True but what’s the point if one is always worse, and some are worse by a lot, some by a little. Using different talents for AOE and ST is good, but whole builds I think that is just bad design. It also makes it harder to balance if you have basically 2 different specs shoved into one. I think the only way something like works if if they actively, like WEEKLY, balance and change things, if they aren’t, it shouldn’t be a thing. You shouldn’t have to suffer through a whole tier with poor gameplay/DPS/talents etc.
For the 1m build to remain it needs more than that, Seraphim at least should be off GCD, hopefully ES would be too, that makes it a lot less clunky in the beginning, you also need Ringing Clarity or else you just aren’t going to get enough HP to even matter.
The Paladin we all seem to want to play is still in the game from 18 years ago. Go into live Stratholme in the plaguelands. There you will find the Paladins you are looking for. They are pre-beta, pre-release nerf paladin NPCs. Prot, holy and ret. And they are absolute bad-a**es! I dont think they have any seals or blessings but maybe auras. The ret paladins have a crusader strike that hits like a truck with a nasty debuff. The prot paladins are tough as nails and hit like a truck. The holy paladins are quite tanky, heal effectively and can hit pretty hard too for holy.
Little known secret, those Paladins were in the game right until just before release. Then when the lead WoW dev for most of WoW development, Bill Roper and his team were forced out of Blizzard by Vivendi Universal management, a new team was hired from Everquest, Pardo, Tigole and Furor. They hated hybrids but loved pures. They emascualted the Paladin, crushed ret and prot so they could not raid and implemented the seal/blessing/aura system. They turned paladins into plate-wearing heal/bless/cleanse/judge/aura healbot clerics and auto-attackadins(your swing timer).
That’s about how I remembered it. It made me super-glad when we got Crusader Strike baselined in Cata, Exorcism turned into a ranged direct-damage spell with no cooldown in Cata, and actually got good builders and finishers.
Cata felt the best to me because, at the time, I had everything. I had seals (they usually weren’t relevant to my moment-to-moment gameplay, but I had them). I had blessings. I had auras. Those were things paladins had always had.
But in Cata, I had builders and spenders of Holy Power. I had an interrupt. I had multi-target damage on short cooldowns with Consecration and Holy Wrath. I had a ranged direct-damage spell with no cooldown, which I’d pined for since Vanilla (still wish they’d given us Holy Bolt in patch 1.9). I had group healing. All things I’ve never had before.
Slowly over a few expansions, I lost the seals, blessings, and auras. It didn’t feel that bad to lose them, as they didn’t factor into my second-to-second gameplay—more than once, I’d wished they’d change seals so that they did affect my second-to-second gamplay, and put forward some easy ideas that they could’ve tried…but it never happened.
But what did hurt: in MoP, I lost Consecration and Holy Wrath—no more multi-target damage. In Legion, I got Consecration back, but lost holy power and Denounce—so no more building and spending, and no more damage spell with no cooldown.
My ideal in Dragonflight: they allow us to get everything again, as it was in Cataclysm. Don’t know if the devs would like the idea of a holy paladin with Denounce and Holy Radiance, but I sure would! If they want to make their class design for us the “greatest hits”, then that’s what they should do—of course, I wouldn’t say no to a revamped Seal system that did affect my second-to-second gameplay!
Whatever type of talents you’re doing you’re always gonna end up with a cookie cutter build. What if done correctly, they can make builds that are better for some scenarios than others. Which is where this new system can shine through. Maybe 1m build will be good in m+, but bad for raiding, maybe on some boss you’ll want more consistent damage over priority target burst. You have to remember, we’ll be able to premake talent builds and save them, and we’ll have more than 7 talent rows or 7 talents available. So there’s definitively gonna be a lot of room and builds possible depending of what scenario you’re facing.
After the Shaman talents, I’m pretty hopeful they nailed their trees. Obviously DK and Hunter will need to be redone, but the future classes will also benefit from their knowledge now and push out good trees.
And expecting blizz to do weekly changes is beyond dreaming at this point. They’ll never do that.
I’m all about a reunion tour with Denounce. I can see how paladins being a melee healer makes sense in a class fantasy type of way, but I personally can’t stand it. Let me hang with the healer homies at range.
