Upgrading Lightsmith to a decent alternative of Hero talents

Classes Paladin
1

So, after seeing the posts about how everyone is feeling about Lightsmith, I came with ideas on how to make the hero talent better.

Lightsmith barely overall feedback is that it feels both unimpactful and clunky/not fun to play for both Hpal and Prot Paladin, on top of not fulfulling the support fantasy as well as we hoped to/

Some changes I would like to see are the following:

  • Add a weaker holy bulwark with % reduced effectiveness to the members of you party when wings are used. This doesn’t trigger with Awakening . Reasoning: When wings are used, barely anything happens. . Now this would be a decent damage prevention ability and make your wings on par with Herald’s Sun’s Avatar in Hpal, rewarding timing, same as abilities like Mastery and Virtue. For Prot Paladin I think this may not be the preferred upgrade, I recognize that, any cool ideas are welcome.
  • Remove the abilities from the GCD. Reasoning: both Hpal and Prot Pal are intensive GCD specs, this just feels clunky and unfun to use.
  • Make them attached to spenders in some form, for example: Sacred Weapons also increases damage or haste of you and your target by let’s say 1% or 0.5% everytime you use an spender to a max of 3-5 stacks. Increase Holy bulwark absorb regen the same way. Reasoning: Most LS abilities are passive, reward active usage of our abilities and make them attached to how we play/to our gameplay loop, on top of feeling GOOD to use, specially sacred weapons.
  • Make the whole damn hero talent visually appealing! Reasoning: Please.
2 Likes
2

Lightsmith is disappointing not only because it’s under tuned but

  • The extra GCDs are bad
  • the shield is weak as both an upfront shield, as well as the reapplying shield that seems more like DR almost
  • the sword is not noticeable at all
  • seasons is still unfortunately a strong choice so it’s like having another ‘meh’ maintenance buff
  • there are other things in the tree? No really they are so unnoticeable
    It’s weak, clunky, boring, not impactful and visually lacking
6 Likes
3

I feel like Power Word Shield from Priest is actually stronger nowadays. Maybe add a DR% component as well? increase the shield from 15% to 20%?

Additionally, it may seems that even after our DPS buffs, we still are behind in DPS numbers. Let’s keep Heralds the higher raw output healing option, with LS being the strongest DPS option but with damage prevention that will suit M+ environment nicely as an alternative.

1 Like
4

Yea, I was excited about the shield for mythic Plus but it’s so underwhelming.

I wish that it was JUST the shield for the active, and then the DMG could be baked in somehow. Maybe it could modify shield of the righteous to either do AOE or single target and based on the number of enemies it hits. Heck, make the tree allow us to use a two hander AND shield!

1 Like
5

Divine Guidance hits like a TRUCK. I’m only ilvl 560ish and drop 1.6mil crits on fools when 5 stacked.

6

As a Hpal, its about 8-10% of my overall in dps, which is really not much either. Not sure about prot paladin though.

Again, as a healer, Lightsmith not only severely underpowered compared to Herald (you lose about 30% of raw HPS or so), wings are noticieably weaker (by a lot), and the only pro you have is basically 20% more DPS than Herald, which doesn’t mean much since Hpal is already the lowest DPS of all healers and this meta is not a DPS healer meta, at least not yet.

Wings being weaker is actually extremely crippling, considering that healing is particularly challenging this season it seems, and that basically ALL herald talents increase your base output: 5% extra cit chance, chance of 200% bonus healing from Holy Shocks, 3% extra haste from each Dawnlight, Dawnlight AOE healing, etc etc. Holy Bulwark is extremely dissapointing in comparison, that’s why I’m suggesting a buff to make it party wide and impactful, considering we have abilities like Mass Barrier and Party-Wide Anti Magic shell now, so wings feel on powerful in the same way as Sun’s Avatar.

If LS theme is damage prevention and DPS focused it needs a buff/revamp to compete. Not even to compete, to be a viable choice, its just really far behind.

