Hi, everyone. I know these forums aren’t as active as they used to be, but as I think about Ret design a lot when I’m playing, it helps to write it all down to clear my head a bit. So to anyone reading this, thank you for indulging me. I mostly do PvP, but I assure you I find other things important as well such as a smooth and interactive rotation, the overall feel / lore of the class, cosmetics, and so on.
I’m formatting this post as a numbered list in an effort to make it easier to digest, but similar topics will be near each other, with the more nitpicky suggestions towards the bottom. Okay then, let’s begin.
(1) My biggest suggestion is to remove Crusader Strike from Ret’s rotation by having it upgraded to (replaced by) Blade of Justice for Ret during the early leveling process. Crusader Strike deals less damage than an auto-attack. It long ago lost the interesting mechanics it had when first introduced. The fact that it has two charges and two tier 25 talents devoted to it makes me want to laugh, or perhaps cry.
How do we fill the GCD void left after we rid ourselves of Crusader Strike? That’s actually the easy and fun part: reduce the cooldowns of our other holy power generators, perhaps give one of them a second charge, design a more interesting and powerful tier 30, and so on. I can see Hammer of Wrath and Divine Storm popping into the rotation more often.
(2) Art of War (Blade of Justice reset) is unable to proc twice in a row. I’m not sure why this is, but it’s stupid and should be fixed.
(3) Bring back Exorcism as an attack that always crits and can only be used on demons, undead, and abominations. This would be a perk against these creature types rather than something we are actively balanced around. Fantasy is so incredibly important to WoW, and the fantasy of paladins is centered around obliterating evil.
(4) Let’s stick to this anti-evil concept for a little while, starting with Turn Evil, which needs a lot of love. Turn Evil was returned to paladins in Shadowlands, but with a 15 sec cooldown and 20 yd range. This is the MoP version which could be used on players! Scare Beast, Banish, Shackle Undead, and other minor CC spells of this sort have no cooldown and a 30 yd range. Fix this, and have Turn Evil once again work on death knights foolish enough to use Lichborne around us (they are immune to fear effects because they’re undead, which means they should NOT be immune to Turn Evil).
(5) Wake of Ashes should also stun aberrations. Add “Sense Demons” and “Sense Aberrations” to the paladin kit for even more flavor.
(6) Divine Steed feels pretty lackluster at the baseline. Now that we’ve experienced the conduit, I think it’s clear that Steed should last for at least 4 sec. And if it must remain on GCD, then I think it needs something that differentiates it from other pure movement speed increases like Sprint and Dash. It should have a knockback, and perhaps Prot can talent it to drag targets along for the ride.
Before I continue, let’s make it clear that I think other classes should get cool stuff too. Hopefully in that light it doesn’t sound like I’m saying buff paladins to the moon. Also, all of these ideas can be considered independent of each other.
(7) Divine Steed should have a glyph that summons one of your favorited mounts. I want to charge into battle on a mechanostrider! If Steed remains a pure speed increase, add another glyph that replaces the mount with the Speed of Light animation from MoP. The graphic shouldn’t have to be a mount unless it does something cool like a knockback.
(8) Heart of the Crusader, our personal mounted speed increase, was replaced in Shadowlands by Crusader Aura. Great! Except, Heart of the Crusader was multiplicative, while Crusader Aura is additive. Basically, we lost a bunch of movement speed and death knights are now faster than us. Fix please.
(9) Add Heart of the Crusader back so that we don’t have to fiddle with Crusader Aura when we’re solo. It’s a nuisance.
(10) Heading into the next expansion, bake the fear reduction conduit (at 30%) into Concentration Aura. While this is a rather large buff to paladins in PvP, Concentration Aura needs to be more useful across the entire game, and across all paladin specs.
(11) I feel that auras should be on a 1 sec GCD, if not placed on their own separate GCD entirely.
(12) Hand of Hindrance is the longest longest cooldown snare in the game, and it’s dispellable. It might be cool to make it work like the old Chains of Ice where it starts as a 90% snare and goes down by 10% every second. Alternatively, reduce the cooldown to 20 sec so that it has a 50% uptime (up from 33%). Or, baseline the portion of Law and Order (PvP talent) that reduces the cooldown when Hindrance is removed early.
(13) This next one is a big change, that some people might agree with me on while others can’t imagine the game working like this. I believe class trumps role, and therefore whenever possible utility should be tied to class: delete Rebuke and give all paladins magic dispel. I suggest other classes receive these sorts of changes as well so that we all feel less generic and more tied to our classes.
