Class Wishlists for Midnight
Death Knight Wishlist
Demon Hunter Wishlist
Druid Wishlist
Evoker Wishlist
Hunter Wishlist
Mage Wishlist
Monk Wishlist
Shaman Wishlist
Warlock Wishlist
Warrior Wishlist
For a brief breakdown of the changes coming to each specialization in Midnight, check out our Midnight Class Survival Guide.
Midnight Class Survival Guide
Paladin Wishlists for Midnight
Our Paladin Writers, Clarius (Holy), Pumps (Protection), and Bolas (Retribution), discuss the most significant issues plaguing their specs as well as the must-have changes they'd like to see prior to Midnight's launch in just a few short months.
Holy Paladin Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Light of Dawn made target capped again
2.
Aura Filtering on Raid and Party Frames
3.
Delete Liberation
4.
Proper Beacon of Light Reminders
5.
Mana Adjustments
Light of Dawn
Light of Dawn being uncapped has brought about some issues that need to be addressed. To understand the issues, you need to know how Light of Dawn actually scales beyond 5 targets. Light of Dawn splits its healing fully when healing more than 5 injured players, but the formula ignores players at full health, but it still actually heals those players. So, Light of Dawn itself doesn't actually do more effective healing on more players, but it will do more overhealing the fewer injured players there are.
When you factor in the Beacon transfer from all that overhealing, it means that Light of Dawn and its Beacon transfer's effective healing scales exponentially, the fewer people in your raid group are injured, peaking at 5 injured players.
The exponential growth is more pronounced the more people are in your raid. This is unnecessarily complicated and unintuitive, but it also makes it impossible to balance Light of Dawn with Eternal Flame and Word of Glory in raid groups, so we end up just spamming Light of Dawn instead of utilizing our strong and impactful spot healing, which is just less fun in my opinion.
The way it currently works also makes talents such as Liberation and Seraphic Barrier scale super weirdly with fewer injured players, and Light of Dawn also currently heals pets which also transfers healing to Beacon effects, and this makes your Light of Dawn scale significantly with the number of pets in your group.
The easiest solution to all these issues is to simply hard cap it at 5 players again.
UI Concerns
One of the worst problems with the addon restrictions in Midnight, is the total lack of control over which buffs and debuffs you see on your Raid Frames. After health itself, buffs and debuffs are the most important things to be able to parse quickly for healers. The current lack of customization might be fine for some players, but it is definitely not fine for everyone.
To me, this lack of customization is a totally unacceptable side-effect of the misguided addon restrictions. If Blizzard cannot provide a way to properly filter buffs and debuffs on Raid Frames, then the addon changes will never be considered successful from a healer's point of view. There are way too many pointless buffs and debuffs that the frames just feel extremely cluttered without custom filtering. The fact that the only thing we have heard from Blizzard on this issue, is that they now allow addons to sort auras by remaining duration, is just laughably out of touch with reality.
We need full control over which auras we see. So far, in my opinion, there hasn't been any tangible benefit to the players from these addon restrictions.
Other things that are missing with the addon restrictions are ways to properly remind you to apply Beacons, Devotion Aura, and the Lightsmith Weapon Buffs. All of these need to be made non-secret so addons can be used for reminders.
Liberation
The last issue I want to highlight here is the talent Liberation. Liberation is simply way too powerful, and it makes our healing Holy Power spenders deal more damage than our actual damage spender, which in itself is really stupid, but we also have very few strong talents in the middle section of the tree, so you lose essentially no healing from taking it. In raids it increases your damage output by up to 400% and makes you deal more damage than tanks, which obviously makes it mandatory.
You could just nerf it, so it isn't overpowered, but then you would have a pure DPS talent in our spec tree that you would probably never take since it doesn't help with pathing or anything. However, if you somehow manage keep it strong enough to be worth taking without being overpowered, then we just have a major portion of our DPS output coming from a completely passive talent that you never have to think about. But then, to keep us balanced with other healers, all our active DPS spells would have to be nerfed in response.
It is a boring talent that takes away the skill expression of optimizing damage as a healer, so I simply don't think the talent should exist in the first place.
Holy Paladin Guide
Protection Paladin Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Off-healing Niche
2.
Seraphim
3.
Immunity Removal
4.
Defensive Toolkit Rework
5.
More Aura Interactions
Off-healing Niche
Protection Paladin, Guardian Druid and Brewmaster Monk are the 3 tanks that can offer their group some off-healing, albeit now quite mild and extremely toned down from the glory days of MoP Vengeance where tank off-healing was at egregious levels. Being able to support your group/raid, even if it's only a single raid member a couple times per minute, feels really impactful. If you are able to heal someone to full once every 20-30 seconds, that is an awesome feeling. Currently tanks contribute miniscule amounts of DPS to both Raids and Mythic+, I would love to see either our DPS buffed or for Blizzard to lean a little more into off-healing as a valued leveraged resource.
Seraphim
This was a fun and enjoyable ability that allowed Prot Paladin to scale fantastically and have an alternate power spender that wasn't just spam Shield of the Righteous. It doesn't have to come back in it's original form but a short term powerful buff with a short cooldown feels very good on all tanks and I believe it would be easy to tie talents and bonuses to if it was baseline.
