It was so great. I don’t know if it would be too powerful in the current meta, but I loved the feel of it. As a healer I couldn’t just completely lean on my ret buddy, but I knew that if there was a giant party-wide damage mechanic, he probably had a charge available to help me top those health bars up, without eating up all his damage potential or GCDs
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Personally, I like that they are finally defining a role for Paladins, and if this is what we are going to be defined around… hopefully it is strong.
In terms of DPS being able to off heal, I think it’s more of an everyone else’s Mythic+/Delve problem and not really a Paladin one…
- Second Wind on Warriors is disgustingly broken.
- DH and Lock Self healing has been historically overtuned.
- Even Mage AoE Barriers had times of being grossly OP. (SL Legendary)
However, with that being said, it does feel like there’s still a few problem talents.
- Selfless Healer, with a better additional secondary effect, should be on a choice node with Healing Hands
- Seal of the Crusader should be completely redesigned
- Maybe Judgement of Light vs Lightforged Blessing would be a good choice node as well
Ultimately, it’s still a good first pass, but if/when some of these talents get nerfed, i think the lack of Paladins’ emphasis on Auras, Seals and Blessings is going to show how limited the Class Tree design can be.
Example: I’m a lot more excited as a Holy Paladin for Blessed Calling because I have Blessing of Seasons…
Only really familiar with M+, where perhaps meets talents seen more healing output (especially from less constrained LoH) usage, but there are least that seems unlikely unless you’re considering their defensives as “healing” or Impending Victory and/or Bloodthirst as “passive”.
A Ret should be pulling at least some 20% more healing than a Fury Warrior on average, or about as much without cost (e.g., passive and oGCDs only) as a Fury Warrior does even with GCDs included.
I don’t mind the general sustain, per se, but I would mind if, later on in compensation, any of our active healing or burst damage were lost.
???
Neither high-end raiders nor M+ pushers are even typically taking it. For those that do, it typically amounts to less than 6% of their overall HPS.
Which is hardly relevant in itself to present tuning. Presently, only Affliction is putting out particularly high self-sustain (and still only about an 1/8th to 1/12th of a healer’s).
That one still is OP. Until very high disc priest ilvl relative to raid stamina values, it puts out more than Luminferous Barrier (and twice as much as Rallying Cry regardless) despite also bundling 15% magic mitigation until fully consumed and lasting for up to a minute instead of 10s and reducing the duration of magical DoTs against the raid by 25%. 2.35x Rallying Cry’s eHP bonus vs. magic, for up to 6x the duration, on the same CD.
I don’t mind the idea but i worry about the execution.
Ideally the idea you want a ret paladin would he because you have those extra heals to make the run safer overall, if at the cost of taking longer since the ret paladin, for bringing the off heals should have lower highend damage to compensate.
In practice however Blizzard never really can make that balance so it swings hella hard in either being absolutely useless healing but insane damage, OP healing but absolutely terrible damage, or pathetic healing with nonexistent damage.
Ideally they’d be more like broken Aug was in S2, except without the buffs, where they could occasionally drop a pretty strong heal from a proc, no HP cost. But the way its designed looks like very very weak passive healing is what they are referring to as the support healer which is kinda meh.
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Yeah, they should, but they don’t.
It doesn’t in Mythic
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/38#metric=hps&class=DPS&aggregate=amount&dataset=95
It doesn’t in Heroic
https://www.warcraftlogs.com/zone/statistics/38#metric=hps&class=DPS&aggregate=amount&dataset=95&difficulty=4
Hell, Arms is doing just as much as Ret.
In M+, you might find it in you to use Lightforge Blessing but you abandon something else such as recompense, obduracy or some.
Fact is, it shouldn’t be close regardless of Lightforge.
Like, the freaking anti-thesis of paladins (Dk’s) are healing more than we are, the hell is this 
Your utilities as a DPS is secondary to your primary role.
Your DPS shouldn’t be conditional/dependent on the tools you bring, unless the spec is explicitly designed as such (Augvoker).
It’s not a DND game or a turn based game where these things would matter.
Do they reduce every throughput shaman has because they have a range kick with the shortest CD in the game? No.
As such, if they decide that what you bring, outside of your main role, is more healing than so it is and it shouldn’t affect your damage.
The important thing is to own those decision and lean into them once they are made.
The thing is, they homogenized the classes soo much that it becomes hard to justify those decisions.
If you’re gonna make kick/interupts such a crucial part of dungeon, how do you justify priest being the sole healer not having the option to even have one…
How do you create compelling and competitive utility between a class which core identity revolves around this very thing and a warrior?
How is it fair afterward that one has more?
It’s not, but it needs to be in WoW.
