Concerns about Holy Paladin Playstyle in S1, S2 and beyond

Classes Paladin
1

I think a good amount of Hpal mains can agree that Herald during TWW and 11.0.0 was close to being one of the best iterations of Hpal:

  • Insanely good spot healing → Spenders felt impactful and Holy shock moved bars.
  • Mana despite not having a proper management mechanic was not an issue
  • Fast paced
  • Utility still in a pretty good spot despite the Sac nerfs
  • Durability still decent enough.
  • Melee gameplay was optimal but could survive while being outside of melee.

Then we got mostly nerfs for Herald and major buffs for Lightsmith.

Enter 11.0.5, Lightsmith AC finally surpasses Herald with:

  • Almost no mana management required.
  • Superior DPS.
  • With the introduction of Tempered in battle, Blessed Assurance buff (AC /CS buffs) and Hammer and Avil, LS finally not only catches up to Herald but surpasses the other herald talent in raw HPS while having damage prevention in Holy Bulwark.
  • Holy Bulwark itseld + Sacred Weapon/Tempered in battle giving more agency to Health pool control.

I love both, LS AC and Herald, however, AC has an 33% ish uptime, and in this window, our main kit takes a backseat, be it Holy Shock, WoG or LoD, significantly shifting our playstyle for better or worse, and rendering our tier set mostly useless.

I would love to see some help delivered to herald, our mana management, herald dps and most importantly spot healing, since I love deeply both playstyles but feel like going forward to S2 with only LS/AC being viable would be a flaw in Hpal design philosophy and our core gameplay. When AC was meta back in early S2 DF, it was quickly overnerfed, but now LS has been dominant for too long, and while I love this playstyle, I feel like it strays far away from the intended/original vision of Hpal for TWW, specially since originally what enabled AC to be viable was a unintended buff to Blessed Assurance which was directed at Prot Paladins and we also got, and this was never rolled back (not that I’m complaining either here tbf…)

Improvements for Hpal going forward:

  • Swapping RI with Power of the Silver Hand positioning in tree
  • Holy Shock is once again too costly and too weak for our main spam ability. With the current cost of Virtue, HS and the healing power Herald has, there’s not a lot of reasons to play it over LS AC.
  • Adding a mana refund mechanic for SotR or Holy Shock used on enemis
  • Revisit our DPS sources/overall.
  • Changes to Hammer and Anvil . This being RNG is terrible for healer design since its still pretty powerful, instead of being consistenly extra healing on judgement that can also crit.
  • Sacrifice of the just being just 15 secs feels terrible and a dead talent.
  • LotM current design and numbers.

I think all of this should be looked by the devs at before entering Season 2. Feel free to add anything you think it may be needed going forward

TLDR; buff Herald to catch up to LS AC, focus on improving the core gameplay of Hpal so both playstyle are close to each other.

6 Likes
2

Yeah 100% agree.

I’ve been concerned with the direction Hpal is heading. I only hope they are cooking something up because it’s starting to feel a little doom and gloom when it comes to the state of things.

The reason I say that is because the hero talents have put the spec in a position where mana, max DPS and max HPS potential are all tied to 1 of the hero talent and I really don’t know how they can fix that without a number of sweeping changes and that’s just unlikely until next season now. If you consider season 2 isn’t likely to land until the end of February, it’s looking like a rough couple of months for this spec.

I also have grown to like playing both, however, I feel like LS + AC has a short lifespan in terms of fun. At some point I will want to feel in control of my healing again and I worry that without nerfs to AC + LS, that just wont be possible.

This is the issue, I don’t really know how they can do that. Perhaps I don’t fully understand why Herald is more mana starved, but how can it’s mana be improved?

My understanding is LS + AC just has many more cheaper globals compared to Herald and to do the same HPS, Herald has to cast more Holy Shocks, Eternal Flames etc. I guess having 33% uptime on AC where you don’t press HS and you just press CS (15k mana) and Judgment (42k mana) works out to be a lot cheaper in the long run compared to a 70k mana Holy Shock etc.

If they just reduced the cost of HS, LS + AC would benefit too and just never use mana in and outside of wings and for that, still be the play.

I guess the problem is AC and so increasing the cost of AC would go some way to address the imbalance. :dracthyr_shrug:

The other issue I see with Herald is the healing profile it provides. With 2 minute wings and Sun’s Avatar lines, you’re a god. Add Virtue and … :exploding_head:. Outside of that you’ll feel anemic and that doesn’t feel great either and has very few places where it would be good outside of a raid encounter where 2 minute stacked burst is needed. AC + LS just has healing all the time even if it’s random procs of Hammer and Anvil.

