Elements of classic paladin class to be implemented in retail

[Halyon]

They absolutely are identity. Have you played Classic at all? This is the first major thing I noticed about class identity; the pain in the ass mechanics they separately had to deal with. You're also wrong if you think that ammo and soul shards are just "bag space." You don't just go to a vendor and purchase soul shards. There was an active element to warlocks where they needed to go out and collect their own soul shards. Rogues had to go out and make their own poisons. Hunters had to make sure they were equipping a quiver or ammo bag for bonus atk speed plus making sure they bought and were using the right ammo (by this specifically I mean the fact that different ammo increased your dmg by different amounts based on its level).

The dead zone is ABSOLUTELY identity. I have no idea how you can say that it isn't class identity. It sounds like you're confusing class fantasy with class identity. Class fantasy is usually used as a term related to the roleplaying aspect of the class. It's how the class stands out in a crowd from the other classes visually. Class identity is what makes each class unique in terms of gameplay.

Some of these things go hand in hand like the deadzone for hunters. You expect to see hunters using ranged weaponry, and ranged weaponry isn't going to be very effective in a close combat scramble (at least not a bow). It's the reason why archers in real military strategies had melee side arms and were protected by others. It's also the reason why guns had bayonets on them at one point as well. The need for those items has obviously decreased now with the fact that guns can now be both a long ranged main weapon and a short ranged side arm, but WoW isn't in a time period where you can just whip out your pistol when the enemy runs up to your face.

As for identity: No other class has this issue. They're either fully ranged and can cast up close, or are fully melee and need to get up close to do any damage. Hunters have a very unique problem that does not translate to any other class in classic. You can master something wholly unique for that class and only that class.

Yes, I have, and I disagree with you in the way they were. I said I didn't mind ammo/soulstones, they should just have been in their own, seperate container exclusively for that resource, like the keyring, but bigger, for x resource only, because them taking up that much bag space was a PITA.

As for the identity...they're still there. Hunters still use ammo, locks still use soulstones, they're just not a thing you have to farm for/buy in ridiculous amounts.

No shit you don't buy soulstones, I specifically put the / between the methods of obtainment for it. xD It's a fantasy game, class identity and class fantasy are very close to eachother. And I know how the different ammos worked. I wasn't engineer for nothing in TBC because of it. Your brain doesn't 404 if someone stands between 3-5m from you for an extended period of time.

...a deadzone doesn't make a class stand out visually, the bow and pet does, what even...it was a mechanic to reflect weapon-swapping I imagine, but it was implemented poorly. It meant you could get blueballed 'till the cows come home if someone knew how it worked in pvp, and in pve it was just annoying when it came to kiting mobs that were slightly faster if your pet started derping. Which it did. Often.

I know why things were as they were, and as such, it's fine, I'm saying it was done very poorly at the time, and I don't want to return to it.

[Isaelyn]

I wouldn't mind getting auras back for flavor (Though tbh I'm also perfectly okay with auras staying holy's utility). I'd love the flavor things like sense, turn, and and holy wrath back and a glyph to change the animation of blade of wrath because I don't see how they thought summoning a giant blade of light out of the ground seemed *less* magical than just smacking someone with a blast of holy light.

As for seals? Eh... They were cool while we had them but I don't thing I'd ever want to go back to them. Especially after hearing about the crusader/holy strike system paladins had in beta before launch, which sounds to be like a proto-holy power system, just with it being target bound instead of paladin bound. Actually.. giving seal of righteousness to holy could be fun, to give them a way to psuedo scale their auto damage with their spell power and an extra button to push while leveling as holy.

I've never reason seen the need for ( too much) spec crossover though. Back in vanilla through early wrath, where you essentially played as a spec and changing it was considerable financial decision sure but in modern wow I view changing spec as being kind of like a caster in DnD changing their spells for the day to better suit the situation they are going into. in modern it feels like you're always just X class to me, just with a different toolkit prepared. Some crossover is nice, for staple utility you should want in any spec, and at least as far as paladins go I feel like we have that on live with bubbles, flash, lay on hands and short duration blessings. Other classes could definitely benefit from a little crossover though. ( Looking at you warriors and demon hunters. )

[Halyon]

Divine Intervention best spell in the game. That's all I want on retail

It was worth it's weight in gold when it came to just wiping a raid quickly and getting people ressed. Was in a guild named after it in Wrath.

