I just picked up hpal bc I wasn’t excited with how the rsham changes went and I haven’t ever dived into hpal so this next season it will be one of my 2 chars starting out.
In m+, melee hpal is a lot of fun, very satisfying button presses lots of agency and good damage.
In pvp, only against very few comps IMO is it even an option. Otherwise you just spend the entire game cc’d.
ya this is a point of major confusion, everyone calls it “melee wings” but you dont actually want to be in melee in pvp 
long time Hpal player, and I 100% agree. as someone who only plays lightsmith holy in both pve and pvp, I enjoyed TWW Hpal a lot. but this new one ain’t bad at all. for me, it’s best described as snappy gameplay. midnight looks good imo
IMO lightsmith is now the most interesting healer mechanic. I used to feel that way about atonement and now it’s so simplified that I no longer finding it compelling.
With lightsmith there’s so many modifiers and knock on effects from it and the shield and redistribution in particular feels very proactive and discish.
Flame build on the other hand feels like playing holy priest.
I haven’t liked herald for holy since its inception. very boring, one-sided spec that is all numbers and little to no interaction
The way I play it the entire hero talent could just say “we will replace the word of glory icon with a little torch, won’t that be nice”. Yeah, hpal got robbed creatively I think. Your guy put all his time into one of the hero talents and then ran out of time before he had to turn in the design and scratched in flame.
100% agree. it’s also funny because the little HoT on eternal flame is completely pointless. there really is no functional difference between EF and WoG.
I do play herald for ret (mostly in pvp) because it’s actually pretty fun being a half melee dot class.
Whats your source for the changes being reverted? The changes are still live on beta
They crossed out all the changes in the recent dev notes, but Im not really sure why they wouldnt have been reverted yet
https://us.forums.blizzard.com/en/wow/t/1201-midnight-beta-test-development-notes/2213807/11
Was pretty stoked when they said they were reverting it yesterday, but it never came. A little odd but would assume perhaps they’re waiting to roll it out with other updates, even though they said they were going to do it yesterday… that’s my hope anyway, because I agree it felt better before the change