Feedback: Paladin Hero Talents in The War Within

Classes Paladin
413

For sure. Nearly every defensive and healing talent and ability and quite a few offensive abilities and talents are nerfed for pvp specifically and 80% nerfs on several pvp talents. After the Recent buffs, while maintaining our Mastery nerf and adding an Armor nerf, we are average. Several specs have more tools, more self healing in their damage rotation, more mobility, MS effects, disarms, invisibility, teleporting enemies, abducting someone to the shadow realm…and Ret is still pretty good.

Even though a few specs counter us pretty easily, overall it’s kind of okay to be average. We are certainly not on the list of specs needing some nerfs, so it shouldnt get worse for us fingers crossed.

1 Like
414

Now that we are getting alpha feedback - anyone see anything on this. literally all i see as a hpal is the other tree being talked about. I get this one was initially hated in concept but how is it in practice?

415

Have they deleted Lightsmith yet?.

416

No? Too busy with beacons

417

What mess did I come back to? Are we really doing this?

Wake of Ashes is Ret’s only, and primary, ‘short’ cooldown for burst. It does a lot for the spec, including damage and generating Holy Power. Everyone playing Ret is taking it, but that doesn’t mean it should be baseline if its power is meant to be part of a ‘talent tax’. If you aren’t taking it because you, “don’t like it,” then you don’t like the current version of Ret and should be playing a different class.

Execution Sentence is a fire-and-forget, feelsbad button that does a ton of ST damage. It contributes to Ret’s feeling of blandness in raid, and contributes to button fatigue over a long fight due to its 30s cooldown. To make it better, it needs a better animation when the hammer finally drops with a matching sound effect, rather than the wimpy dribble of light it currently has. If it was more fun to press, then Ret would be more fun to play in raid.

Final Reckoning feels like uninstalling the sun and dropping it on Detroit. It has an amazing animation, it has an amazing sound effect, it feels great to press. The problem it has is that its counterpart is Execution Sentence, so playing the AoE build feels way more fun and exciting than playing the ST build, so you miss it when it isn’t there.

The solution is to either remove Execution Sentence and give Final Reckoning more ST damage potential (such as making it targeted and dealing extra damage to the target,) or more realistically/appropriately making Execution Sentence feel better to press by revamping the animations and audio effects. Execution Sentence needs to feel much weightier so that the damage it deals feels more fun/worth the input fatigue.

All three of these are iconic Ret abilities that form the core of the spec’s burst windows. Again, if you arent taking ES/FR + WoA, youre not really playing Ret as it was designed to be played.

If you don’t like Ret having a ton of inputs and are skipping Wake of Ashes because of that, then stop taking Templar Strikes and pick up Crusading Strikes instead. You will still have a ton to press, CrS is fine and generates at a comparable rate.

If you want to streamline the spec down to zero inputs then yeah sure I suppose you can play with solely your finishers + Judgment + HoA + BoJ but like if you want to play a 4 button damage rotation then you should be tanking or healing, not playing DPS.

5 Likes
419

Please ignore the problem while pointing out the problem. The problem isn’t the skill, the problem is it’s placement in the tree and the fact both hero talents requires it.

No one is saying don’t take it, everyone is saying don’t lock both the hero talents on one capstone talent.

420

To be fair someone did say they did not want to take it.

Not in this thread but in one of the other 2.
Soo, that happened… :rofl:

I don’t know why he’s posting the answer here though.

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421

yup I saw that person post and though myself he must be trolling…

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422

I mean, if someone don’t choose it, that is their choice. But by making both hero specs use wake turns it into a big trap on not choosing it.

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423

thats not even a problem

again you can take everything but Divine aux while taking wake of ashes.

as i stated before countless times. blizzard shouldnt make new powers or tuning on the lowest tier of players. if you dont take wake of ashes then you shouldnt even be playing ret paladin. theres like 0 excuses. it s the ashbringer

424

K mr. Brick wall that can’t see the truck in front of him.

425

again, the only people who think this is a problem are majority people who dont want to run wake of ashes. no the solution isnt splitting wake of ashes into two parts, cause thats just degen and poor design. so many abilities got split up until multiple talents, we dont need more talents split

426

Next you’ll say it’s the engine of ret while still ignoring the problem isn’t wake, but the fact both tree’s is activated by the same skill extremely deep in the ret tree.

But please go on with your bad self.

