Feedback: Paladins

In Development The War Within Beta Test
282

What you are saying is true about the vacuum.

But my real point was, Holy Shock only really functions, both on Live and in Beta, when the stars align and a bunch of RNG procs we don’t really control line up together.

All because everything Holy Shock does, can be applied to the entire party thanks to Glimmer. That’s a design problem with the spec and something I’m advocating moving past.

Honestly I’d say this is great feedback with regards to the purpose of this thread because it illustrates the issue beautifully.

Holy Shock only feels good when RNG says it feels good. Moment to moment however, it feels like it does nothing, and there’s nothing you can do to make it feel good, outside of popping major cooldowns, once or twice per pull.

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283

Like some other people have said, the recent changes to Hpal are kind of a mixed bag. The HS buff is good, and the HL mana nerf seems warranted, but the IoL change and extreme Herald nerf seem like a bit too far.

In raids, Herald Hpals were overperforming, but I don’t see why our 5-man output had to take this much of a hit because of it. Increasing the amount of DLs applied by awakening wings to 2 (even if only in 5-mans) would be welcome, having only 1 feels like a lot of fun and power of the hero talent has been removed.

The Infusion of Light change also feels really bad, especially considering that Flash of Light continues to heal for a sliver of a health bar, even when buffed with Divine Favour and IoL. I think that the mana nerf to HL seems fine in a vacuum, but in conjunction with this it feels like a flat nerf to the smoothness of our gameplay as well as our ability to heal through big damage events. As a slight aside, I really don’t think FoL has any place in our current kit - it heals for roughly equal to/less than HS, costs more, and has a cast time.

In light of these continued mana issues, you now have Reclamation become an increasingly attractive node to all builds of Hpal, but it’s still locked behind Tyr’s (as many others have pointed out). You might also think that spenders would be a more attractive option when casting is so expensive, but LoD is healing for so incredibly little that WoG/EF is our only real option. These spells also cost 3 Holy Power and 20k mana - if we were to use 1 Crusader Strike, 1 Judgement, and 1 Holy Shock to build our Holy Power, one cast of a spender now costs 165,000 mana; more expensive than a Holy Light, and much less powerful.

I don’t want to write too much more than I already have since this is a long post, but here’s my wishlist: Remove FoL, revert the IoL change (even if the HL buff is slightly nerfed), move Reclamation to a more accessible spot, make our output less RNG-dependent (as other posters have explained), consider removing Glimmer, and buff LoD.

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284

Still would love to see Prot Pallies getting 1 charge of Holy Power whenever they use Avenger’s Shield.

Holy Paladins need to get Unbound Freedom (double freedom). Both Prot and Ret have it, even though it was supposed to be “exclusive” to Ret. If 2 of the 3 specs have it, why can’t the 3rd?

Also would love to see Blessed Hammer/Hammer of the Righteous be changed so that’s it’s an AOE ability to help with aggro, or at least a frontal of sorts.

Thank you, cheers!

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285

Just noticing. Did Divine Hammer get a slight range increase? I could have sworn it was 8 yards last week and now it’s 12.

Been favoring Templar ever since they nerfed Radiant Glory’s interaction with Herald. It doesn’t feel as fluid anymore.

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Right? Maybe just nerf its healing overall by less but decrease its healing even further in a raid environment so it wont be as dominant.

As it stands right now, the state of Hpal is BY FAR the worse of probably all healers.

Our core kit is still incredibly lackluster and RNG dependant with a lot of variance, meaning its just not reliable (as a lot of peoole have pointed up now in this thread). And this is apparent after the nerfs and specially if you were playing lightsmith and compared it directly with Herald pre-nerfs.

On top of that, the spec tree needs so much work. All the ideas above are incredible and blizzard should really reconsider the positioning changes and getting rid of so many dead talents that the rework introduced.

I hope this is still WIP and nowhere near close to Hpal final state for TWW because the spec needs so much work still.

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287

In theory, they removed melee range extension talents under the basis that those talents have been baked into the classes.

So who knows what’s intended and what’s a bug right now, because it’s all over the place.

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Holy Shock and Eternal Flame feel ‘better’ specially considering our tier set for ET.

