Herald of the Sun is the tree I was looking forward to the most, which likely means it has the largest amount of my own personal biases and wish-fulfillment attached to it, which I strongly suspect will make it the worst of the trees I have in iteration 3…
Though at least I’m doing a lot with the sun theme in my naming! 
https://www.deviantart.com/lookoutherecomestom/art/Ideal-Herald-of-the-Sun-Hero-Talents-Iteration-3-1036837365
You can see a bit of my bias with the offspeccing talent I have in tier 4, An’she’s Favor, and how I made Flash of Light castable on enemies if you take that talent–I have pined for a ranged direct damage spell with no cooldown since they took Denounce away in Legion, and I’ll admit the best way to give paladins back a ranged damage spell with no cooldown is probably to add it baseline (or to the holy talent tree), but because the Hero Talents are a new system, I keep trying to sneak in a ranged damage spell with no cooldown using the Hero Talents.
I could go off on a tangent here about how Blizzard is in the bad habit of adding abilities, not because they’re fun or useful, but because they fit the systems the Blizzard developers are adding, and how that tends to make the quality of players’ experiences a crapshoot…but I should stick with the topic of the third iteration of my Herald talents, and my doubts and intentions in this tree.
Iteration 2 actually had Radiant Bolt as an upgrade for Flash of Light—a concept that kind of worked as a choice for caster!holy specs versus instant!holy specs, but that did not work for retribution players. So I replaced that choice in tier 2 with yet another single target vs. multi-target choice: Solar Storm upgrades Light of Dawn and Divine Storm, while Solar Shock upgrades Blade of Justice and Holy Shock. (Solar Storm was a passive in iteration 2 that buffed LoD and DS, interestingly enough.)
I also really liked Blizzard’s own Sunspots concept; it helps us in doing what we’re doing anyway, so I took a stab at importing it into my Herald tree’s third iteration. But I think I goofed my implementation of the Sunspots concept: you only apply sunspots to allies while healing or to enemies while doing damage if you’re spending holy power right after casting Fist of the Heavens. I suppose that was my attempt to make Fist of the Heavens fit in with the Sunspots concept. In and of itself, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does mean there’s a lot more incentive to cast Divine Storm/Solar Storm/Light of Dawn to apply sunspots to as many targets as possible than there is to cast TV/WoG; in retrospect, maybe it would’ve been wiser to use the “Greater Sunspot” concept I had attached to Solar Shock for the single-target finishers.
And then, there’s the Sundog passive…for context, a sundog is to ice crystals what a rainbow is to water droplets: both are refracted sunlight, but while rainbows are on the opposite side of the sky from the sun, sundogs are quite close to the sun due to the vastly different refractive properties of angular ice crystals vs. round liquid droplets. Hence, I wanted the ability to apply sunspots to things near your main targets passively with the Sundog concept–I have a variation of the Sundog concept in my second iteration, as well.
But the fact that iteration 3’s version of Sundog applies healing sunspots when you do damage and damage sunspots when you heal might just be a klunky concept; especially when you consider that Retribution always applies sunspots when they cast healing spells on allies, and Holy always applies sunspots when damaging enemies. In retrospect, those guarantees were probably a mistake, in that they incentivize Solar Storm over Solar Shock way too much. What I’d been thinking at the time when I designed Sundog was that the damage-for-healing and healing-for-damage passive that Selfless Healer was intended to generate would benefit if healing naturally happened for your allies when you dealt damage as Retribution, and if damage naturally happened for nearby enemies when you healed allies as Holy.
Depending on the feedback I get, I might be revising Sundog so that it’s just creating that passive healing-when-you-damage and passive damage-when-you-heal, and take out the effect where direct damage as Holy or direct healing as Ret applies sunspots. Then again: I might be completely revising the way sunspots get applied in general! FotH + holy power spenders for direct sunspots and random procs for offspec sunspots might not be the best implementation, and with the kind of excellent and creative feedback I’ve been getting, I expect I’ll be hearing MUCH better ideas than that
I also took Blizzard’s sun avatar capstone (or something like it), gave it a little more An’she name-flavoring, and plopped it in tier 4 to replace an Avenging Wrath-affecting “Sudden Sunrise” talent that I’d had in tier 4 in iteration 2. My understanding is that tampering with Avenging Wrath’s cooldown does more harm than good, so I figured I should replace Sudden Sunrise with something, and the sun-avatar concept looked so appealing…!
I try to take Blizzard’s ideas into my own trees when I think they look good; one of the other ones I borrowed was Second Sunrise—itself a throwback to a Legion artifact weapon trait from The Silver Hand, and honestly it wasn’t all that different from the Solar Storm passive I had in iteration 2…
I also attempted to make a multi target vs. single-target choice below Fist of the Heavens with Sunstroke vs. Soothing Sunlight. Interestingly enough, the Soothing Sunlight choice is the single-target damage choice…I should probably rename it, even if the effect is good.
Fist of the Heavens likely deserves some prose, itself: I really wish they’d import it into WoW, already—it’s a terrific effect, and it doesn’t even need to have the lightning-flavor it had in the Diablo series: giving it sunlight-flavor works just as well. Though I should probably mention that the little extras I added for Holy and Retribution were intended to pull in some benefits from the Holy tree for Retribution (the Righteous Judgement talent from Holy’s tree—though I see it’s only a 30% chance there, my mistake making it 100% here, but I’ll leave it if the feedback says to), and I also intended to pull in some benefits from the Retribution tree for Holy (i.e. the Improved Judgment talent from Retribution’s tree). I hope that makes sense!
I briefly touched on An’she’s Favor at the start of this, but I should say more about it here: my plans to allow Retribution paladins to offtank or Protection paladins to offDPS in the Templar tree fell flat on their face, but I’m hoping that my plans to allow Holy paladins to offDPS and Retribution paladins to offheal in the Herald tree won’t. I mean, with any given GCD, you can either heal, or you can DPS, but you can’t do both. An’she’s Favor was and is intended to allow for that off-spec capability, and figured I should mention that before I close out.
Finally, the capstone is my attempt to pull in one of Uther’s spells from Heroes of the Storm into World of Warcraft—it’s a nice ability, and I think it deserves a place in WoW. Don’t get me wrong: the old Holy Radiance spell from Cata/MoP/WoD had a near and dear place in my heart, and if I had to do it all over again and had a choice, I’d wish they hadn’t pruned our Holy Radiance no-cooldown AoE heal going from WoD to Legion. But with Holy Light being a multi-target heal (if you take the Resplendent Light talent), and a lot of free multi-target healing coming from Merciful Auras and Golden Path, I don’t think that version of Holy Radiance has a place in paladins’ kits these days. So I’m happy to let that spell’s name go to Uther’s ability.
If I can get my overall Herald concept to work, then I think I can create a Retribution spec that generates a lot of passive healing for allies while benefitting from that passive healing with Selfless Healer, but that also has options for some powerful direct heals if they player wants to do direct healing—not to mention heavily incentiving casting Lay on Hands when an ally needs the healing, or Holy Radiance when your raid/party needs the healing. And I think I can create a Holy spec that generates a lot of passive damage while benefitting from that passive damage with Selfless Healer, but that also has options for direct damage if the player wants to mix in direct damage. I figure something like that is pretty fitting for a Holy/Retribution hero tree.
But I think I’ve spotted enough flaws to know: I don’t have this working yet. Please do leave feedback about other flaws you’ve spotted that I haven’t, and any ideas you have to fix them!
