Tuesday, December 4, 2007

The New Crusader Strike

So Blizzard is finally starting to move forward with the plan to reduce our itemization requirements, which leaves Retribution in a tiny bit of a bind.

What am I talking about? The 110% damage buff and simultaneous nerf (no 40% dmg coefficient) of Crusader Strike.

They discussed back at BlizzCon removing spell damage as a stat for Retribution, and this is certainly a start, but at the same time, a lot of our gear still has a lot of spell damage. While it doesn't scale nearly as well as AP, it had its use, and removing it from Crusader Strike stings our damage a little - one of our major skills now has a rather poor synergy with a lot of our gear stats and one of our raid staples, Judgment of the Crusader.

I can't decide whether or not this is a buff or a nerf. It's the start to something that needs to be done, but at the same time a fair amount of our skills and gear are oriented in some way towards spell damage, and removing that coefficient just took away the 450 spell damage or so we end up having with JotC up on a target.

As a class, we have seen more rapid and fundamental changes than perhaps anyone. We used warrior only gear back when SoC and Consecration were our only damage abilities, JoC being a useless debuff. Then we used gear with spell damage when they added JoC and revamped our coefficients. Then we started to revert to melee gear, but still keeping around a fair amount of int and spell damage. Now it looks like we're going full steam back to melee gear, but at the moment we're still loaded out on spell damage gear.

At the moment, the CS change is probably neutral, just a start towards something that's been needed for awhile now, but any further changes to our skills to reduce spell damage dependency cannot occur without a serious revamp of a lot of our gear.

7 comments:

Unknown said...

Yup. The CS change is a good step forward in the right direction. But blizz needs to make multiple changes at once and test them.

The long fabled sp>ap conversion talent would go a long ways to helping us out.

I don't understand why there doing this piece meal.

Unknown said...

Yup. The CS change is a good step forward in the right direction. But blizz needs to make multiple changes at once and test them.

The long fabled sp>ap conversion talent would go a long ways to helping us out.

I don't understand why there doing this piece meal.

Michael said...

Not sure either. It seems like a tepid 'test the waters' kind of change. If we don't see some more thorough alterations over the next 2 or so patches, you can't help but wonder why they started with this change and just left it dangling.

Unknown said...

An easy way to get the best Ret gear is now through season 3.

The stuff is amazing, and the 5% CS bonus damage on the gloves really is great, especailly when you hit for more than 2k on the PTR without them.

Alex - aka Firelight said...

Speak of item bonuses...

Have you seen how really really bad the set bonuses are on the ret t5 gear?

+Mana and + healing the group??

Wow those really enhance our dps....

Looks like i'll be skipping t5 all together!

Shwitz44 said...

Firelight, the 2-piece bonus is actually pretty good. In a raid encounter, if you count up how many times you judged, and multiply by the mana saved because of that bonus, it will be an appreciable number. It might allow you to uprank Consecrate some and add damage that way.

Alex - aka Firelight said...

Only if you have a seriously low mana pool.

I'm running about 6 or 7k in raids fully buffed.

When i get to 50% mana i pop a potion which fills me up.

With Judgement of wisdom up on a mob as well from other paladins i'm able to top up my mana that way as well...

I'd much rather they'd have given us something useful to up our dps...

The only t5 i want is legs - to upgrade my t4 legs as i'm yet to find a sensible replacement from bosses yet.