[7.0] New Paladin Abilities and Talents

[Morally Grey Storm]

Blizzard is the definition of one step forward, two steps back.

maybe it's some funky stepdancing they are so engaged in ?

[Teleros]

This might all be some justification for raising the gold cap and putting in more gold sinks (you will need to purchase a new inscription item by a player to switch now, possibly expensive as well) but i dont understand the reasoning to hide it as basically saying we dont want you to switch talents too often, but at the same time you need to because the new talent tree only allows you do to so much unless you DO switch between them constantly.

to me it seems like a scapegoat in order to justify another gold sink because there is not a single class or spec out there who does not need to change on the regular for all types of content. limiting it to a item OR being at home does not really allow the current talent tree to function at all the way it was made and is continuing to shape up.

I doubt it - loads of people raid whilst not being anywhere close to the gold cap etc. My thought when I read about the cost was "oh, like the alchemy cauldrons" we used to have. So expensive enough that individual players won't run around with stacks of them for their own personal use, but cheap enough that guilds will have them for raids and such.

= + =

Also, kinda possible that with this change Final Verdict is now the best talent option in the Lv15 row, yes?

Frankly I expect FV to be the default choice in all PvE content anyway, unless there's a dungeon or raid boss with no (or insignificant) adds.

= + =

maybe it's some funky stepdancing they are so engaged in ?

Dance Studio confirmed for Legion :O ?

[ruiizu]

would you not prefer it over aoe we're going to posess come Legion?

Maybe if Consecration weren't a talent.

I had this whole big thing typed up about the new respec cost and accidentally lost the whole post. What a bunch of crap though, creating a nuisance just for the sake of "reasons" does nothing to help the player experience. Honestly all it's going to mean is raiders will carry huge stacks of respec reagents while PvPers will only queue from "safe" areas and world quest people can just suck it up and deal with it. Because the questing experience really needed to be worse.

[Morally Grey Storm]

Maybe if Consecration weren't a talent.

Precisely.

We wanted and begged for Concecration back as baseline, but alas.

I had this whole big thing typed up about the new respec cost and accidentally lost the whole post. What a bunch of crap though, creating a nuisance just for the sake of "reasons" does nothing to help the player experience. Honestly all it's going to mean is raiders will carry huge stacks of respec reagents while PvPers will only queue from "safe" areas and world quest people can just suck it up and deal with it. Because the questing experience really needed to be worse.

Well here's to hoping they realise they fethed up with one, otherwise it'll be slightly bit awful and mildly irritating.
They are pretty professional though, so I'm positive they'll fix this.

[Deleted]

Can someone with beta access please comment on this new issue:
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/topic/4...et-me-keep-it/

It sounds like we will no longer be able to change our talents on the fly (for example while questing). That is absolutely ridiculous. Ret has to choose between ST-build or AoE-build. I don't want to go back to Dalaran every two minutes just to change my talents without cost (the scribe thing will be expensive enough).
Devs are really out of their minds it seems.

The blue i saw was on the US forums so i didn't bother posting anything, but i do think they are insane. I don't have a big preference where the pendulum lands but they can't have it half way like this.
I dislike the design because it doesn't work in one way or the other. With this design, i can't test various talents per boss fight. This will happen to many people. So, theres the inscription item. If its cheap, it will just reset things to the WoD design, if its expensive it will create trains from mages portals to warlock summons and it will simply be a huge bother.

I don't think they can go with this design. If they want talent choices to matter, i only see one way to make it work, wich is to have your trainer give you one talent reset everyday.

Because the problem here is that this design is too much in between. You can't just say: ok i need to commit to these talents for the whole raid night. If we are still expected to maximise the talents per fighter rather than per raid night, as i said before it will be a bother and will create alot of town trains. It's kind of ridiculous. They have to opt one way or another and design the raids accordingly. We are either expected to choose talents per boss or per raid. Giving the choice of both will make players choose the method that will offer the least resistance from the boss. And as such "choo choo" to town every couple of tries.
What i see of the new sugestion does not make talents more of a choice, but rather more of a bother.

