Sunlight Sword has been an absolute blast to play with

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
1

Sunlight just got changed from Holy damage to normal damage on live, stripping it of its spellpower scaling.

I know this was done because it’s an Easter egg item and not intended to do what it did but hear me out — it was really freakin cool. A LOT of us in the pally discord, shockadin in particular of course, were buzzing like never before over it. We’ve had tons of people coming in to ask about it and start the Khonsu grind to get it. It was crazy cool, thematic, and nothing else worked like it. We spent the weekend testing to add it to the sim, theorycrafting, and playing with it.

It was strong for PVP but required you to be in melee range and not CC’d to use it. It was strong for prog but didn’t scale well into BIS gear, instead ending up right around where every other spec was. It was crazy how well it fit in with everything else. The only outlier we found was a weapon swap tech with 2p T4 that had you using Leogan to generate holy power stacks, then swapping back to Sunlight until you need to refresh them/build them again. It’s like hunter melee weaving levels of play required to do it. That’s easily preventable by making the stacks fall off upon weapon swapping to a 1H.

Here’s the key points on what makes it so good for paladins:

  • Scales 1:1 with spellpower
  • Seems to ignore armor
  • Holy damage so all the benefits of that damage type
  • Seal of the Crusader’s damage reduction effect only applied to the weapon’s “base damage” and not to the scaled portion from spell power. This is what REALLY made it effective and honestly made it crazy fun and unique. We had a reason to actually use that seal as our primary damage seal!

That’s really all there is to it. Extra hits do well with it, attack speed does well with it. Can’t use weapon skills with it (CS, DS, etc) though.

The sword takes a lot of effort to get and requires a certain level of skill and gear in getting past Khonsu. Alternatively, you could let us “power it up” back to its original form with a raid drop that can be used on the sword to transform it and give it its holy damage back, if you feel it’s too easy to get or that it should come from the raid.

I know this is a weird item and you guys probably don’t want to deal with it because it doesn’t work like so many other things in the game… but this feels kind of similar to seal twisting. It was a bug. And people liked it. And now’s it been legitimized.

Sunlight doesn’t seem very game breaking at the moment. It’s just good for prog and then it falls in line pretty quick due to us not using any set bonuses with it at BIS.

Really appreciate the work you guys do and this phase has been a blast so far! Let us keep our super cool thematic sword tho please haha!

17 Likes
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Sunlight fun.

Give back the % scaling.

Bring it into balance.

5 Likes
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Dang they fixed it before we got to see a rouge in boomy gear build? that sux lol

1 Like
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I don’t think a SP Rogue would be a viable user of this.

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Blizzard devs just don’t like players to have fun.

2 Likes
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Shockadin finally found something to have fun with. Clearly not allowed.

2 Likes
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Na, this needed a nerf. Shockadins were abusing this to destroy people in wpvp without recourse. It was fun 'cause y’all got to dumpster people.

1 Like
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new devs get irrationally irate when we play how we want to instead of exactly how they demand we play

3 Likes
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"My healer should be a pvp god with strong burst damage that can 1v1 anyone " is certainly a take

2 Likes
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I hope you have a similar problem with tank shaman for consistency :slight_smile:

4 Likes
11

I’d rather they come up with a Weapon Enchant that only Paladins can get by using an altar in New Avalon…

Enchant Weapon - Inquisitor’s Fervor

Has the same visual as the ‘blade glow’ on the Sunlight Sword

Potentially; depending on how the Enchanting system can impact an item’s base stats:

Reduces weapon damage (base) by 100% sets weapon damage to [holy damage based on weapon swing time; just like Seal of Righteous does it; slower the weapon the more the seal hits for. But I would probably cap the max damage you can get to 50% of our Holy school].

Cost would be a Crimson Orb, which is crafted at the altar using a Blood of Heroes and Righteous Orb.

((If you’re wondering how it might work, think of the Enchanter’s pavilion you could build in your Garrison so that your non-Enchanter characters could enchant the illusions and D/E stuff.))

I dislike something like the Sunlight Sword because it’s a “required item” to make a spec viable. - I disliked the ZG set being required to Shock. But that was largely fixed with the Shoulder Glyphs.

By making it an enchant, we can add it to any weapon, and by basing the Holy Damage on the swing speed we can account for 1hand and 2hand Shockadin. - I personally like 2hand Paladin because it feels more “paladin’y”.

