Paladin changes.
Posted: Sun Oct 04, 2026 12:45 am
First off I am posting this here instead of the Suggestions part of the forum even though it explicitly states "balance changes" on its description since it is locked for some reason.
I am here to propose for discussion some changes to the Retribution Paladin that in my mind will make the class maybe not necessarily more powerful but at east more viable than it already is. This is also from the viewpoint of someone who is building Strength instead of Spell Power. So if anything I say here doesn't make sense from the Spell Power side please point it out.
So I have in mind two things that could improve the paladin experience.
The first is something I have noticed when looking at gear upgrades is that items with AP(Attack Power) on them and no Strength tend to be less competitive since Strength receives a 45% buff in a raid environment but AP has none. The buffs Strength gets are the following: 10% from Divine Strength talent, 10% from Blessing of Kings buff and 20% from Vengeful Strikes talent. For a long time I simply thought this means 40% but the game actually calculates them multiplicatively instead. Here is an example:
My current character's base strength is 358. I tested this again today to make sure it works as follows:
358STR*Divine Strength=393STR
393STR*Blessing of Kings=433STR
433STR*Vengeful Strikes=519
519/358=1.4497 or pretty close to 45% more Strength.
Though if you calculate the percentages you get this: 1*1.1*1.1*1.2=1.452 or 45.2% buff. With that in mind we now find out that every 1STR is in reality 1.452STR which makes it equal to 2.904AP.
This becomes the reason that items with no STR and only AP tend to be inferior to a lot of items with STR on them even from lower tier content.
So with that in mind assuming I have not bungled any math, I suggest a change that goes something like this:
-Vengeful Strikes talent now increases Attack Power by 15% instead of Strength by 20%.
To make this change make sense lets take the stats of my old twow character since he was more geared and was in a mix of ZG/MC/BWL/AQ40 gear and would have started naxx with 2-3 upgrades.
That character had ~750STR during a raid encounter (this means both personal consumes along with stuff like druid mark, shaman STR totem and so on. Crusader is the only stat added manually with a normalized value of 25STR at 1ppm). STR is the only stat we need for the below examples.
The formula for AP should be this: ATTACKPOWER = level*3.0 + (STRENGTH)*2.0 - 20.
I will simplify it to 160+STR*2=AP. SO:
160+750*2=1660AP
Then we add Battle Shout, Blessing of Might and Winterfall Firewater giving us the AP the character has:
1660+232+222+35=2149AP - In this example we don't have Trueshot Aura(~95AP).
In the new example with the change to Vengeful Strikes we get:
Before we had STR buffed by 45.2%. Now it is buffed by 21%. so 1.21/1.452=0.833. 0.833*750=624.75. This is our new STR number which I will round to 625.
160+625*2=1410AP
Then we add Battle Shout, Blessing of Might and Winterfall Firewater:
1410+232+222+35=1899AP
1899*1.15(aka the new talent) =2183AP - In this example we don't have Trueshot Aura(~107AP).
(Quick side note here. I am giving this exact proposition with the idea that the devs are happy with where the paladin is. Technically you can keep the original 20% when switching the talent from STR to AP and the resulting AP in the above example would be 2278AP or ~129AP instead of 34AP more than before).
The difference with this talent change ends up being worth only 34AP. I consider this to be a change that does not change the damage a Retribution paladin does in a meaningful way (around 0.5% in this example).
Lastly I should say that there are going to be slight differences in results depending on gear level. In this example less geared paladins would see more than 34AP gained while more geared paladins should see less than 34AP.
In case anyone thinks this would result in bigger differences from paladins gaining more from items with AP I should state that STR still retains most of its power. Lets put it like this:
Before - 1STR=2.904AP and 1AP=1AP / After - 1STR=2.783AP and 1AP=1.15AP
This is a STR nerf of 4.17% and a buff to pure AP of 15%.
This means that STR is still the stat to go for. The idea is again simply to make AP items more competitive. As stated above the actual damage difference should not be meaningfully higher than a 1% buff for most players. There could be some cases where AP trinkets provide more than that but again those fluctuate in performance from one boss to another already. And given we mostly sideline AP trinkets for stuff like HOJ and Blackhands' Breath I am not sure it would be a bad idea anyway to have more viable trinkets.
