I was thinking of something similar. Change the Rites (weapon enchants) to be what determines which buff you’re giving out: the absorb or the extra damage. Keep the actual armament spells, but make it so that it’s only giving you the armament that you chose.
Then, when wings is active, armaments can grant both the defensive and offensive buffs.
An alternative to my first point, ditch the actual armaments spell and make it a passive that works with our Holy Power spenders not unlike Dawnlight for Herald.
Either way, the spell needs to let us a pick a lane, and with any luck, take a more passive role.
Since we’re on the topic of the Armaments. I enjoy them as is but can see where everyone is coming from with simplifying.
I think we should simply make them a choice node selection. Either weapon or shield, let us have the agency going into a key / raid boss to choose which we’d prefer. During AW, then it can grant both.
Season 4 as an example there are some keys that don’t really have big heal checks where we can just send it with the weapon. I think having that agency would be massive and allow players who use lightsmith to have a lot of skill expression.
If we cut the numbers (specially the shield, since 15% HP gets erased pretty quick), then we would need something like: “during the duration of Holy Armaments, your spenders are empowered, dealing X% more damage or Healing”. (I know this kinda happens with capstone but we need a more flat numbers increased for it to be competitive)
This is just because the disparity between Herald and Lighsmith its still quite big in numbers, and thats asumming Herald doesnt get more nerfs and our base kit isn’t buffed as a result.
I suggested lowering the percentages because of more consistent up time. Obviously the percentages can be adjusted to make sense and not feel weak, but I would want to avoid the Aug situation of the buffs being too good and up too often.
And thus why we need to constantly bring this point up. Because being realistic, having the vast majority of our healing come from one hero talent being overtuned is certainly not the situation we want to be in either.
As Daiza mentioned, we have to be realistic. There’s a good chance its probably gonna get nerfed again down the road since it was pulling insane numbers in Raid and during Wings windows. Right now the spec is being hard carried by Sun’s Avatar and Dawnlight, while having still 20+ buttons and a good number one of them lacking impact.
We dont want holy shock to be hitting for 3% of a healthbar, nor WoG for 8%. We dont want to have 20 buttons and just Wings doing so much passive healing that everything else we do has little impact. Specially since Sun’s Avatar is a basically a healbot. That would be bad healer design.
Herald also introduces a lot of RNG and a lot of extra throughput that Lightsmith just can’t keep up with current tuning, not even close.
That’s why we need to give feedback so they re-distribute where our healing is coming from, so when that happens, the class doesn’t feel as bad to play as in retail. Also to prevent an Augvoker Situation if Lightsmith gets buffed or the worst case scenario, where both Hero Talents trees are awful to play and our base kit didn’t get tuned properly for release.
I find it healthy to have a Augmentation Evoker situation with the Lightsmith. that will create a window where if you have a support player, it should be either one or other instead of both.
We have to ensure that the combination of both specs in a party is not viable but power up Lightsmith so it can be Aug level and you will have to run one of those.
Aug always will be a party spot in higher content because it buffs everything. so why not direct competition with the class so you can create a variety of support roles in different party spots?
While this is a good discussion, I think it could go in its own direction.
Right now my feedback would still be directed towards bringing down passive healing from Herald (specifically Sun’s Avatar/Dawnlight) so the majority of our healing comes once again from our active abilities.
So, wouldn’t be better that we would be fixed outisde of wings instead?
In the case this single ability gets nerfed and the rest of our kit is not addressed, we would be once again in a S3/S4 DF situation.
I just want the spec to feel good to play baseline. So it doesn’t matter if you pick Herald or Lightsmith, both to feel good to play. To be capable outside of Wings so if by chance you ran out of CDs, your WoGs and Holy Shocks dont feel like wet noddles.
EDIT: Sun’s Avatar is currently overperforming according to our wowhead writer (Hpal bugs can be found on HoW discord).
“Suns Avatar is doing around 3 times more healing than it should. The spell power coeffecient should be 18% but it is 50% in reality. But it doesnt scale with Avenging Wrath”.
Alrighty, our newest round of changes, let’s get to it:
Herald nerfs were 100% expected, but I’m not seeing enough power being put into Holy at its base to make up for it
Lightsmith… I dunno, the spec needs an overhaul to be worth even considering. The most recent change to make Sacred Weapon do AoE is cool, but it’ll need testing to see how it actually feels
Holy Shock buff is great, enough said
The Divine Purpose change is interesting, giving us a little more incentive to use Prism/Barrier. Also a more compelling choice than Hand of Divnity for raid now. And it’s 1 less cooldown, which is always good
That said… it’s not enough. It feels like our core issues are being addressed very slowly. Right now, we still need to trim the cooldowns and modifiers and put that power into Holy overall.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Reclamation placement on the tree its still nonsensical.
Lighsmith Changes are welcomed and after Herald nerfs its closer in numbers, however, with our core kit as it is, well…
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)
WoG and LoD still have so many layers on RNG on top and hit for so little. Something needs to be changed design-wise.
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)
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.
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.”
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?
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.
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.