Immunity Removal
This is going to be a highly contentious suggestion, but I strongly believe immunities are a plague in the raiding scene. Being able to cheese mechanics so consistently is detrimental to the overall balance of the game. Prot Paladin is also always going to be balanced around having an immunity as long as it has one. And in scenarios where the immunity is not as strong as usual, it will tend to mean that Prot Paladin overall, is weaker than other tanks. This has been seen time and time again where Prot Paladin has the issue of being "too soft" or "too squishy" to comfortably tank certain bosses on early prog and they are often seen early in the race and then dropped for harder hitting bosses UNLESS, their immunity is overpowered and in high demand. Bubble can stay, being immune to damage for a short period of time isn't gamebreaking. Most tanks are nearly immortal with their biggest defensive cooldowns up anyway. But debuff removal/negation should be removed entirely, from not only Prot Paladin but all classes.
Protection Paladin Guide
Retribution Paladin Midnight Wishlist
Top 5 Midnight Wishlist
Wishlist
1.
Herald of the Sun Rework
2.
More Build Options
3.
Raid Viability Equity
4.
Improvements to AoE Talents
5.
Bug Fixes
Talent Build Improvements
Ret has had more than 10 talents removed from the spec tree in Midnight and no new ones added. Although the many reworks and changes to existing talents have been received well, there are very few differences between any builds you make in the new tree, since there just aren't many choices to make - you have to take almost every talent in the tree no matter what. I'd like to see new talents added to add some variety to the builds.
For builds, AoE options also have an extra problem, where they are just way too weak relative to the single target or generic options. For example, for many raid encounters in Manaforge Omega that have add spawns, you don't even take basic AoE talents like Tempest of the Lightbringer since the impact is just too low outside of fights where you constantly cast Divine Storm like Soul Hunters. Talents like Tempest of the Lightbringer, Blade of Vengeance, or Sanctify need improvements to be worth considering at all outside of pure AoE situations.
Although Templar Strikes looks to be better in Midnight than it has been in previous expansions, it still has some bizarre behaviour where its GCD is hard locked to 1s and isn't reduced by Haste, unlike regular abilities that start at 1.5s and are reduced with Haste down to 0.75s. This is fine when you have low amounts of stats, but during cooldowns Ret will regularly easily drop its normal GCD below 1s, especially later on in an expansion when secondary stats are in abundance. This really limits the viability of Templar Strikes beyond maybe the first tier of an expansion - for example, in 11.2.5, talenting into Templar Strikes is actually worse than just using base Crusader Strike and simply not spending the 30th talent point on anything else.
Raid Viability Issues
Obviously Retribution is able to still participate in raiding, but it's consistently been a suboptimal choice, and its popularity in raids continues to drop tier by tier as the issues it has go unaddressed. For utility, the main problem is that it competes for the Paladin spot with two specializations that have historically had extremely strong value in raid compositions that Ret doesn't have (e.g. Blessing of Spellwarding), and there's no longer any backup Paladin spot for Retribution Aura. Although Paladin utility has a ton of applications in other PvE content like Mythic+, it's very difficult to find useful applications in raid that warrant a raid spot by themselves, with the only real example in any War Within raid being Blessing of Freedom in Phase 1 of Queen Ansurek. This means that the utility a second Paladin brings is almost always going to be redundant, and since other Paladin specs have better utility and are often more desirable for their respective roles than Ret is as a DPS, Ret will usually only get a DPS spot on the strength of its damage throughput.
The Ret profile is also a problem for its raid viability in recent tiers. Its cooldowns have very short durations and cooldowns, which can be useful in some circumstances where frequent short duration burst is needed, but is much weaker when the required damage window is longer than a few seconds. This is also inherently a much less useful profile in a raid situation than it can be in Mythic+, since if there are add spawns every 30s, you could simply assign classes with longer and stronger cooldowns to use them on alternating sets instead. Ret also doesn't have options to alter this profile meaningfully; in Midnight you can pick between Avenging Wrath having an effective cooldown of 30s or 1 minute, but don't have any options for choosing a more powerful version with a longer cooldown for situations where that would be useful. This leaves Ret in a spot where it can have cooldowns ready for any point they would be useful, but those cooldowns are rarely impactful.
Herald Problems
Having now played with it (or without it) for an expansion, it feels as though Herald of the Sun wasn't a tree designed for Retribution. Dawnlight as an effect seems like it makes sense for Holy Paladin where they can apply it to multiple allies and do a bunch of extra AoE healing during cooldowns, but this doesn't translate well to a DPS spec where you're often only applying them to a single target. On AoE, you don't have control over how most of the Dawnlights are applied, and they'll often end up hitting random enemies that are immune to damage, don't need to be killed, or die instantly, wasting the application. Most of the Herald effects that buff Hammer of Wrath haven't been updated for Midnight, even though you're now only casting it during Avenging Wrath. From a gameplay perspective, Herald's profile of "casting Wake of Ashes procs a bunch of damage" is basically exactly the same as Templar. Since basically every talent in the tree is about Dawnlight and Hammer of Wrath, I can't imagine that these issues could be rectified without a full rework. I hope that Templar remains the stronger choice until Herald gets the fixes it needs.
Although Templar has far fewer issues than Herald, it shares the problem with immune enemies that can be randomly targeted by Empyrean Hammer and eat a significant portion of your damage. As a bonus wishlist item for Templar, I'd also like to see the cost on Hammer of Light reduced from 5 to 3 to match with how it works for Protection, since Holy Power generation for Ret has been massively reduced with the nerfs to Boundless Judgment and Crusading Strikes. Hammer of Light also still has some bugs that could be fixed where Undisputed Ruling doesn't always apply debuffs properly.
Retribution Paladin
