Hey, I resubbed today for the sole purpose of making this forum post (a fine use of gold). While 8.2 has some great content, I can’t bring myself to play because classes are the vehicle through which we experience content, and class design is not good right now. Let me share a quote from a recent “Dev Insights”:
“As we’ve moved abilities from class-wide to being class-specific in a number of cases, we’ve perhaps gone a bit too far away from that core choice the players make when they’re looking at character creation / character select, and they decide whether they want to be a mage or a hunter or a shaman or a rogue. And then ideally specializaton should truly be just that: it should be taking a class and picking a facet of it that excites you the most, with which you identify with the most, and doubling down on that, becoming a master of that. Instead, for many classes or for some specs, that choice entails turning into an all new class with entirely different abilities and only a little bit of overlap. And that’s another area which we would like to pull back from. So as we think to the future, we want to find ways of reestablishing class as a foundation, whether that’s taking some abilities that are now spec-specific and spreading them out so the entire class has access to them (even if they’re kind of off-role for you, there’s value in that hybridity, in that utility), but also looking to all new systems which we introduce down the line, and trying to anchor them at the level of class rather than spec because, again, class identity means class identity, not spec identity.” - Ion Hazzikostas
I’ve been singing this song for years now, and it feels great that class design philosophy at Blizzard has finally come full circle. I doubt we’ll see the level of change I would love to see, but here is a list of ideas (some major and others minor) to get that discussion started.
(1) Remove holy power. It’s functional but uninspired, and ever since its removal from Holy and Prot, Ret feels closer to a rogue than a paladin. Remember, the goal is to make specializations feel less like separate classes.
(2) Delete Templar’s Verdict (it’s just an edgy name for Judgment). Make Judgment our hardest hitting attack, reduce its range to 12 yds, classify it as a spell, and give it Execution Sentence’s animation (which is flashy and awesome). These changes apply to Holy and Prot as well.
(3) Give TV’s animation to Justicar’s Vengeance. It’s a sweet animation and could be incentive to actually make JV a useful talent.
(4) Delete Crusader Strike. It feels awful to press because it’s basically an auto-attack on the global cooldown. Rename Blade of Justice to Crusader Strike: this is the new paladin level 1 ability.
(5) Bring back Exorcism for the entire class. Yes, it automatically crits against demons and undead. WoW is an RPG and this should be a small class perk that we’re totally not balanced around.
(6) Bring back baseline Hammer of Wrath for the entire class. It should hit harder than a wet noodle since holy power generation is no longer a thing.
(7) Divine Storm is one of those few abilities I would keep spec-specific. There should have a baseline proc that resets its cooldown.
(8) Consecration is tricky. It feels like the whole class should have it baseline, but mechanically it’s a little outdated for Ret. Maybe have all paladins learn it at a low level, and then later on for Ret it gets replaced by Wake of Ashes. I realize some of these suggestions leave talent rows in shambles, but honestly our only interesting damage row is tier 100.
(9) With the holy power generation gone because holy power is gone, Wake of Ashes can now hit a lot harder (and can continue to have a reduced value in PvP). Its cooldown can be reduced to 30 sec, or we can make it feel more like an ultimate ability with a 1 min CD and even more damage.
(10) The cooldowns for Ret’s other various attacks such as Judgment and Crusader Strike would need to be playtested extensively. The goals are to not leave many gaps in the rotation, that no attack should feel like absolute filler (current CS), and attacks should have some interesting interactions with each other (ideally more engaging than our current system of builders into finsher).
(11) Is there a satisfying way to bring seals back as actual rotational abilities? I didn’t like when they became like stances because auras already fill that niche.
(12) Auras: scrap the crappy Holy Paladin system where they gotta change talents to choose an aura. Give all paladins four baseline auras (and bring back the cute aura bar that was co-opted by seals).
Devotion Aura: reduces physical damage taken by 10%.
Sanctity Aura: reduces shadow and chaos damage taken by 10% (or, alternatively, all magic damage taken by 5% and call it Sanctuary Aura).
Fanaticism Aura: a percentage of damage done is converted to mana, split between all healing specs in your party or raid. The numbers would require a lot of tuning but I’m sure it could be done. Wouldn’t it be nice for the impact of your utility to be based off of your skill? You know, unlike Greater Blessing of Wisdom.
Crusader Aura: increases mount speed by 20%. I really miss giving this to friends, and I think it should work in rated battlegrounds again as well. I think it was disabled there back when the effect could be increased via Aura Mastery.
(13) I would probably remove Aura Mastery because it doesn’t fit as well with this new system, and give Holy some additional output as compenstation (probably more baseline Holy Shock crit because that’s interactive and fun).
(14) I think for a spec to have a unique, active ability that the rest of the class doesn’t share, that ability should be special enough that it would have felt satisfying (or maybe already did) capping one of the old-school talent trees: Divine Storm, Avenger’s Shield, Beacon of Light, etc. More on this later.