With Sun Sear, Blessing of An’She, Second Sunrise and and Luminosity, Holy Shock can reach numbers of 1.4 M on a buffed up crit, with its average being somewhere between 450k or 600k on a crit depending on the talents you take (Reclamation, Awestruck, LotM, Bestow Light).

On TWW, thats around ~26% of my Health Bar on a juiced up crit HS, and around ~4% ish for a simple non crit, non buffed Holy Shock (even taking LotM talents and reclamation).

WoG and Eternal Flame are on the same boat. Being able to heal up around 1-1.5m (26-28% of HP) depending on RNG on a crit, but healing around 8% of HP on a normal cast. Not taking into account that ET is 25% stronger if casted on ourselves. As a note, the non crit numbers for both HS and WoG/ET are comparable to retail right now.

How its Lighsmith gonna be balanced against those numbers that Herald gives to the core kit, which some of them are still RNG based? (Genuine question).

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289

I’ve actuallly very much enjoyed lightsmith over the other talent tree. The 100% crusader strike damage after a finisher works great with the melee paladin spec considering in wings it’s basically alternating crusader strike and shield. Running the double infusion capstone to capitalize on the CD reduction to armaments feels very nice as well, not to mention the holy lights are redonkulous. It’s a really feel good hero tree imo

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290

From what I’ve seen in Beta, LS will have a much more consistent and planable DPS throughput with the weapons. M+ testing will be easier to see the gap but with this week’s change, weapon is going to massively slap in keys.

The best comparison between the specs I can make is it’s like using a DPS trink/fyrakks rageheart or healer trink. Herald will have more HPS throughput for sure but LS is going to win the DPS race (in keys) and bring a one shot defensive with shield.

Keep in mind the Armaments CD can be reduced to 40 seconds and have a CDR of 3 seconds for every Infusion used. So realistically you’ll have a armament every 20-25 seconds. With wings up you can generate additional armaments so you can realistically shield 2-3 party members for 15-30% of our max HP on a 2 min CD with wings and one party member every 25 seconds. That’ll be massive throughput in high pressure. It might be busted good in some scenarios.

Depending what happens with the base kit throughput, I can see Lightsmith being best choice for higher keys by a wide margin.

I don’t see a ton of value for lightsmith in raid as is though.

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I did try Lighsmith in up +6 keys last week. But Herald was clearly far far ahead in numbers but as we all know since they nerfed Sun’s avatar.

During high aoe or spot healing situations on Lighsmith, our core kit + armaments was not making the cut for me. Thats why I’m concerned, because of how much Herald buff abilities like WoG (ET), LoD and HS which is ine of the weakness of hpal even after all those latest buffs, but thats not taking into account that we were using LFR gear. I do prefer Lighsmith in terms of fantasy and gameplay over Herald though, even with that disparities.

Guess will have to wait and test again when another round of m+ is up.

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292

I didn’t test it that closely because of how overturned herald was and undertuned the base kit was.

The things I want to check this weekend/next test are.

  • do we get double armaments with awakening procs.
  • if it doubles on awakening we can plan two weapons for big trash pulls and the group goes nuclear. Especially since it scales with blessing of summer.
  • how the shield feels in a 10 vs. incoming damage pressure when we double up on them, with the incoming damage last week, you can essentially ignore healing the two targets with the shield. Combing that with either bsac, bop and DS means you can just ignore a mechanic at least once for everyone except the tank.

-depending on trash/boss scaling the ability to ignore mechanics will far outplay raw HPS throughput. Combining it with an Aug will be such a gross amount of absorb mitigation and DR.

it won’t handle rot damage as well as herald but the skill ceiling will be pretty high. Which I find more intriguing. I think it’ll be less pug friendly though. I’m also interested in trying the Hpal/ppal combo. Because now you’ve got 4 shields/weapons during wings.

I’m not a big AC guy but 1min wings plus the above might be fun. Dropping glorious dawn & Tyr’s for crusaders might and inflo (for the emergency holy lights) might be juicy.

EDIT: just tried it in a heroic quickly - it cooks. was doing around 400-700k DPS on trash pulls with weapons out and 150-300k ST on bosses. But doubt this goes live as is lol. Blessing of summer and weapon combined for 70% of my DPS on bosses. I tried to line Summer up with the weapon.

