2019 ED Pass: Divine Sphere

[Arlathen]

Some feedback for the Divine Crusader changes:

• Add Charisma to Stand and be Judged / Celestial Bombardment for Paladin & FvS Builds, please!
• Celestial Champion now clashes with Paladin's Zeal spell. Please change to Unique bonus to allow stacking?
• +1 Religious Feat per core to suit the new Favoured Weapons abilities for all classes to benefit from Favoured Weapon changes?
• T4: The Book of War - Please Add Bastard Swords to the list. Paladin Vanguard lives matter too

The 'one' extra change I'd like you to consider is for Zeal of the Righteous.

I've never liked the decay-over-time approach to the ability despite it being our main improvement in offensive output in the tree. 4 Minutes is such a long cooldown for the 2 Minutes, 30 seconds uptime on the ability, and at 2 minutes+ into the ability were down to our last 10 stacks and fading fast. Could I suggest the following changes:

• Zeal of the Righteous: 25 Stacks gained, 3s decay per stack, 2 Minute cooldown
• NEW T6: Fury of the Divine (1 Rank, 1AP): Your Zeal of the Righteous bonuses are now doubled to +2 MP/RP/SP/DStrike/Dshot per stack.

This would then preserve the decay rate and burst opportunity design of the ability with a little more investment at T6 for improved output, but also really usefully aligns with the typical 2 minute refresh on Divine Might/Divine Will/Know the Angles type abilities scattered through the Enhancement trees.

[ElweSulk]

Exalted Angel
This is a good tree, for those who can make use of the skills in it. We analyzed it and didn't see much that we thought merited major change, though we might try to loop back for some bugfixes before release. We did make a change to one skill for game balance reasons.

• Reborn in Light no longer charges with Endless Ardor and Righteous Fervor; instead, it is once per Rest (keeps 10min cooldown).

I'm partly ok with this change. The no charging of Reborn is good, but once per rest is not. Please make it usable more per rest. For a proper build currently, it's basically usable once it's off cooldown; so reducing it to once per rest is a huge nerf. No charging is a good buff for those who have difficulty to charge it currently.

Other abilities not mentioned which need change/fix:

• Ascendance: "While in angelic form, you are immune to repair spells and do not have Warforged healing amp penalties.". Please remove that limitation about warforged (you have already for Palemasters)
• Astral Vibrance: Does this work at all? Damage output? Spell point cost? Fix those and make damage scale with some spell power. After fixing spell point cost: don't make it so costly as it's current tooltip says. While you fix it, please make sure it's working properly together with Ascendance (health req. & cost).
• Angelic form (Ascendance & Reborn in Light): Make it easy to toggle this form off

[ElweSulk]

Divine Crusader:

• NEW: T4: The Book of War: (Multiselector): Pick one of the following to gain as a Favored Weapon: Longsword, Longbow, Morningstar, Greatsword (1 Rank, 1AP)
• NEW: T6: The Book of War: Wrath of the Divine: While wielding a Favored Weapon in your Main Hand, you gain +1 to Hit and Damage for every 2 Religious Lore Feats you have with all equipped weapons and shields. (1 Rank, 1AP)

- Picking favored weapon: This locks out lots of builds. Change it to either: 1) your equipped weapon is your favored weapon (i.e. it changes as you equip different weapons, 2) or have a much wider weapon selection, 3) or maybe based on slash/pierc/etc... (same categories you can pick with improved critical)
- Religious Lore Feats: again, this limits people picking this destiny. Change it to be based on something else. Maybe based somehow on greater of str/wis/cha? (since those are the stats this destiny can pick)

[Seph1roth5]

Unyielding Sentinel: Never really played a hate tank so not sure how good most of those changes are...but the buff to undying vanguard seems nice, and I whiff all the time on divine energy resist, so that'll be nice.

Exalted Angel: Uhh well not too much to comment on here lol, but seems fine.

Divine Crusader: Another ED I don't usually spend much time in, but everything seems to be upgraded so...if I ever make a DPS paly instead of a tank it might be interesting. Or maybe if I want to get nostalgic with a greatsword-wielding fvs, that'd be decent for him.

