Holy Paladin Feedback and QoL improvements

Classes Paladin
1

Class tree:

  • Both A just Reward and Holy Ritual needs a buff. This value can go up to like 500%-1000% since current number its abyssmally low. Holy Ritual is also placed in a vital spot of the tree.
  • Lightbringer and Divine Shield upgrade casptone need a rework. They are specially weak for capstone abilities.
  • Lightforge Blessing healing should be higher for Holy Paladin, based on spell power and should be smart healing only for Hpal. Standard Hpal doesn’t really have maintenance healing (except veneration which is currently really weak since HoW was nerfed back last week) and needs to actively choose between dps and healing. On top of this, we don’t have ways to preserve mana other than infusion of light and extremely undertuned talents like Divine Revelations/Liberation.
  • Both Recompense and Sacrifice of the Just are dead talents for Hpal (recompense its for all paladins tbf) Either buff sacrifice of the just to 1 min again or delete recompense and make a choice node between 1 min sac and move echoing blessings additional DR to Blessing of Sacrifice for the other talent on top of 30-15 seconds CDR only. Either you have a stronger Sac or the standard 30% 1 min sac, your choice.

Spec tree:

  • Remove Liberation and add a talent that let us regain mana when using either SotR or Holy shock on enemies. Hpal is one of the only healers specs that doesn’t have a proper mana economy/mana refund mechanic.
  • Swap Power of the Silver hand with Relentless Inquisitor position in tree. Current positioning of RI makes no sense and we just lost 4% haste without any compensation.
  • Make Breaking Dawn baseline and replace it with something else.
  • LotM no longer creates absorb on overhealing.

Lightsmith:
Let’s be real. We will see nerfs here sooner than later. So at least please make reasonable changes before aura nerfing the whole spec.

  • Hammer And Anvil critical healing (but not damage) removed. Add consistent healing with every cast of judgement instead. RNG in healers is terrible even if we can control it with stats.
  • Maybe Hammer and Anvil reduces judgment CD as well? There’s nothing that feels more clunky that having to cast FoL/HL and overheal just to get that CDR to armaments just because your judgment is still on CD.
  • Tempered in battle its one of my favorite new talents ever. If it has to be nerfed reduce the transfer rate and make it happen over 6/8s instead.
  • LS is lacking some more synergy with non AC builds/non caster builds.
  • LS/AC is proving to be too strong, best mana efficiency, best dps of all Hpal builds and best healing output. Nerfing blessed assurance to a value like 60-100% should help to close the gap between Herald and LS AC, however, I don’t want them to kill AC completely and would love LS to be viable with AW:M as well.

Herald:
Herald is almost perfect but its been consistently impacted by nerfs intended to reduce Hpal performance in raid and bugs.
If anything, we need base DPS buffs to the spec and nerf LS dps a little to close the gap between the two. This could also mean nerfing Blessed Assurance which would in turn make AC build weaker.

Thoughts? What you guys would like to see?

2

This or they could just be removed and come up with new ideas. Honestly, it looks like Blizzard needed 4 or 5 more talents for this new tree and they just added a bunch of “x spell does healing”.

Blessings do healing, dispel does healing, SotR does healing, Judgment does healing, Consecration does healing, melees do healing, healing you receive… does healing. All of them are so minor they might as well not exist.

Yeah that would be a good move. While they are at it, redesign Power of the Silver Hand. As far as I can tell, this talent hasn’t been taken in any pve build since it was brought back. It’s terrible. I can’t help but think that it was just copied from Legion when Hpal played differently and it just doesn’t make sense anymore.

If nothing else changes this absolutely needs to happen. If you’re playing LS + AC and you have an awakening ready to go. If that Judgment which procs AC crits and you have virtue up. My god, that hits like a Lay on Hands on the group. If it doesn’t, well RIP. Healers shouldn’t work like that.

If it’s not massively overhealing, it’s doing an absurd amount of overall healing for a passive talent that is an untargeted heal that procs on crits. It’s stupid.

Greater Judgment Hammer and Anvil Total
Crit 611k 5.4m 6M
Non-Crit 305k 305k

Give me an example where a healer can press a button and do 20x more healing based on whether a crits. We’re not even talking about Truth Prevails or if you were in AC too - I think it would be another 2m or more.

Mana Economy
I would like to see a real effort to make Holy Paladin’s mana an actual mechanic that makes sense. Blizzard have been on a mission to make sure Paladins can go oom and it’s probably because of how long we spent being the envy of healers and a source of complaints about how we can do just as much healing as another healer without going oom.

Unless they really sit down and work out what that mana economy relative to healing output looks like, than we’re doomed. I mean rework levels of changes may be necessary to do it. In The War Within they retuned Holy Light around being a mana dump, however, in my experience it just hasn’t worked out.