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The second change is much simpler in my mind. It has to do with melee groups in a raid and the fact that there are 6 classes in the game that want to be in a melee group but only 5 of them give something to the rest of the group. And yes you guessed it: the one that does not provide buffs for the group but wants to be in there is the paladin.
And no I don't count auras since we are running Sanctity Aura most of the time.
This in my mind has 2 different possible solutions: Either give the paladin something that buffs the rest of the group or make the paladin do more damage than other classes.
The second one sounds quite unreasonable, I know. But that is how it ends up. So to understand this lets imagine a raid group. This imaginary raid group has exactly one of each class that wants to be in the melee group.
Warrior, Shaman, Rogue, Druid, Hunter, Paladin.
Now imagine two melee group scenarios:
1. Warrior, Shaman, Rogue, Druid, Hunter. - everyone does equal damage.
2. Warrior, Shaman, Rogue, Druid, Paladin. - again everyone does equal damage but all 5 members are missing Trueshot Aura and everyone does an imaginary 2% less damage than the first group.
So in that sense the paladin has no other choice but to make up the loss of that 5th buff with their own damage. And in case where there is someone who does equal damage to the paladin but gives a buff to the party it makes sense to replace the paladin with that player.
To make it clear I am not suggesting to buff the paladin but I am simply representing how logically a melee group gets put together. And that ultimately a paladin doing the same damage as everyone else is in reality doing less damage than everyone else because everyone else in the group could be doing more damage if the paladin was swapped with one of the 5 classes that provide melee buffs. So in the end a paladin has to do more damage than a considerable part of the group in order to make up for the 1 less buff on the 4 other players.
I hope the above descriptions are enough to understand why the paladin not having a party buff actually matters.
So here my proposal is actually in two parts.
The first is to give the paladin a party buff and I think the easiest way would be to change Sanctity Aura to give 5%
Physical and Holy Damage instead of 10% Holy Damage.
For example on my paladin depending on gear and fight I do about 50-60% physical damage and the rest is holy.
Before if my character did 60%phys/40%holy with 10% holy damage buff I would gain 4% damage.
If my character did 50/50 split I would gain 5% damage.
With the change since the paladin does only physical and holy damage and the aura now buffs both by 5% each the damage gain from Sanctity Aura is always 5% regardless of phys/holy damage split. The only way here the paladin gets nerfed is if someone is doing more than 50% of their total damage as Holy damage.
Now as nice as this suggestion sounds it does come with a drawback or two.
The first drawback is that even though it may be a buff of maybe 1% at most, now everyone in your group has that 5% physical damage buff while the paladin most likely has gotten ~0.5% more damage. Especially looking at Warriors and Rogues and less sure about Shamans and Hunters. I am not sure on the numbers here since paladin is mostly what I play but I expect no less than 3-4% more damage for those classes.
So while this solves the paladin in melee groups conundrum it does leave the paladin damage a bit lower than before when compared to everyone else in the melee group. The best part here is that my first proposition where Vengeful Strikes now affects AP actually has a possible solution.
My original suggestion there is for 15% AP instead of 20% Strength which leaves the paladin doing pretty much the same damage as before(an average of 0.75% more depending on gear). With the slight buff from the new Sanctity Aura we get an average of about 1.5% at most. That still leaves the paladin some 2-3% behind the buffs the rest of the melee group gets.
But if we keep the original 20% when switching it to AP, it results in about 95AP more. That should provide 2.5-3% extra damage and put the paladin at about 4% more dmg which is somewhat in line with what the other melee classes in the party would get.
Lastly I should mention that while I am giving some numbers here at the end without providing proper calculations and instead of that mostly ballpark calculating them in my head since if I was to do a proper write up this post would probably double in length. There simply should not be a meaningful difference especially since at this point the results also get gear dependent as a result of AP buff and taking into account all possible gear choices is waaay too much.
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Ultimately this is all I wanted to say even though I didn't know all of it when I started writing this. I didn't mean this to be such a wall of text nor for it to take 4 hours to write up. I hope the suggested changes are not too homogenising since I am not looking for it. I also hope I got all the factual and mathy and game mechanics stuff correctly.
As for the Octowow team I don't know what they are working on atm or if they have any class changes in mind at all but you can treat this as what my thoughts are for what can be improved while keeping the paladin mostly the same. Hopefully someone reads this and decides to put it in the game.
