I’ve been testing and testing, and I feel that Herald and Sun’s Avatar is hard carrying paladin at the moment. Lightsmith for example is not even close and wont be. Our base kit is still weak and a RNG-fest.
RNG and % modifiers needs to go (at least a good amount of them like all you mention). The button bloat needs to go. Mana management for holy needs an overhaul. Spenders and Holy Shock need more looking into.
More power of Herald (and other sources) needs to go into our direct healing. That way paladin will be stronger at its Core, because lets be honest, Sun’s Avatar and probably herald extra throughput will receive probably more nerfs down the line, specially considering the numbers its doing in Raid right now, that way Lightsmith will be closer to Herald and once those passive abilities are tuned down, at least our direct healing would feel better.
Edit: which abilities could be prunned? Right now FoL serves really no purpose in Hpal. Blessing of seasons is yet another button taht exists just to give us modifiers and extra stuff that we are currently not needing. HoD and Tyrs can be merged together. Holy Armaments needs to be merged with our playstyle in some way either replacing a button or by another new interaction.
Felt the same thing watching raid testing with Dawnlight and Sun’s Avatar being the majority of Holy Paladin’s healing.
It doesn’t bode well for the spec when those inevitably get nerfed and we’re left barebones with the existing issues. I’ll happily take more Herald nerfs if it means Holy Paladin’s fundamental flaws are fixed and we’re properly tuned as a result.
I don’t want to see Flash of Light removed because that’ll effectively kill the caster build, which while I’m not a big fan of playing Paladin at range, reducing our ranged baseline healing spells to Holy Light and Holy Shock (WoG and LoD don’t count because both those are spenders) feels like the wrong way to go about it.
In my opinion;
Hand of Divinity needs to just be merged with Tyr’s
Divine Toll and Daybreak should be merged, and the requirements of glimmer cut, turning Divine Toll into just a mana regain button.
Blessing of Summer should just be cut. Lightsmith will already have Armaments, there’s no need to balance the spec’s base tree around this buff.
Remove Beacon of Virtue and replace by bringing back Holy Radiance. I understand Virtue is good for player expression, it’s still a cooldown. Personally I think it’s really dumb that to respond to aoe damage, we have to spend a global one spell, then more often than not, stack up other cooldowns in the hope that the single target heals we cast does something. Bring back Holy Radiance and give it a regular AOE heal cooldown like other healers. Then we can even get rid of the talents like the Holy Light splash healing.
Now the real crazy suggestions.
Change Infusion of Light to be closer to one it’s Cataclysm version. Infusion causes faster cast times of FoL and HL, and give HL higher chance to crit, maybe even 100% I dunno. The desire here is to avoid what the class looks like on Beta now, where it can drop massive bomb HLs twice every 1.3 minutes, but then struggles after that.
The most impossible; consider if Glimmer is even worth keeping. Right now, a lot of our spec feels like it’s designed to dance around Glimmer, which means Holy Shock has to be weak. But if Holy Shock is weak, then just about everything else is also weak because Holy Shock basically has its hand in everything. So Glimmer either needs to be significantly easier to ally to players to justify it being integral to our kit, or just scrapped all together so our kit can be balanced around actively healing a group instead of tickling them with the Light and having glimmer procs tickle them for some extra health.
Glimmer has a lot of things that make it sound fancy and effective, but I think it’s really just a lot of extra bloat in the spec tree that could be replaced with other things.
The reason Glimmer was so beloved in BFA is because it was strong. All you needed to do was get as many Glimmers as you could out on the raid (prior to it being capped in Nyalotha), and you were sitting pretty, pumping healing, and having a fun time.
In many ways, Holy Paladin back then had exactly what we want now: Less bloat, fewer cooldowns, and stronger core spells. I can’t find any logs from back then that aren’t archived, but I’m pretty sure the healing breakdown (after Glimmer was introduced) would look something like:
Glimmer of Light
Holy Shock
Light of Dawn
Well of Existence/other Essences, I forget
Flash of Light
Short and sweet, but very effective. We had half the CDs, but the buttons we did have felt good to press
Glimmer, as it is now, is a shadow of its Azerite self. I feel it’s better to give it the long overdue mercy kill it deserves and give what little healing power it adds directly to Holy Shock itself.