[LuzBelito]

Yup, seals and auras.

I really miss BC Tank and Wotlk Retri. Those where the days.

[Demsi]

Bring back seals, auras, sense undead, hammer of wrath as base spell, exorcism (replace BOJ with it).

Make paladins what they truly are- buffers, hybrids with "retribution dps" and helping hand for others.

Make us what we were in wotlk- hard to cc/stun/slow. But also not so good dps either. This is humiliating what we are now- 2 min cd dps who can be CC'ed/rooted/kited forever.

WARRIORS have better mobility than rets now.

Warriors have always had better mobility than Ret.

Also vanilla paladin was pretty much "buffers" as you put it, and we can see how that worked out.

[Tumble]

If they were to bring auras back, I'd be happy for them to just be versions of current buffs other classes have. So devotion could give 10% stamina, quite often we find ourselves without a priest. Crusader aura for speed buff that ww give. And possibly one for spell damage reduction. It would he nice to have auras again.

[Tomana]

I still got sub10 lvl paladin in classic but for those that have lvled more which elements u would like adopted in the retail version (please refrain from talking about wotlk and panda...)

Maybe the blessings should make a comeback. Paladin mechanics were utter garbage in vanilla.

[Irian]

There is no longer any niche for them in the current game. Spell pushback doesn't exist anymore rendering Concentration Aura meaningless. Spell Resistances have been removed. I don't think completely reworking the entire game just so you can have a niche ability for Paladins back is good idea. Especially when the niche problem it solved in the first place was removed for being poor design.

Ret Aura is negligable at best and detremental at worst. It lost it's only real saving grace when Paladin threat was no longer tied to strictly holy damage. It's damage was never really significant enough to warrent keeping around, and if it ever got to the point where it was dealing significant damage then being stood in the general area of a Paladin with Ret Aura would completely hard counter Rogues, Feral Druids and Warriors in PvP. Hard countering a class by simply being there is not good design in any capacity. Having an ability which does 0.02% of your overall damage is just taking up space.

Things can be retooled to change in design, for example Concentration Aura instead giving a reduction to interrupt/silence lockouts and resistances being a flat percentage-based damage reduction for certain schools of magic. It's a lack of creativity that led to auras being totally removed.
The idea that an ability like an Aura needs to account for a huge portion of overall DPS just because it does damage is flawed thinking. I remember several add-heavy encounters where that 0.2% would go up to something along the lines of 2-4% and that to me is a great example of an ability that has a ton of flavor and has a legitimate purpose in the game.

Also, PvP these days is balanced with separate values, with many spells being stronger or weaker in a PvP environment so trying to say it has to hard counter fast attackers in PvP is moot. This hasn't been true for a while now.

Have you looked at those raid buff Icons lately? They're all percentage based. That's fine for Attack Power, Int and Stamina which all scale linearly. You cannot add a scalling Armour buff in there though, it will either scale to the point of near meaningless as gear improves or be so powerful that all encounters have to be designed with the assumption that your raid will have it.

You cannot have it be a flat damage reduction either. The current version of Devotion Aura is bordering on broken already. Making something like that raid wide regardless of distance is just insanity, and raids would have to be designed around the assumption that you have the buff because it's way too powerful to ignore.

Let's say you get creative and decide to have the Aura scale with the Paladin's stats. Then you end up with the situation where an overgeared Paladin makes everything easy mode and an undergeared Paladin is practically worthless. Which is ultimately the beginning and the end of this argument. Auras are either worthless or completely OP. There is no middle ground where Auras both offer appreciable amounts of stats to other players without being so over the top that you can't do without them.

Or....crazy idea here. How about we just go back to flat numbers and not scale gear and stats wildly out of control through warforging and titanforging?

