this is a phenomenon that seems to happen often within games like league of legends, where aspects or character strengths that are fine end up getting buffed unnecessarily in order to “mix things up” regularly since this is what has come to be expected from a live-service style game. this can lead to an eternal struggle for balance as the entire intention is to both retain player interest with keeping things “fresh” and shuffle the competitive metagame for viewers and competitors.
in wow’s sense, more often what i see is buffs targeted towards specs that are in my eyes, very much fine and not overwhelming yet still capable. players’ perspectives tend to view the top performers as “what they should also be capable of.” hey, that guy is hitting 150K crits! why can’t i do that? wtf my class sucks! this is especially apparent in a pvp environment where ego, expectations, and performance are of high value to the vast majority. in a pve environment, these desires for high performance tend to be less stressed, with most players aside from mythic WFs and parsechasers tending to be very happy simply interacting with the pve game world through a lens they identify with or mesh with.
cases like prot paladin’s current 10.0.7 spec tree revamp are an example of developers being very out of touch with what prot pala players currently have come to enjoy about their spec’s capabilities and the flexibility offered within the current trees in this xpac. if the dev responsible for prot paladin’s tree and paladin’s class tree is stubborn enough to keep everything the way it is, then several simple things ought to be done:
a) base and spec trees points are further constricted by this update, lending to the idea that some talents should be condensed and reduced in cost -
– Righteous Protector –
is now a capstone in current PTR and as it is a 1 pt talent, should be buffed to 3s CDR per HP ability to reflect the previous strength of the talent. this talent is extremely helpful and quite fun, encouraging creeping power gain through usage of holy power, while providing feedback and reward to the player through both defensive and offensive cooldown reduction, ensuring their cooldowns when used intelligently will be up when they most need them.
– Gift of the Golden Val’kyr –
GotGV’s strength is underratedly high in all forms of content. this talent was one of those talents that you could easily take 1 point of and still feel effective enough. i don’t believe making it into a 1/1 talent is the answer, but it should not be in the position to make it 2/2 mandatory to get Bulwark of Righteous Fury.
– Ferren Marcus’s Fervor & Strength of Conviction –
these 2 talents could be made 1 pointers to free up some space as both are somewhat uninteresting despite the potential power they can bring, with Ferren feeling weaker than SoC.
Base Tree:
many various issues involved with the base class tree for protadin, but i will mention we are more constrained here since not picking DT in a multi-target or pvp environment is essentially trolling. the lack of the old cooldown reduction option for Divine Toll’s capstone is bad, taking away the option of having more frequent DTs used for no good reason. at this point, you could just remove or bake in Divine Resonance and the cooldown reduc into the talent itself, make it a capstone in place of Divine Resonance, and make Seals of Alacrity & Might 1 pointers with both leading into DT. this might not be that balanced but it sure would be fun.
sidenotes: i actually enjoyed the idea of Dusk and Dawn in SL, and i am happy to see more complexity being added to prot paladin’s potential playstyle. personally i can’t encourage things in a spec to be dumbed down too much, lest we have ourselves another legion-esque class gameplay. it’s a great feeling to time the 0-5 game, especially with Sanctified Wrath.