[Alled78]

Some feedback for the Divine Crusader changes:

• Add Charisma to Stand and be Judged / Celestial Bombardment for Paladin & FvS Builds, please!
• Celestial Champion now clashes with Paladin's Zeal spell. Please change to Unique bonus to allow stacking?
• +1 Religious Feat per core to suit the new Favoured Weapons abilities for all classes to benefit from Favoured Weapon changes?
• T4: The Book of War - Please Add Bastard Swords to the list. Paladin Vanguard lives matter too

The 'one' extra change I'd like you to consider is for Zeal of the Righteous.

I've never liked the decay-over-time approach to the ability despite it being our main improvement in offensive output in the tree. 4 Minutes is such a long cooldown for the 2 Minutes, 30 seconds uptime on the ability, and at 2 minutes+ into the ability were down to our last 10 stacks and fading fast. Could I suggest the following changes:

• Zeal of the Righteous: 25 Stacks gained, 3s decay per stack, 2 Minute cooldown
• NEW T6: Fury of the Divine (1 Rank, 1AP): Your Zeal of the Righteous bonuses are now doubled to +2 MP/RP/SP/DStrike/Dshot per stack.

This would then preserve the decay rate and burst opportunity design of the ability with a little more investment at T6 for improved output, but also really usefully aligns with the typical 2 minute refresh on Divine Might/Divine Will/Know the Angles type abilities scattered through the Enhancement trees.

My main concern with crusader is the Epic Moment
ZEAL of the righteous need improvement:

1) decay is meh, remove it
2) doublestrike is not so useful actually for many melee because if the 100% cap

[Ralmeth]

In anticipation of the Knight of the Chalice update later this year, I broke out an old Paladin and turned him into a THF Knight of the Chalice, and brought him up to cap primarily running in the Divine Crusader tree. I really like the changes that you proposed for this tree. However the one thing that this tree is sorely missing is more melee power. I can swap over to Shadow Dancer, Primal Avatar for a much higher, passive bonus to melee power, or go with Legendary Dreadnought and Blitz for even more, than if I am actually awarded all of the melee power you are going to fix in the update. Could you please consider increasing the melee power in the cores and those abilities that grant melee power?

[Ballrus]

[*]Stand and be Judged now has a DC of 10+Wisdom Modifier+Character Level+Stunning Bonuses (We also made it faster & more reliable to cast a few Updates ago)

Can include cha modifier too?
10+Wisdom or Charisma Modifier+Character Level+Stunning Bonuses

Very nice work!!

[Wongar]

Aura of Purification currently only affects one seemingly random enemy while the description still says all "Nearby enemies"

This was changed from all to one a long time ago and I do not ever remember seeing a comment on if this was intentional or accidental. I filed a bug report on it way back when with the hope it was an unintentional side affect of some other change.

Can it please be fixed and put back to it's original working state of affecting all nearby enemies. I used to really enjoy this on my Paladin tank as it provided a different play style with longer encounters and you could feel the tide turn with each encounter as the ticks slowly built up. I don't see how it could be considered game breaking or OP in today's game as the DPS and speed of most groups will clear most encounters before it ever matters. Fixing it will provide those that prefer the slower / damage over time / planned encounters a tool to have fun with.

If this is working as intended, can the description at least be changed and possibly give the ability to select the mob?

[Ballrus]

Stand and be Judged now has a DC of 10+Wisdom Modifier+Character Level+Stunning Bonuses (We also made it faster & more reliable to cast a few Updates ago)

Can include cha modifier too?
10+Wisdom or Charisma Modifier+Character Level+Stunning Bonuses

Very nice work!!

Also:

Divine Crusader
"NEW: T4: The Book of War: (Multiselector): Pick one of the following to gain as a Favored Weapon: Longsword, Longbow, Morningstar, Greatsword (1 Rank, 1AP)"

Maybe can include heavy picks and bastard swd?

And:

Strike Down atm stops movement, can make it work like normal cleave/g cleave?

Thanks.

[Steelstar]

Thanks for the feedback so far! Time to tackle a few replies:

While the DC casting side of EA is fine, nuking options could use some help.
-The T1 SLA could use better dice. Also examine the saving throw, if one is really required on this.

We can take a quick look at this.

Will Crusader Aura now affect more than 1 creature per pulse again? It was never clear if that was a bug or an intentional nerf, but building so much of the tree around an "aura" that only pulses on a single target at a time really hampers its usefulness and the appeal of spending DP to upgrade it.

Hrm. I'll take a look at the targeting numbers, see if I can find anything off.