[Huntingbear_grimbatol]

When huntingbear joins in on the naysay crowd you KNOW its going to be bad.

I've played through multiple versions of Ret on the Alpha/Beta during the winter and spring, I really don't mind something being clunky and I actually enjoy the "colossus smash" gameplay- makes ret feel a bit more coordinated than before. However Ret still has the same problems as it did before, lack of aoe burst, lack of dps control, severe limitations (mastery aoe caped at 3 targets, wtf?), no real raid tools anymore and finally we don't have any mobility except a talent row and they stripped our ranged abilities + execute.

If I were to compare the current state of Ret with anything it would be a worse Arms warrior... Try playing arms (or fury) warrior through the artifact weapon quest line on beta and you'll understand what I'm on about, Fury warrior can talent into having 3-4 dps cds and most of them is on a 1 minute cd. They also got a very strong raid cd and charge, heroic leap (with talent variations).

The saving grace of Rets earlier in Alpha was Greater Blessings and the level 100 talent for them, since they scrapped it I don't see any reason why someone would ever bring a ret over a warrior to raid. Not to crush any dreams or be a doomsday fool or anything like that but Ret is truly in a desperate situation, 9 classes can be melee (not including double warrior or dk specs and trippel rogue specs) and from what I've seen and experienced on Alpha Ret is one of the absolute worst raiding specs atm.


Here's a few things that should happen to make ret easier to balance out and more wanted in raids:
- Judgement debuff changed to a buff on the player- same effect.
- Increase the Holy Power cap to 10 or scrap Holy Power (unlikely to be scrapped this late)
- Some form of raid CD, seriously we're a hybrid class and we got no raid cds but pure classes do? #logic
- Bring inn a short cd dps boost like Seraphim (without the Holy Power cost) and some form of AoE burst like Bladestorm (maybe a talent that makes Consecration have a 30sec cd but deals 500% damage)
- Mobility... make Long arm of the Law baseline or something, but have it trigger of something else- maybe Hand of Freedom.

[Deleted]

The saving grace of Rets earlier in Alpha was Greater Blessings and the level 100 talent for them, since they scrapped it I don't see any reason why someone would ever bring a ret over a warrior to raid.

Welcome back bear long time no see in the ret theads.
But what you said is a very astute summery on how things look at the moment. When I look back at my raiding history I often had discussions with my raid leaders on whom to bring for progress and seldom I told them to take me instead of the second row war or DK when we had a holy paladin available. It was often better to bring the lesser skilled players due to the superior tool kits than me as a ret who only brought worse tools and redundant buffs.
My current raid lead was planning for 2 rets in the setup until I told him about scrapped Greater Blessings (he´s a couple of builds behind). Now he´s not even sure if he will bring one of us should enough of the core team be available...

Funfact: He threatened to kick me and my fellow from the raid should we ever play with Equality. Roughly translated he said: "Should I ever catch you retards playing with Equality you had been part of this raid for the longest time. You know I will catch you. I´m healing your sorry asses... I don´t care if it does a shit load of DMG or if it is working as intended. YOU WONT!"

[Ulthane]

I've played through multiple versions of Ret on the Alpha/Beta during the winter and spring, I really don't mind something being clunky and I actually enjoy the "colossus smash" gameplay- makes ret feel a bit more coordinated than before. However Ret still has the same problems as it did before, lack of aoe burst, lack of dps control, severe limitations (mastery aoe caped at 3 targets, wtf?), no real raid tools anymore and finally we don't have any mobility except a talent row and they stripped our ranged abilities + execute.

If I were to compare the current state of Ret with anything it would be a worse Arms warrior... Try playing arms (or fury) warrior through the artifact weapon quest line on beta and you'll understand what I'm on about, Fury warrior can talent into having 3-4 dps cds and most of them is on a 1 minute cd. They also got a very strong raid cd and charge, heroic leap (with talent variations).

