If armaments are appearing around the player, it will almost certainly cause others to get caught out of position while running to pick them up. Armaments might also end up appearing in no-go zones (boss area denial effects). My team will not be happy with me if my buff gets them killed.
The lightsmith fantasy doesn’t really resonate with me on paper. I am interested to see what the abilities look like.
Getting really tired of doubling and tripling down on low res, immobile consecration mechanics. Between the inherent class design, the vanilla wow graphic design and the current tier set, I really don’t want to see more.
The prot paladin class fantasy is now heroically tossing your allies a weapon infused with the Holy Light only for your aim to be poor and you wind up throwing it on the ceiling or the floor, at which point the Demon Hunter zipping around picks it up off the floor, wipes it off, and proceeds to eye beam the target.
Lightsmith is literally an overdone Marvel gag.
Tying any sort of throughput/defensive/CDR/threat/ HONESTLY ANYTHING to consecrate isnt good gameplay. Too often mobs are moving or the tank pulls them out when you place it down. Maybe if consecrate was placed as an AURA or something on the paladin similar to monk Rushing Jade Wind it wouldnt be as bad from a gameplay perspective. Consecrate had insane value in early wow because we didnt chain pull and we LOS’d everything, its probably time to either redo it or just axe the ability imo.
Holy Armanents… what is this like a passive thing or is another thing i have to decipher or make a macro to target as im dodging for my life in raid/m+ while not being able to see the ground mechanics that bleed into each other? Its a great idea but this also just sounds like augmentation stuff. Why not have it create like a light based weapon that follows you and attacks your target increases dmg they take or sundering their armor as the light overwhelms them. Lightsmith sounds cool. it just sounds like some sort of blacksmith but Engineer inspired gameplay would be cool. Have light constructs or something like that, which is already in the game, from argus where we ride around in light constructs during quests and stuff. I like hero trees but we really need to start listening to class feedback at a base level and apply that also. I and others have been complaining about consecrate issues for a while now. Its one of the worst abilities to press when i play holy or ret.
Honestly what I’m going to do is exactly what I do for angelic feather for priest. @ Player and I dont care because I’m not going to do ground target my stupid DH as he is flying all over the place.
Love the idea of this. Some feedback based on what we see on paper.
Dropping them on the ground is one of those things I feel seems cool in theory but would be obnoxious to deal with in practice. Dropping things on the battle field can result in several more bad/toxic situations than cool/rewarding ones. Accidental pickups, someone who is obnoxiously grabbing all of them when it’s potentially against the groups best interests, or someone rushing to pick up an armarment and dying in the process would cause bad friction. Where being able to target someone specifically means you buff the damage you want to buff and can have some cool moments if you drop a Bulwark on someone and save them from death.
Nobel mentions in his video, he’s like 2 separate buttons for HA I’d like to offer a counter argument. I feel like this would contribute more to button bloat in a game where there’s already a lot of buttons. Having more buttons to press makes the game more convoluted without necessarily making it more fun. More importantly though, if they were separate, to Flame’s point in the interview, most people would opt for throughput over defenses most of the time. Forcing the player to use both would force the player to at least consider if who they may want to protect with Bulwark.
In it’s current iteration, this will see 0 play. Fear is not a common thing encountered in game, also, it only reduces the duration. You can’t reactively use it (like lichborne) if you’re the one who gets feared unless HA can be cast while feared, and even then reducing it by 50% means you still have fear time to do accidental pulls. I would honestly scrap the fear idea and instead make it so anyone with HA has increased movement speed. This way the 2 nodes contrast each other nicely. On one hand you can drop a HOJ and do a small AOE slow, which can be helpful for tanks grouping or for Healers getting out of sticky spots, or you can make your HA a buff by giving your target (and your self by proxy with Solidarity) additional movement speed.
Giving primary stat is always going to be the default correct answer and it increases my throughput and tank defenses. I think this would be a cool chance to let the player choose if they want to do a weapon imbue that exclusively buffs/helps the player or a weapon imbue that heals/buffs players around them. This allows for player personality to kind of shine through here, especially if it’s done in a way that easily allows addons/logs to tie the bonuses back to the player.
