Cataclysm: The Ret Paladin- AKA Multi-Box Burst PVP Machines.

[remanz]

Can you elaborate a little? Can't you deathgrip the mage after he blinks? And what about chains of ice?

Just got back from Blizzcon.

I was laughing so hard when GC said his habit included nerfing paladins.

ANyway. The mage has so many tools to kite melees. Without cleanse, it is just a nightmare. The mage can start with the pet range nova. and simply go from there. Deathgrip is only 1 skill. He has like 3 novas. and obviously, if I am just 5 v 1 mage, I can simply exorcism him to death. But that is rarely the case in BG, combined with warlock, hunter, priest, and of cuz , the unkillable holy paladin. I am not killing anyone.

[Firstcow]

Just got back from Blizzcon.

I was laughing so hard when GC said his habit included nerfing paladins.

ANyway. The mage has so many tools to kite melees. Without cleanse, it is just a nightmare. The mage can start with the pet range nova. and simply go from there. Deathgrip is only 1 skill. He has like 3 novas. and obviously, if I am just 5 v 1 mage, I can simply exorcism him to death. But that is rarely the case in BG, combined with warlock, hunter, priest, and of cuz , the unkillable holy paladin. I am not killing anyone.

Looks like I will need to resub to take on the dk+rets challenge again Now if the wife wouldn't threaten to cut my balls...

[Zappy]

Here's a new idea for the DK/4 paladin teams, and this one is a little outside the box.

Unfortunately, all my gear is ret gear atm, but I'm seriously considering making 4 shockadins. Shockadins look to be back since 4.0.1, so I'm gonna respec soon and give this a go in some instances hopefully tonight. If you're confused on shockadins, some good info here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Shockadins

After taking a good look at the holy tree, I'm thinking this might be exactly what our team needs.

Here's gonna be some of the key talents that'll make this viable:

* Protector of the innocent. Whenever you cast a heal on any target, you'll be healing all 4 of your paladins as well.
* Blazing Light (20% increased damage on Holy Shock and Exorcism).
* Denounce (75% mana reduction on excorcism, but 50% chance to have exorcism instant and no mana when casting holy shock) -- This is basically your art of war proc, except it'll proc from your main abililty -- holy shock
* Enlightened Judgements - increase range by 10 yards of judgements ** and ** instantly heals you for 2915.
* Beacon of Light..... OMFG... Now this talent has some serious goodness when boxed. "The target becomes a Beacon of Light to all members of your party *or* raid. Each heal you cast on any party or raid member, heals the beacon for 50% of amount healed." At this point, we'll have 4 of our guys with a beacon on them at all times. A nice piece of this is that it's not just party - it's raid, so it'll work in bgs just fine when we are split up, so everytime you cast a heal, you'll be healing 4 of your guys at once.
* Sacred Cleansing - Another awesome one.. Everybody crying about not having cleanse... Here's your answer to that one - "Your Cleanse spell now also dispels 1 Magic effect."
* Paragon of Virtue - Reduced CD of Avenging Wrath by 60 seconds, and Hand of Sacrafice by 30 seconds.
* Aura Mastery -- with 4 paladins, you'll have 16 seconds of no silence or interrupt effects.

I think the 5 optional talents would best be spent in crusade (30% increased damage to holy shock) and Improved Judgements - This stacks with Enlightened Judgements - so we'll have 40 yard judgements, however I'm not sure that judgements will do enough damage to justify it.

[Mosg2]

I saw a post or two about this. I'm interested in seeing how it goes but I'm not interested in grinding BG's to see if it works with gear

Maybe I'll go take another look tonight and see how much honor my guys have.

[remanz]

Here's a new idea for the DK/4 paladin teams, and this one is a little outside the box.

Unfortunately, all my gear is ret gear atm, but I'm seriously considering making 4 shockadins. Shockadins look to be back since 4.0.1, so I'm gonna respec soon and give this a go in some instances hopefully tonight. If you're confused on shockadins, some good info here: http://www.wowwiki.com/Shockadins

After taking a good look at the holy tree, I'm thinking this might be exactly what our team needs.

