“The Paladin is a melee hero but isn’t quite as powerful as the Demon Hunter, Blademaster, or Mountain King. The Paladin is more of a background support Hero with a melee attack.”
From the battlenet wc3 paladin page itself.
It’s time to accept that your headcanon of holy paladins being melee dps is just a fantasy and that you really just want to play ret/prot and offheal during intense moments when you think the healer needs help.
The mastery change in Legion made us proximity healers where the magnitude of your healing is a function of distance between the paladin and the target. The target could be both a ranged player or a melee player. The paladin now has to position themselves somewhere in the middle of both the ranged players and the melee players to make the most of their mastery, on average. We were still healers who fundamentally casted spells rather than being glued to melee range spamming CS. In Legion our healing was not a function of our melee damage per second. We were not melee healers in Legion. The concept of melee healing began in BFA after a series of nerfs which severely impacted the traditional caster holy paladin playstyle.
I am not going to look up exact dates for these changes, but there are several significant changes that I have noticed which have severally negatively impacted the caster holy paladin playstyle:
a) HS crit chance reduced from 100% to 30%. This is an insane nerf which results in far less IoL procs and IoL is the core mechanic of caster holy paladin.
b) IoL change in SL prepatch which inverts the functionality to give the bonus healing % to HL rather than FoL, and gives the %mana reduction to FoL rather than HL. IoL FoL was your time-critical heal bomb which filled health bars. Now you have to throw out your Wet Noodle of Light and barely move the bar. If you want to make an impact with IoL, you have to spent 2.5s casting HL and hope that the target does not die or has not been topped off by another healer. This is unbelievably terrible.
c) With 25% unbuffed crit, you could pop wings for I believe an additional 2x crit chance, meaning that 25 * 2 (from HS) * 2 (from AW) = 100% crit chance, meaning that you never miss and IoL with wings. This is another severe nerf to caster holy paladin.
d) The removal of Spirit from the game as a stat and giving all healers the same baseline mana regen (as far as I can tell) and not addressing the mana cost of FoL, resulting in extreme mana issues for a fundamental gameplay mechanic.
The issues outlined above need to be addressed for caster holy paladin to ever be truly viable again.
I am not going to pretend like I played much BFA (only really played Nyalotha), but I have heard that GoL was not the first iteration of holy paladin melee healing and that in the first tier of BFA, hpal took Avenging Crusader or Awakening and played in melee range. This is apparently used as “evidence” that the devs have intended for holy paladin to be melee healers for a while now, as opposed to the holy paladins at the time taking whatever scraps they can get to be effective healers after these ridiculous nerfs to the caster playstyle.
Eventually a theorycrafter figured out that you could gear haste and run 3x GoL pieces and do insane hps. That’s cool…too bad it does not address the fundamental issues with the caster playstyle which lead to GoL being mandatory for the highest levels of content.
I cannot even fault the GoL players at this point. You have to do what you have to do to heal the content that you want to run, and if that means playing your holy paladin, who has traditionally been a single target heal bomber as a rapid fire HS machine who is glued to melee range then okay I guess.
It seems insane to me that caster paladin, who utilizes 100% of the hpal toolkit (except for maybe LoD, unless in melee range and can heal 5 targets) is so flawed that an alternative build, which ignores core mechanics (IoL, FoL, HL) is still worse than this alternative build. The fact that this alternative build can ignore IoL, FoL and HL means that holy paladin is fundamentally flawed right now and needs to be fixed.
So now here we are in the Shadowlands. Rather than address the fundamental issues that made GoL mandatory in the first place, the devs made caster worse by nerfing IoL and had the audacity to make GoL an actual talent. Imagine fixing your car with duct tape and then complaining to the manufacturer, and then new iterations of the same model car are shipped with duct tape in place of an actual solution. It is incomprehensibly ridiculous. This is exactly what GoL being added as a talent in SL is.
I have been playing this paladin since TBC, and for the first time in 12 or 13 years, I am about to switch mains to my holy priest because holy paladin is disgusting at the moment with no sign of improvement on the horizon. I wonder if I have the willpower to write off the last 2.5-3 weeks of progress on my paladin and do it all again on my priest. Or will I just unsub? I have no idea. I am not the kind of player who switches mains each expansion. I am dedicated to my paladin, but the state of holy paladin right now is indefensible. I have yet to try caster pally in raid, so I guess the determining factor for whether or not I switch will lie in my performance in raid. I cannot see it being too good though.