ThePollie wrote:Sigmar's Shield.
Statistical base - 25 Action point per cast, 20 Righteous Fury per heal when attacked. 174 damage, 86 health restored. Duration is 20 seconds, cool down is 20 seconds.
Statistical minimum when Mastery is added - 25 Action point per cast, 20 Righteous Fury per heal when attacked. 221 damage, 116 health restored. Duration is 20 seconds, cool down is 20 seconds.
Statistical maximum, before gear - 25 Action point per cast, 20 Righteous Fury per heal when attacked. 236 damage, 136 health restored. Duration is 20 seconds, cool down is 20 seconds.
Strength improves damage per strike, but healing is unaffected by scaling outside of Mastery points.
When a target is struck by Sigmar's Shield, they receive damage and the Warrior-priest's defensive target is granted the Shield. If any attack connects against the Shielded target, they are healed for X and 20 Righteous Fury is drained from the Warrior-priest that originally cast the ability.
This ability has several uses - Cast it on an ally as a fire-and-forget means to heal them. Combined with Healing Hand, and you can actually manage a respectable amount of healing for how little effort is made. The Warrior-priest can cast it on themselves, as a preemptive defense if they are suddenly attacked, themselves. The ability has the same damage model of Sigmar's Vision, Grace's hardest hitting ability, and can be used to moderately spike damage. I do not advise doing that, if you attempt to test the ability, for reasons about to be mentioned.
What prevents many Warrior-priests from spending a mastery point for this ability are two crippling facts. Sigmar's Shield has no internal cooldown, with a massive Righteous Fury cost for how little healing it grants. In a one-on-one situation, you can expect anywhere between one and three Shield activations per second, amounting to 20-60 Righteous Fury drained per second. This averages to 40, when an auto-attack is chained with an ability.
This is manageable. Sigmar's Radiance, Path of Grace's often used filler and primary lifetap, builds 40 Righteous Fury per strike. Enough to counter the drain with continued use. Though a sudden barrage can severely drain Righteous Fury, this problem is magnified in group play. Should a target being focused be Shielded, the Warrior-priest can expect as many as six to fifteen activations in a matter of a second or two, which can devastate their resource pool.
Worse, once this ability is activated, you can not disable it yourself. This often results in the Warrior-priest being drained completely, with depressingly little healing done for how much was spent.
Compared with Divine Assault, which heals for 350% of damage dealt per strike, at a cost of 25 Righteous Fury per strike. Even through severe mitigation, Divine Assault can easily manage 300 health restored per 25 Righteous Fury, nearly triple that of Sigmar's Shield, while also remaining dramatically easier to control and allowing the possibility of switching targets to spread the healing around more efficiently. Combined with proper target acquisition and a lucky critical strike, DIvine Assault can manage upward to 700 health restored per strike, per 25 Righteous Fury.
As the two use the same resource, many rightly decide that Divine Assault is the better of the two, and spend their mastery point elsewhere. This leaves the ability unused, apart from those uninformed or play-testing it.
Proposed changes.
Buffing this ability is going to piss people off, I'll state that now. Despite how weak it is, strategic use of this ability can make a Warrior-priest virtually impossible to kill in one-on-one. If buffed, this will amplify that.
In my opinion, it's a good thing. It's something we've been bringing to the table, already. Our ability to face someone down and stand our ground, unsupported, has given us something few other healers have. We don't have to kite the Marauder, we can stand and fight it out with them, all while maintaining our healing. Our ability to not be simply bulldozed by the first DPS class to target is an advantage, though small compared to the disadvantage of how easily focused and trained into death we are.
There has been talk in the past of multiplying the heal, so that the Righteous Fury loss is at least met with solid healing. I do not want this. Sigmar's Shield effectively mitigates damage per strike, and increasing the heal too greatly could effectively allow the Shielded target to ignore every bit of non-burst damage until either the effect ends or the Warrior-priest is drained or killed.
The greatest fault this ability has lies in the lack of an internal cool down. Something as simple as restricting the heal-per-strike activation to 0.5 seconds would do a great deal with making this ability manageable, though would hurt its potential healing. Inside of a one-on-one, two strikes per second is about what you can expect, but in group settings you can easily get vast numbers higher.
Increasing the base heal from 86/116/136 to 186/216/236 would make the heal more efficient. It won't compare to Divine Assault's potential, but Divine Assault is also incredibly easy to interrupt.
Reducing the Righteous Fury cost could also help the ability, but I'm on the fence about it. Lowering the cost from 20 Righteous Fury to 15 could help, but the primary concerns are how little it heals for how much it drains, and how little control you have over this ability.
Combined, increasing the base heal by 100 health and setting a 0.5 second internal cool down per activation would do a great deal toward making this ability worth using. The action point cost is fine, on par with our other attacks, and I'd even consider increasing it from 25 to 30, if the healing is improved. As it is, its only true use is within one-on-one duels, duo-roaming, and to crash your Righteous Fury.
