Healing is something I’ve done very little of in my almost 20 years with the game. I made another paladin with the whole purpose of going 1-70 as holy.
I’m 67 now and… what’s the point of this mastery? The way it feels while leveling is they want you to be in melee and doing damage. But… it doesn’t really do any healing. Word of Glory is so strong on prot and incredibly weak on Holy… huh??? Hard casting holy light and flash of light is turbo bad. It feels TERRIBLE compared to literally your entire kit being instant. Hammer of wrath does good healing but isn’t used much. I feel holy pally’s should be so good at aoe healing given their design to be melee. I expect shield of the righteous to do massive healing when I smack it but the talent is garbo. AoE healing with holy is really brutal, light of dawn does absolute peanuts. What’s the point of holy power if the spenders do absolutely nothing?? I just don’t get what’s going on with this spec.
Is it because they want healers to think about mana??? I don’t think there’s a single builder spender healing spec in the game. So… why not just lean into for holy?
Then again this is coming from a player that hasn’t played healer much but my thought of a modern healer is one that does damage until they need to heal… which could be turbo wrong but it’s my thought.
Also Divine Steed still feels so weak on pally.
At 67, you’re probably scaled super poorly for the content you’re doing. You’ll need to get ilevel before you see health bars move.
The mastery is a bit of a relic. But it’s pretty useable now that it synergizes with beacons assuming you talented into it.
Glimmer of light is very strong multi target. The talent “of dusk and dawn” is needed for spenders to feel good, but they are admittedly a little under tuned right now. But only a little.
Word of Glory needs talent investment to feel good, to the point a lot of folks neglect to cast it and opt instead for an empowered flash or holy light, or swap a beacon to whomever needs the spot heal. If you want word of Glory to be useable, there’s a talent in the class tree that gives it +20% while in consecrate, a talent in the right tree that gives up to +45% via casting light of dawn’s, and a capstone that gives you an empowered light of dawn when you cast word of Glory. I run max word of glory investment, but others may advise against it.
People complain about divine steed, but its literally 100% boost when you need it off GCD on 45 sec CD. Sprint is 70% on 2m, spirit walk is 60% on 1m, tiger’s lust is 70% on 30s. It’s numerically powerful.
Thanks for this amazing reply. Once I hit 70, holy shock with daybreak? Dawn break? Where it echoes holy shock a couple times feels so good. Definitely never leveling as a healing spec again hahaha. But, you actually never cast word of glory? What about light of dawn?
Don’t… do i…
mastery decays way too fast after 10-15yards.
Beacon makes your mastery as tho that beaconed target is you so if you are healing a beaconed target,’you have 100% of your mastery
Spenders suck. I ignore holy power typically unless I have 2x blessing of dawn or need to CDR down HOJ
For reference, base Light of Dawn heals ~400% spell power over 5 targets. It’s your primary cleave. But bear in mind base Holy Light heals ~500% spell power, just on a single target. Per unit time, Light of Dawn is about twice as fast though, so it’s 400 units of heals per action, while Holy light is 250 of the same unit. The talent Divine Favor or Hand of Divinity makes them comparable in time per action, however.
Light of Dawn chooses its targets by (almost) pure RNG, so it’s liable to overheal. Still, it is your best option for cleaving if target specificity isn’t an issue.
Obviously, you can factor other bonuses. You’ll probably always have a 20% bonus on each Light of Dawn if you have 1 stack of Blessing of Dawn, or 40% if you have 2 stacks.
Finally, the talent Glistening Radiance makes each holy power spender have a 25% chance to trigger Glimmer of Light. Glimmer is 164% of spell power, up to 216% for if you have 8 targets active. Rounding to 200, and assuming that 25% chance, thats an extra 50% spell powers to add onto Light of Dawn’s value.
They did want us to be in melee when they created the mastery. Now that Beacons also serve as Mastery focal points, it’s a lot less important. It does significant bonus healing though.
WoG can be pretty strong as Retribution, too. Holy Paladins have the weakest WoG’s of all three specs.
You don’t have to hardcast too much. Toss out a few empowered Flash of Lights, not a big problem. Holy Light is rarely used outside of raid, and not used all that much in raid either. Could probably remove it from the game and the class would be better off.
I like where SotR is right now as a DPS ability that can be talented to do some maintenance healing. Wish it did a little better damage still, though, and wish we didn’t actually need a shield to use it.
Light of Dawn’s healing is fine in a raid environment where you’ll hit max targets every time. Don’t even put it on your bars in M+ though, SotR and WoG only. They made these changes because, prior to our rework, people were complaining about being too dependent on spenders, and wasting all their time Crusader Striking enemies for no healing to build Holy Power just to use their spenders. There is a sizable portion of the hpal community that wanted to do away with Holy Power completely. I think Blizzard made a pretty good compromise by retaining HP but drastically reducing our dependence on it for healing. Think of it like a utility resource now. You don’t need it for throughput, it’s there to fill the role Light of the Martyr used to, letting you get an extra heal off while on the move, or contributing some damage with SotR.
Again, because for the first two seasons of Dragonflight we were all complaining about Blizzard leaning into builder/spender for hpal, since it feels horrible to be reliant on spenders.
Divine Steed is one of the most consistently useful and available movement abilities in the game (PVE, I don’t PVP)
Thank you for this amazing post! Divine Steed on 4 seconds feels really good.
I think the only way to make the spender healing work, based on what you said, is for crusader to heal your beacon targets or the lowest HP person in a 15 yard radius, and talent into it for more healing and bigger radius.
So Holy Light shouldn’t ever really be cast? Just Flash of Light if you need to hard cast? Light of Dawn never in m+ and in raid if you need it. I guess buffing Shield of the Righteous would screw pvp in some way.
Thanks again for the reply.
Holy Light (talented with Resplendence) is sometimes worth casting in raid, when it will hit max targets with the cleave heal. But since every holy paladin has to take Inflorescence of the Sunwell now, Flash of Light costs zero mana when you have Infusion of Light, and since every Holy Shock crit gives you two Infusions, it’s just hyper mana-efficient to spam Holy Shock + Flash of Light.
I feel like when paladins talk about wanting melee healing, they’re talking about something like that. More akin to monks’ fistweaving than a huge cooldown every minute like Avenging Crusader is.