Asking again for Denounce to be moved from PvP talents (or keep the “cannot cause crit” effect as an honor talent) to provide for a range option for offensively using HP.
Would be nice for us to have this option available to us so that ie we are able to use 2H weapons on Holy while still having a damaging spender as well as working with other talents (ie Lightforged Blessing, Shining Righteousness).
Not saying “get rid of SotR for Hpal” or anything like that. Would just like to have the option available to us, especially since I was stuck as 2h and without sword and board on Hpal for a decent amount during S2 because of reallllly bad gear drop rng and I know some others have wanted to be able to have 2h hpal back as well.
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It would also be great for ranged holy healing, which is seeing some traction.
I think the challenge is adding something like this while keeping SotR powerful enough to justify going into melee range. I think it might work if it provided some kind of benefit to hardcasted heals since it’s conducive to a different playstyle and won’t conflict too much with the SotR + HS churn playstyle. Maybe spend 3 HP and reduce the mana cost of your next Holy Light by x%?
I want to point out though that encounter mechanics consider different specs as melee or ranged and I’m not sure if Blizzard wants to support a single spec being optimal as either purely ranged or purely melee (although Resto Druid might be a counter example). In other words, I think Blizzard really wants Holy Paladins to be close to the boss. SotR as it is is borderline weak enough to allow for effective fully ranged gameplay and Denounce would probably make ranged an equally optimal and viable alternative. But it does add a lot of complexity to spec balance once you open this door.
They could also just buff the liberation talent. It currently does massively lower damage per holy power spent compared to SotR and causes you to miss out on the holy shock/judgement interaction of the other talent.
Nerfing the talent to 12% makes little to no sense. It could be 100% and still wouldn’t be overpowered. Even with liberation at 100%, SotR would still do more damage in AoE + have a mana restore.
Oh, and the tooltip is worded terribly. Liberation isn’t a conversion like Seraphic Barrier. The tooltip makes you think you’re losing 12% healing to convert to damage but it’s just also doing 12% of the healing as damage. It needs a buff and a tooltip re-write.
I know you are someone who wants hpal to be fully ranged and therefore see this is as a bad thing. But that is where I disagree with you.
It puts melee into the role of dps and resource management without directly interfering with hps beyond whatever gain the Extra resources may contribute. If you are focused on healing you can stand wherever you need to do so, but when you want to optimize your damage and resources on top of it you incorporate your melee.
I know I’m wasting my breath on you because we have different visions on how hpal should function. But I also truly believe the current iteration is a very good compromise.
Liberation is just that. Compromise, it’s going to be less optimal then using sotr but it enables you to not loose all your dps contribution if you cannot commit to melee or do not want to.
Edit 1: you are advocating for Liberation to be buffed to 100% of the heal then that would potentially make it stronger in single target then sotr. Which I strongly disagree with because it means you would only use sotr on cleave/aoe. I’m of the mind that sotr should always be the best choice for damage and Liberation should be a compensation prize for people who don’t want to or can’t make that decision to commit the resources to it.
No, my point is Liberation can be massively massively buffed without making SotR pointless.
12% is a joke. It needs to be buffed or it will never be taken.
There’s miles between SotR being as far ahead of Liberation in its current state and being equal. You can still give SotR a slight edge or even a medium sized edge.
I think it would be fun to buff Liberation so I’m on board. Even with Liberation I think we want to keep SotR a better choice while in melee (or at least better in certain conditions), but I do think a ranged spender for when no one needs healing would round out the spec.
We could also just have WoG convert its overhealing to damage and have SotR apply a shield to allies within 5 yards of the target in addition to its current effects. I don’t even think these should require talents. This would keep the two spenders disjoint enough that they won’t have to compete and they could stay situational.
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Yes. It could be buffed to like 20-25% and be more reasonable. But our healing numbers are always skewed higher then our damage numbers. So asking for a 100% transfer WILL make Liberation stronger then sotr unless they massively buff it which would just make things cascade further from a tuning pov.
At most Liberation should be slightly less then a non-Shining Righteous sotr.
The fun part of hpal for me is the minute to minute decision making on whether to heal or dps with my resources and making Liberation too powerful will make overhealing with your healing spenders the only correct decision. We already saw that happen briefly during the development cycle.
I used 100% and 50% to show how bad 12% was because even at 100% Liberation, SotR would still do more damage when hitting several targets.
I don’t feel like logging into beta to look at exact numbers but SotR hits for 8.somethingK in my beta gear. I think from talents it does that twice to your main target so you have 8 * 6 when hitting 5 for 48k damage. Eternal flame by comparison does 30.somethingK healing and would do 30k damage for 3 holy power vs. 48k from SotR (or maybe 35kish for LoD). That’s why I said at 100% transfer, SotR still does more damage per holy power in an AoE situation. At 50%, SotR still does more damage than Liberation would against a single target since SotR would do 16 something and Liberation would do 15 something. SotR would do much much more in AoE situations than a 50% Liberation.
Those number also were prior to the upcoming healer damage buffs which may not affect Liberation, which would make the situation even more skewed towards SotR than it already was.
Of course the healing abilities are also doing more healing than SotR when you use them, but you may not always need healing when you’re dumping holy power and SotR also restores mana and has a higher chance to proc divine purpose. It doesn’t need that massive damage gap to be useful.
Maybe, though dumping holy power into say Light of Dawn when you don’t need spread AoE healing but want to do more damage would still be a choice with Liberation.
They could also just give us a choice talent for Denounce and then we’re deciding between healing and damage still.
And since it’s the dedicated dps spender I’m of the mind it should do more damage then Liberation in single target as well especially if you’re running Shining Righeousness. I’ll double check my numbers when I’m not at work and get back to you on this.
I think that’s terrible gameplay design personally. I believe Liberation is best when it’s a partial compensation for whatever dps you’d lose not sotr-ing, and not as an alternative way to dps from your dps spender.
