Seals > Holy Power

[Demsi]

Seal twisting is a lot of fun in Tbc, but only if you actually get procs, there's few things that feel as bad as doing shit dps because you got like 10 seal of command procs over 4 minutes

[Venziir]

I used to be such a player, but it was never about complexity. It was visibility that was the problem. Nothing in the game really told people how the hit tables worked, or how ratings converted to percentages. Even playing TBC now, I need Rating Buster and Extended Character stats to really understand what happens when I swap similar-looking gear pieces. I think that these stats could return, the devs just have to explain the stats better.

- - - Updated - - -



That is kind of true. With twisting especially, you load up 2 seals and the first one (r1 command) is 'spent' by the auto, while the remaining seal (blood) is judged. Sometimes you hold the judgement.

My argument is that this seal spending system is better than HoPo, especially if twisting was integrated as a core feature.

Imagine the HoPo UI was replaced with 2 seal slots and a small swing timer.

Imagine seals proccing off of autos and casted heals. A proc consumes the older seal, while the new seal stays.

Imagine having seal-combos for any combination of:
- Command (ST)
- Storms (AOE)
- Zeal (cleave)
- Justice (stuns)
- Crusader (movement speed)
- Shields (block)
- Light (ST heal)
- Dawn (AOE heal)
- Wisdom (mana)
- etc.

Imagine adding unique judgements for all these seals and allowing talents to augment them further.

Oh don't get me wrong; I quite miss the TBC/Classic playstyle of Retri, with the seal switching and judgement consuming. My point was merely, that seals/jugdement was *also* a build/spender system.

- - - Updated - - -

You can't be serious ? so even on and off button is a build / spend for you...

I'm quite serious.

[Segus1992]

That was exactly what Seals and Judgement was though.

It's the same as HP the same way that Lightning Shield stacks is exactly the same as Maelstrom. The important difference is that Seal/Judge as a generator/spender is a small part of the rotation whereas HP in the live game is the entirety of the flow of the damage, with Consecration being the literal only exception.

[Venziir]

It's the same as HP the same way that Lightning Shield stacks is exactly the same as Maelstrom. The important difference is that Seal/Judge as a generator/spender is a small part of the rotation whereas HP in the live game is the entirety of the flow of the damage, with Consecration being the literal only exception.

Eh, bit less passive than LH/Maelstrom honestly, but sure.

[Segus1992]

Oh don't get me wrong; I quite miss the TBC/Classic playstyle of Retri, with the seal switching and judgement consuming. My point was merely, that seals/jugdement was *also* a build/spender system.

I'm quite serious.

Just arguing semantics then? Nobody's saying the mere existence of a builder/spender system is a problem, but rather that modern Ret is entirely about such a rotation.

[Venziir]

Just arguing semantics then? Nobody's saying the mere existence of a builder/spender system is a problem, but rather that modern Ret is entirely about such a rotation.

Well nobody... Except the guy I replied to.

[Swnem]

Errr... no. TBCclassic is right there for your needs and you don't even have to use seal of casino.

I will pass on going back to that.

[Coniferous]

The key question on a build like seals with a bit more skill to it is, how do you balance it? Neither answer is satisfying. Requiring a high skill cap to reach parity sucks, but it’s also bad to have a class that is overpowered if you play it well.

I guess the idea is you make all classes have a higher skill cap? Idk. Maybe I’m just too used to playing tanks and healers where parity is more important.

[StrawberryZebra]

And even then the comparison to Rogues is only surface level. It's really easy to make classes/specs seem the same when you don't bother examining how the mechanics work and what the implications are for gameplay.

And somehow, people never do seem to make more than a quick comparison and leave it at that. Paladins plays completely different to a Rogue, even when they're filling the same party role. The mechanics are completely different, and being able to store 5 while spending 3 allows Paladins more flexability in how they use Holy Power.

Honestly though, I feel as though if Blizzard had named Holy Power something like Holy Seals originally then this discussion would have been put to rest long before it ever got started. A little flavour text like "Crusader Strike - Deals damage and Infuses the Paladin with a Holy Seal" and "Templars Verdict - Judges 3 Holy Seals to deal damage" and so on and people would have had no problems going along with it in my opinion.

Perhaps in the olden days. What I'm saying is that there are niche cases where niche seal usage (wven without judgement) is quite great. See the Seal of Justice + Ravager Proc in Hyjal trash, for example.

Those kinds of one-in-a-million situations where you're using a level 37 weapon in a level 70 raid, have Holy Wrath on cooldown or unavailable for whatever reason and have the stars align to allow both the Ravager Proc AND multiple SoJ procs don't really support keeping Seals around as a system.

