Logging into the Beta now. Will give feedback in a moment.
EDIT:
I actually do not hate the change to Divine Favor, but will need to test out how well it does.
Beyond that, there wasn’t much change. Reclamation is still in the absolute stupidest part of the tree. Daybreak was buffed but it’s still stupid dependent on spamming a bunch of Glimmers which I never liked.
The only real net positives without testing I can see is a buff to Holy Shock (which is good, we’ll see if it moves the needle much) and a nerf to Holy Light’s cost.
Beyond that…yeah just gonna be a week I guess lol.
3 Likes
And this is what I feared. Even though that Holy Shock is appreciated, still a lot of issues with the specs remain.
Echoing that. 100%
It makes less sense now even.
It was just scaled for level 80. It was returning still 2000 mana before this updated.
I know holy shock just got buffed, but I think we are once again experiencing the issues of all of these modifiers on top of our core abilities. Sun Sear, our tier set bonus, Dusk and Dawn, Blessing of An’she. Our abilities would never be good enough until they have like 4 layers of modifiers, since we have all these RNG on top. This has to stop.
3 Likes
Can you guys just remove Tyr’s Deliverance? I am tired of seeing it nerfed every single week when it does like 20,000 out of 4 Million HP
I don’t want to be forced to take it if I want Reclamation
6 Likes
Ok some quick feedback running Heroics.
- Holy Shocks buff is nice, but it still heals for nothing when compared to how important it is to the overall kit. As such it makes any talent that does anything with Holy Shock feel like a bad idea.
- Our Spenders still feel bad to press, but that’s to be expected since they weren’t touched.
- I do like the change to Divine Favor however, since it gives me more control over nice big Holy Lights. The main problem is well…it’s Holy Light. Which means, when I’m in melee, I’m stopping to cast for 1.3 seconds after setup.
Basically as of this week, Holy Light, when procced by either Hand of Divinity or Divine Favor are our only heals that feel like they move health bars, especially now that we can’t rely on HotS beams.
Thoughts of Improvement
- With another nerf to Tyr’s, locking Reclamation behind it is getting even more petty.
- I feel like part of the reason our spenders are bad is because talents like Unending Light exists. I would recommend just removing those and balancing the spenders accordingly.
- I still believe we should have a talent that just causes Crusader Strike and Judgement to just heal on their own, instead of relying on AC to do it.
8 Likes
Some thoughts after testing:
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Holy Shock buff is welcome, but its still about 4% of a health bar. With enough modifiers on top, this spell can reach numbers around 1.3M. Again, with RNG involved. Feels awful since we cant rely on it to really spot heal.
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Holy Light is still so highly tuned, I still feel we are obligate to take Infloresence and talents like either HoD or the New Divine Favor. Even after another Tyr’s Nerf.
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Reclamation placement on the tree its still nonsensical.
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Lighsmith Changes are welcomed and after Herald nerfs its closer in numbers, however, with our core kit as it is, well…
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With Divine Favor changes and Tyr’s nerfed, we lost 2 buttons to press, yey! (?) Still have to take care of something like Blessing of Seaons probably. Why not bake Holy Prism/Barrier of Faith with Holy Armaments now that they are becoming increansigly more important to our playstyle? (Idk just a passive intuitive way to blend this Holy Armaments in our kit or replacing an already existing feature/baling them together)
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WoG and LoD still have so many layers on RNG on top and hit for so little. Something needs to be changed design-wise.
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Eternal Flame HoT is too long and basically does nothing. Overlapping its hots also feel terrible gameplay wise (or would feel, if it actually did anything)
7 Likes
Continuing the discussion from The War Within Beta Development Notes:
Except for Jurisdiction for Retribution Paladins. WHY?
Stop lying Blizzard.
1 Like
My fear is that they’re going to nerf this down to FOL level and not compensate with any other healing increases, and then paladin’s will just be FUBAR’d.
Did we though? What else in the tree would vastly outperform Tyr’s? It’s still a % healing increase for 30-40 seconds, and since we’re tuned so low any % increase we can get is helpful. They should just remove the ability altogether and buff our healing spells (except maybe HL) by 30%.
This. This. This. This. This. This. This. I was so excited that EF was coming back and we would have a HOT again. I am pretty sure I squealed like a little girl. Then I actually used it and realized it ticks for like 15k against a 5M Health Pool… my excitement died.
3 Likes
The change to Divine Favor which attaches its effect to Barrier of Faith / Divine Prism is a frustrating one. Barrier/Prism already represented a powerful burst window for Herald of the Sun which did not need more single target healing added to it. On the other side of things, we lose a quick, reactive spot heal. Tying Divine Favor’s trigger to an on-gcd ability directly harms our ability to use it in situations where we were previously using it. In situations where we press Barrier/Prism and do not want or need the extra healing of a Holy Light we are liable to waste the buff on Flash of Light, significantly reducing the value of the talent.