Crusader looks very nice

But have you fixed WF Warsoul crit mods (T5 & core5) breaking if you unequip the deity weapon for any reason (including swapping to the same weapon type)?

Can you send us more details on this? I'm not familiar with anything specific to Warforged War Souls.

Divine Crusader
"NEW: T4: The Book of War: (Multiselector): Pick one of the following to gain as a Favored Weapon: Longsword, Longbow, Morningstar, Greatsword (1 Rank, 1AP)"

This is a great idea expanding the favored weapon options for war souls/priests. But the selection is really limited. It's annoying to have certain weapons being locked into iconic/non-iconic races. Adding those 4 weapons helps just slightly. Why not have a mutliselector that grants a group of similar weapons.

Like something similar to this:
(Multiselector): Pick one of the following:
You now count Long Swords, Bastard Swords, and Great Swords as Favored Weapons, regardless of your Deity.
You now count Hand Axes, Battles Axes and Great Axes as Favored Weapons, regardless of your Deity.
You now count Light Picks, Heavy Picks, and Dwarven Axes as Favored Weapons, regardless of your Deity.
You now count Clubs, Morningstars, and Great Clubs as Favored Weapons, regardless of your Deity.
You now count Light Hammers, War Hammers and Mauls as Favored Weapons, regardless of your Deity.
You now count Short Swords, Rapiers and Daggers as Favored Weapons, regardless of your Deity.

Also, since this a tree for a special kind of spell power casting and melee build, adding a new enhancement that makes our deities favored weapon a Spellcasting Implement, or something similar, would be a nice touch. Maybe an option to choose between a spell power or a tactics DC bonus while holding a favored weapon.

We really intentionally picked these four weapons as a basic package that fit the theme; we still want to introduce other Favored Weapons elsewhere (as we have been for the last year or two).

We might be able to pull off the Spellcasting Implement thing, I'll take a look.

Please revert, as typing it as Sacred makes Zeal -- a Paladin signature spell -- worthless.

Alternately: Paladins have this bonus up potentially 100% of the time without having to worry about crits or stacking. Starting at level 14. This skill's still good for the crit bonus. I could see the angle of losing out on total doublestrike, but the only way that should be happening is if you currently both (run Zeal at full uptime) and (do not have a Doublestrike item equipped). In which case... you should run a Doublestrike item.

Does the +hate scale with threatgen? Otherwise it feels pretty weak. Any tank 20+ I'd expect to have 70+ Intimidate, so each button-press is giving 14,000 Hate after bumping you to the top of the list. My first life tank has 136-141 (depending on buffs) and I expect +11 from Sharn, so ~150. That's 30,000 Hate every 5.4 seconds (thanks to Linguistics). In either case, 300 is nearly nothing (2.1% and 1%) and even 2,000 isn't a huge gain (15% and 6.7%).

Could those numbers be tweaked a bit higher, or given some sort of scaling?

Thanks

I'm honestly not sure whether the flat hate added by the attacks gets scaled by %-based increases to Hate. Unfortunately, I can't scale it directly. (Have a look at my opening blurb about Unyielding Sentinel - The tools at our disposal for adjusting hate are not good, and I don't think I have the engineering resources to fix that right now, sadly. I'd like to. If I can in the future, I will.).

Would you folks be willing to take a look at the T3 Unyielding Sentinel ability Renewal?

Currently, Renewal lasts for 8 seconds but you will only receive 3 'ticks' of healing. After you use Renewal and the server recognizes (places the buff) that action, it can sometimes take nearly 2 seconds before you receive the first tick of healing.

My suggestion would be to simply(?) add an initial heal upon a successful cast.

I can poke at this.

Would it be possible to get either Wisdom or Charisma to DCs for Stand and be Judged and Celestial Bombardment rather than only WIS? Favoured Souls use Charisma, Paladins will have much more CHA than WIS on average, and it would be great for those classes to be able to fully benefit from their natural tree (for martial FvS at least). It would be in line with the INT/CHA DCs in something like draconic, and would also provide some nice secondary options for some bards/sorc EKs, without becoming the best options for those archetypes.

Would have to talk to the team about the implications of this; SoBJ is a stronger skill than I think a lot of people have given it credit for. Possible.

I'm partly ok with this change. The no charging of Reborn is good, but once per rest is not. Please make it usable more per rest. For a proper build currently, it's basically usable once it's off cooldown; so reducing it to once per rest is a huge nerf. No charging is a good buff for those who have difficulty to charge it currently.