The saving grace of Rets earlier in Alpha was Greater Blessings and the level 100 talent for them, since they scrapped it I don't see any reason why someone would ever bring a ret over a warrior to raid. Not to crush any dreams or be a doomsday fool or anything like that but Ret is truly in a desperate situation, 9 classes can be melee (not including double warrior or dk specs and trippel rogue specs) and from what I've seen and experienced on Alpha Ret is one of the absolute worst raiding specs atm.


Here's a few things that should happen to make ret easier to balance out and more wanted in raids:
- Judgement debuff changed to a buff on the player- same effect.
- Increase the Holy Power cap to 10 or scrap Holy Power (unlikely to be scrapped this late)
- Some form of raid CD, seriously we're a hybrid class and we got no raid cds but pure classes do? #logic
- Bring inn a short cd dps boost like Seraphim (without the Holy Power cost) and some form of AoE burst like Bladestorm (maybe a talent that makes Consecration have a 30sec cd but deals 500% damage)
- Mobility... make Long arm of the Law baseline or something, but have it trigger of something else- maybe Hand of Freedom.

And yet again another voice to Judgment buff. People brought up raising the Holy Power cap in here @Taeldorian if I recall started this up recently.

This talent for consecration you mention should be at level 15 and Consecration should be baseline for starters.

Perhaps make DI baseline and in its place put Long Arm of the Law? Actually have a mobility row.

Judgmemt buff, provide golden pom pom like Vengeance. Capitalize on a maintenance buff that doesn't cost anything and deals damage.

If we had a raid cd it should be something in the process of a Super ret aura or a mass Shield of Vengeance.

Seraphim: returns as a 30 second cd perhaps but no Holy power cost? Animation improved.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Pursuit of Justice for Warchief 2016.

[Ulthane]

Or instead, Inquisition as a 30 second cd, 15 sec duration no Holy power cost. Increases Holy damage done for duration?

[Lunavale]

Or instead, Inquisition as a 30 second cd, 15 sec duration no Holy power cost. Increases Holy damage done for duration?

Ooooor we could have that be a seal!

I really wish they would try and make a functional seal system, like a bunch of different mini-cooldowns

[Ulthane]

What I personally would like to see...
- Mastery changed to Divine Judgement: Increases Judgment damage by xx% (Strong scaling with mastery).
- Added to Divine Storm & TV tooltip: Targets hit by X / Y activate a single use of Judgment to be cast upon them.
- Judgment changed to: Judge your enemies with holy wrath, dealing massive Holy damage. Your TV & DS are able to activate Judgment cast upon enemies hit. 20 - 25sec cd.

Also, if the above where to be implemented
- Added to Execution Sentence tooltip: Execution Sentence will deal it's damage after 8 sec or the moment the target is hit by Judgment.

This change to mastery would achieve a couple of things the players and/or Blizz wants at the same time. 1. It would make Mastery useful for ae, 2. it would make the clunky feeling of holding back spenders go away, 3. it would make Judgment more important as in expansions before, 4. it would cater towards our class fantasy without making us a arms copy, 5. it would gate our damage to a great degree (albeit not in a window), 6. with it Judgment's range makes sense.

My take on the matter. At least I think of it as definitely more appropriate to Ret as what the spec is struck with now.

--- update ---

Thanks btw for mentioning the problem with Law and Order on the beta board, just saw it now. Much appreciated.

This is actually a very good idea.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Ooooor we could have that be a seal!

I really wish they would try and make a functional seal system, like a bunch of different mini-cooldowns

I'd be worried about our rotational abilities getting nerfed because of the mini cooldowns(Or seals rather).

[Deleted]

This is actually a very good idea.

We HAD a functional seal system in MoP beta... Just think back to the FV iteration that buffed either our single target dmg when truth was active or made our FV cleave when righteousness was active. It was functional very functional. If they had extended this to all of our attacks or even just to CS we would have been saved us from them copying the prot hammer onto us...

A working system could look like this today:

-> truth puts a stacking debuff on the target increasing dmg taken (improved by mastery)
-> righteousness let´s our attacks cleave for (x% improved by mastery)

[Taeldorian]

Yeah knowing Blizzard, if we had a working seal system our rotational abilities would 100% be nerfed to compensate for the seals. Rather than having seals actually be a prominent part of our rotational they'd make them easy to manage while nerfing our main damage sources. This kind of thing has happened before.