All of these seem out of place in a tree that otherwise seems to put emphasis on having and upkeeping HA. I wouldn’t be opposed to seeing a choice node where one is obviously a tank thing and the other is obviously a healer thing, which would give a sort of interesting choice on if the healer wanted to do a tanking thing, or if the tank wanted to do a healer thing while imbued with the HA. Hammer and Anvil should be based on if you have HA active, rather than your Judgement landing a crit.
Other considerations.
how does the game deal with HA stacking (similar to Aug Evoker stacking that happened when they were first introduced)
how does the game handle a player getting both HAs on them can they have both or does one override the other?
The cool factor/fantasy would be in the animations of HA. Being able to replace a player’s Weapon Trasmog with a Big Glowy “Yeah, you’re getting that sweet sweet holy light buff” weapon, or a glowing Shield on the back of the player to show that they are being protected by the Lightsmith are things that would feel really cool to the user. This is absolutely leaning into the “Support Spec” category. Having bright visuals to let everyone know You’re buffing them would feel amazing for Lightsmith players.
Looking forward to seeing this progress. ^.^
My feedback for Lightsmith is, please do no do a ground pick up effect. It has been tried at least twice and failed each time due to it being hard to move or see the ability. This has been done on the Monk and Demon Hunter class already and it has been found unfun and simplified where it is a single button to pick up of the buff. Besides that the whole ability is pre-stack the ability for pull to have a buff during Hero/lust and your other abilities.
Honestly the play style fits better with holy than with protection, but for both specs neither are super mobile and having to interrupt casting(holy) just interrupts your throughput and when a DPS or tank is looking for a save the chances of them dragging dangerous stuff on top of your is very high. As for tank(protection) this just leads for a DPS possibly walking into a mechanic to grab the buff such as a boss cleave, boss frontal, AoE swirly, etc. Also moving from a protection side just leads to more micromanagement, buffs spawning in boss, mechanic, or on an unintentional person.
The other part that is being added the rotation between Bulwark and Sacred weapon again which is not a fun mechanic it got simplified due to it having to be gamed to work. This didn’t work with Dusk and Dawn in the Shadowlands iteration and it likely won’t work with the War Within either because players hate having to try to game a mechanic to play it effectively.
To give feedback, I’d say tie this into a current ability that is being used with the group that makes the character a disc priest lite with healing/shield/protection attributes. Paladins already have a ton of utility such as, Blessing of Freedom, Spellwarding, Protection, Sacrifice, Seasons, Word of Glory/Hand or the Protector. This fits well with Consecration, Shield of the Righteous, Word of Glory, Auras or in general changes the current existing Blessing spells into something ++. This would make it fit into the current play style better and give us agency where out buffs/help go.
With all the words above said, all I have to really say is please, please, please do no make this a ground buff/effect someone has to pick up, because it isn’t a fun mechanic and it is hard to see with particle effects, camera movement, and it doesn’t help the right people when it just get placed and it shields a person that doesn’t need it like a rogue or something.
Edit: Another thought I had, was give the Holy spec Hammer of the Righteous, and just have the buffs work similar to an Augmentation Evoker. Drop the main buff on your primary target/targets and using the main attack spell for both specs causes special buffs to get placed on both similar to a reverse beacon where is it builds a shield on each hit or dmg buff on a critical strikes. It will make Holy harder during save situations because heals go out but it might help even out those save situations where they aren’t so drastic and all we have is some quick heals from Holy Shock or Light of Dawn.
It says right in your quote that “Most hero talents do not add new buttons”
I’m lightly suspecting that you are just engaging in humor of some kind, but in the off chance that you aren’t, I’d suggest rereading what you post before going too far with claims.
Are you upset that Holy and Prot get an extra button? Are you just memeing? It’s way too early to be this upset about anything as far as I can tell.
On topic: I don’t play Holy or Prot but I hope to see some good interaction between Paladins of all specs and the dev team for this upcoming beta cycle. Cheers all.
Honestly like this idea. Pre-Buff nothing to gain by gaming the system use it when you need it or don’t. The individual gets their own agency on when to use the ability. For a Dmg Absorb/DPS buff. Helps progression and during farm. Buffs to the paladin could still come to on use effects from when your party use said item and we could just buff them with an Aura or something.
