Aura: Concentration - reduces chance of being interrupted, silenced and stunned.
Seal/Judgement: Wisdom/Light - judgement restores resources for everyone who hits judged target.
Blessing: Wisdom - regenerates resources.
Protection:
Aura: Devotion - increases armor of paladin and group or decreases damage taken.
Seal/Judgement: Justice - judgement snares target and has change to stun target.
Blessing: Kings - increases stats of paladin and group
Retribution:
Aura: Retribution - increases damage of paladin and group
Seal/Judgement: Hybrid of Vengeance/Blood/Crusader - increases damage of paladin and group on judged target.
Blessing: Might - group damage buff
These support abilities define the paladin class. They should be restored in DF. They don’t have to be exactly like the originals but they should be similar in role and purpose. These abilities could be completely or partially talented. They should be valuable to the paladin and to the paladins party or raid.
There should also be baseline class abilities such as Blessing of Freedom, Blessing of Salvation, Seal of Righteousness, Crusader Aura etc.
I was going to say “What about a multi-target damage seal?” but you’ve put that in the baseline
Personally, I’d like a revamped seal system making a comeback, but I’m not sure any class in today’s game should have as many different kinds of raid buffs as paladins had in Vanilla—they looked and felt cool, but I feel like it’d wreck the whole “bring the player not the class” thing if they added that many.
…Unless they normalized the buffs’ effects, e.g. Blessing of Kings has Mark of the Wild’s exact effect, Blessing of Wisdom had Mana Spring Totem’s exact effect, etc. I think they once did that…was it Cataclysm where they did that?
You make some good points. To me “bring the player not the class” has resulted in a low-quality, boring gaming experience for paladins in wow. I assume that spec switching would continue in DF so not all buffs would be available to all specs. Clearly, class metrics would need to be adjusted for seals, auras and blessings.
My experience was just the opposite in Cataclysm: since they were homogenizing healing, and in TBC and WotLK the devs refused to give paladins any new direct healing spells, they had to add four new heals in Cataclysm: Divine Light, Light of Dawn, Word of Glory, and (what I’m really hoping they unprune in Dragonflight) Holy Radiance. It felt like they were making up for lost time, there! I actually had the most fun in Cataclysm.
IIRC, they were merging blessings together, either going from WotLK to Cata, or in WotLK: Blessing of Wisdom and Blessing of Might got merged, and (eventually) they made Blessing of Kings baseline. I’m not sure that’s what we’d want today, though…
I would love the idea of the seals and judgement effects per spec being baked into judgement. If this would give Ret the bump it needs to be desired in high keys or Mythic raiding, I am all for it.
Blizzard has been making fake “baseline” abilities for years. I have seen no evidence that Blessing of Kings or any passive buff has been made “baseline”.
I don’t want each Paladin spec to have it’s own Blessing, personally, as I do think that kindof pushes the “bring the class (spec), not the player” a bit too much.
I think it’s great to have diversity, but it should be within reason.
I think a very simple solution to this is, give Paladins an ability, called “Greater Blessings” that buffs each specialization with Wisdom, Kings, and Might appropriately.
Greater Blessings - Paladin
Bless all members of the raid with a Greater Blessing, deciphered by specialization. Players may only have one Blessing on them per Paladin at any one time
Healing Specialization - Blessing of Wisdom
DPS Specialization - Blessing of Might
Tank Specialization - Blessing of Kings
Whatever Blessing of Might, Wisdom, and Kings offers is obviously up in the air, but all Paladins share in that class fantasy without the need of multiple ones to do so.
Yeah like, I have to refresh my Shield of the Righteous when I tank, guess the uptime is just the initial 8 sec for the whole fight.
“You had to refresh so it’s not 100%” had to be the dumbest comeback he could have went with and he did it anyway.
agree, i mean you got my point, i got yours. I felt like we lost a lot of surviability i enjoyed from cata to mop. I remebr agincourt he didnt say much aside “ret is bad”, lobster would say being middle tier was good to avoid nerfs but the hidden pvp healing debuff obltierate ret surviability anyways, was kinda funny.
Really good post and arguments.