Sorry. There's only about two things completely locked in stone in this pass, and one of them is "Reborn needs to drop to once per Rest for balance reasons".

- Religious Lore Feats: again, this limits people picking this destiny. Change it to be based on something else. Maybe based somehow on greater of str/wis/cha? (since those are the stats this destiny can pick)

We intentionally made this scale off of Religious Lore feats. That might mean this Destiny is better for people with a lot of Divine levels (...or Bard levels, I guess) than for people without that, and we're 100% OK with that.

Strike Down atm stops movement, can make it work like normal cleave/g cleave?

Can do.

[Arlathen]

No way/time to tinker with Zeal of the Righteous then? Sad Panda

[Vooduspyce]

Unyielding Sentinel
This Destiny was meant to do two things: Keep you alive and help you tank. It's decent at the first and not great at the second. Most of the changes here are meant to help you tank. The two new Actives aren't perfect; we had some bigger plans and ran into tech issues in doing what we wanted. Hoping they'll at least be helpful, and we can tweak numbers until they are.

• Commanding Presence's hate doubles to 100/200/300%
• Stand Against the Tide's extra hate jumps to 50% per stack (250% at full stacks, was 100%)

Very happy to see hate gen increased. For the past year or more it's been increasingly difficult to hold aggro against the massive dps others are doing these days.

• Stand Against the Tide's extra hate now applies to missile weapon damage and magic damage as well (was previously melee-only)
• Divine Energy Resistance can now be cast directly on allies (instead of only yourself)
• Ward Against Evil's light damage scales with 400% of the higher of Melee and Ranged Power
• Rank 3 of Ward Against Evil now also grants you immunity to the Mind Control effects of Evil creatures.
• You can now use Undying Vanguard while Crowd-Controlled and/or Helpless
• Undying Vanguard's Temporary HP now last for 30 seconds.
• NEW: T4: Draw them Out: Melee Attack: +3[w]. This attack adds 300 Hate for the user to creatures it hits on top of its normal damage. 6 second cooldown. (1 Rank, 1AP)
• NEW: T6: Celestial Mandate: Melee Attack: +5[w]. This attack adds 2000 Hate for the user to creatures it hits on top of its normal damage. 6 second cooldown. (1 Rank, 1AP)

Tier 6 innate Steadfast states "You cannot be knocked down while Standing Against the Tide." Being able to stay on your feet is very important as a tank and so many things can bypass this and it is extremely frustrating. Knockdown immunity is supposed to be one of those advantages as a tank yet webline trip, giant stomps, dragon attacks, cyclonic blast and the new raid boss in Too Hot to Handle can all bypass it. I understand that some of those are functions of those particular attacks and not a function of the "knockdown immunity", but as a player it's the results that matter, not the technical components of it. Please make knockdown immunity so that we are truly unable to be knocked down.

[Steelstar]

Tier 6 innate Steadfast states "You cannot be knocked down while Standing Against the Tide." Being able to stay on your feet is very important as a tank and so many things can bypass this and it is extremely frustrating. Knockdown immunity is supposed to be one of those advantages as a tank yet webline trip, giant stomps, dragon attacks, cyclonic blast and the new raid boss in Too Hot to Handle can all bypass it. I understand that some of those are functions of those particular attacks and not a function of the "knockdown immunity", but as a player it's the results that matter, not the technical components of it. Please make knockdown immunity so that we are truly unable to be knocked down.

We've been talking about knockdown immunity internally during this pass; it's intended that some very powerful creatures can bypass it (like Spawn Screen does with summoning undead). At some point soon I'm going to add that caveat text to all sources of knockdown immunity, and I'm urging Content to try and stick to the following two guidelines:

1. Be very sparing with when you make knockdown effects that bypass immunity, and
2. If you do, clearly mention in the effect tooltip that this bypasses knockdown immunity, so players can tell the difference between a bug and an intended bypass. (Yes, I know it's hard to look at those tooltips on the fly, but still.)

[SerPounce]

We've been talking about knockdown immunity internally during this pass; it's intended that some very powerful creatures can bypass it (like Spawn Screen does with summoning undead). At some point soon I'm going to add that caveat text to all sources of knockdown immunity, and I'm urging Content to try and stick to the following two guidelines:

1. Be very sparing with when you make knockdown effects that bypass immunity, and
2. If you do, clearly mention in the effect tooltip that this bypasses knockdown immunity, so players can tell the difference between a bug and an intended bypass. (Yes, I know it's hard to look at those tooltips on the fly, but still.)

