My suggestion includes fixing Judgement, HL cost, and so on. I’m not asking for this in a vacuum - this would be part of an entire talent rework.
If Holy Shock should be our primary builder and available constantly, why even have Flash of Light at all?
Again though, I am merely splitting hairs on exact design space. Regardless Holy Paladin needs changes, however Blizzard ultimately wants to do it.
Some basic housekeeping could make Hpal play well and then a hefty aura buff could take the spec from F tier trash to greatness.
Housekeeping:
Aura buff:
Absolutely. The absorb is like 600 on a 400k heal pool. Just Ridiculous. Truth Prevails also needs a decent buff aswell. GJ is currently an huge infusion waste compared to using FoL.
I also pretty much agree with everything else, specially:
Pillars of Light used to be a decent burst healing for Virtue last season. Needs to be reverted.
Rising Sunlight needs to be back to triple holy shock (which was one of the most satisfying heals back then).
Glorious Dawn chance used to be higher but nerfed after S2 DF.
Seraphic Barrier could easily be 30% of absorb value. Right now is 3-ish% of overall.
Tyr’s Hot is meaningless, 12% buff to holyshock/FoL/HL is nice but only last 12s and cannot be extended anymore. Either needs to last the same as Wings or increase the hots healing significantly, with reducing healing beyong 5 targets if its too much.
Agreed with infusions, FoL is kinda problematic being this strong and RNG based.
Remove Martyr and the supporting talent. They are worthless and despite doing more hps than self healing absorb, it’s an annoyance that we HAVE TO take those 2 talents in order to buff our main holy power generator (Holy shock), which comes with a massive negative impact.
Why would you want a higher cooldown on holy shock? It’s fine as is. Word of glory and light of dawn need to do more, and thankfully they’re getting a buff tomorrow.
Yea.
It is truly bewildering to me that someone could pick up the spec and join a key, put Beacons on the tank and themself, then take LotM and spend half the key doing zero Beacon healing because they’re either healing themselves or the tank.
LotM is one of the biggest noob traps in the game across all healers at the moment, especially with Saviour proccing on an already Beaconed target.
It’s inexcusably awful spec design.
Yes, it is bewildering someone who picked a talent wouldn’t read the clear text on that talent indicating that beacon would not work on them. It’s also justice.
I didn’t say the player in that example doesn’t know how the talents work. I said it’s bewildering that HPS loss talents are even on the tree.
Someone got paid a salary to make the apex and LotM talents, presumably knowing how Beacons work. The result is talent options that lower HPS and healing coverage that also put the player in danger, and you think it’s the players that are dumb?
It’s the guy working on Hpal at Blizz HQ that is the idiot in this circumstance, mate. Maybe it’s also you for thinking 135% x 70% is passable talent design.
Shorter cooldowns = less power. I want Holy Shock to be impactful and to have more consistent and powerful Infusions, and in order to have that I recognize it can’t have a super short cooldown. I realize everyone wants to be able to hit a million buttons a second and have every button do amazing things, but you simply can’t have your cake and eat it too.
This is exactly why Holy Paladin will always be in a weird state.
No matter what they do, no mater the tier, Holy Pally since about Shadowlands has been the “10000 apm” healer with tons of instant casts that all feel like hitting with a wet noodle.
You cant have a bunch of instant casts at your disposal, and have any of them being “meaningful”. Buffing any of them risks H Pally becoming too OP, and as such, we are stuck in this constant state of “we have tons of things to press, but we have to press 6 of them to do the same healing as any 1 cast of other healers”.
Holy Light in its current state is a HUGE step in the right direction; slow it down and make it more meaningful; but unless they fundamentally change the Pally design, its always going to be the way its been for the last 6-8 years.
Yes.
Absolutely.
How is this even a question?
why not? Monk gets instant casts. you get procs for instant casts on all of your major spells, that come up so often you rarely have to even hard cast them. you can just push one of your 3 major heal buttons that are on 1.5 min cooldown
I havent played MW in midnight, but the last handful of xpacs, the instant casts were nowhere near as many as h pally.
HPal has 4 and one that can be proc instant.
(holy shock, torch, wet noodle aoe, and lay on hands)
Monk has 4 with 2 that can be proc instant (not including damage spells which are instant healing)(dragon, totems, HoT, bubble)
2 are raid wide healing, but for Hpal our raid wide healing is meh. And with procs and dps to heal pipeline. They have 7 instant healing spells, and are top of the pack
Let’s assume Blizzard fixes Hpal in 3 steps:
What they would fix:
The cooldown issue is the most egregious. Imagine playing any other healer and just not having Revival or Tranq or Halo or Ascendance or Convoke, etc. Imagine how many keys or bosses you simply wouldn’t be able to heal? That’s how Hpal currently feels. You join a weekly blast +10 with mates on alts and the tank pulls three packs? That’s fine on any other healer because you have buttons to babysit the tank or heal through some extra debuffs going out, etc. But on Hpal you just wipe and explain to the group that you’re playing a healer that just doesn’t heal much so they have to play differently.
Making those changes would fix 95% of the problems I have with the spec, improve the gameplay loop, and add flexibility and throughput to the toolkit so that playing a Hpal in any raid or key wasn’t tantamount to trolling your team.
P.S. (@ Blizz) Add Aura Mastery to the CDM so that it’s not so obvious that you don’t care or play Hpal lmao. Jesus Christ can you guys at least try to appear professional? Game development is our passion, btw.
The FoL proc is constantly going off, and not only that, you can make the largest single target hard cast in the game (holy light) instant cast for 2 casts as well every 2 min; with those 2 spells being instant, that literally means every single one of our heals that we have available to us, can be instantly cast.
You would also have to discount pally hots (flame), blessings, shield (which also heals) and judgement (which does a sizable damage reduction).
I guess all in all my point is that Holy Pally is designed for constant instant cast healing (there is never a time where we dont have an instant cast to press), which has no choice but to ensure that none of them are “too powerful”, sadly.
Id almost prefer Pally goes back to Wotlk, where it only has like 4 buttons to press, but each are super meaningful.
We were also designed to only being able to heal at most two people very well and basically dominated an entire healing profile, tank healer. Despite such a requirement being largely gone, hpal’s overall design has never really strayed to far away from that.
It’s the reason why, despite being moved to a builder+spender setup, our kit is still very much designed primarily for single target healing. We have 3 heals that just do Single Target healing and talents designed to either those single target heals either do more healing or something in addition to healing.
Every time they attempted to change things up, it either ended up horribly overpowered, terribly underpowered, or simply not fun to play. And imo, at lot of that was because they kept trying to design hpaly in a way where Holy Shock, Flash of Light, and Holy Light had to exist and be relevant.
I feel they hit the sweet spot in Legion; no holy power, infusion speeding up casts (not making them instant), WoG and LoD on a CD. Every heal had impact, and you felt like you could get in a “zone”. The game play in Midnight would be perfect for that kind of H Pally imo.
I think a lot of what is said here definitely makes sense, but at this point in the season, I’d be happy not being 20% behind other healers on average. If we need to tune just a few core components to get there, it’s fine, before the next big patch.
Why aren’t they listening? It’s actually insane how bad it feels being THIS far behind other healers.
WoG and LoD are getting a 20% buff today, so we’ll see.