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293

Please make Glyph of Winged Vengance usable with Radiant Glory! Some of us don’t want to sacrifice looking like soggy cheese to get wings more often.

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Herald currently has:

  • Dawnlight: Additional 400k healing over 8 secs when casting Prism or Barrier for next 2 casts with spenders.

  • Eternal Flame: 25% more healing than WoG if cast on self (and a pitiful hot that doesnt matter much and its easy to overwrite/waste).

  • Blessing of An’she: Chance of 200% Holy Shock.

  • Solar Grace: 3% haste for 12 Sec for every Dawnlight with stacking effect.

  • Aurora: 15% more healing on ET/LoD after Prism/Barrier and makes it free.

  • Second Sunrise: 15% Chance of additional holy shock and LoD with 30% effectiveness.

  • Gleaming Rays: 10% stronger spenders if you got 1 Dawnlight active

  • Luminosity: 10% extra crit chance on HS and LoD.

Meanwhile Lighsmith has:

  • Rite with either 1% more int or 3% more stamina and a chance for proccing some healing for a unspecified amount.

  • Hammer and Anvil doing 115k healing near target location on crits.

  • 1% extra DR just on targets with Armaments. This basically unimpactful, even with Aura of Mastery.

  • Blessing on the Forge copying your holy power abilities on Sacred Weapons only during wings windows.

The rest of the talents are DR to Armaments, weak interactions with infusions or slows/fear time reduce.

Maybe Lightsmith has a lot of extra DPS right now (that seems likely to be nerfed?), but I just dont see how this dps and Holy Bulwark alone can compete with the insane amount of healing throughput Herald can provide, since 80% of its talents buffs our core abilities, even with nerfs to Awakening and Sun’s Avatar/Dawnlight. And thats for an m+ environment, in Raid Herald is still a no brainer probably.

I love Bulwark because the mitigation value is insane, but what will you do in AOE burst windows with the damage spikes we have seen during DF, when that 15% shields gets erased in 0.5 seconds? I fear that maybe it will lack a lot of throughput and spot healing power.

To me Lighsmith Talent tree needs more love, either that or move some of the power of Herald to our baseline spec tree/abilities now that Sun’s Avatar and Awakening was nerfed. Not specifically nerfing Herald further, but buffing our core kit or lighsmith instead. I may be wrong of course, but I just dont see how LS will compete with the sheer amount of buffs Herald gives to our spenders and holy shock. Maybe DPS alone will make it worth it? Not sure.

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295

Lightsmith works best with the melee paladin spec. One of the passives you glossed over is 100% extra crusader strike damage after a spender and since melee wings is just alternating crusader strike and shield of the righteous, this is active for every crusader strike. Adding in the 20% buff from the talent that gives crusader strike 2 HP and adding in the 50% extra from the enemy hp talent, and every minute with wings you are not only doing a goofy amount of AoE damage, but your crusader strike is putting in WORK for healing.

Herald is quicker to top the health bars don’t get me wrong because it’s burst is right at the start of wings, but outside of wings it doesn’t feel real impactful. The 500% heal from it is realistically only 20% of someone’s ho whereas lightsmith can proc a shield (or sword) on someone twice a minute outside of its own cd

I’ll also add that lightsmith works really well with inflorescence since every armament gives infusion when it expires, running that talent gives 2 infusions and each infusion lowers the cd on armaments by 3s.

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296

I think it’s going to come down to the tuning of both. Ion mentioned yesterday working to remove one shot mechs and smooth damage intake for TWW.(Not present in beta yet but we are ungeared and 4 days into testing)

LS as it is has the potential to shave off massive amounts of time from trash pulls and bosses due to its consistent DPS throughput. The difference between us doing 80-100k DPS in ST and 250-300k ST will shave big time off bosses and ideally stop them from phasing mechanics several times which reduces overall healing requirements. The buffs to base HL and having two stacks of infusion with inflo means we can drop 1.5M heal bombs consistently that we can’t remotely do right now.

