I will smash the training dummy and some low dungeons with Hammer of the Light on Prot and Ret before considering asking for a passive instead. Tuning is always very much up in the air even after the content goes live, but i’m interested to see and how it feels on beta.
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I’m in absolute agreement with this here.
Going from the decision to have Light’s Guidance automatically replace Wake of Ashes for Retribution and Eye of Tyr for Protection after use, and instead replacing that gameplay dynamic with a passive keystone sounds like a step backwards to me.
But this is just only my personal opinion and I really love all the discussion regardless. I believe many would agree with that opinion overall but some might disagree.
It would be challenging to argue that a passive keystone effect would be more fun or exciting than an automatic augmentation for an existing ability. Hero Specs are the top feature coming in The War Within and these gameplay decisions are going to last for at least a year minimum.
Templar now just needs a Blue Response detailing out some answers to a few of the questions we all have brought up in this thread and then for Alpha/Beta testing to drop so we can get the actual feel for how this is going to play!
It would also be very helpful to see some comments touching on more of the Class Fantasy behind what it means to be a Templar as well.
Our first description does not land. It’s too difficult to distinguish from what a Retribution Paladin already is and does too little to reference an overlap with a Protection Paladin’s theme.
I also see absolutely no reason that a Protection Paladin in-game would become a Templar (Fantasy-wise). It does nothing to build on Protection’s theme.
Protection Paladin: Uses Holy magic to shield <himself/herself> and defend allies from attackers.
Templar Paladin: Templar stop at nothing to fulfil their divine purpose of bringing justice and purging the wicked. They call down hammers of light and unleash devastating combinations of Physical and Holy attacks that vanquish their enemies.
This Hero Spec fantasy based on this current iteration and description is 100% indistinguishable from either a Vindicator or a Vanquisher theme.
Gameplay/Design wise it looks really solid! But this thing is not a Templar Paladin.
I am very conflicted because I want to feel excited and I want it to feel fun picking up these Hero Specs in The War Within. And so far I mostly feel like this gameplay will be a perfect addition and a smart twist to how Ret currently plays!
But Templar had to be conceptualized and themed around Hammers?
- No mention of Shields
- No mention of Swords
- No mention of Parry/Block
- No transformative development on Divine Steed
- No reference to Knights or Military
- No Holystrike Focus
- No concentration on the Battlefield Prowess of the actual Paladin player character
- No Heavenly Strength (Two-Hander & Shield) (But understandable based on current goals of Hero Specs)
How did this happen?
There is very little that feels “Heroic” to me about choosing Templar as a Sub-spec from the class fantasy perspective.
Paladins already are primarily grounded around a Hammer-theme collectively as a Class.
Lightsmith as 1 of our 3 Hero Specs also already directly deals with Hammers in their theme.
Looking at this through the lens of my Retribution Paladin, where exactly are all of my Sword-Themed spells coming from then? How could I have 3 possible Hero Spec options, 2 available specifically for Ret but no path to focus on my combat expertise with Swords and Blades? Why do I even have those attacks to begin with? Where is that coming from if not from Templar?
That to me, is the much larger problem overall than say both Templar and Herald of the Sun augmenting Wake of Ashes or developing a different Keystone Talent.
Gameplay might be solid but an exciting class fantasy was absolutely missed!
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I very much dislike that Hammer of Light and Empyrean Hammers have no way to heal allies.
You have described Templars as those who “stop at nothing to fulfill their divine purpose of bringing justice and purging the wicked”. Purging the wicked, however, is only one side of bringing justice. Additionally, this only caters to the Retribution side of things. In order to round out this divine purpose and to better include the core concepts of Protection, I think it would make much more sense and better suit the strength of a Paladin’s versatility if Light’s Hammer and Empyrean Hammers were able to heal allies as well as damage enemies.
I could understand if Ret Paladins’ Hammers prioritized dealing damage over healing and Prot Paladins’ Hammers prioritized healing allies over dealing damage, but if nothing else I would like to see these Hammers be able to resort to the function of their “off role” in the absence of a target for the primary role or if a certain threshold or condition is met.
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I would like to see Hammer of Light be able to cast at an enemy or ally. Casting at an enemy would work as normal, while casting at one’s self or an ally would heal the target and up to 4 nearby allies.
Your choice of target would dictate whether you called down Empyrean Hammers to damage enemies or Empyrean Tears to heal allies.
I would also change the name of Hammer of Light to something like Light’s Decree to dial back the overload of the hammer theme as well as to use something that is more able to embrace the duality of both wrath and benevolence.
Light’s Deliverance would allow you to double down on either Hammers or Tears or have some of both raining down at the same time.
I don’t agree and I don’t like that. Not for Ret/Prot specifically.