These systems worked completely fine for the majority of the game's lifespan. Devotion aura worked completely and totally fine, as did all other auras that had a relevant place back then. It's a recent development that these buffs were changed to be % based due to the rampant and out-of-control design of stat scaling necessitating it. If we just didn't do that, then no, there wouldn't be a problem with stat buffs being a flat number that didn't have to scale with a character. A stat bonus is a stat bonus.

[Swnem]

The only reason these things were removed was because they weren't super interactive. Back when the purged the action bars they looked a lot at what actually required pressing and then removed a lot that was just a long-term passive effect. The abilities we're talking about are very flavorful and enjoyable, but it's not wrong that you didn't really switch out of Battle Stance or Aspect of the Hawk a lot. Which is why they got dropped. Not because they weren't enjoyable, but because they needed to lower button count and these were buttons that weren't pressed a lot.

My "switcheroo" is hardly pathetic. You're literally one of the only people that feels this way and the only reason you're so against them is because you don't like them not because "they'd be bad for the game" because they wouldn't.

.

Ridiculous assertion. Flavorful? Maybe. If you keep a crap ability for long enough they will feel flavorful when one uses nostalgia and feels to make decisions. But, enjoyable? I call BS on that. They were fire and forget skills. There was nothing enjoyable about them. Just some passive for you to forget about at the beggining of instances. Nothing enjoyable about a button you press once per dungeon.

And yes, it is pathetic cause you clearly had no proper knowledge of why these things got removed and go with "feels" completely ignoring the cost they had to the viability of the 3 specs across the years. NO to repeating past mistakes.
Besides, you got better implementations of these things already in live. There is no reason to bring them back.
I know you only care about nostalgia and feels, but these things have consequences wich your superficial analysis doesn't take into account.

So, stop trying to push around a mistake and at least try to sugest how these things could work. I couldn't care less about feelings. My paladin has all the flavor it needs and is enjoyable to play. Just needs more rotational buttons, not boring passives that will hold back it's potencial.

[DotEleven]

Ridicolous assertion. Flavorful? Maybe. If you keep a crap ability for long enough they will feel flavorful when one uses nostalgia and feels to make decisions. But, enjoyable? I call BS on that. They were fire and forget skills. There was nothing enjoyable about them. Just some passive for you to forget about at the beggining of instances. Nothing enjoyable about a button you press once per dungeon.

And yes, it is pathetic cause you clearly had no proper knowledge of why these things got removed and go with "feels" completely ignoring the cost they had to the viability of the 3 specs across the years. NO to repeating past mistakes.
Besides, you got better implementations of these things already in live. There is no reason to bring them back.
I know you only care about nostalgia and feels, but these things have consequences wich your superficial analysis doesn't take into account.

So, stop trying to push around a mistake and at least try to sugest how these things could work. I couldn't care less about feelings. My paladin has all the flavor it needs and is enjoyable to play. Just needs more rotational buttons, not boring passives.

I have plenty of understanding why. It was once again because they were looking to lower button count, so a lot of stuff that was "we press it and leave it alone except in extreme cases" stuff was removed.

It's not a mistake. Those abilities were plenty iconic and flavorful and the one trying to push a mistake is you like the fact the pruning wasn't a mistake itself despite Blizzard already admitting they went too far with it.

But since you're only arguments are I "Don't know" and that you don't like them. I think we're done here.

[Swnem]

I have plenty of understanding why. It was once again because they were looking to lower button count, so a lot of stuff that was "we press it and leave it alone except in extreme cases" stuff was removed.

It's not a mistake. Those abilities were plenty iconic and flavorful and the one trying to push a mistake is you like the fact the pruning wasn't a mistake itself despite Blizzard already admitting they went too far with it.

But since you're only arguments are I "Don't know" and that you don't like them. I think we're done here.

After all these posts you read nothing. I explained very clearly why they don't work. It has nothing to do with my "liking". You're the "feels" guy, not me. I want useful abilities. No matter wich ones they are. Those old abilities were proven to be failures, so unless you can convince me with more than "feels", i won't support their return, no.