Please comment if you think there is something you want to share on the topic or correct me if I have gotten something wrong in my post.
Thank you for reading.
I am here to propose for discussion some changes to the Retribution Paladin that in my mind will make the class maybe not necessarily more powerful but at east more viable than it already is. This is also from the viewpoint of someone who is building Strength instead of Spell Power. So if anything I say here doesn't make sense from the Spell Power side please point it out.
So I have in mind two things that could improve the paladin experience.
The first is something I have noticed when looking at gear upgrades is that items with AP(Attack Power) on them and no Strength tend to be less competitive since Strength receives a 45% buff in a raid environment but AP has none. The buffs Strength gets are the following: 10% from Divine Strength talent, 10% from Blessing of Kings buff and 20% from Vengeful Strikes talent. For a long time I simply thought this means 40% but the game actually calculates them multiplicatively instead. Here is an example:
My current character's base strength is 358. I tested this again today to make sure it works as follows:
358STR*Divine Strength=393STR
393STR*Blessing of Kings=433STR
433STR*Vengeful Strikes=519
519/358=1.4497 or pretty close to 45% more Strength.
Though if you calculate the percentages you get this: 1*1.1*1.1*1.2=1.452 or 45.2% buff. With that in mind we now find out that every 1STR is in reality 1.452STR which makes it equal to 2.904AP.
This becomes the reason that items with no STR and only AP tend to be inferior to a lot of items with STR on them even from lower tier content.
So with that in mind assuming I have not bungled any math, I suggest a change that goes something like this:
-Vengeful Strikes talent now increases Attack Power by 15% instead of Strength by 20%.
To make this change make sense lets take the stats of my old twow character since he was more geared and was in a mix of ZG/MC/BWL/AQ40 gear and would have started naxx with 2-3 upgrades.
That character had ~750STR during a raid encounter (this means both personal consumes along with stuff like druid mark, shaman STR totem and so on. Crusader is the only stat added manually with a normalized value of 25STR at 1ppm). STR is the only stat we need for the below examples.
The formula for AP should be this: ATTACKPOWER = level*3.0 + (STRENGTH)*2.0 - 20.
I will simplify it to 160+STR*2=AP. SO:
160+750*2=1660AP
Then we add Battle Shout, Blessing of Might and Winterfall Firewater giving us the AP the character has:
1660+232+222+35=2149AP - In this example we don't have Trueshot Aura(~95AP).
In the new example with the change to Vengeful Strikes we get:
Before we had STR buffed by 45.2%. Now it is buffed by 21%. so 1.21/1.452=0.833. 0.833*750=624.75. This is our new STR number which I will round to 625.
160+625*2=1410AP
Then we add Battle Shout, Blessing of Might and Winterfall Firewater:
1410+232+222+35=1899AP
1899*1.15(aka the new talent) =2183AP - In this example we don't have Trueshot Aura(~107AP).
(Quick side note here. I am giving this exact proposition with the idea that the devs are happy with where the paladin is. Technically you can keep the original 20% when switching the talent from STR to AP and the resulting AP in the above example would be 2278AP or ~129AP instead of 34AP more than before).
The difference with this talent change ends up being worth only 34AP. I consider this to be a change that does not change the damage a Retribution paladin does in a meaningful way (around 0.5% in this example).
Lastly I should say that there are going to be slight differences in results depending on gear level. In this example less geared paladins would see more than 34AP gained while more geared paladins should see less than 34AP.
In case anyone thinks this would result in bigger differences from paladins gaining more from items with AP I should state that STR still retains most of its power. Lets put it like this:
Before - 1STR=2.904AP and 1AP=1AP / After - 1STR=2.783AP and 1AP=1.15AP
This is a STR nerf of 4.17% and a buff to pure AP of 15%.
This means that STR is still the stat to go for. The idea is again simply to make AP items more competitive. As stated above the actual damage difference should not be meaningfully higher than a 1% buff for most players. There could be some cases where AP trinkets provide more than that but again those fluctuate in performance from one boss to another already. And given we mostly sideline AP trinkets for stuff like HOJ and Blackhands' Breath I am not sure it would be a bad idea anyway to have more viable trinkets.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The second change is much simpler in my mind. It has to do with melee groups in a raid and the fact that there are 6 classes in the game that want to be in a melee group but only 5 of them give something to the rest of the group. And yes you guessed it: the one that does not provide buffs for the group but wants to be in there is the paladin.