I just really want them to touch on the points that keep coming up in the feedback thread. 1. No mobility, even if they said we will have the utility to make up for that, we don't currently and people keep bringing this up which is wonderful. 2. Judgement feeling clunky. There are many suggestions people are throwing out there, Solsacra made some good points, Ruiizu made some good points. Many people are asking for this part of our rotation to be fixed because it evidently doesn't work with our resource system since it isn't a large scale build-and-dump resource. Those two main points keep coming back and it's present in every single page out of the 6 we have. I'm really surprised they haven't said something yet. Not having a lot of mobility is fine as long as we have the tools that make up for it which we don't.

At least they told arms warriors that they like the spec so they know they can't really aim their feedback towards giant fixes. We don't know if they're comfortable with it or not, all we know is that Kalgan's new born child was named Equality. We really don't even know where to aim our feedback because we don't know what they're okay with/what they aren't okay with.

[Aeluron Lightsong]

Even so, I'd say Arms isn't acceptable right now.

[Ulthane]

@Taeldorian Agreed 100%
@CptKnusper People as a whole wanted seals gone. They were bland and when they were good it caused problems across the board. Though I do remember that and that would have been amazing.

Compiling these posts we see the following though.

-Holy Power: Up to 10
-Crusader Strike: No CD
-Judgment: Acts as a self buff or @Nuin suggestion.
-Consecration: Baseline
-Shield of Vengeance: Make it raid wide.
-Divine Intervention: baseline
-Inquisition: Increases Holy damage done by x% for 15 seconds. 30 second cd.
( optional -Divine Steed: baseline all specs, put Knight Templar talent in place of Divine Steed. But no damage reduction.)

Talents
15
-Final Verdict: Divine Storm and Final Verdict also cast Judgment on the targets.
-Execution Sentence: Now causes an explosion when it hits. Enemies caught in explosion are subject to Judgment.
-Turaylons Might: Consecration now has a 30 second cd but deals 500% increased damage.

90
-Long arm of the Law: Casting Judgment now increases movement speed by x for y seconds.
-Divine Steed: Maybe last 2 more seconds.
-Pursuit of Justice: Increases movement speed by 20%

- - - Updated - - -

Either way we could take Self buff Judgment or what Nuin said. This would match both.

- - - Updated - - -

Or hell, both concepts merge. Judgment as a self buff and a hard hitting mechanic.

- - - Updated - - -
@Huntingbear_grimbatol any thoughts on this? Took what you, Nuin and Ruiizu commented about and put into a rough sketch.

[Deleted]

@Ulthane Seal were removed since they havn´t been updated mechanically sicne they were implemented. The iteration I was referring to would have changed them to basically stances. Which in itself is not a bad thing as long as they have a significant impact on how you play. They would have been miles better than warrior stances who were just gates for certain abilities which you could easily macro (bersi stance for recklessness says hello).

If you look at the suggestion below you can see that they would have a significant impact on our play style. Hell if you want to you could give us just 2 judgements (judgement of truth/righteousness) and give it the mastery effects I described. They could save face and keep the current judge as judgement of truth for single target (I feel dirty suggesting it) while actually allowing us to do at least somewhat decent AE with judgement of righteousness (could have the old mass judge effect - duration buff).

It might not be the most engaging solution but it would definitely call for adapted play styles depending on judge.

[Bolt66]

I really like Tbolt's post on the beta thread.
It kinda summarizes up my opinion regarding Ret rather well. Also, it seems the majority of beta Rets share a similar opinion on the spec's flaws like most here do.
Needless to say, I hope this shakes the devs "reserved" handling of the provided feedback up a notch or two...but I'm sceptical about this particular matter until they prove me otherwise.

I'm honestly very happy that the people in beta are talking and being loud about all the issues that have been covered, quite honestly my hope is more people get in the beta and the noise gets louder til this is damn fixed or something.

