So, i couldn’t find a video showcasing it so i decided to level up a paladin with the intent to build him around jugement…and oh boy i was SO disappointed.
First of all i don’t understand why it’s SO slow and seems to be unaffected by melee speed? I’ve tried a very slow one and a fast one and the animation seems to take the same time. It seem unrealistic to “main” that skill for this reason alone.
Then it looked cool to grab the righteous decree node for some divine punishment to enemies…and that would be cool indeed if you weren’t forced to take divine verdict node.
To my knowledge knockback on a melee skill is a constant issue for any arpg and every single player complained about it. Really, playing a melee and having the pack of mobs scatter around you is VERY annoying. Honestly it should be labeled in red like other maluses, it’s unbearable.
So yeah i had high hopes for my paladin but i abandoned him right away after playing for 10 minutes using judgement.
That sounds like you really haven’t tested all it’s possibilities.
I personally was only disapointed by it’s animation and VFX.
(I am pretty sure that this will get updated at some point)
The gameplay possibilities are really nice. You can go hit, DoT, support, heal and everything in between. Also the skill scaling with healing effectiveness gives it a unique spin and unique itemization.
The skill being slow is not a problem at all, since the skill does a LOT of damage.
I main a Judgement Paladin and it’s suuuuuch a cool skill. Firstly it scales off Healing Effectiveness, so be sure to stack that. It also has the ability to heal you, plus deal AOE damage upon expiration.
And the synergy within the Paladin mastery is unreal. Blocking causes you to cast a healing spell to restore health, and casting a spell increases your healing effectiveness and strength, which increases your damage. Blocking also has a chance to cast a sigil to keep that up, which also counts as a spell, which also increases all damage done.
It’s fun stuff if you build around fire, block, healing effectiveness in addition to strength and other stats you find valuable.
I get that it does a ton of damage, but really, if you don’t oneshot the pack of mobs it feels really clunky and awkward to keep casting it if you knocked them back.
Also being slow it’s not just bad damage wise but the main donwisde it’s that it really feels sluggish to “spam” it. Also why isn’t it specified anywhere it isn’t affected by attack speed, and most importantly why?
I totally get your other points and that’s why i was deeply disappointed. It looked like such an amazing skill but the generic feeling while playing it is just horrible imho.
I will try to remove the knockback node and abandon the smite route and give it another shot but the first impression was terrible
It’s a very high mana cost skill. So “spamming” should not be an option from the get-go anyway.
If you invest into mana efficiancy and get a very good mana sustain, you can spam it.
But baseline it’s a high-cost high impact skill.
If you go HIT damage, one-shotting with Judgement is not hard at all.
Even when going DOT, mobs die within seconds.
Try to force yourself using it with different setup. It will grow on you, i am certain.
Also just as a note. The consecrated ground DOT stacks, so it’s REALLY effective against bosses and rares, when stacking multiple of those and keep them in.
Also do not underestimate the Healing Effectiveness scaling.
There are so many avenues to make this skill great.
Your attack speed concern was never a worry for me personally, because if i want to “spam” a skil li would go other ksills instead.
alright man you convinced me, i’ll give it another shot.
Maybe i’ll try to spec out of the knockback effect, even though the smite route seemed fun on paper
No, you can get Sigils on kill if you take the node but it’s only 6% chance. Mind you, I can’t remember what the graphic for each (divine essence & Sigil of Hope) look like so they could have used similar graphics for each.
@Heavy alright man, i’ve failed you XD.
Had some time to play and jesus, i relly can’t stand it. It’s so slow and clunky. The cherry on the top is that you are also stuck in place until the animation is over so you are there looking at your char doing his thing while you want to goddamn move out of an aoe and stuff.
Oh well , time to test the rogue i guess
You can definitely get over 100k crits and some good utility from it too. the mana cost is a tad too steep in my opinion. but it is expected for a super hard hitting skill with utility. I just wish the mana was a smidge lower.
You said you played for 10mins then abandoned it…10mins doesn’t give ya much time to flesh out the build or even gear for it. Sooo yeah…I’d rather read feedback on peeps that actually played it to it’s fullest extent
Yes, but if a skill doesn’t either grab you or at least make you interested to see what it can do in the first 10-20 mins of using it then it has design issues.
It was my first experience with (old) PoE. I tested a few skills and it felt terrible. went back straight to D3 and retried it two or three years later…
Nowadays if you try skills at low level in PoE, most of them feel decent and makes you think “what could i do to make it better ?” They evolved in the right direction.
Last Epoch succeeds already in this area : It has a lot of skills offering an immediate “reward” for playing it, while still allowing the player to think of what it may becomes.
I think it’s important for both the game and players to seize the essence and possibilities right away. This is before almost everything else the most important aspect that needs to be done right before the release.
TLDR : feedback on initial aspect of a skill are important. Even when they can be totally different and improved later. If the first feeling a skill gives is clunky then the player might no stick around for long.
That argument would make sense if i was talking about balancing issues (omg judgement suck cause he does so few damage/has too low melee penetration/doesn’t heal enough/whatever compared to skill xxy from another class,we need to buff/nerf it ASAP!).
But i was talking exclusively about the feeling of playing the skill itself, soooo yeah, your comment doesn’t make much sense i’m afraid.
Inspired by this post I tried judgement with the actual patch 0.8c.
Took all the healing effectiveness nodes in the Paladin passive trees. I skipped everything block related since I went dual wield. Specced holy aura into crit, same with lunge. Main hand I’m using a dagger with crit implicit and crit chance and added melee fire damage. This boosts my crit massively with the lunge buff and holy aura activation boost and rive with increased crith chance buff on first hit.
Last skill in my loadout is smite that I use for the global damage and attack speed buff as well as fissure with the kill threshold that adds some speed for boss kills.
I tried different unique swords in offhand and had the best results with eye of reen. Its not the most base damage but the stackable buff (5% crit multiplier on melee crit) also is a massive damage boost, that outperforms everything else I have currently. With the high crit chance I easily get up to 20 stacks when fighting bigger packs.
I’m Level 81 with not optimised gear, not even having maxed out my skills and I’m going easy through the lvl 100 timeline 1-2 shooting everything with judgement.
Rive fills my mana and does insane damage, too, since I also stacked the crit multi for judgement and rive idols.
I LOVE that build. Lunge into packs, unload judgement (I sacrificed some more damage nodes in the judgement tree to pec into auto casting smite on hit - looks nice and keeps the smite buffs up).
Judgement is a slow skill that feels clunky if you cast it multiple times in a row. But if you mix in some rive hit after each judgement, it feels nice and keeps your mana up.
Huge thanks for being so descriptive. I’m gonna level a guy now and try this. Was using Eye of Reen on another guy that was meant to be a tanky healer and just didn’t have the crit or amount of hits to make the weapon shine. But as an off hand you might be able to get near 30% before adding proc’d buffs.
Not sure if going down the tree grabbing healing effectiveness was the right choice though, since it only buffs consecrated ground which you don’t have since you grabbed smite.
That’s not the case. In the particular case of judgement the healing effectiveness scales with the damage. It’s in the skill description. And it’s a huge boost.
Edit: You are right. The healing effectiveness does only scale with consecrated ground. I mixed things up. I built into the healing effectiveness when I encountered the higher (25+ echoes) of the 100er timelines were not that viable with my lack of defense. I specced out of the smite branch and went for the healing stuff. Sorry for that confusion.
