I’ve been playing around with the numbers trying to find the best healing priority for shadowlands and what I’ve noticed is Crusader’s Might is a significant HPS and HPM loss. This is due to it losing the reduction on Light of Dawn, the lower value of Holy Shock in relation to Flash of Light and Holy Light compared to BFA, and the mana cost of Crusader Strike. As a fan of the Crusader’s Might build I’d like to see it remain at least competitive with the non Crusader’s Might build.
Holy Shock does provide extra Holy Power, which can be funneled towards Word of Glory and Light of Dawn.
I took that into consideration. Crusader Mights’ value was based off a partial of Word of Glory/Light of Dawn and Holy Shock. Holy Shock’s value included it’s heal, It’s interaction with FoL/HL as well as FOL/HL on a beacon, and a partial of WoG/LoD. It still came up short compared to a non CM build in HPM and HPS.
In every case except a Holy Light on a non beacon target was a better choice than doing a Crusader Strike and even then it’s about equal. That doesn’t even take into account the Bestow Faith/Light’s Hammer you would get by not taking Crusader’s Might.
I’m not currently weighting the extra DPS or the intangibles like extra mobility that Crusader’s Might gives or the flexibility it reduces in needing to be in melee. I haven’t factored in Glimmer yet either but currently with it being weaker on the Beta and no longer interacting with Divine Purpose I have my doubts. The biggest factors seem to be HL/FoL, especially when casting on the beacon, are a little stronger and HS and Glimmer are a decent amount weaker on the beta which weakens the power of the Crusader’s Might build. The fairly large mana cost of Crusader Strike in the beta actually makes the Crusader’s Might build a HPM loss in comparison to the traditional build.
Eventually I hope to post a complete numerical spreadsheet of the spell values but as of now the preliminary results are not favorable towards Crusader’s Might. Regardless, as a competitor, I’ll play whatever is optimal but as a fan of Crusader’s Might I hope it can remain competitive in Shadowlands and not just “viable”.
It just dawned on me that maybe that’s the plan. In BFA our best healing was with Crusader’s Might and it contributed a decent amount of damage. Maybe in Shadowlands they want our optimal healing build to do very little damage and if we need to do both then we need to compromise more of our healing. That makes sense.
So I’ve added in Glimmer and it’s closer than I thought. HPM wise Crusader’s Might is slightly better than the standard build. However, even at 8 Glimmers, the standard build will be a fair amount higher HPS. Keep mind both builds were using Glimmer it’s just the additional Glimmers, Holy Shocks, and WoGs from using Crusader’s Might did not perform well enough to stay up with the standard build. But even using Crusader’s Might it was more HPS to use HL/FoL during IoL or on a beacon and a regular FoL until you got to 5 Glimmers. Only a non beacon non IoL HL was an HPS loss to a Crusader Strike that fully reduced a Holy Shock by 1.5 seconds.