Paladin Talents Improvements

In Development WoW Forever Beta Discussion
1

Warriors have recieved some nice QoL updates to their talent trees, I think it’s time Paladins get something similar. The problem talents for Protection trees are listed below together with a Solution.

Redoubt

Current: A tanking spec that relies on a gacha proc which reduces in uptime as your parry and dodge goes up, is a terrible mechanic for a tank that relies on crushing immunity. It actively forces paladins to overbuild defense, just like they had to in TBC in order to ensure they were crushing blow immune. It’s awkward, it actively works against our whole kit.
Suggestion: Rework it into a 5% block chance. I know, less gacha and exciting but this actively works for our class, not against it.

Swift Judgement

Current: I have nothing else to say but; no. Would this be a fun talent if we had a taunt? YES. Do we have an actual taunt? No. We have a taunt that gatekeeps us from doing our core rotation which is already… lackluster to begin with to put it nicely.
Suggestion: Give us an actual taunt so it doesn’t feel like we have a taunt on a 1min cooldown. This also serves the function that we can actually judge a boss/mob with anything but Seal of Fury to apply a judgement effect like Seal of the Crusader, Seal of Light, Seal of Wisdom and ensure that should a DPS be a little bit to trigger happy, we can actually taunt the boss and get the aggro back.

Improved Righteous Fury

Current: 6% Damage Reduction is very lackluster, it’s not per say bad, but.. In the grand scheme of things, it’s not very fun either.
Suggestion: Consider making it give Holy Strike, Seal of Fury and its Judgement a flat threat component that scales with SP. Yes, that means in and of itself Righteous Fury might need a nerf, I’ll take that any day for some more spicy talents that feels better and gives us some meaningful progression, you can also be boring and add a 15% increased threat but that’s similar to warrior and I’d prefer to avoid that. Yes, that means to tank you need to dedicate yourself to Protection, that’s not a bad thing.

Sacred Duty

Current: 4% Stamina and 1min cooldown. It is extremely underwhelming. Why would I ever want that? I have 3 Defensive I can rotate already. Blessing of Protection, Bubble and Bulwark in 5 minutes I can be completely immune to physical damage for 4s, completely immune to all damage for 4s and be completely immune to all damage for 100% of my HP or 8s, that’s a lot of cooldown to have up roughly every 1.66min (no don’t nerf that.) and while I don’t know what our stamina will look like, Vanilla warriors had around 250-300 in Tier one. Assuming it’s something similar.. 10-24 stamina over the first few tiers is not worth it.
Suggestion: Just remove it entirely, it needs to be significantly reworked to be worthwhile. It is currently better to go for Sacred Arbiter or Improved Seals and I’m not seeing that change unless this talent is severely improved.

One Handed Weapon Specialization

Current: It is an awkward talent. It increases various spells like judgement, seals next to melee attacks like holy strike and auto attack, but it does not touch consecration. The text leads you to believe it’s for melee attacks exclusively, but in reality it’s for the majority of your kit.
Suggestion: Make all our damaging abilities benefit and change the wording to all damage made while wearing a one hand weapon (exclude retribution aura though, that’s a why are you hitting yourself effect).

Holy Shield

Current: 4 Charges, 30% block for 10s on a 10s cooldown.
Suggestion: As we removed redoubt, rebase 5% block onto Holy Shield, this keeps it inline with roughly the amount of block uptime and therefore block over time at 440 defense. Preferably reduce cooldown to 8s or give it 5 charges. I know that technically it does not run out on a boss that hits every 2s, but you never know what you guys might cook up and we still need to maintain crushing immunity.

Judgement:

Suggestion: Add a 10y increase to Judgement on either Templar’s Bulwark, One Hand Specialization, Reckoning or Iron Creed. We’re the only tank that does not get to pull from range. You say, but it has 10y! Yes and by the time I’m in range of a mob or a boss in a dungeon, I’ve body pulled. It feels awkward, it means that as the only tank, we have an awkward time LoS’ing, not difficult and it’s certainly not ta weakness, it’s just does not feel like you play a dedicated tank spec. Druid got Fairy Fire, Warriors got ranged weapons.. We need a longer range judgement.

