I love playing sentinel, as I really like both VK and Pally as an archetype. The “holy warrior” and the “shadow knight” are just really interesting as concepts to me. They have been my favorite archetypes in many games I’ve played in the past, especially paladins.
I’ve hated SoH since the first time I used it. It’s clunky, awkward and interrupts play more than anything. So let’s break this down into:
- Ensure that redesign suggestions match what EHG have stated as their design philosophy.
- Evaluate what exactly the issue is.
- Make suggestions based on those 2 premises.
1: EHG’s stated design philosophy on skills.
a. They want to avoid “passive” skills on the hotbar. This is why the “stances” were removed in the first place.
b. They don’t want skills that feel like “must have” skills because it hurts build variety. (pretty sure I saw this somewhere, correct me if I’m wrong).
2: Problems with SoH.
a. Currently, it seems that every single build that’s posted in the Sentinel section of the forums uses SoH. It’s pretty much a staple of ANY sentinel build that’s pushing high endgame content, and not taking it feels like you’re actively hamstringing your build on purpose. It’s not that you can’t function without it, it’s just that you function significantly BETTER with it.
b. With a few minor variations, it’s built in essentially the same way. Everyone takes 4/5 or 5/5 into Enduring Hope and 1/1 into Tetragram. Next, everyone typically puts 4/5 or 5/5 into Empowering Sigils. The other 5-6 points are typically customized for the specific element or damage type, whether that’s fire or void damage, essentially, or focusing more on defense in the block nodes.
c. SoH feels VERY bad to use. It disrupts movement (unless you have the raw mana to invest into the instant cast node), it drains your mana VERY quickly, meaning if you’re a mana spending build you are hurting yourself by recasting constantly. Additionally, the duration is really short, and most of all, recasting does NOT refresh the cooldown on all 4-5 sigils. This last point is one of the most painful, because it means you’re not recasting it once every 25s, you’re recasting it 5 times every 25s. It means essentially that you’re lockstepping around alternating and interrupting your play in order to try to maintain it. This is “okay” for builds that primarily deal damage with a 0 cost skill (such as Rive or Vengeance, or Smite), but it still interrupts play and flow of combat, and is plain frustrating for builds that are more spender heavy.
d. The mana cost as stated above actually restricts builds because if you want to push high level endgame, you need to take into account that you’re going to be running around mana-starved constantly, and so investing into mana spending skills is fairly unwise as you won’t be able to use them too often.
e. It’s just not interesting. All it does is give raw number boosts. Yes, Devouring Orb needs to be cast constantly too, but at least it does something. Sigils just kind of float around and make you constantly look at the counter. You can’t clear a map by running around casting Sigils… you can do that with DO.
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Suggestions for fixing it. I actually like a lot of Hashashiyyin’s suggestions, so I’m just going to add a few of my own thoughts here.
a. I like the idea of a short duration, high power buff. I would actually push it even further and suggest a 10s duration with a 60s cooldown. A lot of bosses (especially for melee builds) have “attack windows” where their cooldowns are all on tick, and they are just auto-attacking. This would synergize well with a “high burst” strategy for those windows.
b. A lazy fix would be to cut it’s mana down to 10 and make it instant cast by default, but I’d honestly like to see something more creative than that.
c. Make it synergize with other skills more. Many of the other skills that synergize right now, do so by spending sigils (eg Judgement - Sigil of Sacrifice), but this makes that node prohibitively expensive (35 mana for sigil and 15 for Judgement). Instead, put nodes in the SoH tree that cause them to USE certain pally skills.
I am not sure how EHG will fix it, but it needs fixing. Of all the trees in Sentinel, Paladin is still missing 1 skill entirely, and Healing Hands doesn’t have a skill tree. This suggests to me at least that Paladin is due for a major rework or reimagining, as it currently only really has 3 skills with trees to specialize into, whereas VK and FG both have 5. Hopefully suggestions thrown out here will have some impact.
(edit - formatting)