It's one thing when special attacks from purple names knock you down, but when it's random arsed driders and your neighborhood fire giant tripping you it seems particularly lame.

[kain741]

Alternately: Paladins have this bonus up potentially 100% of the time without having to worry about crits or stacking. Starting at level 14. This skill's still good for the crit bonus. I could see the angle of losing out on total doublestrike, but the only way that should be happening is if you currently both (run Zeal at full uptime) and (do not have a Doublestrike item equipped). In which case... you should run a Doublestrike item.


We intentionally made this scale off of Religious Lore feats. That might mean this Destiny is better for people with a lot of Divine levels (...or Bard levels, I guess) than for people without that, and we're 100% OK with that.

I hope you understand the contradiction here. You're telling us you fully understand that DC is meant to entice divine melees but you are making one of the biggest DPS drivers redundant with a class spell. If someone is playing a melee dps driven pally they will have Zeal up and running 100% of the time without exception. The idea of this appealing to divine melees loses zeal (some pun intended) when it can't stack this doublestrike. This seems like it should be a different type or maybe melee power (sacred bonus) or maybe if you want to entice divines make it so it will buff zeal to 20% automatically with no need to build stacks when the spell is cast and celestial champion is taken.

[Arkat]

It's one thing when special attacks from purple names knock you down, but when it's random arsed driders and your neighborhood fire giant tripping you it seems particularly lame.

Agreed.

[Tist]

Should Reborn be twice per rest? Three times per rest?

It should have it's charge mechanism removed, and keep it's 10 mins recycle timer. Why mess with the existing timer? It's unbalanced cos some people use it to solo raids? I can use cakes I pay for to achieve the same thing in quests, but that's not unbalanced cos I pay for them? Are the cakes getting a once per rest nerf too?

What should happen is it gets checked for the times it fails (raid rez timer, random times it just doesn't work for no reason) and you keep the charge so you can try again if it didn't rez you.

[Alcides]

Sacred Ground from the divine crusader tree needs to be affected by metamagic feats and positive healing critical.

[Ulfo]

Bring yourself back from the dead as many times as you need (old)
Bring yourself back from the dead once per rest (new)

And you think that's a "pure buff"?

Seriously?

Yea, seriously.

Before, i use it once per several rest and need charge it and keep charge.
New, i can use it once per rest for free.

Absolutely pure buff.

Yea, 10 min cooldown now seems redundant and must be removed.

[axel15810]

Divine Crusader comments -

[*]Confront Any Foe now adds +3[w][*]Confront Any Foe's Light damage now scales with 300% Melee Power

A bit related to the new changes but is there a reason this has to be powered by turns? Maybe I'm being biased here with how I like to play melee divines in DDO, but since clerics rely on turns for radiant servant burst and aura it just seems really impractical to burn through half your turn undeads in a single encounter unless it gives crazy good damage. They regen, sure, but not nearly quickly enough to keep up with how fast you can burn them with this ability. Will test the damage on release, but I personally will not use it unless it gives insane damage for this reason. Unless the intent here is that you'll have to sacrifice your radiant servant abilities and rely on spellpoints to heal if you want to use this ability. I guess this has much more appeal for paladins though, whose turns aren't as valuable.

[*]Celestial Bombardment now only has 1 rank, that does what the old Rank 3 did.[*]Celestial Bombardment now costs 20SP.[*]Celestial Bombardment now takes the Enlarge, Maximize, Empower, Intensify, Embolden, and Quicken Metamagics.[*]Celestial Bombardment is now significantly quicker to cast.

Looking forward to testing. Will see if it's going to be worth fitting fire spellpower into a melee divine gearset for this. Guess those small fire spellpower increases from Warpriest may mean a tad more now.

[*]Celestial Champion's Doublestrike and Doubleshot are now Sacred-typed.

Awesome.

[*]NEW: T4: The Book of War: (Multiselector): Pick one of the following to gain as a Favored Weapon: Longsword, Longbow, Morningstar, Greatsword (1 Rank, 1AP)

Why only 4 options?


Overall impression - I will give Crusader a shot and test it out when this releases but to be honest I'm still doubtful there are enough reasons to justify using Crusader on my melee cleric. I will give it a chance though.