I’d like to share my feedback about the current build that we know of, and got shared on wowhead.
Generally I’d say it’s an overall improvement. The new defensive options are great, especially sanctified plates, and divine protection returning to baseline ability. The offheal options are also neat. The removal of seraphim is amazing.
But there are still some concerns from my side. While the reworked retri aura is slightly better than the last one, it’s still kind of stupid in a lot of situations. Taking 50% health in one hit may occur on progress bosses, but for easier fights, people very rarely take that much dmg in one hit. But I can already see the degen things people will do just to proc 5% dmg for the raid. Standing in mechanics, tanks not pressing def CD for tank buster ability, etc. I wouldn’t say this is a desirable gameplay.
The other thing that I’m salty about, is the old retribution aura effect staying with us a a baseline passive. It’ll still feel bad to compare ourselves against other retri pallys with top logs, because the top logs will continue to be inflated by people constantly dying around the paladin player with that 95% + log. If your raid members are playing well, and nobody dies, you are simply unable to get on the level of DPS others do in raid grps where ppl die, no matter how much skill you have.
And the last thing I wanna mention, is that while the paladin tree is without a question a massive improvement over the current one, I couldn’t say the same about the retri tree. In my opinion it’s bloated with talents that do nothing but buff one particular ability. There are multiple talents that do nothing but buff crusader strike, judgement and blade of justice for example. It feels so redundant. It’s also hard to track how does the interactions even work between some of these talents, when 4 or even 5 talents modify one particular ability.
Also, there’s way too much complication with different damage types. This gets converted into holystrike, that gets converted into radiant, etc. It’s hard to track what does what, why is it good, how does it even work, what gets buffed by mastery and what doesn’t, it’s just weird, and overly complicated for no good reason. Some of the talents in the last row are also very strange imo.