As a follow up, we now have all of the Paladin Covenant legendaries implemented, and testable. We won’t spend much time talking about
Saisons d’abondance or
Martelet de dévotion as they are primarily unchanged from our last post
linked here.
The real talking point is between the Kyrian and Venthyr legendaries, as these are the two most popular covenant choices for Holy Paladin they are the most noteworthy.
Kyrian
The Kyrian Legendary was worded somewhat ambiguously initially, and now that we can test it, we know how it works.
Résonance divine will cast one additional
Horion sacré on the INITIAL target of your
Glas divin, every 5 seconds. This will add up to a fair amount of Holy Power over an encounter. However, a large portion of the
Horion sacré healing may go to waste, as there is no guarantee that person will benefit from a
Horion sacré that frequently. Due to the
Lueur de lumière cap, this also ensures this person will have
Lueur de lumière on them pretty much exclusively for an extended period of time. Some encounters, this may be a benefit or this may be used on a tank frequently. Overall, this legendary is a solid legendary, though it is competing with some heavy hitters for Paladin already, as the power level of our legendaries is quite high.
Venthyr
The real talk however, is in Venthyr’s
Braises irradiantes now that we have a better idea how this works. Essentially, how it works is as soon as you leave your own
Bénédiction cendrée, it instantly disappears, but a portion of its cooldown (based on remaining duration) is instantly returned. This means in some scenarios you could get a mechanic forcing you to run out (and waste
Bénédiction cendrée), or maybe even just stand in the raid if your group “needs” said
Bénédiction cendrée healing. This is kind of unique, as far as mechanics go and could lead to problems.
The real strength of this legendary is in its current tuning values. Essentially skilled players will be able to track (probably with a weakaura) its remaining duration, if you leave after exactly 20s into your
Bénédiction cendrées duration, you can get its cooldown to roughly 2mins, coincidentally the cooldown of
Courroux vengeur. Previously, you could not get an
Bénédiction cendrée with every
Courroux vengeur, but this legendary gives you that option which is certainly powerful. If an encounter has a predictable damage pattern, you could run 2-3 paladins with this legendary, and they would be able to stagger
Bénédiction cendrées and Wings to have very powerful raid cooldowns for practically every damage event of an encounter. This is somewhat concerning, as the damage potential of Venthyr Holy Paladin is still quite high, despite the nerfs. For more information on the nerfs to Paladin in a recent PTR build you can read about
it here.
In conclusion, the
Résonance divine legendary effect is a middle of the pack legendary, which could see some play, but has tough competition. The Necrolord and Night Fae legendaries are comparable in power, but are less represented as covenants for Holy Paladins. The Venthyr legendary, is still early and is a really cool idea mechanically but is probably slightly overtuned and could lead to abuse by stacking paladins on specific encounters to take advantage of very powerful short duration
Bénédiction cendrées.
Now that the new Covenant Legendaries for Paladin can finally be tested on the PTR, we have a much better idea of exactly how they work and interact with other abilities.
Kyrian
Résonance divine has had a significant change since it was last discussed - rather than casting
Glas divin additional times, instead it casts regular
Jugements. Compared to how it was previously assumed to work, this will result in less Holy Power in situations with multiple targets, but more initial damage from
Jugements on single target. It also obviously now won't proc
Clarté retentissante or
Méditation de combat with the extra casts. For how
Résonance divine actually works in practice, it's usually a 30 second buff that casts
Jugement every 5 seconds. For each
Glas divin, you get 6 extra
Jugements with a 5 second gap between each. However, it also seems to have a bug where if the initial
Glas divin hits more than one enemy, you actually get a 35 second buff, which results in an extra
Jugement cast.
The extra
Jugements still proc all the normal effects you'd expect them to, like
Commandement vertueux,
Zèle, and the
Jugement debuff itself. Awkwardly for both
Commandement vertueux and
Zèle, there are a couple of bugs and issues that appear when you end up casting a lot of
Jugements within a small timeframe. For
Commandement vertueux, its buff doesn't actually get refreshed if you cast a second
Jugement with the buff still active, so despite casting 6 or 7
Jugements you'll only end up with extra
Commandement vertueux procs from about half of them, depending on server lag. With
Zèle, if you cast
Jugement very frequently you end up capping at 9 stacks very quickly, and then waste stacks as they're refreshed above 6. Ideally these problems will be addressed before 9.1 goes live, especially the
Commandement vertueux bug, as it's essentially random whether each
Jugement will give you another buff or not.
As far as how strong it looks to be for damage, it's not unlikely based on the current version that it will become the best Legendary for Kyrian. The
Jugement damage and Holy Power alone is probably enough to rival
Verdict final, not to mention the increased
Verdict du templier damage from extra
Jugement debuffs and the fact that it doesn't lose value in AoE situations like
Verdict final does. Whether it really will be better or by how much remains to be seen, but judging by its current design and tuning, expect this to be a strong Legendary in the coming patch.
Venthyr
Braises irradiantes is still a very weird Legendary to try to wrap your head around. It's been clarified to cancel
Bénédiction cendrée once you leave it, but the cooldown reduction it provides does not scale as you might expect. Up to around half of the 45 second duration, 22 seconds or so in, it will still provide 110 seconds of cooldown reduction for
Bénédiction cendrée, which is only 10 seconds less than if you left it immediately after casting it. However, after this point the cooldown reduction is reduced at a much faster rate. This ends up with a strange outcome where there's very little change in the amount of cooldown reduction you receive until half of
Bénédiction cendrée's duration is finished, after which its cooldown reduction is scaled down at a much faster rate.
The result of this is that you can use
Bénédiction cendrée for essentially the entire duration of
Courroux vengeur plus a couple of seconds, cancel it, and then have it back off cooldown shortly after your next
Courroux vengeur comes off cooldown. Although this sounds very strong, it only ends up being around 15 extra seconds of
Bénédiction cendrée compared to a normal 4 minute cooldown use. While you can also just wait the full 45 seconds on your last cast of
Bénédiction cendrée each fight, since you don't need the extra cooldown reduction if you can't cast it again, it might not end up as strong as
Parangon fou for Venthyr.
Night Fae
Saisons d’abondance has thankfully had a design overhaul. It now doubles the effects of each Season for its middle 10 seconds. Since each buff lasts 30 seconds, you end up with 10 seconds of the normal buff, then 10 seconds of the empowered version, then another 10 seconds of the normal buff.
As you might have noticed,
Bénédiction de l’été's average damage is actually quadrupled rather than doubled, since both the chance to proc and the amount of damage are doubled rather than just one of them.
It's fairly difficult to evaluate the new version of this Legendary.
Bénédiction de l’été is by far the most valuable Season, so increasing its value by that much means that it's at least worth some consideration. Since in raid combat you can cast
Bénédiction de l’été prepull and have your season reset back to
Bénédiction de l’été on pull, you end up with more uptime on
Bénédiction de l’été than any other season anyway. There could be a build similar to current Kyrian with
Condamnation à mort and
Rétorsion finale, where
Condamnation à mort is used within the middle 10 seconds of
Bénédiction de l’été in order to buff its damage by proccing off regular casts within its window, but could also proc off the final hit of
Condamnation à mort. Alternatively, it could just be used on another class with a strong 10 second burst window every 3 minutes, like a Balance Druid. Either way, this is likely to be a Legendary with some niche uses at the very least, and has potential to be much better.
Necrolord
Martelet de dévotion hasn't received any recent changes. It's still a pretty underwhelming effect and is unlikely to change Necrolord's position compared to other covenants.