(14) Make Absolution (AoE rez) class-wide.
(15) Let’s move onto talents, starting with tier 15. Righteous Verdict has this drawback where if you need to use another holy power spender, the buff falls off. Why, when RV already automatically loses to Zeal in AoE situations? Change RV to a flat ~12% damage buff to TV. No complexity is lost since RV was never something you actively managed.
(16) Execution Sentence deals less damage in PvP, even though it was already likely nerfed out of PvP when it lost the ability to crit. Try allowing it to deal the same damage in PvP as it does in PvE and see where that takes us.
(17) Tier 25 talents, as noted earlier, should interact with more interesting holy power generators than Crusader Strike.
(18) Tier 30: Fist of Justice and Blinding Light are great, with Repentance not seeing as much play. I believe Rep should be instant with a 6 sec duration, 1 min CD, and 20 yd range. Alternatively, it could require Selfless Healer to make it instant. For Holy and Prot, I think Rep should be replaced in their talent trees with Hand of Hindrance.
(19) Moving onto tier 35, I’d prefer if Unbreakable Spirit reduced the cooldown of Blessing of Protection instead of Lay on Hands, but I can see arguments against that. More importantly, Eye for an Eye has some pretty big problems. Is it ever the right choice in PvE, outside of the rare raid encounter with physical damage? It’s somewhat situational in PvP as well, and the “eye for an eye” part of the talent is a big joke: it deals less damage than Crusader Strike, which itself deals less damage than an auto-attack.
The best solution that comes to mind is to keep the name, but change it from an active ability to one that increases Shield of Vengeance absorb by 30%. But, I’m sure there are other ways to go about this. You could just stick Divine Protection here, if that wouldn’t be too broken.
(20) Tier 40: Divine Purpose should no longer be nerfed in PvP as it would be nice to have a possible alternative to Seraphim. I think it was nerfed in a previous expansion and the devs just forgot about it.
(21) Holy Avenger just doesn’t really work for Ret which has multiple generators that grant 2 or more holy power. Why not try something like “Your holy power spenders cost one less.” I think that would be a good start.
(22) Tier 45: I don’t think Selfless Healer is truly a viable alternative to Healing Hands. In that vein, make it so Selfless Healer only requires three stacks for the same effect, and allow it to be used on Turn Evil as well. Perhaps after you land a killing blow, your next Flash of Light is guaranteed to crit.
But whatever happens with this talent, the name should be changed to something other than Selfless Healer, which only made sense back in MoP when the bonus healing did not apply to yourself. Maybe call it Speed of Light.
(23) Justicar’s Vengeance is dead for another expansion, and I see no reason to revive it now that we have Word of Glory back. I’d replace it with Divine Storm healing, or perhaps utility that has nothing to do with healing. Would it be OP if Ret got Blessing of Spellwarding? Yea, probably.
(24) Tier 50: I don’t have much to say about this tier other than that Crusade feels a little outclassed by the other options. In PvP, Crusade has always struggled as it causes Avenging Wrath to lose its healing in exchange for a ramp-up mechanic that tends to be more downside than upside.
(25) Hooray, we made it to PvP talents! Aura of Reckoning and Unbound Freedom are great, wouldn’t change a thing about these. Blessing of Sanctuary is great too, but I think it should be baseline. It would be really fun to have in battlegrounds, but it’s just not worth taking over something like Luminescence or Vengeance Aura. It would be very situational in PvE, but that’s why it would be fun when you do find a use for it. I think the devs don’t understand this when they turn all these sorts of mechanics into PvP talents.
As for it being OP for Ret to have this baseline, I think other classes should get some of their kits baseline as well.
(26) I don’t like the way Judgments of the Pure is designed at all. Maybe if Ret had a shorter Judgment CD it would be better, but even then it ties utility to an important rotational ability, and whether or not you dispel the right thing is random. Maybe Prot should keep this talent, but it doesn’t really work for anyone else. I still think the best solution is to make magic dispel (and interrupts, etc) a class-based mechanic rather than role-based.
(27) Lawbringer and Divine Punisher are not great because with one you need to switch targets a lot, while with the other you need to train a target. These restrictions make them worse than our other DPS PvP talents such as Aura of Reckoning, Vengeance Aura, and Luminescence. I suggest combining them: “Judgment applies Lawbringer. Casting Judgment causes all other enemies with your Lawbringer effect to suffer up to 5% of their maximum health in holy damage. If your target is already affected by Lawbringer, Judgment generates an additional holy power.”
