Holy pally isn't fun

I main prot and it’s awesome. So I wanted to try holy and heal some peeps for a change.

Firstly it just feels really weird. I’m not really squishy or scared of mobs if one agroes on me. I almost still feel like a tank without agro control and about 50k less health.

Second the healing is so bad. For mythic it’s more viable but after spamming as hard as I could in a raid, watching a monk with 20 ilvl lower than me keep up… well I was embarrassed. And to watch a druid, only 1 ilvl lower than more than double the HPS.

Honestly they are great for dedicated tank healers, but for raid wide heals, that will always be a negative. I’m aware of the smart healing holy has but it honestly doesn’t compare to whatever other healer kits are capable off.

At 369ilvl I just find 9k hps, just bad. Or maybe I’m wrong. What do other holy pallies think.

Honestly thinking about rolling priest just to satisfy my needs of healing.

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go mistweaver

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I have a decent amount of experience with all healers, so I want to chip in real quick and give some advise, but before that lets look at current healer balance in Raids, which is actually quite good:

In terms of HPS we have Holy Priest and MW Monk at the top (by no more than 10% though) and all others pretty close to each other. Now the reason this is fair is because those two healers don’t bring much more other than their HPS to a Raid, while Disc, Shaman, and Paladin bring A LOT more. Imo Druids also don’t bring too much to a Raid and should be up there with the HPS healers so I think they are the ones that might need a bit of a buff actually.

Now, from what I understand you are pretty new to Holy Paladin (and maybe to Healing), so it’s only natural that you are not going to perform to the level as someone who mains that role and has much more experience than you, that shouldn’t stop you though, you can get there with practice.

As for the option of rolling Priest, I think both Holy Priest and Holy Paladin are good choices for a player who wants to get into healing for the first time so if you enjoy the play-stile more then go for it. In term of competitive play typically Holy Paladins are in more demand (both for M+ and Mythic Raiding) but generally all are viable.

I’m actually not a first time healer. And the rotation is extremely simple with paladins. As it was with priest back in the day. Honestly dude. The numbers just don’t add up. I appreciate you being cool about it. But I remember having this same problem in G’huun with 2 other holy pallies. They just couldn’t get much more than 10k. Kicked them and we didn’t wipe.

I dont see what a Holy paladin brings to a raid. I don’t see any utillity that is actually worth it. The cone is a waste. The smart healing is a waste. The holy shock is small. Holy light is small. Flash light wastes mana. No real AoE healing. noHoT’s. Basically a tank healer, that’s about it.

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Well, the numbers not adding-up argument is just not true, you need to consider that every single target heal a paladin does in a Raid is cleaving to 2 more targets (beacons). We don’t need to do math, just look at warcraftlogs.

Now, about what Holy Paladin brings:

One thing is Devotion Aura, both the passive and the Aura Mastery active are extremely strong tools that don’t show on the meters (you can use wowanalyzer to see their actual value)

Next is the spot healing niche, which is what paladins do better than everyone else, and that’s a super important role that many of the more AOE heal oriented specs don’t perform well (to the point where unless the target is about to die the right choice for them might be to ignore it and not heal them). Yes the kit is very basic but a great deal about mastering a Holy Paladin comes in choosing who to heal, selecting the right target and actually preventing people from dying is what a great Holy Paladin does in Raids. Now 3 Holy Paladins in the same group is probably not a good idea and I can see that being a problem.


Edit: Now if you don’t like being forced to the spot healing role and want more options then yes my advise is to re-roll to a class that does what you want, for better or worse that’s the only role available to Holy Paladins in Raids and I actually agree with you on the “not fun” part, but that doesn’t mean is under-powered.

Now, about maybe playing Priest for healing actually I do recommend it. I mained Holy Paladin in MOP but I’ve been Disc main since Legion and it’s a very fun spec to play with a lot of depth and room for improvement, but it’s also kind of niche in what it does. Holy is a bit more basic but it’s alright too and very flexible to do whatever you want, so it’s a good choice too.

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Giving em another shot. Playing high keys with pally has gone well so far. I think its just the raids that were an issue.

