Paladin tree feedback
(1) There has to be a better implementation for auras. Holy and Prot have to spend a point to get our mount speed buff, while Ret has to do the same to get a real aura. I get why Blizz wouldn’t want paladins to bring more than one raid buff, but that doesn’t justify naming personal buff mechanics “auras.” I think the aura system should be scaled back to something like what we had in Legion. In the short-term this makes the class tighter and more refined, while in the future it leaves space to either add new abilities or to try to revive other retired systems.
Suggestions (further explanations in italics)
- Auras of the Resolute changed to a choice between Dev Aura and Conc Aura. We lose the tinniest bit of freedom by having to preemptively choose our aura, but the goal is to make auras passive effects.
- Auras of Swift Vengeance replaced by this part of Unbound Freedom: Blessing of Freedom also increases movement speed by 30%. Ret then gets Blessing of Freedom as one of its freebie talents. I didn’t suggest making Retribution Aura a passive because the mechanic feels at odds with paladins having a battle rez: we get Wings, drop everything for two sec to rez our ally, and then avenge him?
- Crusader Aura made a baseline, passive effect so that we don’t have to spend a talent point on it or micromanage it while questing. Then change the speed bonus back to being multiplicative so that death knights aren’t faster than us. I demand these changes as the premiere horse class of World of Warcraft.
(2) If Blizz doesn’t want to give us Long Arm then they should actively work to improve and make us like the horse.
Suggestions
- Take Divine Steed off the GCD. What’s the justification behind this GCD anyway, that it’s really distracting to pray to the Light while rogues directly communicate to their legs to move faster? It’s so arbitrary that our movement speed ability requires a global. Minor stuff like this that can so easily be fixed, but isn’t, makes me think someone at Blizz has a weird, dated view of the class.
- Cavalier choice node: a second charge of Steed / Steed removes all movement impairing effects. The latter intentionally does not provide immunity. It’s horse + Escape Artist.
- Delete Seal of the Templar. This talent is like someone took the talent Acrobatic Strikes and subjected it to extreme austerity measures before giving it to paladins. There are multiple issues with it that aren’t worth solving.
- Not strictly necessary, but Seasoned Warhorse could remain a node: duration increase / cooldown reduction.
(3) Turn Evil is really bad compared to other situational CC such as Hibernate. Just as with Seal of the Templar, there are multiple reasons why this is the case. A good solution would be to make TE baseline and then replace it in the talent tree with increased HoJ range (currently a PvP talent). “But other classes need to spend a point on their situational CC.” Yea, but they get their raid buff for free so it evens out.
(4) I like Golden Path, but the follow-up talent Seal of Mercy is like half the benefit for twice the cost. I’d also like to note that our trees in general place a huge emphasis on Consecration, a spell with limited use in PvP. A quick fix here is to remove the second rank of SoM and buff the first rank to 100%.
(5) If you think for just a moment about how each spec uses Word of Glory, it’s easy to see how much weaker Afterimage is for Ret. A simple tweak to buff it for Ret without really changing it for the other two specs is to let it stack once: if we spend 20 holy power our next WoG splashes for 30%, and if we wait until we’ve spent 40 holy power then it will splash for 60%.
(6) Feels like Blessing of Protection and its follow-up talent should be sort of swapped. What I mean by this is with the first talent we could choose between BoP (5-min CD) and Spellwarding (5-min CD). Then the follow-up would reduce the cooldown of whichever we chose by 2 min.
(7) Just hitting a target dummy for a few minutes, the numbers on Touch of Light seem laughably bad. I didn’t try Incandescence (the other talent on the node).
(8) Seal of Clarity is Divine Purpose’s little brother? I don’t find it terribly exciting, but I suppose it’s hard to invent brand new talents and easy to be a critic.
(9) Aspirations of Divinity: I don’t enjoy Crusader Strike’s role in Ret’s rotation and so I don’t love this talent either.
