During DF I mained an H Pal, everything was so much easier then. Now, it’s much more difficult. I also have a Resto Shaman, Resto Druid, and I dabble in the other classes every once in a while. So far, Resto Shaman feels much better, I can actually top people off, whereas with H Pal, I’m 601 ilvl and stuck with a 250k flash heal using infusion, it’s pointless. H Pal needs buffs big time. For now, and for the first time, I’m thinking of benching my H Pal. Resto Sham is just so much stronger and mine is only 588 ilvl. Resto Druid, I’ve yet to really try harder content with outside of Heroics.
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I recommend watching other experienced holy paladin’s running keys, like Ellesmere: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2257788010
He goes into detail while doing keys about each mob pack, what cooldowns to use during bosses and other helpful tips.
After the beta rework you cannot spam holy light or flash of light and expect to move HP bars. You are required to make the most of your DPS generators, holy power, beacon of virtue, and rotate cooldowns correctly.
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And thats issue people dont wanna be forced into Melee/AC. Which is a major part of our issue is that even if you run melee Hpally it still lacks.
Numbers show only what 5 holy doing any keys above a 9? vs 95% other healers is shaman.
Overall our HP Spenders are weak.
EF Hot isnt effected by our 4pc so running Dawnlight is weak af as it really only effects glory.
And sadly the hpally discord is toxic as hell the mods are useless and the people above mods are a joke as well giving the excuses of Soon or google lmao.
Hopefully they rework holy just like MW monk needs a rework.
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Holy paladin has the 2nd best representation in keys above 10 for healers.
The HoT isn’t a huge heal and should never impact your decision making as to when to use EF. The 4 piece impacts the initial heal, which is the same value as WoG.
Please do your research before saying things that are blatantly not true. It speaks to how little you know about the spec in its current state.
Not liking it is fine, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad - it just means YOU’RE bad at it.
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That’s a loud minority. Casting hpal sucks. People complained about spending globals on DPS to build holy power so they made flash and holy light build and now they are complaining about that too. Casting sucks. I’ve suggested many ways to make casting things better (not a permanent playstyle)
But honestly, continuing to advocate for a caster style is literally destroying the class
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Resto shammy may be stronger for M+, but saying Hpal is weak?
Hpal is literally in its best state since S2 DF. Far far ahead of how it was back in both S3 and S4, and arguably a little bit better than S1 DF in some regards.
Caster Hpal is, thankfully, no longer a thing. If you enjoy casting, there’s 5 more healers to play (excluding Caster MW).
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xD you can make it stronger op, my flash can crit 1m+
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dr60TgFLl0w
enjoy op. Caster is well and alive, embrace your inner priest.
I don’t know what’s more criminal
- supporting caster hpal
- not taking wings
or - a thirty minute video for showing a one mil flash (supposedly, I’m not watching that crap)
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:3 at least there is no editing bs in there lol.
what do u mean no wings
There’s basically no build variety in Hpal. The differences between both Raid and M+ buils are minimal.
You can choose to not take CM’s, and ‘not follow’ the meta builds and go for Inflo,Divine Revelations and MoC and be casting all you want, but you will be underperforming compared to the rest.
The math has already been figured it out at this point. Your build works in a 4, because everything works in a 4.
You’re not taking Avenging Wrath: Might, a pretty much ‘mandatory’ Hpal talent.
You’ll be performing better, and probably having much more fun, if you just go Hpriest instead.
As an additional note, not going herald is losing a lot of troughput, which may be fine, if you are going to min max dps as a healer, but since you are going caster, your dps is basically 0 at all times outside of Sacred Weapon/Blessing of summer.
This is my first time doing Mythic+ keys, and as a Holy Paladin I have been genuinely curious how the APM compares against other classes. I feel like I’m playing Starcraft. I’m stubborn, and feel like there is absolutely no way any other healer matches my APM. Not because I’m better, but because they simply don’t have the same spell diversity.