Eternal Flame is hitting significantly harder as is Holy Light.
More feedback:
Flash of Light is pointless at current tuning, especially since it is no longer mana reduced 100% with infusion procs.
Holy Light actually moves Health Bars further cementing the fact that FOL is useless.
the Silver Hand talent, if it procs, can beef up Holy Shock but kind of sucks relying on yet MORE of the RNG that plagues holy paladin
I wish the Eternal Flame HOT portion actually did something. 13k ticks on a 4M+ HP bar is effectively not noticeable.
Dawnlight being tied to one ability kind of feels bad. I wish it was similar to the Farseer shaman’s in that it is tied to one ability, but at least can RNG off another (but, you know, Hpaladin really doesn’t need more RNG).
Daybreaks Mana return is crap.
Holy Light’s mana cost is too much.
HP spender’s should lose their mana cost if everything else is going to stay the same.
Against my better judgement, I went into M+ with it. I actually ended up doing several cause the first one went surprisingly well. Holy Light (at least with infusion procs) may be the hardest hitting ST heal atm across all the classes.
Hoping not to get lost in the sea of Holy Paladin concerns, but just a few things which really stood out during my experience in the Beta test.
Revised Spec tree still feels a little clunky and tough to move around given the placement of 2 point nodes and importance of the capstones to the core gameplay requirements of M+ in particular. New Bastion of Light also feels worse to use in it’s new iteration at the 2 min CD.
Major scaling issues with the power of all healing, but specifically here: Word of Glory. This is supposed to be a significant tool in the Protection Paladin self sustain kit it should be immensely increased in power in general, but especially should it be self targeted.
Also on the WoG train, Lightsmith is somewhat focused on the regular consumption of Shining Light procs to ensure a stream of CDR on the central focus of the Hero Talent Tree. With the current mana cost on WoG, it is extremely common to run out of Mana which feels terrible as a tank since as mentioned above, there is a heavy reliance on this ability to ensure adequate enough self sustain to remain a competitive option in M+ and Raid.
The Solidarity node in the Lightsmith Hero Talent tree feels like a useless point since it provides a gameplay experience which should be intrinsically a part of Holy Armaments in general. Perhaps a better use of this node would be to provide said mana cost removal on WoG when used through a Shining Light proc. This could also further stand to provide uniqueness to the choice to play this Hero Talent set.
Holy Power Generation given current Beta gearing levels feels more starved than it should given current haste values. Templar’s demand on Holy Power is not met as a result and feels far worse of a choice to play in a tanking scenario like M+ where the resources are already strained with trying to maintain SOTR uptime. If this divide is by design and intended to drive a choice more aligned with M+ vs Raid, then alright, but given current haste values on beta it still feels unfun.
Holy Bulwark and Divine Guidance are impactful and feel good to use in practice. Yes, the absorb from Bulwark is huge but that’s what it’s supposed to do as part of the Lightsmith class fantasy. Please do not decimate this in tuning
-As surely mentioned before somewhere above, Class set 4pc is clearly not triggering off of SOTR. Hoping it’s a bug, but again calling it out as a reminder
As someone who is going to be put into Prot Pally for Mythic Raid prog in TWW and will have to push keys to do so, please for the love of the light, don’t make it feel like a prison by leaving things in the state they are now.
Some other nice to haves might be: HOPO back on Avenger’s Shield, SOTR off GCD, and another 5% armor on Sanctified Plates would go a long way.
Why is both hero talent trees for Ret Paladins made for Wake of Ashes?
I’m not saying WoA is bad, but I don’t use it. Why not have a Hero talent tree for something else?
This is crap and “forces” everyone to make almost the same talent tree builds. VERY boring and unimaginative development.
I thought, having a talent tree system, was about giving players choice. Focusing the hero talent trees around 1 talent, reduces build diversity, but having 2 hero talent trees for the same specc. focus on the same talent, basically completely removes player choice. It’s garbage. Fix please.
Which is, at least for me, the nightmare scenario.
Holy Light being the hardest hitting single target spell in the game, but requiring being propped up by what? 2 Cooldowns, and 4 layers of RNG would be terrible.