It's such a highly specific series of events that need to happen - So specific in fact that I'd say it would count against Seals as a reasonable gameplay mechanic. Because that was precisely my point you've just backed up.

[Hofflerand]

Holy power wasn't the mistake - it was adding Templar's Verdict and redesigning Divine Storm. I'd like to see something like this:

1. Judgment is now a holy power finisher with a 10-yd range. For Ret, you can just rename TV to Judgment.
(To be clear, I'm saying to delete the version of Judgment that we have on live.)

2. Give paladins 3-4 seals: buffs unleashed by Judgment as debuffs. Their effects, durations and cooldowns, whether or not activating a seal generates holy power - all of this can be ironed out later.
3. Bring back the talent Empowered Seals.
4. Bring back Exorcism as a holy power generator for all paladins. It always crits against demons, undead and aberrations.
5. Just as Prot replaces Crusader Strike with Hammer of the Righteous, have Ret replace this joke of an attack with Blade of Justice (and give it two charges).
6. Divine Storm: a hard-hitting, 12-yd radius AoE holy power generator with a ~10 sec cooldown. Heals for a percentage of damage dealt and uses the original animation.
7. Add a Blade Flurry mechanic via either seals & Judgment, or Consecration the size of Ashen Hollow. I think this could actually feel really satisfying - think of Greater Judgment from Legion, or multiple Blade of Justices impaling a pack of mobs.

I could go on, but the gist is seals & Judgment is a cool mechanic, and that there is nothing inherently wrong with holy power - some of our current attacks are not so cool, which gives holy power a bad name. My solution? Merge seals & Judgment with holy power.

As for seal-twisting, I'm glad it has a second life in TBC, but that's where I'd leave it.

[Beefkow]

Holy power is literally combo points 2.0.

There is zero meaning in the rotation, nothing at all.

Just mindless build and spend BS.

[Lothaeryn]

Holy power has been garbage from day 1. Do you know why?

Because its a BORROWED RESOURCE SYSTEM FROM ANOTHER CLASS.

If i wanted to play combo ponts I'd simply play a fucking rogue. Rather than rework the system design for paladins regarding seals, Blizzard did what it always does and put the class on the backburner with quick "solutions" to its class design.

Seals weren't perfect by any means in their original incarnation, but that mainly was because it was used as an afterthought rather than the critical junction of the class's overall design. Seals only worked for a single spell and Auto Attack and had basically zero impact on the class's overall function outside of the Seal/Judge mechanic Paladins originally launched with.

In Wrath, we saw that Blizzard was aware of this, and tried to change the design of seals to be more functionally versatile, but ultimately failed on their final iteration, which led to paladins being ridiculously strong in burst with little nuance in rotation scheme. While this system wasn't perfect, it was on the right track.

Then in cataclysm, the seal system was abandoned altogether basically in favor of combo points, because why bother trying to fix a class when you can simply copy/paste right?

Instead of being lazy, Blizzard could have easily doubled down on the system they had in place in Wrath and made it morph the effects of other skills such as consecration and divine storm, which opens up new utilities that Paladins normally did not have all the while diversifying the way seals affect your rotation and the situations in which you would want to use them.


For instance, in this scenario, instead of Jugement being the only spender of a seal that activates a particular effect on the seal, we can add Consecration and Divine storm into the mix to add additional utility based on the seal it was cast with.

So as a reminder, Your seal Spenders (or Sealbreakers as I will refer to them further on) are: Judgement, Consecration, and Divine Storm. Crusader Strike will directly apply the Melee attack effect of each seal and Templar's verdict could either be morphed into a ST variation of these seals or dropped entirely, Consecration and Divine Storm will have CD's either dependant on the seal broken, or the seals themselves will incur a Cooldown depending on how they were spent.

While some seals may simply be retired due to redundancy, you could easily have 4 seals, each with utility: Seal of Righteousness, Seal of Light, Seal of Wisdom, and Seal of Justice. Each with distinguishable visuals that can be color coded based on which seal was used to cast the breaker.

Seal of Righteousness: plays out like a normal dps seal, it simply does damage and is your primary source of offensive dps when Sealbreaking. Righteousness does holy damage on judge, consecrate and does AoE damage on DS.

the real changes are when and where you use the other seals.

Seal of Light:

Judgement: Same as before, applies a judgement debuff that allows allies to heal from damaging the target.

Consecrate: Acts as an AoE heal effect for allies within the consecrate rather than an offensive dps tick. Much akin to Light's Hammer but strictly for healing.

Divine Storm: Morphs into Light of Dawn as a cone AoE in front of the caster.