Why would it?
Its the Hero talents between Prot and Ret, Holy is not involved…
I can agree that there isn’t much going on from Prot/tank point of view, but which trees involving tank that have been releases does?
Druid maybe? By sole virtue of heavily buffing one of their capstones (lunar beam) that was already thematically cool but just not numerically competitive.
What are they gonna do? Add even more defensive powers and CDs to a spec that already have tons of them and a DPS spec which is arguably the tankiest one in the game PVE wise?
Besides. they already nerfed Prot healing because people were doing healerless M+ again.
This isn’t a bad idea to transfigure to lightsmith though, if it could play off WoG maybe or fuse SotR and WoG, Idk.
Since it would make sense for them to have a spender that either heal or damage.
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The ability to heal isn’t limited to just Holy (look at the Paladin class tree for an array of examples) and doing so falls perfectly within the realm of what Protection is about. Gaining an option to provide additional off-healing at the expense of damage is far more fitting for this duo than a tree full of dealing additional damage.
Taken directly from the Hero Talent page: "We like to say on the team that our goal for Hero Talents gameplay is for them to make you “what you are, but more.”
This is as much or more to do with encounter design and shouldn’t be an excuse for bland class design.
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Exactly, all three already can heal. The hero trees are meant to focus, in part, on things that are specific to their spec and role.
They are tank and DPS.
It’s not their role to heal.
Besides tying a heal to a 5HP ability available every 30-40 sec is not what you want, it’s flat out clunky.
You want your heal to be accessible in a pinch, not to have to go through 2-3-4 GCD to access it.
Prot can already heals others just fine and Lightsmith will focus on helping your team even more, whatever form it may take.
Prot/Ret Templar need to take things on the offensive, not on healing, it doesn’t fit the theme.
Aside from the “hammer” theme that doesn’t seem that popular there’s nothing really wrong with what the Templar does mechanically.
Neither is there anything wrong with Herald except the names of abilities apparently.
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And it can already damage enemies just fine. So I find it odd that you would be okay with a tree of nothing but “deals more damage” but opposed to mixing in a bit of off-healing when that is one of the defining characteristics of Prot Paladin.
It may not be what YOU want, but as an option, it certainly is something that I want. At no point would you ever be forced to use the ability for its healing potential, but I would greatly appreciate having that option when I found it to be worthwhile.
It’s fine if we have to agree to disagree. That being said, I do hope Blizz will consider my suggestions, but the more likely outcome will be that the final product will much more closely resemble what we currently see.
Yes and dealing damage is part of its role if for nothing else but to hold aggro.
Healing is not in their role, it’s a perk of the class.
If I want to support my group better through heals, I will choose lightsmith because it’s shared with Holy.
(There’s plenty of passive heal in Lightsmith)
If I want to have more damage, I will choose Templar because its shared with Ret.
If I want to help with some heals while I’m Ret, I will pick Herald.
If I want to reduce the damage I take while I DPS (ever so slightly) I will pick templar.
We don’t want a second healing tree on both Prot and Ret, it’s redundant.
They all have their niche and it’s done well.
Lightsmith will be the one you’ll want if they rework it to not feel bad.
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If that’s all we can expect from Templar I want to see something like Empyrean Hammers reducing the cooldown of Shield of Vengeance by 1 second.
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Well you’re in luck, because Empyrean Hammer will reduce the damage you take from enemies by 5% when it crits on the mob and its surrounding.
Piggybacking on this effect though, it would have been a neat way to make HoL/Wake scale with haste if it had an interaction where it reduces Wake CD.
For example, when you get to 50 stacks (supposing you can’t stack more) every Empyrean Hammer hit reduces Wake by 1 sec.
It does somewhat “scale” right now but the problem is that, realistically, it really only does in steps and probably just once?
Like, I don’t expect we’ll ever be able to get 50 stacks in 30sec, even by expansion ends.
We’ll likely be short on getting it before 3rd wake at start so, best we’re gonna get is a bonus HoL on 3rd wake for all expac…
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If Blizz reads nothing else, these last ~50 posts have all been really good. I love all the different ideas being presented and the more respectful discussions that have been going on.
Swapping Hammerfall and Hammer of Light (small detour here but why not just call the talent this? Light’s Guidance doesn’t do anything but tell you the activation requirements for Hammer of Light, anyway, so we can free up that name for something else and just call the node Hammer of Light) sounds like a good idea with how the tree is currently set up.
