I know that I’m about to poke at someones baby. As a dev I know that never feels good. Let me preface this with: I love the Paladin. It’s likely my new main unless the final class is a satisfying melee dps or better yet a Dark Knight… It tanked better than the Warrior on all of the trash pulls. I never felt like I wasn’t able to pick up mobs having such a short cool down on my taunt. It was refreshing after so long as a Warrior feeling like group tanking was so painful. I love the fact that the second tank class fills all the gaps I felt with the Warrior. The kit is great.
However… While I like the tanking side of things and all of the individual abilities I do think the pip mechanic could be more engaging.
There are too many interruptions to the flow of combat. I’m ok with slow and steady but the Paladin feels like it jumps from 80 mph for a second then back to 5 mph for 2 seconds alternating the whole fight. I don’t know if you’ve ever been in Atlanta rush hour but that kinda stop and go traffic flow is infuriating. I’d rather go a consistent 30 mph the whole time than have the 80 mph bursts and brake slamming.
That elaborate analogy to say, I think the pip system needs to be rethought out. My suggestion would be as follows.
Auto attacks are on a consistent .25 or .33 second cool down. Something that you can get a nice relaxed rhythm to your swings and feel more like you’re swinging a big hammer around.
Auto attacks generate pips instead of consume them.
These two suggestions have the following benefits.
Combat now flows better. There’s no stunted waiting on pips.
It eliminates “waggle to win” that can currently be done.
It eliminates the unrewarding and unsatisfying 5 damage attack from a giant hammer.
It still gates DPS and prevents players from injuring themselves like the original Warrior.
You feel more like you’re swinging a large hammer around.
If you were to remove pip generation from Call Lightning, you get the side benefit of making the abuse of the hammer throw teleport harder to do without an out of combat pip builder. I’m of two minds on this change though.
I would expect damage per swing to be adjusted as well keeping in line with a tanks dps.
This also plays more into the pip management play style. You’re more likely to hit max pips and thus stop mitigating damage. With the current pip mechanic, I don’t believe anyone would ever hit 5 pips outside of pre-fight prep or even need to think about losing their damage mitigation. It’s so unlikely that it may as well not even exist.
Further adjustments would be to balance out spell casts. Right now, your heal is pretty strong and on an extremely low cooldown.
I think this should have a pip cost. The Libram of Blessing is likely fine as a 0 pip cost ability. The Libram of Power and Healing should likely be 1 pip each.
I believe these changes shift the Paladin from a play style of struggling to generate pips to do anything to a play style of ensuring pips are consumed through ability use as soon as possible to keep from maxing them out and gating your own pip generation.
Once again. I love the Paladin and it’s kit. I just think the current iteration of the pip mechanic is holding it back. As usual though this is just my opinion and can quite likely be different from the rest of the community.
I did post this outside of the general Paladin feedback thread for more visibility and to also narrow the scope of discussion to specifically the pip mechanic. Hopefully that’s acceptable.