Seal of Wisdom:

Judgement: Same as before, applies a debuff to regenerate Mana from the Target taking damage

Consecrate: Applies Consecration of Wisdom, which applies a Mana over Time effect to allies who stand within it (basically utility for mana regen for raid encounters much like Mana spring totem in some regards)

Divine Storm: Unleashes a burst of divine energy, applying a mana burn DoT to 4 (or more) targets around the caster. (This particular Sealbreaker is debatatble, as I've toyed with Mana drain but that would feel redundant with consecrate, or an AoE silence but that is kinda OP similar to Arcane Torrent)

Seal of Justice:

Judgement: There have been a few iterations of this seal and its active effects, while I cannot attest to what it will be directly, Im certain it wouldnt be a 2s stun proc like vanilla, more than likely it would be an Attackspeed/Cast time debuff on weapon swing. Its Judgement effect will remain the same as a direct snare reducing the target's movement speed by x%, or it can be morphed into a silence depending on if they want to remove Rebuke or Hand of Hindrance.

Consecration: Snares all hostile targets, reducing their movement speed by 30-50%

Divine Storm: Pulls all hostile targets inward towards the caster (The alternative is for this to project forward 15 to 20 yards much like the Legion Ashbringer Divine Storm effect and pulling targets into the whirlwind. This acts as an AoE deathgrip or sorts, allowing paladins the utility of moving hostile mobs for encounters and as a minor CC in PvP)


And these are just examples... I've even considered Consecration of Wisdom as a sort of Anti-Magic Zone or Divine Storm of Wisdom draining mana from nearby enemies to create a mana shield for the user.

Not only is this design congruent with how Paladin class fantasy was portrayed originally, it does not infringe directly upon any other class's resource system. Holy Paladins can have talents that empower their Light and Wisdom utilities to better heal or support their raid, Prot Paladins may have talents that improve Justice's CC control utilities for things such as Mythic+ and PvP, and Ret may have its own utilities that add onto the Seals to morph them to suit their needs(such as cleave or DoT's akin to Seal of Vengeance).

Holy Power was never needed; it was and has always been a bandaid fix because Blizzard could not be bothered to TRY and design the class more enthusiastically. Seals could have been much more versatile in their use and how it changes the class's throughput and utility.

[Gestopft]

Holy power has been garbage from day 1. Do you know why?

Because its a BORROWED RESOURCE SYSTEM FROM ANOTHER CLASS.

Just to quote myself from earlier in the thread:

...the comparison to Rogues is only surface level. It's really easy to make classes/specs seem the same when you don't bother examining how the mechanics work and what the implications are for gameplay.

You fill up circles and empty them...must be the same thing, right?

Despite surface level similarity, I have never once been on my Rogue or my Paladin and confused that toon with the other one ...and both toons are Blonde BElfs with black transmogs. The actual gameplay is quite different, so I have never felt like they are all that similar in practice. Paladins, unlike Rogues, have fixed spending, and can bank two HoPo beyond what is spent, giving them more flexibility in resource expenditure. And for rogues, CP generation is (mostly) abilities with no CD whose usage is dictated by energy, while Paladins generate HoPo through several short CD abilities. They have different considerations when it comes to both generating and spending resources. Like they're different classes or something.

Holy Power was never needed; it was and has always been a bandaid fix because Blizzard could not be bothered to TRY and design the class more enthusiastically.

This is the sixth expansion with Holy Power, and in that time, class design has had prunings, unprunings, spec-centered designs, class-centered designs, talent system overhauls, and just for Paladins we've had revamps of the Holy Power economy (most notably after Cata's godawful iteration), we have had Prot/Holy getting HoPo removed, Prot/Holy getting HoPo restored, Holy officially being considered a "melee" healer, etc. It's fine to not like Holy Power, or the design of Paladins in general, but the assertion that "Blizzard could not be bothered to TRY" is utterly ridiculous.

Seriously, this take is on the level of "Blizzard doesn't try making good armor sets anymore because we have transmog."

Seals could have been much more versatile in their use and how it changes the class's throughput and utility.

Yeah, sure I guess...

I will maintain that having to put a new seal up after every Judgement was (again, in my opinion) the worst class mechanic ever. And I think a lot of people shared that opinion...which is presumably one of the reasons that they took that mechanic away. But then, of course, seals became largely passive and weren't particularly engaging j(ust like Stances/Presences/Chakras- they tended to be either something you set and left alone, or something that was a situational chore, and you'll notice that like Wrath-style seals, those mechanics all were eventually retired). Could they have settled on a version that was neither an utter nuisance nor mostly non-interactive? Sure...but somewhere between those two sounds sort of like a series of maintenance buffs? Or maybe some short CDs, perhaps with a shared CD so you choose one situationally (actually I like this one)?

[cparle87]

Wait, was this when Judgement still consumed the seal? Because that was like the worst class mechanic in WoW's history imo (or at least tied with having to drop a bunch of totems every single pull).

