Beyond disappointed with how holy paladins have turned out. I have been playing holy paladin since WoD and im on the edge of just giving up on the class.
Being forced into melee with glimmer has ruined the class for me.
Bringing back holy power is ridiculous because it was taken out for a reason, managing two resources gets tedious. With that being said even the attempt to make it work has been horrible. Youre forced to be in melee to use CS and the fact it costs mana AND has a CD?
Why doesnt judgement give holy power, what a waste of an opportunity.
The fact healing your beacon target can give 1 holy power is counter productive. Isnt the whole point of a beacon to avoid healing them?
If forced to play with holy power why not make infusion of light proc to give you one holy power when using flash of light or holy light.
The mastery basically forces you to play a melee style because its based on proximity.
I agree with most of what u said except for Holy Power.
I kinda liked the gameplay and being able to use free Healing with no cooldown. If u able to manage it well its quite nice.
I agree quite sad about the mastery I liked the Shield one. But I think the Mastery should be applied to u and your Beacon Target. So u still can be range and benefit from max heal on melee target
I agree with possibly potentially not having enough Holy Power generator. Obviously, weâll have to wait and have some amount of time of hands on to know for sure.
It does feel like Judgement should be included as a HP generator. The fact that its not feels off.
Then again, Holy Power is essentially being used for instant-cast burst healing. I mean obviously the class power budget will be weighted with HP in mind but for practical purposes, its free healing. I donât feel I have enough understanding to completely write it off or not.
As far as our Mastery and the various melee components, I absolutely love everything about it from conception to theme to game-play.
I have been melee healing since I leveled my Blood Elf as a Holy Paladin in Burning Crusade and fell in love with the concept then.
Personally, I have other healers to get my non-melee healing game-play fix.
I suppose there are people that enjoy the themes of Paladin but simply donât enjoy meleeâŚbut really, the class theme is a militant crusader of the light.
People that donât enjoy melee healing should likely find a different class as Holy Paladin has always been a melee healer but in the more recent years/decade has been dialed in to be even more so.
Priest is there for those that enjoy the theme of light and healing from a safe distance.
Holy Paladin was never pushed into a melee healer role until Legion.
It spent ~12 years as being able to fully function as a backline healer if thatâs what you wanted to do. They even had a spammable ranged attack for awhile.
While melee healer makes sense thematically for a paladin, forcing people into it also goes against over a decade of history of how the class functioned in this game.
Holy Paladin has literally Always been designed as a melee healer.
Remember Seal of insight from 2009? Holy Paladin gains MP5 and a small heal for damaging targets with melee attacks.
Or old Holy Radiance being a proximity heal from the same humble origins of Holy Paladin?
Hell, Judgement of Light was only castable in melee range in BC and up until somewhere pre-Naxx. And even later it was only increased to 10 yards.
Yeah, from Vanilla WoW thru current retail Holy Paladin has always been primarily a melee healer. Recent expansions have just been including more and more ways to make it fluid and enjoyable.
I donât understand how people have played Paladin all this time but âdont enjoy melee healingâ.
Always having melee abilities does not mean they were always a melee healer. Even in vanilla/classic you simply didnât have paladins always sitting in melee. Could you have been in melee to get something out of seals? Sure, I suppose, but itâs not like mana was an issue for paladins when flash of light was dirt cheap and they got all their mana back when they crit.
You were never pushed into being in melee/close range in the way you are in Legion, BfA and now shadowlands. Even when we had holy power the first time I donât think most paladins sat in melee range all the time and certainly didnât care about their distance from the targets they were healing.
Light of Dawn originally had a 30 yard range baseline.
Holy Paladinâs frequently played at a distance up until Legion.
Holy Pally has always had incentive and has been framed as a melee healer.
Itâs okay to not like that but to be willfully ignorant or flat out deny it is another thing.
And yes MP5 and Mana return was super important in all aspects of Holy Pally play, thatâs why they had the ability in the first place. Oomâing in raids or arena was a common occurrence if you didnât play around Seal of Insight.
Besides, those were just a few of the more important abilities I mentioned off the top my head.; theyâre were plenty more.
