Each day I hope to open Discord and see news of Holy Pally changes coming in 10.1 and although we haven’t seen a tonne of other class changes yet either, I’m starting to get worried that there won’t be any.
While Holy is numerically fine, there are a tonne of issues that the playerbase has been screaming out for the devs to fix for quite a while now.
RNG
For a spec which has a builder-spender rotation underpinning it’s healing, where 50% of our GCDs do no direct healing, the amount of procs we have just exacerbates the problem. It is terrible healing design honestly.
You LoD into full health targets to fish for wings procs. ie You have excess healing when you don’t need it.
You WoG a single target because no one else needs healing and you use your empyrean legacy proc when no one really needed it. More excess healing.
You proc a Divine Purpose on a WoG or LoD and now you have the choice of trying to fish for another wings proc and more overhealing or SotR which packs the punch of a marshmallow on single target.
Now that you’ve spent all that time fishing and overhealing you’re now healing first boss of SBG or Hyrja on tyrannical week. They go into their damage phases and now you’re just praying for any of those procs. Because of all that extra healing you’ve been doing all dungeon fishing for procs, damn it feels bad when you don’t get one when it’s actually needed.
Too much of holy’s throughput feels out of your control and because so many of our globals do no direct healing it just feels doubly bad.
Talents
The class tree slaps. It’s actually so good since 10.0.7. The spec tree on the other hand sucks. There’s just no other way to put it.
Too many uninspired boring talents, and talents you have to take to progress that give you next to no value because they are caster related.
This topic has been discussed widely so I won’t go over all the problems in the spec tree.
Making infusion relevant and retuning the bottom right points to include melee playstyle spells would go a long way to fixing it. Also divine protection is now baseline for ret. Why is it still on our tree?
Answers
There’s no time for a complete rework but I hope they would:
rebalance our healing by removing or lowering the rng nature of it. Buff our base kit and nerf our procs.
buff holy shock via something like shock barrier. Buff judgement of light, lights hammer, holy prism or golden path to compensate. Then take a bit off holy power spenders and procs because they hold too much of our throughput.
give us a reason to use infusion procs. Ie fast holy light casts.
give us two charges of holy shock. This would be a nice QoL change to avoid munching our crusader’s might CDR because of the gcd.
first off, nice post. I’d never really considered the significance of procs in the holy spec, but you are right. The RNG factor is quite important to our throughput. I still think Holy is missing some of the raw HPS numbers that other healers can generate when needed. I have kept groups alive when playing my shaman through the use of overlapping cooldowns and high mana cost/high HPS spells. These are 2 things that holy lacks. in M+, wings is our only real cooldown - aura mastery is very lackluster imo in 5 person content. BoV → WoG → divine toll → WoG/LoD will top up the group for at least 10 seconds, but once that BoV fades we are in trouble. Granted, these situations are sorta rare and usually occur because of bad pulls - but other classes can just power through these mistakes, and Holy paladins really can’t. On paper, our most interesting, powerful, and dependable proc is infusion of light. I honestly very rarely take advantage of this. Standing still in M+ for 1+ seconds in melee range doesn’t really work imo.
my suggestions that aren’t game breaking - these aren’t unique ideas, and I’ve stated before that I think these are easy wins up increase our throughput, QoL, and fun.
judgement builds HP
crusader strike needs more damage and more charges. explosive orbs exposes the weakness in Holy’s kit more than any other affix. also, the mana cost on crusader strike is tuned way to high…
SotR needs to be prot only. we need a real dps spender
I like the builder/spender model - but it needs to be doubled down on, especially for the fast pace of melee in M+. a bigger HP bank, more builders, less RNG, etc.
make infusion more substantial and give us a reason to cast holy light or flash of light. Flash could go instant, or holy light could be cast on the move. something more to make this proc get used.
the overhealing on spenders could add a shield - give us a reason to overheal - we already do a ton of that.
beacons need to be moved off the GCD (with an internal cooldown on beacon of faith) and BoV should be the target +4, but this is a minor issue imo.
rethink the bottom row of the spec tree. other than glimmer, they are meh at best when compared to other specs capstone choices. our best abilities feel very unimpactful.
breaking dawn should be replaced with something interesting. with the right group comp and situation it’s unnecessary, but the other 90% of the time it’s mandatory, and LoD still misses a lot (I’m ok with it being an aimed heal).
I will also agree with Westly that our class tree is solid except for the SotR skill… being able to spend 2 points there just feels bad.
This should honestly never be a thing. It just creates degenerate gameplay like we saw in MOP with eternal flame and spirit shell.
I’d rather see, as you mentioned, a proper DPS spender. One that doesn’t always commit us to sword and shield so that two handers can see play again. Personally I’d love to see exorcism come back for us, but slightly reworked so that it’s actually powerful for single target as well.
I’d like to see our heals empower our dmg and vise versa. Incentivize spending holy power on dmg when healing isn’t needed and healing when dmg isn’t needed.
More than anything though, and it’s been beaten to death on the forums and rightfully so, is infusion and mastery being essentially useless. If they’d just change those to something more useful then we’d immediately be in a better spot.
fair point - damage shields were problematic in MoP. how about if our only group based spender changed from a cone to something smarter? I personally love the glimmer playstyle so I’d double down on LoD boosting that, but i know others don’t favor this. and if it was simply a smart group heal it would probably mimic chain heal and essence font.
I don’t have a perfect solution, I just know that the deeper I dive into DF holy the more I like playing other healers even though pally has been my main for a long time. what’s frustrating is that the bones are there for a really fun and rewarding spec, I don’t think a rewrite is necessary, just a few tweaks/shifts and we’d be good to go (less than what resto shaman and mistweaver have received in DF)
In my opinion, which granted means next to nothing, these are some things that would make Hpal feel quite a bit better.
Judgment should generate Holy power. There’s not much to be said about it, having it as a generator would give us a little more generation in both melee and range and make everything feel a bit more fluid. (As an aside, Judgement of the Light could use to be more accessible). Currently it’s a bit hard to justify taking in M+, but not having it makes judgment feel anemic.
HPal should have some form of Templar strikes. New Ret feels much more fluid with TS than with standard CS with 2 charges.
Something needs to give between LoD and SotR. Either SotR needs to be able to proc awakening or LoD needs a damage component. Spending HP on heals fishing for procs, when no one needs healed, feels bad.
Crusader Strike (Preferably like Templar Strikes) needs a small group healing component similar to how ancient teachings works. It could be weaker than AT if necessary, but currently HPal has too many GCDs devoted to things that do zero healing. The minor self healing we just got for CS doesn’t amount to much and doesn’t do anything for the group. Once virtue drops things get hairy really fast.
HPal needs a new mastery. We are neutered in ranged comps to the point the overall healing per LoD cast will do 50-75% of the healing listed in the tooltip. It feels terrible. Shock barrier has always made the most sense to me, but anything would fee better than it does now. It never feels like a gain, it always feels like you’re losing healing.
I like having a shield but SotR should have the shield requirement lifted (or be renamed/replaced with a similar AoE spender) for those who prefer using a 2H weapon. Keep weapon damage out of the scaling factor and have it do more damage when used on a single target similar to how the new Windwalker tier set will buff Fists of Fury’s damage on the main target.
HPal could use an overall damage buff. It doesn’t need to be drastic, but as it stands, HPal damage is very lackluster.
HPal is a super fun spec, it could just use a few quality of life changes.
I would like to see a more refined vision for the spec, traditionally Holy pal has been a spot/tank healer and incredibly mana efficient. Giving us better dps tools would be a start, i would also like to see abilites such as divine radiance and guardian make a return as well for a more caster based build.
I’ve also thought about how adding a bigger Holy Power pool would improve things. This would go some way to fix the issues of having to spend when no one needs it to avoid capping and slightly resolve the issue where you need spend globals on 0 healing during high intensity moments as you’d have a bigger Holy Power bank to use.
I think the developers would be concerned with how much burst throughput you can unleash in two globals though if we had a 6 or higher Holy Power cap.
They would need to nerf our spenders because banking up too much throughput could be overpowered.
Having said that, I don’t think this is a requirement. Holy could be fine with 5 Holy Power as long as it’s not procs that mean you can have effectively 8 Holy Power (Divine Purpose + 5) and that proc is RNG. The reason we’re even contemplating a bigger Holy Power bank is because everything else does next to nothing. Just buff everything else and nerf our Holy Power spenders to compensate.
I’m also a little concerned with the tier set next patch contributing to the GCD locked nature of the spec. I was playing with Lights Hammer last night and when you have that thing down, it is so hard to keep on top of your Holy Power gen. Because of the CDR nature of the tier, you are encouraged to send Lights Hammer and Holy Prism on CD contributing to the lack of control over healing.
PvP wise we are just an unmitigated disaster. With wings it took me 3 globals to kill a healing stream totem.
Versus a disc priest one game where I was getting fantastic procs, I was in full DPS mode and this disc was struggling to stay afloat. By the time we ended the game, I had 800k damage and the priest had 1.1mil.
I even specd hard into damage and utilized sotr for the first time ever.
We are entirely useless at this point.
I could go on but it would be repeating what everyone else has been saying.
based on my anecdotal experience with target dummies in valk.
410 ilvl shaman without stormkeeper but with lava surge = 33k dps, no dps trinks, no hero, no earth elemental. easy rotation, flame shock spread, chain lightning spam, lava burst on proc.
415 ilvl pally - I didn’t use divine toll but I did use wings and light’s hammer = 22k dps, no hero. less interesting rotation, press the button that’s available with a priority of light’s hammer, consecration, holy shock, crusader’s strike, judgement, and hammer of wraith. it is slightly more complex I guess, which isn’t a bad thing, it’s just that nothing feels impactful - and the numbers reflect this.
this is very unrealistic damage of course - with a shaman I’d have an easier time getting closer to this level as much of the damage is instant at range without consuming vital resources (holy power). Getting close to this theoretical pally max would require a static group for light’s hammer and the willingness to spend all of your HP on SotR.
in a single target scenario I think this gap would widen between these 2 classes.
the biggest, and easiest fix to the pally dps issue would be to uncap the charges of crusader strike and replace it with a DPS boost node for those that want to be melee. during my experiment there were times where all of my damaging spells were on cooldown and I just stood there. this is of course much less of an issue outside of tests like this, but still indicates that pally cannot go effectively full time offense when the need arises. (my haste is at 22%)
bursting to 90k with wings + divine toll? ok, sure, but I can’t think of very many scenarios that would line up where I’d spend all my throughput cooldowns for DPS and not regret having them for 1 to 2 minutes for healing.
22k is low in a dps test, I’ll own that. but my post was more about the realistic sustained dps that a holy pally can do vs a slightly less geared resto shaman in the same scenario.
On big pulls when everyone is using cooldowns and interrupting etc you won’t need to heal and can just DPS. Obviously it’s a gamble on pugs, but when you start pushing keys it’s expected.
fair point caffeination - but I was talking more about consistent damage throughout the course of a full M+ or raid, but you are right - if we go absolute ham we can trade decent damage for the ability to perform quick triage healing. as someone that mostly pugs however, I usually don’t choose this path for obvious reasons =)
Part of the issue with Holy’s damage at the moment is Blessing of Summer. If you watch Ellesmere he’s doing insanely high amounts of damage because of how well Summer scales in high m+ coordinated comps.
Essentially our damage ceiling is far higher than your average Joe can achieve. This is honestly very bad for your average player because 1, they (Devs) aren’t likely to think Holy’s damage is low if the top end players do good damage, and 2, it’s out of reach - we can’t just find ourselves a fire mage and pull big around their CDs with Summer rolling. Buffing our base damage without a nerf or rework of summer and you’ll skew the healer meta too far towards Holy Pally. You’d have the healing community up in arms.