(15) Every class has a utility budget, and if I had to cut something I’d cut greater blessings. I’d prefer one powerful system to two wishywashy systems. But why not bring back WotLK Sacred Shield? It’s a fun ability because it requires maintenance (unlike Kings which lasts for an hour), and if you time Flash of Light with an active shield it has a bonus chance to crit. Wow, synergy between spells, what a novel idea.
(16) The Retribution passive might be interesting in a moba game where there’s always a lot of death because it’s purely PvP, and where you have 100 champions and can design a few to be a little more esoteric or quirky. In WoW, though? The gameplay just isn’t there, it’s a boring perk and nothing more. Remove this so our other utility can be more powerful.
(17) Since its inception Divine Steed has been, to put it nicely, divisive, and lately it’s started to feel redundant as well. Why not remove it and have baseline Blessing of Freedom increase speed by 70%? You can play with the numbers (duration, etc) further, but this is a good starting point.
(18) I wonder if it’s time to make all blessings undispellable (Freedom already is for Ret and Sac is in general) but with shorter durations. For example, BoP could last 6 sec instead of 10. Counterplay is great in theory, but when the other player or team has no dispel BoP lasts absurdly long, and when they do it’s a 5 min CD getting countered by a spammable ability. It’s used more often than not to remove a physical debuff rather than for the persistent effect, which I find disappointing.
(19) I don’t play Holy as much as the other specs, but if at all possible I’d like Holy Light to return to being the powerful and less efficient heal, and Flash of Light to the weaker but more efficient one. Then make Holy Light baseline again. I’m sure there’s more than one way to look at this, but to me it feels stupid to charge up a big heal that heals for very little - hell, Holy Paladins are perma locked into a PvP talent that buffs Holy Light by 50%! Look, when FoL and HL worked the way they originally did, and when all specs had both, I used each extensively for different situations. I feel like I’m still being punished for a crappy design decision made all the way back in Cata when the devs wanted all healers to have the same exact three casted heals. Bad Blizzard, bad!
(20) Remove Rebuke. Avenger’s Shield gets spammed so much that if any tank can get away with not having an interrupt, it’s Prot Paladin. Holy already doesn’t have Rebuke and that goes against trying to make paladin feel like one unified class again. Ret would certainly notice its loss, but I strongly believe it was a mistake to give every DPS an interrupt. For starters it made classes that had already had an interrupt feel watered down.
(21) On that note, only priests, paladins, and maybe monks should have magic dispel. Make it class-wide and have dangerous debuffs of all types be common throughout dungeons. The reason why certain utility such as Heroism and battle rez are considered mandatory is because dungeons and boss encounters still aren’t designed to give other utility enough chances to shine. More on this later.
(22) Give Ret back Blessing of Sacrifice. I think talenting into Blessing of Sanctuary should replace and improve Sac rather than be a separate ability, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
(23) Bring back Turn Evil. Along with Redemption (which I’d like to talk about as well), it’s one of seven sample spells listed for paladin in the original game manual. How do I know this piece of trivia? I noticed the game manual on my shelf earlier today, dusted it off, and several minutes later I was like damn, I’m going to spend hours writing a marathon post on the forums, aren’t I. Paladins need these sort of abilities to not feel like glowy warriors, and the great thing about TE is it’s so minor it doesn’t eat much into our utility budget. The only reason to remove it is if you’re overly worried about ability count, which is easily solved by having TE replaced when you talent into Repentance (a perfect solution as Rep is a direct upgrade).
(24) Turn Evil can affect any and all undead (except Forsaken which are considered humanoid for obvious reasons). One day it suddenly didn’t work on death knights using Lichborne, and to this day I feel the same way: how incredibly arbitrary and stupid. The only reason to make a change like that is if something is incredibly absusive, which it wasn’t.
(25) Wake of Ashes also stuns aberrations (which Turn Evil can fear). Old gods and their minions are mad evil, and so it feels like I’m playing a paladin to have bonuses against this creature type. These sorts of minor changes are important because WoW has lost so many of its RPG elements over the years and we should fight to bring them back.
(26) Divine Intervention, maybe? Up to you guys. Just saying.
(27) Remove Shield of Vengeance and make Divine Protection baseline for Ret. Here I continue to normalize abilities between the specs to make paladin feel like one unified class again (and personally I prefer DP anyway). Then remove Eye for an Eye. The talent now improves Divine Protection’s damage reduction, and it could possibly incorporate elements of SoV into the mix (the bonus here is the name Eye for an Eye makes sense that way).
(28) HoJ rank two: increases the range to 20 yds. It feels disappointing to spend a PvP talent on this, and yet Ret sort of needs it to function in arena due to how the game has evolved over the years. I hesitate to say this when we’re trying to make the specs more similar to each other again, but probably only Ret should have this.
(29) On that note you may also want to give Holy rank two of each aura (except Crusader Aura) to makes them, say, 25% stronger. As much as that Dev Insights video makes the case for the devs trying to turn over a new leaf, I’m sure there will continue to be a stronger emphasis on role than I would like.
(30) Druids shouldn’t have an out-of-combat resurrection. Resto is already the best mythic+ healer and so maybe it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for it to rely on a hybrid DPS or tank for this utility. Feral and Guardian already have a rough deal, so I’d say make Ursol’s Vortex a baseline druid spell (currently only Resto has it baseline).
