Because it was never finished in the first place. And the people who worked on the initial design are likely no longer around.
A bit of a tangent; but to my understanding the class team is constantly being shuffled around, for whatever reason. And supposedly the people responsible for class design are doing double duty and are working on something else at the same time. This, of course, leads to not enough time being spent on classes, or crippling bugs being left in for a long time.
When they finally get time to put the finishing touches on classes, the people who made it are no longer around and the new guys have different ideas in mind. And so classes are in a constant state of flux and feeling “half-baked”.
This is a good idea. Might actually see some play. Right now it is a completely dead talent. Which only “breaks even” with SoV if you take more than 200% of your health over the course of DP every minute. There is no scenario where that happens.
Would it still provide the 30% spender damage bonus? If so it sounds completely pants on head overpowered.
It was.
It wasn’t changed to ST vs AoE until a week or two before the Ret rework went live. Prior to that it was a playstyle choice.
TL;DR - Holystrike build was a traditional Ret Paladin, focusing on big melee crits with high self-sustain. Radiant build was a mid-range Paladin with very strong DoTs. Similar to how Enh functions with their Storm vs Elemental build.
The Holystrike talents only affected melee abilities (plus Judgment and HoW). Which excluded Final Verdict, so you’d actually use Justicar’s Vengeance, which at the time naturally did Holystrike damage and it was the only spender to do so. The healing it did was based on the damage it caused, rather than being percentage based.
Physical Prescence plus Blades of Light made Crusading Strikes do almost as much damage As Blade of Justice does today. Doing nearly 3 times (120%ap vs 48%ap) more much damage CSAA does today, while also generating holy power on every hit (rather than every other). It was kind of absurdly strong.
The Radiant talents provided a very substantial boost to DoT damage, about 56% (30% from Penitence and 20% from Searing Light). Expurgation was also a lot stronger back then (90%ap over 6 sec).
Execution Sentence was considered a DoT. Truth’s Wake was also a bit stronger if i recall correctly. A full radiant build did >50% of its damage through DoTs.
Here is a picture of what Ret's old Talent Tree used to look like
That said, i do not fault them for scrapping all this in favor of ST vs AoE, because the Radiant build was clearly not finished and there was no chance in the universe it was going to be done before the launch of the patch. You’d ignore every single button to just spam BoJ as fast and hard as you could. Ignoring even spenders, because there was no Radiant spender (Burning Crusade did not affect DS at the time).
So instead the playstyle of the Holystrike and Radiant builds were merged into one, the one we have today, and the talents would dictate your damage profile rather than playstyle.
Sorry, should have mentioned that Blizzard just updated the patch notes to partially revert the buff to Lightforged Blessing.
