Monday, January 26, 2009

Making Blessings Less Tedious

An anonymous poster left the following comment in response to a post I made on Friday:

Simple, combine BoW and BoM into the same blessing. Much like how sanctuary provides runicpower/rage/mana, the new combined blessing could offer AP and mp5.
I mean, ultimately why would it matter if it's seen as "OP"? You have both of those blessings anyway in just about any raid you do, and alot of the times in heroics (especially if there's 3 paladins running them, which happens suprisingly often). I don't see this an issue for balancing encounters. I suppose a few classes will benefit slightly more from it than others...pallys/rogues/hunters, but like I said, you're going to probably have both of the current blessings in a raid anyway, so this just simplifies the application of them.

I like where this is going. Here's what I envision - eliminate the Improved Blessing of Might talent, and merge it into the Improved Blessing of Wisdom talent. Do the same with Blessing of Might itself. Rename them Blessing of Light and Improved Blessing of Light so that they have a neutral connotation (and yes, I know that Blessing of Light used to be a blessing). BoLight will provide both attack power and mana/5 to the recipient.

I left the talent in the holy tree for two reasons:
1) Holy has a more natural connection to the Light, and therefore should have stronger blessing power.
2) Retribution paladins usually bring Kings to a raid, and protection brings Sanctuary, so why not give the holy's something to do.

Ideally, I'd like to see Kings swapped with Deflection in addition just so we'd have a blessing associated with every talent tree (Light -> Holy, Sanctuary -> Prot, Kings -> Ret), but that might be asking too much of Blizzard.

If we went about making these changes, we could do away with the class-based buff system. Paladins world-wide would be rid of Pally Power and ZOMGBuffs. One reagent, one buff, one hour duration, all raid members affected. One paladin does Kings, one paladin does a blanket Light on the raid, and one does Sanctuary. Bing, bang, boom, done. Of course, the price of Symbols of Kings would be increased to compensate for the decreased frequency of blessing.

I wouldn't mind though, as I wouldn't have to keep 200 symbols on me at a minimum for a raid.

At face value, my vision of Blessing of Light probably provides too much from one buff in the way of resources to any physical DPS class with a mana bar. However, Blessing of Might right now pulls double duty for warriors - the harder a warrior smacks something, the more rage he gets, and therefore the more often he'll be able to hack and slash. Well, Blessing of Light would provide resource and direct DPS-boost to the mana-using physical DPS classes. Fair is fair, right? Plus it wouldn't scale with damage like rage, so if anything it's underpowered vs. the current incarnation of Might for warriors.

Rohan has his crusade to change Hand of Reckoning's name to Rebuke (which I agree with), and now I've got my cause to champion. It's simpler for paladins, takes a measure of tedium out of the game, and unless I'm underestimating the effect of mana/5 on mana-using physical DPS (which, in a 3 paladin raid, they'd likely get anyway), it isn't throwing off game balance. My question is this: how can I make this happen?

6 comments:

Posh said...

I like it. Signed for my part. A good idea. That would like you say, let us live without some kind of buff addon. One buff for the masses.

I have hereby signed under your banner.. :)

Jong said...

I would love to get rid of pally power. This makes all the sense for PvE encounters, but I see lots of balancing issues for arenas.

Rohan said...

I'd go a step further, and change Sanctuary from a Blessing to a talent that modifies Righteous Fury. It's borderline overpowered as it is, and hurts guilds without a prot paladin.

Then make Kings a baseline buff. So you only have two buffs: Light and Kings. Both of which are good enough to hit the entire raid with if you only have 1 paladin.

Make a post on the WoW Healing/Tanking/DPS forums. GC reads those, but not the others.

Paul said...

Whilst I like the idea of giving Kings to the Ret tree (it's where it began after all), there's no way that Blizz would move both the avoidance talents into Prot.

Anonymous said...

I love this idea; the design of one blessing per spec is very clean.

I'd have Kings (as you do) in the first tier for Ret so that any spec can grab it if they want, leave Sanc deep Prot, and I'm neutral on where to put Light.

Fedaykin98

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