Retribution Paladins continue to take a beating. As much as Ghostcrawler tried to soften the blow in his post, there just isn’t any nice way to go about this — Blizzard is looking for a way to make Divine Shield and Avenging Wrath to be mutually exclusive once again. He says that the combination of both spells contribute to the impression that the spec is overpowered.
Blizzard might do this through Forebearance, but says that they’re also looking to reduce the duration of Forebearance through a hotfix. This means it’s a pretty serious issue considering the duration of Forebearance was also intended to balance or space out the use of Divine Shield and Divine Protection. They have no timetable for the change, although it should be expected that it will be applied soon. Blizzard doesn’t seem to hold back on nerfing the Paladin class, stating that “the last round of pretty severe nerfs didn’t seem to do enough to Ret’s dominance of PvP”.
These are very fast reactions to nerf a spec that was “dominant” for all of a few weeks in a metagame that is tuned for Level 80. This is an extremely disappointing course of action in comparison to the complete absence of nerfs to Druids despite their utter dominance of the Arena format for three seasons (reducing Cyclone’s range wasn’t quite the solution, was it?). Paladin representation in Arenas went on sharp decline through all four seasons — and this includes the Holy spec.
Retribution Paladins continue to take a beating. As much as Ghostcrawler tried to soften the blow in his post, there just isn’t any nice way to go about this — Blizzard is looking for a way to make Divine Shield and Avenging Wrath to be mutually exclusive once again. He says that the combination of both spells contribute to the impression that the spec is overpowered.
Blizzard might do this through Forebearance, but says that they’re also looking to reduce the duration of Forebearance through a hotfix. This means it’s a pretty serious issue considering the duration of Forebearance was also intended to balance or space out the use of Divine Shield and Divine Protection. They have no timetable for the change, although it should be expected that it will be applied soon. Blizzard doesn’t seem to hold back on nerfing the Paladin class, stating that “the last round of pretty severe nerfs didn’t seem to do enough to Ret’s dominance of PvP”.
These are very fast reactions to nerf a spec that was “dominant” for all of a few weeks in a metagame that is tuned for Level 80. This is an extremely disappointing course of action in comparison to the complete absence of nerfs to Druids despite their utter dominance of the Arena format for three seasons (reducing Cyclone’s range wasn’t quite the solution, was it?). Paladin representation in Arenas went on sharp decline through all four seasons — and this includes the Holy spec.
[UPDATE: The nerf has been applied on live realms. So much for the advanced warning Ghostcrawler was talking about. Avenging Wrath now causes Forebearance, and Forebearance's duration has been reduced to 2 minutes.]
From comedians Rich Kuras and Sandeep Parikh (who you know best from The Guild, most likely) comes a look at the United States presidential election through the eyes of Azeroth. If all of the 11 million active World of Warcraft subscriptions were US citizens, Azeroth would be the 8th largest state in the union. Rich Kuras looks to find out whether Azeroth would be a red or a blue state. I think the last thing any of us want is political fisticuffs, so just take this video as the light political humor that it is and don’t read too much into it.
The polling stats at the end are a little silly because the numbers most certainly wouldn’t come out that way on a larger scale survey, but that’s alright, it’s not meant to be super accurate. It’s just a silly little thing, and I chuckled at the commentary from the people they spoke to on both sides of the fence. Deep political commentary? No. Mildly entertaining? Yes! And I admit, I smirked at the mention of Mike Gravel.
Thanks to all of you that wrote in about this video the last few days!
Readers have already started sending in a few costumes for Halloween this year — if you’re dressing up as something from the World of Warcraft, don’t forget to take a picture and send it through our tipline. Reader Taytayflann of Frostmane assembled this great Bloodfang costume from a Horde hoodie that he bought — the shoulders, which took the longest to make, he says, are made out of shin pads, cardboard, wire, red and black cloth, and staples. They turned out really well, and even though it was probably tough putting them together, it was probably still easier and faster than traipsing around Blackwing Lair with 40 people trying to get the virtual set.
There are only a few pictures in the gallery below, but we’ll be adding in your entries from the tipline throughout the weekend (both of real-life and ingame costumes), so check back to see more. And don’t forget to have a safe and happy Halloween tonight from all of us here at WoW Insider.
No matter what you call those big floating pyramids above Azeroth, right now is the right time to chase them down and kill the Scourge hanging around beneath them. If you don’t have epic gloves or shoulders on right now, odds are that you could use the upgrades from the Argent Dawn, and while the necropoli were completely camped early on in the event, things have died down a bit now, especially in the off-prime hours. I was able to pick up my 30 runes earlier this week, and when I got lucky on a leggings drop (I love that my Hunter is in a mail kilt-y thing now), I picked up two nice new epics, a cool tabard and an achievement.
We don’t know exactly when this stuff is all ending — it might be soon, or it might run right up to the Wrath release, but either way, now is probably the time to play it safe and pick up your runes. Look on your map for the purple skulls when they spawn and make a beeline for the zone when you see them, keep an eye around the zone as you fly in where the necro might be, and with most people already having nabbed all the runes they need, the pickings are probably about as good as they’re going to get. You’ll have a tougher time nabbing the rare spawns that drop the legs and the chest, but if you just want to nab some runes for the various Argent Dawn rewards, it’ll go fast.
Now if I could just get people to stop camping my fish pools until I get Mr. Pinchy…
Retribution Paladins continue to take a beating. As much as Ghostcrawler tried to soften the blow in his post, there just isn’t any nice way to go about this — Blizzard is looking for a way to make Divine Shield and Avenging Wrath to be mutually exclusive once again. He says that the combination of both spells contribute to the impression that the spec is overpowered. 
Invincible vengeance no more originally appeared on WoW Insider on Fri, 31 Oct 2008 23:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
No matter what you call