I think you’re right though, I think they need to make SotR and Holy Shock return mana when used offensively. They then need to work out how they can give Holy a “holding pattern” sort of mana-neutral rotation and then a sports (big expensive) mode. Right now, neither exist.

A Coherent Identity

IMO Hpal lacks a coherent core, something that ties the whole spec together that runs through all facets of the spec.

Hpal is primarily a builder spender spec with a unique resource - Holy Power. There’s Beacons which is a unique healing mechanic. From there it gets complicated. It has casted heals that are an addon and have been fighting for relevance for a long time now. It has melee wings. It has Infusion procs. Divine Purpose procs. Divine Favor? It has this LotM mechanic. Veneration? Tyr’s? Prism/Barrier of Faith? Hand of Divinity?

What is Tyr’s Deliverance doing? Why does it only buff casted spells and HS? Why are there 3 talents that have seen little play (Barrier of Faith, Tyr’s, and Power of the Silver hand) that all have the same core problem - they only work for half our kit and that half is the ugly step child part of the spec that no one engages with. :dracthyr_shrug:

IDK I find the overall design of this spec to be very frustrating. I like the way Hpal plays right now but there’s just a whole lot of cruft on the tree that has just been regurgitate back from HPal past and dumped onto the tree with no coherency. Most of it gets no play and makes no sense and there doesn’t appear to be any effort to make it make any sense.

3

To be fair though Hammer and Anvil is all the hero tree really has going for it. It can do upwards of 15% of your total healing. The moment it’s nerfed Herald is back to being the better performing spec (HPS wise).

1 Like
4

My negative Nancy feeling is that AC simply can’t be meta. The high profile hpals that have the devs ears will complain as they did prior to the DF season 2 rework that they felt like dps players. The term “healer cosplay” was used. AC needs to fly under the radar. Viable, not meta.

1 Like
5

Honestly I can’t tell the difference since the patch dropped - it seems like Herald plays the same as before, with more or less the same healing done. That could mean I’m doing it wrong of course, but as long as I put out roughly the same healing as other classes that doesn’t concern me much. I’m not a fan of the LS gameplay, so I haven’t tried it.

6

We got a 6% nerf due to Herald overperforming in Heroic Raid week. LS didn’t needed the nerf back then.

Then they wanted to give us another 5% nerf but backtracked due to the Dawnlight bug, again in raid. The issue with Herald, and not really that big of an issue, is dps.

LS AC is ahead in HPS by roughly 5-6% in average compared to Herald data from 15 days ago. And tomorrow Hpal mana is being nerfed, which will impact Herald the most.

In M+, I would say Tempered in Battle is also a extremely powerful ability. It’s basically another external. Maybe not quite, but still really useful to stabilize the group or mitigate heavy ST damage.

Oh no, totally, I would rather see new talents that half the garbage they gave us in the new class tree, but probably unlikely anytime soon.

I agree. Specially since their contributions are usually 1-2% of overall at most. They shouldn’t exist to being with.

Yep, and once they nerf that and probably AC+ Blessed Assurance too, LS is back to feeling terrible.

With the mana economy, we could talk for hours probably. I agree on all your points.

Back in 10.1.5, Barrier of Faith was actually a really good talent, because of the raw healing Holy Shock and our casted heals did of course. Even in late seasons in DF the talent was usabel, its just that now its way too undertuned to compete with Prism. I understand why they had to nerf Tyr’s but now like you said, its just an useless talent.

7

Well, that’s the problem. It’s a passive talent that relies on procs and it’s doing 15% of your total healing.

I don’t want LS to be nerfed at all. I’ve been enjoying it. I just want it to play a lot more deterministically and locking a 6m heal behind critting on Judgment is bad imo.

The way they should nerf it is make it heal all the time on Judgement (for a reduced amount) or nerf it a lot and put that power into the base kit of LS like in the shield or the weapons (which do so little healing right now).

To give you an example. Imagine if Sun Sear (from Herald) read like this:

Holy Shock and Light of Dawn critical strikes cause the target to be healed for an additional 5 million over 4 sec.

and Herald based kit needed to be nerfed to account for that. That too would be just as terrible.

1 Like
8

Well, it’s not like hammer and anvil by itself is broken.

It’s all the judgment talents + hammer and anvil + avenging crusader healing from judgment that’s absurd. On top of the fact that it all transfers to beacon.

Judgment is just giga strong for Lightsmith.

It’s just not one culprit.

9

That’s correct.

We got Hammer and Anvil giga buffed and now we have this strong interation /healing spike with Virtue/Awakening.

We have Tempered in battle being a really powerful life transfer that its also misrepresented in logs.

And we have the prot buff to Blessed Assurance that somehow went through to holy after nerfing it from 100% to 20% just some some weeks earlier, making AC surpass AV:M in basically every aspect.

