I would personally prefer to see it buffed in damage at least (and halve the heal if necessary) so we could possibly use it for DP procs when we need to heal ourselves a bit without feeling like we sacrifice a lot of damage. Righteous Verdict also makes it even worse because if you’re not pressing TV/FV in single target every 6 seconds, you get to lose even more damage, yay! 
if it costed 3 HP, it actually wouldn’t be that bad, but it costs 5 HP, which severely skews it into the “never pick this talent, ever” category. Not sure what they were thinking when they looked at this ability in beta. “That’s perfectly fine” like, no. Any reasonable person doing their job would see that it’s not even close.
JV not working fully with DP is part of why it was never used. When DP proccs JV is reduced to 2hp cost instead of 0, meaning you still have to sink HP into it. Reducing it’s HP cost to make it more in line with Heart Strike would be the easiest way to fix it.
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Wow. That is even worse than I thought, and that was already pretty bad. They would need to fix its interaction with Divine Purpose then as well. It’s probably a contender for the worst-tuned ability in the entire game relative to its cost and the way it just functions… it’s really bad.
Remember we used to have a glyph that made it exorcism granted 10%dr and one that ds healed for 8% of hp? Justicars node could be replace with something like this. A ret version of judgement of light maybe higher healing less charges? Spenders heal all allies within x yds. For x% of their hp? Idk anything is better than jv.
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Even the old version of DS that healed would be nice.
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Alright so we got SOME improvement today.
Retribution
Divine Protection has been added as a choice node with Shield of Vengeance. Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.
Justicar’s Vengeance now costs 3 Holy Power and deals 7% less damage.
The talent locations of Ashes to Ashes and Divine Toll have been swapped
My hot take on it.
It is a step in the right direction. In my initial post I listed the list below as priorities for Ret in DF.
- Retribution Aura does not feel and is not in fact an AURA. An aura should have a positive effect on everyone and not just the paladin. The DF effect is better than the previous one but FAILS at the critical task of being an aura.
- Replace SoV with Divine Protection/Give us a % damage reduction defensive. It hinders our presence in high content difficulty. AND OFF THE GCD
- Divine Steed is not liked by the community, either go full Diablo 3 crusader style with it or give us options to use something else. AND OFF THE GCD
- You need to answer the following question internally WITHOUT naming spells or abilities available to Prot and Holy: Why should a group/raid bring a Ret paladin?
They seemed to have partially answered the second point.
My follow up question to this change would be:
Why would you increase the CD to 2 min for a %DR that is currently well balance at 1min for holy?
It feels like the % should be twice as high if we’re gonna have twice the CD on it.
It feels like a PVP taxe again for some reason.
Hope to see it either bumbed in % a bit or CD reduced to 1.5 min at least.
JV… What can I say. It went from dead to bad. Big improvement to reduce the HP cost with a pointless DMG nerf thrown in to give the illusion that it was a fairly balance ability. I don’t know what to say to be honest. Even if it is slightly better, it just adds to the button bloat if we take it and it makes it so that we have now potentially 7 HP spender accessible to us albeit some with CDS.
- TV(FV)
- DS
- WoG
- JV
- ES
- WoA Path of ruin
- Seraphim
Maybe just make it a passive power?
2 Likes
I have a feeling we’re being overly taxed for Divine Shield and Lay on Hands. While both these abilities are powerful, their CD, and Forebearance really neuters them quite a bit.
Now that the last full hybrid class is out it is quite evident to the most casual observer that we are quite severely are the bottom of the totem poll, in fact buried under it. Healing is NOT utility, it’s another form of throughput, and Holy and Prot provide what little utility there is with barely a cost to themselves.
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When it was first in Legion it actually did the same damage as TV, so you were paying 2HP for the heal, basically, and if you managed to hit somethnig that was stunned it was pretty flash. However, even then it didn’t interact with any talents that buffed TV, and it only healed for damage done, which meant hitting an absorb shield with it or something that was nearly dead meant a very anti-climatic heal. Then they nerfed it, and that was the end of that.
As for the change, remember that the 7% damage reduction is also a 7% healing reduction. With these stats hitting a stunned target gives you damage about equal to a TV (assuming no other buffs to TV) and a heal about 2/3rds as strong as a WoG. An Unstunned target means less than half a WoG and about 2/3rds of a TV. It’s way too weak in healing to be used as an emergency heal and way to weak in damage to be rotational.