2 Likes
3

I am still one of those Hpal die hards who hasn’t rerolled. I will say right now the problem of the Hpal is that Port and Ret are so far superior in terms of bringing tools to group content. I have played both. I love both, I feel more in control with herald? Yes. But I feel more powerfull with LS. Tempered in battle is one the best talents we ever had It’s amazing and I don’t want to lose it unless they find a way to keep wings up more time outside of me spaming for awakening or wait for 2 mins (Herald). But overall we are strong. our main problem is that Prot and Ret are stronger and when I am pugging I can see parties with both and no way I am going to get invited as a 3erd paladin.

BTW rite of Sanct is goated.

1 Like
4

I started as hpal in S1 of TWW, but have since re-rolled. My paladin is still geared and all, and I still do my round of weeklies on him, but I have to say I echo a lot of the same sentiments shared here. Especially so after trying out most of the other healers and seeing how much better they’re performing with their hero talents. Some of them clearly have their own issues, like Oracle Disc, but most feel like they’re in a much healthier state.

I played a lot of Holy Paladin on PTR, and watching Herald be nerfed into uselessness has been disheartening. It was such a strong theme for a hero talent tree, and really complimented the Holy Paladin playstyle after the removal of Glimmer and its related talents. Holy Shock and WoG/EF felt great to press, finally.

But after the nerfs it just felt so lackluster to play. Outside of wings every 2 minutes your healing just feels like it tickles health bars.

And then we had the rise of Lightsmith. I don’t mind the idea of a more utilitarian hero talent tree, but it’s been buffed so much that now it outpaces Herald on all fronts. It feels better having wings every minute, especially for how often incoming damage is happening m+.

However, after trying out Mistweaver, it’s hard to play Lightsmith and not feel like it’s a scuffed version of Mistweaver. There’s a lot of parallels between toolkits even, like:

  1. AC = Chi-Ji (1 min)
  2. Divine Toll = Sheiluns
  3. Aura Mastery = Revival (3 min)
  4. Blessing of Sacrifice = Chi Cocoon

And so on. But MW gets a lot of other tools, like being able to heal while stepping outside of melee with empowered Jade Lightning. It just feels way more cohesive and better put together.

AC Lightsmith works, but to me it almost feels like an unintended playstyle/build. HS/WOG are key parts of the toolkit for Holy, but they feel terrible to press with this hero build. Relying on Awakening procs to fill in gaps between CDs feels particularly bad to me, too. Especially when Disc Priests are able to pull off an insane burst AOE heal every 20 seconds with Mind Blast (+Mindbender) → Radiance → Penance to cover basically every damage event, it makes AC LS feel so much less effective in comparison. Heck even Totemic Resto Shaman can drop a HST every 15-20 seconds and let that cover basic AoE damage bursts better than Holy Paladin can.

As a side note, they really need to do something with Light of Dawn. Either make it worth pressing or get rid of it. Or maybe make it a choice node with Virtue, like in a raid vs dungeon decision.

3 Likes
5

Hi, I have a question. I’m fairly new to paladin and healing in general. Is there a ranged holy paladin build that works?

I tend to stay away from the mob because I prefer to be ranged and have more visibility on everything that happens.

Thank you in advance

6

yeah, thats my whole point with this kind of topics :frowning: I dont think I’m being all gloom and doom, had a lot of fun with Hpal this season though I had a lot less available time to play. I don’t think Hpal is in a bad spot number wise or balance wise, but it’s definitely concerning that even if it was intended or not (I think it was unintended) we strayed away from how Hpal was apparently supposed to be played by design, even if we still are not in the bottom of the barrel, this is not even talking about balance but about how current Hpal is being played compared to DF or other expansions.

AC was absolutely destroyed back in S2 DF before 10.1.5, and now here it has stayed for 2 months or more now (not that is neccesarily bad), but makes me question what’s their intended design goal/vision for Hpal, if they actually have one at this point?

I’m not really sure many of the nerfs Herald saw were justified, other than the early nerfs when we were 15% ahead in raid content.

I think reverting some of the mana nerfs (this is of course, assuming they dont want to/can’t afford to spend time on fixing our mana management as a whole), then nerfing some of the Herald Aoe passive healing, and then increasing our core kit as a whole. Maybe this will increase the power of LS/AC outside of AC windows, but then I think it becomes a real choice if you wanna go LS with AW:M instead or how and when you use your HS/Spenders vs CS/Judgement/SotR to heal.

I haven’t rerolled either, but have played pretty much all healers except Hpriest this season and Rdruid. I dont think the gap is even that big to be honest, like for example, how it was back in S3/S4 of DF. Same for ret and Prot, yeah they got 1 min Sac, but comparing to other healers, who else has Sac + Holy Bulwark + Bop + Freedom + Tempered In Battle + Aura Mastery? That alone is one of the best utility kits in the whole game, on the same level of Rshaman in my eyes or more.

Have you played with a Prot Pal in a premade? Double armaments is insanely fun.