(10) I would need to play for quite a few hours to decide whether or not I like Of Dusk and Dawn. Either there’s some subtlety to it, or it’s largely passive and boring. Either way I’m a little surprised Blizz chose this to be one of our final talents. Has the class truly been so lacking in depth over the past few expansions that we need to fall back on this legendary? There were really no other options? Oh well, I hope it surprises me.
(11) With Seal of Order, one of the bonuses of being in Dusk is a 10% armor increase. Is this necessary to make the talent attractive to Prot? Because as the other specs I might prefer increased healing taken.
(12) First Blizz doesn’t know what an aura is, and now there are all these talents named Seal of This and Seal of That. Names and history are important. Seal of the Crusader is cool because it’s based on auto-attacks and because the original also increased holy damage (via Judgment). But Seal of Order, Seal of Clarity, and so on have absolutely nothing to do with the seal system. It’s bad fan service. I want whoever is designing this class to love it, but whether it’s with auras or Steed or seals, I don’t get that impression at all.
Ret tree feedback
(1) Moving onto the Ret tree, I would swap Divine Storm with Timely Judgment. This provides a route to skip Divine Storm in PvP (sometimes we don’t need it).
(2) I like the Blade of Justice theme on the right side of the tree. The left side has a Judgment theme, but Judgment is also spread all over the place. Perhaps there could have been another Hammer of Wrath talent, or something that makes me actually like Crusader Strike (impossible).
(3) Compare Condemning Blade, which increases BoJ crit by 5%, to the WotLK talent Sanctity of Battle, which increases all crit by 1% and the damage of CS and Exorcism by 5%. Not only does the DF talent feel stingy, but you can spend three points on the WotLK one. I think this sort of talent having multiple ranks feels better because then it’s powerful enough to actually notice when you’re hitting stuff. That said, this feedback may be too late at this stage in development.
(4) Another change that’s unlikely to happen, but I really dislike Improved Crusader Strike. Of all the abilities to give a second charge, why the one that’s at the very bottom of the rotation? It’s never made sense to me.
(5) Divine Protection on a 2-min CD is bad. We would need to take 150% of our health in 8 sec just to equal Shield of Vengeance defensively (SoV of course also deals damage).
(6) Righteous Verdict is one more useless mechanic to clog up the buff bar. Option A is to make it a flat 5% increase to TV. Boring, but at least it doesn’t pretend to be a mechanic. Option B is to make it a stacking, rolling buff. What I mean by this is not that it can stack indefinitely like Fury could do with Execute back in Legion, but rather that if you get lucky and TV a few times in a row the buff can reach 15 or 20% before the original applications fade and you’re back to 5%. I’m picturing this with Crusade and Executioner’s Will.
(7) Consecrated Blade: When empowered by Art of War, Blade of Justice applies Consecration. So if I take this other talent, Ashes to Dust, and AoW resets Wake of Ashes instead of BoJ, does that mean I miss out on the free Consecration?
(8) I’m not sure yet what to think of Path of Ruin.
(9) No one knows if Crusade is intended to be on a 3-min CD, right? I don’t know, I could see Ret having 3-min CD build as one of several options so long as the damage evens out in the end. It’s all about flexibility. For example, I’ve suggested in the past that Seraphim should replace Wings, let’s say with a 30-sec CD and appropriate stat values. Then we’d have three ways to build our cooldown: Seraphim, Avenging Wrath, or Crusade.
Of course that’s not actually happening. Blizz should communicate their intentions with Crusade and the Ret tree in general.
(10) Truth’s Wake is another Condemning Blade or Hallowed Ground. You’re not likely to ever notice it. These may as well be secondary stat increases, but I guess Blizz wants them to be superficially interesting.
(11) Sanctified Ground seems especially bad now that we have access to the PvP talent Hallowed Ground. Could we just move Hallowed Ground here, or would that be broken?
(12) Maybe Sealed Verdict can stack once or twice so it doesn’t get wasted and so that we can have some meaty BoJ’s. For a long time now I’ve wanted generators that can hit hard under the right circumstances.