I will not speak to Retribution and Holy as I don’t enjoy those specs, so other’s will need to weigh in on those.

Gearing Situation

Could we hand out some incentives for us to do dungeons for loot? Currently there’s no mail gear that gives +heal or +sp, so my holy paladin bros are once again forced to run around in cloth and leather and Protection Paladins have to make do with strength which does not benefit our threat at all, I suspect that situation continues in plate gear.. If Holy and Protection Paladins want gear that actually fits their spec, they are forced to grind for very expensive recipes through Merchant’s Favor whereas everyone else gets to go into a dungeon and come out for the better.
Pretty please fix that. We shouldn’t have to throw hundreds of gold towards gear while leveling, just to get some sense of progression and yes, between buying crates, the materials for the crates and the materials to craft the gear I’ve burned through 50g for lvl 20-30 gear :zany_face:

1 Like
Paladin Conversation
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I certainly agree that the cooldown & duration need to overlap, the current situation is ridiculous.

i also agree with this but was told the developers had specifically called this weakness as being deliberate, which is strange because it’s not really true, if we are in an undead situation then exorcism works fine. A reliable low damage ranged pull seems logical.

i also agree that the current mechanics are awkward to say the least.

For the last beta update they removed improved armour from the Warrior Tree, I’m not sure they really have a fixed view of what to do yet.

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Prot at the minute feels like it’s all shortcomings, without any punch to make up for it. In the dev’s mind the punch seems to just be that you’re a paladin, and can cast heals and blessings. That is of course iconic and powerful, but as a tank it makes you feel toothless

I honestly can get on board with all sorts of weakness in protection paladins (the weirdness of Judgeing our taunt, the fact that most of prot’s CDs drop threat, …), but I’d love at least one part of tanking we can really excel at

If warriors are kings of AoE/cleave, where are Paladins? If warriors have an easier time reaching uncrushability, can paladins at least get a smaller window of higher defences (ie. you can briefly become uncrushable, and massively amp your block value), or some proc that lets us cast heals with no/low cast time so that we can actually perform that part of the paladin fantasy while tanking

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Hmm, having a full SP set from Merchant’s Favor, I’m probably a bit biased in this and the SFK 28 sword, but Paladin is in no way or shape worse off than a Warrior at the moment. I actually have an easier time managing 8-10 mobs in a dungeon. We have about the same single target threat, currently favoring paladin ever so slightly due to Seal of the Crusader but it’s really slightly and AoE.. Warrior does not even come close. I suspect that once Retribution Aura is fixed to use our spell power and not the mob’s spell power - it’s just going to balloon even further.

I think the most important part is that, we should have a talent kit that actually supports us, rather than working against us. I think that a baseline 82.4% avoidance is very high and reasonable, remember that it is without +block/dodge/parry on top. Warriors only get uncrushability by spending 10 rage, but it also means that they’re no longer gaining rage to from blocks to stay uncrushable and even with the rage on crit, maintaining Shield Slam requires 2.8 rage a second even in the most optimistic scenarios with a 5 rage/s gain (that’s with 54% avoidance and 10% crit), you’d be forced to drop Heroic Strike and Thunderclap less, which brings your threat down. What it comes down to really is how much flat threat Shield Slam has retained, I suspect a heavy nerf as most other flat threat has seen upwards 48% reduction that and it’s getting far more damage now, we’ll see in the end.

Where Paladins really shine is that we have 3 defensives each making us entirely immune to damage that we can use every 1.66min. Two of them do require a taunt, but any good TBC paladin will tell you, it’s not that difficult to taunt and remove the BoP/Bubble aura. We can also maintain ~12% damage reduction slightly beating warriors unless warriors use shield wall on cooldown.

I think paladin overall is in a good spot, but I think the talent tree needs a significant overhaul to provide more incentive to take some talents and remove the whole maybe you’re crushing immune, maybe you’re not crushing immune. Who knows, only rngesus.

If it turns out that Warriors are far ahead of Paladins end-game in terms of threat, I would expect a buff to paladins (especially how well our SP scales on our attacks, I mean 6.5% on holy shield is.. so low you might as well remove it. 200SP? Here’s 12 extra damage on a block like.. what).

