Did the math...

Don't I look good in that stuff? ^_^

Well, I got bored today, and decided to get the pen(cil) and paper out and do some numbers on the PTR. Finally season seven gear was made visible, so I was able to get the most out of it. This would have been a lot easier had RatingBuster worked on the PTR, but Blizz's attempt at making that addon cuts it off, making it not even show up on the addons tab on the log in screen. Problem with theirs it doesn't show percentage of hit/crit and exact numbers of attack power. More on this, on the thread I made on the WoW forums, please bump!

Anywho, what I came to talk about, here are my stats currently (unbuffed) on live.

• 25,304 HP
• 3981 AP
• 27.11% Crit
  
• 5.06% Hit
• 773 Resil

After crunching numbers, deducting gems and enchants, etc, I came up with the following, and was pretty shocked how much are stats are going up. These numbers are with epic gems and enchant totals added in.

• 29,154 HP
• 4691 AP
• 29.83% Crit
• 5.03% Hit
• 929 Resil

Of course, I'm not surprised at a decent upgrade, but going up that much kind of surprised me. That's a 710 attack power increase, alot more than I gained going from Deadly to Furious. The resil and hp are crazy too. I have trouble getting down anyone with that much resilience, let alone someone in plate, an absorb shield running, extremely reliable heals, and putting out lots of damage. Now, honestly, I may give up 190 attack power, by switching out my Titan-Runed PvP trinket for the newest version of the Medallion, I'll also be dropping DMC: Greatness in exchange for the Battlemaster's Rage. But it could be temporary, depends on if I like them or not, so if anything changes, it will the attack power, but only slightly. Time will tell!

P.S.: For all my Seal of Command supporters, Seal of Vengeance/Corruption has been nerfed. YAY!

Thanks for stopping by!

Q&A pt.2

So, here I am again, bored as much as ever. I figured I'd go ahead and finish my Q&A about the ptr, so here goes.

Q: Seal of Command's damage is drastically lower damage wise to the point where we're seeing Seal of Vengeance/Corruption surpassing it in overall damage, and even Seal of Righteousness getting higher Judgement damage. Is there any reason to be using Seal of Command come 3.2? If so, why?
A: Now Seal of Vengeance/Corruption being added to the PvE dps side for Ret I really like to be honest. I had been wanting to use it, just because it seemed a DoT damage rotation would be pretty solid. However, we all know that I don't care for PvE, so how much damage it does there is irrelevant. The problem with SoV is that, although being marginally higher DPS in PvP situations, is that it causes alot of trouble in an arena situation. The DoT lasts 15 seconds, so you end up not being able to CC anyone with the dot until it falls off. The only way to not get it to fall is of course to stop attacking and wait, or stop casting Divine Storm. So you have to lose alot of dps just to CC, to the point where you can't control your situation. It's up to you how you play your comp, if you just want to zerg, go ahead and use it, but if you can't repent that other healer in a double healer set up, don't say I didn't warn you. Seal of Righteousness however is not higher DPS like a good many rerolladins are saying. Yes the judgement damage is higher, but, none of the seal procs crit, so the slight judgement damage you gain is overshadowed by the fact that your seals aren't hitting hard. Yes, we all love big numbers, but you hit with your melee weapon alot more than you judgement, if you this seal, you deserve the sub 1500 ratings you'll sit at because of it. This answer is turning into a wall of text, so I'll end it. Seal of Command is better overall in PvP in my opinion because...
1) Your CC can still go through. No DoTs to worry about.
2) The damage is on demand, no waiting for a DoT to stack, or waiting on your Judgement to get off CD to get your "lolburst."
3) Mana is no longer an issue when using Seal of Command because of the new glyph. You can spec into Defelection (5% parry maxxed) rather than Benediction. Judging SoC will give you a 28% mana return total, and the glyph will give you 8% mana even if it's absorbed.

Q: Blizz mentioned they would perhaps implement a spell interrupt for Paladins, your thoughts?
A: Honestly I'd love this. I've been waiting forever for something like it, since we're the only melee without some sort of lockout, or way to stop casting outside of HoJ or Repentance. At the moment, rolling a Blood Elf is the only way to get a silence as a Paladin. This however, would really tip the balance in the favor of Blood Elves more so than they are now in PvP. Mainly because you would see a situation like this (being that it's on a 15 second CD like everyother kick-like ability). Healer begins to cast>Interrupt, 3 second lockout>Starts again>Arcane torrent, 2 second silence>Again>Hammer, trinkets>Again>Interrupt>Dead. It could be potentially what makes Arcane Torrent get nerfed, we'll see though.

Q: What spec are you going to use?
A: 0/20/51 hands down. Testing in battlegrounds, arena skirmish, and dueling this turned out being the best out of all the specs I tested. Only points I would maybe move would the one point out of Eye for an Eye, just depends on how many Shamans we see, being because E4E will break grounding totem, so it's pretty useful.

Thanks for reading, next post I'll be going over the recent Paladin Q&A from Ghostcrawler, and voice what I feel. See ya!

Long time no post, so, time for some 3.2 Q&A (Part 1)

So what's happening? Yeah, been a while since I've posted but, I've been busy with other things as usual, and my PTR testing has been spoiled due in part to speed hackers in battlegrounds, arena, and even dueling sometimes. Funny thing is, I ended up killing 3/5 of the guys who didn't know what they were doing with the hacks, but that's another story.

