Holy Pallies may be entering a new weird phase in their history. After the multiple aura nerfs and targeted buffs to our casted heals Flash of Light and Holy Light, it’s looking like the pendulum has now swung in the opposite direction and instead of ignoring Infusion of Light procs, we might just ignore Holy Power and looking at top logs, people already are.
Note: Holy Paladins will be numerically fine next season, this discussion is more about the direction of HPal and the balancing act Blizzard has on their hands.
Why?
The Wowhead class writer does a much better job at explaining this than I ever could so go read this post in particular about the topic.
At its core, the reason we’re looking to ignore Holy Power is because:
- Holy Shock is our strongest button by a long way when you consider Glimmers. If you look at the top logs. Holy Shock is doing ~ 200k total healing per cast, far surpassing any other rotational spell.
- Our season 3 tier set is solely Holy Shock based. It doesn’t directly interact with any other spell.
Combined, this will lead to a “Holy Shock or bust” playstyle which in turn leads to a gameplay loop of Holy Shock → Infusion proc? → Flash of Light because consuming an Infusion of Light proc is the most Holy Shock CDR available (-2 seconds) and Flash of Light is the best Infusion consumer and essentially free. With so many Holy Shock reset interactions (Consuming infusion -2 sec, and a 22% chance to reset its CD at maximum Glimmers) combined with 2 Infusions via Inflo, and enough crit, this gameplay loop + our cooldowns is pretty much complete and doesn’t have a tonne of globals left for other spells.
In my opinion, that’s a little sad because hpal have a tonne of other abilities and a whole resource that will fall by the wayside.
How do they fix it?
Well, this is far above my pay grade but there are a number of ways I think they could address this. Keep in mind that given the triangular tension on these mechanics, these suggestions may just introduce new tensions. 
- When designing tier sets, they need to keep in mind this Holy Shock, Infusion and Holy Power economy. They could have for example, as part of the 4 set, encouraged Holy Power expenditure. eg your Holy Power spenders extend the duration of your active Reverberations by x seconds up to a maximum of y seconds or, your Holy Power spenders increase healing done by Reverberation by x% for y seconds stacking up to z times.
- Move, update or change talents that are causing this tension on the core mechanics of Holy. ie Take a look at the power of Holy Shock CDR (Imbued Infusions, Glorious Dawn, Crusader’s Might, Seal of Order), and what impact they have on the spec. IMO there are far too many Holy Shock CDR talents as if there were no other talents they could come up with. IMO this diminishes the whole purpose of having 2 charges. 2 charges gives you the freedom to press other buttons while not losing potential casts of Holy Shock. That’s just not the case with a talent like Glorious Dawn. There are so many opportunities for resets to occur (especially in raid) that with good RNG you can sit at 2 charges, spam Holy Shock and still not consume them all. That’s bad design imo.
- If Infusions are going to remain a core tenet of the spec, they need to add more ways to consume it. In the 10.1.5 rework they added Judgment but Judgment has a 9 second (hasted) CD. This means you still have to cast to consume all possible Infusion procs. They could add options that make Judgment usable with an Infusion even if it’s on CD, or add a talent that makes Flash of Light instant for a melee leaning playstyle, or even make a redesigned Light of the Martyr interact with it.
- Rework (I know, I know), the spec tree to create build diversity and playstyle options. If there were talents that enabled you to pick where power in your build lies (ie in Infusions, or Holy Power, or even Holy Shock), when a tier comes along that diminishes the power of one of these, then you can build your talent tree in a way that doesn’t make ignoring or devaluing one feel god awful. There are already elements of this on the tree, however, to give an example of this problem - take a point out of the middle section of the tree, where do you put it? There’s very little opportunities to think “I’ll put it here and that will make this part of my build more powerful or play different”. The top and middle section of the Holy Tree is still very uninspired. This one is probably the most difficult to achieve and won’t likely occur until 11.0.
- Remove something(s) from this spec. Having this tri-mechanic tension which sits on top of a full set of dps (and Holy Power generator) buttons + healing cooldowns + utility is a lot. I have a theory that prior to the rework they acknowledged that HPal had a lack of healing buttons. You’d generate Holy Power and spend - that was basically it. This led to a lot of empty healing globals. To fix that, they flooded the spec with Holy Shocks, buffed Infusions, CDs (a buffed Tyr’s, and adding Barrier of Faith, Daybreak and a tier set that buffed Light’s Hammer and Holy Prism). Now it feels like there’s just too much going on that you can’t use them all. I don’t want to go back to the season 1 and the lack of healing buttons, but I think there’s a middle ground.
A lot of Holy’s gameplay, talent, and tier design issues stem from the two opposing gameplay styles that need to be appeased. Trying to add interesting and diverse talents on a single tree that don’t favor, break or go completely unused by the other playstyle is always going to be a challenge. I would love for them to work out how to do this well, however I suspect that as long these two playstyles need to be catered to on a single tree, we’ll continue to get generic Holy Shock talents and tier sets as that’s the easiest solution.
If you have ideas on how they would fix it, or have comments on these ideas I’ve listed, please share them, it’s a topic that is really interesting.
