Are we throwing away years and years of identity in favor of an unintentional playstyle?

Classes Paladin
1

The last time being a ranged caster holy pally was 100% viable was WoD. The mastery was changed in Legion so that the magnitude of our heals become a function of distance between the target and the paladin. This does not necessarily mean we are melee healers, more so proximity healers who need to carefully position themselves between melee and ranged to maximize our healing potential.

BFA releases with azerite gear, and someone figured out that you could start gearing haste/mastery, rather than crit/mastery and stand in melee the entire time and spam CS and do ridiculous HPS. That’s cool, I guess. This change effectively means that the holy paladins healing is a function of how many CS you can squeeze out per fight, and I do not like that, at all. I disliked the GoL playstyle so much that when I was recovering from jaw surgery in summer 2019, I renewed my subscription and open a quick guide to see if the stat priority was still the same as it was before and saw that haste is now dominant and proceeded to close the guide out of disgust and went on playing the traditional caster pally.

Now we are at the end of BFA and moving into SL, and there appears to be a schism between players who want to keep the traditional holy pally playstyle, and parse tourists who will play whatever will net them the most HPS for their wowlogs.

I have seen people suggest that holy paladins have “always been melee healers!” as if the mastery change in Legion somehow meant we were required to DPS to do maximum HPS. Despite the mastery change in Legion, we were still casters who used Judgment on CD for the legendary ring proc + JoL, unless we were saving it for big incoming damage.

This new healer/melee dps hybrid design philosophy feels artificial and is a slap in the face to everyone who prefers the old playstyle instead of the GoL playstyle. Holy paladins have never been melee dps/healer hybrids until this GoL playstyle came along, and now people are being historical revisionists and acting as if we have always been dps healers.

The future of hpal seems like it hinges on the direction the spec is about to take in SL and I hope the devs make the right choice and move away from melee dps healing, and start making design decisions that move the spec back towards what it has historically been. GoL is essentially a one time meme build that was much stronger than the traditional playstyle because the traditional playstyle has been neglected with the mastery change in Legion. The gap between the tradtional playstyle and GoL should never have been as wide as it was.

I have been playing my paladin for 12 years and I am at the point where I am either going to a) keep playing the old style build and being ridiculed for it b) play my holy priest or c) unsub.

Please stop with the melee dps/healer stuff.

20 Likes
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I’m someone whos’ in the Hpally should be melee camp myself. What I find interesting to note is that Blizzard has infact always seemed to have mechanics on paladin they might have been added with the intention of it being a melee healer, but just wasn’t practical due to theory crafting and how the other game mechanics work., such as hit rate and how fight mechanics target healers.

In Vanilla and TBC you have the Seal and Judgment system, which where enhancements to your autos/debuffs that you maintained on the enemy by auto-attacking, they seemed to be intended to be a passive way for paladins to provide damage and support between spellcasts, with FoL’s intention being a spell you quickly toss out between swings. From playing classic and using mouseover macros to heal, I’ve found in alot of situations that this method is rather effective. However, the players also realized that FoL is an incredibly effecient spell to cast So it became the “blue dress and spam” style instead of the intended “support with passive melee swings between healing and buffing style” There are a few interviews on Youtube where one of the classic designers, Kevin Jordan, stated that this was the intention with the design.

Wotlk is a tad more blurry but the Holy Tree does have the caveat that judmgents of the Pure also increased Melee haste as well as casting haste. and even then i’ve read a few guides that state attacking in melee to benefit from Seal of Wisdom is an “ancient paladin secret”

Cataclysm continues this trend, even giving the holy paladin the old ret trait that caused crits to place a stacking buff on themselves that increased their damage (and healing ofc) and keeping the Judgments of the Pure mechanic, albiet without all the old support judgments. This does however also come with the introduction of the Denounce mechanic (albiet as a buff on Exorcism instead of it’s own spell). And Holy Power was added, even with the option, however limited due to fight design, of using Crusader strike to help generate it.

MoP and WoD are where I somewhat agree with you, with the introduction of Denounce as a core filler for dpsing. but even then there was still the seals and the option (again option, im aware it wasn’t optimal or always practical) of using crusader strike to generate Holy Power. I do think this is about the point Blizzard had infact decided to embrace holy paladin being a fully ranged healer.

And then Legion, with the goal of focusing heavily on class flavor and fantasy, brought back a heavier emphasis on being melee to make paladin stand out even more against other players. The old Absorption Mastery, which I get why it was missed, but absorptions where way too powerful and way to dominant, replaced with the proximity mechanic which at the least brought the paladin closer to the frontlines.

So yeah, I personally don’t agree with the “favor of an unintentional playstyle” when my own understanding seems to be that blizzard initially intended a melee style, saw players optimized it out of the class, gave them what they want for a bit, and slowly started to reintroduce it when they decided to focus on trying to make all the specs have unique identities.

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I think you are confusing “core healing functionality” with “spells and abilities that holy paladins should have because they are paladins”.

Holy paladins do wear plate armor and have shields. When questing by themselves, they are going to use Judgment, CS, Consecrate and Seals when they were in the game. I am not going to pretend otherwise. To my knowledge though (with the exception of BFA), holy paladins have never relied on melee dps abilities to actually heal though. We have always been the “tank healers” who drop massive single target heals and who struggle with AOE healing. This is the core identity of holy paladin and has been in the game for as long as I can remember.

Blizzard going “all in” on the melee dps healing is a byproduct of the GoL playstyle being so strong. The reason I say this new direction is artificial and unintentional is because GoL was an azerite trait that someone figured out was ridiculously strong if you optimize for it. Optimizing for GoL means standing in melee and spamming CS. This playstyle overshadowed the traditional playstyle in pure hps, and now the devs believe that the future of holy paladin lies in being melee dps/healer hybrids rather than casters because people wanted to do maximum hps for their mythic progression. We would not be in this situation if the traditional holy playstyle was not nerfed and overshadowed by GoL. This is why I use the terms artificial and unintended.

As it stands right now, I am somewhat okay with throwing out the occasional CS for HP, but the idea of being forced to dps as much as a disc priest is a huge turn off. Even before the mastery change, I enjoyed standing in melee range in dungeons and interrupting for the tank with Rebuke, positioning mobs with AT before the nerf and stunning mobs with HoJ. These are important aspects of the holy paladin toolkit and functionality, but my effective healing was never tied to my dps. This is a fundamental change which I just flat out do not agree with.

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Unless you are trying to be top of the top what is forcing you to go with one play style or the other?

As long as you can clear the content at the level you want to clear does it matter?

1 Like
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The point I intended on making is that I disagree with your statement that paladin being a melee healer is an “unintentional playstyle” by giving examples of little things that appear to be mechanics that blizzard have implemented in the past that at the minimum suggest that blizzard always wanted the option of being frontline support even as a healer. Not to mention the entire lore of (at the minumum, human and dwarf) paladins are that they’re literally battle priests who where trained because the priests from the first war where poorly suited for combat.

Even if said mechanics where unoptimal or impractical in harder fights the design element was always there.

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They just need to commit to it frankly.

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You make very good points. My understanding is that the melee play style is still the top play style but the caster play style is not that far behind, and may even be dominant at end game with legendaries, soulbinds, and tuning.

I think it is unfortunate how holy Paladins have evolved with time. I would prefer a play style that is range independent. I would like to go back to being a caster first, but I don’t mind being incentivized to be in melee.

Ultimately, Paladin is the class I like the best and healing is the role I like to fill. I will stick with Holy unless my guild needs me to dps or tank. I know some version of my spec will be viable, because Blizz would have to really drop the ball to make it not.

Here’s hoping they change their minds on the spec direction in future expansions.

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Frankly, Blizzard needs to enable us to go either way, and make both viable playstyles.

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I’m pissed of what Ret has become, but seeing what they did to Holy is disgusting too.

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If they are so hell-bent on making us melee healers at least give us something like disc has that makes all of our dps abilities heal rather than a cd like avenging crusader. I do not like this middle of the road crap they given us. The rework in legion made me hate my hpal. The only reason I have even leveled it is for sentimental reasons as it was my first character. I still have hope that I will enjoy it again, someday…maybe.

