Return of Reckoning

First things first, before the anger boils up again. This is not a thread about Disciples of Khaine. While a mirror class, they do not function closely enough that I feel any buff made to Warrior priests would translate well with them. Warrior priests are more supportive, while Disciples of Khaine are more offensive. Keep them out of the thread.

Second, I am not an expert on every class in this game. My time has been spent play-testing the Warrior priest, specifically Path of Grace and in melee. And this will be a bit of a read.

[1] MAD
[2] Gear
[3] Tactics
[4] Renown
[5] Proposed change, conclusion.

[1]M.A.D - Multi-attribute-dependency. Credit to Azarael for teaching me the term.
This is, without a doubt, one of our bigger issues. While all classes benefit from most of the stats in game, few if any other have the same problem with statting as Grace-priests do. We have relatively low base strength and require a lot to maintain competitive healing. We need weapon skill to prevent excessive mitigation from crippling our healing. We need toughness, wounds, and initiative to prevent ourselves from being easily taken down. While a Slayer can neglect their defenses, since they can expect to have a Guard, we can not. We have no AoE detaunt outside of a costly cross-spec into Wrath. Between this and being forced to dump into strength to keep our healing up, we are often left with very little of anything else.

Right now, even buffed, I have roughly 4,600 health. One successful Sever Blessing and my health is low enough a Sorcerer can kill me in a timestamp. One combo, fast enough that I have virtually no time to recognize I'm about to be blasted, locate the Sorcerer targeting me and cast Repent. Assuming I haven't been disabled already. I could keep them constantly detaunted, but even then they can take me for half my health and it still leaves me vulnerable to any other DPS, and I will be within range of them all.

As it stands, I'm actually confident we can't reach the strength soft-cap. Even with every talisman in strength, renown in strength, and mixing gear sets for the highest possible, even buffed the closest I've come to the cap is still 100 points shy. And that's before considering debuffs, which we are almost certain to encounter in nearly every fight.

Resolving the problem will require a very delicate approach, as any buff that offers Grace staying power has the potential to make Salvation outright unstoppable. Between our stats, only strength and weapon skill can easily be buffed without overpowering Salvation priests. Even something as small as +1 strength per level may suffice, which would nudge us closer to a Slayer's base strength.

[2]Gear - The problem inherit with hybrids and laziness.
Anyone who has played a Warrior priest of any mastery spec can tell how aggravating this issue is. Both Stalker and Devastator sets have wasted statlines, regardless of your spec. While not as big a problem as a few others, the amount of wasted stats we often have on our gear leave much to be desired. More than a few Salvation priests have bemoaned the amount of strength their armour gives them, knowing full well they'll never make use of any of it, wishing it were somewhere else. Grace has a similar problem with willpower, as it is a stat we can not make effective use out of.

For example, I don't use the full Devastator set. I would love the +5% melee critical chance, but it isn't worth giving up the stats my current influence helmet and chest piece offer.

This is a problem for which I have only managed to find one solution - Two separate sets of armour, focused to either of the two mastery trees. The armour Knights of the Blazing Sun get make me frankly envious, given their armour actually functions regardless of their mastery spec.

[3]Tactics - The fun of choosing between red and red.
Much like the situation with our M.A.D, our limited decisions on Tactics hinders us further.

Divine Fury - +25% damage dealt, -20% healing. Specifically, the healing done without damage as a requirement. Healing Hand, Divine mend, etc. Sigmar's Radiance and Divine Assault are unaffected, thankfully, by the debuff. This Tactic is an absolute requirement, as even with the 1/4th boost to our DPS it still falls short. Our healing relies on our damage, I have not found an even passably mediocre build that doesn't include this. With our gimped willpower and the -20%, our other healing abilities are flat out crippled. Which serves to further necessitate higher damage to ensure better healing.