With awakening procing solidarity and giving out additional armaments and AC doing it as well. It’s more than just a 35-48 charge hero spec. With the armaments lasting 20 seconds, we should ideally be able to nonstop chain them in keys between charges/awakening procs and AC(or wings but I think AC is more beneficial atm) and have incredible uptime. Keeping in mind that an ally holding an armament also gets additional 33% value from our aura. So that much additional DR will add up over the course of a key, especially during AM. And the weapon also echos our LoD and WoG for full effect during wings, so on a 1min AC CD you’re getting double WoG heals (1mil +) It’s just hard to gauge right now because everything is dying so quickly.

I think LS will shine if players decide to change their style of play. Holy Light casts will be non-negotiable with infusion procs and especially with divine favor / hand of divinity.

As is, I think it has a much higher skill ceiling but it’s also reliant on groups playing appropriately and not making mistakes as often.

Trying to get a little more comfortable with it in heroics the last day or so and my overall DPS throughput is around 300-500K in dungeons. I’ve had zero concerns with HPS but we’ll see how it tests in 9-10s next testing weekend. I think it’ll be fine but playstyle may not be for everyone.

I think LS will scale wildly with Aug too unfortunately.

I think they’ll both have niche situational uses, Herald will handle Rot damage intake better and LS will handle Burst intake better.

There are changes I’d like made. I think it needs an offensive approach. Maybe making CS cleave to two nearby enemies for 30% damage.

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I don’t play pally that much so I don’t know what this acronym is

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Light of dawn

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I know, but even taking AC is still not worth it compared to AV:M and Herald. The only argument number wise would be for DPS with Sacred Weapons, since AC gives 1 SC every min for free, and 1 other when it procs through awakening.

Even considering this, Herald with regular Wings is still ahead tuning-wise and has more consistent throughput and higher hps ceiling.

Thats why I’m asking devs reconsidering some of the tree decisions of either Lightsmith or moving a little of the Power of Herald into the our core abilities/direct healing or core abilities instead.

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300

Retribution Paladin Feedback and Wishlist:

After doing a decent bit of testing on Beta, blizzard has definately made some good strides to making ret better via QOL and some improvements, however there are definately a few large issues still left unattended.

current issues & Wishlist Items (core talents):

  • Hybrid builds of some aoe and some single target are still pretty bad. While blizzard has certainly taken a few cracks at this and it is better than Dragonflight, we still have to give up significant single target to get a little aoe and vice versa. This is due to powerful single target/aoe options being on the same choice node and far too many talents being required to get the basic aoe kit which also takes away from our single target. Other specs have the ability to get both single target and aoe without such large tradeoffs. Tradeoffs are good and healthy for the game, but its a bit too much for ret.

    • The new “cleave options” in “Vanguard of justice” and “Judge, Jury and Executioner” unfortunately are a massive swing and a miss and I don’t see them being taken. Both are very undertuned and only accomplish a smaller sub-set of what other talents already do but better. I don’t think blizzard is grasping the core of what retribution paladin talents should accomplish. Ret is a unique melee that has the ability to play partially at range and also unlike many melee, has several points of damage that aren’t hardcapped at 5 targets or less. “Vanguard of Justice” is especially bad because it is a 2 point node that doesn’t even give 1 point worth of value compared to other talents. It also just doesn’t make any sense even in conjunction with the other talent… If you are doing aoe, you aren’t doing to spend your holy power on a single target ability… and you definately aren’t going to spend 2 talent points to do what you can already do, but better by never using a single target spender in aoe… not to mention the lack “non-mandatory” talent points there are in aoe should prevent you from even trying this.
      • similiarly, many of our iconic abilities are talent points instead of baseline such as blade of justice and divine storm… there is no reason to have these as talents.

  • Unlike most other specs, ret requires an extremely high amount of talent points to be spent just to get what most consider our “basic aoe kit”. In modern WoW this feels terrible. I would like to see more of our talents be made baseline or reduced in # of points required to allow for more interesting and unique talent builds. A really good starting place would be to make Blessed Champion 1 point instead of 2 points for 50% cleave. Additionally, our iconic ability Hammer of Wrath being the only generator that cannot cleave is odd. I think Hammer of Wrath should also be able to hit 5 targets just like it did from the Season 2 Dragonflight Tier Set. That Tier Set should be baked into one of our Talents such as Blessed Champion or Vanguard’s Momentum.

