As a follow up, we now have all of the Paladin Covenant legendaries implemented, and testable. We won’t spend much time talking about
Seasons of Plenty or
Duty-Bound Gavel 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.
Divine Resonance will cast one additional
Holy Shock on the INITIAL target of your
Divine Toll, every 5 seconds. This will add up to a fair amount of Holy Power over an encounter. However, a large portion of the
Holy Shock healing may go to waste, as there is no guarantee that person will benefit from a
Holy Shock that frequently. Due to the
Glimmer of Light cap, this also ensures this person will have
Glimmer of Light 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
Radiant Embers now that we have a better idea how this works. Essentially, how it works is as soon as you leave your own
Ashen Hallow, 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
Ashen Hallow), or maybe even just stand in the raid if your group “needs” said
Ashen Hallow 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
Ashen Hallows duration, you can get its cooldown to roughly 2mins, coincidentally the cooldown of
Avenging Wrath. Previously, you could not get an
Ashen Hallow with every
Avenging Wrath, 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
Ashen Hallows 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
Divine Resonance 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
Ashen Hallows.
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
Divine Resonance has had a significant change since it was last discussed - rather than casting
Divine Toll additional times, instead it casts regular
Judgments. 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
Judgments on single target. It also obviously now won't proc
Ringing Clarity or
Combat Meditation with the extra casts. For how
Divine Resonance actually works in practice, it's usually a 30 second buff that casts
Judgment every 5 seconds. For each
Divine Toll, you get 6 extra
Judgments with a 5 second gap between each. However, it also seems to have a bug where if the initial
Divine Toll hits more than one enemy, you actually get a 35 second buff, which results in an extra
Judgment cast.
The extra
Judgments still proc all the normal effects you'd expect them to, like
Virtuous Command,
Zeal, and the
Judgment debuff itself. Awkwardly for both
Virtuous Command and
Zeal, there are a couple of bugs and issues that appear when you end up casting a lot of
Judgments within a small timeframe. For
Virtuous Command, its buff doesn't actually get refreshed if you cast a second
Judgment with the buff still active, so despite casting 6 or 7
Judgments you'll only end up with extra
Virtuous Command procs from about half of them, depending on server lag. With
Zeal, if you cast
Judgment 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
Virtuous Command bug, as it's essentially random whether each
Judgment 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
Judgment damage and Holy Power alone is probably enough to rival
Final Verdict, not to mention the increased
Templar's Verdict damage from extra
Judgment debuffs and the fact that it doesn't lose value in AoE situations like
Final Verdict 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
Radiant Embers is still a very weird Legendary to try to wrap your head around. It's been clarified to cancel
Ashen Hallow 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
Ashen Hallow, 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
Ashen Hallow'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
Ashen Hallow for essentially the entire duration of
Avenging Wrath plus a couple of seconds, cancel it, and then have it back off cooldown shortly after your next
Avenging Wrath comes off cooldown. Although this sounds very strong, it only ends up being around 15 extra seconds of
Ashen Hallow compared to a normal 4 minute cooldown use. While you can also just wait the full 45 seconds on your last cast of
Ashen Hallow 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
The Mad Paragon for Venthyr.
Night Fae
Seasons of Plenty 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,
Blessing of Summer'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.
Blessing of Summer 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
Blessing of Summer prepull and have your season reset back to
Blessing of Summer on pull, you end up with more uptime on
Blessing of Summer than any other season anyway. There could be a build similar to current Kyrian with
Execution Sentence and
Final Reckoning, where
Execution Sentence is used within the middle 10 seconds of
Blessing of Summer in order to buff its damage by proccing off regular casts within its window, but could also proc off the final hit of
Execution Sentence. 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
Duty-Bound Gavel 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.
