Actually the more I sit and think about it the more it speaks right back to the overall problem with Paladin design in general, that all originates from our former role as Tank Healers.
The argument that if FoL was instant in an Infusion, it’d be another Holy Shock, well that’s really only because Holy Shock itself lost its primary distinction: it used to be a crit cannon, that could reliably set up Infusions.
This was good because our healing kit was primarily quick single target heals, and we had to make use of those to heal groups and raids. The game doesn’t work that way but Blizzard seems very reluctant to actually let us move beyond that design.
And every time they try, such as with leaning us more into a fast pace, splash healing, instant heal build, they eventually nerf them into the ground to try and get us casting our single target heals again, while making sure the game is designed around healing everyone as quickly as possible.
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I hadn’t thought of this admittedly. Inflorescence would be the only way for the spell to see a net gain in performance which I don’t really like that much (two talent points + infusion procs).
Guess we’ll have to see if there is any further tweaking to be made before 11.1.
That’s how I feel, at least if I’m reading all this right. And that makes me feel like Inflorescence is going to have to be mandatory (has it been since Dragonflight? I feel like there was a period it was just really good and not mandatory).
I wonder how much of the nerf is related to Beacon of Virtue + Moment of Compassion. Spamming +50% boosted Flashes on anyone and healing everyone was pretty good after you used Toll or Prism or whatever.
I still think the biggest problem with balancing Holy will always remain Beacon (any version), and we’ll never have an active tool kit that feels both good and complete unless we lose the 30%+ of our healing that comes from passively healing the Beacon targets.
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Absolutely. It’s iconic and has been with us for so long, but it’s effectively saying that every spell in our kit does ~30% (Faith) to 100% (Virtue) additional healing which does throttle the baseline healing power of each spell.
Edit: which you said, oops
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Virtue is one of, of not the most enjoyable spell HPals has. It feels equivalent to disc priest atonement or the healing from jadefire stomp. It’s our AOE healing method. There’s no reason that it should be why our other spells feel so weak. Virtue is already on life support. If it gets any weaker if won’t be worth a gcd, and completely removing the spell means we have, effectively, zero AOE healing. (Divine toll healing lies in the rising sunlight which is single target, divine favor is mid at best, and light of dawn is comically useless) I literally had to Google LoDs name because I couldn’t even remember due to never using it xD
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The constant problem with Beacon is that it was designed to allow a single target tank healer to heal 2 people at once, during a time damage came out slow enough that you could heal those two people within a few hard casted spells.
There isn’t much that can be done with them, if they are so important to keep but they can’t make or individual spells too strong because, with how the Beacon works, would just end up as “too much” free healing unless Beacon itself, and especially Virtue, became too difficult to cast.
Which becomes more problematic, because the last round of nerfs to Virtue made it clear Blizzard doesn’t want us to use it like Atonement or Jadefire stomp. Atonement, for example can have a near 100% uptime with Radiance having a 15 sec recharge time, while also lasting 15 seconds, and two charges. Jadefire Stomp meanwhile can be constantly proc’d to keep it rolling indefinitely. Meanwhile Virtue was given a steep mana cost with the explicit intention so that we couldn’t cast it as often.
Tldr: everything can be balanced to be useful, they just don’t. Also new virtue suggestion
There’s absolutely no valid reason that our single target spells couldn’t be tuned to be useful, while virtue could be balanced around that.
Another idea that would be absolutely ridiculously fun would be: virtue becomes avenging crusader, same cooldown and duration, and we only get avenging wrath (on a one minute cooldown)
Holy paladin for the longest time (recently) has been an all gas no breaks playstyle.
With this suggested virtue change, we still get an AOE healing option while our single target heals could be tuned to do more .
Additionally, avenging crusader is actually pretty weak on its own. It’s being hard carried by tempered in battle and hammer and anvil. Without that it’s just average level AOE heals. Having the option to pair with wings could make it affective to actually heal through significant AOE DMG
This is the main reason I don’t want more classes added to the game, even if they can be attractive like bards. Since monks were added, all the new classes are always on meta or a good state, in detriment with the “classic” ones.
