Great stuff! An interesting read and awesome to see the practical feedback from someone who has experienced the variety of different builds on how they compare.
Have you tried casting Healing Hands through Smite instead of direct casting it? This is more or less what I’m building towards currently:
Though the equipment is unobtainable levels of perfection, this version of the build is unrefined. One of the biggest questions I can’t answer until I actually get further towards it is how much mana gain you want on smite, so you can keep on low mana while comfortably maintaining your sigils. The idea is that you can still do the whole direct cast divine bolt healing hands stuff. You won’t be nearly as good at it, due to the lower cast speed from virtue of patience, and the point allocation within Healing Hands being less favorable. Plus, you don’t have the volatile reversal buffs. However, hh divine bolt pally already excels at the situations you would use that mode. What it normally lacks is single target damage, and this should be substantially better in that area.
After all, normally VR gives you 30% more damage taken by enemies, and a 30% cast speed buff. With this, as long as you’re down 60% or more mana, you get that cast speed bonus with smite always. And, since the virtue of patience cast speed drop doesn’t affect smite, you can get the 48% more damage from there all the time. So Smite casting rather than direct casting with VR would deal more damage, even if Smite did no damage itself. Then, the 36% double cast chance for smite has to be considered, not to mention it does damage itself, a ton actually, more than healing hands in this setup, as 500% more damage vs ignited targets with a ton of missing mana puts in a lot of work.
The real reason I love this variant of the build though is how lazy it is to play. Smite autocasts vs the closest target while right click is held, but ignores the input if nothing is in range. So you hold down right and left click and you wander around, autotargeting anything that comes close into oblivion before continuing on your way. Cast Sigils of Hope as frequently as possible until you’re low on mana then use it to refresh your sigils, release the prism shards, and keep your mana down. If you come across a tough group or arena or portal or something just hold down healing hands until it’s dead. If you come across a tough single target pop down a javelin banner near it for extra smiting, stick close so you get the healing, and hold down smite. It’s a blast to play, for me personally at least.
Anyway the tl;dr is from my calcs it should be easily double, closer to triple the single target damage of direct cast healing hands / divine bolt, even accounting for the VR buff. And sustain / splash damage figures should both be Way worse, like half as good. But still great to exceptional compared to other builds. That’s just in theory though and assumes things work as advertised and as expected, which may not hold. So I’d love to see what you find if you have a chance to test it out.
