My most recent build was a Judgment pally built around the Unique Gloves. Prior to starting the build, I noticed a node called Urgent Inquisition that removes CD from judgement and thought the idea of punching the ground hard and fast sounded really cool. In hindsight, I really regret not noticing the unavoidable Pious Offering node in order to path to Urgent Inquisition.
Mana had never been an issue on other builds. Warpath had smoothly and synergistically genned mana for any other skills I was using. Cinder Strike did the same for Hail of Arrows since I went duration and needed something to do between attacks. Swipe/Maelstrom Werebear doesn’t really require mana when you reduce Maelstrom’s cost via tree. Falconer’s never heard of mana lol. I didn’t realize beside skill specific affix’s, the only real affix for mana regen is %Mana Regen.
You don’t really have access to judgment till mid 40’s, and I pathed towards less conc duration first since it makes more sense for speed leveling. Early mono’s I finally specced into Urgent Inquisition and quickly noticed Pious Offerings impact on gameplay. I immediately had to start searching for mana solutions. After days of agony, trying to figure out a way to make this build work the way I had envisioned, I’m left completely disappointed.
My issues with Judgement and pathing towards Urgent Inquisition is this. Being forced to take Pious offering and it’s 20% mana cost pretty much conflicts with not having a cooldown, and the one branching node in between asking you to use another attack also conflicts with this. If I was interested in using another skill in between attacks I wouldn’t be reaching for a no CD node. I would suggest to future users to invest into CD on gear and ignore that part of the tree altogether as you will attack more DPS and more consistently than no CD at all.
My suggestions towards Pious Offering would be to firstly remove it lol. If mandatory, I believe its should be less penalizing. Changing it to flat mana would be in line with how other skill behave or lower the cost from 20% to like 5-8% since you are scaling attunement and therefor have decent pool of mana by high levels (my first hit cost over 150+ mana, and the exiled rouge probably dodged it lol). Another couple options is either flat mana gain to the pally tree, or class specific affix shards “Mana on block” or “Mana When Hit”. Maybe there’s currently a way to scale Judgment to some broken level, but using the gloves and scaling attunement you never get a lot of attack speed to begin with.
I feel this current area of the tree needs work and if anything, pushes players into more un favorable gameplay such as looking to 1 or 2 tap a boss. You wont suffer losing all gas 3 hits in and the remaining fight looking like Quin69 Lul.