Beta released, R.I.P Paladin

Classes Paladin
223

Well… yes and no.

The positions of where each talent would be, would be appropriate for throughput talents. They would be in the last 3-4 rows of the talent tree.

An example would be Seal of Alacrity.

  • Seal of Alacrity is basically the same thing as Relentless Inquisitor, right? It’s not a static increase, but they both just increase haste by X%. It’s kindof silly to have both talents in the Class and Spec Trees.
  • We should have Avenging Wrath baseline, with Avenging Wrath: Might taking it’s place in the class tree, to ensure that if you have any ability that effects AW at least we have the base version.
  • Divine Steed should also be baseline and 1 talent should be dedicated to Steed of Glory.
  • Divine Protection should be in the class tree in the current Divine Steed’s Place.

Now…

  • Divine Toll + Divine Resonance(Ringing Clarity) would be two final talents.
  • Exorcism + Empyrean Endowment(Vanquisher’s Hammer) would be two final talents.

But one or the other would be in the spec trees. It is perfectly fine to have ONE combination in the spec tree and one in the class tree imo. Many classes have similar choices in their covenant abilities. But for both to be in the Spec trees, that’s just lazy imo.

Holy has 3 Covenant abilities in their spec tree alone, showing how awful the covenant abilities truly were for Paladins, lol…

Imgur

Our spec trees are bad, our class tree is worst. No question about that. There’s a lot of other problems with our tree, and even this one here…

This is simply an example that is changing the bare minimum while removing so much of those redundancies.

  • Adds Divine Protection to the Class Tree.
  • Adds Pursuit of Justice (or w/e) for a bit more speed.
  • Make 1 charge of Divine Steed baseline and make 1 talent to buff it, Steed of Glory.
  • Make AW baseline and put AW:Might in it’s place.
  • Remove Seal of Alacrity and put in Relentless Inquisitor in its place.
  • Add Exorcism and Empyrean Endowment (Vanquisher’s Hammer Clone) to the class tree, more paladin fantasy and a shared covenant ability.

An additional option thing, depending on how crazy you want to get, is make HoW also baseline and add Improved Crusader Strike in its place, or simply make that baseline as well. =/

Edit:

Personally, I do not think our Class tree should be any less than this:

Imgur

We should have all our utility at the top of our tree, our 3 major through put talents. Having AW:Might, Judgement of Light and Judgement of Justice be mixed in there is fine, imo, but nothing really more than that.

A row of defensives and then our final talents.

Imgur

Yellow/Left - Holy Knight
Green/Middle - Protection Templar
Red/Right - Retribution Crusader

I still think Mad Paragon and of Dusk and Dawn need to change, but this late in the Beta it’s probably not gonna happen, so… ¯\ _ (ツ)_/¯

11 Likes
224

Blizz, give this man a job!

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225

Well… exactly. :joy:
Everything is relatively easy to fix.

The problem is they seem to not agree with our feedback so far.
Very few things have changed based on it.

Your Class tree looks properly paladin-like, a.k.a. as boring as i would expect it to be, but at least it works as intended, which would be the bare minimum to expect.
But is not something i can say for the current Class tree.

I can clearly see you tried to make it as closely as possibly to be “easy” for the devs to follow and able to be implemented. Nothing crazy, nothing of Paladins asking for the world or anything extraordinary.

I think it’s sad that we have come to accept the bare minimum.
Though we will in the end settle for less than that as we don’t have a say in the matter, as our feedback doesn’t seem to be considered much.

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226

I just can repeat myself like a broken record: who can actually honestly think that dividing Divine Steed into freaking four talent points when on live we need just one talent to get an even better version (conduit gives more duration increase) is “good game design”?
The spite in this is too obvious for my taste.

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227

Apparently the devs think it’s okay to spend 4 talent points to get less mobility than we have on live.

I’ve given feedback towards that.
Even made a post showing the differences between the classes.
We’re the only melee class that doesn’t have any baseline mobility.

And between all classes, only locks and priests don’t have any either. But they don’t need it as much as a melee needs it.
Also all our specs are melee now, so evidently we need some form of baseline mobility.

Their Divine Steed… Crusader riding a horse into battle or whatever fantasy is also skippable, we can just not take Divine Steed… and AW from the class tree. :smiley:

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228

Oh believe me, I know, lol. It’s an uphill battle just to get PoJ for Paladins, it’s pathetic.

Blizzard has no problem making fun and creative Paladins in all their other video games, but there for some reason is this underlining detest for them in WoW…

This would at least move more of the boring talents to the class tree, so the spec trees could focus on unique and fun builds. =/

3 Likes
229

I really appreciate all you’ve posted so far on the alpha forums, good work!

Can’t speak for locks, but priest have easy access to Body and Soul (which is a movement speed buff on what…? 12s cooldown? Something like that.) Plus they can get feathers quite easily, too. That’s two different movement abilities with 2 points…not 1 ability with four points.
I mean, does a caster need a movement ability on that short of a cooldown which also can be granted to others by simply casting Power Word: Shield on them? It’s effectively a LAoTL that can be shared with others. Again: giving paladins nothing but dumbed down Steed when others can have mobility for days is spiteful, nothing else.