Here's gonna be some of the key talents that'll make this viable:

* Protector of the innocent. Whenever you cast a heal on any target, you'll be healing all 4 of your paladins as well.
* Blazing Light (20% increased damage on Holy Shock and Exorcism).
* Denounce (75% mana reduction on excorcism, but 50% chance to have exorcism instant and no mana when casting holy shock) -- This is basically your art of war proc, except it'll proc from your main abililty -- holy shock
* Enlightened Judgements - increase range by 10 yards of judgements ** and ** instantly heals you for 2915.
* Beacon of Light..... OMFG... Now this talent has some serious goodness when boxed. "The target becomes a Beacon of Light to all members of your party *or* raid. Each heal you cast on any party or raid member, heals the beacon for 50% of amount healed." At this point, we'll have 4 of our guys with a beacon on them at all times. A nice piece of this is that it's not just party - it's raid, so it'll work in bgs just fine when we are split up, so everytime you cast a heal, you'll be healing 4 of your guys at once.
* Sacred Cleansing - Another awesome one.. Everybody crying about not having cleanse... Here's your answer to that one - "Your Cleanse spell now also dispels 1 Magic effect."
* Paragon of Virtue - Reduced CD of Avenging Wrath by 60 seconds, and Hand of Sacrafice by 30 seconds.
* Aura Mastery -- with 4 paladins, you'll have 16 seconds of no silence or interrupt effects.

I think the 5 optional talents would best be spent in crusade (30% increased damage to holy shock) and Improved Judgements - This stacks with Enlightened Judgements - so we'll have 40 yard judgements, however I'm not sure that judgements will do enough damage to justify it.

Hmmmm, Shockadin, didn't someone already try them in BGs ? Insane surivial, but lack firepower to kill. It seems a little goofy to me. I have to test the firepower to decide. But we don't need the DK anymore, don't we, if we go holy. We become a gimped shaman team with better healing.

[Ualaa]

I like it Zappy.
Have been thinking of this composition for a while, then reading of the Cataclysm changes kind of unmotivated me to try the team.

You get a team with a massive amount of healing, which makes them rather hard to kill.
I especially like getting cleanse again on the pally team.
A shock spec is also more ranged, or less vulnerable to being kited by a frost mage or whatever.
Not sure if they have enough sustained DPS or burst, with this spec but that remains to be seen.

[Zappy]

I'm still up in the air on it. My druid healer for my alliance shammys suggested that I give it a try. He's not decked out in gear by any means and showed me some recount data from a heroic where he was seeing 4-5k dps *and* keeping the tank up. Couple that with some good gear and multiply it by 4, and it may just be interesting.

There is obviously a lot of theorycrafting at this point. After watching a few videos of some decent 4.0.1 shockadins dueling - mage, warrior, shadow priest, and you'll learn the shockadin is all about burst damage -- Holy Shock and Exorcism spam, and they never seem to run out of mana.

If I recall, i never sold my quel'delars after hitting 1800, so I should be able to change them in for the spell one, and buy the healing shield (only 70 honor points). I figured I'll reforge all my ret gear to have intellect on them to give it a try, then if it seems viable at all, I may just starting grinding for the gear on them as I don't really have that much else to do until cataclysm.

One thing that should be nice is that I can't imagine heroics would be that difficult on this team with so much survivability, and if they can pull off that much dps, I'll truely be impressed.

As far as the DK, tough to say for sure - Getting necrotic strike @ 83 for the MS debuff will be nice, plus I like the idea of having my tank level with my paladins. I can't decide between frost or unholy for my DK at this point. Unholy still seems to do some insane damage.

Time will tell if this spec will be viable or not.

[Zappy]

This seems very interesting so far. Basically, I'm wearing 1800 ret gear on my paladins and I'm respec'd for shockadins. After some basic macro tweaking for a 1 button DPS spam, i am able to achieve 3.5k DPS:



Now mind you... In full ret gear, buffed up, I have 118 spell power. LOL. I'm gonna have some more fun with this tonight, but I think I may have to farm a quick 219 wep for each of them, reforge them and see what I can get.

[Mosg2]

I was able to sell back my 1800 Ret weapons. I'm kind of hesitant to grind honor on these guys just for a test, but... What else am I going to do with my time between here and there?

Edit:

I bought the 1800 caster mace+shield and the WG shoulders/back. The rest of their gear is Relentless/Wrathful Ret gear. With a one-button spam I was up to about 3500dps before running out of mana, which happened pretty fast (only 10k mana).

I'm going to try some BG's and see how it feels.

[Zappy]

I'm totally up in the air on this one. After flying around to the various rep vendors, I picked up a lot of rep gear, traded my ashen verdict ring among a few other things... I haven't socketed or enchanted yet, however, my DPS actually went down to around 2500 - this is with about 1k SP and 16k mana.

The interesting part is that I ran a few heroics and found it much easier than straight rets. Rets are quicker, however keeping people healed and topped off was now easier than ever.

So the real question is if they get their SP up, what kind of dps are they capable of doing.