Just got around to reading the paladin hero talents. You all decided to give paladins, the class with literally the most tools of any class, weapon imbues? You literally ripped off shaman… again… have you all any shame? Worst of all why are you paladins not sounding off about this nonsense. Disgrace.
A big question I have is what is the actual cool down of this new ability. I don’t think we can even critique this tree very well without knowing if these buffs have a 30 second recharge or a 2 minute recharge. The difficulty and complexity changes a lot based on how much this skill is actually a part of your rotation.
Anti fear/mind control/stun/knockback, any of those would be a Rets dream in pvp so maybe they may make it into Templar. I love when Augmentation makes me do more damage or be more durable, wont mind at all if a fellow paladin can too, but lookinh for and walking over buffs doesnt interest me. They tried making Kyrians stop and look at something that spawned on the ground randomly in SL and it wasnt popular, I dont see hunting for buffs during raid and M+ exciting too many people. Gonna be kind of busy doing the actual content.
I had an honest chuckle out of nowhere imagining it
Most people arent complaining about buffing themselves and allies, paladin is a help your teammates hybrid class, but they are not pleased with putting on them on the ground, or needing to find and touch them.
I’ll start by saying that I really like the direction this tree is going. I enjoy the class fantasy of buffing allies and summoning divine weapons of Light sounds really fun.
That being said, I see a couple (pretty large) problems with the current design.
This is going to be tough to target properly, especially in less-coordinated content. Both Prot and Holy have more than enough going on that trying to drop these things on specific party members is a tall ask. What happens if they trying to target a tank running around? What if the DPS is clumped for a mechanic and you’re trying to hit your top pumper? Moreover, all these problems will be magnified in content in which you’re not as familiar with the players.
Many of the non-Armament focused talents are, frankly, utterly worthless to the current Holy Paladin. I understand that there may be substantial rebuilds of the core class and spec talents between now and the launch of 11.0, but without knowledge of what those changes would be, I am forced to evaluate them as they would fit into the current live designs. And right now, the live devs have done their best to make sure that Consecration and Crusader Strike are completely excised from the Holy Paladin rotation as repayment for Augvoker’s sins. I don’t really care that Crusader Strike will deal more damage or that Judgment will explode, because unless the numbers are pushed to an absurd degree they simply aren’t worth pressing.
Button Bloat is getting very out of hand for Holy and (to a lesser extent) Prot. Adding yet another activated ability on a 20-ish second cooldown will further exasperate this problem. Same caveats as the above, but something I really hope the devs are monitoring and thinking about for other class and spec changes.
I’m very excited about these new designs and I look forward to seeing them in action and their future (hopefully better) iterations.
20-second weapon imbues. Very similar to the Seals that paladins had since before day 1 of vanilla.
Thematically, I really, really like the idea of the Lightsmith as presented.
However, from a gameplay perspective:
Back to the top: I do like the concept, though.
I feel like it’s a real missed opportunity given Hero talent are supposed to not complexify and be mostly passive.
How simple is it to apply a seal to your party under the form of a 1hour buff or aura effect.
Idk.
I only play Prot and Ret so I hope Templar and Herald gets better stuff than what Ligthsmith came out as for the moment.
Again, I like the idea.
I don’t like the execution for now. 
This is what I’m afraid of, because this is exactly (EXACTLY) how Blessing of Seasons works right now. All four blessings are in fact very impactful if used at the right time, but because Summer is the easiest to measure and easiest to use effectively, paladins who use this talent are incentivized to use 3/4 of the blessings the second they come off cooldown, whether it’s the ideal time for them or not, just to cycle back to Summer ASAP. My hope is that, if they do choose to keep it as a cycling ability, at least being able to store up two charges will mitigate a lot of that urgency, since you’re still recharging the holy damage buff while sitting on the shield buff if you don’t want to use it right away.
My other hope is that they remove Blessing of Seasons and/or give that a charge system as well (I would actually use it instead of the lazy aura talent if I could stockpile 2-4 charges).
The activation of armaments needs to be passive like other trees, not active