What an ignoble comparasion.
SoR can have 100% uptime but if you mess up rotation or not play kyrian you actually may end up with windows whitout it, that alones makes it different, and it must be active when bosses/elites are about to hard-hit you. It also does aoe damage while giving you a passive debuff, its actually very well designed for tanking.
Inquisition? you had to lose damage to activate it so you could actually do damage, already bad from the start and the moment inquisition wasnt up was the moment you were playing the class entirely wrong, it was just horribled designed, its literally the same thing our mastery do now and was specially terrible in pvp situations which could result in losing or affecting burst windows.
The design was just horrendously bad.
As i said in pvp it could be critical because you lost burst windows and still had to activate it when people were already bursting the moment they touch you. Which means you would also have to play defensive while activating an obviously obligatory buff. Imagine if warrios had to use 3 slams before using colossal smash, thats all inquisiton was in that front. In raid you would legit have to lose a gcd for the sake of refreshing it instead of doing damage.
Also Try to be more polite, for your parent’s sake.
Must haves:
Prot- Divine toll - Can’t imagine tanking without it anymore.
Ret- Final verdict - Gives paladin’s extra range, extremely helpful in PvP, and helpful in PvE too when you need to move out of aoe but still want to hit the boss.
Tier set from 9.2 - Makes ret less of a noodle outside of wings.
What if they make auras allow the specs to act more like a class and not a spec?
Like, say for instance,
Defender Aura- Grants 20% armor and 10% magic resistance to the Paladin and their group.
Recovery Aura- The Paladins abilities radiate a passive healing effect to themselves and their group. The more damage you do, the more this heals for. (think things like consecrate, judgement, divine storm)
Damage Aura- The Paladin inspires their group, granting 10% haste and a 10% cooldown reduction.
These would be useable by any spec at any time and they have to be powerful enough to warrant bringing the class to things like Mythic+
Oh and lets make Crusader Aura provide a 10% movement speed boost AT ALL TIMES, not just while mounted.
And let’s pull a page out of Anduin’s book…
All Paladins now have a group combat rez, on a one hour cooldown, shared across all Paladins in the group, with a 10 second cast. ( the 10 second cast time is so you can never guarantee you’ll get this cast off, even if you use bubble to protect the channel)
This is not meant to be something you can cheese and use to prevent every wipe, but is meant to be something heroic and game saving, something to make this class feel truly heroic.
There, now people have every reason to bring a pally to their mythic+ and having more than one isn’t seen as a bad thing.
How is it different? One lasts 8 sec the other lasted 15 sec and they both enhanced your effectiveness in your role.
They are both buffs which you can track the uptime and they can/could be maintain at 100%
So aside from the effect what is different?
Just admit you dug yourself a hole and you were wrong by saying that “It’s not 100% uptime because you have to refresh it” and get on with it.
You said something stupid, whatever, everyone does.
Nobody said Inquisition was the top end gameplay dream for ret, but it wasn’t the worst we had either.
That ship sailed out the door with Ghostcrawler. It’s been bring the class, not the player for a long time. That’s why there’s such an imbalance between specs and classes right now. Up until the last season, healers were largely imbalanced, and dps continues to be. If it were bring the player and not the class, the game would spread out the utility and be more balanced so you can bring the player regardless of the class, but that’s not happening.
How about bring the player who is a Paladin? That is the essence of roleplay and WoW is a role-playing game.
The Paladin is a hybrid support class which can play all 3 roles and that should be the focus of paladin class design, not “bring the player, not the class”, whatever that means.
Bring the player, not the class meant you weren’t going to be lacking x, y, z, necessary component by bringing one particular class over the other, so if the player is a player playing the paladin, that’s okay. That’s not how the game is designed currently.
For examples, during the first couple of seasons dungeons heavily focused on interrupts and several had deadly curses favoring shamans to such a degree that other healers were lacking. So unless you brought something else like extreme damage, it was bring healer-x regardless of the player. Paladin healers could do huge damage so healers that couldn’t didn’t fall into that healer-x category and holy priests, mistweavers, ect fell the the wayside regardless of the player behind the controls.
and get on with it.