Right now, Glimmer is functionally a crappy Beacon that can only be spread 1 at a time using Holy Shock, the heals it provides are weaker if you spread it too much, but keeping it on one makes half the tree useless, and it’s also tied to our only on demand mana cooldown.
Just like the constant yo-yo with Beacon, everything has to be scaled terribly else Glimmer has the chance to be absolutely nutty.
We could just remove Glimmer, have our spells actually do something on their own again, and just actually give us a bloody non-Holy Power, AOE heal again.
It doesn’t even need to be crazy strong, able to blanket the entire raid and invalidate the rest of our kit. It just needs to be strong enough to give us some actual wiggle room in aoe situations that does not require cooldown stacking.
Unrelated but I will keep banging on about this.
Either buff Merciful Aura to actually be worth considering overing Blessing of Seasons,
Remove Merciful Aura if you don’t intend to buff it since nobody will ever take it over Blessing of Seasons.
Remove Blessing of Seasons since it’d redundant since Lightsmith can provide armaments.
Crazy idea, since Merciful Aura is nothing but passive healing, maybe change the name and its function to work more like Jadefire Stomp+Ancient Teachings. Call it Glorious Path (a play off the Base Tree’s Golden Path). Move Avenging Crusader’s heal component to it and turn that cooldown more like
Glorious Path
When standing in Consecration, Crusader Strike and Judgement will heal up to 5 allies within 30 yards, but increases the cooldown to 20 sec.
This way;
It would not be just passive healing as it requires the Paladin to drop and stand in Consecration, something we already want to do since it buffs WoG.
It would actually give an option against Blessing of Summer.
Would give melee healing a way to consistently heal without major cooldowns.
Would allow changing Avenging Crusader to just being an attack speed or crit buff, instead of being the primary source that allows Melee healing to exist.
I haven’t played a lot of holy paladin, i’ll admit. I’ve been trying to learn it because i intend to main ret next expansion. The last time i really played it was in BFA when glimmer had just made its first appearance, and holy pally wasn’t really designed around it.
I miss that version of holy pally. Holy shock made health bars move. All of the spells made health bars move. And you had avenging crusader when things got dicey and that kept people alive really well.
Nowadays i feel like i gotta use 2 different cooldowns per pull to make people’s health go up. Cooldowns that didn’t even exist until relatively recently now dictate whether or not you can keep people alive.
Meanwhile i currently main evoker and play a lot of pres and the difference between the two healers is shocking. As pres, my base kit makes people’s healthbars go up. Cooldowns are for emergencies. I have spell combos instead of cooldown combos.
So i think glimmer needs to go in the garbage can. It’s holding the spec back. On top of that Tyrs and Hand of Divinity need to be merged and be made instant.
Yes this is the basis of most of the Hpal discourse, for at least the last 2 seasons. When compared to other healers, your it always feels like your ability to keep people alive is entirely dictated on if your cooldowns or RNG procs in your favor.
Right now on Beta it looks like the spec is entirely propped up by HotS’s lasers and RNG Infusions super buffing Holy Light. This can be worked around by the tuning pass turbo buffing everything by a crazy amount, but that’s honestly just putting spoilers on a beat-up pickup. It’ll look nice but it won’t actually help the problem.
So, sadly I can’t share links or images, which would’ve made this easier, but I gained access to archived boss kills from Ny’alotha, and compared to current Holy Paladin, our healing sources have quite literally doubled.
From a Mythic Shad’har kill, my (Paladin-based) healing sources were, in order:
Glimmer of Light
Holy Shock
Beacon of Light
Light of Dawn
Holy Light
I didn’t use them on this fight, but if I had thrown in Flash of Light and Lay on Hands, they’d make up #s 6 and 7. Now, from a current Forgotten Experiments log, I’ll add everything else that makes up our healing done in its current form:
Flash of Light
Lay on Hands
Tyr’s Deliverance
Light’s Hammer
Word of Glory
Overflowing Light
Greater Judgment
Judgment of Light
Crusader’s Reprieve
Touch of Light
Keeping in mind most of the later sources on that list are contributing very little (1% or less), I wanted to write out this list to just to show how bad the bloat is: Our healing sources have quite literally doubled since BFA. I won’t get into meta, or parses, but the simple fact is that Holy Paladin was strong back then, and we achieved that with less in our arsenal.