The tree currently focuses a lot more attention on Empyrean Hammers than Hammer of Light, so introducing the player to Empyrean Hammers as the “core mechanic” of the tree might make it more understandable. The “Shake the Heavens” part can be moved onto Shake the Heavens itself, then you can add more effects to Hammerfall/Empyrean Hammers like the DR from the Empyrean Hammer (bad node name when the mechanic is also called this) node (honestly, I just really don’t like that DR is being closed off behind crit. They’re two completely conflicting ends of the damage spectrum. But I digress.) Then you can give the Empyrean Hammer node something like “Empyrean Hammers have x% extra crit chance on enemies affected by judgment” to tie it into Undisputed Ruling and make the aoe effect easier to get off, while the crit damage nerf on the node stops it from being overpowering.
Probably something like the passive causing Eye/Wake to call down three Empyrean Hammers that are guaranteed to crit without reduced damage to the nearby targets? But the problem is we’d need to also change Light’s Deliverance to affect this passive. At 50 stacks, it calls down 5 hammers instead of 3? Empyrean Hammers deal their bonus damage to the primary target if no other enemies are hit? But I don’t think this route is all that necessary, Hammer of Light as it currently stands does the job fine.
It’s also an extra GCD which can throw off your rotation. Likely won’t, but worth mentioning.
As a Prot Pally main, I agree. My current issue with both Prot options is that, RP wise, my character would never pick either of them.
This is a good point. Almost every talent and spell Ret uses either has blade in the name or a blade in the artwork/animation, and Wake has a blade in the icon and comes from a sword originally. But they’re extremely railroaded into hammers with Templar.
As a Prot Pally, I’d prefer more damage reduction to more healing. I don’t feel like (off-)healing is a defining characteristic of my role, it’s just a benefit from my class. Blood DK is the tank who is defined by (self-)healing. I always considered myself the “do big pulls and take low damage” tank. SotR, Argent Defender, Guardian of Ancient Kings, and incredibly high innate block chance mean more to me than WoG, LoH, or Judgment of Light. But that’s just my personal feeling.
This would be a nice QoL change across the board for both Ret and Prot, but I think it would result in having Hammer of Light, Eye of Tyr, and Wake of Ashes all nerfed in some way. Likely damage nerfs across the board to compensate for higher uptime.
Based on some napkin math, Prot’ll be able to get 14 stacks before losing Shake the Heavens without haste or procs over 14 seconds, Ret could possibly get even more using Templar Strikes (I honestly don’t know how this node works though. Does it require both charges from Improved Crusader Strikes to get both parts off? Or does it use one charge for both parts? Would both halves proc Higher Calling in Templar?). So we can almost certainly get a double every third HoL, and if you delay the second HoL as long as possible you can almost certainly accelerate it to a double cast every other HoL by adding another 7/8 stacks to the 14 you’re already generating. Again, before haste and proc chances.
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wake cdr is just gonna make us desynce wake and thus be more of a hinderance than a boon. plus it’ll harm its status as a ret engine since you’re either gonna hold it or blast it on cd.
we should really stay away from “cdr” or cd extensions. theyre always harmful to the spec and unhealthy in multiple dungeon encounters. they flatten our burst curve even more to a boss uptime dependent consistency spec…and the only good consistency spec in the game rn is outlaw because they have alot of uptime protection. hence why im also trying to get rid of the empyr hammer duration extension talent
Napkin math time for me too 
I don’t think it would be that bad of a power spike, especially if it only reduces the CD once it’s at 50.
Supposing you stay in combat at all time (see scenario below), it would only mean that you would squeeze a 4th wake below 1min30.
The weirdness might come in when we get 50 stack before 3rd wake…
It already is through Seal of the order, it has a 27 sec CD.
Which makes you delay it by 5-6 second on third cast.
Except now as it is, you might want to delay even further because you’ll be at like 45ish stacks when Wings comes back up.
BUT if you do cast it a 3rd time on 54th second and a reduce CD mechanic is there.
You’ll get to 50 stack in the first 2-3 gcd and then you have around 25/28 sec to get Wake to 0 so you can cast it in your Wings.
Considering Wake 27 sec CD, we would most likely be able to cast it again somewhere around 10 seconds into wings.
I don’t think it would be that much of a problem to be honest and I don’t think it would be unfun to play either.
The only caviat with this is Execution sentence, for this one it become tricky to make it fit for sure.
yes but this would make it worse. that wait isnt that bad either
its more than lightly gonna be lowered so im not particularly worried
im just wary with hard cdr mechanics on engine mechanics. like if it were up to me i owuld get rid of seal of order as well since its buffing all generators and thus lowering the gap between spenders and generators in terms of damage which isnt a good thing
Sure that’s a way to solve it.
I just feel like it perpetuate Ret scaling problem by virtually cutting haste out the equation.
And we’ll still encounter moments where we either wait for some more stacks or get stuck at new number because we didn’t wait.
