Holy Shock
Lets talk about…
Suck wisdom you demon fuck!
Proving once again that it is way too early to really count on anything being set in stone, among the Twitter Developer chat posted on the 16th, Holy Shock and Art of War were mentioned:
Q: Now that paladin’s Holy Shock is baseline is there any plans to change the Art of War talent?
A: We like Art of War, so we don’t expect it will go away. We understand the concern that Holy Shock might compete with Art of War a little bit in terms of role (an instant damage spell) and that’s something we’re going to have to address.
Compete in terms of role for damage? What? Realllllly? Unless something mad changes Exorcism will still blast harder. Not only that, lets consider the aspect I’d be FAR MORE CONCERNED ABOUT… ret having an instant 4-5k heal on a 6 (or 5 glyphed) second cooldown on top of using Art of War procs for Flash of Light. Sounds overpowered right? Even with Holy Shock’s fairly heavy mana cost (741 mana), in a “I need to kite or die” scenario you’d still have enough mana to judge every CD and pop holy shock every time it was up on top of using AoW procs when you could. If they increase the mana cost of Flash of Light as significantly as I imagine they may, perhaps this won’t be quite as effective as it may sound though.
As much as I like my class to be ridiculously diesel, having two good instant heals as a DPS seems like it might be a bit over the top. Right now Art of War is one of the best abilities in the game as far as keeping yourself alive (when RNG doesn’t screw you over). Assuming our other weaknesses are covered a bit more in Cataclysm, such as getting an interrupt and maybe better forms of damage reduction CD’s than just “Divine oh shit it just got Mass Dispelled:” then Art of War should be more then adequate in most situations. However Art of War itself could do with a change.
For example, on an equal skill level playing field, lets say two Rets duel. If one Paladin doesn’t crit as much as the other, or has a dry span for a bit, then they get RNG’ed and probably lose. It does, at least in the case of 1v1 make that much of a difference. In a group scenario not so much, but it is still common to have streams of really bad luck against extremely high resilience targets. Often times this will seriously douche you over.
My suggestion is to have AoW have a stacking mechanic behind it. It stacks up to 5 times. When you crit, the stack immediately hits 5. When you don’t, an ability hitting or white swing puts up 1 stack of AoW. The stack would be useless until you got it to 5, in which case then you could instant FoL/Exorcism. What this would do is increase the number of AoW procs in shitty situations where you don’t get any crits for a while. This would make it just a little bit more dependable, and thus improve the quality of my PvP life by an additional 11.346%.
Just my two cents right now on this issue,
~ Ree
The Art of Shred 
Really you dont think Holy shock will hit that hard? I guess when Im holy and over 3k sp holy shock still hits less than a white damage would but….How much would it chance the priority list? I mean it might be above CS but with the seal proc the CS does I dont think so…I can see it replacing Con on single target as the mana dump but with the 2 set t 10, DS is the new mana dump. Hmmm…so many questions!
Actually yeah that’s a really good point – it may just replace Consecrate as a filler move for single target. Not sure how that damage will compare though. I might play around and make some janky 31/0/40 spec to see how hard Holy shock punches in my gear and run some numbers.
That and also…The nerf to DS, I think they said they are doing the same thing to DS that they did to whirlewind. Where it hits unlimited targets now but at like 50% less damage. So that could also bump Holy shock somewhere in there. /sigh Man I liked it when you could just make a cast random macro and bind all the skills to it and just spam it and still be like within 500 dps of what you would do if you micro mange that shit.