I know the thought of paladins having stances has been kicked around before, but looking at 3.1 and the somewhat bandaid style fixing that Blizz is doing, I figured I'd sit down and try and come up with something better. And while I highly doubt this'll ever reach anyone at Blizz or that they'd honestly care, feedback regarding my assessment of the issues would be appreciated.
So, here are a couple of the issues that I feel are present and hinder the balancing of paladins as a class properly:
1) We can heal. Obviously this is a good thing in some regards, it makes us flexible, and it gives us a role as a healer. This is the central component of the can of worms that is paladin balancing.
2) We can DPS. Yeah, you probably think I'm joking with how I'm phrasing these points, but points one and two are very relevant to point 3, which is that:
3) Righteous Fury is our only "stance." It's not really much of a defensive stance; 6% if talented, okay, well that's nice. The points are still low enough in the tree that Retribution and Holy could pick them up. But compare it to any other defensive stance. Massive armor and HP gains for Death Knights and Druids, more mitigation and access to tactically relevant abilities (and the exclusion of others) for warriors. But in all cases, a tradeoff is made. Not so for us, except for the whole pulling aggro thing.
4) Only one of our specs really "uses" mana. But we're all stuck with it. Yes, Protection and Retribution do use mana, and yes we can run out, which honestly is a design flaw as the focus seems to be us not running out. Warcraft in general, however, is designed so that healers are meant to run out/use mana. So while we all have a blue bar, it's supposed to be more like rage/energy for 2/3 of our specs.
There's some causality here, and you can see it in the bandaid-style fixes for mana regen and the various mitigation talents in deep protection. Basically, since we have flexibility and no limiting factors aside from talents and the gear we're in, it's damn hard to balance us.
Anything which greatly increases mana regen for Protection and Retribution to be really viable means that Holy becomes overpowered unless there's a downside. (See: Divine Plea)
And, anything which greatly increases survivability is also OP for both Holy and Retribution in the sense of PvP.
So how to reconcile all this stuff? Take a page from the DK playbook. Except just 2 stances, instead of 3. The assumption here is that Holy is how it's meant to be, that paladins at their core are healers and they don't need any sort of stance to get it right. They use the base abilities and never have to switch into either of these proposed stances. And since I'm pretending to be creative here, let's call them Oaths. Say, Oath of the Protector and Oath of the Crusader.
EDIT: Just so that people don't point out that such a "stance bar" would be a bit anemic, and also not work in the UI with our Auras, the answer is basically just to make them normal abilities which have a common flag, like Hunter Aspects.
So here goes:
Oath of the Protector
-Toggle, lasts until cancelled.
-90% increased threat from all Holy Damage.
-Up to 10% additional health.*
-Up to 9% damage reduction from all sources.*
-5% of base mana regenerated every second.
-Reduces all healing done by you by up to 90%.*
* indicates that this quantity is a sliding scale, balanced around having a certain defense rating above the minimum. Let's say 540 for now.
So, at 400 defense, the Oath does three things: It's a threat modifier, grants mana regen, and it cripples healing. No health or damage reduction. At 540+ defense, it would be the full 10% health boost, the full 9% damage reduction, and heals would function normally.
The problem of bandaid fixing Protection's mana pool, and lower base HP is fixed. And blessing of Sanctuary can go die alone in a fire, or ideally be removed completely.
There's no compelling reason for Holy to ever use this, but you could make an argument for Retribution, due to the mana regen. That's why the 1-stance model fails. Hence,
Oath of the Crusader
-Toggle, lasts until cancelled.
-10% additional melee damage dealt.
-Reduces threat by 30%.**
-Reduces all healing done by you by 90%***
** The threat modifier could be removed from the deep Retribution talent
*** indicates that this penalty is removed deep in the Retribution talent tree.
Would this one force a rebalance? Maybe, maybe not. I think you can argue that Ret is currently not looking great in 3.1 (though it's incomplete, I understand.) The trick with a stance is that it needs to be compelling enough for Retribution to have to keep it on instead of the defensive stance (See: Death Knights and PvP), and offer enough of a penalty so that Holy would never take it. I'm making the assumption here that Retribution doesn't have mana problems. Which at the moment, with Seal of Blood/Martyr (which I find stupid conceptually), is mostly true.
Also, with the bursty nerfs currently announced with Patch 3.1, this would be a way to bring Ret's sustained damage up without greatly overpowering them in PvP (Notice it wouldn't help Judgement).
If you made it through all that, thanks for reading.
-Korangar
Korangar
Sun Mar 01, 2009 11:57 am
