First of all, let me introduce myself in case some of you don’t know me. I’m Kpihuss, a veteran Return of Reckoning player since around 2017. I’ve always liked the WP and played it with a book for many hours until I reached RR83. Since I had a huge amount of War Crests, I started playing it with a shield so I could farm armor talisman fragments on my own in Gunbad. What began as an odd and solitary way to play the WP turned into a different way to play it in RvR and SCs—fun and addictive.
I think I was one of the firstd shield WPs on the server, and people laughed at the build until the fight started and many were astonished by how a shield WP could heal, as long as he was in melee. It was a class capable of doing a lot of AoE healing (like Martyr’s Blessing, but almost without a cooldown), but the most interesting and powerful part was its single-target (ST) healing.
It was a VERY DIFFICULT class to play; you had to be in BiS to be able to survive. You also needed good party members to cover you in many moments when you couldn’t heal and were extremely vulnerable: when you were slowed, punted far away from melee, or during a siege. But you knew that as soon as you were back in melee you could heal and survive. I’ll repeat it: it was a class with a lot of vulnerabilities and extremely hard to play (one punt out of melee and you were quickly dead by RDPS) and easily kiteable. If memory serves, I played it from RR83 to RR88 entirely with a shield, so I consider I’ve put in many hours with it and know how to play it.
Shield WP gameplay consisted of staying on (or near) the frontline, contributing small damage per hit (400–600 per strike), adding some party healing (800–900 per normal hit to the party), but most importantly having the ability to counter a DPS burst by adding a channeled ST heal of 2k/s to the defensive target. In short: to keep yourself and your party alive, you had to deal damage, heal, and hold your ground in melee.
For personal reasons that aren’t relevant here, I stopped playing in September 2023. And now I’m back—for some people’s joy and others’ despair, hehe.
Naturally, when I returned, the first thing I did was study the new WP builds in depth, with special emphasis on Grace, since Salvation became boring to me a while ago and, above all, a very poor healer.
I’ve been playing Grace WP almost non-stop for about a month—in scenarios, small-scale RvR, and WBs. I’ve tried offensive, defensive, and mixed builds; I bought another full set of weapons and armor to go full armor talismans, reaching around 4300 armor. I tested many different renown builds, spent many hours running tests and logging data in spreadsheets to see what I was doing wrong, and I’ve realized I was doing almost nothing wrong.
You’ve killed the hardest healer class to play in the entire game, and there’s nothing players can do right now.
Right now, Grace WP has the following problems:
- If you want to survive in melee and build very defensively, your heals are so small that any Salvation WP with Conqueror gear will have similar heals while being able to withstand more damage, without having to be on the frontline suffering melee pressure.
- If you want to hit a bit harder and build offensively to get more effective heals, with the new change making the heal debuff also affect lifetaps, you can’t hold the frontline because you take a lot of damage that you’re not able to heal back.
- If you go for a mixed build, you neither withstand the damage nor are your heals strong enough to sustain anything.
- Almost 40% of the healing I’ve done in the scenarios I’ve played has been on myself, and party heals have always been insufficient because they’re tremendously low.
- The tactics “Exalted Defenses” and “Leading the Prayer” don’t work. The first doesn’t increase heals by 20%, but rather between 5.15% and 10.32% of total healing (or around 13% of the casted Grace heals), unlike what happens with Salvation; and the second one simply doesn’t heal you when a party member gets the proc. I can understand this might be a temporary bug, but it directly affects two tactics a Grace WP routinely uses. EDIT: Leading the prayers works as intended, it only heal the same HP healed by the group mate (if there are overheal on your group mate, you only will be healed by the same than your mate and overheal is lost. The double tick for heal yourself is lost too since the patch)
- On the other hand, the change to “Divine Strike” and replacing its role with “Sigmar’s Will” is very bad. I like the fact that it no longer affects 3 offensive targets like Divine Strike used to, since now you don’t lose your AoE detaunt when you use it, but there’s also a very bad side: by not doing AoE damage, the AoE heal you do is small, especially considering the large amount of Righteous Fury (80) it requires. Doing ~1000 AoE healing while in melee at 20 feet, when a fully defensive Salvation WP is doing almost the same with Martyr’s Blessing at 30 feet without needing to be so exposed, seems like a major unfair comparison given how extremely hard it is to play a shield WP. Not to mention it can be blocked/parried, making the heal minimal. I understand that Grace WP could previously end up as top DPS and top heals in SCs, but that damage wasn’t lethal, nor were those heals, most of the time, decisive (as when a WP spams Martyr’s Blessing in a siege). They had big numbers, but they weren’t “real.”
- Fanatic and Divine Fury now affecting heals negatively makes dealing damage (and therefore healing) even harder. No critical rate, no parry...
- Another important point is that attacks are no longer spiritual, so you have to pierce armor with very low WS, which makes the heals even smaller.
- But above all—and yes, I’m repeating myself—it’s that the heal debuff affects lifetaps. To me this is the biggest nerf the class could have suffered.
- Right now you neither deal damage, nor heal, nor keep yourself alive, which has made it unplayable. Even in BiS.
Please, as a Grace WP player, I ask the GMs to review the class, giving it some utility and/or survivability, and not relegating it to a class with no purpose and no options to be used (not even in scenarios or PvE).
And again, thank you to the GMs to keep the game alive.
