Holy paladin is coded as melee. Mechanics coded to target ranged players don’t hit hpals. Hpals (and to a lesser degree, mw) are the melee healers and that’s in the name of variety, there are 4 other ranged healers.
I played paladin in Vanilla, TBC and the first few patches of WOTLK. Vanilla paladin was mostly a broken class outside of healing. You could ‘tank’ Stratholme for some fun though.
I’ve only recently dusted off my old deleted paladin. From what I remember I’d say we were mid range healers. I would ‘dip’ into melee when I could and wasn’t punished for being out of melee range.
That said I am looking for a melee caster…
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That has no bearing on how the game considers you. The first boss of seige chases a range flagged player, with hpal and 3 melee it will pick a target at random including the tank. The final boss of TD prioritizes ranged players for explosive blast and will choose at random each round.
Based on this internal flag, we can say that hpal IS a melee spec. Intended to be in melee range. It’s no secret that LoD works better if you take a couple steps back, but heals are weaker than prot heals if you try to stand at 30yds.
Didn’t say as such.
To be clear, I was speaking to how I remember playing in those expansions. Which has no bearing on how the game currently considers the spec (agreed).
We could wayback some guides for holy paladin; that would end the argument.
Holy Paladin is fully ranged healer in classic. In fact you wouldn’t be allowed to have any seal active on target due to debuff limit, and it was mana loss anyway to activate it. It was only viable solo, or maybe in dungeons, when everyone was overgeared.
I dabbed with holy in MoP and that was fully ranged as well. I loved that gameplay. WoD was also ranged. Not a fan of whole melee healer thing they’ve started pushing in Legion and BFA. If I want to melee dps I play a ret.
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which is fine but that doesnt change the fact that they took away the viable ranged/mid ranged option that alot of us liked and forced us to add dps to our rotations. That also doesnt change the fact that giving a holy power for hitting a beacon target is counter productive.
Fair, and I was not insinuating otherwise. Was just stating what position I hold so people would be able to fairly interpret my response.
Side note: Just because I am looking for a melee caster doesn’t mean I don’t want flexibility. I still think our mastery is bad even for a melee healer.
Last expansion that wasnt the case. There was an option as mention above to extend your mastery to a beacon target as well as yourself allowing ranged play. Im pretty sure range abilities targeted hpals then and the melee only mechanics is a relatively new thing to accomodate the CS glimmer build
100% agree
Hpals have been coded as melee since, at the very least, since 8.0. Glimmer as a trait was added in 8.1 which was 6 months later. What happened in previous expansions is entirely irrelevant as every class goes through a redesign every expansion which are every ~2 years. “It wasn’t always this way” in no way amounts to a hill of beans. You are currently designed to be in melee range.
No one is debating the fact that they are meant to be in melee range now but the class was still viable as ranged before where as now it is not at all. Thats the issue.
The class was just simpler back then. It has always been a melee based healer. No amount of mental gymnastics will change that fact. They’re based off the wc3 paladin and those were melee support heroes.
Unfortunately due to debuff limits on raid targets you didn’t really have to get into melee range as a paladin to judge and maintain a seal debuff. Doesn’t change the fact that they were absolutely designed that way. Turns out dated game design just had us around primarily just for buffing and our tank healing.
When you weren’t in a raid setting and not doing things like that in dungeon content, you were simply not playing to your fullest. I won’t say you were playing wrong, because everyone has their own idea in their head how the right way to play is. However, the classes seal system was designed with you being in melee range and maintaining them as an additional bit of healing or mana return for your melee or caster heavy team. It also provided your team with a bit more damage by you maintaining the seals.
They were strong if used correctly (directed at whoever above said they were more of a mana drain, that is simply wrong).
As for the holy power…
While we’ve had it before, it was also designed specifically for us to use it during those times of the game. The way it’s designed now and how it feels on beta leads me to believe they simply did a rush job and slapped it on there for the sake of doing so. The holy power spenders we have now are different and don’t feel as good with all our additional advancements to our melee kit.
The beacon holy power gain is just stupid if I’m being completely honest. Now when you’re forced out of melee range by a mechanic, and you will be plenty from my testing so far. You will now have to make sure your shock is on cd and spam heals into your beacon even if they’re at full life. It’s absolutely dumb game design and it will have those of us crazy enough to power through this design asking why we hate ourselves.