Totally in agreement. That ability has been useless for like 3 or 4 seasons in a row now almost.

This is exactly how I feel, even if its fun.

While I feel like this is true to an extend, MW still lacks utility compared to us and mitigation .But ,their playstyle feels 100% like and intended playstyle, like you said, that it’s so true in my eyes, and this is why I’m concerend about how Hpal gonna feel in S2 if they dont make some changes here and there.

1 Like
7

You can use one of the preset talent builds from wowhead for range healing:

However… you will want to stay as close as you can to the majority of your party or raid, because of how mastery works. The closer you are to your targets, the better (larger) the heal.

Scroll down the page until you see the raid - caster talent sets, click the button to copy the talent build to your clipboard. In WoW open up your talent tree and look for the import button. Paste the contents of your clipboard into the box, then give it a name. You will then be able to select this any time you want to use a range healing spec. Personally I have them all saved, so I can switch between builds easily.

8

I did an extensive number of keys last week. LC AS Holy Paladin works, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s an unintended playstyle/build. It’s really tough to explain, but something that comes to mind is the era of the No-Ice Lance Frost Mage build that was in the past. Clearly Blizzard didn’t intend for Frost to ignore a button/proc, but it was more effective to ignore it. It kind of reminds me of that. It works, but it doesn’t feel legit to me.

I think it’s actually a very fun build, but it needs a little more fine tuning and tweaking I think. I like this direction for hpal, and it fits the class fantasy very well to me.

1 Like
9

I think it’s mostly because our core kit just takes a back sit. LoD? Been useless for seasons now. HS? You press it because you need HP, no because it feels good to press, not even to really spot heal outside of Rising Sunlight anymore, AND cost too much mana.
WoG? Good enough but not better than your CS with blessed assurance which also heals in AOE. Virtue + spenders is not doing as much as AC windows, etc etc.

The core design of the class, including the rework made during the beta of TWW just fell behind to unintended buffs and layers of passive effects like Tempered in Battle and Hammer and Anvil.

If you combine this with Holy Bulwark and AC + Blessed Assurance the whole package works, because of the sheer amount of tools and Health Pool control it provides (which I personally love), and honestly, I dont think other healer really has tools like this at this point, despite not being ‘meta’.

This enabled a whole different playstyle, ehich I think its really good but nerfing the core playstyle of Hpal, even when it was not overperforming at the time, definitely hurt it until this day. Not to the level of Caster Hpal in the latter half of DF, but still. Shammy has Spirit Link totem, Disc has double Pain sup, but we have Sac, Bulwark, Tempered in battle, BoP and LoH.

However, the fact that all those pieces work together doesnt really means they were meant to in the first place, something that Herald Hpal definitelty had going for, for example. At least thats how I view at it.

2 Likes
10

I think you hit the nail on the head. They put in so much effort into making core spells like HS/WoG work leading up to TWW, that this new LS AC setup feels jarring to play because it bypasses the base toolkit to such a large degree.

I think it’s a good playstyle, but it does feel like it’s missing something. It relies very heavily on Awakening procs to fill in gaps between AC/DT CDs, which I definitely do not like. Perhaps shorter CDs on AC/DT would help alleviate this, or perhaps a different CD entirely. I also think some rebalancing of the healing profile might be in order…HS/WoG should not be as weak as they are. The current balancing of power puts way too much strength in the LS hero tree IMO.

2 Likes
11

Not to mentioned that Sun Avatar’s talent is currently bugged and sometimes doesn’t apply a single Dawnlight

1 Like
12

Making avenging crusader have the 20% more healing and crit while reducing healing transferred from judgement and cs by 20% would mean we could use our base kit (which is better at single target healing) OR do damage for melee healing.
It would basically send wrath to the grave but even as someone pushing 13’ using wrath, I would love that change

13

Just wanted to mention LotM/Bestow Faith as an abject failure. This was probably supposed to beef up holy shocks, but isn’t/won’t be taken.

1 Like
14

This is true, think I mentioned it breifly above. Expanding on that, if they are not going to make it a net positive, why gave it a risk/reward mechanic?

This talent was somehow worth it when Holy Shock was roughly 25% stronger, because then they actually moved bars. And even then, you had a huge absorb shield on you during Virtue+DT windows because of No cap on the absorb

Holy shock is now nerfed, cost more, and just isn’t prominently used that much for spot healing anymore. Which imo is an issue, specially after how many rounds tuning it went during beta to make it worthwhile again to begin with.

Edit: Balance tuning 13/12/24

While these are positives, specially because veneration is such a small % of our overall, even 12.5% buff is probably meaningless either way. This buff doesn’t help with our ST tbh nor the issues described above.

Buffing Consecration damage is of course great, welcomed, but feel like consecration was doing a healthy chunk of our damage (about 10% ish), maybe SoTR and Holy Shock would have been better.