Feedback: Paladin Updates

[Kaivax]

In this thread, we’ll be testing and talking about Paladins in The War Within. Look here for posts from the development team as adjustments and bugfixes are made throughout the testing period.

Please note that off-topic or inappropriate posts will be strictly removed.

Thank You

Before we continue testing The War Within, we’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who read and responded to the Hero Talent previews we posted over the last few months.

Looking to the Alpha

In this first Alpha build, every single class has at least one new Hero Talent tree available for testing, with the rest coming in the following weeks. We’re asking testers to initially keep several things in mind:

• There are UI elements on the talent panel that are placeholder, including things like talent icons, text, or final UI art.
• Some talents may not be functioning yet, or may be marked as not yet implemented (NYI)
• New spell visuals and audio for several new Hero Talent trees are still a work in progress. Many trees are using placeholder assets for now that will be updated over the course of Alpha.
• There are some talents that are not fully tuned yet. This is expected, and we will implement tuning adjustments throughout testing.

The combat design team has two big areas of focus right now that we are prioritizing over other concerns such as tuning or generic class updates/maintenance:

• Finish building the remainder of the Hero Talent trees that are not yet available.
• Fix bugs that are blocking testing of new talents.

With the Alpha build being playable and all of the discussion that will occur around the flood of data, we wanted to reiterate that the responses to our blog previews were highly valuable. The feedback we received allowed us to make some early improvements or revisions while we didn’t yet have a public test environment. It allowed us to take some big early swings on certain trees, and then react to early feedback quickly.

Going forward, we aren’t planning to publish any additional Hero Talent previews in blog form, since we’ll add the remaining classes to the Alpha as soon as they reach their ready-to-test state.

Working from Feedback

Several Hero Talent trees have received changes after reading feedback to the blog posts. Some of these were tuning changes to ensure that the Hero Talent tree felt competitive, while others were significant design changes. The feedback thus far has been of great benefit to us.

Going into Alpha, we feel good about the shape of the Hero Talent tree designs. Keeping a consistent number of utility and defensives nodes across all trees, having parity between number of choice nodes, and the overall structure of the trees are things we’re confident in.

We’re also working on tweaking some core class designs as well. In some cases, it was necessary to make adjustments to the class or specialization talent trees before significant work was done on a Hero Talent tree. In other cases, we did work seeking to improve base class talent tree designs.

Alpha Feedback

Now that we’re in Alpha, we’re looking for feedback on how it feels to playtest these trees. We’re specifically curious about:

• Hero Talents that you feel are “required” for your spec in a type of content, such as raiding or Mythic+, or that push you towards picking a specific tree.
• Hero Talents that create frustrating or unsatisfying gameplay or rotations for your spec.
• Hero Talents whose functionality is confusing, unclear, or difficult to track during gameplay.

Throughput comparisons of Hero Talent trees are helpful, but we’re more interested in gameplay, feel, and choice feedback at this stage. Also, when possible, we appreciate it when you focus posts or articles on a single spec and Hero Talent tree, rather than combining feedback about multiple issues.

Again, Thank You

We greatly appreciate all your feedback on Hero Talent trees and are very excited for you to see everything else we’re working on. Thank you!

– The World of Warcraft Combat Design Team

[Kaivax]

Retribution Paladin

Hello Champions of the Light!

In The War Within, we have several updates to Retribution that we’re excited for you to test in the Alpha, and we’d like to highlight some of our goals and philosophy here.

Secondary Stat Scaling

Our initial goal is to explore how we can make secondary stats more appealing to Retribution, to allow a natural progression of scaling throughout an expansion. Due to the nature of many talents offering guaranteed critical hits, it was difficult for us to make Critical Strike a stat that felt valuable. To address this, we’ve reworked and rebalanced these talents to not automatically crit. They will instead gain value when you do crit, such as increasing their critical strike damage.

This type of design has been applied to other aspects of Retribution to increase critical strike value. Most notably, Art of War has been updated so its chance to proc is increased when you critically hit or the new cap stone Burn to Ash that increases the duration of Truth’s wake and makes your other damage over time effects more powerful when you critically hit.

