Ability Bloat - What would you do?

[Morally Grey Storm]

I would gladly discard Holy Light, Divine Light, Holy Radiance, Repentance, auras, all seals but 4 typical "1 for deeps, 2 for aoe deeps, 3rd kinda for pvp, 4th is meh", and ability to cleanse magic off of myself and teammates as ret!


oh wait.

/grumble grumble

[trystero]

There is a skill cap to everything, even to simple things. The question is how high/low that skill cap should be. In my opinion the higher the better.

A big part of WoW is self improvement. Getting better and better and seeing yourself progress both as a player and as character. If there is a very low skill cap, then you quickly reach a point where you can not improve yourself which is rather boring. It is more fun when you always got something to improve, something to work for. I do not know if that is just my generation though, I know that the current generation is just about instant gratification and havig everything served on a silver platter, something that I to be honest find frightening.

The reason I prefer (some variants of) poker over cribbage is because of the skill cap. I can pump a ton of time into cribbage only to gain a marginal edge. A total rank amateur who can do no more than count the points in his hand will beat an expert at least 40% of the time due to chance alone. Poker's not like that at all obviously. If WoW had a low skillcap, fewer abilities to the point of mindlessness, I'd probably have quit long ago.

I don't understand why people are so eager to remove abilities in the name of "bloat." That's a nerf, plain and simple. I love prot paladins because it feels like the complete package; I've got a tool for every task set in front of me. First week of ToT I was tasked with tanking the bats on Tortos; Holy Wrath's snap threat made it a trivial task (and HW morphs into great single-target DPS filler). HW is one of my favorite abilities, not just for DPS filler but because it doesn't require me to target or to place it. I just click it, boom, instant aggro. Would I want to remove Con then? No thanks, I like having a standard AoE DoT that I use when stationary or as a "trap" that I know mobs are about to run over.

The only way you could remove or consolidate abilities like Con/HW would be to compensate by lowering or eliminating the CD on HotR. There would be too many gaps in the rotation otherwise. Doing so, though, would lead to more HP generation, which would make us pretty damn broken. So the only solution would be a complete overhaul of the class, something which I really really don't want to see. I doubt anyone does.

Not to mention that removing abilities like Blinding Light does nothing but nerf us. Don't like it, don't use it. It's not as if by removing the ability you're also removing the reason for that ability. That is, if paladins didn't have Blinding Light tomorrow, then there would still be mobs to stun or knockback; it's not like crowd control would've been removed from the game. And besides that's only considering it from the perspective of raiding. That's a good spell in PvP and questing/world.

because someone said something about tossing on RF for some fringe case in 25H content, and it kinda went downhill from there because I said that I would discount anything in 25H because that's less than 1% of cases where it could work and something shouldn't be kept around just because the upper crust will find a use for it.

Of course, more than 25H raiders use RF when outside of protection spec. We could include any raider. It's not like 25H Tortos is done in such a way that only holy paladins would use RF for it. That strategy can be applied just as effectively to a 10N group as a 25H. I can also think on H Meg (10 or 25) you could put RF on your ret paladin to grab the purple head's adds. Really any time you want a plate DPS tanking adds and don't want to run an extra tank. I also use RF as Ret in heroic scenarios all the time. There's no point running as Prot in those but by the same token I don't want the mobs gravitating toward my ranged teammates. Or when I'm running old raids with my friends, I'll put RF up as Ret to hold the mobs and pseudo-tank. I know that we've moved away from RF, but my point is that you from the start have been looking at this problem from a very narrow perspective and haven't thought through most of what you're saying.

Like here,

I do think that some of the Hand spells could be merged. Sacrifice + Purity, for instance. Sacrifice already reduces damage (and the stupid transfer part should DIAF); Purity reduces damage by a smaller amount and then also reduces DoT, there's no reason outside of an extra ability since Purity is a talent why those two should be separate, just make Hand of Sacrifice reduce damage by 30% AND reduce DoT damage by 70%. Freedom and Salvation are bit of a weird state since Freedom is 95% a PVP talent, and Salvation is 95% PVE, so they could stay separate. Emancipate should be part of Freedom, no bones about that. I will concede about Cons + HW however, but I do think some kind of special version of Cons for Holy could be interesting.

If you merge Hand of Sac and Purity then you remove one of the strongest parts about Purity, which is its 30 second cooldown. As you can't put Sac on a 30 second CD (it'd be broken), you'd have to go with the longer CD. But the main point of Purity is to mitigate DoT damage (the 10% redux was added later to buff it a bit) and that's best handled on a shorter CD. You're not really doing much of anything by mitigating 5% of DoT damage as opposed to 20%. So while the two abilities have totally different functions, you want to merge them just because you don't feel like they should be separate?

[Krekko]

FYI I never once said Blessings, I specifically excluded them because they are basically "fire and forget", not something that you even need to bother to keybind; it was someone else who said Blessings should just be some always-on aura thingie like DKs have. I did however said that RF should have been given to Prot only as a passive because it's pretty much never used outside of Prot except for weird things with Holy (bats on Tortos?), which is where the argument came up because someone said something about tossing on RF for some fringe case in 25H content, and it kinda went downhill from there because I said that I would discount anything in 25H because that's less than 1% of cases where it could work and something shouldn't be kept around just because the upper crust will find a use for it.

That's not true though, and I think that's where most people are having an issue with your statements lie. You're claiming that it's used by only the 1%, therefore it's marginally useful and easily disposable. We're arguing that it's not merely marginally useful, and not so easily disposable and it's MUCH larger than 1% that use it, in fact, I'll even argue in the coming expansion it will be an even greater percentage required to use it for Heroic Scenarios and Scenarios as they become much more common.

I find use for it, plenty of fellow Paladins find use for it, on a daily basis, and we're not (necessarily) the 1%.


Even removing Turn Evil (one of the very few "bloat" spells one could argue we have) would be something you need to look at in the larger picture, especially with the new talent for it. You need to judge it's use against it's usefulness against the potential gain from it's removal.

You need to stop and think of the implications any removal might have, and judge the loss against the gain.

To be blunt, your failure to use something or inability to use it appropriately and maximally and then writing it off as an ability that belongs to the "upper crust" is not proper reflection of the spell/ability itself and is far from the truth. I can't suggest enough, even if you don't use it, making sure you understand the usefulness of such a spell(s) can have and what they offer to us as a class and to each spec (Holy an Ret included), and don't judge something based off your use/needs but rather the use and needs of the class.

If your finding you have issues with managing space, keep it in the spell book, there is nothing forcing one from using said spells, if others find use for it then that's great and it should stay! But when nobody finds use for it or it has become irrelevant or outdated THAT is when spells become "bloat" and require replacement.

My two cents.

[Freia]

I would gladly discard Holy Light, Divine Light, Holy Radiance, Repentance, auras, all seals but 4 typical "1 for deeps, 2 for aoe deeps, 3rd kinda for pvp, 4th is meh", and ability to cleanse magic off of myself and teammates as ret!


oh wait.

/grumble grumble

Ret will probably never get the ability to cleanse magic off their teammates on little to no cooldown as long as all healer specs have magic dispels. Shadow Priests have shown how unbalanced this is. They were the only dps spec with a magic dispel(on their normal dispel) when cata began. Spriest/Healer/X teams could not be cced and it continued to be imbalanced with mass dispel which is why it has continued getting nerfed.