12

definitely was fun but a weap scaling off spell power can be really broken for a lot of classes who have even more sp than paladins. locks were hitting with it for 4k. it was broken in pvp on the class I tried it on as well.

it was fun but shouldn’t have stuck around in the game long term.

maybe a cool thread to pick up for classic+ though

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This mechanic would allow Shockadin to do well and needs to be looked at.

It was a great umph weapon that shows proof of concept and just needed the gear as well and attention to work.

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Apply a 50% damage nerf to it in PVP then or something, I don’t care. I just want it for PVE.

2 Likes
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Bump cause I agree with the general message here, I too enjoy shockadin and would like to not only see a bit more support added for the class but also the addition of spellpower weapons for ALL classes to utilize, meaning spellpower swords, maces, daggers, axes, staves, and polearms. Heck add fist weapons, bows, guns, and crossbows in there too.

Never have we gotten to play around with this kind of mechanic before and although it was unintentional i think blizz may have stumbled upon something truly LEGENDARY as far as classic gameplay is concerned.

It would also help to support some undersupported specs OTHER than shockadin and would open up the avenue for new possibilities.

Spellpower rogues? Full Spellpower Flask set warriors? Elemental shamans being able to melee, boomkins being able to melee, etc etc etc

Also agree entirely, Blizz has all but abandoned PvP balance and the PvP events/BGs are literally empty. They even stated themselves they would be entirely focusing on PvE balance and everything else will simply be a consequence of that balancing whether it makes one class OP or not.

Besides this point, There are Warlock Tanks who can endlessly heal/dot you up, druids who can use boomkin and have thorns/tank pieces and talents for tanking and using frenzied regen to stay alive almost indefinitely. Almost any class that CANNOT heal/tank effectively has atleast one build that enables them to drop someone from 100-0 in a couple seconds. Seen Spriests do it, seen mages do it, seen hunters do it.

They honestly should continue to focus on PvE gameplay. (also why the weapon was removed because it was overpowered for Shockadins in raid with their melee hits doing bonkers damage see Aurathiel’s Logs) Although if we’re being honest it just put them in line with all the other DPS, they weren’t WAYYY above every other DPS or even every other paladin but it basically made the spec viable in raid whereas right now it falls so far behind that they exlcuded it from the pre-raid BiS sims…

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There aren’t enough in existence for this to have ever had a real impact.

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(also why the weapon was removed because it was overpowered for Shockadins in raid with their melee hits doing bonkers damage see Aurathiel’s Logs)

I wasn’t even grossly above other people in my raid, too. I was just up there at the top with the others who were topping charts. There were several of us doing around 6k dps, give or take. It sims higher but that’s if you’re on the boss 100% of the time and don’t need to do mechanics AND that’s also assuming we have it implemented perfectly into the sim. It’s a weird weapon that works differently from a lot of things. Jh (the guy that implemented it on there) has already found multiple bugs as a result of implementing it.

But yeah, most of your damage is loaded into your auto attack. If you cannot auto attack, you cannot do meaningful damage.

2 Likes
18

Unfortunately this says alot about how far back shockadin has fallen when the melee damage is a majority of what you’re outputting (although i’m also sure there was some give and take when making the build better for 1h melee hits vs pure shockadin damage)

And yeah I agree, at best it brought us up to speed with the rest of raid DPS it wasn’t even outrageously powerful, simply very good for our specific build. (didn’t even log as high as some of the highest twisting paladins)

Also love the testing you did with the weapon before it was nerfed, glad to have paladins like you among us exploring every option of the class instead of just going with the meta. Bravo! :clap:

1 Like
19

If tank shaman can be immortal, burst, and infinite seal heal, then yes they should be nerfed. However, they don’t have the healing or full immunity in a pvp scenario that shockadin did, and are still very easily killed by a good range caster. Also, there’s like 10 threads on shaman complaints, so take it there.

The other issue on the pve side was the weapon itself was available as a progression item, that was able to bring a healing spec up to a top dps spec (for progression purposes). Adding a top dps that can also burst heal in a pinch, when there are hard dps checks currently just gave too much of an edge, especially for an item that could be obtained pre-raid.

I’m not against shockadin, but this item needed and deserved a nerf.

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Consistency is much to ask for :slight_smile: