Sunday, May 21, 2006

Extensive Paladin Changes, Part II

Continuing on from Part I.

15. Make Spiritual Focus a baseline ability and apply to all spells.

We are melee characters. Spellcasting in melee should be second nature to us.

16. Increase Righteous Fury to 2.0x threat, and Improved Righteous Fury to 2.5xthreat.

No more Salvation, so we need to up our threat output.

17. Put Seal of the Crusader as an 11pt talent in the Holy Tree. Increase the attack power bonus by 25%.

To give the trees a bit more identity, each tree gets a unique seal at 11pts, and a unique aura at 21pts. Crusader is a good seal for the Holy tree, working nicely with Judgement of Light and Wisdom.

18. Add Seal of Faith as an 11pt talent in the Protection Tree. "Your attacks instead deal Holy damage equal to 80% of weapon damage."

Converts your physical damage to Holy damage. Really good against heavily armored opponents and for tanking with Righteous Fury. However, damage against an average opponent should still be slightly less than Righteousness.

Against 30% damage reduction:

Comand > Crusader = Righteousness > Faith

19. Add Ablation Aura as a 21pt talent in the Protection Tree. "Damage taken by party members is reduced by 0.02% of their Intellect."

Our answer to the 10% damage reduction of Defensive Stance. A decent amount of mitigation for characters with high Int, but relatively little for warriors. A tanking warrior should still prefer Devotion Aura. 500 Int = 10% reduction. Also continues our subtheme of protectors of the cloth.

20. Replace Sanctity Aura with Dominion Aura as a 21pt talent in the Retribution tree. "Damage done by party members is increased by 3%."

We make our allies stronger. Plus, with the loss of Salvation, this is a double-edged sword in PvE. And unlike Sancity, this works all the time and for all damage. 3% may be a little low, could be as high as 5%.

21. Add a new Aura to the Holy tree. Quite honestly, I can't think of anything particularly stylish to add here. Maybe something offering extra resistance to stuns, interrupts, and fears.

22. Add in the Guard talents to flesh out the Protection tree.

Between Guard, the new Reckoning, Seal of Faith, and Ablation Aura, Protection should be pretty interesting.

23. General clean-up of talents. Most talents are okay, but you'd need a replacement for Spiritual Focus, Improved Seal of the Crusader, and Improved Concentration. I'd also improve Pursuit of Justice to 6/12%, but still not stacking. It's now strictly better than the enchant, but not overly crazy.

24. Make Hammer of Wrath still fire once it has started casting.

People drinking a potion when you're in the middle of a cast and thus cancelling the spell is silly. The potion will probably save them from being killed by the Hammer, they shouldn't also avoid it entirely.

So that's about it for changes I'd I'd make to the paladin. Nothing major is changed, the paladin is still a melee character, with relatively low damage, but high survivability. It's just cleaned up a little, a few of the more outrageous abilities removed, and some more options and flexibility added in.

Note that I am not adding new Blessings. I think the Horde have a point with the way our Blessings scale with the entire raid. Having four good blessings is enough.

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