The Holy Paladin set bonuses are as follows:
Currently these bonuses are insanely powerful. I don't expect the 4pc to make it live at its current tuning values, unless we are only seeing a part of the picture. It is possible there are significant nerfs coming to Holy Paladin's damage, warranting a powerful set bonus, or some other context we are not aware of but currently this set bonus would lead to Holy Paladins having very high (and possibly permanent) uptime on
复仇之怒, which is of course a massive buff.
Gameplay wise in a vacuum the set bonus doesn't change much, it incentivizes you to occasionally use
荣耀圣令, even if you wish to
黎明之光 every 30 seconds due to the 2pc. However the reality is, this set bonus has excellent synergy with the Necrolord covenant, as well the addition of a second legendary being restricted to a Covenant legendary makes
义缚之槌 very appealing as well. All of this combined will make Paladin feel very different if you go down that route. The synergy between these abilities certainly means that Necrolord will be a competitive, or even Meta option depending on the fate of
红烬圣土 and Venthyr.
Overall the set bonus is designed well. High
复仇之怒 uptime is something that is fun to play around with and very thematic to0 Paladins. We saw something similar with the Ineffable Truth corruption late into Battle for Azeroth. We don't have any context for other balance changes. Paladins have been a hot-topic for a while now, and have consistently dominated progression raiding rosters, so I would expect to see some kind of changes.
The downside is this set bonus isn't fantastic in Mythic+ or PvP. It's clearly designed with PvE in mind. It also could result in a rise of other less common legendaries such as
破影者,日之破晓.
In conclusion, this set bonus is good. It will feel powerful and I like that it fits into Holy Power generation, incentivizing aggressively accumulating and spending Holy Power. I would be surprised if it remains untouched going into live, but without the context of other class changes, we don't have the full picture of healing for next tier.
The announced 9.2 tier bonuses for Protection Paladins do not change their play style at all. The 2-piece bonus is entirely passive for something they do already - spend Holy Power on
正义盾击. The 4-piece bonus will have a chance to fire off a
审判 when an attack is blocked. Spending Holy Power or blocking will happen regardless of what a Protection Paladin does and this won't impact how they gear, or press buttons. One interesting aspect is that the 4-piece could interact with
法官的审判 and create a lot of Holy Power efficiency -- through gains and cost reductions.
Power-wise, the 2-piece bonus is pretty standard -- 4-5% damage reduction and this is in-line with other tank tier bonuses that provide similar amounts of damage reduction. The 4-piece will have a massive delta in performance between Raid and Mythic+. Part of that is damage profile -- there are some magic dots in the upcoming raid that won't trigger it but the other is just the number of targets we'll be fighting. It's possible that the bonus won't be included in an optimal raid set. Blocking is more common in Mythic+ because there are more targets doing mostly melee swings, and that will lead to situations where Holy Power can't be spent fast enough.
The gap in power for the 4-piece between Raid and Mythic+ will be really significant. The rate at which you block will obviously increase as you are tanking more targets and this bonus could scale to unreasonable levels especially when combined with
法官的审判. The 4-piece should be tweaked so it scales more reasonably when tanking multiple targets while bringing up the floor so it's better for raid content. Conceptually, I like both bonuses because they are attached to Block -- an area for Protection Paladin that doesn't get a lot of development but they just need to nail the tuning.
The Retribution set bonus is themed around the
战争艺术 passive, which gives your auto attacks a small chance to reset the cooldown of
公正之剑. Baseline, this chance is 12% with Rank 2 of
战争艺术, but doubles to 24% with
愤怒之剑, which is the most commonly picked talent in its row anyway. This isn't an RPPM proc, it's just a flat chance per auto hit.
战争艺术 can't proc on two melee hits in a row, but it will still average out to roughly 12% or 24% per melee over a fight. Depending on Haste, whether you're using
狂热, and whether or not you have
风怒图腾, you can expect to get somewhere between 5 to 8
战争艺术 procs a minute.
The 2 set bonus provides
for 2 seconds whenever
战争艺术 procs, which should end up being around 10-15s of extra
per minute. Currently,
is mostly used to buff the
处决宣判/
最终清算 window, so random procs in that situation won't matter a whole lot, but they do work a bit better when you also consider the 4 set bonus. 2 seconds of
is enough to fit 1-2 GCDs in - more on that below - so you're likely to be able to use at least a spender or a
灰烬觉醒 proc within that
proc window, or potentially both. You'll also get an extra 2-3
灰烬觉醒 casts a minute, considering that you won't get any "natural" wake casts anymore, which is a very solid damage boost in either single target or AoE. The 2 set alone might not be a huge damage gain, but together they should provide a sizeable increase. Numbers aside, it's also just really fun to be able to cast
灰烬觉醒 a lot.
