Sun Paladin Radiance...

[Delmuir]

This is an underwhelming category. It's fine with 4-6 points invested but it's not worth a category point nor the opportunity cost of the other talents.

1. Radiance... Pretty underwhelming. It's a mediocre light and blindness resistance.

2. Illumination... reduces enemy defense, stealth and invisibility. Worth a point.

3. Searing Light... tiny damage and chance to daze. Also worth a point.

4. Judgment... this is basically an emergency heal but it's actually a pretty mediocre skill as it's slow.

There's just no way to justify taking this category, given the alternatives. As such, I suggest keeping all of the old effects but adding some new ones:

1. Radiance - At level 5, you can now use your lamp slot as a second tool slot as you no longer need a lamp.

2. Illumination - Lets you plainly see weaknesses in enemy armor and defense: critical +15% and crit multiplier +50%

3. Searing Light - Increases all light damage by up to +25%.

4. Judgment - While this reduces the radius of your radiance, it doesn't reduce its intensity. Your radiance collapses into an intense light aura that negates all darkness. For the 5 turns that the radiance is diminished, you are immune to darkness and light damage. Maybe reduce it to 3 turns...

Would this justify the category?

[Pisastrish]

It would also be nice if the light radius from chant adept added to the radiance radius unlike other light sources

[Delmuir]

That's a good call. It should... that's a perfect place for a synergy.

[starsapphire]

1. Using a charm will put another one into cooldown and equiping two charms would not be a good idea.
Lite is not for light only, it can offer pretty good passive stats, no worse than those on diggers, so I will doubt a bit about the value of this.
2. Very strong passive, it's Blood Red Moon + Dark Ritual, both of them are passive good enough to be class-defining. It's very likely to make a randboss rolled in it really deadly. However, it's still a passive that won't change you playstyle, and locking a very strong passive behind an 'optional' tree is... hmm, I would say it will reduce people's freedom of choice.
3. It's an another passive ability, and it isn't changing your playstyle
4. Single damage type immune would be too restrictive for a player character that needs to fight monsters with all kinds of damage. If the enemy can only do light/darkness damage by chance, this skill would be very strong, or it would be completely useless. If Sun Paladin have access to Darkest Light, it might be an interesting synergy, but sadly they do not.

A meaningful option of unlockable tree should bring more way to player.
The problem here with radiance, is that the whole tree does not introduce a meaningful new playstyle, and it does not give extensive options against different enemies like the new glyph Anothril got. To player, they are just passive stats. Sun Paladin already had so much active talents tough, so we can't make it a new active tree though.
It's mediocre now, but not too bad to use for a point filler, partly because Sun Paladin does not have many alternatives. At least it's free daze+accuracy.
Giving it a strong passive would make it strong enough to be a must-take, but your playstyle remains unchanged. You will even try to avoiding using T4 more than before, for you will losing your passive.

[Dervic]

I agree the talent tree is sub-par, however it's not as bad as you make it.
1. Radiance would work better if aura effect radius and light radius were separate. Light radius should be 1-5(TL) while keeping everything else the same.
2. Illumination, it works and paladin sure needs the extra hit chance. However it's a bit of a 1pt talent, needs an incentive to add more points to it.
3. Searing sight - Works, although the damage might be low.
4. Judgement - This works but I'd prefer something different - Focus your radiance on a single target for 8 turns, increasing the effect of Illumination and Searing sight on it by 40-200%(TL).

[SDY]

Ultimately I think the tree would be more useful if it had some synergies with the rest of what the class does. As is it’s just some random gimmicky stuff without a clear theme or niche.

The class could benefit from more movement skills - adding a “move at light speed” would be thematically appropriate and be serious competition for a movement infusion as a category point, though somewhat redundant with Rush.

The class could also benefit from a specific tree to support a staff-wielding SP - one that does more direct light damage, which seems somewhat like what Radiance was trying to do anyway. Boosting the damage and dropping the cooldown substantially on the last two talents.

The tree has some good ideas, they may just need better numbers.

[Frumple]

Move at light speed... wait, did something happen to that one talent that basically does exactly that, themed nicely for the sunpa? Path of something or other, innit?

Changes though, I'unno. I'd probably make the 4th tier a sustain. Little self-healing danmaku glowing boom balls. Wispy sorta' things just self-generating. Extra aggro gloom or summat.

Probably stick a blind-resist countered evasion somewhere in there, that weakens with range. Probably in the place of the daze component. Always liked the daze but it's weird. You're glowing super bright, you should be hard to hit up close and/or blinding stuff, not dazing, dat's more lightning's shtick.

Whole tree could basically be light-themed umbraphage mixed with some kind of reverse creeping darkness or whatever that doomed tree is. Super-light or whatever it is stuff, probably a short distance constantly then a few tiles a turn beyond that, scale stuff based off the amount of lit/extra lit junk in radius. Tone down judgement damage but give the balls some weight, damage blocking and whatnot.

Staff sunpa's just crusader though, innit? Staves still work as 2handers, yeh? Ogre rolling staff/shield was always amusing. Not necessarily good, but definitely amusing.

[SDY]

Path of Light, yeah, Sun Paladin’s only movement skill by default (Rush can be unlocked, but it’s not that good anymore).

For staff was thinking more long the lines of a caster tree, the way Wyrmic has with breaths with actual ranged damage skills not dependent on weapon.

Radiance has two options - support other builds or be the focus of a build. As just numerically better it would be an option for supporting other builds (the defense penalty, for example, helps with melee, but the other skills are just too weak). The other alternative is a complete rewrite so that Radiance could be a 5/5/5/5 tree that is the focus of a build.

The path of least resistance is just to buff it. The first skill stacking with light radius instead of being independent and giving full blind resistance, the second skill giving an all resist penalty in addition to the defense penalty, the third skill inflicting stun, and the last skill adding to shield instead of healing would make it much more attractive.

[Tryble]

Daze is a more potent defensive effect than stun, if you're strictly looking for protection. Daze is more brutal than people give it credit for; it cuts accuracy, damage, and power in half, and totally blocks movement. If you're looking to take a moment to cast and recover or just escape, daze has you covered. You can step away and cast suncloak, barrier, bathe in light, heal, and the enemy is only then coming out of the daze, having done nothing of consequence in that time. The only thing daze doesn't have over stun is talent CD reduction...but the loss in damage, accuracy and power means that anything they throw at you is kind of negligible. A shame that it breaks so easily and frequently by accident.

It's the last ability that really needs help. Weak damage and healing whose timing you can't control? Bad. Paladin's generally gonna be at high or max life anyway, under a shield. Having the effect boost shields is a good improvement suggestion in my opinion.

[nsrr]

This is an underwhelming category. It's fine with 4-6 points invested but it's not worth a category point nor the opportunity cost of the other talents.

If these are the problems, why not just suggest unlocking it? Possibly unlock it and move it to Generic.

Trying to buff it to be competitive with Combat Techniques seems futile (balancing against Blinding Speed alone seems like a lost cause) and it's a given that SP is going to unlock either the 2hand advanced tree or the shield advanced tree (or both if you're a crazy Ogre). Aside from that, I don't feel like SP is particularly weak as a class and tossing a bunch of passive buffs on top of passive buffs doesn't seem like it's necessary. Buff it enough to be worth a cat point and it becomes both OP and a 'must-have', restricting other build options.

[Delmuir]

Good call. Maybe it would be enough to just unlock it.

I don't imagine that my suggestions are the best ones. I usually post threads out of the hope that people will throw their own ideas out there. So good call on that.