So how?
You need to switch the paradigm, if Paladin utility comes from helping others in your group maybe Warrior utility should focus on hindering you enemies.
And to some extent, Blizz seemed to have started to pick up on those ideas.
Providing both with group incentives, only differently.
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Not sure I like this tbh. Two things are going to happen now, neither of which are good. They nerf our damage to compensate or they nerf the healing to end up being useless and we back to where we were before.
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Read my comment above.
It’s unlikely they would, that’s not how they’ve been doing things lately.
We’re not in classic.
Look at Shadow Priest statistic as off-healing.
Why aren’t they at the complete bottom with augvoker if that’s how they compute things?
It’s non-sensical, I don’t know where this belief comes from.
If you have to be concerned about something as a tradeoff for this, it should be other utilities, which none are really impacted.
To the contrary, they are all mostly improved.
And let’s not forget that they removed Aura of retribution without any compensation.
And while it was the good call, IMO, to remove it, it should also have been at the cost of some utilities being buffed as well.
So it’s not like it’s coming out of nowhere either.
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I think if I wanted to be a healer, I would have gone holy. If I wanted to be a support spec, I’d go Aug. I like the theme of Paladin, but I want to dps, and ret is their only option for that. If you want another support spec, sure, makes sense you’d make it a Paladin, but then make a new spec; don’t ruin ret.
Ret is short for Retribution, a word which has no connotations or connections to support. I like being able to toss out the occasional life saving utility, but the focus of a dps spec should be to do damage.
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I have Seasons macro’d into SotR and WoG and only ever cast it on myself, on cooldown.
Look at me, I’m the fast one now.
I don’t necessarily disagree. I’m just saying how it does work in WoW, or rather how Blizzard claims it’s supposed to work but then doesn’t really because their balance folks are terrible at their jobs.
Like the ideal, from Blizzard’s perspective should be, “A Ret paladin with it’s defensive utility won’t be blasting the crazy high dps numbers, but they will be significantly harder to kill thanks to that defensive utility.” the balance being, a slightly lower run overall, for the benefit of being a much safer run. Do note, I specifically said “slightly lower” overall, not nonexistent terrible that makes them terrible at their primary role, which is damage.
Blizzard again is just terrible at balancing so it swings terribly, not just for Ret but for every class just about all the time. So this ideal situation is functionally impossible meet in practice.
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It haven’t work like that for I don’t know many years.
This is not something they communicated in recent years either.
Empirically they don’t work like that.
If it did SP would not have been so strong in one of the season in DF.
Neither would have been Havoc DH with its leech.
The idea simply doesn’t hold water.
They did that in Classic, TBC and Wrath for sure but even in Cataclysm is started to fade away.
And it coincidentally happened at the same time they started rolling back mana as a ressources and replacing it with HP, Focus, soul shard, etc.
Those systems started to streamline damage as you weren’t limited by mana and had the agency to generate your damage ressources.
True, although it did get generally better in DF.
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I’m pretty excited to get some passive healing since nearly everything we do requires resources or a GCD. It always felt wrong to see my self-healing at the bottom of every dungeon/mythic/raid/BG as a Paladin, unless I have to WoG myself several times a pull I get out-healed by rogues and warriors.
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AGREE!
It was so good in 5 player content! I loved it.
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I completely forgot this ever even existed in this form but you guys instantly made me remember how much better this was.
+1 for this style of gameplay!
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I do think part of Ret’s utility should consist of being a “support healer,” but most of our healing in m+ will come from Lightforged Blessing. While I’m glad that’s getting buffed, I’m a lot less impressed with the other passive healing talents, especially the ST ones.
Ret’s off-healing in PvP, meanwhile, will still have egregious modifiers. Basically everyone we heal has a permanent Sharpen Blade applied to them, and that’s before actual healing debuffs + dampening. WoG and FoL are core abilities we learn on the way to level 10 — how is it acceptable that they’re so bad? Empyreal Ward will be very strong, but if it means the rest of our off-healing sucks, then that’s too high a price to pay.
Holy Pal is going to be broken in PvP on Tues. It’s already the best arena healer while the class tree revamp is a PvP buff. Ret needs a PvP buff, Holy doesn’t.
More thoughts on the class tree
- The Prot talents in the class tree annoy me.
- Rebuke should have the same range as HoJ.
- A Just Reward is a missed opportunity to do something interesting with Cleanse.
- Turn Evil and its follow-up talents should be consolidated into one node. PvP builds don’t have enough points with this new tree, and that’s with a bunch of dead talents!
- Divine Spurs should reduce Steed’s cooldown by 30%. Or, why not just reduce Steed’s baseline CD by 5-10 sec and axe this talent.
