Hello, I would like to have some discussion on some concerns I've had for a while about seals.
As I have looked at how seals have been handled in the "Cataclysm" Beta, with the extreme nerfs in damage output, I am starting to get this feeling that seals shouldn't even do damage, anymore.
To put this mechanic into perspective, back in Vanilla and TBC seals were pretty much our only real damage resource, aside from Judgement and auto attacks, and most of a Paladin's time was put into managing these things, in terms of damage. The reason these seals did damage to begin with was to compensate for the lack of button attacks we had. Also, some of our seals had special effects, like Seal of the Crusader, which increased attack speed and its judgement increased holy damage from all our other seals/attacks. Granted many of these effects were quite bland and were very situational, but it was quite fun when you found some use of them.
Then came WotLK. New abilities were added. Crusader Strike became a bit more useful compared to its TBC version, Divine Storm gave us a more viable AoE damage than Concecration, and Exorcism was in 3.1 finally useful against every unit, not just Undead/Demons. Though, we lost some of our "interesting" seals, which had certain special effects. Still, we earned new Judgements (JoL, JoW and JoJ.), which made up for this loss a bit. Though, seals were still a big chunk of our dps, and Blizzard started to think that it was a problem, because it removed a lot of the personal control over the damage, and decided to act.
Now, in "Cataclysm", seals seems to shape up to be probably the most uninteresting thing we have, in our arsenal. All the interesting parts about the original seal system are gone and the amount of Judgements have been reduced to a nerfed Judgemnt of Light. If seals are doing so bad in damage, I think it's time for a total redesign of them, or should I say, a reimplementation of the old design.
When I mean "old design", I do not mean the kind of seals that were back in Vanilla and TBC, and that they should be lasting for a shorter duration and need to be refreshed after Judgement, but something that works similar in terms of giving special effects to things like Judgement. To me, that part of the mechanic was interesting, fun, and gave a bit more depth to the gameplay.
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So now I'm asking you, what do you think? Do you believe the same as me and think they should be redesigned? If you do, write some ideas on what you would like to see being implemented, in our current seals that could be useful, in a way Blizzard think these seals should be used for(Seal of Justice=PvP, Seal of Truth=long single target dps, Seal of Righteousness=short single/multiple target dps, etc.).