I would like more defined roles. A warrior that’s the immovable wall, but not the best at threat. A paladin that’s great at threat, but squishier than a Warrior. A druid that’s… doing it druid thing of being somewhere in-between.

5

All of this blabla and not a single paragraph about how Seal of justice is useless. Come on guys…

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Yo, how dare you disrespect Seal of Justice incredible usefulness in preventing mobs from running away. That calls for a Scarlet Crusade inquisition.

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sorry, I meant: BRING BACK TO LIFE OUR LOVED SEAL OF JUSTICE

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Bubble Taunt is a tricky manoeuvre & is 4 seconds max so a single hit. I generally use it to cheese mechanics, again as most paladins use it.

The average paladin mitigation is i believe 11.68%. Or 11.64% can’t remember which.

Also BOP only makes us or indeed anyone we cast it on immune to physical damage. I pretty much use it in tbc on caster dps riding my threat, thats what any sane prot pala does.

Only our new cooldown is reliable, an absorb & it’s inferior in almost every scenario to shield wall, but still a big improvement on no cooldown.

Ret Aura improvements are basically to partially mirror the loss of blessing of sanctuary add to that the seal of fury absorb and for paladin it’s more or less a wash.

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11.68 or ~12% because it’s cleaner to say. Shield Wall if you hit it on Cooldown gives warriors 13.33%, a massive reduction while at it and then nothing for the next 4min and 15s. So, it’s great if you’re in an OH SH** moment, but terrible for reducing spike damage.
100% shield is not terrible, it might as well be 100% immunity as long as it’s up, on raid bosses that can be anywhere from 4-8 hits or 8s.
Our small absorb also counts for damage reduction, effectively shaving off 10 damage each hit more or less currently, if a hit would do 50 to a warrior, it does 40 to us (excluding AoE scenarios). Now that’s of course less relevant in a raid, but if we can get that to say 30 hp shield, it’s suddenly 3% less damage taken on a 1000 damage hit.. Combine it with our blocks being 30% bigger, so a 54 block value shield gives us ~70 vs Warriors 54 then we’re looking at almost 7% extra damage reduced vs 5.4% damage reduced. It starts to add up.

That’s my issue with this whole thing, on paper, Warrior is positioned to be much better at reducing damage, but in reality.. All the little things Paladin gets, they stack up over time. ~22% of all damage reduced after armor simply for existing, that’s not a bad deal, for a warrior that means popping a cooldown to reach a ~19%

Bubble Taunt is not really that tricky, in an AoE scenario, yeah since we don’t have an AoE taunt and that’s fine, but all you need to do is wait for judgement to come off cooldown and then smash bubble and judgement or bop and judgement. Since Judgement is an oGCD cooldown, they’ll hit at the same time. Macros are really effective for this or a weakaura if you want it nice and easy on your screen.

I generally don’t include the minor shield and block, but if one does and compare it to warrior, we do have less damage taken assuming both gets to crushing immunity and Paladins slated at 72.4% avoidance without the talent proc suggest that’s the intention. I would be weird if we didn’t get it and had to deal with crushing blows, but not having the HP and Armor of druids.

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I have spent weeks articulating models that measure mitigation for melee damage & spell damage.

All the models I’ve built tell me that warrior is better placed to mitigate both moderate and high physical damage. This works on the basisxthat currently there is no clear and predictable path for paladins to become crush immune

I’ve modelled in variable spell damage, reckoning procs, steal of fury absorbs etc, crush immunity on/off toggles etc.unless you have a gimped arms warrior throwing in thunderclap or super fast attacks Warrior wins. Only scenario which tips this is fast attacking moderate damage.

If we have a clear path to crush immunity then thunderclap is the differentiator.

In TBC (which forever is closest to matching from a pala tanking perspective), we can win out on threat with a variant of a 0/40/21 build, but it requires your healers to be well geared and accept that a quicker kill comes with greater risks. The only way our absorb beats out Shield wall is on a single hit that takes close to 100% of your health. Other than that Shield wall will win out. It also has a 3 minute cooldown. In Magic encounters there is not much difference other than cooldown usage. It’s difficult to see at present what advantage a Paladin brings to the raid table unless it’s cheesing mechanics. True they are a lot better than classic, but they dont have an obvious niche yet. Perversely as our avoidance gets better mitigation from redoubt and reckoning tail off and mana management will potentially become more important. It would be nice for blizzard to share the design philosophy for prot.