I decided to make a Q&A about the PTR, using some questions that I've received from people on the PTR and live, asking my opinion on the new changes, here goes

Q: Vidication, should I really invest my points into this talent? It only affects attack power now, therefor making it worthless to 3 classes in the game totally, and 5 specs of the hybrids.
A: It's a hard choice really, and I see it coming down to personal preference, or what setups/brackets of arena you'd be playing in. Seeing as how most 3v3 arena right now is cleave, it would be good. However, with 3v3 and 5v5 getting all the attention now, don't count on tons of cleave comps. I more than likely will not be specing into this, hypocritical from my last post, but further testing has made me not really care for the talent.

Q: Pally damage is going down, how do we kill stuff? I've been reading in forums everywhere that Ret damage is pretty "lol" now, and that we'll rely on a MS class to kill things.
A: This isn't true. Yes, seal damage is lower, and Crusader Strike's damaged was lowered. The difference here though is the re-addition of Exorcism back into the Ret rotation and the four second cooldown of Crusader Strike allows for less of that "waiting on cooldowns" dps feel that the current Crusader Strike can have in certain situations. That's just from a PvP stantpoint, our PvE damage from what I understand is quite a bit higher, but I'll adress seals later. Overall, I'd say our damage is a little higher than it is now.

Q: How's Ret's survivabilty now? With the removal of Seal of Blood/Martyr, does it really feel different? And Art of War?
A: First, Art of War is different, but some people got this wrong for a while on forums, and even I did (I think) on my first PTR post. It is now being activated by all melee crits (this includes Judgements), allowing for a pretty reliable (if not up the whole time) stream of AoW procs. Also another change to note is that you choose now, you either cast an instant cast Exorcism (1.5 sec cast now, forgot to mention, sorry holy and prot) or the usual Flash of Light. Another change is Sacred Shield, and this is my favorite. If you have this active, and cast flash on a target, they get a HoT for 100% of the Flash of Light spell you cast. Combine that with a critical heal, and you'll have two HoTs rolling on your target with sacred shield, providing some very decent, if not borderline over powered self heals. Survial is up 75% I'd say, which is pretty high, seeing as we can survive pretty well right now if played right.

Q: The resilience changes seems to be a double edged sword...On one hand we benefit more from wearing mostly PvP gear, but the same can be said for the people we go up against with heavy resil, healers in particular. What's your opinion, stick with mostly PvE gear or migrate to PvP gear and give up some damage?
A: Well, I for one never liked PvE gear being so dominant in PvP. I really liked how it was in BC, when resil gear was usually always better than anyone rocking full PvE gear, especially in the case of Warriors, and Paladins. Only class back then that could get away with nothing but PvE gear were rogues, but that's blizzard's fault for making their PvP gear always bad compared to their PvE loots. If you must, you can maybe get away with wearing PvE gear as usual, but don't expect do be doing all the damage you are doing currently. With the nerfs in damage, and buffs in resil, the guys in full resil gear will be hitting you harder than you are hitting them. Since a Ret with around my resil (773), which comes out to be a 9.43% damage reduction and and 20% crit damage reduction (unless of course the static stacks with crit, in which case you're looking at a loss of 30% damage on crits, unsure on that at the moment). That gear vs someone with maybe about 150 more ap than what I have, but 100-200 less resil is substantial. If you wear PvE gear, you do so at your own risk.

Well, that's going to do it for this Q&A tonight, going to bed. I'll be back with some more answered questions. Hope it was helpful :)

The new Retribution, and hints at the future expansion

So we are on the verge of the next patch, and I have new revisions, and new thoughts after actually being able to play on the PTR. First of all, I LOVE my new charger, I also made it to the WoWHead database, see here. Anyway, moving on to actual mechanics.

First on the list, I have to point out the things in my last post that were proven wrong after some testing.

Righteous Fury: Probably bugged as of this last PTR build, the tooltip shows that it has no mana cost, sadly, it still does. So atm, no free six percent damage reduction.
Vindication: Actually a very useful talent at the moment, where as I said otherwise in my last post. Sadly, I think this talent will be almost useless come late season seven or early season eight, seeing as it won't scale, besides (what I think) with level increase.
Art of War: This procs off Judgement as well.

Now to talk about some fixes in the new PTR build. Well, there were really only two. The Crusader Strike previously was still costing the same amount of mana as it does on live. This was causing minor mana issues, this is has been fixed, now it's only five percent base mana, which helps out greatly. Also, thankfully, they fixed the proc on Seal of Command to proc off of Divine Storm. This helped out with the DPS on the seal.

So far, testing has been great, and I have been enjoying the new ret. It still is bursty, but not to the degree of killing people in a Hammer at fifty percent. The survivability has gone up considerably however. With the new resilience change, and the change to sacred shield, we are living longer, and fitting more into the defensive hybrid we are supposed to be. To be totally honest, I'm quite glad that I'm not getting destroyed by full twenty-five man Naxx, or Hateful Glad. geared Death Knights, other Ret Paladins, and Rogues, just because my resilience doesn't seem to matter.

I'll have some videos as soon as I can, at the moment however, I seem to be lagging worse on the PTR than live. Remember, on live, I'm running a completely overhauled UI, whilst on the PTR, I have no addons. Who knows.

Oh and on another note, seems like we might be seeing a third expansion to be announced on Blizzcon. Want to know more? Click me!

Until my next post, get on the PTR and find me, I was posted as Sunstrikesc, but now it's Sunstriker.