Posts with tag tier-15-bonuses

The Light and How to Swing It: Retribution and the battle of the bonuses

by Dan Desmond Jan 23rd 2013 at 9:00AM

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Seasoned ret paladin Dan Desmond is here to answer your questions and provide you with your biweekly dose of retribution medicine. Contact him at dand@wowinsider.com with any questions, concerns, or suggestions!

This PTR cycle of patch 5.2 has been pretty quiet on the retribution front, or so it seemed. The few changes we're seeing are mainly talent-centric:

Hand of Purity also reduces all damage taken by 10%,
Eternal Flame's HoT is twice as effective when self-cast,
Selfless Healer was nerfed a bit, likely to compensate for the 100% Flash of Light buff to Sword of Light, and
Repentance's cast time is being increased to 1.7 seconds.

Regardless, I've always been a bit disappointed when we go through a patch unscathed. I suppose one could take it as a sign from the devs that they think ret is doing okay (whether this is true or not seems to be a matter of personal opinion), but it's a tad boring to not see any retribution news in with the list of changes.

Despite this lack of alteration, it seems there's still something we can get excited and/or worried over -- our tier set bonuses. Our tier 15 two-piece bonus, Exorcism putting a debuff on your target that makes it take 6% increased Holy damage from you for 6 seconds, seems to be fairly solid. With Exorcism's cooldown being 15 seconds (reduced by haste through Sanctity of Battle, of course), and Art of War giving us a 20% chance to reset Exorcism's cooldown on autoattacks, this buff should have a pretty high uptime. Personally, I don't really find it particularly appealing, but I don't hate it either. It's a two-piece bonus, it's not the star of the show.

Our four-piece bonus, however, has stolen the limelight and caused quite the stir not only within the ret paladin community, but apparently even at Blizzard as well as the blues ping-ponged between two ideas before finally (albeit momentarily) settling on one.

Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It, Mists of Pandaria

Patch 5.2 PTR: New notes from Ghostcrawler on tier 15 bonuses, other balance concerns

by Adam Holisky Jan 15th 2013 at 2:00PM

Ghostcrawler hit the forums and updated everyone on some stuff happening behind the scenes with the patch 5.2 tier 15 set bonuses, and just other system/balance things in general. It's important to keep in mind that this is the PTR and things can and do change relatively frequently, so if your concerns are not addressed, it doesn't mean they won't be at some point.

Ghostcrawler has also been saying on Twitter recently that he and his team are preparing a PvP post, which might be up as early as this Friday. According to El Crabo, in that post they'll address many of the changes happening to PvP in patch 5.2, as well as enumerate some of their future plans.

Notable in this post is the following:

Restro druid healing is being buffed slightly across the board
Monk's Spinning Fire Blossoms' nerf is intentional
There's a new retribution paladin 4pc bonus
They're redesigning the priest's Shadow Word: Insanity
More changes to priest healing: "We are going to nerf Divine Aegis for Prayer of Healing, but also lower the cost of Power Word: Shield (for Disc only) and increase the healing and damage of Penance"
New 4pc PvP bonus for priest: "Reduces the cooldown of Chakra by 25 sec and during Spirit Shell, Flash Heal costs 50% less mana."

The full posts is as follows:

Ghostcrawler

Hunter
- Aimed Shot's cast time has been lowered from 2.9 to 2.5 sec.

Shaman
- The Elemental 4pc does count Lava Bursts cast while in Ascendance.

Paladin
- The Protection 4pc counts damage after all mitigation, and does count absorbed damage.
- The Retribution 4pc set bonus has changed. It now has a chance for Hammer of the Righteous or Crusader Strike to cause your next Divine Storm to cause extra damage to your target. The idea being that you might swap from TV to DS when you get the proc, so that the RNG is something you can actually do something with rather than it just being RNG for extra damage.
- Retribution now does 50% extra healing with Flash Heal. The Selfless Healer talent has been reduced to 20/40/60% bonus healing.
- Sacred Shield's absorb effect is now dispellable, but the periodic effect is not.
- Blinding Light has a 1.8 sec cast for Holy only. We think Holy's CC chains are too strong at the moment, but we don't think Ret or Prot need the nerf.

Death Knight
- I said above that the Zandalari from the 2pc benefited from Unholy mastery. That was a bald-faced lie. It deals physical damage, like the ghoul.
- There is a good chance we're going to redesign the 4pc DPS bonus.

Priest
- The Golden Apparition from the Healing 4pc heals the lowest % health friendly target within 40yd. Note that it has no visual yet, but will not work like Shadowy Apparitions. It is a simple missile, not a summoned unit.
- Further clarification on the Healing 2pc: the Glyph of Prayer of Mending will only boost the first heal. The glyph effects won't be carried over due to the set bonus. It will be 160% -> 110% -> 121% -> 133% -> etc.
- We are going to redesign Shadow Word: Insanity.
- We are going to nerf Divine Aegis for Prayer of Healing, but also lower the cost of Power Word: Shield (for Disc only) and increase the healing and damage of Penance. In 25 raids, Disc is using Prayer of Healing almost exclusively and we don't think the Spirit Shell change will be sufficient to change that. We actually want Disc to get back to using PW:Shield a little more, along with Penance. Disc's throughput is overall too strong in PvE, not even counting the fact that absorbs are often more beneficial than heals.
- Angelic Bulwark and Spirit Shell can no longer be dispelled.
- The 4pc PvP bonus for healing priests has changed: Reduces the cooldown of Chakra by 25 sec and during Spirit Shell, Flash Heal costs 50% less mana.

Druid
- The Guardian 4pc is currently a 50% increase to rage generation while Enraged.
- We are going to slightly increase Resto druid healing across the board.
- We still like the DR change to Cyclone, but we are going to increase its range to 30 yards, and the PvP glove bonus for Balance and Resto will be to increase Cyclone duration by 2 sec.

Monk
- Spinning Fire Blossoms' damage now scales from weapon damage rather than attack power. This will result in an intended nerf.

source

Filed under: News items, Raiding

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