Paladin Updates
In this module, we’ve made a number of changes to the Paladin class.
Overall, we felt the Paladin class was in decent shape at the very high end – Paladins were still sought after in the very hardest group content. But beginning and intermediate Paladins often had more trouble, and we wanted Paladins to be a solid choice at all item levels. And, as always, there were plenty of bugs to fix, tuning adjustments to make, and potential quality-of-life improvements.
Some of the more important changes include:
- The little-loved Bond of Virtue swapped out for a new healing power (still named Bond of Virtue) that does an AoE heal, but also heals the party member with the lowest HP.
- This should help Paladin healers keep low-HP party members topped off, something that was sometimes difficult for Paladins compared to other healing classes.
- The Oathkeeper’s Emissary of Warding feat adjusted so that about half its value goes to all Oathkeepers, and only half comes from the feat.
- This should allow both Oathkeeper capstone feats to be viable choices, but without lowering overall Paladin healing (whether the Oathkeeper takes Emissary or not).
- This should especially help lower-geared Oathkeepers, since to get full the value out of Emissary of Warding required very good gear and stats.
- Note this change is an overall buff to the Paladin class, even though the “headline numbers” of Emissary of Warding have gone down. The extra healing value hasn’t been lost; it’s just been transferred to the base powers (Divine Shelter, Divine Touch, etc.) that Emissary of Warding affects.
- The Justicar’s Intimidating Presence feat significantly improved.
- Hopefully this will allow both Justicar capstone feats to be viable choices.
- General increases to healing magnitudes to help Paladins stay on par with other healing classes.
- Auras significantly increased (roughly doubled in most cases) in effect.
- Improved readability for the Paladin’s Stamina and Divinity meters.
- New blocking animations that are less jerky than the old ones.
- Multiple fixes to unclear or incorrect tooltips.
- Multiple other small bugfixes.
See the patch notes for all the details!
There were also some general changes to player powers that are of special note for Paladins:
- Threat reworked and retuned.
- More of the threat value was put on the base character, and less on the “extra threat” powers. The overall threat generated is the same or higher, but the hope is that now “extra threat” powers can be interesting options rather than must-haves.
- AoE healing modified to hit players or companions, but players first.
- This lets you heal your companion in solo play, but still heal players in Trials without “losing” heals to companions.
- This was functionality that was first rolled out to Bards, but now all healing classes should have it.
- Various enemy powers that had CC (crowd control) effects were bypassing the CC immunity that tank classes were supposed to gain when blocking. Blocking CC immunity should be more reliable now.
- Player shields with small shield values should no longer overwrite existing shields with larger values. Instead, the shield with the largest remaining shield value will be kept.
Updates to Boons
Over time, as more campaigns have awarded more boon points, some characters have pretty much all the boons that they care about. While technically it was still possible to spend boon points, those points were typically spent on boons the player didn’t care much about.
While we didn’t have enough time to completely revamp all the boons from top to bottom, we did want to make some smaller modifications that meant all characters had something to spend their hard-earned boon points on.
With that goal in mind, we made the following changes:
- Players can now purchase more than 1 Master Boon and more than 2 Tier 5 Boons.
- These additional boons will cost extra boon points (1 more point per rank for each additional boon you already own).
- Various Master Boons that were unappealing have been strengthened.
- In particular, some of the conditions that would proc the Master Boons were too restrictive, and they’ve been made more generous. For example, the boons that used to proc when you used an At-Will while at less than 30% HP have had the HP requirement removed.
- There have been some minor bugfixes to boons as well (see patch notes for details).
We hope that these changes, although modest, will make earning boon points more valuable for players.
About The Author
