Make Shield of the Righteous an empower ability

Classes Paladin
1

Like Evokers have, you know? You hold down the ability to charge it up and it becomes stronger the longer you charge.

But for SOTR, it’d be a little different:

  • Lift your shield, reducing incoming damage from in front of you by X%, and begin charging your shield with light. On release, do holy damage based on charge time, and trigger talents that proc off of SOTR.
    • You could tap it to instantly cast the ability if you need to, don’t HAVE to charge.

Then you could rework some talents to radiate light out from your shield as you charge it, doing damage and healing (more healing for holy, more damage for prot) in a cone in front of you, and you could give prot a proc to instantly cast the fully empowered version of shield (including all the damage from the radiating light talent), and make infusion of light do the same for holy pally.

You could also add a talent to reduce damage for allies behind you, or transfer some of their damage to you.

Would make SOTR feel a little more “epic.”

2 Likes
2

The difficulty with the charge idea is to consider what you lose while charging.

You lose healing your allies, you lose GCDs to spread defensives or apply virtue or aura Mastery before a large damage event, you lose other dps

The thing to consider is what do you build up to, group dr/shield, a hot, an AOE DoT? And what do you get for just casting without charging.

3

I would love, in gameplay terms, ShoR to be an ability you can charge and release, especially in response to enemy attacks. Especially big boss attacks. Unfortunately I think that would be quite overpowered, since it’s effectively a DR whenever a large ability is about to hit. If you get real good at timing, someone could hit it a split second before a big attack goes off. That would mean for a skilled enough player, a % Dr whenever they want it.
I think an infusion based ability for ShoR would be a good idea for a melee based holy paladin, but it needs to be carefully done to avoid being overpowered.

4

Well that’s the fun thing, you can choose what you want to do. Instead of just doing a bland rotation into infinity, you can make decisions on how to handle things, yeah?

And you’d just get less damage, wouldn’t get the longer duration DR, wouldn’t get the AoE damage / healing, just whatever triggers from SOTR finishing its cast, like we do now.

We have talents like Lightforged Blessing that kinda do nothing, you could rework it into something that triggers while you’re charging, do damage and/or healing with like excess light magic or something, make it so that a full charge doesn’t necessarily brick your damage / healing.

You’d have to intelligently decide when to hold it down, when to just spend hopo on something else or tap cast the ability.

Bake it into prot pallies kit, make it a reactive tank instead of just mashing buttons like it does now. It’s certainly balanceable.

5

This would be horrible for prot. Having to stand still to charge it or risk having sotr drop because you have to move would be atrocious gameplay.

1 Like
6

While it’s not necessarily a bad idea, that’s the kind of mechanic you need to build your spec design around.

It works for Evoker because they were specifically designed with it in mind from the start.

For it to work on any other class/spec, it would need to be completely reworked to accommodate it.

2 Likes
7

Maybe this could be an optional talent, but I’m not sure how blocking would work with charging up a huge shield. Evokers don’t have shields and don’t worry about charging up reducing mitigation, but protection paladins are all about keeping that shield up.

8

Oh wait I got an idea, charging up reduces the damage of the next attack to hit you, only if you are currently charging, so like: 15 to 30% DR over a three second charge. Anything to hit you during, would be reduced by an amount by the length of how long you’ve charged

9

Deal, but only if each charge segment uses 1 Holy Power.
So you can charge up to 3 HP to use it (maybe more with talents)

10

That’d be cool, actually!

11

What would be the difference between tapping and holding to charge? If it’s just damage done, then why would I ever opt not to charge?
I’m assuming we’d have to stand still to charge? How is that different from standing still to hard cast? I’m melee range, which nearly everyone has been complaining about

12

In slow paced or downright easy content you outgear, could be interesting. In the chaos of high M+ casted/charge up main HP spenders sounds…inconvenient at best, a death sentence at worst. Prot Paladin has a few things it can do exceptionally, one is denial of enemy casts. It could provide some feels bad moments to have to end the charge up of SotR to use other abilities to inturupt casts.

It is a very cool idea, might be safer for non-tanking gameplay.

1 Like
13

Sorry, I wasn’t clear about my thoughts. If SotR were to be made an empowered ability, there would be no option to not charge. I just meant that, in the same way evokers can charge for between 1-4 charge “segments,” SotR could also be charged for variable amounts of segments, costing more Holy Power and having a stronger effect per segment fully charged.

14

My question is still basically the same, what’s the incentive to hold longer?

For evokers one of them is healing over time vs burst upfront

15

I dunno, they can balance it for more damage and more efficient charge-to-damage ratio or whatever they want. I’ve put about 2% thought into it.

16

It’s basically a proposal for a melee caster playstyle which everyone blatantly hates. If we could move while charging then maybeeee it could be fun

17

I think that would be neat. There are other MMO’s that do have melee “casting” of abilities, with a cast bar before it goes off, but which allow you to move at the same time.
But on the other hand, that’s not really at all how WoW works, and they’re probably not going to change the whole feel of their game and all their classes. I just like to let the imagination run.

1 Like