I do like that Templar Strikes has a (slightly, but noticeable) reduced GCD.
If it didn’t have that, I wouldn’t use it.
I hope Blizzard learns from Template Strike that adding a bit of spice instantly improves the feel of the spell. I feel like it was a part of why MoP class design felt so good, because there were these small things in each ability. Then later they kind of dumbed everything down because they though it didn’t matter, but it did. I hope it will be a lesson for them on how to design abilities in the future.
I loved it til I used the Crusader one and tested it on the pvp dummy. Crusader was much more dps.
They can shave some damage from our finishers to buff this and CSAA up to worthy on taking levels.
They had that in PTR and last second swapped it back to high damage finishers. They don’t WANT Ret to be sustained damage. They want them to be burst.
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Then we both know what is going to happen in the end don’t we?
History tends to repeat itself.
Edit:
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/class-tuning-incoming-march-28/1553383
Le sigh.
I hate it when i am right about this. They are nerfing both our survivability and burst in pvp.
And not fixing the tree’s bugs. As well as csaa and templar strikes still bring undertuned.
A lack of a Holy Power, such that your spenders are fixed combos dependent on their proccers’ CDs or stand on their own CDs is literally more rigid. You’d go from having bankability… to not, to having control over whether to spend towards AoE or ST… to no such control.
Test with it and then without (taking a utility/defensive talent instead, purposely dropping the point in throughput). Only then, if your total dps goes down, is Crusading Strikes actually costing you net damage.
The point of Crusading Strikes is reduced opportunity cost for fitting in that HP generation, not the damage of the Crusader/ing Strikes themselves.
- You’d feel its benefit on the amount of damage everything else is putting in over time through freed up globals, not on CS itself.
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Yeah I like holy power personally.
What I thought would have been cool though if instead we had seals that we cast, and then empower via building basically holy power, and then spending the seal via judgement for an effect based on the seal
Like seal of light would heal us as we built holy power for it, and then judgement would cause the seal to release a healing nova around us
What would be the difference between that and just applying the Seal’s effect on your HP spenders, though?
As far as I can tell (though it’s late, so single-digit brain cell count atm), unless you cause Judgment to purge your existing Seal and put Seals back on the GCD, that change would mostly just be leave us with…
- Ret’s core rotational GCDs being trimmed to just 3 buttons [CS/TS, BoJ, Judgment] and
- less control between ST and AoE.
I’d be happy to get Seals back, honestly, especially if we trim some bloat throughput nodes from the Class Tree and re-add them as alternative utility once we have the extra point or two to spend on them as to leave them optional… but reducing throughput control just because Judgment used to be the way we exploited our Seals (when still skill would do, and the more bankable, the better the synergy with that exploitability) seems both unnecessary and worsening.
Fair enough.
It was more shower thoughts than anything with serious intent
Musing of the deluge
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TL;DR Increasing the Holy Power limit from 5 to 7 or 10 would have drastically increased design freedom and build options.
I never once suggested they should remove Holy Power. Just that there was quite a few people speculating that HoPo as we know it might be on its last leg. Having just 5 points limits design too much. If we were able to bank 7 points like Rogues, or perhaps even 10, then it would have solved almost every issue Blizzard had.
- Crusading Strikes could go back to generating 1 HoPo every strike.
- Holy Blade and Imp. BoJ would no longer have to share a choice node.
- Vanguard of Justice could have gone back to 4/5 without feeling terrible to play with.
- Divine Toll/Resonace overcapping with Boundless Judgment would have been solved.
- And probably some things that i’ve forgotten, ideas that never even made it to the test servers, etc.
Holy Power spenders could also be tuned more appropriately when there is more wiggle room, so to speak. There is room for hard hitting HoPo generators in a world with 7/10 HoPo. But not in one with 5. Simply because of how spamable spenders have gotten, they cannot hit very hard.* And then generators cannot hit hard either.
But if we used spenders less often, say with 2/2 Vanguard of Justice, then there would be room for decently hard hitting generators as well.
*Outside of modifier stacking. One of the points of the rework that wasn’t really touched. Even though they set out to reduce modifier stacking.
For example, say that Holy Blade was made baseline. And Expurgation was moved to it’s previous slot and buffed appropriately. Then we could have the option of a very hard hitting Blade of Justice, or smaller more frequent ones.
This cannot happen right now because Holy Blade+Imp.Boj would result in a overflow of HoPo. To balance that HoPo generation from other sources would have to be reduced, or the damage of HoPo spenders would have to be nerfed. But if spenders are nerfed, then you run into the problem we had in the PTR, which was that BoJ was out damaging TV/JV/FV. And pressing BoJ even when at full HoPo was the correct choice to avoid AoW muching recharge time of BoJ.
This is partially the reason why all generator saw pretty big nerfs in the last week before 10.0.7 went live.
If you want to see the original Crusader Strike, from which the idea of Templar Strikes came from, go into Live Stratholme in WoW classic and fight the ret paladin NPCs. They use a powerful melee strike that is combined with a nasty holy damage over time. Blizzard still hasn’t improved upon Bill Roper’s original Paladin design that was nerfed into the ground when Roper left Blizzard during vanilla wow beta.
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It seems you dont know what a filler is
Except there in lies the real problem: reduced bankability due to too much effectively uncontrolled (or, obligatory to use asap as not to risk proc-waste) Holy Power generation.
What matters isn’t the Holy Power maximum, but rather the average number of GCDs of flexible space before which one is forced to use their finishers (i.e., your finishers’ practical bankability).
Simply undo the excess and be rid of or tune down the 4-HP talent and there would again be no issue with Holy Power. Its issues are entirely of the rework’s making — a fault of its excesses/oversights.
Yes, you could increase the maximum HP to 7 or 10 or 20, but that does nothing if/when you increase (especially, poorly controllable) HP generation by the same rate. It’s the ratio and resultant (lack of) flexibility that matters.
- Though, again, even this worst-yet state in that regard is miles better than having no Holy Power at all (no bankable, shared-cost finishers through which to provide that extra level of burst- and damage-type-control).
Yeah of course. But having a higher cap facilitates that better than a lower cap. Because with a higher cap you (Blizzard) can more finely tune HoPo generation. You cannot generate half a HoPo. But with a cap of 10 you effectively could. Because 1 HoPo in a system of 10 is equivalent to 0.5 HoPo in a system of 5.
Holy Blade + Imp. Blade of Justice provided too much Holy Power. But what if BoJ provided 1.5 HoPo instead? That could maybe have worked.
But to be fair, overhauling Holy Power in a minor patch was likely far beyond what they could have accomplished. But i wouldn’t be surprised at all if Holy Power point ends up being split into chunks of 5-10 next expansion.
After all, this is the exact reason why Destro Warlocks have their 5 Soul Shards split into 10 fragments.
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crusading strike is better lmao. off the gcd dmg and everything.
I would like to have see what that was like, I’ve seen youtube videos of the original design and its a real shame they ditched it for the really clunky seal design in Vanilla.
It looks really cool, much better than the baseline Crusader Strike at least for Dwarves. But I hate all the extra GCDs it adds. I think they pretty much nailed the build options with this talent tree.
A least-priority skill of like type (among, say, ST, Cleave, and AoE).
- I.e., Crusader Strike could take priority over old Consecration in single-target while still being a “filler”.
Which Templar Strikes still is/are.