Feedback: Paladin Tuning Changes 4/23/2024

i have to say w/o wings the seal swapping mechanic is dogsh&t rn

Holy is straight up zero fun. No fun tricks, can’t heal on the move. Can’t compete with priests healing speed in sunken temple. Non viable in pvp.

Tank and dps abundance, can’t find a group. Seal twisting not fun. Feel like I’ve invested too much time in a forgotten class (with a fantasy I love for RP…). Feels too late to reroll in sod, burning out. Feeling Sad.

Has nothing to do with wings ya derp. It’s that we’re only getting half the Martyr dmg we should be getting. So it makes the use of the global pointless where you could instead use exo or literally anything else.

Honestly these changes feel like a placebo. They aren’t meaningful or do anything to change the classes playstyle in SoD.

SoR crits - DPS wise? It’s essentially useless, losing the utility of Martyr feels bad, unless they move Martyr to another slot allowing the use of Divine Storm with it, any other chest rune in Ret/Prot’s current state will continue to feel bad.

Sacred Shield - 60 seconds, great but this essentially making holy paladins press LESS buttons which was/is a big issue for the play style at the moment. In a raiding environment, a smartly placed Sacred Shield will off set its cost with illumination procs.

Seal Twisting - Again another placebo. Great I’m glad they’re listening to players but let me present to you a situation. You are running a 2.0 speed weapon. You are using SoM and standard dps runes (exo/art of war). You have a swing coming up, your judgement just crit and Exo is now off cool-down.

Do you - prepare a twist with command or exo? And your answer is exo - it does more damage than a twist and will put it on cd for your next reset that is likely coming up.

What we need is:

A rework of Aegis - Honestly this doesn’t need to be block, block is a terrible stat and is a trap. Make it increase health by a percentage OR even better combine this and Hand of Reckoning. If it needs to stay on its own slot, it makes Divine Protection, no longer grant immunity but gives 50% damage reduction for its duration and no longer causes forbearance.

Something interesting for holy - holy feels like it did at 60 just earlier. There is little to no difference to it’s play style. Beacon and Sacred Shield means one Paladin is doing the job of two.

Seal of Command - Either buff the damage by say 25% OR make it a permanent buff that no longer has a judgement but allows weapon swings to proc for additional holy damage.

I hate Seal of Command because of the proc chance. It could do 100% weapon damage, I still wouldn’t care because I can’t stand auto-attacking every 3.5 seconds for 10 seconds praying for a single proc.

The only thing that would make me change my mind about it’s stupid proc chance is if it was a passive effect/buff like Druid’s Omen of Clarity or something like you said that could proc while another seal was active.

1 Like

What about Reckoning not working with Spell DoT Crits. They fixed Eye for and Eye for did NOTHING for Reckoning… Feels bad.

That’s not the half of it. Is Righteousness giving Vengeance? Because Consecrate crits should and they don’t. Reckoning should absolutely work with DOT crits.

This is what I mean when I say the devs don’t understand how Paladins work.

To be fair the devs don’t even really know that reckoning exists as a spec. Hence the 0 runes or any attention to it to make it viable.

Brooo don’t break my heart like that! :sob:

Consecration crits do give vengeance. it was patched a few weeks ago.

Really not impressed. I guess the change might provide some benefits to Protection and Holy, but for RET, they are not very relevant.

Make Exorcism BASELINE!!!

Also, who the heck need “twist”? It was a thing only because it was the only thing RET could hold on to in a era where RET was badly designed and terrible.

4 Likes

Unironically, the current meta for paladins means if you are twisting those times are few and far between.

Exo doesn’t need to be baseline BUT Art of War and Exorcist really need to be one rune. You can’t run one without the other.

That’s essentially what i mean. Exorcist should not take up a rune slot by itself.

The fact that the rune takes up a rune slot means a RET can never take the other really useful runes on the leg slot without losing so much of its damage.

The “any target” portions of Exorcist and Purifying Power should’ve just been a skill book from the very beginning.

The idea that a paladin can’t deem his enemies evil and channel the light to cleanse that corruption is nonsensical. Particularly when considering the more fanatical leanings of the class and the Retribution spec especially.

1 Like

This is a good explanation for the problem of Ret runes. One rune literally requires another rune because they both affect the same thing. And ALL ALL ALL of our Phase 3 runes are bad—especially Hammer of Wrath, since if someone is at 10% HP you might as well keep swinging anyway instead of blow all your mana, waste globals, and reset your swing timer. Hammer of Wrath in general is useless, worst execute ever. And 18% holy spell crit? LOL

Our Shaman runes (STR/Agi and Fear break) are never used because of this, including Rebuke (which should not be a holy spell and should last longer than 3 seconds but I get the consistency with Earth Shock).

Both Wrath and Fanaticism are essentially the same rune. 18% holy crit is amazing for a holy Paladin but they weren’t struggling with crit in the first place. Currently in my gear I’m better off running it instead of Wrath simply because ones 14% crit the other is 18% so it feels like a no brainer to me.

Like I think the playstyles etc that the runes are promoting seem somewhat counterintuitive to the mechanics of Classic.

Protection Paladin being a tank that relies on block deals little to no damage, and relies on arguably the worst tanking stat in the game. Even if you do block the amount you block is so minuscule it’s not worth it. They’d need 1 some sort of block scaling and 2 a buff to how their block interacts with their kit.

Ret - Exo is just a pain. The runes need to be in the one rune, we’re essentially stuck running Martyr regardless of what other chest runes there are. The two head runes are the same with one likely scaling better with better levels of gear. Sheath of Light isn’t a spell book and instead a rune we always need to run or risk gimping our damage. I could go on and on but I doubt this will get seen by anyone.

Holy - Flash of Light need I say more.

The reason why block exists is to prevent crushing blows. Block is extremely important in 60 endgame, but the damage mitigation is so bad unless something is done, it will feel squishy since the paladin isn’t getting crushed, just pounded by normal hits with no way to avoid or diminish them.

Thats the point of armor and stamina. To reduce the hits and be able to soak whats left. It sounds to me like you want to be a DPS that can tank, not a tank that can tank.

Prot War DPS was never fantastic. FuryProt was an abomination. Feral tank DPS was never amazing. Shaman tank DPS was because they could dual wield but their threat is rightly tied to threat modifiers now and WoE requires a shield so instead of damage output theyre much more in line with other tanks. Locks are in a similar situation as well.

What exactly is it youre after here?

Blizz devs bet their farms on Exorcism.

The whole RET setup that revolves around the Exorcism is a pain in the as, but somehow devs just love it.

Tank damage at 60 is a joke and block isn’t extremely important I’m sorry. Tell that to any Fury/Prot tank or druid. TBC sure it was something to think about because in some content a tank getting crush would mean your tank was in a very bad position from a healer’s perspective.

In classic, damage is king for tanks. More damage is more threat, and more threat means more damage your DPS can do without being threat capped, more DPS means faster kills, which means less time during the fight where mistakes can happen.

This is even more truer in SoD with how strong healers are, unless a crushing blow is dropping your tank from 90ish% to 5% in a hit, block is an even more useless stat than it was before. Healers have more tools to bring tanks up to a safe spot with Druids and Priests having externals for Physical and all damage respectively. This means that with a barkskin up, that crushing blow is doing 25% less damage not accounting for armour and health pools.

Unless boss melee damage is severely overtuned, or there isn’t some type of ridiculously overtuned scaling for block, it’s going to and will still be a dead stat for tanks.

The only time we’re going to be wanting a “block set” is for jump runs of DM.