3 Likes
7

they want holy to be the pvp spec and would rather you don’t heal with paladin

8

Shhhh. Let people continue to complain so we get more buffs :joy:.

Yeah divine guidance terrible under underpowered. Bulwark so weak I can’t even see it in the meters. Needs 100% buff minimum and off gcd to even be playable.

3 Likes
9

I have played both in M+ to a reasonable high level at this point.

You are trolling if you think Holy Bulwark is nowhere near close to Sun’s avatar. You are trolling if you think LS talents are nearly as good as Herald’s.

You are exchanging party wide survivability/insane amounts of burst aoe healing for about 100k dps overall at most in a meta where DPS are doing 1M-1.5M.

LS buffs are additionally bad for the same reasons Tyr’s healing and Glimmer passive healing/dps were bad for Hpal gameplay loop.

The hero talent need a rework not to be competitive, but to be fun and feel impactful to play. If LS is about damage prevention and buffing damage, it needs serious help to compete with what Herald brings to the table, and even then in its current form AND to fulfill that fantasy as well.

LS will still feel clunky to play even if its get giga buffed by let’s say 200%.

2 Likes
10

I agree. Needs 200% minimum.

It really does need a raid buff though. Maybe 1 shield per 5 man group goes out or something.

11

I agree with most of your ideas. I think they need to focus on how the Hero Spec feels to play when you press it.

There are a couple of things I think they could do.

The weapon and shield have a travel time, so when you throw a shield at someone, there’s this weird delay before the shield is actually applied.

While that’s thematic, it contributes to that clunky feeling we’re all talking about. Even if you removed the spell from the GCD, it would still feel slow.

They could keep the same spell tuning envelope and buff the upfront shield and nerf the shield that ticks up over time to compensate. I think that would make it feel more upfront and reactive vs the empty global feeling it currently has.

If they want to go full rework on this hero tree, I think there’s a whole field of ideas.

I’ve thought about leaning into the Lightsmith theme and bringing back a new and refreshed Light’s Hammer.

Light’s Hammer

Every 60 seconds, Consecration is replaced with Light’s Hammer for 30 seconds. When the Light’s Hammer buff fades, any active Light’s Hammer effects turn into Consecration.

  • every minute your consecration turns into Light’s Hammer.
  • casting Light’s Hammer grants a buff that causes consecration casts for the next 30 seconds to recast Light’s Hammer – ie you can’t override Light’s Hammer with a consecration. For the next 30 seconds, you just move around your active Light’s Hammer.
  • after 30 seconds, any Light’s Hammer you have active, will just turn into Consecration – this is to prevent potential abuse by pressing Light’s Hammer right before it expires to extend its duration.

Hammer and Forge
While Light’s Hammer is active, Light infused weapons and bulwarks are periodically thrown to a nearby ally. Perhaps they could update the old Light’s Hammer animation, to actually have a Light infused Forge and Hammer in the middle.

This could be periodically – every x seconds.
This could be based on when you spend Holy Power.
This could be based on the type of spender used. SotR = Shield, WoG/LoD = Weapon.

I know the rework ideas are probably well and truly off the table at this point, however, it’s a cool concept they could explore if they really want to go down the route of Holy Armaments being summoned. I’m just not sure if making it passive in this way will go against the design philosophy of it being support-lite kinda spec.

1 Like
12

Not a bad idea but I would swap the shield to wog and weapon to sotr since if you are casting wog it is because you need the heals.

1 Like
13

Prot Lightsmith doesn’t need a rework just tweaks to Valiance and Fear No Evil/Excoriation.

Valiance is garbage filler that doesn’t even feel like a normal trait let alone a hero one. Increase the discount to 10 seconds if you want it to feel ok. 20 seconds to feel “heroic”

Fear No Evil/Excoriation is garbage and needs to be changed to +30% fear reduction when holding a shield / grants an extra charge of hammer of justice.

