Blizzard is constantly pushing forward with new content for the upcoming World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion. With the alpha up and running, there’s always something new for the alpha testers to try out.
That isn’t to say that everything is going to be running flawlessly, of course. Blizzard’s latest changes have been met with a bit of criticism, as one would expect.
This isn’t a bad thing, of course – the whole point of an alpha is to get criticism, is it not? But rather than stay silent on the notes that they’ve received, Blizzard is highlighting the feedback given and putting their response out in the public to remain transparent.
Their recent notice comes in the form of acknowledging criticism given over the state of the Paladin class on the alpha. Specifically, some of the abilities have been met with reviews either of being underwhelming or just flat out annoying.
One of the more confusing abilities has been Blessing of the Seasons, an extensive ability which we wrote about here back when it was first added to the alpha. As a tl;dr, the ability cycles through four auras based on Summer, Autumn, Winter, and Spring, all of which cycle into each other and provide unique buffs to allies and debuffs to enemies.
“You can let each season last anywhere from 15-60s,” Blizzard wrote, responding to players that felt the ability was obnoxious to maintain. “Assuming you have a favored buff based on role/context, that you want to keep for 60s, it’s more like 4 presses every 2 minutes, but you might vary that based on planning ahead to have certain buffs at certain times.”
Another ability discussed was Ashen Hallow, the Venthyr-specific ability. Blizzard admits that the tuning “might be pretty far off,” discussing different options on the table. At the moment, they’re looking at increasing the value to match the “enormous” visual.
Seraphim and Inquisition were targeted next, with Blizzard stating they don’t have a direct fix but acknowledge that the pair is “uncomfortable.” “Candidly, one reason it’s hard to address is that there’s probably a split among people thinking one or the other would be cooler to keep,” they assert.
Finally, they mentioned the ability Shield of the Righteous, an ability that seems to lack much of a place for it. All in all, Blizzard seems to believe that the ability is one that has been mostly discarded, saying quite blatantly that “You certainly can use it, and one can imagine situations where you would. But if you don’t, or don’t put it on your bar, that’s fine.”
All in all, it’s lovely to see Blizzard being so transparent with their work and how they’re responding to feedback. Hopefully, Paladins will end up in a better, more refined spot by the time the alpha comes to a close.
