Holy strike balance act

[Geojak]

Holy strike causes some controversy. Here is a proposal to get it balanced.

First let's establish how holy strike dmg is calculated rougly

((Meele dmg * 115% physical dmg with vengeance) + holy strike bonus holy dmg + spellpower bonus dmg) * 125% holy dmg with vengeance and saticity aura.

Important to note. As a meele strike it has a 200% crit multiplier unlike spells which have 150%.
See how the 115% multiplier is up there twice? This is what we call double dipping.

Note that seal of commands procc work the same and hit rougly 70% as hard as holy strike.

All turned into holy dmg in goring armor on a 10s cd. It used to be 8s before class changes in last summer.

The ability baseline bonus holy dmg is very small and the mana cost on higher spells high, which makes most paladins use rank 1 only which still hits reasonably hard since it ignores armor.

Holy strike allows paladins to turn strength and meele hits into holy dmg which is very important to tank single target threat with rogheoinea furry. Nerfing holy strike dirently affects paladin boss tank ability which isn't the best already without t2. 5 gear.

Holy strikes do not reset judgement of wisdom unlike normal meele hits, which can cause the effect to fall off with a slow meele weapon on a hit parry dodge

Now that we established how the status quo is, let's list the needed changes

Make a separate version of holy strike for npcs and players so that npcs will not be nerfed. A

Change the dmg formula into two separate parts working less like Soc and more like sor
-a normal white hot doing normal white hit dmg and refreshes seal of wisdom
-a separate component of holy dmg independant of weapon dmg
White dmg: white hit *1.15 with vengeance and critting 200% since meele
Holy dmg: (holy strike baseline dmg + spellpower bonus dmg) * 1.25 holy dmg multiplier, with vengeance and santicity aura. 150% spell crit multiplier and also affected by the 5% holy crit chance talent in holy tree.

Obviously this is a super massive nerf. The ability would just turn useless. We need to adjust numbers.

First we want to increase the holy strike baseline bonus dmg alteast by 100% to make the spell even worth using (max rank has somehing like 36 bonus dmg currenly), secondly we want to decrease the mana cost by around 30% of the higher ranks. Max rank cost 465 mana and wouldn't even do 465 dmg without these changes

OK burst fixed but wait prot pala lost massive threat and ret pala got even more shit. We wanted to lower burst but not necessarily siingle target dps on bosses. What to do?

Change crusader strike, another problematic ability.
Crusader strike was supposed to be paladin armor pen and while the dot those a great job at increasing holy dmg. It does not cause threat.
Crusader strike is arguably not usable at all on low levels since it cost too much mana, and does too little.
Max rank crusader strike does I think 106 dmg and rank 1 I think 20 dmg both reduced by armor

- turn crusader strike into holy dmg

That's it, holy strike now ignores armor, get bonus threat multiplier, does not do massive burst in pvp and increases the ret and prot paladins dps on single target by a small amount. It would make sense to give crusader strike even a 5% sp scaling to see the holy dmg. Debuff ramp up, so does the dmg very slightly.

A bis geared sp paladins has I don't know maybe 500 sp. 5% of that 25 so holy strike would do 106+25 dmg. Nothing crazy.

And that's it

P. S. If you are just comming to this threat to whine about paladisn in pvp then pls leave

[Kairion]

Frankly the Holy strike changes you propose are way overengineered.

For both Prot & Ret paladin just making holy strike in its entirety reduced by armor would fix any pvp related problems with only making paladin marginally worse in dungeon/solo content and having again no negative impact in pvp due to bosses being reduced to zero armor:
Splitting it up into multiple attack components will likely have knock on effects like double proccing on hit shit or at least triggering two instances of JoW. It allows you to keep vengeance up better since you have two different segments with different critical hitchances.

It not resetting JoW never really came up for me as an issue, and i think its cool to have these "skilltesters" in the rotation where blindly pressing everything that comes off cd can have negative impacts.

The crits will be much less chunky since sanctity will not affect the physical damage anymore and thats a good thing, but its hamstringing prot quite hard. If the whole damage is just impacted by armor (but ideally remaining as holy damage), its already much less of a problem for PvP without making it worse for raiding content. And frankly as a prot paladin, max rank Holy strikes would even be fantastic without armorpen as property (and yes you do have the mana for that with a bit of JoW abuse)

Manacost reduction however i think is fair, you pay 2 mana per point of damage on max lvl wich is way too much.

Crusader strike however should certainly not get buffed. Its debuff can already provide up to 437 holy spelldamage. That alone is plenty of reason to cast the spell to begin with. If we remove its ability to proc windfury i'd be more likely to accept buffs to CS, but with it procing weapon enchants and having spellscaling of its own, it can be very disgusting on Spelldmg paladins.

[Ravenstone]

In my opinion these changes are not feasible or even useful at this stage. I understand the desire to smooth things over as they currently are without upsetting the other areas of the game, but in this thread you are proposing that we maintain Protection Paladins state as a good raid tank by balancing Holy Strike and Crusader Strike around the fact that their main build currently is 30 points in the Retribution tree for Vengeance. This should not be the case. Prot and Ret trees need reworks to actually serve their intended purposes. Protection Paladins should not be building their main spec around relying on Holy Strike and Vengeance double dipping.

Prot needs a rework as we've started discussing here: viewtopic.php?f=41&t=5323
Retribution needs a rework which I started a discussion about here: viewtopic.php?t=5315