A buddy of mine is on beta right now and ran him through the process and he noticed the restrictive rotation right away and he started reading the threads and feedback and kinda was like: oh... well damn you were right!

Noise people, noise.

- - - Updated - - -

Also who ever Tbolt is on the beta, someone ship him a cookie. He hit the nail on the head.

- - - Updated - - -

But I think it's pretty clear, whats been stated on that feedback by some people and even here before: Get rid of holy power.

- - - Updated - - -

I know i keep posting different shit but its me going with the flow that I see but personal honest to god opinion/feeling is regardless of flow and trying to put feedback to make it work the blunt harsh truth is this gotta go.

Thanks guys, that's actually me

A lot of that feedback was definitely framed by the discussions here and then confirmed by my own experiences on beta. It is a sad state for sure but I'm glad most people are on the same page, for their feedback. I find that the people who say they like the current beta setup are usually those who are very casual and don't do much (or any raiding). While I think this is fine and their entitled to their point of view, it definitely needs to be recognized where their feedback is coming from since almost any tool kit is sufficient for those needs but not so for the rest of us.

@Taeldorian Agreed 100%
@CptKnusper People as a whole wanted seals gone. They were bland and when they were good it caused problems across the board. Though I do remember that and that would have been amazing.

Compiling these posts we see the following though.

-Holy Power: Up to 10
-Crusader Strike: No CD
-Judgment: Acts as a self buff or @Nuin suggestion.
-Consecration: Baseline
-Shield of Vengeance: Make it raid wide.
-Divine Intervention: baseline
-Inquisition: Increases Holy damage done by x% for 15 seconds. 30 second cd.
( optional -Divine Steed: baseline all specs, put Knight Templar talent in place of Divine Steed. But no damage reduction.)

Talents
15
-Final Verdict: Divine Storm and Final Verdict also cast Judgment on the targets.
-Execution Sentence: Now causes an explosion when it hits. Enemies caught in explosion are subject to Judgment.
-Turaylons Might: Consecration now has a 30 second cd but deals 500% increased damage.

90
-Long arm of the Law: Casting Judgment now increases movement speed by x for y seconds.
-Divine Steed: Maybe last 2 more seconds.
-Pursuit of Justice: Increases movement speed by 20%

- - - Updated - - -

Either way we could take Self buff Judgment or what Nuin said. This would match both.

- - - Updated - - -

Or hell, both concepts merge. Judgment as a self buff and a hard hitting mechanic.

- - - Updated - - -
@Huntingbear_grimbatol any thoughts on this? Took what you, Nuin and Ruiizu commented about and put into a rough sketch.

I like most of this and at this point Beta Ret is so in trouble that literally almost anything will be an improvement.

-I think if we're going to go to 10 for HoPo then it might just be time to make it work like a rage bar and get rid of the points.
-Crusader strike without CD would be great. Also it needs to hit harder or have an added effect (like a cleave or stacking +holy/crit/etc).
-Definitely need a raid utility cooldown.
-I'm not a big fan of inq/seraphim type mechanics but should be fine if it doesn't need HoPo to activate.
-We definitely need a baseline movement skill. If we have that then it's fine for T90 to either add another skill or augment the existing one. The struggle is real with this one while questing.

Edit: had a few more quick thoughts.
-I think BoJ is a prime candidate for a proc. DP is just not cutting it from my experience. I think allowing our auto attacks (or a no CD CS) to proc a BoJ that benefits from mastery would be fun.
-Also Divine Storm is quite lackluster at the moment without the Judgment buff. Even with the debuff I didn't find it to be too great. So why not lower the HoPo cost to 1/2 since it's pretty much our only AoE skill without talents? This would allow us to start AoE sooner and do so more frequently.

[Deleted]

Or instead, Inquisition as a 30 second cd, 15 sec duration no Holy power cost. Increases Holy damage done for duration?

I am traumatised by inquisition. I don't want anything to do with it. Buffs that remove penalties aren't any good. Inquisition like buffs are just self inflicted nerfs.