A more subtle-but-effective change is an update to Mastery’s coefficient to scale better with the secondary stat. We’ve also updated Mastery with a passive proc that gives you a chance to blast your target with holy damage when you cast Judgment. The damage and chance are both increased as your Mastery is increased. Alongside these baseline changes, we’ve introduced several new talents that interact with Mastery to make it a bit more engaging and flavorful.

AOE versus Single Target

One of the sources of frustration we’ve seen when it comes to the Retribution spec tree is that there is a large amount of friction between Single Target and AoE builds, leaving very little wiggle room for any sort of hybridization. We’ve done some restructuring to alleviate some of this tension, to create more room to explore hybrid type builds for when the scenarios might call for it.

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We look forward to hearing your feedback especially as it relates to our goals for Retribution in The War Within.

Here are some questions we have for you:

• Do these changes open up new build possibilities?
• Are Crit and Mastery more exciting as stats now?
• Do talent choices feel more meaningful?
• Is there anything unforeseen that these changes created, such as degenerate builds or rotations?

[Kaivax]

Holy Paladin

Our goals are to replace Light of the Martyr with a passive spell but keep the same thematic sacrifice theme, move more of their throughput from Beacon of Light into their baseline spells, and redesign Blessing of Summer to feel more specific to their role.

Blessing of Summer will now work as an external buff that converts healing to damage or damage to healing ability depending on which specialization you place it on. We’re hoping this offers a dynamic and more interesting way to use the spell. This effect will have a slight cap in order to allow us to tune it between AoE and single target scenarios, similar to Ancestral Guidance.

Beacon of Light represents a very large amount of throughput and we’d like to move more of that budget out into the base spells. We believe this gameplay feels better to use as your direct healing will be punchier while still offering around the same total output.

Light of the Martyr felt a little too separated from the Paladin kit as well as being an additional keybind eating up space when talented. The intent of its update is to keep the thematics in place while moving its power into a passive.

[Fossilz-sargeras]

On this first build I have a few gripes that have stayed from dragonflight post rework, however some huge improvements in this first showing.

Hero talents - Templar feels incredible, It’s super satisfying to play, It has a bug where if you’re not in melee range for the top portion of hammerfall, it will not give you stacks of Light’s deliverance.

Light’s guidance’s Hammer of light is perfect, It has a good visual (that scales poorly on smaller models), a good sound effect, and interacts with your kit well and will play well in my opinon.

My gripe with the templar tree have to be the awkward choice between a 2 second duration horse with +30% speed for 3 seconds… and the Less damage from your blessing of sacrifice that is giving you movement speed, I really don’t think a pure movement option should ever compete with a utility option and taking the horse talent will feel bad, like you’re not doing all you can, even if you are reaching to try and have the DK’s new and improved divine steed

Herald of the sun, is quite the opposite, from dawnlight not target seeking so you can actively lose your dawnlights if you don’t target swap after you wake of ash, to eternal flame not being something you can really press as a ret as healing is not a part of your support kit yet without costing you a large amount of dps, to it largely feeling very focused on divine storm.

The nodes that impact Divine storm also impact hammer of wrath, but hammer of wrath is not equal to divine storm, It clearly feels like there’s more of an AOE pull on this hero talent tree, It uses divine purpose which has been a dead talent for a very long time due to tuning, but is fun nevertheless

Sun’s avatar has some very unfortunate targeting for retribution and all too often when I wings, I want my dawnlights on the pack of mobs and to deal that aoe splash, very often when I press wings, even as a dps, I lose 2 or more of my dawnlights to healing allies, which is cool and all, but If this is supposed to make my dps for TWW, accidently healing doesn’t feel good at all.

The glimmer of herald of the sun for me is Blessing of an’she, this feels like a clear aoe focused hero talent tree, and this hammer of wrath buff feels like it’s actually adding quite nice priority target dps, it feels very good to be able to meaningfully target something important and do significant damage to it because of this proc, albeit because of some of the changes to the base tree and ret tree that I will get into in a moment, Blessing of An’she is actually the reason I was playing herald of the sun for more than just a few dungeons.

Talents - The rework to Vengeful Wrath being an actual execute increase is very welcomed, it helps crit not feel so bad because we lose an automatic crit, and is going to feel very nice on bosses when they take a while under that 35% hp mark.