Seal, judge, seal, wait, judge, repeat. Somewhere in the 20s or 30s you get exorcism which only works on demons or undead. Then 40 (50?) you finally get crusader strike.

I'd totally mark seals way worse than totems. At least those are once per pull, multiple pulls if you drag things to you.

[StrawberryZebra]

Because its a BORROWED RESOURCE SYSTEM FROM ANOTHER CLASS.

And your proposed solution is stances - A mechanic that would be borrowed from another class.

Holy Power was never needed; it was and has always been a bandaid fix because Blizzard could not be bothered to TRY and design the class more enthusiastically. Seals could have been much more versatile in their use and how it changes the class's throughput and utility.

The alternative was a class gated entirely by cooldowns. One with practically no depth, nuance or skill required to pilot it. This is where we were in Wrath, where the difference between a faceroll and a highly skilled Ret Paladin was very small.

If that IS what Ret Paladins want, then I'd respect you more if you just came out and said it. Don't ask for Seals and barebones mechanics back, just say you want a easy class with big crits that does tonnes of damage like back in Wrath. There's nothing wrong with being a simple class if thats what people want and find fun.

[Beefkow]

And your proposed solution is stances - A mechanic that would be borrowed from another class.

What stances? That shit was pruned in legion from dks and warriors, even then most of the time it was stance and forget. Wotlk stance dancing sucked NGL, but it was a big distinguishing factor between a good warrior and a bad warrior.

At least his idea is more interesting than the mindless hurp a durp we have today.

[Utok]

I don't think holy power is the issue with why seals feel better to play.

It's a combination of nearly all abilities doing poor damage and needing a cooldown to deal normal damage. Even with amazing gear, if you are grinding stuff then most the skills you use outside avenging wrath makes it feel like you are running around naked.

The damage needs to be rebalanced away from avenging wrath and Templars verdict.

[roboscorcher]

And your proposed solution is stances - A mechanic that would be borrowed from another class.



The alternative was a class gated entirely by cooldowns. One with practically no depth, nuance or skill required to pilot it. This is where we were in Wrath, where the difference between a faceroll and a highly skilled Ret Paladin was very small.

If that IS what Ret Paladins want, then I'd respect you more if you just came out and said it. Don't ask for Seals and barebones mechanics back, just say you want a easy class with big crits that does tonnes of damage like back in Wrath. There's nothing wrong with being a simple class if thats what people want and find fun.

I do want a simple system. low skill floor, high skill ceiling. TBC twisting provides that. Swing speed changes can vastly change the optimal rotation. At the same time, simplicity allows niche abilities to be used more often because there is less clutter in the rotation.

I want a COHESIVE system, where every button feeds into the core mechanic while still feeling good to press.

I want a deep system, where seals+judgements provide answers for output of various types AND niche scenarios.

I also think that HoPo achieves some of these goals to some extent. But not as well as Seals could. There could maybe be a world there both systems are in play, but I think that is a bloated rotation, and the main reason seals were phased out. I think the devs chose the wrong system to remove. I can see their reasoning, but I genuinely love TBC Ret in a way I never did in Retail.

[Dzonathan]

Seal could've be fun if Seal twisting was embraced as a core Paladin mechanic.

Example: After casting a new seal, the previous one remains active until next weapon swing.
Example 2: Seal affects 2 next weapon swings and you can stack as many seals as you can squeeze in during that time.

[roboscorcher]

I don't think holy power is the issue with why seals feel better to play.

It's a combination of nearly all abilities doing poor damage and needing a cooldown to deal normal damage. Even with amazing gear, if you are grinding stuff then most the skills you use outside avenging wrath makes it feel like you are running around naked.

The damage needs to be rebalanced away from avenging wrath and Templars verdict.

I agree, they've heavily nerfed good abilities to make the newer ones hit harder. And the ramp up time is annoying, especially when compared to the burst from a lucky twist.

With Dragonflight's announced talent changes, I'm now praying that they allow players to choose between HolyPower and Seals in the Class tree. Allow players to choose what mechanic they like more. If you choose seals, you unlock seals that you can combo via twisting. If you choose HoPo, you unlock the HoPo spenders. Or maybe the spenders exist without HoPo, but they cost a lot of mana, which must be managed via seals.

I'm really interested to see what the new trees look like. I am hoping we can modify Divine Storm to either project out (like the leggo effect) or provide a stun on a longer CD (like Uther's DS in HotS).

Consecrate will probably be modifiable to travel with the player, provide healing, or do more output on a longer CD (like the venthyr aoe).

Judgements could also get some mods, maybe baked-in seal effects (because the likelihood of seals returning is pretty low tbh).

What are other people are hoping for or predicting in the new trees?