Numbers and even the mechanics could be tweaked a little, but my point is these talents should be combined into something better than what they are individually.
(28) I think Law and Order and Jurisdiction should be combined as well. I would baseline the part where if Hand of Hindrance is removed early, its cooldown is reduced. Then make the talent work like so: “Increases the range of Hammer of Justice and Hand of Hindrance by 10 yds. Blade of Justice now applies Hand of Hindrance for 3 sec.” You can leave out the range increases to BoJ and Divine Storm.
(29) I was unsubbed when I read about the 9.1 PvP talent updates. I thought the new Ultimate Retribution sounded fun and funny, so I subbed to give it a try.
It’s completely impractical, even in random battlegrounds. The graphic is difficult to see, even for me, the paladin who knows he is using this talent. Maybe just reuse the current Execution Sentence graphic? It’s prettier and hard to miss. Furthermore, 8 sec is simply too short and should be increased to 12. Ultimate Retribution should make me laugh and have fun in casual PvP, but even there it feels like a complete waste of a talent slot.
(30) Vengeance Aura and Luminescence are maybe a little boring, but they’re good. I mean, the crits from Vengeance Aura are actually pretty fun.
(31) Uther’s Devotion is a cool legendary, but unfortunately it was never competitive. First I would buff it to reduce the cooldowns of blessings by X per holy power spent: Freedom by 1 sec, Sac by 2, and BoP by 3. Then for the next expansion I would either make it a Ret PvP talent, or better yet have it replace Justicar’s Vengeance on tier 45. (Holy and Prot already have options which let them use their blessings more often.)
(32) I could see Guarded by the Light, a Prot PvP talent, being shared by Ret. If it’s worth using, that would help buff Selfless Healer. I’m trying really hard here to make tier 45 not just auto lock into Healing Hands. I love Healing Hands, but it should have some competition.
And that covers PvP talents. All that remains now are a few miscellaneous topics.
(33) The original Divine Storm animation was a thousand times cooler. WoW paladins these days are sadly lacking in heavenly thunder and lightning animations, which D3 crusaders have in spades. Shamans, warriors, and paladins should share the Thor aesthetic, but shamans gobble up the vast majority of it.
(34) Righteous Defense was more fitting for paladins than the generic Hand of Reckoning. But I understand why RD was replaced, unlike ripping magic dispel away from Ret in Cata. That I shall never forgive nor forget.
(35) I enjoy Soulforged Censer (it’s the Torghast anima power that increases your damage and healing when an enemy dies in your Consecration). I like how Cons is designed now where it has one foot in and one foot out of the rotation. But I also like when it has utility and situational use, so I don’t know. Maybe when an enemy dies in your Cons it increases your party’s movement speed, and it can stack and refresh so the more enemies that die the more movement speed you get.
(36) I think BoP could come down to a 4 min CD. It’s often been lower than that, or had two charges. It just feels really long at 5 min, and even Spellwarding is 3 min.
(37) I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel here, but Blessing of Sanctuary doesn’t use the new blessing animation where you pull out your libram. Fix please.
(38) Aura animations should pulse periodically.
(39) Aura animations are weird when you’re mounted. Some show at your waist, while others are beneath you on the ground. Crusader, which you cast more than any other aura while mounted, is practically invisible while you’re moving on your mount. It has a cool animation, but you just don’t get to see it often.
(40) Shield of the Righteous should be usable without a shield. It’s a magic shield projected (seemingly out from your chest) via holy energy. It would be highly situational on Ret, but fun and skillful to use in niche situations. If Holy can use it, why not Ret?
(41) Rebuke’s animation looks kind of bad with a shield, and really bad without one. I think it can use an entirely new graphic. If we don’t ever get Exorcism back, it had the perfect graphic for an interrupt where you stick your hand out and blast the target with holy energy.
(42) I kind of forgot to talk about 9.2. Well, I was originally a night fae paladin until I eventually gave up and went kyrian. I still think night fae could be great (without gimmicks via the legendary) if Blessing of Seasons was streamlined and improved. It should be a 2 min buff that cycles between seasons one after the other (it would still be up to the player to move it around to the right ally). The cooldown would be 3 min so that the downtime is at the end rather than between each season. Perhaps it generates one holy power on use and each time it switches to a new season, and Winter’s measly 30% snare should definitely be replaced with a useful PvP debuff such as a cast-speed reduction or healing debuff.
I would love for a revamped Seasons like this, and also Divine Toll of course, to follow paladins into the next expansion as talents or whatever.
And that’s that. Thank you so much for reading, and farewell!