Divine purpose hasn’t seen the light of day in a very long time and has been a fun proc that ret has used in the past, I would love if it could be viable in any sense.

Seal of Order + Fading light, these two talents being defense competing with CDR does not feel right, fading light was incredibly powerful on the release of the rework and was swiftly put into the ground, But should defense compete with something like CDR? this has been an odd choice that feels rigid like quite a few talents do, such as Divine resonance vs Quickened invocation.

In the retribution tree I want to address the elephant of the tree Divine Hammers…
It was reworked to be a “breath” style mechanic from frost DK and it is extremely unwelcomed for many players and plays bad in most scenarios of play, It’s not fun whatsoever to stop spending holy power, and just spam generator abilities to maintain this little ramp 2 minute cooldown buff, even if it did immense dps, the gameplay is not what ret has ever been and feels like it’s not working, If it’s intended to stop pressing holy power spenders and just spam judgement and blade of justice and to essentially halt your ret paladin for a “breath of sindragosa” style of mechanic, then surely it should be a capstone or something much more gameplay involving and fleshed out, this feels very awful in the middle of the tree, competing with consecrated blade, It doesn’t work in my opinion whatsoever and doesn’t fit ret, A lot of people have fond memories of divine hammers simply being a “moving consecration” with a neat visual, currently this gameplay is unfun and I feel as if I’m playing my character improperly by spamming 2 buttons until the hammers stop spinning.

There’s quite a few problematic AOE versus Single target talent choices that have yet to be addressed and force you into a single style

• Consecrated ground almost does nothing and is competing with rush of light, a super powerful single target talent.

• Vanguard’s momentum Is a super good single target talent, and is competing with an extremely lackluster aoe only option in sanctify.

• Blade of vengeance Is an AOE GODSEND for retribution and it’s competing with empyrean legacy… which could be good for cleaving and be more impactful than a free divine storm every 20 seconds.

• Blessed champion is a 2 point node for basic Mythic plus aoe viability and is extremely mandatory, this could easily become 1 point node for “cleave”.

• Burning crusade + Searing light VS Blades of Light + Divine arbiter are extremely cut and dry single target or aoe talents and it’s one of the largest proponents of this argument, If you take searing light you’re losing a very large amount of single target, and if you take divine arbiter you’re losing huge amps to your AOE.

• Execution’s sentence VS Final reckoning these two are also extremely cut and dry ES is for ST, and FR is for aoe.

It doesn’t feel good destroying your other damage to do one or the other, sure it makes sense to be able to focus on what you want or need done before you do your activity, when MOST SPECS are able to aoe at a very small (if any) cost while retribution plummets to obscurity because of talent choices? It feels like you’re not getting the whole character.

Highlord’s Wrath adds extreme value to our mastery and it’s quite nice actually wanting a stat other than versatility, coupled with the change to make Greater judgements overlap WHICH IS AMAZING FEELING, really make this talent nice when it has been largely ignored, it feels like a rightful amp to mastery, and isn’t in too difficult of a spot to pickup.

Adjudication giving 5% crit damage is good to aid with critical strike being a potent stat going forward, Penitence could also gain something other than just being a flat 10% dot damage, to help with scaling later on, it feels lackluster in comparison for being on the same tier.

The new truth’s wake replacement Burn to ashes adds quite a bit of value to crit, and most importantly needs you to crit enough so that executions sentence lands on the target with this new 30% amp on it, assuming it works like penitence does with execution sentence and does buff it.

Execution sentence has a pretty core problem of locking you onto your target for its duration and feels extremely rigid, worse than that however if the target dies it is completely lost and it’s on the target for over a third of the time and losing a huge portion of your damage to the functionality of it feels bad, If it could go off if the target would die to it would be a welcome change, kind of like a true execution if it is to stay as the single target only choice of that node.

Executioner’s will and Divine auxiliary are extremely bland for being capstone choices at the bottom of our tree still, effectively +4 seconds to execution’s sentence only and Auxiliary is never taken…

Final verdict Vs Justicar’s vengeance… JV has never been used and isn’t equal to FV at all in terms of output so I’m not actually sure why JV exists, if they were equal but FV has range and JV heals you for damage dealt that would make sense, but I don’t really understand why justicar’s vengeance has existed for so long as a dead talent with no purpose? It feels like a pvp talent option to me personally…

Mastery – Well it was buffed quite a bit and now also has a chance to proc a lovely sounding exorcism effect for extra damage and both effects go up with your mastery which is nice, there isn’t some weird scaling being presented to the player, It appears that the damage of the mastery proc is not scaling with our own mastery which feels a bit odd, it will become basically a tool just to proc things like divine arbiter if it falls to the wayside.