Once we understand the why, a ranged pull & reducing Holy shield cooldown to 8 seconds is really all that jumps out.

I don’t mind if we are a bit better taking magic damage and warriors are better on physical damage.

Warriors will likely have a bit better single target threat and paladins better multi target threat.

Then a month later Druids will become the tanking overlords and all that theorycrafting will be for nothing.

11

Shield Wall has a 4min cooldown though 11min reduced with talents.

If a boss does 1000 damage ever 2s (just because) and we assume 102.4% mitigation both Paladin and Warrior having a similar dodge/parry and the rest covered by block on a shield with 54 block value (I’m not including strength in this, because as it stands we don’t know if Paladins will be strength or intelligence based) and 50% armor mitigation for both. It does assume you can reach at least ~200 SP, I think it’ll be possible, but that’s also unknown. In the grand scheme of it all, it’s not going to move the numbers enough if it’s 20-25 from SoF rather than 30.
Paladins block value is ~70
Warriors block value is 54

Paladin:
Block is subtracted: 930
Armor is subtracted: 465
Damage reductions are applied;
Both active: 393,39
Righteous Fury: 437,1
SoF shield: 363,39/407,1

Warrior:
Block is applied: 946
Armor is subtracted: 473
Damage reduction is subtracted: 425,7

Over a 10 swing period:
Warrior: 4257
Paladin: 4106,4

It’s a small discrepancy, but Paladin do edge out a win on pure hits.

Warrior including it’s Shield Wall would further reduce its damage for 12s, but for the sake of parity, we’ll let Paladins use their Bulwark too, then the math becomes how long does it take for a paladin to catch up.

With Shield Wall and Defensive Stance subtracted: 170.28

So first 10 hits and I’ll be gracious and give Warrior a clean 6 hits with 170.28 and Paladins a clean 4 hits. I will also assume Paladins use their holy strike as the barrier comes up so it only benefits from the 10% for 2 strikes.
Warrior: 2724
Paladin: 2142 (timer expires, a boss does not break a 4k+ barrier on 4 hits)

Next 10 hits:
Warrior: 6981
Paladin: 6248

We can fast forward until Warriors Shield wall comes off cooldown at 4min Paladin we assume is 40/20 so no 1min reduction.
Warrior: 49551 (pre shield wall pop)
Paladin: 47308

The next 10 swings with Shield Wall
Warrior: 52275
Paladin: 51414

Unless I’m somehow missing a step, but I’m fairly sure that’s the damage calculation of Classic. No matter how long a fight last, a Warrior will never catch up to a Paladin in terms of damage reduction. I’m not applying dodge, parry and miss into it, because it would result in similar numbers of of 32.4% damage being avoided entirely over a period, so the actual numbers would be much lower, but still favor the Paladin.
What I’m not sure about is whether or not block, dodge and parry applies to an absorb shield such as Templar’s Bulwark, if it does (even if it does not), it’s unlikely that even a 1s attack speed would burst a fully buffed Paladin (4k was just a low ball park number, we’re more likely to see around 6-7k HP).

Don’t think it’s wrong? I do assume a paladin runs a 1.8s weapon tho, because that’s the only spell sword speeds I could find. Now, this I only really find relevant for raids and in raids I assume absolute parity for both tanks in terms debuffs on a boss. It’d be insane otherwise.

Whether a Warrior will be the best single target threat entirely comes down to how much Shield Slam’s flat threat have been nerfed, I don’t assume it gets its old 250 flat threat anymore, not when all other flat threats have seen nerfs of up to 48%, but we won’t know that until we actually get access to it.

Holy Shield is decidedly worse unless all 4 charges are spend, there’s no doubt about this. It’s 210’ish * 1,92, which with 2s attack speed bosses means you need 80% block and since baseline dodge, parry, miss is 31,8% that’s never happening. You can spot 1209 threat if 3 charges is used compared to Shield Slams 913 + (the unknown flat threat), I’d be mighty surprised if it’s not somewhere around 1200 threat too.