So again, I’ll plead with you Blizzard: Please trim the fat on Holy Paladin. Cut our cooldowns and modifiers in half, make our spenders worth spending, and make our core abilities stronger than a limp noodle.
We’ve reiterated, listed, and commiserated over all the talking points, so now all we want is some acknowledgement that you’ve seen our feedback and are working on something lol.
I agree. I’d rather more consistency than reliance on RNG in the spec.
That said, the way Holy Light moves a health bar when it’s buffed (at the 587 scaling in M+, the max crit I saw was a little over 3M, average was 1.5-2M) is the level of tuning that healing should be at. It felt good to be able to move a health bar, compared to say shaman whose max healing wave I had in an entire dungeon was < 2M. Or a max heal on holy priest being 1.1M (pretty sure serenity was < 2M but I’d have to go check logs again to verify). Moving health bars during this testing has been miserable, so it’s been nice that at least one character can make a HP bar jump up lol.
But, 100% remove all the mini-CDs and let’s focus the healing into our actual abilities. I wouldn’t be sad if Glimmer went away (I’ve never liked it). I wouldn’t be sad if tyr’s went away and our healing spells just automatically got buffed by the amount it buffs when active. Holy Paladin AOE has always been questionable at best (even when we had Holy Radiance, which I am still kind of sad they took away cause it was nice to have at least one not-light-of-dawn aoe heal). Given the recent slashes they did to Beacon, and Beacon of Virtue specifically, I wish they’d make Beacon of Virtue an hour long (they can slash it from 25% down to 15% for all I care) so we have some sort of reliable “AoE”.
Oh, I will say this, in order for me to excel at healing I had to effectively forego any “DPS” talents for healing and very seldom actually stood in melee range. Part of it was that quite frankly, often times with the damage patterns I didn’t have many spare globals to contribute (and if I did, I’d run in and use them) outside of keeping judgement on CD. I really wish they’d give us Denounce as a replacement option to CS.
Additionally, I don’t remember if I mentioned it a few days ago with my initial post, but the talent that has a chance to proc a consecration on judgement’s target was putting it at MY location instead of my target’s location (so I quit using that talent). But, if that talent works again, it would be nice and quite frankly shouldn’t be a proc chance it should just be 100% chance.
I do not like execution sentence. Or any ability that’s like “do damage for 10 seconds before damage happens”
Like if we just threw out the ability and only had Final Reckoning i would be okay with that. At least if a target dies with final reckoning you got some value out of it.
Anyway, that’s my 2 cents on an ability i’ve hated for years. Kind of miss when Final Reckoning had a passive proc of its damage taken increase for a single target when the spell was sitting off cooldown.
If the difference between FR and ES was less than 5% on a single target i’d use it FR all the time, but it’s a bit more than 5%.
Execution Sentence has received a substantial nerf on the beta. Although both Herald and Templar seems to play better with ES, so i am not sure if the nerf amounted to anything.
Ideally ES should deal all its accumulated damage split between all nearby enemies if the target affected by ES dies before it goes off.
Lightsmith needs to be just a flashy proc per minute weapon enchant that is roll specific or three enchants and you can choose what to give yourself or another player.
Max 2 enchants.
Party or raid member can open trade and put their weapon in will not be traded slot and you enchant their weapon.
This removes the gcd that honestly feels bad.
Greatly fits with the lightforging theme.
Add a crazy holy or radiant fire enchant effect.
This also lets you target what your group needs.
Want to buff your healer? enchant their weapon, need more dps? enchant their weapon or your own tank getting smacked…you guessed it enchant their weapon.
Keep essentially all the effects you already had or tweak them but this is a way way better version.
I swear set it and forget it cool little pre m+ or pre boss targeted social interaction, and a flashy effect that looks like the heavens imbued peoples weapon…so cool people will love it.
Light smith having rotating buffs is the worst part of lightsmith. I really wish it was just the damage buff or just the shield. Or even better both. Haven’t we learned from seasons that rotating buffs are not fun?