Also take Holy Armaments off the GCD or Lightsmith will always feel clunky. It’s a bad decision that makes your players feel bad for trying to make it work.

edit: Blizz baited and swiched’d me back after skipping 2 expansions because Paladin was fun to play again during TWW beta. I’m already on the fence about quitting again after tank nerfs. If they don’t smooth out Lightsmith and Prot soon I’ll be out.

1 Like
14

They’re about to be better with the “Tuning.” They don’t want Herald PVE healers. It’s now clear and I’ve been right. Lightsmith is getting an extremely huge buff. One of the moves is getting an 150% INCREASE in healing.

Yet theyre nerfing 5% AGAIN.

Nah. Its time to put the game down again. This happened during bfa. I’m over hpal getting destroyed.

15

All a healing buff does is improve lightsmith’s ability to hold agro because the animated weapons steal some of yours. I’d much rather they improve the rotation first by taking Holy Armaments off the GCD. That would almost perfect the tree.

1 Like
16

Idk if buffing a proc that currently does almost nothing by 150% is “extremely huge”…

2 Likes
17

Hammer and Anvil not only still has only 20 yds of healing, its a really really small % of our overall, so, yes you are right.

Buffing things like Divine Guidance also its a passive buffs to something that is not going to help a lot when your party is dying to a AOE burst event. Nothing in LS will help you in that situation, other than make it a little bit easier to heal yourself and a DPS if you throw a holy bulwark on them, meanwhile, Herald Sun’s Avatar can carry you through 20s with minimal healing unless its a really heavy AOE burst.

Nothing else really offsets this in LS, LS DPS is higher yeah, but DPS is not as important as making your group survive the keys right now. And in Raid LS is even less useful.

100%. You are absolutely right on that as well.

This would actually be really cool and makes a lot of sense gameplay-wise. SotR feels weak in Herald and making something like this would actually reward smart Holy Power spending. A the end of the day, I just want Lightsmith to have a real impact and feel powerful to use, since thematically I think its superior and fulfill paladin’s support fantasy.

If throughput is not LS thing, then preventing damage and dpsing should be, but for that we really need ways to reward correct play and we need LS changes to buffs its capability to handle high burst situations: for example, Disc priest still has Rapture which is a really cool ability, Mage has prismatic barrier, DK has party wide AMS, and so on, as well as providing ways of min maxing to those who want to maximize DPS potential and just not 'you press a button, now you do 20% more DPS passively".

18

A 300% SP shockwave that heals up to five targets within 20 yards is stronger than a baseline chain heal. The problem is that it procs on a judgment crit, which is just not reliable enough for an AoE heal of that size. (My current judgment crit chance is 32%.)

The intention seems to be to improve a nice-to-have extra healing event, but the whole problem is that the spec’s on-demand healing still doesn’t hold a candle to what Herald brings to the tune of 20% to over 30% of our total healing between Dawnlight and Avatar of the Sun. It’s not even in the same ballpark.

If Hammer and Anvil procced automatically off of an infusion of light-empowered judgment on the other hand, we might be getting somewhere, because we can plan for its use more reliably.

Setting this aside, as the healing spec with the lowest DPS currently, LS would need to boost our DPS throughput by 50%+ for it to even start being worth considering on those grounds. I don’t think they’re actually serious about that though, or Holy would be seeing the same sort of boosts Prot is getting to the DPS from those abilities this Tuesday, when they’re gutting us like a fish.

2 Likes
19

lightsmith and totemic have to be the worst designed trees in the entire game. Im just amazed they were greenlit and oushed to live in this state.

2 Likes
20

As an update, The buffs to Hammer and Anvil and Divine Guidance are noticeable enough, though I dont think are enough to make LS comparable to Herald. It may look stronger than what it actually is, since Hammer and Anvil procs on crits and this week affix gives in return a lot of crit chance.

On the other hand, its just a lot of passive healing that you barely have to pay any attention to, and as a healer, this is not desirable on most cases since it takes away agency as to whom you want to heal and when.