I know Button Bloat has become everyone’s favourite buzz word of late, but removing options and flexibility from a spec to try to reduce it is not a good path forward. This change is only a loss. Divine Favor was an instant, off-gcd ability, anyone who wanted it to work this way could already have accomplished it by macroing it into Barrier or Prism. The rest of us have lost an interesting ability with its own set of use cases unrelated to its new activator ability.
I’d been excited about Divine Favor before this, especially because the talent it shares a node with is such a momentum killer in the rotation with its cast time. The loss of versatility with this change now inclines me back towards Hand of Divinity, for no other reason than that the ability to choose when and where I use an ability as a healer matters. And if those priorities are reflected in the meta at-large, none of us have even been saved a keybind. Please revert this, or make it so Divine Favor only affects and is only consumed by Holy Light. With a change like this the talent could even be entirely passive and just read “Every 30 seconds your next Holy Light etc. etc. etc.”
7 Likes
Here’s the thing I’d argue though and you did bring it up. We need less buttons to press and our abilities to be balanced as such.
We honestly need more abilities pruned and merged to something else, thus I’m certain the campaign to merge Hand of Divinity to Tyr’s won’t be going away.
While yes, we will be losing out on the versatility of getting to choose when to use a button, that versatility is almost meaningless when the rest of our kit is tuned into uselessness because “We can choose to use a cooldown now”.
I won’t pretend like it’s great, but it’s kind of where we’re at at this point.
Do we want to be constantly balanced around cooldowns we might have up, or have a kit that actually functions on its own?
8 Likes
It’s just a 10% increase to HS, HL and FoL for 12 secs. Boundless salvation only extends the passive hots, which were doing around 3-4% of my overall in keys before this second nerf. The only reasonable argument would be to buff Holy Light since its so grossly overtuned right now.
It seems they are tuning down all passive healing like Sun’s Avatar, Glimmers, Tyr’s, Beacons, but our core spells are still not where they should be I think (its hard to guess without some M+ testing rn, but def feels like we lost a lot of throughput anyway with Herald’s nerf).
Honestly, yeah I think that would be it. Something those lines. Bring down Holy Light a little, maybe FoL up some more, as well as Holy Shock, WoG and LoD.
100%. This is the main issue with Hpal right now and has been since 10.1.5.
We the lastest nerfs though, I think when we test again against real damage going out, maybe we wont be able to keep up as we were before since we barely received buffs with this latest round of tuning.
1 Like
Personally I love the the Divine Favor change, honestly I prefer it this way.
My grievance is Reclamation, seriously make it baseline with lower healing/dps value. Keep the refund.
Reclamation (Baseline) - Holy Shock and Crusader Strike refund up to 10% of their Mana cost and deal up to 20/30% more healing or damage, based on the target’s missing health.
6 Likes
Whole heartedly agree with the above Holy Paladin feedback, don’t have much to add, except for that while the Holy Shock buff is nice, the buff essentially took it from pitiful to simply underwhelming. Our core spells need to feel like they’re enough on their own without relying on cooldowns or modifiers.
As for the Lightsmith changes:
- Sacred Weapon is adding a considerable amount of damage in dungeons - yay! I think it still pales in comparison to the damage other classes are capable of doing. The splash healing from Sacred Weapon is less impressive, but that may have strictly been me not fully capitalizing on it
- Actually using the Armaments spell is a chore and I need to remind myself to press it. Please think of a way to make it more deterministic and passive, Holy Paladin does not need an extra button
Edit:
Addendum to the above. Sacred Weapon, when properly utilized, is doing disgusting amounts of damage in dungeons lol. 100% expect nerfs. It was 50% of my overall in a heroic Rookery. The healing it grants is still very underwhelming, but that may just be because there isn’t enough damage in heroic dungeons for me to get the most out of it.
4 Likes
Actually the more I think about it, the more I feel they need to just remove Tyr’s Deliverance.
It does nothing beneficial long term for the spec and only exists as this point to block access to Reclamation and is only useful if you also get Boundless Salvation to extend the length.
If you don’t get Boundless Salvation, it’s a pretty useless spell.
6 Likes
Nice. I shall once again main my ret and have fun doing it if things keep up at this pace. Not fun having alts with lesser gear outdo a fully BiS paladin as has happened to me in the past. I’ll get back to no life ing this game all day everyday on a paladin if they truly are going to be as fun in the beta as they will be in TWW.