(13) Very glad to see Exorcism back. It seems geared towards AoE, but I hope we can find use for it in PvP.
(14) Selfless Healer tends to be weaker than Healing Hands, which it shares a node with. An easy buff would be Flash of Light is instant at 3 stacks (down from 4) and does 12% additional healing per stack (up from 10).
(15) I don’t like Eye for an Eye. It’s useless in PvE, and why should this ability exist when the base class has Divine Protection? It’s bloat, plain and simple. The name is such a waste too. We take this talent for the damage reduction, while the damage return is negligable. Much of Legion design, from the horse to Eye for an Eye to what has become Retribution Aura, lacks depth, nuance, or any good reason to fall in love with the class.
(16) I think JV can actually be useful, but it will be highly situational. Blizz did something pretty cool here where it does the same damage as FV against a stunned target, barring a Templar’s Vindication proc (and outside of Virtuous Command as well I guess). JV is maybe a little bloaty, but I don’t really mind that it exists.
(17) Blizz should take a close look at the Ret defensive kit and decide what they want to do with it. Just brainstorming here, but we could choose between DP on a 1-min CD, and SoV that is no longer an active ability, but rather works similar to Cata Sacred Shield (hell, it could just be Cata Sacred Shield). Remove E4E and leave JV in that spot by itself. That’s one less defensive but more survivability during stuns.
Is DP on a 1-min CD a potential problem in PvE?
(18) ) I wasn’t a big fan of Vanquisher’s Hammer but I like Empyrean Endowment even less. We don’t have control over it and it’s just not very exciting for such a late talent.
(19) Virtuous Command in Shadowlands requires melee range even on ranged abilities. Too lazy to check right now if it’s still broken, but probably is.
(20) Executioner’s Will seems really cool to me. We’ll probably mostly only use it in raids though, which sucks as I don’t raid.
(21) Divine Resonance should be replaced with Ringing Clarity. Multiple paladins suggesting this is not an echo chamber as I’m sure many realized it right off the bat. One mechanic is simply more fun than the other. Reminds me of Steed where paladins tell Blizz over and over that the horse is just not that fun of a mechanic, that we’ve had more enjoyable mobility in the past. Blizz responds the more enjoyable mechanic doesn’t fit their vision, and then doesn’t take feedback to improve said vision.
Final thoughts
(1) It would have been great if Ret could dedicate itself hard to the left side of the paladin tree to pick up magic dispel, but for some reason only healers are given the option to build towards another role. The game is obviously designed around m+ where healers are expected to play like a hybrid while the same is discouraged for DPS.
(2) I mentioned earlier that I like the right side of the Ret tree with all the BoJ talents, but I think it would have been even better if there was a node at the end. Basically, you build up a core ability and make it stronger and stronger, until you reach the end and put your personal stamp on it. Exorcism as a replacement for BoJ could have been a great half of an end-of-ability node, for example. It has a longer range, deals holy damage, and used to be tied to Art of War.
(3) I understand why the final few rows of talents are gated behind spending twenty points, but I’m not sure I like the initial gate at eight points. It will make the process feel slower while leveling (especially considering you bounce back and forth between trees every level) and just overall feels restrictive. That’s my initial impression, at least. I’m sure the trees were designed with this gating in mind, unfortunately.
(4) BoP and Sac both have great follow-up nodes. Divine Steed has bad ones while Freedom doesn’t have one. These are opportunities to build the class.
(5) Regarding PvP talents…
- Why don’t specs like Ret have access to Precognition? It would be fun to juke someone and cast Repentance in their face. It’s an opportunity to express skill, but we don’t even get to try it out and see if it’s worthwhile as Ret.
- Keep an eye on Blessed Hands and Ultimate Sacrifice — Holy might be really broken with these talents + Spellwarding / Sacrifice of the Just.
- I could say a lot more about PvP talents. Maybe next time.