2 Likes
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My main concern is that going further in the melee dps healer hybrid direction may hinder my ability to play the traditional style hpal. I feel I lucked out in BFA, given that my preference was still somewhat viable for mythic+ and heroic raiding. Hypothetical future design decisions may negatively affect my ability to play caster pally, and I think the concept of melee dps hpal needs to stop now.

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You did give many examples of little things that add flavor to the the holy paladin identity, but at no point was your effective healing ever a function of your dps as much as it is now. Sure, autoattacking for mana will give you some mana back, which will allow you to cast more spells, so in that sense you’re right. But the difference between that and GoL in terms of sheer melee dps seems like the difference between night and day to me.

I guess we disagree on the use of intentional/unintentional. I know what you mean by saying that these are intentional design choices in the sense that the devs are consciously making these design decisions, and they may very well have intended this from the very beginning, but I still maintain that the extent of these design decision are the result of the unintentional GoL build that overshadowed the traditional playstyle in mythic raiding.

I think there is an important difference between being a paladin, who naturally has a fair amount of melee spells/abilities, and just full on being a healer who has to dps to heal.

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Well said.

I wish we lived in a universe where if someone was taking damage I could cast and heal them while using mana as my resource.
Now we have to spend several GCDs which don’t heal but still cost me mana and if this person that needs a heal is still alive maybe I can heal them. Maybe.

2 Likes
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Disagree with the premise. Holy Paladins as a melee healer gives us a clear and distinct identity, and Blizzard has been clearly pushing us in this direction since Legion. That’s a good thing.

The dominance of 8.2+ Glimmer and the current clunky mess is… not so good. I’m all in favour of a viable traditional healer build (as per the 8.0 build where we spammed a lot of Holy Light and only got down and dirty with Avenging Crusader), but I’m strongly in favour of Blizzard committing to Paladins in melee range.

Note: That should probably involve more mobility with a healer build. For example, I think an excellent change would be for Holy Shock to guarantee Infusion again (RNG on HS crits is horrible) and Infusion makes FoL instant.

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Holy Paladin is supposed to be a melee healer. The spec is inspired by the cleric in D&D. Glimmer is a red herring. They can remove it from our spell book and it wouldn’t change a thing. There is a reason we wear plate armor and use a shield. That should tell you what the designers had in mind.

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The change in Legion made us proximity healers though, not melee healers. I state this in the first paragraph. If we are forced to stand in melee 100% of the time, which some people seem to actually think is a good idea, then our mastery in its current state gimps our ability to heal anyone who is not in melee range, effectively meaning we can only heal approximately half the raid.

I do not think that more mobility is a solution. It feels more like a band-aid at best. Imagine big damage going out and the range are in need of healing ASAP. Are you suggesting that we mount up and run out to them to heal them and then run back to melee range? Our healing is mainly tied to CS, so we are losing healing the second we leave melee range. This seems very inefficient and poorly designed.

I think there is an important distinction between being a paladin who has melee functionality as part of their identity, as opposed to being a healer who literally produces healing by doing melee damage. I am perfectly fine with the former, it is the latter which I have issues with.

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There is a difference between having melee functionality as part of the spec identity and being a healer who produces green numbers by doing melee dps.

1 Like
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How do we produce green numbers by doing melee dps? That sounds like a fist weaving play style.

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By standing in melee range spamming CS to lower the remaining CD on HS, as per the GoL playstyle.

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I agree with this. I would play much more of holy paladin if they allowed traditional range healer style more. Heals are still casts, it exposes to kicks, it’s not fun in chaotic 40v40 or BGs.

I actually tried to play current holy paladin without crusader strike this prepatch and I loved the gameplay, it reminded me of MoP a lot. However this will probably end up sub optimal eventually, but I wish it was officially supported. Let there be a talent that moves HP generation from CS to some ranged heal, maybe make bestow faith generate HP on application instead of cast.

Talents are supposed to allow to tailor the experience to your liking. Let there be a way.