Server Patch notes 01/12/2018

[roadkillrobin]

Are there to by ANY kind of synergy with Dark Rites and the other mastery trees? Prayer of Salvation is actutally usefull and worth pumping levels into due to no ICD on the proc, but DoK's Covenants are completly useless in warband settings. There's no reason to not max Dark Rites for DoK in ORVR atm. You basicly have mastery points that doesn't do jack.

I would say Devour Essence is still completely worth grabbing, but I'd also say maxing Dark Rites is worth it for the increased ability levels. I know when I play Salvation I always max that tree to maximize my casted heals.

Pillage Essence is now level 5 in Sacrifice, which is a great way to quickly replenish Soul Essence while AP-draining your enemy.

No, neither of em is worth anything in large scale combat.
PE can be blocked, parried making it a wasted GCD were you could be using Blood Offering to regain SE. DE drains to much SE and without AoE procs does trash damage/heal to validify draining your SE, which is your moast important resource.

[Rydiak]

Are there to by ANY kind of synergy with Dark Rites and the other mastery trees? Prayer of Salvation is actutally usefull and worth pumping levels into due to no ICD on the proc, but DoK's Covenants are completly useless in warband settings. There's no reason to not max Dark Rites for DoK in ORVR atm. You basicly have mastery points that doesn't do jack.

I would say Devour Essence is still completely worth grabbing, but I'd also say maxing Dark Rites is worth it for the increased ability levels. I know when I play Salvation I always max that tree to maximize my casted heals.

Pillage Essence is now level 5 in Sacrifice, which is a great way to quickly replenish Soul Essence while AP-draining your enemy.

No, neither of em is worth anything in large scale combat.
PE can be blocked, parried making it a wasted GCD were you could be using Blood Offering to regain SE. DE drains to much SE and without AoE procs does trash damage/heal to validify draining your SE, which is your moast important resource.

I'd have to double-check, but I thought WP/DoK abilities still generated class resources even when avoided, meaning Pillage Essence should still generate 45 SE when used. If so, that is 45 SE versus 30 from Blood Offering.

But really, nothing changed for Dark Rites/Salvation other than a few abilities from Grace/Sacrifice being easier to reach.

[Snoxx]

I'm happy to see there is some really interesting stuff going on with grace WP.

Unfortunately, I'll need to grow more fingers to press all the shiny new buttons you gave me.

Here are some of my opinions after a quick test.

- Sacrifice!/Blood of my Blood:
Ouch, this hurts! But it seems to heal a lot as well. Interesting "backline heal" option for grace WP.
Do we really need the resource consumption on it? Isn't sacrificing your hitpoints enough?

- Shielding Grace/Soul Ward :
This could be exactly the defensive root breaker a melee healer needs. Well done!

- Divine Warden/Blood Guard:
More %block rate is really needed, because the new shields have such a lousy block rate by itself (about 1%).
The 10 second duration sounds too low for my taste. If I also want to upkeep my strength buff (Sigmars Fist) and my parry buff (Sigmars Vision), it feels like I'm wasting almost all my time with cycling through my self buffs (and I'm not even trying to buff my teammate, that would waste even more time). I end up with too few time for my actual job: healing!
So please, either increase the duration to 20 seconds (to be more inline with other similar buff abilities), or completely remove Divine Warden/Blood Guard and simply give the WP/DoK shields more base block rating. Remember, having to give up 2hand-hammer in exchange for a lousy 1% block rate was a very, very bad deal. Giving up 2hand-hammer in exchange for a shield with 10% block (without the need for active self buff) sounds more reasonable.


Unsolved issue:

Grace spec with 2h-hammer did more damage and generated more heal from Sigmar's Radiance and Divine Assault. Sigmar's Radiance has a decent base healing value and still works with lower dps from the now forced 1h/shield, but Divine Assault has only a pure damage-to-heal multiplier. Less damage = less heal. Right now it is probably not even worth using Divine Assault at all, because you can get similar heal values from Sigmar's Radiance (and on the bonus side, Sigmars Radiance will heal the entire group and builds resources instead of consuming them).

Really, I might kick Divine Assault from my hotbar and replace it with one of the new abilities. I don't have enough fingers anyway, see above

In the case of a wrath-spec WP the situation is different. They use 2h hammers, are more offensive spec, usually with lots of strength and crit%, thus will deal much more damage and generate really nice heals from Divine Assault.

So we need to figure out a way to buff Divine Assault for grace WP without making it overpowered on wrath WP.

[Rydiak]

Great feedback, Snoxx!

I agree that DS/DA (and DoK equivalent) feel too anemic on their heals due to exactly what you've described. A Grace/Sacrifice-only buff to the *healing aspect* (not damage aspect) of these two abilities feels completely necessary.

In regards to Sacrifice!/Blood of My Blood, I haven't really had too much of a problem with the resource cost but I do notice I am burning through my resource faster as a result of all the new toys to play with. Not a bad thing, mind you! Melee heal feels like a real spec now, and no longer one that exists despite the game's best efforts anymore.

In regards to Divine Warden/Blood Guard, I think the block buff is fine, both in potency and duration. It is a decent block buff, and definitely makes the spec tankier, but I think the trade-off of requiring effort to keep the buff up 100% of the time is intentional. If you want to stay block buffed then you need to sacrifice a gcd every 10 seconds to do so. I agree completely that the spec is very very action intensive though. I feel like I can sleep half the time while playing Salvation and still maintain top SC healing, but while playing Grace I need to ALWAYS be fully active in my gameplay...so I guess I half agree with you on this issue then.

Shielding Grace/Soul Warden is perfect, and I wouldn't change a thing on it.

[roadkillrobin]

I would say Devour Essence is still completely worth grabbing, but I'd also say maxing Dark Rites is worth it for the increased ability levels. I know when I play Salvation I always max that tree to maximize my casted heals.

Pillage Essence is now level 5 in Sacrifice, which is a great way to quickly replenish Soul Essence while AP-draining your enemy.

No, neither of em is worth anything in large scale combat.
PE can be blocked, parried making it a wasted GCD were you could be using Blood Offering to regain SE. DE drains to much SE and without AoE procs does trash damage/heal to validify draining your SE, which is your moast important resource.

I'd have to double-check, but I thought WP/DoK abilities still generated class resources even when avoided, meaning Pillage Essence should still generate 45 SE when used. If so, that is 45 SE versus 30 from Blood Offering.

But really, nothing changed for Dark Rites/Salvation other than a few abilities from Grace/Sacrifice being easier to reach.

Everything changed. You no longer have a relible melee heal that can generate resources aswell as doing some healing while doing so You no longer have a groupheal on the move when in close pxomity to enemies.

[Rydiak]

So Pillage Essence being avoided is an issue, but Transfer Essence being avoided isn't?

I see what you mean, though I disagree with the sentiment that "everything changed" with Salvation/Dark Rites. You could always carry a shield now, spec RR into Defender, and continue to use Transfer Essence (hybrid build). You just won't get the benefit of both Transfer Essence and a resource-generating chalice. The devs obviously wanted to segregate Transfer Essence/Sigmar's Radiance from non-melee heal-spec though, so players have to adapt to that.

[adamthelc]

No, neither of em is worth anything in large scale combat.
PE can be blocked, parried making it a wasted GCD were you could be using Blood Offering to regain SE. DE drains to much SE and without AoE procs does trash damage/heal to validify draining your SE, which is your moast important resource.

I'd have to double-check, but I thought WP/DoK abilities still generated class resources even when avoided, meaning Pillage Essence should still generate 45 SE when used. If so, that is 45 SE versus 30 from Blood Offering.

But really, nothing changed for Dark Rites/Salvation other than a few abilities from Grace/Sacrifice being easier to reach.

Everything changed. You no longer have a relible melee heal that can generate resources aswell as doing some healing while doing so You no longer have a groupheal on the move when in close pxomity to enemies.

Not being able to use SR/TE without a shield is 1 thing. You can count that as a nerf, though I think the majority of backline healers wont even notice. You also get AoE Detaunt baseline, which I think most backline healers will notice.

[Snoxx]

In regards to Divine Warden/Blood Guard, I think the block buff is fine, both in potency and duration. It is a decent block buff, and definitely makes the spec tankier, but I think the trade-off of requiring effort to keep the buff up 100% of the time is intentional. If you want to stay block buffed then you need to sacrifice a gcd every 10 seconds to do so. I agree completely that the spec is very very action intensive though. I feel like I can sleep half the time while playing Salvation and still maintain top SC healing, but while playing Grace I need to ALWAYS be fully active in my gameplay...so I guess I half agree with you on this issue then.

The block% buff ability itself would be fine, if the only trade-off were using a gcd every 10 sec to keep up the 10% block rate.

But the real trade-off is something different:
We got our precious 2hand hammer taken away, and we got a shield instead which does basically nothing.

Divine Warden/Blood Guard feels like a band-aid fix, to make the worthless shields at least worth something.

In other words:
If my 2hand hammer did 1% more damage than my 1h+shield combo, but the shield gives me 1% block instead, then everything is fine. But things aren't fine, because 2hand hammer did way more damage, the difference was way bigger than than just 10% more damage (and thus, more than 10% bigger melee heals). Can we have some proper replacement at least? How about a shield with 10% base block rating (without the need to self buff every 10 seconds)?

[Rydiak]

In regards to Divine Warden/Blood Guard, I think the block buff is fine, both in potency and duration. It is a decent block buff, and definitely makes the spec tankier, but I think the trade-off of requiring effort to keep the buff up 100% of the time is intentional. If you want to stay block buffed then you need to sacrifice a gcd every 10 seconds to do so. I agree completely that the spec is very very action intensive though. I feel like I can sleep half the time while playing Salvation and still maintain top SC healing, but while playing Grace I need to ALWAYS be fully active in my gameplay...so I guess I half agree with you on this issue then.

The block% buff ability itself would be fine, if the only trade-off were using a gcd every 10 sec to keep up the 10% block rate.

But the real trade-off is something different:
We got our precious 2hand hammer taken away, and we got a shield instead which does basically nothing.

Divine Warden/Blood Guard feels like a band-aid fix, to make the worthless shields at least worth something.

In other words:
If my 2hand hammer did 1% more damage than my 1h+shield combo, but the shield gives me 1% block instead, then everything is fine. But things aren't fine, because 2hand hammer did way more damage, the difference was way bigger than than just 10% more damage (and thus, more than 10% bigger melee heals). Can we have some proper replacement at least? How about a shield with 10% base block rating (without the need to self buff every 10 seconds)?

Like I said, I think a buff to lifetap healing would be what we need. 15-20% buff, most likely, based on the numbers I've been comparing between 2h and 1h output.

[Snoxx]

Like I said, I think a buff to lifetap healing would be what we need. 15-20% buff, most likely, based on the numbers I've been comparing between 2h and 1h output.

I don't care whatever exactly they give us in exchange, but they need to give us something.

Because the lousy shields they gave us count as nothing.

For all non-insiders I'll clarify what grace spec WP lost:
2h-hammer = more damage, bigger melee heals, way bigger autoattacks, and 10% parry (and block?) strikethrough.

What we got instead:
Shields with about 1% block rate.

(and I think DoKs got 10% parry from dual wield and now they get 1% block from 1h+shield instead, aside from lower damage / lower melee heals)