The combination of these three its what is making LS so so strong atm to be the best/second best healer in Raid environment, though I’m still unsure how strong is for M+ compared to current Rshammy.

I can already see the aura nerfs coming in the same way Herald was overperfoming in the past, so thats why we need to give feedback about better ways to handle this nerf.

Personally I think a good solution would be one or a combination of the following:

  1. Nerfing Blessed Assurance from 120% to a middle point value between 20% and the current one, so it becomes less powerful HPS wise considering its DPS and mana efficiency.

  2. Nerfing Tempered in battle HP transfer rate.

  3. Standarizing the healing from Hammer and anvil in the way we disccussed above, by making it heal on judgement normal hits and nerfing/reducing the amount of spiky RNG healing in LS.

This may sound like I want to nerf LS + AC build just because, but not at all. I really love both LS+AC and Herald+AW:M, so just hoping they dont murder one or the other (or both).

10

Unironically aura nerfs don’t impact AC. The healing is based on damage so healing nerfs won’t do anything.

1 Like
11

Yeah, but Blizzard almost nerfed paladin by 5% because of a bug. And now they are nerfing Virtue and holy shock because of … ???

So we can’t never be so vocal about these things nowadays.

Imagine instead of nerfing AC healing transfer they nerf the damage of CS and judgement baseline. Maybe I’m being too paranoid.

Either way, I do sincerely think changing how Hammer and anvil works and simultaneously nerfing Blessed Assurance would be the best course of action to try balance both hero talents and also improving the healing profile of LS by smoothing it out instead of having insane spikes of healing like we have now.

1 Like
12

Faith’s Armor should increase the armor of the target of WoG.

Blessing of Freedom should be baseline, Steed of Liberty a choice node with Divine Spurs.
Move Lead the Charge in place of this choice node.
Move Light’s Revocation in place of Lead the Charge.
Move Blessing of Summer from the Holy Tree in place of Light’s Revocation.

Holy Ritual should heal the target for 5% of your max health on cast, 1% every second for its duration, and 5% when it ends. The target should be healed for 200% of the remaining effect if the Blessing is removed.

Judgdment of Light should be changed to Judgment of Wisdom, restoring 1% mana you and all allies within your Aura.

Golden Path needs to be buffed by about 100%.

Bake Blessed Calling into Echoing Blessings.
Replace with the following:

Delete Worthy Sacrifice / Righteous Protection.
Replace with the following:

Delete live Seal of the Crusader.
Replace with the following:

Lightbearer should heal allies for 10% of all healing done to you, regardless of the source. Otherwise this is a dead talent for Holy.

Hammer and Anvil healing should be reduced by about 65%, proc on every Judgment, and retain a chance to crit on each target it heals.

If you remove Hammer and Anvil’s ability to crit and have it activate on every Judgment you cast, you’re just diminishing the value of the crit stat.

2 Likes
13

No, you’re right. Judgment is doing a lot when you take everything into account. But my complaint about Hammer and Anvil is to do with the variance it provides and the sheer amount of HPS it’s contributing to our overall.

I’ve looked over some logs from my last raid night and I’ve tried to find a fair value for each spell.

Spell Healing
Hammer and Anvil 3.22m - 6m
Divine Toll 2.27m
Prism 2.1m
Holy Bulwark (total) 1.8m
LoD 1.26m
WoG 1.25m
Holy Bulwark (upfront) 985k
Greater Judgment 581k
Holy Shock 454k
Truth Prevails 320k

Tell me Hammer and Anvil which just requires you to crit with a Judgment isn’t doing an absolutely ridiculous amount of healing.

IDK if anyone can verify this in their own logs or if I missed something because that doesn’t seem right.

Yeah that’s fair, and I assume part of the goal with Hammer and Anvil is for it to boost the value of crit.

and retain a chance to crit on each target it heals.

btw I think it still can crit and not crit. At least in my logs I found 1 case where all 5 hits crit for the total of 6m but a non-crit was ~3m.

1 Like
14

This is a good solution! Love it

15

Well the blessed assurance nerf for PvP has been applied to PvE; increases your next crusader strike damage by 40% (was 120%).

Blizzard really needs to get their QA under control because these bugs happening.

1 Like
16

“We hear your feedback, since these nerfs directly affect Herald, we are now nerfing LS/AC as well”.

Truth be told, that 120% CS buff was never supposed to be there to being with. Still sucks though.

Well, Divine guidance anyone?

17

We just got a Nerf on Blessed assurance. aparently it’s not intended, the Devs did not flag the talent to just PVP. i WILL BE NOT SURPRISED if they leave it like this. I have to say that the product quality of the holy paladin lately has been so bad.

2 Likes
18

Well the original 120% buff was not intended either, who knows what’s even happening over there. It’s been weeks of unintended/non-sensical changes now.

1 Like