Level 100 Talents

[Fouton 266]

Updated April 4th 2014, after the 6.0 Patch Notes and Level 100 Talent Changes.

 

 

Level 100 Talents

 

In this post I'll be going over each level 100 talent for each spec, and talking about how they will affect gameplay. The format will be: Spec, what each talent does, what type of talent it will be considered as (defensive, situational, dps, movement), and then showing the reasoning behind the choices.

 

NOTE: All these talents will most likely change before WoD's release. This is just some initial math on the future expansion. This math is also done with T16N SimulationCraft, which means the damage %s will change as we hit 91-100.

 

 

Retribution:

Firstly, here's a link to Auriel, our prominent Ret Paladin, and his opinions of the talents for this spec: https://www.icy-veins.com/forums/topic/4776-level-100-talents/?p=57583

 

The three talents for Retribution can all be considered a DPS gain, when used in a specific way. Overall, I believe it will be an interesting decision between Seraphim and Empowered Seals. I cannot say anything for sure yet, because I don't have the theorycrafting completed.

 

Auriel's opinion: "I think I can't really jump to any conclusions here, but it seems to me the clear cut winner for ret is going to be EmpS. It's pretty much a passive buff that we don't have to think about or sacrifice anything for, Seraphim is nice but until it gets all its changes, I can't make a decision on how it will be used. FV I think will be great for PvP especially with melee comps, such as Warriors and DKS."

 

Empowered Seals:

Passive:

Your seals also cause your Judgement to empower you with an additional beneficial effect which persists through changing Seals:

Judgment of Justice:

Increases movement speed by 20% for 20 seconds.

Judgment of Insight:

Heals you for 5% of your maximum heal every 2 seconds for 20 seconds.

Judgment of Truth:

Increases attack power by 30% for 20 seconds.

Judgment of Righteousness:

Increases attack speed by 15% for 20 seconds.

 

Quoted from Auriel

I can see Empowered seals being used heavily for pvp, Especially Judgment of Justice, the speed boost is decent enough to make a difference, and when stacked with LAotL it can be pretty damaging and allow us to get away.

 

I don't quite understand what JoI is saying though but I can see switching to it temporarily to get the buff then popping your SH insta cast.

 

JoT will be decent for most fights I can imagine, and honestly with the removal of inq I can see it making this talent the "go-to" talent. Unless they give us a sort of replacement to inq buff kind of thing. 

 

JoR is decent, but honestly unless it's changed to a flat amount of haste it's not going to be that useful, in my opinion.

 

 

Seraphim:

5 Holy Power

Instant, 30 Second Cooldown

The light temporarily magnifies your power, increasing your Haste, Critical Strike, Mastery, Multistrike, Readiness, and Bonus Armor from gear by 30% for 10 seconds.

 

Quoted from Auriel

For Ret: Honestly it's difficult to say how useful this will be, that's a BIG chunk of HP to be using EVERY 30 seconds, and only for a 10 second buff, I could see it being highly useful for prot, but honestly unless they make it a longer cd with a longer uptime and lower % I don't think I'd use it. I mean to have something that powerful have THAT much of a cost and on such a short CD it would be a dps loss to have it over other talents and just let it sit there just because you don't wanna spend the HP.

 

 

Final Verdict:

3 Holy Power, 10 Yard Range

Instant

Requires Melee Weapon

Empowers your weapon with holy energy and performs a devastating strike, dealing 280% weapon damage as Holy.

 

Replaces Templar's Verdict.

 

This spell is pretty straight forward. Basically your Templar's Verdict base damage deals about 101% of what it used to do, and then it ignores armor. This is a pretty simple damage increase, since it ignores the 32.01% damage reduction that boss armor has, while dealing 101% of its base damage.

 

This means the damage gain from TV will become +33%, and likely also scale well with mastery. Here's Auriel's response:

 

I could see Final Verdict being heavily based on the situation, and when I say based on the situation, I mean in PvP, While I think using FV will put all rets going towards Mastery, (idk exactly how haste is going to be in WoD or what numbers we will be looking at) I think EmpS is just too good to pass up, and while it's nice to be ignoring armor, our mastery already ignores armor, and it is very very devastating.

 

 

Protection:

Overall, it's hard to judge what a paladin will be using at 100 to tank. Holy Shield seems to be the first one scratched off the possibilities, however it's still dependent on how much damage it really does. Seraphim and Empowered Seals have two completely different effects and are tough to measure. I would initially state that Empowered Seals will be the winner of consistent tanking fights, and Seraphim will take heavy hitting mechanics.