The problem is that if it’s buffed much it risks being too strong - two JVs already does more damage+healing than a (baseline) TV+WoG. On the other hand, JV is a self-heal only, and if you compare it to the free healing Fury gets from Bloodthirst, it’s not that flash. It’s also generally weaker than swapping Death Strike for Frost Strike. So, there’s room in there for it to be buffed.
However, I think a better talent would be one that grants self-healing from TV at some percentage of damage done, and group healing from Divine Storm (as it once was). If the healing from TV is greater than what you’d get yourself from DS, there becomes an opportunity for some choices - do you WoG yourself or someone else for a large heal, do ST damage even if it’s an AoE pull to get some healing for yourself whilst still doing damage, or do you hit DS even if it’s a ST pull to lose some damage but put a small heal on your whole group? A little bit of a choice, making things a bit more engaging than just spamming your rotation.
5 Likes
PLus all of our “amazing” healing comes from a talent. We are being balanced around healing hands. If you went selfless healer our offhealing drops heavily. Blizzard believed we dont need defensives because muh healing.
What if that is the real problem. If healing hands didnt exist and instead we had a real competitor to SH maybe then we woudnt have to deal with this nonsense?
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The problem is their philosiphy hasn’t kept up with game design. Ret is a rapid pace constant barrage of abilities and procs for middle of the pack damage, barring burst. We don’t have a lot of opportunities to utilize our utility without it coming at a major cost to DPS.
If they want our healing to be our utility, and again I believe healing is throughput and not utility, then it needs to be baked into our rotational abilities, and not be bottom of the barrel.
9 Likes
Updated Class Talent tree feedback.
LoH and Turn Evil should be baseline abilities. They are too niche to be talented into without feeling like a waste 98% of the time. These have been removed from the tree and put baseline.
A few talents have merged, but 98% of the talent tree is the same, minus Auras.
8 Likes
Very well-written OP. I hope the devs see this.
Blizz’s response is troubling because it’s this method of thinking that always produces horrible game design and erodes loyal players faith in the company.
Fun should always trump class philosophy in a video game. When the two are at odds, the philosophy should bend. Any competent designer is capable of making it work.
5 Likes
Actually, I believe there’d be a rather interesting mechanic available where a Paladin would slowly build stacks on an enemy, call it “Vitriol” or “Condemnation,” what have you. Once you’ve reached enough stacks the target receives a new debuff “Evil Doer!” When the debuff is active, all abilities that would interact with “Evil Beings,” undead, abberation, demons, etc., can now be cast on the target as if they were of the ascribed type. The idea is we’d have our usual targets, i.e. DK and Lock pets, but can now also reach a point where we reach a small spike in a prolonged fight. That’d give a reason to at least treat Turn Evil as a talent.
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Some good news coming out of the devs team today with the Mage changes.
It’s not about Ret pallies specifically but it does address something our community was worried/concerned about.
Core Tree
The Core tree is seeing the heaviest redesign. Our goal has been to increase options by adding new spells, reducing overall multi-point nodes, cutting all existing 3-point nodes…
This is something many mentioned in their feedback for Ret.
The 3 point Seals talent in the third tier of our tree really feels bad to pick and hinders our utility options.
This is also encouraging considering Seasoned Warhorse is a 2 point investment.
If this thinking is consistent across the board we should see our own class tree cut down on those as well.
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Yeah, hoping Seasoned Warhorse is 1 point, at the very least of any changes… and Seal of Mercy needs to be something else entirely, not just reduced to 1 point. The 3 point talents are pretty fluff and boring. Hoping with a proper rework they add more interesting stuff to the general tree.
3 Likes
It feels like we’re paying a tax instead of being able to chose talents. The three point nodes desperately need cut, as do many of the two point nodes. I’m not asking to be OP, but would like room to spend points on stuff.
5 Likes
Big news from Ion interview with Maximum.
Paladin are likely getting battle rez in dragon flight!
4 Likes
That does make a lot of sense and would help, so that’s good news.
They’re looking at giving it to Paladin. It’s not guranteed.