Light of dawn being apart of the spenders is also stupid. It was a very mediocre heal before that was only halfway decent after having azerite boost its yardage. Now if you want it to be decent you will have to get a legendary for it that will simply not be the best one. Then you have to factor in our mastery that makes it even worse unless you wanna waste a talent to also increase our mastery reach (overall useless talent btw outside of very niche fights).
So without the additional yardage you have an extremely low range heal that requires you to hit 4 targets (based on current tuning in beta) to be a net healing gain over a single word of glory. In pug play or groups with casters/hunters good luck getting people to understand how your garbage mastery works and your tiny ranged cone heal requires your team to help you out by grouping up during aoe damage phases.
I’m all for holy power coming back, but I want them to actually design our spec properly for it after all our changes instead of just adding it for the sake of doing so.
It feels absolutely bad in its current state. Can you still do mediocre minimal skill content with it in the next expansion? no doubt.
Will you have to work twice as hard compared to all other versions of paladin that came before to make your clunky new holy power system work with your increased focus melee system? yup.
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I would say back then it was intended to be a melee based healer. It was not implemented that way though. I waybacked some guides and looked at the talents (poor memory) and that argument appears to hold. Whether or not they intended it to be, back then, you could effectively play out of melee range.
All you had to do to take advantage of seals was auto attack. You literally judged, sit in melee range to auto attack and regen Mana, heal like a madman. At least in heroics. Forcing a dps rotation is a failure.(as it breaks the caster pally that Mana enjoy) Taking holy radiance and illuminated healing(no reliable aoe), failure. Losing divine light light with infusion of light procs(big heal aside from flash, hurts Mana). Bad.
You could easily set in melee or ranged and be an effective healer. The only true benefits to being in melee was the Mana Regen from seals/judgement. You did minimal dmg either way(minus a few broken instances) and in heroic pve mythic pve(now) you needed the healing more than the dmg.
You didn’t need that in cata because of divine plea returning Mana and Mana pots
Every other healer heals at range, so whoever wants to play a backline healer can just play them. The only reason why pally couldn’t do it right for so long is that blizzard was not creative enough and the technology wasnt there to make it work. What blizzard needs to do now is double down on the concept.
Blizzard just need to do things like this
or
make Holy Light similar to enhancement shammy’s heal, so for holy pally you cast holy light but for every holy power you have up max of 3 the cast time gets reduce by 35%,70%,100% and the healing is increase by 75%,150%,200% while the amount heal without holy power should be nerf to balance out the healing with holy power.
Make judgement generate holy power, does the buff I suggested where you heal for auto attacks.
Consencration heals & generate holy power
Healing done to targets within the proximity of the mastery grants holy power.
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I’d agree to this day I won’t play Holy Paladin. Mana. Spells should cost mana. Manage your mana. You want to add complexity? Make it harder to manage mana. Holy power feels forced. Like you just wanted to change stuff to say you changed stuff.
I just found this forum because I was looking to see if I can actually play Holy Paladin this expansion after returning from a long break.
Turns out, I can not.
Agree and disagree with your points
- Glimmer and melee don’t have to be related. Its only related due to crusaders might talent. This might be different this expac due to Imbued infusions talent.
- What do you mean about 2 different resources? In shadowlands I have never really had to make any sort of considerations when managing mana. To me the only resource was holy power. At least in dragon flight we might now use infusions (literally were useless in SL).
- Agree judgement should give holy power. You should incentivize players to use their abilities.
- Agree the beacon holy power is dumb, would be way better if the holy power was tied to infusions.
- Agree hpal mastery is super anoying, and so is light of dawn. While being in melee for crusader strike should be a option/playstyle, it probably shouldn’t be required. Our mastery currently requires us to be in melee. Sometimes mechanics make this pretty difficult, cant hit boss, cant get holy power, cant heal, party is in trouble.
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I guess a big issue would be, is that given the choice being in ranged is almost always better than being in melee. Given that, if a hpal chooses the option of playing a melee hpal vs a ranged one what benefit are they getting for taking this risk
They are coded as melee, so they will be bringing melee mechanics to the ranged group if they are not playing melee as well as loss of dmg.
Having Holy Power back feels pretty amazing to me. Especially when you tie in Shining Savior, Avenging Wrath: Might, Awakening, Divine Purpose, Blessing of Dawn, get a proc where you can use it instantly again, and you can basically Word of Glory someone from half health to full with one spell, then move on to the next target.
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I disagree, i think that mana, not holy power should go away. mana isn’t a fun mechanic to manage, hopo is a unique mechanic among healers and I like that.