Discipline - Flat boost to Willpower, roughly 128 or so, at this level if I'm not mistaken. If a Slayer wishes to get their strength up, they can slot Brute Force. If a Salvation priest wants to free up stats for wounds, they can slot Discipline for the extra willpower. We have no such option, as Discipline offers us nothing valuable. -20% off healing from Divine Fury means the extra 128 or so Willpower will make no meaningful difference, but we can't get extra Strength like a Slayer can or extra Toughness like an Ironbreaker can.

Greave of Sigmar - Sigmar's Fist adds roughly 100 strength to your defensive target, Greave of Sigmar adds an additional matching toughness. Another Tactic I have been unable to be rid of, while hating it all the same. The buffs do not stack. The moment a Knight enters your group with their buffs up, you have a potentially wasted Tactic slot because they offer the same buff, on an AoE, and it does not require you to be in melee range with a successful hit to apply it. Despite this aggravation, we have too few defenses as it is to risk giving up so much extra toughness on the chance we have a Vigilance Knight in the group.

Intimidating Repent - Causes Repent to affect all targets within 30 feet of the first target. We have to cross-spec to get an AoE detaunt, something no melee DPS has to contend with. Though this is dangerous ground that I'm uncomfortable even touching, it need be addressed. Ironbreakers and Knights are durable enough to eat the damage sent their way, and in fact most prefer to be targeted instead of their Guarded allies. Slayers and Witch Hunters have AoE detaunts at their core, allowing them to cluster-detaunt several enemies atop of their high likelihood of being Guarded.

While other healers can remain far enough from the fighting that any attacker would be noticed before closing ground and can be safely detaunted or intercepted, we don't have the luxury. Every form of damage and CC in the game is within range to hit us on a moment's notice, without the warning of a Sorcerer running 40 feet to get within range.

Grace of Sigmar - Sigmar's Radiance deals X damage and healing, with 50% of the damage added to the healing. Grace of Sigmar increases the base heal and the heal-per-%damage to 75%. One of my favourite and more hated of tactics. With this slotted, the constant armour and Guard mitigation I encounter hurts a little less. Having my 730 damage Radiance reduced to 212 is more tolerable with the higher base heal and by squeezing more out of it with the 75%. Though I've come to hate that I need spend a mastery point and Tactic slot just to get Radiance to heal -less- than a Salvation priest's AoE healing, while also being in far larger degrees of danger. Add in a few lucky parries and our healing falls even further behind.

[4] Renown - Sigmar damn the MAD.
Back to the issue of our stats, again. I have spent days cycling between a few renown combinations, but they are all almost entirely the same. 20 strength/15 reduced crit chance, 35 points taken up on the spot and I have yet to find success otherwise. With the horribly low amount of wounds, I can't afford to be eating a critical hit 35% of the time. With our low base strength and massive dependency on it, the strength is again a necessity I can't part with.

At the end, I have 5 actual points that can be spent elsewhere. Which is effectively nothing, in the grand scheme. 4 in Disrupt/dodge and 1 in parry is my usual decision. While I have heard arguments this will get better once the renown rank limit is increased, I don't believe it. I still foresee much of my renown going into strength and reduced critical chances. Our defenses are just too low to afford being crit constantly, and we will always need the strength.

[5] Proposed changes, the conclusion, and the ire of more than a few angry people.

Finding a fix to our MAD is problematic, given our relationship with Salvation.
+1 strength per level, possibly weapon skill as well, would help without being too drastic. Effectively an extra 32 strength.

Allowing Sigmar's Radiance to ignore 10-15% of enemy armour would help prevent mitigation from crippling us as badly as it does.

Personally, I would rather see Grace of Sigmar removed as a tactic and it's effect made baseline with Sigmar's Radiance.
Doing this will leave a mastery tactic missing from our tree, though this is an opportunity to create another tactic to replace it and fix another problem, potentially with our MAD. More importantly, a tactic that high in Grace's mastery tree will ensure it does not affect Salvation.

