Honestly, Skeletor's breakdown video on this is really in-depth and worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WqIsavbVK4
Paladin seems to have a lot of things that seem reasonable, and a lot of things that seem absolutely utterly baffling.On one hand, all of the paladin specs didn't have their rotations gutted, and still feel okay to play. Prot paladin looks good. Holy paladin actually looks like many talents might be viable, at least in the beginning. Ret doesn't seem too bad. But...Losing the blessings felt like a loss to me; I almost would have expected an "unpruning" to return blessings to everybody. The auras are just... not good. Devotion aura is fine as it's basically where it was in BFA and Legion. They lost a huge opportunity to give us Aura of Sacrifice and Aura of Mercy - why did we just drop those? Retribution aura is *terrible* - Aura Mastery, a Holy Paladin's strongest cooldown when used with devo aura, does nothing if somebody doesn't die when you use Aura Mastery. Crusader Aura would be an interesting Aura Mastery if it gave everybody a movement speed buff instead of only being a mounted speed buff. I'm not sure what concentration aura with mastery does, but I'm glad this spell was unpruned. It has useful implications for pvp. Word of Glory could use some tuning. I miss the ret talent, and I think it would have been nice to see that as a "word of glory changing" talent - keep a talent for the BFA version, and leave the beta version baseline.Paladin feels close to really good, there are just some things that don't feel well thought out holding us back. We've gotten almost no beta changes; come on Blizzard! You can do it!
I would argue that door of shadows is quite possibly completely irrelevant for a paladin who has access to an ability that can get them to the same location in most instances in the same amount of time without having to cast for a full second and allowing you to move during it. The only way it'd be nice is for cases where there is something that would not allow you to go straight to the location you want to get to, which almost never happens in fights or dungeons, but could happen in overworld. Pretty much the vast majority of people in beta have already realized that it's not going to be useful to skip mythic+ packs due to its short range compared to aggro radius, which only grows wider with each mob in a pack, and the fact if anyone fails the narrow window then you all collectively fail, and it'd only be possible if the area is wide enough or has a sharp enough corner that you can cut diagonally.
give us back exorcism
They gave us Devotion aura, awesome, BUT THEY REMOVED ALL OF OUR BLESSINGS! Jesus christ WHY Blizzard. And our AoE damage is out the !@#$ing window. Jesus christ they murdered my &*!@ing class.
After leveling a paladin up to 60 on the beta and choosing Kyrian as my covenant, I can say that it plays better than ret paladin on live (which is probably just because I'm choosing the fun talents and not the best simming talents.) There's only some relatively small complaints imo, and I'd like to add another one: Justicar's Vengeance should be reverted to its Legion state with the higher damage.
Healing hands cannot even be used in Areas. I don't think any class has any talent that is completely disabled in arenas.
"Final Verdict turns Templar's Verdict." I guess.This was in WOD as a talent which I loved but yay we get it "back"Legendaries as a whole are pretty uninspiring and re-hashed from past expacs, a bit disappointed. Badge of the Mad Paragon looks to good to be true and I wouldn't be surprised if this is nerfed shortly after release.
Retribution Aura should just be a thorns aura again, make the other crap about party members dying some baseline thing.
i feel if they replace *Healing hands * talent with * divine intervention * talent from legion will be better unless lay on hands can be uesd in arena , second thing in the same talent tree there is * justicar's vengeance * been useless for ages hope they remove it or replace it with *long arm of the law* , this the only talent tree feels useless the other ones is great
On ptr, the hammer of wrath skill doesn't even work. Hopefully that gets fixed.Other than that it feels just like bfa paladin, just with less downtime. Eh.
Concentration aura could be very strong in mythic plus (or PvP, even), especially if you are in a composition that is lacking interrupts or just fails to catch an interrupt. Kinda a good 'save your bacon' aura to reduce the penalty of missing interrupts that causes silences, especially since Devo aura will mathematically be slightly less potent in a smaller group. Of course 3% damage reduction is still great, whether it's 1 person or 20, but the value of that aura increases with more players.I'm also very happy to see Wake of Ashes being made baseline, as like Bolas mentions, it was by far the most popular choice. I admittedly haven't messed with paladins on beta, so this is good information to see.
