I’ve come back every expansion trying to re-love my holy paladin. I’ve mained it since TBC, its gone through a ton of iterations and ever since BFA I just can’t enjoy it anymore. I didn’t like glimmer, I was unimpressed with covenant abilities, the only season we felt “good” in DF we still had glimmer and it was one season. S3/S4 felt horrible, and now I feel the same in TWW.
I don’t understand how they don’t see the issue with our spot healing on every ability except for one. I don’t want to come off too rude, but is there even a paladin dedicated class designer at all? Are they intentionally dragging the specs “feel” into the dirt?
I figured with cata classic getting a lot of good attention from the classes feel, we’d see some positive changes towards what they were in cata, since from what most holy paladins I’ve talked to in cata classic, they enjoyed it.
But we are right back to where we were in S3/S4 of DF.
Please just buff our spot healing output on holy light, flash of light, even holy shock at this point. I’m not asking to fill health bars in one cast/gcd. I’m asking to be able to do it in like 4-6. Spread our healing throughput in WoG/Eternal flame into other spells. Make eternal flame completely a HoT and get rid of the instant healing aspect. Just something.
Holy paladin in Legion in my opinion was pinnacle holy paladin gameplay, just below that cataclysm.
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What about full caster is better than say a melee/m+ focused build?
Your comments don’t have any juice to them and there’s nothing for me to understand. Please elaborate further in detail.
More Survival focus? For myself? for the group? How is a full caster more survival focus?
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Do note, I have not gone Full Caster as I feel our current design heavily deemphasizes it.
But it is to my understanding, the idea of going full caster means you will no longer be in melee range (thus avoid a lot of mechanics) and would rely solely on your casted abilities, to generate and spend Holy Power. Assuming you build a massive amount of crit to reliably get Infusions, mana shouldn’t be too terrible of an issue but do not quote me on that. But either way, more crit should mean bigger heals from FoL and HoL which also get transferred thru Beacons.
Your HP generation will take a very noticeable hit, as you won’t have Crusader Strike to generate HP and your damage abilities will just be Holy Shock, Judgement, and Prism so your already low Hpal dps will be almost nonexistent.
If there are any Caster focused hpal’s out there that can correct this, please do so.
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This is incorrect. All paladin builds should be in melee. Casting builds should still be in melee range to interrupt, CC, stun, and do any meaningful DPS.
Anyone who is not doing that is legitimately trolling their M+/raid group.
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Agree, I know there’s a lot of Hpals from TBC and even classic to like to stay in the backfield and just spam holy light. but this is not the game anymore. we are 1 of 2 melee healers and it should stay like that. the problem of nostalgia is that is creating this desire on blizzard to make a hibrid out of us and making the class don’t work.
as right now, we are just fine content is challeging and if you miss a qeue in an AoE mechanic you will struggle. but we are fine compared with DFs3/S4. We need to get a Fistweaver full treatment, if you want the current set up to work. Glimmer is gone and it was bad but was a great concept, the problem is that was nerfed so hard that it end up being a burden.
I feel stronger than I did during DF. Though I didn’t really do M+ until S3 and 4, I did get KSM and that was all I cared to legitimately earn. I knew we were considered a lesser healer then but I achieved my goals.
Ellesmere has a video where he heals a 12. You probably can’t push as high as a good resto sham, but for most people we are probably viable enough as far as M+ is concerned.
I think its important to note, my issue hasn’t been its performance in TWW, I’ve felt fine. Its just how it plays.
This is my OG character and when I fired him back up I wanted to be a classic shockadin but it doesn’t feel right now so I went prot. If you could go full caster I would. Not viable atm imo. We rely too much on SoTR.
Og hpal. This is the most fun I’ve had as a healer since Legion when we absolutely rocked, and shadowlands when we were fairly op (before getting repeated damage nerfs).
Still have some pretty big weaknesses, over dependance on wings and raid being stacked up. Light of dawn being trash. Sotr being a button we press as a healer (shield mandatory is trash, sry not sry).
But overall things are not bad. Done some m+ and it was nice to not be outhealed by tanks for a change, raid is fun (queen is wrecking my guild but still), delves are chill. This expansion has been quite nice.
If there was anything I’d call a real issue worth changing for our spec, it’s that our mastery needs to go. We’re so crippled if the raid is spread and this problem compounds into our hero talents (Herald dawnlights). Blizz is far too cowardly to change our mastery though, so tough luck I guess lol.
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I think current holy pally is my favourite in quite awhile. I am probably in the minority and I love melee healing though.
If you like APM and your carpal tunnel can handle it, and you like the resource threshold to heal, go for it.
For me, it’s one of the worst healer design if we got strict to RPG and class fantasy (literally you don’t heal by doing damage, you build resources and then you heal).
Some affixes and mechanics (mass dispel and curses) aren’t friendly with your toolkit so you need to brute force them by healing and Virtue (mana eater ability with no other benefit than transfer 10% of your healing to someone else), so isn’t very pleasant or mastermind class of how to use your class.
And don’t forget all the anti-meele mechanics that force you to hard cast heals when HS is on cd and you aren’t in meele range.
Mastery has been an issue for a decade but they are deaf about it.
I started to hate the SOTR sound (like the Blade of Justice one, so unpleasant).
I think I have had enough with the class and healing this expansion. So yeah, I benched my paladin. I miss the old healing nukes we used to drop, honestly, and how our crits interact with our whole talent tree. But now it’s like accumulative small healings, not satisfactory at all.
Its crazy how much smoother mistweaver healing+damage is. I don’t think thats any more part of a monk class fantasy than what a paladin should be. We shouldn’t even be using SoTR imo, just bake it into LoD as someone recommended. Theres so much bloat with paladin right now. Takes care of the “needing a shield” thing as well.
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Personally ive always believed that’s because there was always a clear, constant condition that needed to be met for Mistweavers damage to healing. Keep Jadefire Stomp active and stand in it. Simple and straight forward.
Ive been saying if they just added something similar with Consecration, Judgement and CS heal. But that’d be too similar to Jadefire stomp so we’re left with the balance nightmare of AC.
This is one of the most fun iterations of HPal when you play it the way it was designed to be played imo.
I definitely think Light of Dawn needs some changes or an outright rework at this point, Flash of Light and Holy Light could use some buffs to make the caster playstyle not terrible, Lightsmith needs some more group healing to compete with Herald in m+, and I do have concerns about future seasons with how reliant we are on Virtue for AoE healing currently.
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Caster Paladin is suboptimal. Doesn’t fix the spot healing since at all since FoL is relatively weak even if you take Divine revelations/moment of Compassion/Divine Favour etc. The difference is just that you will be casting FoL as filler/builder, other than that, there’s really not much between both playstyle as you will still be in melee.
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The fantasy is wonderful. The gameplay feels rough. Going from resto shaman where you can press your riptide button on someone with 30% health remaining and see it shoot to full, to Holy Paladin where I often feel like I’m just shining flashlights on people is pretty tough.
I’ve also been trying to make Lightsmith work because I love it thematically, but it’s simply not consistent enough. Having no HoTs in modern content is difficult.
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The melee healing is awesome, to me it’s the other parts that make it rough. Light of Dawn feels really weak and awkward to use. It’s a cone so it’s vague and really positioning specific, but you also don’t have many HoTs so Hpal tends to be a very ‘unforgiving’ spec. You end up in a situation where you’re doing melee damage but then also must flip your camera around to try and locate and target all your damaged allies. It’s no wonder most people just spam WoG.
The solution to this to me is a talent to make Light of Dawn a circular radius with reduced healing past 5 people. Let us have a consistent AoE heal button like every other healers has
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