Set bonuses aren't actually testable on the PTR yet, but fortunately the way the set works seems to be relatively straightforward. There's only two things that aren't fully clear:
- Hardcast - it seems pretty reasonable to assume that the 2 second procs would add duration to an existing rather than overwriting it or just doing nothing, given that many other similar effects work the same way. Because 战争艺术 effectively has an ICD by not proccing on back to back auto attack hits, it wouldn't lead to chain procs for a longer buff than intended either.
- 愤怒之剑 - Apart from increasing the number of 战争艺术 procs, it also increases the damage of the next 公正之剑. I would assume that it wouldn't increase 灰烬觉醒 damage if it reset that instead, but I think that it should. 愤怒之剑 can proc just after you cast 公正之剑, reset 灰烬觉醒 instead, and then proc again before 公正之剑 comes off cooldown. Alternatively, with low haste 公正之剑 could just not come back off cooldown before the 愤怒之剑 buff expires, since it has a 10s duration and 公正之剑's cooldown is 12s baseline. Randomly wasting 愤怒之剑 isn't a fun outcome, and could be easily fixed by making it increase the damage of whichever ability it resets instead.
This tier bonus ends up pushing Ret towards a slightly different build than it currently uses. Because
战争艺术 just procs off auto attacks, effects that increase the rate of auto attacks obviously become a lot better.
狂热, as well as effects that cast more
审判s for more
狂热 hits like
圣洁共鸣, will probably be the best options to use to maximize
战争艺术 procs.
处决宣判 may still be usable, but instead of holding
灰烬觉醒 for each window like we do now it'll just be used on cooldown instead. For conduits,
异端逐除 will become a bit worse, since half of your
公正之剑 resets will reset
灰烬觉醒 instead, but
真理觉醒 may become good enough to see use for the first time.
My biggest concern with the tier set has to do with the gameplay adjustments that need to be made to maximize the
buff. 2 seconds is theoretically long enough to fit 2 GCDs in, but in practice this won't happen consistently for most players. For example:
- Reaction time to the proc needs to be taken into account. At the moment it's easy to slam 公正之剑 when you see an 战争艺术 proc, but with the set bonus you'll first need to process which ability actually got reset before using it. Even though this is only a split second hesitation, it can very easily make the difference between getting an extra cast off before the buff drops or not.
- Auto attacks will happen mid-GCD. If you happen to cast an ability just before an 战争艺术 proc, you're almost certainly not going to get a second GCD buffed by .
To maximize the chance of getting a second GCD inside
, it's very likely that an auto attack tracker will become necessary to track exactly when a proc could happen. It'll probably result in a style of play where you try to use a spender right after an auto attack happens, just in case you get a proc, so that you don't have to instantly react to it in order to get another ability inside the
window.
This punishes players who can't make these small optimizations in one of two ways: either they don't track auto attacks and only get half the value from each
proc as a player who is, or they do track their autos and start leaving large gaps in their rotation to try to accommodate potential procs, leading to a DPS loss from holding their ability casts for too long. This problem could be fixed by changing the 2 set bonus to simply buff your next 2 abilities instead, to give the same benefit without requiring as strict of a timing window. Just to be clear, there's no problem with having tier set bonuses that change the way that you play a spec - that's ideally what you'd want from a set bonus. The issue here is that the level of optimization required to maximize procs will be prohibitively high for many players, and the difference between optimizing it and not will probably be significant.
Other than that, whether or not you have
风怒图腾 will also start to make a very big difference on Ret's damage output. Even this tier, when it only affected
公正之剑 resets, Ret was one of the best melee to have in a Windfury group after Arms and the Rogue specs. But considering extra
灰烬觉醒 resets and
procs, Windfury will probably be more like a 5% DPS increase. If Enhancement is still good and more guilds start to bring them then this isn't as big of an issue, but it'll be frustrating playing without Windfury knowing that you're losing a significant amount of damage without it.
Overall, I like the design of the set. Random extra
灰烬觉醒 resets seems like it'll be a very fun addition to Ret's playstyle, and push it towards a build that is a bit different to what's been used in Shadowlands up to this point. If the 2 set gets adjusted to be a little less punishing for players not fully optimizing to play around it, then I'll be very happy with how it looks going in to next tier.