting when exhibiting your martial skills?
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6 comments:
1) That's decent PvP buff. I say fix because why would an instant reset the swing timer? They 'never' have for shamans or paladins as far as I can remember. I say 'never' because there have been similar resets with procced instant heals, which I also regard as bugs or oversights.
3) That's an impressive aura. I wonder though, it would certainly gimp the paladin specced for it, but could the other paladins gain enough to offset that with the free points? I doubt it since that paladin would essentially have no specialty, be good at nothing, while the others would only gain a handful of points.
I'm hoping that AoW-FoL resetting your swing timer was just a coding oversight in 3.0 and they couldn't spare the resources to fix it until now. Unfortunately hard to justify mechanics are so commonplace that it's easy to invent some awful design rationale for it, such as 'oh, heals must have a DPS trade-off'.
In terms of the Aura, assuming that no additional changes to the 3.1 Ret tree are made (a huge assumption, most likely wrong) a Ret Paladin can get every DPS-increasing talent bar IMP. BoM and still get Imp. Devo Aura in Prot. Ret really doesn't have to give up that much for it. Holy simply will never grab it because the trade-off for not going Holy/Ret is too high. Prot will pick it up due to the stream-lining of talents, but still not every guild have a Prot Paladin.
It's highly unlikely to ever become a serious build option in raids, but it may be quite an interesting variant for 10-man and 5-man raids in guilds with small populations and limited class variants. It's not a build that frees up points for other Paladins in your raid, instead it is an option for squeezing out every bit of raid benefit you can from your spec without gimping yourself.
But my point remains somewhat moot, as they can't be done with the Ret Tree as it is now.
Can they?
Note that the starting team rating in the next arena season will not be 1500. The current system of starting teams at 1500, with the intention of having half of teams immediately lost points down to where they actually should be is not very fun. I think I recall seeing 1000 as a potential starting point, but I have no idea whether that's accurate.
The upshot is that I wouldn't entirely count on the arena libram being accessible.
Yep, good point, I should have made that clearer. On that point, whilst we do not know what our starting rating will be, 1300 rating is the lowest rating requirement of any gear that requires rating under the proposed 3.1 system.
Assuming that relative skill requirements for gear remains the same Deadly gloves (1350 Arena Rating Req) in 3.1 should be as 'easy' to get as Hateful gloves are now (1615 Arena Rating Required). Thus any Paladin capable of 1600 ratings in the current season will hopefully be able to get the Deadly Libram in 3.1.
You're right though, we just don't know that much about how the rating system will evolve in 3.1. We also don't know what gear will become available through Emblems and the new Wintergrasp Raid. Whatever the change, 1300 for a very, very good PvE Libram is much easier than the current 1930.
YES! The white set with the surcoat ftfw! I'd also take the blue or red ones :). It would be awesome if those color variations were for the heroic "valorous" t8 per spec, white being for holy, blue for prot, red for retribution. Either way the gearset looks 100x better with the surcoat.
I noticed that you made a comment related to a post on Blessing of Kings frustrated because someone mentioned using Maxdps.com and you said it was almost "invariably wrong" Can you write a post elaborating on this? I value your opinion, but have been using Maxdps almost exclusively because of its clean interface and ease to use. Also, can you recomend an alternate site, somthing that i can use as reference so that when raiding 25 Nax i can pull it up and quickly figure out if somthing is worth me rolling on or not?
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