Overall I think this first round approach to trying to solve ret’s problems are a welcomed, It’s nice to see that the issues that are discussed about the spec are also being discussed here, I hope to see the team continue to try and make a lot of people’s favorite character as enjoyable as it can be

[Fossilz-sargeras]

I must forgive my lack of thought, on this original post I forgot about a passive that torments retribution and has for a while now… Instruments of retribution, I understand it’s cool for flare and theme, however in lower tier of play it makes retribution a monstrous spec because of constant deaths and skews ret’s power level.

At the higher end it feels very bad when you’re early into progression and you get a free wings, half of your active CD for someone playing poorly, or being undergeared, etc etc, you basically wipe if you lose more than one unless you go deep into a boss, so it becomes a bad thing seeing random wings… During farm and gold sales… people dying to lack of trying or a buyer leads to extreme wings uptimes that are not normally obtained and makes attempting to play retribution optimally obscure, due to this singular passive.

I see that a new build came so I will spend the next few days on it and come back .

[Fossilz-sargeras]

After playing with the new reworked vanguard of justice and judge jury and executioner, I have some thoughts…

It feels like these two talents are mandatory for eachother and they don’t really help your single target VS aoe problem, they’re basically 3 more aoe talent points required to do optimal aoe, It’s not increasing our priority target damage while aoeing, it’s creating an option but requiring the same input of 3 holy power

That being said, 3 holy power spenders feel great, I love that VoJ was changed, however its current version I don’t think is accomplishing anything… with JJE when you use a proc, the following FV now buffs the targets hit for your next… single… divine storm, So you’re using an AOE proc, to make your single target finisher… AOE, to then have a debuff to take more AOE damage…

I really am glad that ret is being trialed with, I love changes and I’m sure everyone is happy that ret is getting attention, I feel like JJE is much closer to being “good” than VOJ, perhaps JJE could be a form of Fervor of battle, providing a free FV when you cast divine storm on 3 or more targets, VoJ’s current design requires the CURRENT JJE, so I don’t think it’s very good, It doesn’t really feel fun to get a JJE proc, use it, Press FV, Then go back to pressing divine storm…

I’m not gaining priority target dps, the delta of our AOE vs ST talents still remains
Also blessed champion is 2 talent points for basic cleave functionality

I can’t wait to see what more y’all have in store for ret

[Kaivax]

Hello, Retribution Paladins.

This week’s update is about quality of life improvements.

Wake of Ashes
Retribution Paladin relies on Wake of Ashes for both of their Hero Talent trees, and it is core to Retribution’s rotation. With these in mind, we moved Wake of Ashes before the 2nd gate. Additionally, we’ve noticed that aiming Wake of Ashes caused frustrations when strafing and we’ve made changes to make it feel good while strafing as well.

Expurgation and Templar Slash
Blade of Justice and Templar Strikes are deeply connected to the Holy Power economy, and they both have talent and stat interactions that makes you press them more often. The damage over time effects from these abilities were losing value due to being reapplied in a short cadence. Which in return made pressing your core buttons feel worse. We’ve decided to make the damage over time effects roll over their remaining damage value into the next application.

Templar Strikes
We’re increasing the cooldown of Templar Strikes because it requires you to press more buttons than your usual rotation. We’re compensating by increasing its damage. We believe this change will be beneficial to the health of the rotation.

[Lenarius-chogall]

The Expurg/TS change is nice.

[Lenarius-chogall]

So, now that I was able to port over to Hallowfall I’m testing out the new Radiant Glory ability that replaces Avenging Wrath and the new Hero Talents. To me, using it with Final Reckoning and Divine Toll feels clunky. RG gives you wings for 13 seconds, FR lasts 15 seconds, and Divine Toll also last 15 seconds. But I’m unsure how to best utilize that tight window.