Haste is a very important stat for us AND prot, yet Wake (our hardest hitter) doesn’t scale with it at all.
I just wish the stacks keep going up if it’s not gonna reduce the CD.
i feel like your overestimating how much haste actually does for prot and ret. secondary stat scaling is kinda irrelevant in the grandscheme of things. i wouldnt worry about it to much.
how would you even make wake of ashes scale with haste? without making it somewhat more annoying to use like giving it even more cdr like regular generators. with current haste values, wake of ashes would be about 23-24ish seconds or something. your effectively still holding it until it al lsyncs anyways. with crusade and hero and pi i tthink you can lower it to sub 20 seconds i guess. but then it would be subject to tuning and lose some of its nuke damage to keep it balanced
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Depends if you like to be at the mercy of balance/tuning team as we are now.
From the start of last patch Ret was buffed 3-4 times totaling around 13-14% buff because of our damage not scaling.
HoW doesn’t scale with crit (with 100% talent) outside of the secondary interaction of Blessed hammer.
Wake doesn’t scale with haste
Searing Light doesn’t scale with haste (internal CD) and doesn’t proc from dots
All our Dots don’t scale with haste.
I don’t want to 100% rely on tuning check by blizz to make sure my damage goes up when I gear up, kind of breaks the RPG element of the game.
I mean, they already made us play with a Wake “scaling” with haste back in SL and at the start of DF.
The power/talent that made AoW proc reset the CD of Wake was a way to make it scale with haste.
The more haste you had, to more attacks you made, the more AoW proc you got, the more it resets Wake.
OR…
As I suggested, if the stacks stops at 50 and Wake is on CD, every Empyrean Hammer reduce CD by 1sec (or .5 whatever, the number ain’t the point).
That makes it so that the faster you use spenders, the faster you get Wake back.
(Since you get 1 Empyeran Hammer per spenders at base)
Since normal builders and the GCD are affected by haste, it means that the accessibility of Wake is now tied, for a time, to HP spenders and how fast you can get them out.
Giving it some form of haste scaling.
Obviously, make Truth Wake DoT scale with haste (DMG per tick and haste increase the number of ticks).
tree looks sick, really happy with how it turned out. to me, looks like the best tree so far. wake changing into hammer will feel really good gameplay wise, think like judge>wake>hammer will feel super good as long as hammer of light hits hard. the capstone talent could have issues with the stacks and cd of wake, might be overlap there ie overcapping stacks or something. mechanically the tree has a lot of great interactions i am seeing, overall very happy with it. raining down empyrean hammers sounds very fun.
i love the hammer theme. glyphs would be great to see to change it up from hammers to other weapons but i am glad hammers were picked as the main theme. i am excited to see what hammer of light visually looks like, hopefully its really cool.
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you’ll still be in the mercy of the balance tuning team with scaling. rets issues were never “we scale bad” its always was “we hybrid like poop”. take abberus for example, great st raid but ret gets punished in sark and echo with important add phases, same thing this raid until they turbo juiced wake of ashes (again horrible buff)
that wasnt “due to scaling” its due to "spec has a legendary weapon so better keep it undertuned while every other spec got buffs consistently since the start of the patch. warrior and dk shared the bottom with us while every spec got consistently buffed. even specs like dh which has the best scaling in the game with amn and kye got buffed by alot during its rework and its now middling all in the rankings. scaling wont magically make your spec good
that doesnt mean crit is a useless stat since everything else can crit including wake of ashes. also honestly? given the herald tree i dont think vengeful wrath is long for this world
wake shouldnt benefit from haste cause it would be too strong
its not supposed to proc from dots and its internal cds are never reduced by haste for any spec.
thats the only thing i agree with
again every spec in the game needs a little boost from blizzard, this isnt a paladin only issue
ya and wake was weak enough to justify wake resets. infact because of wake resets and its “haste scaling” EVERYTHING got nerfed including aow proc chance, zeal melee speed increase and haste reset chance itself got nerfed. to keep things balanced, concessions need to be made and they were made for a rng talent that kept wake of ashes weak. no thank you
then wake of ashes and hammer of light would have to be tuned downward and weaken to allow such a mechanic. cdr mechanics doesnt mean the thing its effecting stays strong, it means we get tuned around that thing OR that thing gets incredibly weaker.
tuning isnt “make this do that and were all happy” it effects alot of things and thus should be done carefully. people though us having a full holy kit means mastery would be our bis stat despite it being way to strong during ptr. so it got hit and now people think mastery is a “dead stat” when its really not. post and pre rework never made you prioritize mastery over any other stat at all. with this example, one can realize that the community has a very poor understanding of “scaling” and its history for any spec.
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