Here is a breakdown of healing based on spells, not active effects:
Generators
- Holy Shock (Damn near on GCD in M+, especially in Raid)
- Judgement (Damn near on GCD for generation)
- Crusader Strike (On GCD for generation + CDR)
- Holy Prism (On Cooldown for throughput, unless rarely saving it for burst)
What I want to point out here, is these are not fillers. These are not just gap closers or parse padding. These are core, fundamental parts of our healing rotation. If you don’t do this, you literally cannot heal. Not figuratively, literally. (I do not subscribe to this idea that paladins can be cast healers. That’s so farfetched).
Now let’s quickly go over spenders
- Word of Glory [Eternal Flame]
- Light of Dawn
- Shield of Righteousness (Since we’re on the topic of M+)
Honorable mention of Flash of Light and Holy Light for generators too. This puts me at 10 spells that are absolutely fundamental to the survival of my party. I’m willing to part ways with Flash of Light and say 9 spells if you instead use Holy Light for its proc.
So nine spells. If you go into M+ and just use these spells, I wager you don’t complete M+2. That’s because you’re forgetting everything else!
- Blessing of Sacrifice (I use this almost on CD)
- Blessing of Freedom (I try to use this on CD)
- Blessing of Protection (Honestly I forget about this, but try)
- Blessing of Summer (On cooldown no exception)
- Blessing of Virtue (It’s simply better) **
- Binding Light **
- Divine Toll
- Avenging Wrath
Reminder, these are all spells. Not passives, not effects. These require a keybinding, a GCD (mostly) and the mental capacity to measure when and how to use them. So that means we’re now at approximately 17 spells in our rotation. I’m willing to cut a few of them such as Aura Mastery, Lay on Hands, etc since they’re very situational and calculated. Other classes have similar spells.
I really want to keep going, and write a large excerpt on all the systems that intertwine these abilities but I don’t have the capacity to format that here. So instead, just a reminder, we also have awakening stacks, holy prism combo’s, managing dawnlight for wings or awakening, watching for holy light procs, and I’m probably missing some.
(End of Healing)
Let’s pretend this paragraph is me now detailing the additional damaging spells and rotation.
(End of Damage)
And now you are finally in M+. You have upwards of 17 unique healing or damage mitigation spells being utilized within 2 minute windows (Since most cooldowns are between 0-120 seconds). You also are expected to weave in your few damage dealing abilities, interrupts. In addition, you are expected to be in melee range which is undoubtedly the worst location for a healer to be.
It took me a week to figure out why people kept saying Haste was important for paladins. I couldn’t understand it, because I never cast. I’m quite literally an instant-cast healer. I never cast. So I just bit my tongue and stacked haste. It’s not until this week in M+ I realized Haste secretly reduces your GCD time. The tooltip doesn’t specifiy this. That’s when I realized just how bad this was. We rely so heavily on our generators (That let me remind you, do practically nothing for healing) in order to heal, we need to have the shortest GCD possible in order to spam our spells to make up the difference.
Let me rephrase that. In order for me to cast a good party heal. I need to use 3 GCD’s to generate 3 holy power (These three GCD’s are not impacted by haste % btw). Then I need to use a GCD for Blessing of Virtue (Not going to argue over beacon). Then I use a GCD for a Word of Glory which should spread heals over the group. That’s 4-5 GCD’s to respond to a sudden burst of party damage. I’m not saying this is bad, nor am I saying this is how it actually functions. In reality, you should always be sitting on the necessary Holy Power to reduce this rotation into a reponse that requires less than 2 GCD’s. However, that’s just one more sprinkle on the cake of micro-management our class requires in real time.
I don’t know what the point of this post is. It’s not to bash shamans, or say they’re better or worse than paladins. I personally love paladins and their playstyle. There are just times where I feel as if I’m putting in twice the effort of mouse clicks and button presses to get nominal results compared to other healers. So that naturally creates resentment. I am willing to best most paladins do not use their toolkit to the length that is offered, because who the **** would not only keybind 20+ abilities, but actively manage their cooldown timers and usage within a dungeon. Probably only the top tier players (which I am definitely NOT). So I guess my only point, which is entirely subjective, is it feels like I have to sometimes do twice the effort to get the same distance as some other healers in the lineup. That’s all. Maybe I’m wrong, no idea. I only play paladin.