Hammer of Light requires 5 Holy but Wake of Ashes only gives 3. So, I’m assuming I need to start my rotation off with a Judgement to get 2 HP, then use FR, then WoA (which will put me at 5 HP), and then use Hammer of Light, followed by Divine Toll, and then just AOE/ST as normal?

Any other pallies wanna chime in on how this feels to them?

[Bolas-frostmourne]

This post is feedback about the Hero Talent trees in different content types for Retribution.

As was highlighted, in Raids or Mythic+ in Dragonflight you often feel forced to run specific ST or AoE builds due to the small amount of leeway you have to change these builds or hybridize them, and how specialized they are at only performing well for the intended situation. I have some concerns that the new Hero Talent trees could reinforce this divide with their current designs.

Herald of the Sun seems to fit much better with AoE talents than it does for ST. The applicaions of Dawnlights themselves are AoE by nature, being applied to 2-4 targets depending on the source. Burning Crusade is only taken in builds focused on AoE, and it also buffs Dawnlight damage. The bonuses it provides to Hammer of Wrath and Divine Storm also seem unbalanced, as the magnitude of the buff to each ability is the same, but Divine Storm makes up a much larger proportion of AoE damage than Hammer of Wrath does of ST damage. Just based on the design of the tree, Herald seems like its output should significantly increase as more targets are introduced.

By contrast, Templar seems much less useful for AoE than it does for ST. The initial Hammer of Light damage does do some AoE, as do Empyrean Hammers when they crit, but it seems like the damage increase you’d gain from the addition of new targets couldn’t be equivalent to Herald. As an example, going from 1 to 2 targets should result in the following increases for each:

Templar: +50% of Hammer of Light damage, +60% of Empyrean Hammer crits, but reduced buff from For Whom the Bell Tolls
Herald: +120% of Dawnlight damage (one extra DoT on an enemy plus 2*10%), Divine Storm crit chance +10%, 30%*15% chance for an extra cast, bonus damage from enemies moving through extra Sun’s Avatar beams

Looking at the differences between the trees here as target counts change, it’s difficult to see how the trees would remain competitive in both ST and AoE situations regardless of where tuning ends up. Templar also has a downside when extra targets are introduced that your priority damage drops, as most Empyrean Hammers hit random targets around you rather than your primary one. With the current design, I think it’s very likely that we’d see players either gravitating towards only using Herald in all PvE content due to its better performance with higher target counts, or split between using Templar in Raids and Herald in Mythic+ if Templar ends up tuned better on single target in order for it to not be significantly behind with extra targets. Either way, some players might feel forced into using a specific tree depending on the content rather than being able to choose based on gameplay style or theme.

[Fossilz-sargeras]

Personally I like the new radiant glory, it feels smooth for wake of ash to be so incredibly important and to always have damage for things, This rolling off of wake of ash style that specifically templar does extremely well, 2 HP > wake > HOL feels incredible imo, It instantly gives you 5 stacks of crusade which is cool if you choose to use crusade, However because this has Visions of perfection tied to it, competitive dps is going to be a nightmare when you have a pull of an extreme % of uptime of wings, and the next, you do not, that could lead to some very unsatisfying problems during progression… all based on RNG

Divine toll, FR, and ES, feel really out of place now, FR And ES stand as forcing single target or AOE only, perhaps at this point they could just be combined into something less punishing to take yet less specialized so that you’re not left feeling like a damage profile is lost, Divine toll being 1 minute now when you’re looking to play RG 30s windows is very very odd.

The new VOJ and JJE are still +3 aoe talents but don’t do much for you outside of that, I do like the idea of what they’re going for with 30s RG wings, the wings aura must be applied to your character before wake of ashes does damage though or you’ll be losing a bit of dps, a few other specs have had t his “always damage” feeling like ret is going towards like frost mage, It’s pretty feast or famine so hopefully ret is allowed to be competitive still, either way, I love that ret is getting attention

[Lenarius-chogall]

Someone on the Paladin Discord mentioned with so much being tied to Wake, balancing might become an issue at some point.

I would really love it if we didn’t have to choose between ES and FR. Put them on separate nodes so we can have both. Would solve a lot of problems ret has imo. You could even make ES last longer for an increased CD for all I care.

But ya, HoL hits like a nuke right now.