Potential solutions are tactics for additional armour, strength, wounds. Even with another -20% to healing tacked on, I would still prefer it. XXX armour with -20% healing, maybe a flat boost to a melee stat.

While I would like to see Divine Fury done away with somehow, I don't see it happening. While our damage could be buffed enough not to need it and the tactic removed, I don't see it happening anywhere before T4. Arguments that the -20% healing keeps us in check are laughable, our lack of willpower has more than done that. I honestly do hate this tactic. We effectively have only two slots because we can't physically avoid taking this.

Reserving this post because I intend to write a long one a bit later on about the WP's issues. I've been playing WP in both book and 2h specs specifically to educate myself on the crippling flaws of the 2h, in preparation for dealing with them.

Just my 2 cents from maining a Grace WP till patch 1.4.0

- Convert all Grace abilities to do spirit damage.
- Let Sigmars Vision also increase dodge and disrupt by 10% and switch it with Sigmars Shield in the mastery tree.
- Make it so Healing Hand is unaffected by the two -20% healing tactics.

- I must say it would be interesting to incorporate Grace of Sigmar in the base ability; the remaining tactic slot could be used to buff initiative/anti-crit, or some sort of cc breaker?

Tricky but interesting thread! Looking forward to this.

Azarael wrote:Reserving this post because I intend to write a long one a bit later on about the WP's issues. I've been playing WP in both book and 2h specs specifically to educate myself on the crippling flaws of the 2h, in preparation for dealing with them.

Reserving for the same reason. I did everything I could to make melee healing work on live, I would love it if RoR could deliver on the promises made by Barnett & co and make this completely unique healing style work.

Rebuke wrote: - Let Sigmars Vision also increase dodge and disrupt by 10% and switch it with Sigmars Shield in the mastery tree.

God damn it, I can't believe I forgot to mention this.

Sigmar's Shield, as it stands, only serves to dump a priest's righteous fury and cripple them, with next to no reasonable healing in return.

As it stands, with appropriate mastery points, Sigmar's Shield heals for 136 health per activation, drains 20 righteous fury, and has no internal cooldown. In practice, it's a lot of drain, for very little healing, with the potential to instantly dump your resource if the damage gets a barrage of attacks.

Increasing the heal to about 240, reducing the drain to 10, and adding an internal cooldown of .5 seconds would do a lot to make this ability viable. As for swapping it's position with Vision in the tree, I don't object. Making it more open to Wrath could help that spec, as well. Especially as Wrath has little way to spend Righteous Fury, outside of using Divine Assault and Healing hand. Neither of which are mastery-focused.

All right.

I've been playing book WP and 2h WP, and the reasons for book WP's superiority and only a few players choosing to play with two handers in Grace spec are clear to me. Let me preface this by saying that I already know the class isn't truly viable when played as it was intended to be played, and if anyone intends to come into this thread to state that melee WP is working well as a healer, I expect them to have an amazing analysis of why this is so.

MAD (Multiple Attribute Dependence)

If you're playing melee WP, your casted heals rely on Willpower, your lifetap heals require Strength and Weapon Skill, and much like a book WP, you need to stack defenses and armor as well. Not only is melee WP punished by having to split its stats across Str, WS, Toughness, Willpower, Initiative, Armor and potentially Parry, it requires even more defense than the book version to work because it needs to work in the frontline. On the opposite side, we have classes like BW and Sorc, which need only concern themselves with Intelligence and token defenses.

Forced Splitting

This is possibly the greatest design flaw with the class and it's related to MAD. The two halves of the WP don't synergize correctly. Touch of the Divine and Divine Mend are very Willpower-sensitive (especially Divine Mend), which promotes stacking Willpower, but having Willpower comes at the expense of Strength, WS and defensive stats. If your damage is low, there is no point actually taking the risk to attack, and you might as well take a book and stay in the backline as a pure healer. Therefore, the choice is between full backline healer and fully offensive melee healer (disparagingly referred to as "DPS WP"), when it should instead be between full backline healer and hybrid melee/casting healer.

