I love paladin, paladins used to mean something, they used to be a force to be reckoned with, but for a long time now they are just always a second rate healer. In arenas many people simply refuse to queue up with paladins because they’d much rather have better heals in their team. Please start paying attention to what your community is telling you.
I was really happy to see some of the talents being changed and reworked, I think you’re doing a good step in the right direction, I also love the new UI, but some of the things with paladins are just incredibly broken / useless.
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Retribution Aura, why would you ever use that, you shouldn’t be “buffed” only when half the raid is dying already, you should already have gotten a buff to try save them, it’s stupid to buff you when people are already dying. And even then 4 seconds Seraphim is completely useless.
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Why does it take 3 points for us to get mobility from Divine Steed, would it hurt so much if Seasoned warhorse increased it by 2 seconds instead of 1?
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Seal of Reprisal is a completely dead talent for holy paladins, why is it in the paladin tree if they can’t use it?!
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Touch of Light is completely broken, it procs once in ~40 heals and literally heals for 120. Even if it healed 120 on every single heal it would still be useless.
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Hollowed Ground is completely useless, even it was 100% increase to Consecration damage it would still not be worth it, I don’t get how you think 10% means anything at all, instead why not make the range increased by 10 yards, that could be valuable or at least something.
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Judgment of Light is completely useless, it’s a 3k/min heal if you have 100% uptime in melee, which is just a dead talent. Even 1 single Golden Path would have healed more than that in 10 seconds and that’s already useless.
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Why does Golden Path and Seal of Mercy take 3 points to get a 450/s heal, it’s something nobody is ever going to take. Even if it took only 1 point for all of it you would still need to consider if it’s worth it.
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Zealot’s Paragon shows 0 on the tooltip, because you probably rounded it down from ~0.4 or something, it’s really confusing but also why so short? You can effectively get 1.5 additional second from wings if you cast both hammer and judgment, what’s the point of that?
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Seraphim is a completely dead talent, it heals about 15% more than Seal of Order, at the cost of 3 holy and it doesn’t even make up the holy you had to spend for it to use it. Why create a “ult” talent that’s meaningless, can’t you buff that a little to give people the actual choice to play it, right now it’s completely unplayable.
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Hammer of Wrath sometimes procs randomly on targets even if they’re on 100% HP and no wings procs, it’s bugged.
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Seal of the Crusader is a completely dead talent for holy paladins. If you somehow manage to proc it using i.e. a Holy Shock then you have literally Crusader Strike and Judgment left to use it before 5 seconds run out, for only a 6% increase on damage. Why would you ever use that over 100% uptime 10% damage increase from Of Dusk and Dawn.
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The tooltip for Of Dusk and Dawn shows 6% but when you take it it suddenly shows 10%, it’s broken.
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The tooltip for Avenging Wrath sometimes shows 25 seconds when I hover it, most other times 20 seconds, something is broken there.
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The playstyle of melee and constantly using Crusader Strike seems nice at first, till you realize it’s a great way to dump your mana in record time, it makes the playstyle unplayable for most use cases. Crusader Strike has for a long time been almost a useless ability because of how significantly it affects your mana, why not lower the cost a bit so paladins can actually use it?
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Second Sunrise combined with Empyrean Legacy at first seems “okay” but it’s also just useless. To get a 20% proc on 100% double heal from Dawn talent translates to an average of ~30k heal / 2.5 minutes. Nobody is going to play that and for the most part Light of Dawn again remains a useless ability. Why not buff dawn a bit so people can actually use it.
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Tirion’s Devotion is useless, you can with an operly optimistic exaggerated estimation get about ~10 Word of Glory’s / min, so effectively it’s about 10s reduction of lay on hands per minute. Nobody is going to waste points on that.
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The proc rate of Power of the Silver Hand is incredibly low, I have emptied several mana bars trying to get it to proc and it almost never does. It’s completely unreliable to use in PvP.
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Blessing of Winter needs a rework, even if you use Crusader Strike and Judgment and Holy Shock there isn’t a way to actually get it to 10 stacks without melee attacking, which means you have to run in range for them to hit you anyways, this is a 45 second gap or 30 second ability that doesn’t really do anything.
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Divine Purpose is almost a no brainer over Holy Avenger. When you use Holy Avenger you literally only have Crusader Strike and Holy Shock to generate power, maybe a random bestow, but actually getting the value from Holy Avenger is not happening. And it’s been that way for a long time. If at the very least Judgment got you a holy power, it would drastically change how powerful Holy Avenger could be, but at the moment it’s not comparable to Divine Purpose. Can you change something about that so it’s at least a viable option to pick?
One of the biggest issues you also have is that right now you put Beacon of Faith in an incredibly bad position in the tree, to take it you have to sacrifice one of your major big heals / talents. But Beacon of Faith is an ability that almost every paladin is going to want to take and consider fundamental to their class, why put it in such a terrible position in the tree.
Most classes have gotten really great buffs to things but it feels like again paladins are just being a bit neglected and again just fall behind priests as a second rate healer. So again if you want to achieve anything in 2s, play a priest and forget paladin, it shouldn’t be like that. Give paladins a little love, you have neglected them for long enough.
Most of the things I point out above is just common sense and a bit of logic if you had thought at all about the talents you make. I may not be correct about every point and maybe there are some reasons why you did what you did, but I just don’t get it. It’s like you take someone who has no clue what a holy paladin is and let them dream up random things. You really should start to listen to your community and start involving people who have a clue in your product discussions, ask some of the top rated paladins to help you out, they have played their classes for thousands of hours and they can help you make better decisions about talents and getting it right. And don’t dream up a bunch of random stuff and then ask them to “test” it out after you already dreamt out a bunch of useless things, let them be part of the product discussions so they can help guide you away from these stupid talent decisions.
And while it’s understandable that some things aren’t perfect, having some talents that’s just straight up broken is utterly unacceptable, to release a product with so many bugs, as a company it’s really poor to offload your work to your community and let them figure it out and call it “feedback”, it’s not their job to debug. You’re a billion dollar company, hire proper QA engineers and properly pay them to do a job.
I really wish to see a day again when paladins are really competitive in PvP again and when they just feel good to play again.