Not to mention that Crusader Strike, literally youâre main attack, is and always has been a melee attack. Judgement started out as melee only and was only increased to 10 yards somewhere around NaxxâŚI donât remember exactly. And only more recently was increased further to 20 then 30. Itâs okay for a melee class to have some range abilities.
Itâs true that Holy Pally(and Ret for that matter) have more range abilities than other melee classes but that doesnât mean they are not melee.
Plate armor? Check.
Mostly Melee or <10 yard range attacks? Check.
Abilities that push and define melee proximity? Check.
Just because you can play Holy Pal at range doesnât mean itâs the correct way.
Holy Pally is and was a ranged class about as much as an Unholy Death Knight.
If you werenât in melee range then you literally werenât using Crusader Strike, Judgement or any of your Seals.
You could stand in the backlines and cast heals til your Oom I guess?
Exorcism had a hefty mana cost and later versions had a cooldown. You couldnât spam it.
And it wasnât frequently relevant to have to use until BfA. Even in Legion it wasnât that important.
When we had holy power originally, you didnât need to be using crusader strike. In say WotLK, you were casting holy light a lot.
In expansions where we had holy radiance that was another hopo generator.
Itâs incentives to be in close range were minimal at best until the mastery change.
Being willfully ignorant of the fact that many/most holy paladins played as ranged healers for over a decade is a thing too apparently.
Were you planning on being hit by melee attacks frequently in PvE as a holy paladin?
That you infrequently ever used in PvE when playing as the healer? Check.
Also had this in mists and WoD when Blizzard had fully embraced that they were just a ranged healer anyway, so why make them solo as melee! https://wow.gamepedia.com/Denounce
It really was never the incorrect way to play them in a group until Legion+ and half the reason you wanted to get closer in 5 mans was to deal damage since healers doing damage didnât become important until Legion.
You apparently have a poor understanding of paladin mana mechanics in early WoW history if you think thatâs what happened if you werenât in melee.
Paladins were the most mana efficient healer in the game for a long time.
Their main mana regen mechanic at one point was a massive mana regen ability that cut your healing output by 50% temporarily. Still didnât have to be in melee.
If you werenât in melee range you werenât casting Judgements, your werenât doing damage.
As noted above, if you werenât in melee range you were literally just spamming heals until Oom since you didnât get any benefit of Seals(seal twisting), Judgement or Holy Radiance.
You and them were doing in wrong. I donât know what else to tell ya.
No but depending on your partners ability to peel means I sure I just wearing plate because itâs pretty to look at. Also, questing and leveling is s thing and Plate armor is likely figured into Paladins power budget.
If you werenât Judging, Crusader Striking to take advantage of your Seals you were doing it wrong.
Good healers have ALWAYS DPSed in downtime and as much as possible.
I dunno, maybe we played a different game.
Iâll just leave it at that, as that seems the only thing I can think of now.
The game I remember if you werenât in melee, literally all you were doing was casting some of your heals and a few low dps ranged utility spells like Denounce or Exorcism on cooldown.
I guess you you could get by that way and I guess if you didnât know any better, you might even think that was an okay day to play?
Honestly i just dont want blizzard to forgot about the people who fell in love with hpal when they were ranged focused. It would be nice to have two viable options atleast. In legion i played pure ranged hpal and did very well and top 10% of my brackets but thats when the class was at its most fun for me. people could choose between santified wrath and avenging crusader and build from there, both good options.
However, now its everything built around crusader strike and glimmer or be useless.
Looking back at it, even though I used to often play my Holy Paladin at range during the Cata/MOP era (when I started maining it). I canât tell for sure how much of that was because it wasnât âforcedâ onto melee or how much it was me just not caring about min/maxing so didnât matter to meâŚ
So I know I didnât feel âforcedâ to be melee but I was also a much more casual player and didnât care for min/maxing or looking at guides, and I do remember having pretty nice benefits from playing at melee range. So Iâm inclined to think that present-me who cares more about min/maxing would consider that same version of Holy Pala as also being Melee.
