#0 - Oct. 28, 2009, 5:29 p.m.
Q u o t e:I've underlined the portion that is the crux of the problem - there is a "core issue" Blizzard sees with the paladin class. And later in that post, he said that something may be done with Lay on Hands. This is a spell of great power and interest, and so I wrote up what I thought may be a nice change, should Blizzard decide to redesign it:
The paladin class isn't just supposed to be for support anymore, but at the same time, the original intent for many paladin abilities was to help the group. Over time however they have contributed into making the paladin into a "one-man army," able to play offensively, defensively and heal without say the stance changing or shapeshifting or sometimes event talent specialization required of other classes. /Many of the LK balance problems we've had with the class are because of that core issue.
From what I gather with GC's post, Blizzard likely thinks that the current Lay on Hands is a little too powerful to be given to all flavors of paladins. That, I'm not entirely sure I'd agree, but for the sake of argument, let's use that as a starting point, and given that is the case, what can be changed about LoH to make it a balanced spell?
First of all, it's a little bursty. It heals for a lot. In fact, it heals for the paladin's health, which makes it (potentially, and in reality, most of the time) the largest heal in the game.
Now let's take a step back and think about WoW. This is a game that is inspired by D&D, a lot. In fact, if you takes a sober look at the Paladin class, you would notice things like Lay on Hands, disease resistance, etc., to be reminiscent of D&D flavors.
Now obviously these are very very different than the D&D versions. But let's take a look at Lay on Hands for a moment. In D&D, Lay on Hands is a spell a paladin can cast for a specific amount of health per day, but can dole out the healing in portions as the paladin desires. I'd like to take this fact, and make LoH in WoW a more interesting spell. So here it goes:
My idea is to let Lay on Hands be:
1) A spell that can heals up to 100% the Paladin's total health over time (more on this next) in a long time period, say 20 minutes.
2) The heal cannot happen all at once - but in several chunks, and each chunk can be, say, 20% of the paladin's health. So a total of 5 chunks can be doled out.
3) To prevent the healing paladin from spending 5 GCDs spamming this uninterruptible instant cast spell, there needs to be some kind of short cooldown between the chunks.
4) The short cooldown doesn't have to be a hard cooldown. Rather, it'll be a debuff that increases the cast time of the spell until the debuff expires. That way, the spell becomes interesting, as the paladin will have to decide to continue using the spell, or to wait till it's instant again to cast. Tentatively, let's say the debuff has a duration of 10 seconds, and it increases the cast time to 2 seconds (with the amount of haste a Holy paladin has, anything less would be nearly uninterruptible, and there'd be little decision).
With that, let's write the spell descriptions:
Lay on Hands
Instant, 40yd range
Heals a target for 30% of the paladin's health. Causes a Lay on Hands Exhaustion debuff that lasts for 10 seconds and that increases the cast time of Lay on Hands to 2 seconds. Also causes a Lay on Hands Depletion stacking debuff that lasts for 20 minutes if the paladin doesn't have the depletion debuff yet. If the Lay on Hands Depletion debuff stacks to 5, this spell can no longer be cast.
The talent Improved Lay on Hands in the Holy tree needs to be changed, so that the 20% damage reduction cannot be chained for 5x15 = 75 seconds of 20% physical damage reduction. It can be reworded as follows:
Improved Lay on Hands
Grants the target of your lay on hands spell 10/20% reduced physical damage taken for 15 seconds if you have not incurred the Lay on Hands Depletion debuff. In addition, the Lay on Hands Depletion debuff duration is reduced by 2/4 min.
Also, this seems a bit underpowered for Holy paladins when you think about it. 20% of a Holy paladin's health is probably smaller than Holy Shock past some spell power point, and so the use of this spell would become nil. Also, having a healing spell scale with stamina is kind of odd to me, personally. So I'm suggesting adding a scaling factor:
In this talent, add something:
Holy Guidance
Increases your spell power by 4/8/12/16/20% of your total Intellect. In addition, your Lay on Hands spell benefits from 20/40/60/80/100% of your spell power.
The spell power coefficient could probably use a larger percentage such as 120%, since it has a high CD (overall), and other drawbacks (cannot instant cast within 10 seconds).
