Saturday, March 10, 2007

Retribution Talent Idea

Actually, the post below gave me an idea for a Retribution talent:

Spirit and Steel (5 points)
Requires 20 points in Retribution Talents
Gives you a 4/8/12/16/20% bonus to Physical and Holy damage you deal for 8 sec after you cast Holy Light or Flash of Light.
Gives you a 4/8/12/16/20% bonus to the amount healed by your Holy Light or Flash of Light for 8 sec after you deal a damaging melee attack.


The truth of a paladin is that whenever you cast a healing spell, your damage-per-second goes down. And whenever you swing your weapon, your healing-per-second decreases. And it is this trade-off that causes most of the problems for paladins who want to melee.

This talent offsets that loss. Healing feeds damage, and damage feeds healing, which is how it should be for a paladin.

You could tweak the numbers, or even make them dependant on each other. The amount of extra healing could be determined by the amount of damage done by the last melee attack, and vice versa (though you'd have to be careful about getting into a positive feedback loop). But I think this might be a decent way of getting to the Vampiric Embrace ideal, without directly copying VE.

Edit: Clarified the dependancy idea. Also changed it to a five point talent and reduced the duration slightly.

7 comments:

  1. interesting, i really like the idea. 20% is pretty much overpowered though and having it based on how much healing you do might create an un-intentional reckbomb effect where somebody busts their entire mana pool healing and then walks up to somebody and 2 shots them. Although, if it was lowered to like 10% and had a 20-30% chance to proc, it seems balanced

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  2. You have to take into account that any time spent healing decreases dps and vice versa.

    For example, tossing one Holy Light every 10s decreases your (non-Judgement dps) by 20% or so.

    There's a cost for this ability. Unlike Vengeance it's not free extra damage.

    I am leaning to reducing the duration to 8s or so, though, to make weaving heals and melee more like the default behaviour.

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  3. yeah, but thats the sacrifice for being a hybrid. Hybrids can't have everything they want. If a paladin specs full ret, he can do damage very similar to warriors, especially with crusader strike. With this talent, it would mean that paladins can do great dps and great healing at the exact same time, which not only destroys the only real weakness of hybrids, but it makes other classes much less desirable.

    I do like the idea though.

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  4. Sounds like an interesting idea in principle, but I'm a bit out of touch with the state of the Paladin nowerdays. Haven't played mine since the Crusader fix/nerf.

    The real class-appeal for me was never DPS or Healing though, it was survivability. I was always the last one standing if things went pearshaped, and that prevented complete wipes quite a few times.

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  5. i do like the idea.
    vampiric embrace is one of the few hybrid-skills in the game... and it belongs to a so called healing class... the hybrid-classes need more spells that connect one competence (tanking, healing, dd) with another.

    ~Glyx

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  6. What would you think of making it a talent procs on crits? Similar to the Elemental Shaman talent "Elemental Devastation". At 3/3 it makes your offensive spell crits grant you a 9% melee crit bonus for 10 seconds.

    Reworking for a Paladin you could move it a little deeper in the Retribution tree, 4 points that would have your critical heals grant you +10% melee crits for 10 sec and your melee crits give you +10% spell crit for 10 sec. If you wanted to get away from a time based dynamic you could reduce the crit bonus to one spell/hit and double the crit bonus.

    A good build using that talent would have to be based around it with heavy spell crit/melee crit to maximize the beneift, but I don't think it would be overpowered.

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  7. I like what s4dfish said...
    However depending on how deep in the tree it is you could potentially take holy power or sanctified light along with this talent... that WOULD be overpowered IMO. If you put it where divine purpose is it would work alright and make it a 3 rank 3%-7%-10%.

    Overall though I don't really enjoy a talent that would require me to stop meleeing to benifit my party. I would much rather have some sort of "vamp embrace" from melee dmg done.

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