Touched by the Light -- a backwards-looking talent?

[Dorvan]

With the latest build I've heard that Consecration now benefits from AP as well as spell damage, which leaves me with the question: what is the purpose of Touched by the Light? When we first saw the talent it made sense because as far as we knew we'd be using War/DK tanking gear with Str on it and not +dam, but now that we've seen how the mechanics have developed: all our abilities scales with AP, so there's really no reason why we *need* spellpower.

Blizz can't remove the spellpower coeffs from these abilities due to Holy Paladins, but considering that we've otherwise been made completely independent of spellpower, I don't see any reason to keep it around as part of our stat arsenal, even via a passive talent. Really, the only advantage of having spellpower over a passive threat boost is better healing ability in tanking gear: aside from that specifically having spellpower serves no purpose.

From there, it just seems that getting spellpower out of the picture would be better for the simple reason that more complicated stat mechanics = more opportunities for Blizzard to mess up itemization/scaling. Based on how they've developed our mechanics, Touched by the Light is no longer necessary for our threat model, and I submit that it should be replaced by an equivalent threat-producing talent that leaves us solely in the realm of melee stats for our threat generation.

Any thoughts?

[ulushnar]

But then how would we do our imba 130% crit healz in our tanking gear?

[Snake-Aes]

Swap it with bladed armor in a fluffy name or whatever, I guess, Giving us ap from armor/stamina.
It's like I voiced a couple times here...what's the point on having double scaling!? It's plain simpler if you use only 1 stat and buff it appropriately. In this case switching the stam->sd to stam->ap or armor->ap

[Mavrix]

Or even going the other direction might not be so bad:
ap to armor or ap to stam?

[Snake-Aes]

Or even going the other direction might not be so bad:
ap to armor or ap to stam?

That would require different gearing, we'd be fighting with ret pallies for gear and that's frankly just weird o.o We'd lack defensive stats like dodge, defense rating and stam.

[ulushnar]

The spellpower component of our Seals/Consecration aren't going anywhere since Holydins use them too. As long as that's the case, there's no harm in having both AP and SP scaling.

[PsiVen]

There's no reason not to have double scaling, it only screws versatility to remove it. This one talent gives us tons of threat and encourages us to stack stamina for everything but avoidance.

I am quite happy with TbtL as is. Besides, do we really want to be stuck with ZERO base +healing? Think of how much your heals suck with +600... The only justification I see is that HotR could be used with 2H and our AP sent through the roof to deal decent damage with negligible regen available.

[Sark]

The spellpower component of our Seals/Consecration aren't going anywhere since Holydins use them too. As long as that's the case, there's no harm in having both AP and SP scaling.

Agree plus that talent is meant to be dual purpose for threat + healing.

I think it's fine.

(as long as i can get enough crit to take advantage of it)

[Snake-Aes]

It's not bad per se, it just doesn't make much sense from a development standpoint, I guess. We're getting free sd which just gets added up to the ap...but why? Might as well just give all AP so it's simpler to work with when retuning.

[Dorvan]

The spellpower component of our Seals/Consecration aren't going anywhere since Holydins use them too. As long as that's the case, there's no harm in having both AP and SP scaling.

More complex scaling = greater chance of it getting screwed up. To me it's a case of Keep It Simple, Stupid. I don't see a compelling reason to give us spellpower any more than it'd make sense to give Warriors a stam -> spellpower conversion and add spellpower coeffs to all their abilities. It's an unnecessary complication aimed for a world where our abilities scaled only on spellpower and not AP. Since that's no longer the case, I think this extraneous stat dependency should go.

As for the healing factor: at this point we're going to be a lot more effective DPS'ing in tanking gear than healing in it, even with TbtL. If we're healing, we should be wearing healing gear.

[Snake-Aes]

The spellpower component of our Seals/Consecration aren't going anywhere since Holydins use them too. As long as that's the case, there's no harm in having both AP and SP scaling.

More complex scaling = greater chance of it getting screwed up. To me it's a case of Keep It Simple, Stupid. I don't see a compelling reason to give us spellpower any more than it'd make sense to give Warriors a stam -> spellpower conversion and add spellpower coeffs to all their abilities. It's an unnecessary complication aimed for a world where our abilities scaled only on spellpower and not AP. Since that's no longer the case, I think this extraneous stat dependency should go.

Don't have to remove the scalings, just change it so what we use is all in one stat, so our damage equations would always be something like (APC*AP + SPC*0)

[ulushnar]

The spellpower component of our Seals/Consecration aren't going anywhere since Holydins use them too. As long as that's the case, there's no harm in having both AP and SP scaling.

More complex scaling = greater chance of it getting screwed up. To me it's a case of Keep It Simple, Stupid. I don't see a compelling reason to give us spellpower any more than it'd make sense to give Warriors a stam -> spellpower conversion and add spellpower coeffs to all their abilities. It's an unnecessary complication aimed for a world where our abilities scaled only on spellpower and not AP. Since that's no longer the case, I think this extraneous stat dependency should go.

Ok, I agree...

That you're a witch! Burn him!

Ahem, yes, there's potential for calamity with the stamina to spellpower scaling on top of our fully realised AP scaling. And Yes, I expect it'll be changed before the XP goes live.

I think they're still feeling out this new paragdim for us and we'll see where it ends up. But I'm not gonna cry if it goes live as-is.

[Dorvan]

Don't have to remove the scalings, just change it so what we use is all in one stat, so our damage equations would always be something like (APC*AP + SPC*0)

Yes, that's what I meant. You can't remove the SP scaling factors because of Holy Pallies, but our mechanics just shouldn't be designed around using that so that it's easier to get the scaling right for us.

[Splug]

It does take less time to pull up closet gnome / itemrack / your backpack and change gear than it does to go back to town and respec holy, however. Even with full healing gear, 30% of your stam converting to spellpower would be quite a bit, especially with the stam tallents pumping the base conversion point up. Whether the tallent works by applying x1% through a spellpower coefficient to increase threat by Y, or applying x2% through an attack power coefficient to increase threat by Y, the effect should be the same, right? It doesn't complicate gearing at all, though it might make the character sheet look a little wierd. However, if it became straight AP, it would be totally worthless for healing... though it'd increase autoattack damage.

I guess if anything, doing it this way is less complicated to ballance, because it only improves threat-abilities (holy damage), without increasing inefficient autoattack damage as well.

-Splug

[DeadMilliken]

Honestly?

I'd rather keep it as is.

Blizzard obviously wants all three specs to have an innate amount of spelldmg/healing.

I think its perfectly fine for us to get spelldmg in this one instance AND for our gear to work off spelldmg or ap.

Why?

STR/AP looks to be the better MT stat.
SPDMG looks to be the better OT stat (*when not tanking, healing).