  • Regarding wings, it looks like blizzard took my advice from months ago and is making crusade a playable option in TWW which is great! However getting procs for 6 seconds of crusade is a pretty bad feeling since you will never be able to even fully stack crusade in that amount of time. Similiarly, 13 seconds of crusade you will spend half of that time just stacking crusade up. I would suggest making a change to Radiant Glory such that the chance to extend wings during an active wings is doubled or tripled and the chance to proc wings when wings is not up is halved or even 1/3rd. This will allow for wings extensions to be more frequent while maintaining similiar uptime. While this shouldn’t affect normal wings too much, Crusade will feel much better to play

  • Divine Purpose, a beloved staple of ret paladin is currently unplayable. It is undertuned (why is it 10%/10% when the other specs are 15%/15%?) and competes with too many other nodes (all of which are essentially required). I would suggest moving this node to somewhere else in the tree or just simply make it baseline for ret.

  • Divine Arbiter cannot crit. There is no reason for this. Its counterpart Searing Light can crit… Make our Single Target Capstone Talent (which is now even weaker than Dragonflight) able to crit…

  • Divine Auxiliary is still one of the most useless capstone talents across all specs and is essentially never taken… This capstone talent would be a great place to offer an option to enhance ES/FR to fix their shortcomings (such as making ES do aoe and making FR do more single target).

  • Rush of Light should grant its haste on any holy power spender crits, not just single target.

MISC

  • Why does Boundless Judgment increase mastery by 50%, but Improved Judgment does not? That makes no sense they are a choice node both affecting the same spell
  • Patch notes mentioned blessed hammer will spawn from the target hit by a crit of Hammer of Wrath if Adjudication is known, but the talent doesn’t mention this and I believe was also removed from the game?
  • talents Sanctify, Judgment of Justice, Consecrated Ground, etc. are never taken. These are good canidates to create interesting talents to vary gameplay.
  • reworked Righteous Cuase is even weaker than Dragonflight version which was already never taken… perhaps consider buffing it by like… idk… 150% to make it competative?
  • Night Elf ret when?

current issues & Wishlist Items (Hero Talents):
Templar

  • Templar Empyrean Hammers are essentially invisible. Their animation is far too fast. Can these be slowed down and possible a bit bigger so you can truly see the fantasy of you literally raining down hammers on enemies?
  • Sacrosanct Crusade is a laughable defensive at 10% of a shield of vengenace… I think we can do a bit better here.
  • Increasing Wrathful Descent from 60% to 75-80% or more would greatly help in the aoe department for a hero tree that is otherwise completely devoid of any other aoe damage and would further promote stat scaling via crit.

Herald of the Sun

  • I think the nurfs to Sun’s Avatar was a bit heavy handed. I understand it was massively OP for holy, but it was overboard for ret. I think part of the fantasy here is having tons of lines up all the time frying enemies. While numbers are all relative in beta, you can always “decrease the damage and increase the number of lines” and get the same math. I am of course speaking from the perspective that all ret paladins will probably only run Radiant Glory since its just simply the best option. This means our lines have gone down from 6-8 to 3-4. Additionally, not a big fan of the “reduced after 5 part”. Can we remove that or increase it to 8?
  • while templar technically has 2 defensive boosts (the pitiful shield + 5% dr), Herald has nothing but some healing. Perhaps replacing the very useless nodes of Illumine/Will of the Dawn with something more interesting utility/defensive-wise would be nice.
  • If the number of Dawnlights is not being increased, then reverting Solar Grace back to 4% would be nice
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301

I’ve been trying to find a place to move ET to the spec tree for this reason.

  • if we move the healing modifier/throughput from Tyr’s to the base kit they could look at having ET take its place. It wouldn’t even need to be all of Tyr’s throughput obviously, just some healthy middle ground.
  • Then make breaking dawn a 1 pointer and move it to replace boundless salvation. (40 yrd range). If that’s too week a capstone maybe include the old talent giving it a chance to cast a second time at reduced effectiveness.
  • In the Hero spec tree, just replace the ET node with maybe the CDR for prism from holy shock crits or have it get a buff from IoL.

But I think it’s too much of an overhaul this close to live.

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