WoW Season of Discovery Phase 4 PTR: Paladin Changes

• Hammer of the Righteous damage has been increased to three times weapon damage (up from 2x weapon damage).
• The Art of War now reduces the remaining cooldown of Exorcism by 2 seconds on critical hit (previously was 1 second).

Developer’s Note: The old version of Art of war did allow for a playstyle that was unique to SoD where a fast two-handed weapon had a place in the game and while we’d like to move away from “exo spam” one button playstyle, we still love the idea of the build. The previous adjustments to Art of War also hit protection especially hard so we felt it appropriate to adjust this to still allow exorcism to be used rapidly without it completely dominating the rotation of both retribution and protection paladins.

• The Divine Sacrifice rune has been replaced with Hand of Sacrifice:
  • Causes target party or raid member to transfer 30% of damage taken to the caster. Lasts 12 seconds or until the caster has transferred 100% of their maximum health. 2 minute cooldown.

Developer’s Note: The version of Divine Sacrifice we introduced to Season of Discovery has a lot of drawbacks, and it is very situational on a slot filled with other situationally good utility. We’re changing this to be more like the familiar Hand of Sacrifice from future expansions. Blessing of Sacrifice is rather weak in Vanilla WoW aside from avoiding CC in PvP with no cooldown, and it also removes the target’s Blessing. This should be more generally useful with fewer drawbacks than Divine Sacrifice (or Blessing of Sacrifice, for that matter).

• Activating Holy Shield no longer provides attack power, but now provides 2 spell power per point of defense instead.

Developer’s Note: Protection Paladins gain enormous value from Sheath of Light, and Defense giving Attack Power only furthered the value of that rune. So, we’re swapping the bonus Defense provides Paladins from Attack Power to Spell Power to further enable and encourage the usage of other runes such as Malleable Protection, which has also been adjusted.

• The Malleable Protection rune now doubles the spell power bonus granted when activating Holy Shield.

Developer’s Note: In the same vein as the last Dev Note, this is about having players feel less bad about taking their Defensive while adding value to the Defense stat. Spell Power is also a bit more thematic than Attack Power for Protection Paladin.

• The Vindicator rune has been replaced with a new rune: Shock and Awe
  • Holy Shock now grants the paladin 1 additional spell power per point of Intellect for 30 seconds on use. (replace with actual tooltip text)

Developer’s Note: The Vindicator rune was just too strong in relation to the other options in this slot in its previous state so we’re adding a slightly different version of it to the Talent itself. But that left us with a Rune open, and an opportunity to give the “shockadin” playstyle another option for players wishing to pursue that niche.

• The Vindication talent now reduces the target’s attack power by 70/140/210 and grant 3/6/10% additional attack power to the paladin when it triggers. Lasts 30 seconds.

Developer’s Note: The original intent of Vindicator was to add some value to a Talent that was functionally unusable in PvE in Original WoW. As a result we’re moving the portion of attack power reduction and the AP increase to the actual Vindication talent itself.

• Shield of Righteousness now causes damage equal to two times the paladin’s shield block value.

*Developer’s Note: The damage scaling on this ability was not satisfactory so we doubled the contribution that shield block value adds to the damage.

Additional Notes: Previously it was reported here that Shield of Righteousness scaled with attack power. This was an error that we’ve since corrected. Shield of Righteousness only scales with Shield Block Value. *