In other words Iâm inclined to think it was always supposed to be melee but there was just not as much information and guides so I just didnât knew (nor really cared at the time). That said Iâm not sure if the âbenefitsâ from being melee were as big and crucial as they have become lately.
If it was always supposed to be melee then they sure did a great job of tricking people for multiple expansions. I believe it was supposed to offer options and even if the vision for paladin is changing i hate that a large amount of us are being told to switch classes if we dont like the new rules. Whats the point of having 3 slots in each talent tree if were only able to select the crusader strike glimmer build to be useful.
It certainly wasnât required to be melee, but at nearly all points it was better to be melee than not. At the very least, standing at the gold-standard 40 yard range hindered you greatly due to LoD where other healers did not care. Donât really understand the argument since its not like you cant heal at range on live, you are never âforcedâ to unless your heals had melee range on friendlies, youâre simply gimped to some degree for doing so which has always been the caseâŚ
Personally, enjoying HP Holy pala currently. You have to actually think about how to use your resource (sorta), instead of mindlessly spamming holy shock+crusader over and over again like a robot, waiting for cooldowns that are reduced by random procs so they are never reliable to yourself. Now it is much more the tank/spike healer that Iâve loved it to be.
Yes, holy pals probably wonât be as overpowered as they are now. But that is a good thing. The balance of healers right now in Beta is extraordinarily close and awesome. The only healer that really needs anything is Mistweavers since all their stuff is bugged or just not working at all.
Yeah, I mean Iâm not sure, I just look back and remember that there were always benefits so I wonder if present-me would find those benefits as mandatory now or not. I canât tell for sure.
But yeah I donât like the argument some people make about âoh you should just re-rollâ, I think we should consider the different perspectives and what the player-base wants and I do see many long time Holy Paladin players wanting to be able to play at range and really hating our current mastery and I think that alone should be good enough reason to try to provide that playstile as viable alternative.
You need to be in melee to spam crusader strike constantly so thats pretty much being forced to stay there. Paladins were more so mid range healers in regards to LoD which went back to being a frontal cone in legion i believe.
Judgement has had a 30 yard range since at least Cataclysm so the idea that you needed to be in melee to judge is also wrong for most of WoWâs history. Also, in WotLK Holy Paladinâs specifically had a talent to increase judgement of light and wisdom range by 15/30 yards because Blizzard already knew as early as WotLK that Holy Paladinâs didnât want to be there anyway, so they took out the only reason you really needed to move in closer prior to that time.
I also would say even if you were min/maxing you simply did not need to be in melee much or at all in most of WotLK or in any other version in the 12 years prior to Legion. Judgement when it was only 10 yards range would be your only reason and only if there wasnât somone else doing it.
In early WotLK your optimal way to play was to spam sacred shield on everything until it was nerfed to single target. In later WotLK you spent most of your GCDs casting holy light I believe, so you would have been hurting yourself wasting your time/globals doing melee attacks that served little to no useful purpose.
After that you also had no reason to be in melee 99% of the time. Even if you wanted to contribute damage you had no reason to be in melee in MoP or WoD.
In Shadowlands I think it will actually be worse since youâre going to want to be in melee range to maximize holy power generation the way it is currently implemented.
That wasnât the case last time we had holy power as you frequently cast either FoL or Holy Light depending on the version of the game. The mana costs and output of those spells currently in shadowlands makes it seem like thatâs not going to be a good way to play compared to hopo generating and spending as much as you can. SL ability balance is just nothing like what it was last time we had hopo.
The current mastery is also awful for those who would prefer to stand further back like they used to, but many ignored that in Legion especially.
Basciallly yes, there used to be talent that would allow your beacon to act as a proximity as well i believe. Do youd stand in range to be close to them and your beacon would be on the tank to hit melee proximity.
Everything from paladin mastery to crusader strike now giving holy power baseline is Blizzard forcing players to make paladins melee focused; if people want to heal ranged theyâre going to be playing âsub-optimallyâ because they will not be generating as much holy power as melee specced holy and their heals will not be as effective not to mention melee centered glimmer of light/ crusaderâs might builds is already looking like the best build.