The healing component of the class needs to be just as effective as it is in the backline when specced for melee, or it's never going to be worth forgoing a book and regenerating resource in the proper manner by attacking targets.

Violation of the Mechanic

With this one I'm basically referring to the book. A class which was fundamentally designed and promoted as needing to attack to gain resource should never have been given a powerful means of regenerating that resource while not attacking. All that did was give the original developers an excuse to stop making the class work as intended and turn it into a healbot.

The other problem with this particular violation is that elements of the class designed to facilitate its correct operation as a melee healer (AoE spec detaunt, medium armor, Smite/Essence Lash etc) have been inherited by the backline spec, which should never have had access to so many defensive tools.

Guard Reliance

My experience with melee WP has been colored by one simple fact: even chumps who normally love to beat on tanks can and will crush you as soon as they see you anywhere near the front line with a two-handed weapon. Melee WP without Guard simply can't survive in the front line at the moment - you're wasting your team's time and your own time if you even try this. Backline WP, conversely, does not require Guard until it is focused. This makes melee WP impossible to justify, because DPS classes require Guard as well and the melee WP doesn't bring enough to the table to justify it being a primary recipient of Guard, and because of this I'm not really interested in hearing about how melee WP can survive with Guard. I know it to be true, but that you'll never actually get Guard makes it irrelevant.

Tactics

This is another big one. I see the following as flaws:

- No option to use Brute Force. It may not matter that much later, because the utility of tactics can end up eclipsing the value of +160 to a stat at rank 40, but being forced to lean on things like Divine Fury to power lifetaps (which hits casted heals, forced splitting again) is ridiculous.

- Grace of Sigmar. You should not have to be forced to slot a tactic in order to make one of the two melee healing skills you have vaguely compete with Touch of the Divine. Period. Touch of the Divine with ~450 Willpower heals for 550. Radiance with Grace slotted heals from anywhere between 400 and 600. Factor in the greatly increased risk of using lifetap heals (noted below) and it's completely out of line.

Lifetap mechanics

I'll just establish what you gain and lose from going melee WP here:

Gains

+ Immunity to healing debuffs on group heal
+ Ability to deal damage while group healing

Losses

- Book regen, worth 8 RF/s (forced to attack or supplicate to build RF)
- Power on casted heals
- At this level, Cleansing Power, Divine Warding and Pious Restoration
- Damage component of lifetaps mitigated by Guard and defenses
- Damage component of lifetaps blocked by parry / block / absorbs
- Can't use lifetaps while out of range of a target
- Can't use lifetaps while disarmed or knocked down
- Divine Assault channels, so it's interrupt bait

You can add to this that the safest targets to actually hit end up being tanks, which will generously apply their armour and toughness reductions to the group heal's damage component and would simply love to parry the strikes you need to attempt to burst heal someone with DA.

Combined with the fact that you need those lifetaps on yourself more often than not to survive and can't afford to use them on other people, there are just too many disadvantages.

Lack of Compensation for Risk

We hear a lot about what a balanced mechanic Combustion / Dark Magic is. Given that properly generating RF/SE is actually far more dangerous than Combustion, the payoff is crap in comparison. A spec which is forced to work in the front lines while being a healer archetype should have a massive payoff for doing so. Instead, it's punished.

Gear and Stats

Same rubbish that all hybrids suffer from. WP (and likely DoK as well) have their gear split between attacking stats and healing stats, and even worse, biased towards Wounds instead of Toughness. Even the sets have this (Devastator giving Str bonus, Stalker giving Willpower bonus) as well as the influence rewards (mixed Willpower/melee critical chance).

Sigmar's Shield

I made a section just for this, because this skill is laughable:

You smash your weapon into your enemy, dealing 187 damage to them. Your defensive target becomes Blessed for up to 20 seconds, and will regain 150 health each time they're attacked. You will lose 20 Righteous Fury each time this blessing occurs, and the effect will end if you run out of Righteous Fury to power it with.

