Retribution Paladin Feedback -- Build 21232 -- 3-Mar

Please feel free to reply to this thread with feedback you have on this specialization in the most recent version of the Legion Alpha.

This thread and subforum are for class feedback. We may not be attentive to other threads on this subject. Please confine discussion in this thread to issues related to this spec only.

Thank you!

03/03/2016 08:03 PMPosted by Solsacra

Equality -- This ability needs to go. Degenerate gameplay will only ensue from this. Purposefully forcing a player to take damage & causing heart-attacks for Healers is not cool or interesting. It's infuriating. I can't imagine what Equality encourages and causes to be objectively better than what its setting out to achieve. Neat idea, VERY bad gameplay. I think we have enough of that take-damage-deal-damage paradigm as is via Shield of Vengeance – at least this encourages us to stay alive and simultaneously reward that effort.

I think this talent touches on a handful of topics about class design philosophy. It's a great example of talent design that doesn't fit today's norm, but in a good way - and in a way that we need more of, not less. The topics I see in play here are philosophies about what role talents play, the mechanics of a talent that require a player to take damage, and possibly the location of the talent in the tree.

In a forum discussion, we tend to get lost in the mechanics of an ability. This is true not only because the most well-spoken players on our forums are organized raiders with personalities that lean toward the analytical, but also because the nature of a forum lends itself to considering theoretical use cases more than the actual moment-to-moment experience of playing the game.

In my actual experience of playing a ret paladin in Legion content, I'd say that equality might just be the most fun and gratifying talent in the tree. It's gleefully fun when you end up in a situation that would have resulted in your death to hit the button and watch your enemies go from nearly full to dead. As much as an expert player might imagine that such a situation never applies to them, the reality is that it does (and more so in Legion world content than in the recent past). Beyond that, it's fun to occasionally manufacture exactly that situation.

It's important to recognize that so much of World of Warcraft resides outside the confines of reliably topping a damage meter in a 10 player raid. This is particularly true once again in Legion, where we anticipate that players will spend far more time in non-raid content than they have in recent years due to the role of 5-player dungeons and world quests (fueled by the general possibility of getting an item upgrade from any content in the game), and of course pvp. As such, it's important that we view talent design through the lens of "not everything will or should be the most efficient path to victory in a raid".

As to the mechanics of this talent, many players balk at the group play implications of a talent that assumes you've taken a bunch of damage, comparing that with a variety of other mechanics we've had in the game at one point or another that encouraged a player to take damage. For content that isn't particularly challenging, it tends to be a non-issue (if you want to potentially get yourself killed, have at it). As it relates to challenging content, our experience suggests that frequency is a meaningful part of this equation, and if in challenging content healers are stressed it also implies that the stress is as a result of players taking damage that is out of their control, which also implies that over the course of an encounter a reasonable opportunity to use the ability without deliberately manufacturing the conditions will arise due to its long cooldown.

In addition, from a purely mathematical perspective the ability does (or at least should) hold up if you use it around every 7 minutes or so, enough to provide some slush to account for the situational nature of the spell. In addition, the talent nets meaningful damage over time and should/does hold up against the other talents in the tier.

03/04/2016 03:29 PMPosted by Masabuns

Equality is not a fun ability to use in any practical sense outside of PvP or solo content.

Many players will likely not agree with this statement. Fortunately, there doesn't need to be universal or widespread agreement.

03/04/2016 03:29 PMPosted by Masabuns

I can't imagine any practical sense where I'm going to request my healers let me drop horrendously low to optimize my damage with this ability, and I know I'm not going to be the only one in high end raiding guilds feeling the same way.

Great, that's why it's a talent. Choose a different talent.

03/04/2016 04:46 PMPosted by Masabuns

The alternatives on the tier simply aren't that great either from a gameplay stance, as Gomak elaborated on, as none of them change up how you play and simply add passive benefits..

Totally fair, and while it isn't possible to get every talent in a tier to be interesting to every individual, we certainly do want there to be a choice on any given tier that you find cool.