We Giveth… You Rejoice… We Taketh Away…

Astounding.  I’ve reached a point in my World of Warcraft tenure where no price would seem unreasonable to have a seat behind the closed doors of a Blizzard conference room during the discussion of Paladins.  Upon launch, the Retribution tree was a random assortment of unorganized brain flatulations etched into a talent calculator and passed off as reasonable.  Before long, these flatulations took a more “solid” form as to say that although the Retribution tree was still complete and utter “fecal excrement”, at the very least it had fixed dimensions and was confined to a particular paradigm.  When patch 1.9 made its way onto our hard drives, it was almost as if Blizzard employees were taking the excrement and slinging it up against their white boards to witness what would stick.  The soiled remnants, after some modest deliberation, represented what we were left with as of the moment.

The Burning Crusade came as breath of “fresh” air in that Retribution Paladins seemed to, at the very least, have a place in this world.  For the first time it appeared as though some actual thought had gone into our construction, paving the way for a bright new chapter of the Paladin history.

The euphoria was short-lived…

No later than one month past the initial rework of the BC Retribution Paladin did the developers once again seem to meet within conference rooms and chuck “brown” matter at the walls.  The result was a mildly-effective, laughable archetype with a complete lack of any damage that could be considered as sustained. 

What we have today, ladies and gentlemen, is a repeat of the Burning Crusade travesty – only this time it is working from a talent tree that was largely accepted and appreciated by the Paladin community.

Blizzard giveth…  We rejoice…  Blizzard taketh away…

In the latest batch of Paladin “adjustments”, we are to see the following:

• Judgements of the Wise now only restores 15% of base mana (down from 33%)
• Judgement of Wisdom now only restores 1% of base mana (down from approximately 2%)
• All Judgements and Seals now do 20% less damage
• Hammer of Wrath can now only be used against targets at 20% health or less (down from 35% or less)
• Art of War now does a flat damage increase to Judgement, Crusader Strike and Divine Storm instead of a critical strike damage bonus increase.  The flat damage increase is at least 5 to 10% less than the critical strike damage bonus was.

If I may, please allow me to summarize the above in an eloquently-written and factually reasonable statement:

U GUYZ WUR DOIN 2 MUHC DAMUJ AND PEEPLE COMPLIANED SO NERF LOL

In all honesty, it isn’t the damage nerfs that frustrate me.  Putting aside the fact that Mages, Disc Priests, Warlocks, good Rogues and Feral Druids laughably destroy my Tier 6/Season 4 Retribution Paladin as we currently stand, I was understanding about a reduction in our burst capability.  What I am NOT understanding of, however, is an outright assault on our mana regeneration.  The math has been posted countless times for the developers to view but it seems to have fallen upon blind eyes.

Regardless, enough with the “woe is me”.  It’s time for me to officially investigate this nerf and present the facts in statistical format as I have done many times in the past for various other posts.  You can expect my next post, which should arrive shortly, to be one of statistical analysis with respect to the indentation left by Retribution’s hand-carved (unlike other classes ours seem to made of solid wood) nerf bat.