A mix of playing fun and playing well is what makes rets the best imo. And there seems to have been some more effort put into the lore and class design for this expac.
1 Like
It’s basically an active merciful aura now. I think these two should be combined into one talent. A passive merciful aura heal for what it is now and then the active steroid for 20-30 seconds (outright remove boundless salvation) that also amps FL, HL and HS by the 10% for it’s duration.
This also can help remove further button bloat by giving an actual competitive alternative to blessing of summer.
Giving us a new capstone in place of Tyr’s and Boundless which IMO should have some form of DPS focus because of how bad our DPS is still. (Ashen hallow replacing consecration node please)
Just because I want it to have more FaceTime for potential devs reading. I really think shining righteousness node should change SotR to divine storm and remove the requirement for a shield.
2 Likes
The issue with combining them would be that as a result it would be increasing our passive healing which they have for 3 builds in a row trying to reduce now.
I’m not 100% happy with ability being now basically useless either, even for a caster build, but if that means our spenders and holy shock can get stronger then its a fair trade.
Edit: NVM thought you suggesting mergin Merciful + Tyrs, not Tyrs + Boundless. My bad.
Edit2: i would gladly take a 2H sotr equivalent like divine storm. Maybe be could go even further, blend consecration with divine storm you can take that extra button and have it be like Jade Wind Rush following monks. Even if it would be a dps loss, our dps is still 0 so.
Seconded, there’s a 2H Int mace from The Stonevault, which means it’ll be in our season 1 loot pool for the weekly vault. If they’re going to keep adding 2-handed int weapons to our loot pool, the shield restriction on SotR needs to go.
Adding to the topic of Tyr’s Deliverance, why not make it a passive? Our healing spells have a chance to grant the target Tyr’s Deliverance, and we can still extend the duration with Boundless Salvation. Just nix the spreading to allies part, and honestly, get rid of the +healing taken modifiers and just buff Holy a bit to compensate. I do agree with all the above posts that Reclamation needs to not be locked behind it.
4 Likes
Adding to the topic of talent nodes, I feel like there are some that are either frivolous, or outright ignored and could stand to be replaced/nixxed.
Glimmer Modifiers
We have:
- Glimmering Radiance
- Illumination/Blessed Focus choice node (I can’t think of a single reason anyone would ever run Blessed Focus)
- Light’s Protection
- Overflowing Light
Why on earth does Glimmer of Light need this many extra talents? Illumination should be baked in, Glimmering Radiance can probably stay, but the other 2 seem superfluous.
Saved by the Light
- Highly situational at best, and even when you can proc it, it contributes very little overall
Power of the Silver Hand
- Negligible, never worth the talent point, and locked behind Aura Mastery talents. Why? In Legion, we got it by virtue of it being in our Artifact tree, but it wasn’t something we had to go out of our way for. It was just there, and didn’t impact gameplay.
Breaking Dawn
- Why is this still a 2-point talent? If you want it to be worth taking, make it a 1-pointer that turns Light of Dawn into an AoE rather than a frontal cone, or does some AoE in addition to the cone, and give it the extra range
5 Likes
I agree with this - with how heavily glimmer has been nerfed since last years rework, it’s clear they want to take power out of it but so many nodes are required to make it serviceable that it just gimps hpal because there’s no real alternatives in the spec tree.
Alternatively -
i think an option that should be explored is moving merciful aura’s to be a choice node with Tyr’s. This gives us the option to have a passive healing aura or the active, stronger version for burstier situations. As it stand, i don’t really want to play Tyr’s in keys but now we can’t get reclamation without it.
4 Likes
Blessed Focus is a trap talent especially since so much of our kit requires spreading glimmers around for various reasons. I’m certain somebody will tell me a use case where Blessed Focus is god-tier but I’m honestly not seeing it.
But yes, overall the amount of extra talents Glimmer needs to “feel good” and it still ends up feeling bad from a gameplay perspective because so much of Glimmers power comes from a) it goes on everything and b) procced by HS. So HS has to be terrible, so Glimmer isn’t absolutely busted.
Saved by the Light is stuck in the era where Beacon was an important spell. Now it’s just crutch and this talent is basically worthless.
I’ve never even taken Power of the Silver Hand because it was just more RNG, to maybe make an already bad spell hit somewhat better.
Breaking Dawn is honestly still in the tree for the same reason Divine Steed is still broken into Divine Steed still needs 3 talent points to not be terrible. Pure spite lol. They know nobody likes those talents but continue to shove them in our path so we either have to take some deranged pathing that hurts the specs or just grit our teeth and bare it because we literally have no other option.
3 Likes