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It’s reaaaally disconcerting to hear you expect to be even with other healers your first time out. It’s not all about ilvl. Healing is far more about skill and practice. You can’t expect to be an expert, or even mediocre, healer on your first few outings.

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Ill run through some things that make Hpal worth bringing:

  1. Devotion aura. 20% DR over 8 seconds is actually really good for progression. It’s good for farm too but progression is what I’m going to be discussing here. You’re going to see mercy a lot all over the place because people use it to pad however if you look at first kills you’ll see devo aura being used more often than not. It’s an extremely strong CD that can save the group from wiping or save a few people from dying. You can look on WoWanalzyer to see devos actual strength through DRPS. Plug in any log either from you or someone else that you know uses devo correctly and you’ll see how strong it is.

  2. Bubble. No other healer has an immunity and this was actually very valuable in uldir. Immunities are generally always good but there was a lot you could do in uldir with bubble. Examples being: -Take an orb on mythrax pre nerf, bubble and walk out, raid will take no damage. -Take a sheer for the tanks on mythrax. -Boil soak p3 ghuun with bubble when there’s a boil in growths or when everyone is taking a lot of damage from ramping stacks and waves. -Take thrashes for tanks on fetid. Etc.

  3. Cleave healing. A lot of people still think we’re “tank healers” but we actually aren’t. At least not directly. If you directly heal the tanks you’re going to lose a lot of healing. This is due to how beacons work. Our niche is cleave healing and triage healing. We always heal 3 targets for the price of 1 with beacons and even up to 7 targets with LoD if you don’t directly hit your beacons. This helps smooth out tank damage quite a bit while allowing you to heal other people rather than focus solely on the tanks. The only time you’d directly heal tanks is if they’re getting destroyed and they really need extra focus but tank healing is better done from a mistweaver now. Our cleave healing is fairly good.

  4. BoP/Freedom: This isn’t a dealbreaker but it’s actually been decent this tier. You can BoP the stomp on fetid so you or someone else doesn’t get knocked back, you can freedom while orb running on ghuun and never get rooted, you can bop and soak thrashes for tanks, etc. You wouldn’t take an Hpal just for these two but they’re just extra utility which is still a plus.

Those are just a few reasons to bring an Hpal. You can’t look at HPS and determine which healers are best solely from that. Healer utility in raids is very important. If Devotion aura for example showed up on logs/charts we’d be a lot higher than we are but you can do what I mentioned earlier to measure it’s use.

Also, if you’re performing badly don’t automatically blame the spec. There could be many reasons, for example: Too many healers for the content you’re doing (ie 4-5 healers for normal), you’re not playing correctly, etc.

EDIT: If you’re talking about actual gameplay rather than performance then I’d agree it’s pretty boring. I really like AC but outside of that it’s definitely dull imo.

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Holy pally gameplay is very dull in BFA.

I miss the fast paced pow pow ST whackamole that was legion hpal

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I’m not really new to healing, and it took me less than an hour to fine tune holy pallies rotations and priorities. I did hit about 11k after a little more practice. I guess I should add I was pugging uldir. If they don’t see big numbers they don’t care lol.

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Holy Paladin healing sucks, it is boring and feels weak.

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Healing is dependent on the fight you’re doing and the skill of the other healers you’re with. If they’re good and you aren’t on par they will snipe all them heals from under your chin and make you look bad. If you’re with bad healers and you’re mildly decent you can look like a pro. Not to mention paladins are very dependent on stacking fights and proximity more often than not. Kind of like the scorpion fight in Nighthold. I was always unmatched by other healers because of how the fight worked. We have our moments to shine is what I’m saying and it has a lot to do with other healers and the actual fights, not necessarily that one healers is weak.

It also boils down to how efficiently you use your cooldowns. For example, me and another pally raiding heroic Argus had the same ilvl but he was far better at timing his cooldowns to the fight and he was at maybe 1.5m and I was at like 800k. I mean, you can pop your CD the same time a druid uses tranq and obviously you’ll get pushed out pretty quick so timing those cd’s is also a way to alter the numbers fairly heavily.

