Caster build has been a failure. Time to move on

Classes Paladin
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I think it’s time to admit that trying to bring back any sort of “caster” paladin build has failed. Not only is it unpopular, but it actively prevents Holy Paladin from reaching its full potential.

I have a few 410 ilvl healers, one of which is Evoker. Evoker talent trees are the pinnacle of what healer trees should be. Multiple extremely competitive meta builds for raiding, a tree full of synergistic talents, individual point choices per boss/dungeon/group comp.

This is because Evoker doesn’t have two wildly different playstyles it’s split between, all the talents enhance the core Evoker toolkit.

Now look at the right hand side of the Holy Paladin spec tree. It’s wasted. We could have gotten more ways to flex our Shadowlands playstyles, instead we got ruptured.

I hope Blizzard can take another pass at some of our talents, move away from the caster build asperations and give us more ways to play the class the way it should be played: instant cast melee healer.

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Honestly, I think it’s too early to give up on making both playstyles work.

The Class and Spec trees never got iterations during Beta, I mean, the class tree is literally half a tree right now…

No attempt was really made at making Paladins’ work, for any spec, for any playstyle, so idk if it’s fair to judge if something isn’t “working” just quite yet. =/

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I prefer a caster style for raids and PVP and love the melee build for m+. I wish they’d flesh the trees out more. It all has to start with re-designing infusion of light to work differently for melee vs caster.

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New talent trees had and still have every opportunity/potential to make both playstyles viable but there just aren’t enough devs/any devs that care enough to advocate for pallies.

But I look forward to druid’s 8th iteration in every new patch.

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The only thing preventing holy paladin from reaching its full potential is having healing output gated behind damage abilities. Time to go back to ret bro.

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It has to start with a lot of things, lol.

It’s very evident that our class was designed backwards, and it needs a complete rework from the ground up. :frowning:

The game has just evolved beyond what Paladins were…

Blizzard: I heard ya’ll liked Tyr’s Deliverance 10 years ago, here ya go… make it work.

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Tyr’s makes me so sad. An ability that heals for less than a WOG Crit that has a cast time and a 1.5 min cooldown.

Oof.

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It’s ok to just say you don’t play high keys or raid mythic. I think getting rid of casting would help you in LFR as well.

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I don’t care lol. I’ve done this argument 100000 times with Resident Evil 4 kids. History > whatever this garbage is.

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100% agree.

I get that a minority of people are attached to the idea of a caster holy paladin, but the class design doesn’t have room for two viable archetypes with multiple sub builds.

Pally and Monk should just be full melee healers with more interesting talent choices. There’s plenty of other ranged healing specialization to choose from.

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Boldly spoken for a level 45 character.

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I’d argue it’s definitely not a minority. Not sure how long you’ve played, but Hpal was always a ranged, tanky, big bomb casted heals spec from vanilla all the way up til Legion. It was always my favorite healer.

The current design is a clunky mess. Too many instant casts and weak casted heals. Extremely weak outside of cds. Granted I come from a PvP point of view, but the spec is designed very poorly. It’s either broken due to numbers tuning, or bad. The melee mastery fairs poorly in a PvP environment. Tbh it’s just awkward and unfun to play. The melee playstyle may work okay in mythic+ but that’s it.

Personally the need to stray away from pushing healers into doing so much damage and go back to the old school healing archetype.

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Um… some evokers have wildly different builds and playstyles. Some never touch emerald blossom, some focus their builds around frequently using it.

Some people do lifebind combos, some do not.

The way one evoker uses their echoes vs. another may differ significantly.

The TA changes in 10.0.5 took away a bit of a TA focused style outside of raiding, but the idea that Evokers don’t have significantly different playstyle options in their tree is completely false.

Melee pally is a modification of caster paladins, which pre-date melee builds by several years.

Melee pally doesn’t even do any healing from melee directly outside of a cooldown. “Melee pally” is essentially just choosing to manage your resources differently.

Caster builds really just need a few modifications to be in a good place.

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I would prefer if the tore down half of the talents to eliminate one spec. I don’t actually care which. Just choose. Ret rework is coming, let’s get some work done for holy also.

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Yeah, it’s wild that this guy will just delete the entire history of paladin because blizzard is too incompetent to implement a real caster spec. If the general tree was good one could perhaps argue that blizz gave an honest effort; but we all know no real effort was made.