[Celebhil]

i'd like to see paladins homogenized a bit between the specializations, such that regardless of what role you pick the overall play style and utility paladins carry to the group remain roughly the same. Melee combatant with Healing, powerful buffs and auras.
Flash of light for example is such a worthless heal to have; you have the spam cast it consecutively to heal anyone a moderate amount and only situationally useful with talents. now having it as a cheap heal for holy to parse mana consumption is fair, Why give the ret and prot paladin a heal and then punish you for trying to use it either on yourself of teammates(the time spent casting undermines tanking and dps roles). A more sensible change would be to make it more like the original holy light where it heals a moderate amount, but expensive mana wise and therefore the limitation remains the same, unless you're holy you cant spam heals consecutively nor heal efficiently over time.
Auras can make a comeback like how they turned devotion into a defensive CD, but i admit i don't know what exactly the effects would be without making them rather insignificant like ret and sanctity or overpowered (having each paladin carry a powerful defensive aoe CD for example seems excessive when blizz wants to keep the amounts of those available to a group limited to healers only)
Seals and judgement should never have been the baseline skillset, it was poorly thought out; seal of the crusader was only ever useful for its judgement for example. Passive damage output is both boring and unbalanced anyway. The mechanic of blessing yourself/weapon with magic remains confined to picking one and forgetting and we already have that in the game with what enchants you pick for your weapon or deathknights runeforging. its redundant.
With that in mind though having judgement apply debuffs and implementing consecration as a baseline skill that each paladin uses to implement effects might be cool. instead of a wisdom blessing for example have it as a judgement debuff the paladin has to actively use to help restore mana

[Palapop]

Warriors have always had better mobility than Ret.

Also vanilla paladin was pretty much "buffers" as you put it, and we can see how that worked out.

Warriors have always had better mobility than ret? Do you even pvp?

Hand of freedom + removing stuns. Emancipate? Long arm of the law?
I'm not talking about CLASSIC paladins only here. Just to add that.

And also... same goes for what kind of buffs I want back. Not vanilla-style. But something like mix between wotlk/mop.

[Demsi]

Warriors have always had better mobility than ret? Do you even pvp?

Hand of freedom + removing stuns. Emancipate? Long arm of the law?
I'm not talking about CLASSIC paladins only here. Just to add that.

And also... same goes for what kind of buffs I want back. Not vanilla-style. But something like mix between wotlk/mop.

Yes i do pvp, double charge, tripple heroic leap is bounds and leaps better than anything ret has had in the past.

[Celebhil]

wether it be classic or retail, warriors were always more mobile. if remove stuns you mean divine shield, the stratagem against paladins in pvp was always kite, purge freedom or blink/run/ sprint/ etc, kite again. Emancipate sucks, 1 min CD so.../trinket remove CC. long arm of the law didn't address snare spam.

i dont think the focus of this thread was to talk about pally classic pvp as it was hardly anything good to being laughable. pve and class kit in general

[StrawberryZebra]

Things can be retooled to change in design, for example Concentration Aura instead giving a reduction to interrupt/silence lockouts and resistances being a flat percentage-based damage reduction for certain schools of magic.

That Aura already exists. It's got a lot of severe limitations on it because of how absurdly powerful it is. Do you know why you barely ever notice its effects? Because all of that power is completely invisiable to the player. No indicator, no feedback. Nothing. Invisible power makes for very poor player experiences because you never know how much impact you're having.

The idea that an ability like an Aura needs to account for a huge portion of overall DPS just because it does damage is flawed thinking. I remember several add-heavy encounters where that 0.2% would go up to something along the lines of 2-4% and that to me is a great example of an ability that has a ton of flavor and has a legitimate purpose in the game.

To me that is an example of an ability that is highly situational.

Ret Auras main attraction was that it offered you extra threat when you already had aggro on the mob. Which is backwards, you don't need any extra threat when you're already holding aggro just fine. If mobs were hitting your party, it made pulling threat off them harder. The only class and spec that gained anything significant from Ret Aura were Prot Paladins, for other tanks it was a marginal benefit at best.