I will say I don’t like the state of holy paladins, I find them boring to heal with and they feel like they’re in a weird spot for melee healing… and the mastery is awful imho. I’ve posted before on changes I would like to see but- I miss my bubbles. It’s all in how you swing the light brodudeman

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Finally some honesty. Everything you said is spot on. Literally /end thread

I hope your open to constructive criticism, because you’re not playing the spec as well as you could be by a large margin. From your logs, you arn’t doing much else other than pressing flash of light and holy light. In particular I’m looking at your 11k hps heroic vectis run from vectis (I’d provide a link but I’m not allowed). I’m not going to pull apart your build, but I just want to mention that there are better talents to be running.

You need to be using holy shock basically on cooldown, or at least doing your best to not cast flash/holy light when you could be using it instead. It’s faster to cast, and makes your FoL or HL better, this is especially the case if you’re running holy avenger and sanctified wrath which reduces the CD by 30%+ and 50% respectively. To be blunt, you were not doing this (you casted it 10 times when you could casted over 40).

You should also be using Light of Dawn pretty much on CD, instant cast for a 5 man AOE heal. It’s expensive but that’s why you’re using holy shock on CD which is very easy on mana consumption. Vectis always has 2+ people taking damage from omega vector, and the tanks taking damage making light of dawn pretty much always an effective ability to use as it in total heals more than both flash of light and holy light when it heals 3 targets. To be blunt, you didnt cast this once. Also, try not to over heal with it. On your heroic fetid kill, 70-80% of your healing with it was over healing.

The class can output just fine, its a different playstyle and requires a lot of attention/muscle memory to use the core healing spells on CD.

Now is it fun? Well… That’s subjective. It’s awkward in a lot of respects, but that’s because it isn’t meant to be played quite like a traditional healer. Avenging crusader and judgement of light heal for a lot and require you to transition from standing back and healing to dpsing, it can be a bit awkward. Moreover they don’t have smooth healing, it’s all bursty so unless the raids getting hammered you can feel kind of useless. All that aside I actually prefer my hpal to my monk currently, it has more minor CD’s to watch and has a lot more utility. But that’s just my preference, I still think a lot could be done to make it more entertaining.

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Damnit I forgot about light of dawn

hpal healing is not straight forward like a monk, hpriest, or duird. I would recommend looking at high parsing Hpal logs and see what they are using and when. A lot of pallies I see in heroic pugs pay the spec very wrong given the current way they are balanced. This results in them doing the 9k hps you are talking about.

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If you’re forgetting our only aoe ability and one of our best abilities I’d wager to say that you’re performance is probably based on personal play as opposed to much else.

Your post is also talking about gameplay not being fun and performance being bad. Maybe you’d prefer a spec like disc that when played perfectly pulls high numbers and has a high value to the raid. Though that’s much harder than Hpal and our performance isn’t bad.

Either way hps is dependent on a lot. How many healers, CD timing, positioning, etc. Gameplay definitely sucks imo but our performance isn’t bad at all. You can look at Hpal logs for your specific realm if you’d like and comb through some good ones so you can hit those players up if you want and ask questions. Forgetting you’re only aoe ability kinda shows this is probably a personal play issue though so probably start there.

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I thought they were more of a spot healer? So they should do better in arenas and m+ than raids no?

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They have toolkit that is more strongly suited to spot healing, but still have some tools for minor raid healing (Judgement of Light, Light of Dawn, Grace of the Justicar, etc…). That being said, even in a raid environment spot healing is extremely valuable and still results in a large amount of HPS. With beacon of virtue every heal hits 3 targets, so you maintain that on tanks who usually need a heal and then spend most of your focus on spot healing people who are getting railed by single target damage (which is very common, eg eye beam on zekvoz, shadow barrage & pool on zul, vectis omega vector, etc…). You get passive healing on tanks through beacon and focus on saving people rather than trying to top people off with raid heals.

In regards to them being better in one form of content or another, they can do well in all content if played correctly.

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A huge misconception is that pallies are “just” tank healers. I was still going of this old mentality for awhile as well but now more than ever our niche is pretty well defined in a raid. If you’re doing it right we’re keeping tanks stable and spot healing the rest of the raid allowing us to pick up spots where AoE healing isn’t cutting it from the rest of the classes.

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