Healing Hands has a node that gives you a +25% chance per point (capping at 100%) to cast healing hands when you hit with a melee attack. Healing Hands also has a node that converts it into a melee attack. I don’t know why I never considered Healing Hands proccing Healing Hands, but now I shoot 16 Divine Bolts per swing (10+3 from HH1, 10+3 from HH2 ) and it’s glorious.
Edit: on a side note. I’m trying to decide between Symbols of Hope for Divine Flare or Abyssal Echoes (converted to Fire) for an AoE button. On one hand Divine Flare does insane damage in a relatively large area and gives a decent enough buff (+12 Fire Melee damage and +12 Fire Spell damage with my spec) between casts, but Abyssal Echoes would give me a permanent 20% attack speed boost and deal some AoE damage on top (more the larger the group). Is Abyssal Echoes even worth considering?
That’s funny i realized the same thing the other day while trying stuff on dummies, i was like wtf, why do i get a double hit with a single HH xD
Not sure if this is new or even intended but yeah melee HH do proc melee HH
For the rest TBH i never tried recently to make Abyssal Echoes looks good damage wise but yeah usually it’s trash tier unfortunately regarding scalling.
Symbols seems a very solid choice, with or without Divine Flare
I want to say it’s intended, but it’s still really funny and way stronger than I expected it to be. It’s only 11 Divine Bolts per cast (5+3 from the direct +3 from the proc) if you take the Divine Bolts passives, but they hit surprisingly hard.
As for Echoes vs Symbols, Echoes (even with the attack speed + damage vs blinded buff) just does pitiful damage and the buff isn’t that helpful. Symbols is stupidly strong in terms of damage output with Divine Flare, it’s just super clunky and feels like a knock-off brand of Holy Aura. Where Holy Aura always buffs you (except on CD with a specific node) and activating it makes the buffs stronger. Symbols punishes you offensively and in Health Regen for activating it for the trade off of some ward and damage reduction (or ward and a damage burst with Divine Flare). I went into it at length in another topic, but basically Divine Flare’s design is counter intuitive to what Symbols is trying to do and it needs some work.
Symbols is designed as a passive buff that works as an “oh crap!” Button defensively in emergencies. Divine Flare should, in theory, turn it into a nuke skill. The cooldown goes from 18s to 3.6s when you take the node, but the Symbols still only come in every 1.73s (5.19s for 3 symbols) meaning you’ll get 2 symbols back before you can recast the skill. You can increase the acquisition rate to 1.37s per symbol (4.11s for 3 symbols) which means, depending on the timing (because symbols acquire on a timer that runs constantly) you can have 3 symbols when the skill is off CD, but you might still only have 2. And the damage/range/healing (and recast chance when hitting a boss/rare) all scale with max symbols if you went with the easy to reach 4th symbol for 3 spec points it lowers the cooldown even further to 1.8s but now it takes 5.48s to reach the 4 symbol cap! You can get a single symbol back on kill or hit against boss/rare, but that’s a 10% chance, alternatively/additionally you can spend 4 points to guarantee you regain a symbol, but that only guarantees 3 symbols at the base cooldown, and 1 with the further reduced cooldown. Not only that, but the mana cost remains at 30, which is super hefty for a 3.6s CD nuke, Judgement (as another high damage nuke) deals similar damage, has a slightly longer 4s CD and costs half the mana!
Divine Flare, in particular, is built to be similar to judgement as a high damage skill on a cooldown, but everything about how it works is directly antithetical to that playstyle. They either should have kept the cooldown the same and had it be a high cooldown nuke, made the CDR 50% instead of 80% (9s instead of 3.6s) or added a 50% reduction in mana cost to make it more in line with Judgement. If there are concerns with the passive buffs coming from such a high damage skill? They could always replace the symbol acquisition rate node that’s before Divine Flare with the old Sigils of Hope node “Soliloquy” which limited you to one Symbol but made the passive effects slightly stronger (I think it was comparable to having 2 sigils) and then adjust the “scaling per symbol” upgrade nodes to have chances to proc and damage/area equivalent to what it is now with 3 symbols.
This rant got longer than I expected, so I’ll stop here and quote it over to my Divine Flare thread
Healing Hands would be great if it really produced 11 bolts per cast. Sadly, it doesn’t.
Divine Catalyst states “Divine Bolts cast: 5” when maxed out.
But in reality it only produces 1 bolt per target. So against a group of enemies, you will fire 5 bolts, but against a single target (boss), you will fire only 1 bolt.
The additional divine bolts from Paladin tree then apply to this one bolt per target, so against a group, you will fire 15 bolts, and against a single target (boss), you will only fire 3 bolts.
So with +3 from the proc, the best you can do on single target are 6 bolts, and the best that a caster HH can do are only 3 bolts.
Oh really? That’s slightly disappointing, I mean 6+n, where n is 1-5 depending on target count still isn’t bad as both the direct and procced casts can proc the 3 divine bolts from the passive tree with the direct cast adding n bolts from its skill tree.
Edit: Wait, I’m confused now after re-reading your message. Let me go over both nodes again and I’ll edit again when I get a chance
Edit 2: Okay, so Divine Catalyst (HH node) is “when you directly cast healing hands and you heal yourself or an ally cast up to 5 divine bolts at nearby enemies” and Divine Bolt (the passive) is “when you hit with a melee attack you cast a divine bolt at a nearby enemy” with +1 bolts for it’s bonus and another +1 for the Shared Divinity bonus.
So, this is +5 when you heal, and +3 for the main and procced hits each. Now if it’s 1+2 per Bolt because of the Paladin Passives, that’s 3/6/9/12/15 + 6 bolts on cast for 9/12/15/18/24 bolts maximum (based on skill level). So at 5/5 Divine Catalyst that’s a minimum of 9 bolts (1+2 for the heal, 1+2 for melee 1, 1+2 for melee 2) per cast. And a max of 24 bolts if enough enemies are nearby
