First Impression of Retribution Paladin Rework in Dragonflight 10.0.7 - Guide Writer Feeback

RPT Publié 22/02/2023 à 12:24 par Bolas

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Protection divine is now baseline, with a 1.30 CD (63s with Esprit inflexible).

Bouclier du vengeur is still a talent that you'll practically always take, and now has a half duration GCD. It still has a 1.30 CD (63s with Esprit inflexible).

Égide tutélaire is also in the Ret tree and you'll usually have no problem taking it. It significantly buffs both active defensives.

Plaques sanctifiées in the Paladin tree, offering a staggeringly large amount of stamina and avoidance.

A plethora of new healing options:
Célérité de la Lumière makes Éclair lumineux an instant cast, and buffs its healing. It puts it on a 6s cooldown, but there's no real situation you could ever spam Éclair lumineux to begin with anyway, if nothing else because your mana pool just isn't big enough to let you cast it more than 3 or 4 times in a row.

Prière dirigée casts a free Mot de gloire once every minute when you drop to low health. It also benefits from Mains de médication.

Bénédiction sancteforge gives free AoE healing for every Tempête divine.

Sursis du croisé causes Frappe du croisé to also heal you every hit.

Lumière faiblissante gives you an absorb shield based on the damage your generators do.

Protection divineBouclier du vengeurBouclier divinPlaques sanctifiéesMobilityBond héroïquePalefroi divinBouclier divinJugement de justicePalefroi divinBénédiction de libertéLiberté déliéeAura de vindicte50% of their Health in a Single HitAura de vindictePoussièreAura de vindicteAura de vindicteThis Cannot Occur More than Once Every 30 Sec

If the ICD is group wide, in groups with one Paladin, you'll have that Paladin start in Aura de vindicte, proc the damage buff, and then swap to Aura de dévotion. Once the ICD is up, they'll swap back to Aura de vindicte, and repeat. They'll end up swapping Auras twice every 30s to maintain both the damage buff and the damage reduction.

If the ICD is Paladin specific, you could run 3 Paladins, and have them rotate their Auras to permanently maintain the 5% damage buff. This would at least require the Paladins to swap Auras in the first 10-20s of the fight, and probably more often if subsequent procs don't happen exactly on CD.

Retribution GameplayFrappes de croisadeFrappe du croiséTempête divineRétorsion finaleCourroux vengeur : colèreCroisadeCourroux vengeurRétorsion finaleCourroux vengeurCroisadeParangon de zéloteCroisadeCourroux vengeurNew TalentsRetribution Talents

All of the passive stat nodes in the Retribution tree like Enseignements de la Lumière or Arbitrage now have an additional effect to them too, which is a nice bonus to make them a little less boring.

Lame sainte sorta feels like it just exists to soak up a talent point. I'd consider this a fundamental part of Lame de justice as a spell, since every version of it we've ever had ended up generating 2 Holy Power, so it feels weird to need to pick it as one of your first talent points.

In the top third of the talent tree, there's only 9 talent nodes and 8 points to spend on them - that said, there are also 6 choice node talents among them, so you still do get to make a lot of choices here, just between two different options on a choice node rather than between two or three different talent paths. There's also two utility nodes here, which means you'll usually just pick one of them to take and then take every other talent in the section. I like the effects these talents provide, but I think most players will be reluctant to take more than one of them since it'll probably come at the cost of a decent amount of damage to do so.

Cause vertueuse vs Art de la guerre is a really cool way to let players decide the mechanic they want to have for Lame de justice resets. Cause vertueuse should probably also reset on Tempête divine casts though, or otherwise in any situation involving AoE you'd essentially be forced into always taking Art de la guerre, assuming they're tuned to be comparable on single target.

Jugement de justice is a pretty tame version of Long bras de la loi, but I like that it's managed to sneak its way back into the talent tree in some form, since there's a lot of players that really love that effect.

Expurgation has had a redesign so that it now procs off every Lame de justice cast rather than just crits. I liked having some talents that would alter your secondary stat preferences, but its position in the tree makes it seem like it's supposed to be a talent that you'll just take in most regular builds rather than a talent that you'd build around for Lame de justice specifically, which makes sense. Currently if you use Lame de justice on a target that already has an Expurgation debuff, the original one just gets completely overwritten - I'd like to see a mechanic similar to Balafre d’âme instead where the remaining damage on an existing Expurgation dot gets added to any subsequent application instead, especially since Cause vertueuse and Art de la guerre can cause you to cast a lot of Lame de justices in a small period.

Héritage empyréen is still a talent I like a lot, but it still has the awkward incentive if you're using Croisade and Rétorsion finale that you'll probably want to use Tempête divine to build Croisade stacks on single target, to then use the Héritage empyréen proc after your Rétorsion finale at 10 stacks. Hopefully without this might not be a damage gain to do anymore, but it's not very fun to have to hardcast your AoE spender on single target just to save the proc.

