It feels like you’re constantly fighting against your own defensive mechanics, rather than having them synergize.
This is a great way to put it. There’s a lot of tension between Gladiator’s mechanics right now, I don’t feel like they’re pulling in the same direction.
It’s deceptive though, right - Old Gladiator would persist the shield through the next encounter regardless of their life total whereas Gladiator even on -100% cooldown will still lose the shield at end of combat, and if you’re storing combo for the next encounter it means you’re not resetting your cooldown.
I think combo is a frustrating currency to manage because it can go sideways for a lot of reasons. Maybe you miss too much, maybe an opponent doesn’t die to your melee damage but some other effect (blazing enchant, thorns glyph, toxic/corrosive gas, enemy “friendly fire”, any number of things) and so you don’t get extended turns to re-engage in melee so the timer runs out, etc. Maybe if combo were less goofy to manage this change wouldn’t feel quite as much of a downgrade for Gladiator, idk.
But now there’s an added pressure to keep your shield cooldown as low as possible, which means you’re actually killing with combo hits consistently, so you’re trying to hit this sweet spot between doing enough melee hits to build combo but not enough to accidentally kill with regular attacks, but getting enough successive combo to kill with your chosen move. And you have to be <=50% health or the shield isn’t even in play. So it’s the combination of shielding requiring continual cooldown resets, being on low health, and managing an awkward resource in Combo hits to keep Gladiator, uh, gladiating
It feels like a big change from the old Gladiator, where the shield was already actively managed rather than passively; you could always choose to combo kill and refresh the shield, cooldown not even being a thing. Combo was still awkward but at least you could accrue it at your leisure and spend it when you saw fit to gain all your shielding back at once.
I will continue to try and refine my approach to Gladiator since it just doesn’t function as it used to, this is all still pretty early analysis on my part. I don’t assume everyone plays the game like I do, there are a few variants of Gladiator given the way combo hits get their damage, and maybe a different one that’s more aggressive and less of a wall of EHP is simply more appropriate now. But my old standard method, where there was less pressure to sustain and use combo and shielding was always present and ready to be refreshed is definitely not in the game anymore.
Yeah, I pretty purposefully didn’t talk much about Paladin because it has such a tight and self-referential set of abilities. The only things I would really say is that Lay on Hands and Cleanse fight for real estate and Cleanse generally wins, though LoH is a nice emergency healing option and is very emblematic of how Paladins function in other RPGs, as an instant restore to full health option. Wall of Light just doesn’t do anything for me personally, I could see it having applications as crowd control or to let you cheese enemies into pits. But everything else about Paladin is just so supremely considered and synergistic that I didn’t think it was worth needling too much.
That is a pretty solid idea, it would definitely make it feel more worthwhile to save your combo up between encounters. It can be a difficult resource to manage effectively given the other extenuating circumstances like environmental hazards and “oops all melee whiffs, womp womp” so feeling less pressure to just spend it at the end of every encounter would take a load off!