So you have an aura which you'd run for the sole benefit of one person in the group. That's something which doesn't need to be an aura, simply a castable buff.

Or....crazy idea here. How about we just go back to flat numbers and not scale gear and stats wildly out of control through warforging and titanforging?

These systems worked completely fine for the majority of the game's lifespan.

Because, and follow me here, those flat stats were EXACTLY the problem in the first place! They were so universally useful that they were mandatory. When you're tuning content around the assumption that those extra stats are just going to be there then groups without them are at a disadvantage. If you're tuning with the expection that they're not there, you've undertuned the content for when they're present.

Given the huge pushback Blizzard got regarding homogenisation when they spread buffs around amongst all classes and specs allowing other Classes to provide the same Auras as a Paladin would no doubt be met with outrage.

Between balancing nightmares and players crying foul over homogenisation, removing flat stat buffs was really the only sensible choice for the game long term.

[Nurvus]

I personally like the idea of the Seals coming back. But would want them more in line with the way they were post-vanilla. Still affecting rotations and requiring shuffling to max DPS, but with the longer duration.

I want Seals back too, but I want their active side that interacts with your rotation, not the passive bullshit they became in later expansions.

I would give up the passive effects entirely, and have them do something powerful on a very short duration, like empowering your next ability or all abilities within X seconds.
Mana could be its bottleneck.

[Irian]

That Aura already exists. It's got a lot of severe limitations on it because of how absurdly powerful it is. Do you know why you barely ever notice its effects? Because all of that power is completely invisiable to the player. No indicator, no feedback. Nothing. Invisible power makes for very poor player experiences because you never know how much impact you're having.

The reason it's boring is because it has no impact on the game itself. Choices and flavor matter, and that iteration is simply a talent instead of a switchable passive aura that you can vary depending on the situation.

I hate current iteration of Devo aura because it's not a choice, or even really anything. It's a tiny range reduction buff with diminishing returns which you never interact with. It's not an option out of multiple, it's not something people appreciate existing, it's just there. I strongly remember actually wanting Devo aura specifically for physical-heavy AoE fights in the past before it was changed for some heroic encounters.

To me that is an example of an ability that is highly situational.

It absolutely is and that's why i love it. What's wrong with a buff or aura that has a very situational effect?

So you have an aura which you'd run for the sole benefit of one person in the group. That's something which doesn't need to be an aura, simply a castable buff.

I mean, I'd be totally cool with it being a "Blessing of Retribution" instead, tbh. I just personally miss paladins feeling and being beneficial to the party in ways that make you want specific classes in a party.

Because, and follow me here, those flat stats were EXACTLY the problem in the first place! They were so universally useful that they were mandatory. When you're tuning content around the assumption that those extra stats are just going to be there then groups without them are at a disadvantage. If you're tuning with the expection that they're not there, you've undertuned the content for when they're present.

Given the huge pushback Blizzard got regarding homogenisation when they spread buffs around amongst all classes and specs allowing other Classes to provide the same Auras as a Paladin would no doubt be met with outrage.

Between balancing nightmares and players crying foul over homogenisation, removing flat stat buffs was really the only sensible choice for the game long term.

I think this is just where we fundamentally disagree on what WoW's game design should be like.

If every buff is mandatory for a raid group, in my eyes that's good design. You should think to yourself "Shit, we don't have a paladin, let's find a paladin for x buff". That's why this wasn't a problem in the past and why it wouldn't be if it was brought back. Mandatory buffs can and should exist IMO.

Blizzard needs to stop being afraid of every class or almost every class being mandatory for a raid group. There are 12 classes and (assuming it stays this way) Mythic raid groups are 20 people. Is that really an issue, especially considering some of those will undoubtedly overlap?

[Palapop]

Yes i do pvp, double charge, tripple heroic leap is bounds and leaps better than anything ret has had in the past.

Brought to you by "Legion". Start of dawnfall of class design and balances. Pre legion? Warriors used to sit full roots and craps while paladins would just freedom, or dispel them self and move on...

[threads]

auras, seals, delete holy power from ret.