They do this on purpose, isn’t like they are throwing a dice. They don’t want you to play Meele healer. The whole hero talents are a big lie.
They are biased on their balance. They want us to play what they choose to be the most viable spec on a drawing board and things will be the same.
They keep reworking and nerfing Holy Paladin but Disc Priest is untouched and practically, buffed the next patch, even it’s top meta on M+ and with a perfect performance.
The new vs classic classes argument is an odd one. While it does make sense that new classes are tuned higher to incentivize playing them, generally classes rise and fall in terms of viability/meta. The unfortunate part is that the cycle is not equal between the classes.
I agree with no new classes, for a different reason, division of resources. It’s unlikely proper balancing will occur.
Holy paladin needs to not have two choices of wings. No other class has a talent choice that changes the style of gameplay as significantly as the difference between our two wings.
Our talents need to provide decisions between aoe vs single target heals, or HPS vs utility, but instead they are divided between melee and ranged, conflicting non synergistic and provides no valid decisions that impact our success as a healer
I’m not saying to nerf it, just stating that beacons definitely factor into individual spell tuning.
It literally doesn’t have to. They could easily double our HPS and half the transfer through virtue, and virtue would end up having the same impact currently
Which they have been doing progressively over the last expac-ish when they dropped virtue from 35% to 25%, and the 50% it was in Shadowlands.
Yet our single target spells are no better
This is a good idea, but would likely also have to accommodate Beacon of Faith/Light as well.
It could still be the choice node, so you couldn’t have both
There are other classes with Beacon-like effects that don’t pay the tax.
It’s not as good as Beacon is, but for example, Druids have Rampant Growth, although it’s impossible looking at logs to see how much that is doing. They are getting Spiritual Bond next patch etc
Disc’s entire kit isn’t heavily taxed because it could heal 1 or 5 or 10 targets with Atonement. Sins of the Many only kicks in at 5+ Atonements and it’s a only a 2.5% damage (healing) loss per target and it transfers 35% of damage. Vivify doesn’t do next to no healing because it could heal all party members with Renewing Mists.
If the issue is that it’s all Holy Pally healing that transfers to the Beacon, I would be interested in experimenting with options so only certain spells transferred or certain spells transferred at a higher rate.
That would be interesting in m+ where trying to meet healing AOE checks revolves around big ST heals transferring to your Virtue or Faith targets and all the inconsequential healing that is transferred outside of your big hitters is irrelevant.
Although, these days the transfer of Hammer and Anvil is doing a lot of heavy lifting too.
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The healing from hammer and anvil is unreliable and wildly disappointing because of that. Sure it’s nice when it happens but that is shadowed by the inability to access that output when it actually matters
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In my ideal world, HPal mastery would be changed and the class rebuilt around a new mastery. But, given the unlikelihood of that, I think a couple major changes could go a long way towards cutting the fat of the spec.
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Beacon of Light should no longer heal at all. Its ONLY purpose should be to give you a second proximity node for our paladin mastery (so mastery would work based on distance from you or from your Beacon target). Say, putting it on the melee group if you’re playing more at range, or on the range group if you’re playing more in melee.
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Beacon of Faith should be completely excised from the game.
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Beacon of Virtue and Light of Dawn should be meaningfully merged in some way into one AOE healing ability. Maybe a talent that allows LoD to apply Virtue buffs to targets it hits, so your follow-up single target heals will continue doing AOE healing to everyone who was hit by LoD for some seconds (though shorter duration and less splash heal than Virtue currently)
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All of our healing spells have their throughput rebalanced for the new Beacon-less world.
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The main issue i have with this idea is that there would need to be some big changes to how LoD works (ie, not a bloody cone and did’t cost Holy Power).
Beyond that, turning LoD into our own version of Atonement would at least be thematic synergy with our cloth counterpart (wrong spec notwithstanding). In fact back before they finally killed glimmer i suggested the same kind of thing; have LoD apply and refresh glimmer so it has an actual use in the kit.
There should be major changes to how LoD works regardless. It’s telling that the paladin players who are most ok with the ability are the ones who just decided to never use it.