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Paladins are going to be int based. Essentially gearing looks to be sta/def/spell damage.

We have no path currently to 102.4% & if we can’t get there then we are missing something.

If we do get there without gimmicks then thunderclap availability will be the difference.

At that point paladins will require slightly more healing, my models show that Paladins have an overall smoother damage profile but that shield wall + last stand are more effective than the absorb shield, particularly where high damage attacks are concerned.

Are we assuming that if a Paladin tanks there will always be an arms warrior throwing up thunderclap, that seems like a big ask.

Like I say I can live with the current scenarios i’m seeing even if we eat crushing blows. Providing we get a ranged pull & reduced cooldown on holy shield, we will be better on AOE stuff but just stress the healers a bit more.

13

That’s assuming there’s not a Libram drop for additional block percentages and that our gear somehow won’t have block, dodge, parry. I find it unlikely, there’s already at the very least 4% block from gear drops alone in the 15-30 range, that’s huge considering that was never the case in Classic.
If we look at a TBC tank, yes, it will be intelligence based, if we look at SoD it’s going to be strength based.
Blizzard has made no real statements on the gearing part of it. What we know is it’s spell power in terms of coefficiencies. If it’s strength based gear, we get minor increases to block and holy strike damage, if it’s intelligence based we get higher spell crit that feeds 80% of our rotation and an absurd mana pool that I just don’t see us need.

The interesting part is that 15% Seal damage actually beats 20% Holy Strike damage, for raiding, I think Seal is the better option, even if you only get 20% consecration cost reduction, unless it’s a boss that requires high mobility. In dungeons it’s likely better to just have 15% run speed. It does kind of come down to how much mana sustain we have at 60, but if we can just reliably proc 2 .

The 100% rage on crit on warriors was specifically to give Arms and Fury builds the ability to maintain thunderclap, demo roar outside of their rotation.. If we then all of a sudden say, noooope that just devolves into a then no one should be expected to maintain their debuffs. I don’t think that’s a good stance to start out with in a raid environment.

In any case I would still take a 5% block talent and 5% extra block on Holy Shield any day over a talent that may or may not be up and therefore may or may not make us crushing blow immune and while it does take 80% block to spend 4 charges in 10s, I think it would feel better with 8s cooldown. That and a range increase on judgement.

14

I just wanted to add my +1 to the increased range on Judgement. Not having a ranged pull feels suboptimal, and if the Healer/DPS pick up a stray mob there’s no way of taunting it back without dragging whatever you are fighting with you as you run after it (or have them stop what they are doing and run to you).

15

Sorry I should have just said spell power. I believe that our generic tanking gear will be stamina / spell power and defence. Meaning a higher budget for stamina. I dont see us having a big mana pool.

I think we will be pushed to stack stamina, otherwise there is no point giving us a 4% stamina increase.

16

I agree some changes need t be made.

Taunt needs to be a spell like hand of reckoning, which is ranged and not tied to Judgements.

I also think the last talent needs to be changed to Captain America shield throwing, as per Wrath, this gives us , a ranged pull and a silence.

17

Hand of Reckoning, but no AoE component, it’s simply too strong and it meant us Paladins in TBC were abusing Bubble + AoE taunt and BoP + AoE taunt in case it was pure physical and casters weren’t trailing your threat. It cheese’d so much. Warriors get an AoE Taunt, they don’t get full immunity while doing it.

I prefer holy shield, it’s more in line with other Vanilla talents druids and warriors get, I do think we need better scaling on it to be competitive with Shield Slam, 6.5% is means even with 200SP, each charge only gives 13 ~25 threat, that’s.. just too low. That or we get our 10/20/30% or 5/10/15% Holy Threat on Imp. Righteous Fury, then scaling can stay as is.

I would rather they gave +2/4/6/8/10y range on judgement on Reckoning or maybe Iron Creed.

I have finally found a use for Swift Judgement. I use it to apply a damn seal and then immediately use it so I can judgement the target with Seal of Fury and do a Holy Strike.. Otherwise the minute I click judgement, DPS is like AND WE’RE OFF!