Strange: I kind of thought they goofed with the shaman class talents—the spec trees seem mostly good, but the class talents rub me the wrong way for a few different reasons. I’d list them here if I didn’t worry I’d be going too far off-topic by doing so.
One thing I didn’t like was how it felt like there were too many totem abilities and not enough direct-damage abilities in the shaman class talents. That makes me worry a little that the devs might put too many blessing or aura abilities into our class tree, when those are the kinds of spells that really ought to be baseline.
We can hope that we get a lot of our kit baseline, and we get to choose utility in our class tree. Hopefully our trees are not a blunder like the hunter trees. But then again, its nice to see how responsive blizz is being with feedback.
Crazy thought. But you don’t suppose blizzard is redesigning our auras?
I only bring that up because with the Datamined seal for ret, it gave us 3yds on some of our abilities when we used divine steed OR had crusader aura on.
There is no way we’d use the current crusader aura over other auras we have.
But you’d think Auras would be you know, Auras(something that effects allies)and not some passive personal buff like this is and the current Retribution “Aura”
I guess this seal IS the new incentive to use Crusader Aura. Wouldn’t be to surprised if the other auras (at least Conc Aura) get similar bonus effects with certain talents.
With the selfish buff that we’re getting to increase range on some abilities on using Crusader Aura, i think it would be nice if they did the following in the Retribution Spec tree:
Crusade - every party or raid member affected by your Crusader Aura have their range on all abilities increased by 3 yards. Crusader Aura range increased by 1 yard per ally affected.
That would be a really nice, but not mandatory reason for Ret to be invited and have Crusader Aura on.
As it could be really hard to quantify the extra dmg or healing everyone would be able to do, but it would undoubtedly be a bonus! and unique aura effect.
The amount of hate we’ll get from party members. “Wtf are you using crusader over devo”. Plus not using sh*tty ret aura feels bad if you have people dying and you can benefit from the free wings.
This is the problem with auras since they were reintroduced. If you are the only paladin in the group (quite likely in M+) you are always forced into Devo Aura. Wouldn’t mind seeing current Devo Aura gone and making auras in general pure utility without defensives. Conc and Crusader Aura already work that way, Ret Aura can go die in a fire and Devo Aura could be revamped to be pure utility (can’t think of an example from the top of my head).
And to be fair: I don’t know what Crusader Aura even exists for. Where are the 20% mounted speed really needed? A battleground? If no side has it, it is no advantage anymore.
Auras in general are what I would call superfluous. Give us our 20% mounted speed baseline back and just cut the rest.
I know this is wishful thinking but can we get range holy paladin back? Being in melee sucks. I can’t believe we will have another expansion where we barely cast HL or FL.
Bring back the old Infusion of Light.
Make it two separate trees one for range and other for melee, choose what you prefer.
I know it will never happen, as long as crusader strikes grants holy power (get rid of it) we’ll be stuck in melee…sigh
Also stop shoving down our throats AoE healing, I see Vanquisher Hammer is back, we are triage healer not AoE ones. Light of Dawn is not Holy Radiance.
I agree I want to go back to the play style of cats where my judgment increased my mana regen. And get away from us being in melee. I do like the feeling of light of dawn but I don’t want that to be the only aspect we have we where built to be tank heals. Just because the few elitist want healers to do dps doesn’t mean we should be forced to. That’s why I chose to play a healer. To heal.
holy judgement should do something healing wise baseline. not having to talent into it. mana regen, healing for damage dealt like the azerite trait, whatever. just something
I really hope they do something with this ability. It’s just the worst. Poor damage, poor interaction, just poor…
I did not enjoy the 1min build personally. What I did like was the 1min damage profile. However, doing no damage outside of that window was also terrible. I’d love to have the reactive proc style of gameplay back from WoD, with the option to talent into that 1min profile again, but with 1min wings instead of Seraphim.
Seraphim, despite being powerful, feels horrible to press. Kind of like the original Inquisition. It takes a GCD and 3 HP to provide a buff, with a CD that doesn’t match up with other CDs.
I am a fan of both Execution Sentence and Final Reckoning, but also don’t want a lot of cd bloat. I think it’d be interesting if they combined them into a short CD Fist of Heavens style ability that’s more rotational and offers a mini-mechanic that we can optimize outside of our big CDs.