Long Arm of the Law - Ret's New Gap-Closer. [12759]

New Beta builds inevitably mean new Paladin changes, and yesterdays' is no different. The talent calculators haven't been updated quite yet but Curse Networks twitter feed released a few very interesting changes. I know a number of Retribution Paladins will be very interested in them:

Improved Judgement - Now increases Judgement range by 10/20 yards.

Okay, so a longer range Judgement for Ret (and other specs willing to throw two talents in Tier 1 Ret). Longer range always represents a DPS increase in encounters with target switching so that's a flat buff to the talent, even though the cooldown reduction is no a factor. PvP considerations would be more significant if the Judgement debuff still limited run-speed to 100% (as Judgement of Justice does now), but this effect has been rolled into Seal of Justice's debuff (as opposed to a minor stun). The trade-off therefore is one of damage for utility when choosing your PvP Seal, and it should be interesting to see if Judgement will be able to proc SoJ's speed limiting effect.

We then come to the gap-closer:

Long Arm of the Law (tier 3): 50/100% chance; 30% move speed buff for 4 sec when using Judgement on targets >= 15 yds away.

As gap closer's go, it's an interesting mechanic. The principle is that if your target is a long distance away you've got some ability to close the gap, but staying on a close (<15 yard) target requires some utility cooldowns if that target has snares/sprints of their own. In PvE it's a straight buff for target-switching encounters such as Professor Putricide where time-on-target is paramount.

On the flip-side, this talent is a sprint, not a snare. As such, snares against you will still be very effective and mean that closing the gap to competent Hunters and Mages will remain a difficult proposition. Equally, staying in melee range will be harder due to the lack of Judgement of Justice, possibly necessitating the use of SoJ in place of a Seal which deals significant damage. I'm also not sure if Pursuit of Justice is still a part of the Cataclysm talent trees. Another point worth investigating is just how close to someone you can get in 4 seconds at 30% speed from 15-30 yards away.

And yeah, I'd call it the 'Swift Hand of Justice' if there weren't already a trinket by that name.

Other interesting changes revealed were:

Sanctity of Battle: Causes haste to reduce the cooldown of Crusader Strike.

Divine Storm buffed to 150% weapon damage (from 90%) with 3 Holy Power.

Hammer of the Righteous - Hits target for 39% weapon dmg, all other targets in range for x to y holy dmg. 4.5 sec cooldown.

Divine Favor - Increases spell casting haste/crit by 20% for 20 sec. 3 min cooldown.

As well as the new graphic for Holy Power charges.

I'm highly unconvinced by Haste reducing the cooldown of Crusader Strike unless CS's base cooldown has increased significantly (beyond the current 4.5s). The 1.5sec Global Cooldown on most Ret abilities result in this only effective when haste brings CS's cooldown close to whole multiple of 1.5s (give or take latency), and tbh I'm really struggling to see the point. Hopefully there'll be more information on how this works soon.

Finally, Eskostar in the Elitist Jerks Cataclysm Change for Ret thread mentions an explicit change to Divine Purpose: 40% chance to generate holy power on Judgement, Exorcism, Templar's Verdict, Divine Storm, Inquisition and Holy Wrath. This greatly increases the Holy Power generation rate, though whether you'd spend this HP on anything other than Templar's Verdict/Divine Storm is another question.

First Hints of the Powers of the Ancient Kings

Beta Build 12664 hit last night, and there's not a whole lot that needs to be said about it. As always MMO-Champion has the full listings for all classes, aswell as a few very cool screenshots, so check it out. There's not a whole lot to say about the build, like the last couple they've tinkered around the edges but not changed the fundamentals much. Here are my highlights for Paladins:

Vindication talent now causes Holy Wrath to have a chance ('chance' has to be one of the worst words in Talents, it's so woolly) for an AoE 10% Physical Damage debuff (i.e. Demo Shout). Overall a good change, but as always you have to question exactly what is meant by 'a chance'.

Avenging Shield is cemented as part of the Protection Paladins' rotation as the cooldown is reduced to 20 secs via talents and it has have a chance to be reset on successful Crusader Strikes.

Holy Shield's duration is increased from 15 to 20 seconds. Looks like they were listening to what I said last week about the problematic way that HS interacts with CS, but even at 20sec the problem remains. Crusader Strike remains an unreliable means of generating Holy Power for Protection, especially at lower tiers of content, and so virtually all HP would remain spent on HS. Prot could do with a higher rate of HP generation or more reliable means of generation less susceptible to the whims of RNG. However even that sticks in the craw somewhat when Warriors get 10% additional block passively (scaled by Mastery) and critical blocking effects.

Art of War is no longer as likely to be 'always up' with a nerf to 15% chance to proc, but the tighter rotation makes this feel less of an issue and just allows other spells to get a look-in.

Imp. Crusader Strike is back and reduces the cooldown of CS from 4 to 3 seconds (with two points invested). Spam, spam, spammy spam spam. Not a great fan of this, but it does tend to close down the available GCD-space, hence making decisions of other spells to use more meaningful.

Seal of Justice see's a change in the tooltip - no longer stuns the target, instead limits its' maximum run speed. So far this isn't reflected in the MMO-Champ or WoWHead Cataclysm spell databases so we really don't know what it means. It may be that the 100% run speed limitation is being removed from the Judgement and instead is a Seal proc debuff (bleh change IMO), or it may be that it's a more meaningful Snare. This is one that needs to be tested (and me with a broken Beta account, Oy!)

There's not really an awful lot to talk about then - they're tinkering around the edges but not changing too much from previous builds. I still think Protection doesn't have a really distinct flavour in Cataclysm so far, though chucking out Avengers Shield regularly may help. To a certain extent leveraging in Holy Power more should tend to help, but I'm of the opinion that more reactive defensive abilities would be a boon to making the spec more fun. We shall see what the future hols in this regard.

Anyway, that's boring stuff. So in an effort to be less boring, lets have a look at Guardian of Ancient Kings.



The Guardian is our level 85 spell and as you can see has different effects depending on the specialisation you have chosen. Note that duration of the Guardian's manifestation is as yet unknown, but we can at least make the educated guess that for Protection it'll last approx. 12 seconds to match up with Shield Wall.

Protection: Summons the Ancient Protector, reducing the damage you take by 60%. However it's possible that during this time the Guardian is killable, making the duration potentially quite short. Currently, the duration is unknown.

Holy: Summons the Ancient Healer, who can cast Light of the Ancient Kings:



This heal should scale with your Spell Power, and it'd be pretty cool if it also scaled with your haste at the same time.

Retribution: Summons the Ancient Crusader, who fights by your side and strengthens your attacks.





So, something akin to the Shadowmourne weapon proc. It's unknown if the 20 Str buff starts to stack as it attacks, or starts at a full stack which reduces as it attacks. In addition, the damage done by the Ancient Crusader itself is as yet unknown.

Something of a mixed bag really. The Guardians may turn out to look awesome and be very powerful, but they probably won't change playstyle very much. Protection Paladins especially may feel short-changed as the Guardian is merely a slightly more powerful version of a spell they already got at baseline (Divine Protection). All three are very much 'fire and forget', though only in the case of one spec does it synergise with other cooldowns.

If the offensive potential of the Guardian + Avenging Wrath + Zealotry is deemed to be overly strong expect them to become mutually exclusive later on in the Beta (as with Divine Sheild, Divine Protection, Lay on Hands and AW currently).


with thanks to Lebeau on the MMO-Champion forums for drawing the threads together.