427

The context of my analysis here is that I have been playing ret paladin for nine years, engaging in both pve and pvp content regularly. (no TLDR will be provided to avoid misunderstanding my assertions)

By creating situations where the proc effects of an ability or talent are determined by crit is going to be an underwhelming expxperience from a PvP perspective. It unfortunately does not achieve the goal of the devs (that goal being to make the hero talents not feel compulsory for certain content). This goes for both the hero talent and general talent changes that paladins will undergo.

Crit, for ret paladins at least, is a useless stat outside of one specific circumstance. This circumstance is prolonged pve encounters (ie. raid bosses/dungeon bosses). This is because crit, as it currently stands, is a stat that suits classes which can spam out numerous abilities in a relatively short amount of time as crit chance is ‘% chance per hit’. Ret paladins are currently not designed to offload enough abilities per minute to justify crit being higher than the minimum. The only way crit would be useful for retribution paladins is if they had 80-90% crit before buffs, which (as far as I am aware) is not currently possible.

If the devs want to design the hero talents (and rework the paladin talents generally) to improve the paladin experience, might I suggest one of three options:

  1. a total overhaul of ret paladins into a crit hit machine (please not this one).
  2. adjuting the talent tree to better synergise with haste or mastery variants for certain abilities (like the idea of “swift justice” allowing paladin to rapid-fire hpower generating abilities and triggering auto-procs of divine storm or judgement via crusader strike/blades of justice/temp verdict; and perhaps a mastery variant of “the might of the light” where abilities can cause stacks or procs of a buff which sends mastery through the roof [like back in BFA where mastery could get up to 180% and is felt fun]).
  3. or focusing more on the dots that ret now has.

Whatever you do, do not take away the slows from wake of ashes and judgement, because in pvp you effectively make paladins sitting ducks (which does not synergise for the better with the excessive amount of forbearance inducing abilities). Furthermore, please refrain from making ret paladins a support class. They have far too much of the prot and holy toolkit in a bad way. They are effectively shoehorned into either the current meta builds, or the monstrocity of a build like the one I am currently running.

Regardless of what you do, please stop incorporating crit into the paladin builds, as it is just a pointless stat for the ret builds and rotations that will be possible and also makes for an underwhelming experience.

On a positive note:

  1. I really enjoy the fact that paladins can now choose to be melee range or mid range fighters.
  2. I also really enjoy the fact that you can either go physical dmg or radiant dmg (for clarity, holystrike dmg currently does not work as a hybrid school).
  3. I like the addition of divine protection, though 20% dmg reduction is far too little for any class.
  4. I enjoy many of the end-of-tree talents, especially on the ret side of the tree.

This is pretty much all that I’ve got to say on the matter. Thanks for listening.

2 Likes
428

They don’t design those talents through the constrained lenses of PVP.

They let the PVP balance do its own thing.

The proof is the Steed talent for DK. If they were considering PVP at all at the design level this talent wouldn’t exist.

The only concession is that they seem to have a 1 talent policy oriented very specifically at PVP for all Hero talent but that’s the extend of the thought they gave to PVP for these.

I don’t know where this assumption comes from.

It’s neither useless or amazing ATM it’s just “ok” and they are making it more interesting through added interaction in TWW.

Furthermore, as far as PVP goes, crit is not “good” for anyone since they nerfed crit damage a while back.
Which was a push to make damage intake less spiky at random.

Since that, as a general rule for PVP games, near instantaneous death, regardless of how it happens, feels extremely bad and it’s no exception in WoW.

Obviously crit will never be an appealing stat if they never design any effect that interacts with it.
And these addition are bringing scaling back to the spec which is a good thing as your character growth in an RPG should be driven by gear acquisition and not regular dev tuning passes.

The only way…? really?
Those kind of hyperbolic statement don’t really bring anything.
Obviously this is not true.

Except its not, it’s 30%.

You’re talking through PVP lense again which is not within the scope of this thread, you have a problem with PVP balance, you should bring that specific concern there.

In fact, this whole post is tainted with this PVP lense.

At baseline for the base game, crit is not a “bad” stat for Ret neither is it useless, your POV is solely driven by how crit is balanced and dealt with in PVP.

Which is not an appropriate starting point to design from in a MMORPG that clearly isn’t making its PVP gamemode the main feature for the game.
And this even after recognizing it’s one of the endgame pillar.

I wish PVP would be more fun for everyone, but constraining the design space on the back of a gamemode that needs to have it’s own balance anyway is not the way to go.