 

Empowered Seals:

Passive:

Your seals also cause your Judgement to empower you with an additional beneficial effect which persists through changing Seals:

Judgment of Justice:

Increases movement speed by 20% for 20 seconds.

Judgment of Insight:

Heals you for 5% of your maximum heal every 2 seconds for 20 seconds.

Judgment of Truth:

Increases attack power by 30% for 20 seconds.

Judgment of Righteousness:

Increases attack speed by 15% for 20 seconds.

 

This talent is going to be controversial for a while. It will be bringing Seal Twisting into a paladin's playstyle. This means that you will likely be swapping seals before every judgment to gain a new buff, then swapping to your normal seal, then back for when you need to judgment again. It also highly depends on whether seals are taken off the GCD, since currently they are, and you'd be spending 25% of your GCDs swapping seals just to get a different judgment off.

 

I will assume they are taking the seals off GCD, but then it proves another questionable piece of gameplay: Addons that swap seals for you so that you don't have to think. There will likely be an addon in WoD that rotates between seals on every judgment cast, so that you don't have to do any of the work yourself. This is something Blizzard has always tried to avoid, so hopefully it will turn out nicely.

 

Either way, it's hard to theorycraft what this talent will do, but I imagine it will be extremely powerful to start, which worries me because I personally don't like the idea of Seal Twisting to be part of my gameplay.

 

 

Seraphim:

5 Holy Power

Instant, 30 Second Cooldown

The light temporarily magnifies your power, increasing your Haste, Critical Strike, Mastery, Multistrike, Readiness, and Bonus Armor from gear by 30% for 10 seconds.

 

This cooldown can be amazing for paladins. Especially with that mastery gain. Currently my prot paladin reaches 78% damage mitigation from mastery, and popping this cooldown with my current levels of mastery would cause me to mitigate 90% of all physical damage, and at a 30% faster rate from the haste gain! (33.54% from 25.80%, from my current gear). Note these numbers are all from my current gear, and aren't flat number gains for everyone else.

 

The biggest thing to remember is that there is readiness on this ability. This means if you pop it then use your other cooldowns, they will come back faster. This gives it excellent usage to combo with Holy Avenger, which will most like be two required talents for a Mastery build paladin. For Haste though, if the paladin is sticking with Divine Purpose, they will find that Seraphim will put them at a strange haste level, give little gain on the readiness, and increase self healing. Probably won't be as effective as Empowered Seals for a Haste build, but it still has potential.

 

After all that mastery vs haste talk though, is the Armor gain. That Armor gain will be another large physical reduction boost. It gives a slight advantage to haste for consistency's sake, and because mitigating so much physical damage already means that you might consider the holy power from haste more effective as self healing.

 

In the end, it's a huge holy power spender, but may not be used on cooldown, due to how long it may take to generate that 5 holy power. This ability will also depend on if Divine Purpose can allow a free cast (I doubt it), and if not Holy Avenger might make it much easier to use.

 

 

Holy Shield:

1.5 Minute Cooldown

Increases your block chance by 10%, and when you block, you deal 1+(50% Attack power) Holy damage to your attacker. Additionally, you can now block spells.

 

Now that the Attack Power is being shown, it seems it will hit about as hard as judgment does for us now, so it will be fairly powerful. There is no listed duration though, so it will have a 90 second cooldown, but is listed as "passive."

 

Right now it would be a ~4% damage reduction to all melee swings. Additionally, as tweeted by Celestalon, it will give you the ability to block SPELLS! Yes, this amazing ability can block frontal cones, spell DoTs, and targeted casts! Looks like it'll be your go-to talent for spellcaster bosses.

 

This talent does have an additional use as well, as it can kill any low level mob while you're sitting around AFK. You'll have the ability to stand where a group of mobs spawns and just farm them while you're tabbed out by having them suicide on your shield. Of course, they have to be able to hit your first, so your dodge/parry can't be too high.

 

 

 

Holy:

The talents for Holy are mostly centered around Beacon of Light. They all bring a unique and very fun aspect to the ability, though technically Beacon of Insight has nothing to do with the spell. In my opinion, Beacon of Faith will be the most used talent, though its extremely difficult to be certain of that with all the healing changes that have come. I wouldn't bet anything on my guessing on these talents, other than the macro I listed for Beacon of Faith will be gold.

 

 

Beacon of Faith:

60 Yard Range

Instant, 3 Second Cooldown

Mark a second target as a Beacon, mimicking the effects of Beacon of Light.

 

This is going to be a great spell for paladins, which will increase their Beacon of Light healing by ~100%, and give another target to generate more Holy Power off of. This will work well when combined with Selfless Healer as well, since you will be able to generate your holy power on either tank when you use your Flash of Light.