(31) Why do I care about such a minor spell as Redemption? Because it’s another one of those seven sample spells listed for paladin in the original game manual. Because I remember doing the first paladin quest in Elwynn Forest - Redemption was so special that we had to earn it rather than buy it from a trainer, and then only two classes on each faction had it. Redemption is important because WoW is supposed to be an RPG, and on that note I also believe only priests and paladins should have a mass rez and that it should be baseline to all specs of those classes.
(32) Profession items devalue class utility. Think about it: in reality, Arcane Intellect is only 3% intellect because when a mage is not around for something challenging like a high level mythic+, you just use this scroll. I would make these items weaker, if not remove them entirely. I like the engineering model where items tend to be a good deal worse to begin with, and then on top of that they have a chance to fail. I know Inscription in particular has been difficult to make useful after the removal of glyphs, but classes are more important than professions.
(33) On the topic of required utility such as Heroism, I think the first and best way to make them less mandatory is to make other utility across the game more attractive. We need more scary poisons, curses, and diseases to dispel, DPS and tanks with this utility should be held equally accountable as healers, and perhaps dispels should even be placed on a separate GCD. That last bit has implications for PvP, but I won’t go into that right now.
(34) I think hunter pet abilities, even from exotic pets, aren’t quite class abilities and therefore they shouldn’t be as powerful as the real thing. They probably shouldn’t have access to Heroism or battle rez at all, and their healing debuff should be 15%. Some utility compensation may be in order after a nerf like this, but that’s the way I see it.
(35) Make poisons baseline for all rogues. However, Wound Poison should have to stack 5 times to reach 25%. Mortal Stike should be the reign supreme.
(36) I’d like to warn everyone who has made it this far that I’m starting to go off the rails, but at this point I may as well get it all out my system. Blessing of Sanctuary is the only blessing that doesn’t use the new libram graphic. Fix for consistency please. Also consider renaming Hand of Hindrance to Guilt.
(37) When designing talents, I think the devs should err towards “permanent” decisions rather than constant micro decisions to be made between every boss pull or arena game. Of course these decisions aren’t actually permanent, and finding creative ways to maximize your output or utility for a boss can be a very good thing. But in general, I prefer when talents feel like you’re crafting your character for the long-term. I consider tier 45, tier 75 (minus Eye for an Eye), and tier 100 to be pretty well-designed tiers. Eye for an Eye is bad because when it’s good it’s great and when it’s bad it’s useless. In other words, the choice is entirely dependent on the situation. Word of Glory is a fun ability on its own, but it was nerfed out of PvP and is obviously the best choice in mythic+. Same problem as with E4E: there’s not even a hint of player choice here.
(38) One thing I do miss about blessings from the old days is social buffing. You’d run past a player while leveling or doing dailies and throw them Kings, and they’d toss back a Mark of the Wild. One of the failings of the Legion / BfA greater blessings is you can’t really use them that way. If you don’t understand where I’m coming from, play some Classic and you’ll see what I mean. It’s nice.
(39) Make auras only apply to party and raid members. I run around town and some random paladin’s aura is always being applied and falling off. Mildly irritating.
(40) There are too many useless buffs and debuffs that clutter our screens. Do I need to be informed for the entire week via the top-right of my interface that it’s pet battle week, or that I get bonus items from dungeons? The answer to that would be a resounding “No.” I believe there are two buffs from simply activating warmode, while the only one you should ever see is if you reach Assassin. Why is Earthlink, that stupid minor azerite trait, a buff? “I’m gonna wait until I have full stacks of EARTHLINK before I pop my cooldowns!” said no ever. Speaking of cooldowns, do I need to see three separate buffs whenever I pop Avenging Wrath? And do I really need 32 debuffs vomited on me whenever an Assassination Rogue touches me? There must be a better way. Also, the default raid and arena frames suck for various reasons.
(41) Another (very minor) UI complaints: ever since BfA, raid buffs randomly go to the left of the buff bar. If you want, bring back the consolidate buffs interface option, but otherwise buffs should sort by application date like they always have. Maybe add an option that some add-ons have to sort by remaining duration, that would be cool.
(42) Increase the pace of arena. RMP is obnoxious this expansion, but I found it infinitely more fun to play against than teams that live you to death. This isn’t only PvE items - some classes are just designed that way as well. Furthermore, double DPS (and not just rogue-mage) should at least be decent in 2’s. Variety is the spice of life, and once upon a time people loved this bracket.
Thank you for reading my WoW dissertation! As a quick disclaimer, I think Ret can be perfectly awesome if holy power isn’t scrapped and our combat-system redesigned from scratch, or if we don’t get X or Y utility ability back. The gist of this post is to get the ball rolling on the various ways to return some of that paladin class flavor that has been sacrificed over the years on the altar of specialization and role.
This was a lot of fun, but back into hibernation I go. Enjoy the patch everyone!
(Cross-posted from Items and Classes forum: https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/returning-ret-to-its-paladin-roots/232953)