1 Like
429

Can Paladins get a charge or a leap as a gap closer, Divine Steed is nice and all, but we really want something like “Falling Sword” or Wings of Light or something, something that gets us into the Frey like we’re meant to right off the bat.

430

September 2nd and paladin talents (specifically holy) are extremely underwhelming

431

Just posted this in another thread because I didn’t see this one, so copying what I posted to here since it’s the official thread.

Prot Paladin - Templar - Hammer of Light
Hammer of Light (HoL) and Eye of Tyr (EoT) have no synergy and feel weird being on the same button. It creates an awkward playstyle where EoT is less like a defensive CD and more like an inconvenience that I have to deal with before using HoL. There is also a 100% chance I’m going to use HoL right after EoT so having to press the same button again makes no sense. One would think HoL would be triggered automatically with EoT but I see why it isn’t (EoT would require a target and holy power).

To address these issues, HoL needs a slight redesign. It could read more like this:

Hammer of Light
Hammer down your enemy with the power of the Light, dealing X Holy damage plus an additional Y% of damage absorbed by Eye of Tyr up to Z, and J Holy damage up to 4 nearby enemies.

Additionally, calls down Empyrean Hammers from the sky to strike 3 nearby enemies for K Holy damage.

Can only be used on enemies affected by Eye of Tyr.

It works as it does now except it also has “plus an additional Y% of damage absorbed by Eye of Tyr up to Z” and “Can only be used on enemies affected by Eye of Tyr”.

The idea is to encourage using EoT as a defensive CD by giving it some bonus offensive capabilities when used optimally.

We achieve this with the “Y% of damage absorbed by EoT” line. Now, HoL directly benefits from using EoT in a high damage situation. The straightforward example is using EoT just before a raid boss’s tank buster. This turns HoL into some nice burst damage.

Let’s not forget about the “Can only be used on enemies affected by EoT” line, though. This line gives us a little wiggle room for min/maxing. You could use HoL right after a tank buster, but you still have 4-5 seconds of EoT left. So you could wait a few seconds to take a melee swing or two from the boss and then use HoL to maximize its potential.

Limiting HoL to enemies affected by EoT is also key in high target situations like dungeons. Using HoL immediately after EoT when you’re getting hit by 10 enemies is okay, but you could wait out that full six seconds to really juice it up. Be careful, though! This comes with some risk. What if you’re waiting it out but UH OH, you got CC’ed at the last moment and miss the cast of HoL entirely!

The suggested change adds some much-needed synergy between Eye of Tyr and Hammer of Light as well as introducing a risk/reward aspect to its usage.

Prot Paladin - Lightsmith - Holy Armaments
I love the flavor of Lightsmith but Holy Armaments feels like it should be purely passive for prot. Neither Holy Bulwark nor Sacred Weapon care about what your target is doing so there’s no need to line them up with CD’s. This makes it so they should basically be used on CD with little to no thought as to who gets them most of the time.

432

Why?
Seems overly restrictive.

I get how the whole shtick is counter-intuitive, I happen to have the same opinion.

It transforms EoT into a damage CD.
So you want to use it on CD regardless of circumstances.

I think the one thing going for this type of interaction is that HoL has a HP cost, which means you make the decision to use your HP on this instead of SotR, which in turn can make you vulnerable.

Having EoT used before HoL somewhat mitigates this vulnerability.

But that’s it.

Furthermore, the more pressing issue with both tree is their lack of interaction with AS which is due to AS having itself no interaction with HP system since the start of DF.

433

At first, I thought being able to “miss” HoL could be interesting but really that would just lead to feel bad moments. Using it “too early” means you lose out on damage and missing it entirely would just feel awful. The “build up” mechanic would also only really apply to trash since a boss’s tank buster would “fill it up” with ease. So yeah, that restriction can be removed.

Without the restriction the play pattern doesn’t achieve what I was going for, unfortunately.

Against bosses it would likely be EoT, tank buster, HoL. Which isn’t much different than the live version. On trash it’s EoT, wait 6 seconds for it to end so you get max damage, HoL. The “double tap” has been delayed here but not for an engaging reason.

Admittedly I didn’t see the hero talents until after launch, so this was a pretty quick and dirty attempt at making the interaction of EoT and HoL a little more interesting while sticking to the same basic playstyle they have in live. Overall, I think my idea is a bust. Not surprising lol.