Edit: A better way to convey my frustration is I don’t feel like there is a sliding scale of class proficiency for holy paladin. In a fantasy wonder land, I would like to be rewarded for mastering every spell and ability my class offers. Making it obvious that I stand out, and am proficient with my abilities and task. Instead, it feels like that absolute minimum. As in, if I don’t use every single tool at my disposal, I’m unable to complete content that other healing classes would be able to complete with a lower level of class proficiency. Again, this is just a feeling.
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This isn’t exactly untrue and has been a thing about paladin since S3 of DF.
Back then, everything was nerfed to the point that it always felt you were doing nothing until cooldowns were up. Everything is better in that regards now, a nice HS or WoG crit will actually do something now.
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You’re not wrong in this sentiment. The spec has gone from historically one of the easiest to one of the harder healers to play and optimize. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, but player skill is 95% of the battle with holy paladin in its current iteration.
I have to agree with this too. For a long time you could build on your mastery of the class slowly, but still do very respectable healing while you were learning.
They’ve made several attempts at “fixing” the class over the last 6 months, which can be pretty annoying when you finally get into a pattern of play that works.
Still, the good news is if you do survive the learning curve, the rewards are pretty good. They’ve nerfed the class recently, maybe a little more than was warranted, but performance is still good.
Overall I feel that no matter how much complexity they add, as long as we’re still reactive healers, I’m okay with it all.
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not mandatory, i have 32-34% chance to crit without it, i traded it with flask lol.
the focus of my build is to keep infusion at all times and 32% crit is enough, later i’ll increase it to 39%-46% and will spamming holy light.
+back in the day that extra crit buff is baked in the wings already, they just removed it for being too op.
the key is to synergize your talent build with your chosen attribute, which people nowadays doesn’t consider.
Your post is pretty interesting to me, because I barely feel any of these issues anymore.
The one that recently changed significantly how fast paced our spec felt wss the removal of Holy Infusion and took me a while to get use to it again.
All the issues you mentioned were even worse back in DF. Our spenders were twice as weak, there was a lot of casting, mana management (or lack of) and many more buttons like Tyr’s deliverance, Hand of Divinity, Daybreak on too of glimmer management. Back in DF I would say Hpal was one of the most complex m+ healers after 10.1.7-10.2, and everything you did had minimal impact, so now the spec feels like heaven in comparison, even though our spot healing had been nerfed for about 20-26%.
I dunno, I have mained a holy paladin since BC. I am used to blizz making major changes to the class every other expansion.
I got my 2000 rating on week 2. I got this ranking by running 100% in PUGs. I also play as caster holy paladin with Beacon of Faith. I don’t even have crusader or shield of the righteous on my bars. You do have to know how to use the skills you have and know incoming damage patterns but I am pretty mobile considering. Between Holy shocks and Judgement, I have enough time to move out of all mechanics in between my Flash/Holy Lights. I use my steed to burst in, stun/interrupt and then run back out to where I am comfortable.
I have spoken to a few people who play other healers and the 1 thing I think we all agree on is that Blizz failed at moving away from killing people in 2 globals unless we liberally use our CDs. In higher keys, I basically just rotate wings, divine toll, Aura Mastery almost on CD while popping in Hand of Sac/Prot on people.
Granted I am not doing anything higher than 7s and I am pretty sure I could heal an 8. But basically I am capped at the moment by badges so until next week, the most I can be is likely 614 until the badge cap increases. But it is doable…I bet many other holy paladins who prefer the melee style will say I am not 100% efficient but it definitively works.
i blew my badge and only at 611 
Holy pallies were casters from inception. What are you talking about