And no I don't count auras since we are running Sanctity Aura most of the time.
This in my mind has 2 different possible solutions: Either give the paladin something that buffs the rest of the group or make the paladin do more damage than other classes.
The second one sounds quite unreasonable, I know. But that is how it ends up. So to understand this lets imagine a raid group. This imaginary raid group has exactly one of each class that wants to be in the melee group.
Warrior, Shaman, Rogue, Druid, Hunter, Paladin.
Now imagine two melee group scenarios:
1. Warrior, Shaman, Rogue, Druid, Hunter. - everyone does equal damage.
2. Warrior, Shaman, Rogue, Druid, Paladin. - again everyone does equal damage but all 5 members are missing Trueshot Aura and everyone does an imaginary 2% less damage than the first group.
So in that sense the paladin has no other choice but to make up the loss of that 5th buff with their own damage. And in case where there is someone who does equal damage to the paladin but gives a buff to the party it makes sense to replace the paladin with that player.
To make it clear I am not suggesting to buff the paladin but I am simply representing how logically a melee group gets put together. And that ultimately a paladin doing the same damage as everyone else is in reality doing less damage than everyone else because everyone else in the group could be doing more damage if the paladin was swapped with one of the 5 classes that provide melee buffs. So in the end a paladin has to do more damage than a considerable part of the group in order to make up for the 1 less buff on the 4 other players.
I hope the above descriptions are enough to understand why the paladin not having a party buff actually matters.
So here my proposal is actually in two parts.
The first is to give the paladin a party buff and I think the easiest way would be to change Sanctity Aura to give 5%
Physical and Holy Damage instead of 10% Holy Damage.
For example on my paladin depending on gear and fight I do about 50-60% physical damage and the rest is holy.
Before if my character did 60%phys/40%holy with 10% holy damage buff I would gain 4% damage.
If my character did 50/50 split I would gain 5% damage.
With the change since the paladin does only physical and holy damage and the aura now buffs both by 5% each the damage gain from Sanctity Aura is always 5% regardless of phys/holy damage split. The only way here the paladin gets nerfed is if someone is doing more than 50% of their total damage as Holy damage.
Now as nice as this suggestion sounds it does come with a drawback or two.
The first drawback is that even though it may be a buff of maybe 1% at most, now everyone in your group has that 5% physical damage buff while the paladin most likely has gotten ~0.5% more damage. Especially looking at Warriors and Rogues and less sure about Shamans and Hunters. I am not sure on the numbers here since paladin is mostly what I play but I expect no less than 3-4% more damage for those classes.
So while this solves the paladin in melee groups conundrum it does leave the paladin damage a bit lower than before when compared to everyone else in the melee group. The best part here is that my first proposition where Vengeful Strikes now affects AP actually has a possible solution.
My original suggestion there is for 15% AP instead of 20% Strength which leaves the paladin doing pretty much the same damage as before(an average of 0.75% more depending on gear). With the slight buff from the new Sanctity Aura we get an average of about 1.5% at most. That still leaves the paladin some 2-3% behind the buffs the rest of the melee group gets.
But if we keep the original 20% when switching it to AP, it results in about 95AP more. That should provide 2.5-3% extra damage and put the paladin at about 4% more dmg which is somewhat in line with what the other melee classes in the party would get.
Lastly I should mention that while I am giving some numbers here at the end without providing proper calculations and instead of that mostly ballpark calculating them in my head since if I was to do a proper write up this post would probably double in length. There simply should not be a meaningful difference especially since at this point the results also get gear dependent as a result of AP buff and taking into account all possible gear choices is waaay too much.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Ultimately this is all I wanted to say even though I didn't know all of it when I started writing this. I didn't mean this to be such a wall of text nor for it to take 4 hours to write up. I hope the suggested changes are not too homogenising since I am not looking for it. I also hope I got all the factual and mathy and game mechanics stuff correctly.
As for the Octowow team I don't know what they are working on atm or if they have any class changes in mind at all but you can treat this as what my thoughts are for what can be improved while keeping the paladin mostly the same. Hopefully someone reads this and decides to put it in the game.
Please comment if you think there is something you want to share on the topic or correct me if I have gotten something wrong in my post.
Thank you for reading.