So, 150 health for 20 Righteous Fury, with no control over the consumption of RF, on a 9pt mastery skill. The skill doesn't scale, and blowing a 55 AP Divine Aid (Heals an ally for 337 points, and an additional 390 over 5 seconds, BEFORE scaling) is still a superior solution that's not as likely to end up blowing all of your RF to do.

Now, let me talk about solutions.

Guard Reliance

I think this one is a simple fix, and it's a bilateral one between both WP and DoK. The Intimidating Repent and Terrifying Aura tactics should be removed, and their effects should apply to the standard detaunt if the caster is wielding a two-handed weapon (WP) or is dual wielding blades (DoK). This takes a tool that the backline spec doesn't need and shouldn't have away, and gives it to the 2H and dual wielding DoK in all circumstances - thus providing a concrete benefit to opting to use offensive weapons. It also means that melee DoK and WP aren't as dependent on Guard and that it's less effective on them if it is given.

Grace of Sigmar

That tactic should, as the OP proposed, be absorbed into the basic healing skill. As aforesaid, a tactic affecting a single skill should make that skill awesome. It shouldn't merely serve to make it viable.

Multiple Attribute Dependence

This has to be solved in a way that doesn't allow book WP to benefit. My original proposal for this was as a stacking buff which applies when dealing single-target melee damage and causes a portion of the user's Strength to also count towards Willpower for x seconds, to ensure that playing offensively meant continually having to go in and fight to power Willpower heals and prevent abuse of Supplication / Blood Offering.

Lifetap Mechanics

Honestly, this one is over my head. I need to hear suggestions on this, because I'm not really sure what to do. I think a general chance to 10% parry strikethrough on two-handers (as opposed to block strikethrough) could be of some assistance here. If casted heals are given a means of working with the melee spec, it might not be necessary to change anything more.

Gear and Stats

Hybrid classes need access to sets dedicated to either spec, appropriately named. "of Piety" and "of Fury" would be my suggestions for divergent sets.

Azarael wrote:Lifetap Mechanics

Honestly, this one is over my head. I need to hear suggestions on this, because I'm not really sure what to do. I think a general chance to 10% parry strikethrough on two-handers (as opposed to block strikethrough) could be of some assistance here. If casted heals are given a means of working with the melee spec, it might not be necessary to change anything more..

This is one matter I've yet to come up with a solution for. The block-strikethrough has to go, though. It's an insult to encourage me to attack tanks, while discouraging me because of the mitigation that will cripple me. I'd rather 10% parry or extra armour penetration.

Azarael wrote:Gear and Stats

Hybrid classes need access to sets dedicated to either spec, appropriately named. "of Piety" and "of Fury" would be my suggestions for divergent sets.

I am already giddy over 'Fury' gear for my warrior-priest. Would be nice to see my wasted 37 willpower go into something actually useful.


Another problem that I have found, which may be resolved with an increase in healing ability, is Action point management. With how little we can heal at times, I often find myself unable to stop attacking long enough to recover AP. This soon leaves me starved, as Radiance is fairly AP hungry, which ultimately leaves me unable to heal.

If AP regenerated during Divine Assault it would not be as much of an issue, but that may be a tad too powerful.

Restorative Burst, which recovers AP on a critical with a direct heal, does not work with any of our Grace heals. Only Divine Mend and the initial heal of Divine Aid work, and neither are reliable. Wouldn't mind having something like that, personally.

My opinion on AP management is that it should remain where it is for now. If using RF during the downtime of AP regeneration becomes viable for melee healers, increasing AP regeneration will overpower them.

So if I read this correctly your goal is to make the DPS WP more into a working support, rather than trying to make him a viable DPS option? I personally really like this approach, although I fear that a WP with decent scaling heals on top of what he has right now might just be too hard to take down, especially in lower Tiers