The excessive button bloat for a lot of specs is pretty frustrating. The whole unpruning thing has had a lot of ramifications when everyone is also getting a guaranteed +2 abilities with covenants. It makes active talents difficult to take as it's just not feasible to be using that many buttons rotationally without running out of available gcds or simply losing efficiency.
Thank you for the good summary.While I do agree with most issues you have mentioned I would like to point out some issues myself. The loose of BoK und BoW is in my point of view is not a big deal. While especially BoW was nice for healers, from a player perspective it was press and forget. Therefore it was more flavor then actual gameplay. However, I dislike the change to WoG as it was just fun to play with. Especially within M+ it was kinda unique for a melee to bring strong 3 target healing to help in difficult situation. The current version either needs big tuning changes or a return of the intial talent. In addition to that, the introduction of the lay of hands talent seems underwhelming and less fun to play with. As the result, the talent row feels like a flat downgrad compared to BFA in terms of strength and fun! Additionally, the issue that was mentioned before for 3 holy power spenders being buffs and talents desperately needs a look. The playstyle with all 3 of those are not fun and plays clunky. From my perspective at least 1 of those talents have to be removed and replaced entirely. Elsewhise, we either have the situation that we have an unfun playstyle or the best of those 3 is picked in almost all situation. As the result, the other 2 talents are dead which limits our talent options. The return of Concecration is welcome as it adds flavor to ret. paladins back. However, tuning has to be done. Currently, as mentioned above, the skill is underwhelming. My suggestions is to increase the CD but add damage and 1 holy power. Alternativ, I would like to have a interaction with other skills while standing in Concecration which could be added via a talent. As the result, the skill would feel meaningful in Aoe situation but would not flood us with holy power. In regards to the covenant abilities I can't say much because my feedback comes mostly from ptr point of view. However, my concern is, as the result of "players choice", you are either forced to play what is best for us and ignore which covenant and covenant ability I personally like or we don't care about our performance and pick what we like. This is not specific to retribution paladin but this worries me the most and therefore I wanted to add this. Just my 2 cents and my personally opionen. Written via phone. Thanks!
It's just shocking how Word of Glory, an optional utility talent that has been praised as THE example for utility done right, has been turned into such a lackluster button press. It was such a satisfying button to press in BfA: You sacrificed output because it cost 3 Holy Power but in turn you got such a huge heal which never felt like a waste and in most cases saved your group from a wipe. It was especially useful in weeks where healers had it rough. Consecration doing pitiful damage is also quite the surprise. I imagined it would be a useful spell in AoE situations, especially above 5 targets. It's a very iconic Paladin ability that really should never be made useless. If it's not going to generate Holy Power, at least prop up its damage and make it like it's BfA version: 4s cooldown, 12s duration. Easy to reposition. Wake of Ashes doing less damage to secondary targets is pretty funny as well. It just doesn't match the visuals. Given it's 45s cooldown, I don't see why it's such a big problem that it is uncapped. It really doesn't need the reduced damage to secondary targets. Retribution Aura has been ridiculous since day one. It was fine as a passive that buffed you whenever an ally died and didn't quite interfere with the rest of the spec. Now it's an Aura but it doesn't quite buff anyone else except you? And you have to switch to it if you see an ally dying? So to gain its benefits, you need your allies to die? Instead of saving them with the abundance of tools the Paladins have to save their allies? What the *!@#? The level 45 talent row is also atrocious. I just don't get why Justicar's Vengeance is still there and with Word of Glory baseline and less manufactured downtime there's not any interesting choice to make there. If they want a utility row there, here's a better idea that's more fitting to Ret: Make it the "Seal" row, similar to how Holy had an "Aura" row. Give us three seals that augment our auto-attacks and Judgment to debuff the target. Seal of Wisdom, Seal of Light and Seal of the Crusader. Yeah, I know, this isn't a very fleshed out idea. But anything would be better than that row. All in all, seeing the changes at the start of Shadowlands Alpha, I was just excited that my class is going to feel more complete by itself without the need for external systems and "mandatory" talent choices. Now it all just feels... lukewarm and unsatisfying. Missed opportunities and additions that feel like a loss. That's a shame.
Agree to the level 45 row and would like some changes or rework to this talent row.