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The problem with melee vs caster with holy is the talents are to specific to one build and the Mastery.

-Tyr’s Deliverance line is to much on casting HL and FoL on a specific target. Maybe focus the extension on Holy Shock and spenders without a specific target. Then fix how much it heals, and how many is healed, and make it all one talent.

-Power of the Silver Hand just delete

-Barrier of Faith just make it Sacred Shield with 2 charges and adds a tiny 5% damage reduction plus maybe it can proc something

-Light of Dawn range be 30-40yrd baseline maybe a talent choice node with Holy Radiance(aoe 20 yrds around the target healed)

-LotM line brought down to 2 talent points add more flexibility(WoG) to maraad’s

-Infusion of Light change. Lots of Ideas out there

-Make Holy Light and Flash of Light generate HP without a beacon to stop silly gameplay of just healing beacons to get HP(Tower of Radiance buff helps but still crappy)

I also agree just having either caster or melee to focus and pray they can make talents interesting

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Id prefer casting over avenging crusader as a sometimes alt holy paladin.

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My issue is they tried to incorporate Caster Paladin back but completely missed the mark in terms of Holy Power Generation.

The ground work is their but it’s missing a lot of core skills or adjustments to really make it shine.

For example Denounce replacing Crusader Strike to be a consistent HP generator, consecration being a targeted AoE spell.

Literally these two changes alone would be a great step forward and easily achieved.

Holy Shock becomes baseline, first node is a choice node between Crusader Strike and Denounce, this will determine your play style, obviously going as is you’d pick CS nothing changes, Denounce replaces CS as a ranged casting ability and consecration becomes a targeted AoE.

I feel like they just didn’t think it through entirely.

Caster Paladin brings so much nostalgia for me I’d love to see it return some way.

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Ironically, Caster HPal worked better in Shadowlands before the options for a dedicated build. (PvP speaking)

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And once upon a time, Paladins were also the dedicated “tank healers” too. And Ghostcrawler (remember him?) had to make a post telling Holy Paladins how to heal Loken because they also had no multi-target healing that didn’t rhyme with “Deacon of Fright”

I assume you’ve also probably noticed that long-casted big bomb heals are harder to pull off these days than they used to be to…like…being dependent on long casts for throughput isn’t the best place to be in a lot of situations…

Are we talking back to the days where healers sat around twiddling their thumbs because their mp5 wouldn’t kick in if they spent mana on damage? Or farther back to when whatever damage they did hardly mattered anyway because +damage and +healing were different stats? And I mean…now that Ashen Hallow is gone and Evokers are a thing, it’s not like H Paladins do THAT much damage anyway…

I hate to be “that guy,” but you’re posting on a level 17 warlock so clearly you understand the concept of posting on toon that isn’t one’s main…

I disagree. It’s more of a balance question than a design question, though.

However, also agree: when in Legion Blizzard said "hey, maybe plate wearing paladins should actually be in melee range I rather agreed with that. Let the cloth-wearing squishies cast from way out in left field. What’s the point of plate armor if you aren’t going to be in the thick of it?

Awesome idea actually. I spend the entire last expansion (and maybe more?) ignoring the bananas around my Paladin. Kinda dumb, really.

This sounds like a “you” problem: Holy has been a top-tier healer while having healing output “gated” behind damage abilities, so this is clearly not an accurate statement. You can have your opinions, but you don’t get to pretend that your opinions are facts.

I don’t necessarily disagree: however I will add that Evokers have zero history as a class previous to these talent trees. I think the Preservation Evoker tree is good, but my opinion is also utterly untainted by any history with the class, unlike every other. Building a class from the ground up with the new talent trees in mind is a different project than when you have to account for the various iterations and play styles people have enjoyed over the years.

I mean…it actually sort of does though. I wouldn’t say it’s quite as disparate as what they are trying to accomplish with Holy Paladins, but again…ground up versus long history of various iterations.

And to officially take a side, I suppose; I think Paladin should 100% be a melee class. I LIKE that it’s such a different beast than other healing classes. I LIKE that the tradeoff for having so much instant-cast power is having to think a few GCDs ahead (even if it takes some time to get used to). The CD dependence…well not so much. It’s not perfect. But I do LIKE melee Holy Pally. It feels unique compared to every other healer’s healing style, and as an alcoholic, err… altoholic, that matters to me.

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