I hope everyone is doing very well. I am back in the game after a while and I intend to play holy paladin in pvp, especially BGB (no arenas for the moment). It’s my first time playing this spec, and I’m finding it somewhat complex to “make it work”.
My problem is that I feel that this specialization suffers from “button bloat”, and so, I would like to know if the following abilities are really used when playing battegrounds as a hpal, or if I should remove them from my bars:
LOD: simply feels like a wasted button. It doesn’t heal at all.
SOTR: I find it very useful when doing PvE, but I don’t see how to include it in my rotation when playing PvP.
Consecration: The same thing happens to me as with SOTR.
FOL: I heard someone say that FOL heals too little to be worth having a button assigned to this skill (even with the talent that increases its healing by 50% whenever you are healing an ally with the beacon of light).
Crusader Strike: I don’t like having to do damage to heal, I’m generally what I call a “turret healer”, i.e. stay a bit away from where everyone is fighting, and just heal from there.
That’s why I’m also interested in knowing if it’s worth using FOL to heal, as it’s the ability I prefer to use to get holy power.
If possible, I would also like to know if you consider that I should continue using Beacon of Faith, or if I should change it to Beacon of Virtue, considering that BGB may require more AOE healing.
LoD is pretty useless. It heals for very little, has limited range in PvP, and lacks a lot of buffs that WoG/Eternal Flame (Herald Hero Talent) have. It is a pretty useless button.
SotR is also a pretty useless button in itself, but there is a PvP Talent called Denounce that replaces SotR with a single target, ranged, DPS ability. Though this still costs Holy Power.
This being a PvP Talent makes its use slowly fade as you get higher in rating. The damage and cost, both Holy Power and being a talent, is too steep for how little it does, and 2100+ you will rarely see Hpals running it cause your job shifts more into the 40 yard healer role.
Consecration has pretty decent, but niche use.
You can break enemies out of stealth
Class Talent: Golden Path, the talent that grants healing isn’t awful
Class Talent: Consecrated Ground snares people, something very useful vs some classes cause paladin is a bit squishy when sat on.
PvP Talent: Hallowed Ground removes snares for you and allies within it, very useful vs Mage, DK, and Hunter.
FoL isn’t a “great” ability, Paladins have struggled with finding a balance between Flash of Light and Holy Light for the last 4 expansions now.
FoL is your quick cheap heal, Holy Light is your long casted heavy hitter heal. They both are buffed differently by Infusion of Light proc, and are just both situational. =/
Neither spell will account for much of your overall healing, but again it just a situational thing. If you need that big heal, and know you won’t get kicked, you cast the Holy Light. If you only have a second to spare, than you may find yourself casting a FoL.
These are hard to tell.
Crusader Strikes has some uses when playing Avenging Crusader (melee wings), and other times its used as a nice Totem Stomping ability.
There are situations where you can use it on a random Pet and generate a charge of Holy Power, but you aren’t going into the front lines hitting CS and SotR very often.
Again, it’s just this weird identity issue with Paladins where Blizzard gives the option of Denounce, but doesn’t address CS. =/
Depends on the map, usually.
BoV can see some decent use when you are healing the offensive group in Battle of Glineas, or Temple of Kotmogu, but if you’re doing Arena or small group pvp, like defending the mines with 1-2 other players, BoF is probably better.
While it’s never really great to remove abilities from your Hotbar, LoD and SotR are two that you don’t really need. Of all the abilities, these are probably two you could remove and still get 2400.
(Again, if you’re not running Denounce[PvP Talent])
Everything else is hard to judge cause it’s pretty situational. =/