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230

No no… that’s in the Class tree, all that i mentioned is that the rest of the classes have a movement ability baseline. I didn’t mention the goodies they have in the Class tree.

Only classes without a baseline movement ability are: Paladin, Priest and Warlock.
And Paladin are the only melee without one if we can look at it like that.

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231

How did Paladins get the laziest dev?

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232

Technically speaking even that isn’t true. Whilst not “baseline” Warlocks all get Demo Circle as their free talent point in the class tree, so since they can’t skip it, it IS essentially baseline.

Also when it comes to Priest, both Body and Soul and Feathers have always been talents and not baseline abilities so having them still as talents isn’t much of a change.

So that means paladin is the ONLY class that loses baseline mobility and then has to talent into it to get it back. As well as requiring 4 talent points to make useable.
The more you look at it, the worse the design actually is under scrutiny.

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233

I just did a comparison from DF only, but yes, if we look at how things are now in SL, we’re the only class losing our baseline movement ability.

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234

Our new week of waiting begins…

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/gameofthrones/images/b/b5/BlackFriday7.jpg/revision/latest?cb=20131128001932

https://media0.giphy.com/media/l0HlvmixowLkPsjSg/giphy.gif?cid=790b761107ae1eb92cd1495837c8b1f42f09cdf183c171eb&rid=giphy.gif&ct=g

235

They’ll just get a lot less Paladin players paying for DF, oh well. This is their chance to rework Retribution into being more than it has been for the past 6 years. We’re watching, Blizzard.

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236

Question for those on beta, does consc actually tick high enough to warrant using a gcd on and as it stands, the talents we get that change/buff consc just dont seem worth it. even being able to place it wont make it worth on Ret due to the fact you will have to move at some point before your use has even really started.

I’m seeing people praise it on beta and even on live… its concerning that the class dev might listen to these praises and think its in a good place or a good design direction.

I think its a waste of time, static ground effects no longer have a place in this game outside of raiding and even then you have to be stat’d poorly or have extremely bad rng to even have nothing else to press in place of consc.

237

It does significantly more damage. At level 60 in pretty bad gear (~ilvl250) i’ve seen it tick for over 400 damage. And you can have multiple down at once with the Consecrated Blade talent.
Even on single target (target dummy) it ended up being my 2’nd highest source of damage, only behind TV. Doing roughly ~10% of my total damage. Although i suspect this will change as we level up and get access to more talent points.
In 4 target AoE (again testing on target dummies) Consecration does roughly double the damage of WoA and that is with the set bonus.

1 Like
238

Interesting, thanks! :smile:

239

It’ll be grand on Fort weeks - except all those Fort weeks where the tank has to move. Which is most of them, and even the ones where they don’t have to they will, because not moving means taking longer, and taking longer means not timing and not timing is a Bad Thing.

So really, having lots of damage tied to a stationary ground effect is going to suck. On the other hand, at least it’s not most of our AoE damage, the way Earthquake was for Elemental in SL.

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240

i see this arguemnt a lot but i dont think is that bad, so many classed have stationary aoe dps abilities, and ours is not only procced off AoW but we also cast it in a short cooldown if the cd stays the same as live, so we even get less punished than lets say shammies with earthquakes that takes their resource, or dks with DnD.

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241

Death and decay isnt the main dk aoe damage. Dks dont spec into plus100%d&d damage, neither do wsrriors with whirlwind or shamans with crash lighting. Why does cons hav to be such a high damage distribution for us? It should be a modifier or enhancer not 15% of our damage.

242

Honestly, I don’t think Consecration being on a 9 sec cooldown is that punishing. It’s up often enough that you can place it in the path of kiting that you’d only max miss out on like 2 sec of it.

I think the bigger issue is the lack on fluidness in Consecrated Blade and Exorcism with Consecration.

Consecrated Blade doesn’t really add a meaningful button, and it’s reliance on Art of War - and with that Auto Attacks - feels as if it’s just meter padding.

Very rarely will you be placing those AoW BoJ’s in strategic places to utilize that extra Consecration and Exorcism.

Additionally, Exorcism has a 30 yard range, which is nice for other uses, but honestly, it doesn’t feel great trying to use it before you get your Consecration down.

Exorcism also doesn’t generate Holy Power, and since we have AoE Holy Power Finishers, it doesn’t feel great to prioritize either.

I care more about using the AoW BoJ for the Holy Power, and to get it on cooldown faster, than I do about where I place Consecrated Blade, so 90% of the time it just falls at my feet anyways.

I’m also pretty GCD locked, with procs and RNG, that hitting Exorcism doesn’t feel very high priority and Ashes to Dust (WoA Resets) devalue all these things still.

So, all these on paper sound good, but in actual practice they are all pretty underwhelming. It feels like a half baked idea still, which is cool to test out, but it’s definitely not ready for Live.

Edit:
It also doesn’t spread across Consecrations, so if you use Consecrated Blade on a target 8 yards away, Exorcism will only apply the debuff to target in that Consecration.

2 Likes