 

The best part about this, is that they made it become its own spell. This means that you can control which beacon you are moving when. For this talent I highly recommend making a modifier macro, like this:

#showtooltip [modifier:alt] Beacon of Faith; Beacon of Light
/cast [modifier:alt] Beacon of Faith; Beacon of Light

Which would allow you to replace your Beacon of Light when cast normally, and Beacon of Faith when cast while holding alt.

 

 

Beacon of Insight:

320 Mana, 40 yard Range

Instant, 15 second CD

Places a beacon of insight on an ally, increasing their healing received from your next direct single-target heal within 1 minute by 30%. When consumed, or the target reaches full health, it moves to the most injured ally within 40 yards.

 

This talent is the perfect choice for any single-target paladin. If you've always hated AoE healing, this is the talent for you. It may not be the most effective or efficient talent, but if you have both beacons on tanks, and manage to have this consistently bounce between them instead of melee, you can get a ton of Holy Power by putting your Flash of Light on the tank for the 1 holy power, then have it bounce to the other tank.

 

There will be many other uses, but that's the first one that jumps right out at me. I don't see this talent being too useful for raid healing paladins, however with all the healing changes coming in 6.0 it really has potential to create a raid-healing, yet single-target paladin. Especially if you glyph for a no-GCD Beacon of Light, and use it to get holy power per time it bounces.

 

 

Saved by the Light:

Passive:

When your Beacon of Light target drops below 30% health, you instantly grant the injured target a protective shield absorbing up to 30% of their max health for 10 seconds. You cannot shield the same person this way twice within 60 seconds.

 

This spell is a great saving spell for heavy tank damage, or raid members who are likely going to drop under 30%. With Glyph of Beacon of Light you might even be able to keep reapplying it on people who are about to drop under 30% and give massive bubbles across the whole raid as you continue to heal people who already benefited from the bubble.

 

It's definitely more of a situational talent than a straight buff, and it will take a lot of skill to use in a raid healing environment. This spell probably won't rival The Light Within, since you can only use this with 1 beacon active, but it will be amazing in specific encounters.

[Fouton 266]

Updated! The Ret section is fairly vacant however, and I will be poking some rets to help me out.

[Oreoxd 165]

Empowered Seals:

 

For ret: I can see Empowered seals being used heavily for pvp, Especially Juydgement of Justice, the speed boost is decent enough to make a difference, and when stacked with LAotL it can be pretty damaging and allow us to get away.

 

I don't quite understand what JoI is saying though but I can see switching to it temporarily to get the buff then popping your SH insta cast.

 

JoT will be decent for most fights I can imagine, and honestly with the removal of inq I can see it making this talent the "go-to" talent. Unless they give us a sort of replacement to inq buff kind of thing. 

 

JoR is decent, but honestly unless it's changed to a flat amount of haste it's not going to be that useful, in my opinion.

 

 

Seraphim:

 

 

For Ret: Honestly it's difficult to say how useful this will be, that's a BIG chunk of HP to be using EVERY 30 seconds, and only for a 10 second buff, I could see it being highly useful for prot, but honestly unless they make it a longer cd with a longer uptime and lower % I don't think I'd use it. I mean to have something that powerful have THAT much of a cost and on such a short CD it would be a dps loss to have it over other talents and just let it sit there just because you don't wanna spend the HP.

 

 

Final Verdict:

 

I could see Final Verdict being heavily based on the situation, and when I say based on the situation, I mean in PvP, While I think using FV will put all rets going towards Mastery, (idk exactly how haste is going to be in WoD or what numbers we will be looking at) I think EmpS is just too good to pass up, and while it's nice to be ignoring armor, our mastery already ignores armor, and it is very very devastating.

 

 

 

Closure: I think I can't really jump to any conclusions here, but it seems to me the clear cut winner for ret is going to be EmpS. It's pretty much a passive buff that we don't have to think about or sacrifice anything for, Seraphim is nice but until it gets all its changes, I can't make a decision on how it will be used. FV I think will be great for PvP especially with melee comps, such as Warriors and DKS.

 

Please keep in mind this is the personal opinion of me, Auriel, and doesn't necessarily make these the best choices, I will also be updating this post or adding on to it as I find out more and do testing on the talents themselves. This is just a little bit of insight on what I think about what I see.

[Fouton 266]

Updated with the newest build, it seems Empowered Seals got a LARGE buff. I'm guessing Seraphim was posing some terrifying gains with it's huge CD reduction benefits.