- Sac should be a 1-min CD, its follow-up should be Recompense / Righteous Protection, and Worthy Sacrifice should be removed.
- Lead the Charge should be removed because it’s kind of lame, and more importantly so that PvP builds can go straight from Holy Aegis to Stoicism. Or just add another path to Stoicism.
- Vengeful Wrath should cost 1 point. (And why is HoW so weak without a Blessing of An’she proc, and is it a good thing that it’s not part of the AoE rotation?)
- Lightbearer should apply to our own healing. It makes me feel like I’m not supposed to heal myself.
- Light’s Revocation should make Divine Shield not a Forbearance ability at all.
And the Ret tree
- How is it that this tree already needs so much work again?
- You have to skip JoJ in the first gate. It’s that or Expurgation, which is not a choice.
- Righteous Cause: 6% per holy power seems low. Try 8-10%? It’s kind of a mandatory talent in PvP right now with how Ret has to play.
- So many trap talents! JV, Inquisitor’s Ire, Sanctify, Improved Judgment, Divine Hammer, Divine Auxiliary…
- Divine Protection, like WoG and FoL, feels bad to press in PvP. Even if Empyreal Ward and Light’s Revocation solve some of Ret’s survivability woes, DP should be 20% so that it doesn’t feel awful.
- Aegis of Protection should additionally increase DP’s duration by 2-4 sec. (Trying to make this an actual alternative to SoV.)
- Final Reckoning and Execution Sentence should be combined into one ability: targeted FR that applies ES to your primary target and hits targets around it.
- The final tier should be more about playstyle choice than ST vs. AoE. Searing Light should deal more damage to the primary target, while Divine Arbiter should deal more AoE damage and with a larger radius.
- Another talent that needs a larger radius / hitbox is Blade of Vengeance. BoJ when used against a target with a large model doesn’t hit the mobs around it. It’s really annoying, and I believe Hammer of Light has this issue as well. Remember when our entire Divine Storms used to project forward 20 yds, or when it had a 15-yd radius after using TV? How did it come to Ret having tiny ranges on its AoE abilities.
Hero talents
- Templar’s utility talents are better than Herald’s. I’d like to see a rework or buff to Illumine / Will of the Dawn.
- Solar Grace should increase haste by an additional 1% per stack. Templar already got a nice haste buff to Undisputed Ruling that will help make up for the loss of Seal of Alacrity. Losing haste sucks.
PvP talents
- Ret needs more of them, especially stuff targeted at 2v2 and Blitz viability.
- Aura of Reckoning should be moved to the Ret tree, to a node that PvP Ret builds don’t care about in order to free up a PvP talent. (And PvE Ret builds can pretend it doesn’t exist.)
- Sanct would feel really, really nice off the GCD.
- Lumi should simply apply all the time to allies in our aura.
- Hallowed Ground could make BoJ also spawn a Cons under our feet.
- Spreading the Word should include appropriate effects for Spellwarding and Sanctuary. Currently Spellwarding acts like BoP and reduces physical damage. Sanct could dispel a second ally within our aura of the same effect.
Bugs
- Hammer of Light and SoV reset the swing-timer.
- Hammer of Light doesn’t generate stacks of Crusade when triggered by Light’s Deliverance.
- Will of the Dawn’s 5% passive movement speed doesn’t stack with active movement speed buffs.
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Not to rain on your parade but Lightforged Blessing is only getting buffed for Prot/Holy. It’s staying the same for Ret.
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Something something, give rets their chunky flash of light or wog heals back again. Who cares if some turbo high end players can do healerless keys, they’re a fraction of a fraction of a percent of actual gameplay experiences.
What is Arthas? He’s an angry shiny ret boi that bonks undead and heals things while being invincible thanks to wc3s ridiculous divine shield. Class fantasy in a nutshell.
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Really? Huh. According to the notes, it’s supposed to be 3% for all specs.
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The Wowhead talent calc also says 3% for Ret. We’ll see tomorrow.
But yea, a lot of the other healing talents are trash. Why would I take A Just Reward when I can spend that point on something better? Why would I take Holy Ritual unless I’m forced into by pathing? I’m all for this sort of utility, but this revamped tree really needed a good second pass.
I’d be fine with it starting at melee range if, like DH, there were a Class talent to extend it — i.e., available to all specs.
It is initially basically just a bash, after all. And it doesn’t make much sense to force any of the specs out of their way to collect their mere melee interrupt.
That seems excessive.
I’d prefer the latter for both.
I imagine that’s part of the “support” fantasy they’re going for, while also likely being intended as a way to keep that “support” less durable in their own right, instead both sending and receiving resources?
Agreed.
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