It makes sense to nerf Sanctifier and Lame consacrée when they were previously strong enough to even see use on single target, but I'm not sure it makes sense for them to still be in the talent tree generally when Consécration itself has already had its cooldown increased to 20s and all of the talents that make your generators cleave are likely to be stronger than these anyway. I'm definitely not a big Consécration fan, but these versions of these talents seem like they could just be something else a bit more interesting for Ret.

I like bringing back Ire de l’inquisiteur, an old Legendary from Legion that never really saw any use, but the % per stack and cap mean that at maximum stacks Tempête divine will only do 50% more damage, which isn't even enough to beat a Verdict final or Vengeance du justicier on single target.

Jugement du généralissime has an interesting concept, but currently you'll end up constantly overcapping buffs with Résonance divine. I'd like to see either an increase in the stack cap, or some other mechanism that means you don't end up losing value from it when every spender you use will be buffed by Jugement anyway.

Putting Condamnation à mort and Rétorsion finale on a choice node together makes sense from the perspective of not wanting too many damage buffing modifiers to exist, but I'm not sure it'd be a really oppressive combination without , and there's a lot of players that really loved that playstyle from Shadowlands who would love to be able to use both at once.

Impulsion de l’avant-garde currently provides all its damage bonus in just the first talent point, and the second point only gives you one extra charge of Marteau de courroux. It should probably be tuned so that the second point provides a bit more benefit. I like that it emphasizes Marteau de courroux's role during execute a bit more, since it always felt odd to have an execute ability as Ret that didn't significantly increase your overall execute damage.

A choice node between Verdict final and Vengeance du justicier is a cool idea, but I'd like it more if it was just a "do you want more range on your spender or a heal on your spender" choice rather than also picking between different base damage on each or a Marteau de courroux reset effect too.

There's a few talents that seem like they'll probably be fairly undertuned, like Marteau divin or Auxiliaire divin or Flammes bouillonnantes, but since this is the first iteration of these abilities I'm not too worried about tuning still needing to be done.

Some talents don't really work at all together yet. If you take Frappes de croisade, Sceau du croisé doesn't proc off your Frappe du croisé auto attacks. If you take Marteau béni, Frappe du croisé améliorée doesn't give it an extra charge, Justice expéditive doesn't reduce its cooldown, and Lames de lumière doesn't make it deal Holystrike damage.

I'm really interested to see what happens with the talents that alter spell damage schools like Lames de lumière and buff specific schools like Lumière incendiaire. These clearly aren't done yet, but it's design space that has seen minimal exploration other than one or two talents like Breuvage sombre, and I think there could be a lot of really interesting ways to specialize into Physical or Holy or Fire damage that could be really great if they're fully explored.

Paladin Talents

There's definitely some significant pathing improvements - for example, you now no longer have to take 2 ranks of Poing de la justice to get throughput increases. There's no major issues with throughput nodes being locked behind utility nodes anymore, although there are still a significant number of throughput nodes you'll want to take.

Unlike the Ret tree, most of the passive stat nodes are still just boring multi point passive nodes like Égide sacrée and Sceau de puissance. The one node that has an additional effect, Sceau d’empressement, still has the same passive bonus as another node already in the Ret tree, Enseignements de la Lumière. I'd like to see more interesting effects added if we're going to want to spend 4-6 points on this style of damage node.

Punition is a nice bonus for interrupting, and is a lot more reasonable than the free Verdict du templier that it cast originally.

I'd really like to see real options for pressing your buttons to meaningfully offheal in the Paladin tree. Currently, most of the options are either passive benefits like Bénédiction sancteforge or Voie dorée or Jugement de lumière that won't help much if your group is taking heavy damage, or effects like Image rémanente or that would probably be throughput increases for Holy, but aren't very helpful for a Ret trying to offheal in a pinch. Compared to options in other hybrid class trees like Soutien ancestral or Étreinte vampirique or Veille de la nature, there's nothing even close to comparably strong for Paladin.

Incandescence is a lot worse now that Consécration is on a longer cooldown, we don't get free procs as often, and we're less inclined to press it anyway.

A lot of the talents are effectively useless outside of the spec they seem to be primarily designed for - for example, Bénédiction sancteforge procs off Tempête divine when neither of the other Paladin specs actually have access to that ability, and Armure de foi is an armor buff when that's a completely irrelevant effect for either Holy or Retribution.

You can still very comfortably take every capstone and lose almost nothing for doing so. Since the entire bottom third of the Paladin tree is essentially throughput, this means that every capstone is now basically a baseline passive damage bonus rather than something you'd ever pick or choose between.

Invocation accélérée is realistically never going to be used - taking it would desync Glas divin from your other 60s/2min cooldowns, and losing Résonance divine is way too high of a price anyway.

Similar to the choice between Verdict final and Vengeance du justicier, Sceau de l’Ordre and Lumière faiblissante are very similar abilities, except one gives you a stronger throughput bonus while the other simply provides an absorb shield. It'd be a lot more interesting if the choice was more like between a flat damage reduction or an absorb or something similar instead of one being strictly better for throughput.