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Thanks for the detailed write up. Before reading this we already had changes planned for a hotfix for Consecrated Ground and healing effectiveness scaling DoT paladin in general.
These mostly stemmed from Holy Trail scaling with added spell damage. This was a result of a miscommunication late in the skill’s development and was not intentional. The healing effectiveness scaling from the Path of Judgement node is meant to act as a replacement for added damage scaling, like it does for Consecrated Ground. The fact you can scale it with both, and they’re multiplicative means you can extremely high damage. If you have 100 adaptive spell damage that’s a 6x damage multiplier, which is fine on its own. If you have 500% increased healing effectiveness, that’s also a 6x damage multiplier which is fine on its own. However if you have both that’s a 36x damage multiplier, which is not fine.
Despite this being a mistake it has meant that healing effectiveness scaling damage over time paladin builds have become viable, which was one of our aims when adding Holy Trail to fit in such a build alongside Consecrated Ground, so we’re not removing it. Instead we’re keeping the spell damage scaling and extending it to Consecrated Ground, but make it stack additively with the healing effectiveness scaling. We’re doing this by changing the healing effectiveness scaling on both Holy Trail and Consecrated Ground to grant 1 adaptive spell damage per 5% healing effectiveness.
This change has no negative effect on Consecrated Ground as the effective damage multiplier you gain from increased healing effectiveness is the same as before (i.e. the 20 adaptive spell damage from 100% increased healing effectiveness will still result in 100% more damage). There’s now just the additional option of scaling it with increased spell damage and other sources of flat spell damage, such as caster weapons and paladin passive nodes.
We’re also just buffing the damage of Consecrated Ground and the Pilgrimage node in Javelin to try to ensure that these builds still deal good damage without the crazy multiplicative scaling on Holy Trail.
The Kindling node on the Shield Bash tree is also being addressed. You’re correct that it’s use for something like Consecrated Ground wasn’t intended. When we add nodes that buff the next use of a skill we generally intend for that to be used to provide a powerful boost to a single instance of an attack, not as preparation for a persistent effect, and balance accordingly. However we haven’t generally been careful enough to avoid edge cases such as this interaction with Consecrated Ground. It’s being changed to give +5% crit chance (additive) and +100% ignite chance and it will also work with throwing attacks, but will no longer work channelled skills. The hope here is that this will leave the node with some uses in setup heavy attack builds, without it having the potential to warp the power of persistent effects such as Consecrated Ground.
After reading your post, it’s clear that there is a separate issue of the Judgement tree not having enough options when optimising purely for Consecrated Ground damage.
We’d rather not funnel players towards Pious Offering as taking on that magnitude of mana burden should ideally be a choice that people can feel free to avoid for this sort of build. Prior to the spell scaling there also wasn’t a spammable mana generator to use in between Judgement uses. As you correctly pointed out, Javelin wouldn’t be a good fit for this because it has a cooldown. Smite kind of fits now, but we still don’t want that sort of mana management to feel mandatory, especially as the build is already juggling multiple cooldowns.
Instead we’re changing several nodes on the right side of the tree that previously only applied to Judgement hits to also apply to Consecrated Ground. These nodes are Sigil of Sacrifice (consuming sigils for added fire damage), Divine Destruction (more damage against high health enemies), and Purifying Flame (more damage against ignited enemies). Purifying Flame will also require only 1 point in Sacred Sword (from 2), so that you don’t have to spend more than the one point you would already put in it to reach Swift Verdict.
The Scourgebane node (more damage against bosses) was excluded from these changes to avoid further pigeon holing this build as a boss killer, which would make it harder to balance.