Our class tree barely touches on our unique class wide utility. 1 minute off bop is not impactful at all, it’s also really boring. And that’s it, our other utility got nothing. Nothing enhancing freedom, nothing about bubble, no new utility at all either. Spellwarding was removed and replaced with nothing. Shaman class tree in comparison touches on all of their utility, it was clearly understood how to handle that but not in the case of paladin. No unbound freedom in the tree? No uthers guard? Why?
Generic and Frustrating talents:
Touch of light and incandescence contribute almost nothing to dps or hps either in the case of touch of light. What even are these talents? Touch of light procs twice in a 9 minute encounter and does nothing, incandescence procs maybe 4-5 times.
Dusk and Dawn has been controversial since alpha. Holy (and many ret/prot) paladins have been asking for its removal since then. It’s been altered a couple times (timer increased from 8 to 12, then to 15, then to 20) but it feels absolutely awful still. It is a maintenance
buff that requires constant attention. World first raiders to regular players have complained about this. It is clearly frustrating, it just needs to go. Even if some like it, too many have expressed that they dislike it.
A capstone should be exciting, not bring frustration. It is also too good not to take, logs prove that you just do much less healing if you don’t maintain it. Maintenance buffs are annoying for healers (hence their removal), that logic needs to apply to holy paladin too.
Three points for a nerfed version of Shadowlands steed? Really? Divine steed, Cavalier, 1 second extra duration. DKs got two charges of Death Grip and Deaths advance, while deaths advance is also baseline and off the gcd. I can’t even think of an explanation for this, it’s just so sad. Steed got no upgrades at all, it was downgraded in fact, meanwhile dks get double their mobility? Is there anything we are able to be excited about in our tree?
Consecration damage increased by 10%, haste increased by 2/4%, mastery in wings increased by 4/8%, armor and crit increased by 4%, Crusader strike damage increased by 5/10%, Dawn increases damage and healing by 8%, speed and avoidance increased by 2%. Talents like this are in every class tree, the problem is we have many of them while our class tree is already barren of unique or interesting talents. Feels really bad.
Yeah paladin is a train wreck right now. Been my main since Cata, except for a time in Legion when the changes from WoD were less than exciting.
Once I saw them add and remove Long Arm, and actually nerf the already abysmal Divine Steed, I dropped it and will likely never play it again unless it is given updates and improvements.
Every point you bring up has been mentioned ad nauseam since the alpha. Hundreds of posts were made on the beta forums about it. The developers simply don’t care. It’s that simple. They lack the creativity, did not listen to any feedback and there was next to 0 dev interaction. They are hoping players move on and give up complaining about the pre alpha talent tree.
The only thing I saw that could qualify as “listening to feedback” was to bring Exorcism back and give Ret Divine protection.
HOWEVER, they did so in such a way that I can’t in good conscience make the point that they “listened”. They looked at words on the forums, that’s what they did BEFORE the beta thread and ignored it altogether for Ret.
Exorcism has no interaction with our gameplay and only interacts with Consecration.
DP was made to have virtually no upside over SoV.
Cooldown
SoV = DP
Damage reduced
SoV > DP
(30% total health shield * Vers for 15 sec VS 20% DR for 8sec, would have to take at best 150% damage of health in damage over 8 sec to contest)
Damage dealt
SoV > DP
Compared to warriors who got weekly rundowns on the thought process that went into changes and actual communication on where they were in development process for each spec and what they wanted feedback on.
Hell I can’t bring myself to use exorcism if I’m not doing an AOE build. The button just doesn’t feel worth it on raid bosses when I can just shove the point into a single target dps talent.
Warriors, rogues and dhs who had their developer in the class discord discussing things and posting updates in the forum thread as well.
I am not sure where our dev(s) went or what happened, but the reason I am posting this feedback is because 10.0.5 is coming up and would be a good time for them to catch up on this stuff that did not happen during alpha/beta.
They reworked balance Druid tree entirely, priest got some talents reworked, even hpal got a few talents reworked that were not doing so well or had issues mainly for the (failed so far) caster build.
While i tend to agree, exorcism is pretty nice to have. Ive used it alot when needing to run out of aoe etc.
At the very least that means when im out of range i can still dps abit. Though i will say it doesn’t feel particularly good to press most of the time.
Its the same with consecration too, its good dps but pushing it just feels bad. Especially when tank pulls mobs out right after i drop it.
Ret dps is pretty decent atm, im usually around 40-50k overall in m+. The bad part is that it feels like im playing a piano. Way more difficult than most specs for quite honestly little return.
Insane right? The disparity between classes and how they are treated. It’s like there is no general oversight on what they do. It’s like some devs took the initiative on communication without directives coming from above, leading to some of them just not following in their peers steps because they weren’t given the specific instruction.
The more I think about it, the more it looks like more of a leadership failure from the lead class design.
That’s actually spot on. Ion confirmed all of that himself in his interview with max (I think it was max at least). The question was about why druids and priests sat for months without an update.
He said developers aren’t really assigned to any specific class, they go to classes that they know well enough or to classes that do not have enough developers/help. That is why druids/priests sat for so long without updates, there is no specific “priest developer(s)” or “paladin developer(s)”. They pick and choose and sometimes they get shifted off the class they were working on to a class that needs more developer help.
The developer who worked largely on healers also quit as the talent trees were being made, so I’m sure that messed things up some.
But yeah communication was super hit or miss. Either you got a developer that knew your class and wanted to discuss it with the players or you didn’t.
The irony being that current scheduled class changes for paladin have them reduce the cd on SoV but not DP, making it even less of a choice between the two lol.
I’m hoping this statement “We are looking at Retribution as a whole and will have more to share in the future” that they made is actually going to be something more than minor balance changes.
Yeah, they reduced Shield of Vengeance’s cooldown (which was needed) and is a great change but totally forgot about Divine Protection. I think Blizzard can’t even remember DP exists for Ret lol.
You also forgot the only one thing in which DP excels over SoV which is not being on GCD.
Its gonna be some meaningless change like those boj and cs buffs…
-wog healing increased by 5%
-d&d damage reduction increased to 5%
-divine steed cd reduced to 40s
I 100% guarantee. They have no clue what they are doing
I am glad they are looking into ret, I hope the outcome from that is really good. Either more mobility or better survivability.
However I really want to see some changes to our class tree still. Dusk and Dawn is stronger than the other capstones by quite a bit (logs prove this) and is very annoying, zealots paragon is too weak, and we have a bunch of placeholder/filler talents all over the place. At least a couple of those could be replaced with talents that enhance our utility (unbound freedom and uthers guard are easy wins)
This is the part that hits home the most along with the stuff about steed. 7 talent nodes that do nothing but % increases. So much room to change those to innovate the class.