Outside of melee wings, Crusader Strike is simply a bad button. It’s a do-nothing rotation tax whose sole purpose is to help you get to your good abilities. Thing is, our good abilities (judgement, holy shock) already had short cooldowns. So we nerf our good abilities by up to 80% to bring in a bad rotation tax? Imagine nerfing eviscerate for rogues by 80% and adding a do nothing tax they have to press before each finisher to increase the damage of it by 80% - this is what crusader strike is.
I’m fine with melee hpal, Crusader strike is just bad and I hate nerfing good abilities to bring it back. If you actually have healing to do, you may end up preferring flash of light anyway since it actually heals. I have two solutions.
Easy solution: Revert nerfs to holy shock and judgement. Make Crusdaer Strike → shield of the righteous your mana efficient package you use when there isn’t much healing. No cd on crusader strike, no buffs to it, but make it regen mana. So if you have downtime you just crusader strike spam damage efficiently.
hard solution: Keep nerfs to holy shock and judgement, but make Crusader strike feel equally good and valuable to press as those abilities. This would require putting your thinking cap on like triggering a flash of light on lowest health target, or a mini jadefire stomp aura buff for a while, etc. Something so it’s not a pure rotation tax.
Minor note for pvp or other scenarios where you can’t or don’t want to be in melee. The only justification for the status quo nerfs to holy shock and judgement is that crusader strike will give us the CD back. But if we can’t get into melee, we’ve just eaten the full 80% nerf, and some of us are celebrating it? makes no sense to me.
Agreed. I’m not against Crusader Strike existing in some fashion as a useful part of our healing kit, but “a super weak single-target auto-attack swing that does zero healing and eats all our GCDs” is not useful, or contributing to our healing kit.
despite the us vs them arguements seemingly overtaking the discussion, I think most of us are in the camp that Crusader strike coming back is fine but not as a sacrifice to the current state of holy paladin. I want it back as incentive to be in melee, or as you stated a highly mana efficient higher dps/lower healing rotation during low damage.
Fully agree. We have choice nodes, lets make use of them. No need, absolutely NO NEED, to go nerf the core rotation of caster holy to implement melee. CHOICE NODES DAMMIT.
I hope blizz will listen to reason, but history has taught us otherwise. This so easily could have just been a talent choice to reflect whichever playstyle you like, not force it on either side. We all are paladins, there is room for all play style if blizzard put any effort into things. I don’t see how even the melee paladin camp is happy with this, it literally adds nothing, just screws the rotation to add a filler button, I thought they were trying to prune pointless button pushing?!?
I played the latest beta and the change is BAD. We lost cooldown just to get them back through Crusader Strike, they aren’t even better. Just a direct nerf to all. I have thought a good solution though. First, Avenging Crusade needs to give Crusader Strike Permanent, melee attack that does 1 holy power. Now change Might of The Crusader into Wisdom of the Crusader and now Crusader strikes returns mana! Excellent, now we can choose HPS and DPS output or Mana Regen through that choice node and choose the playstyle with our Wings choice node. revert all cooldown nerfs.
I hope you like my changes, and if so I recommend we present a united front where we want the cooldown changes reverted, make CS perma upon speccing into Avenging wrath, and changing Might of the Crusader into Wisdom of the Crusader. It just works.
I had to put auto attack button at the number 1 slot on my action bar as crusader strike use to preform that function. Crusader strike was not just some useless button, as you seem to think, it is a critical part of play. It’s not about generating holy power. Not everything is about YOUR STYLE OF GAME PLAY!!!