Holy Paladin is non-Viable in PvE in DF

Classes Paladin
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I have been healing as a Holy Paladin since Vanilla WoW. I have barely healed in raids because as my guild leader says, “Holy Paladin Sucks” and he is right. Holy is now non-viable in PvE. Why is the Holy Paladin why is the Holy Paladin non-viable in DF?

Holy has terrible survivability

The first thing I noticed about holy healing in DF was that I was dying a lot in PvE and PvP, more than I ever have since Vanilla WoW Molten Core by orders of magnitude. I am getting one or two shotted in PvE, PvP constantly. Holy can’t take a hit, even from non-bosses. Plate armor is irrelevant, we might as well be wearing cloth armor for healing like we did in vanilla wow. Holy mastery requires that we be close to those we are healing or be a melee healer but we lack the survivability and mobility to withstand the pounding we take when we do get close to elites and bosses where are primary healing targets are.

Standing still in Raids and Mythics is instant death for Holy

Survivability and castable mana-based healing that is too weak and too slow. I no longer use Holy Light because I die before I can finish casting it. Flash of light is not much better. The cast time for Holy Light should be cut in half and Flash of Light should have buffs and procs that make it insta-cast most of the time. Even with 20%+ haste, Holy Light casts too slowly.

Solution: Buff Holy Paladin damage base damage mitigation significantly, by at least 20% or about 60-70% of prot mitigation. I feel like I am wearing cloth armor but all other healers who do dot wear plate have better mitigation than Holy Paladins do.

Holy Light is so slow and ineffective that it is useless.

Castable mana-based healing that is too weak and too slow. I no longer use Holy Light because I die before I can finish casting it. Flash of light is not much better.

Solution: The cast time for Holy Light should be cut in half and Flash of Light should have buffs and procs that make it insta-cast most of the time. Even with 20%+ haste, Holy Light casts too slowly.

Beacon of Light needs an AE component and should be buffed by Mastery

If this were BC, Beacon of Light would be fine because we were tank healers in BC. We are no longer needed as tank healers. In many situations, tanks can out-heal Holy Paladins so they no longer need our healing. In DF, Beacon of Light is insufficient because it is not tied to our mastery.

Solution: Beacon of Light should have a passive, talented AE component so that it heals targets nearby to the beacon target and that healing should be buffed by Mastery.

Useless Non-healing Abilities in the Holy Spec - Beacon of Virtue and Rule of Law

Beacon of Virtue and Rule of Law are both non-healing healing abilities that are wasted cooldowns, wasted talent points and wasted buttons on toolbars. BoV and Rule of Law are an admission by the WoW devs that holy melee healing is broken.

Solution: BoV and RoL should be removed as active, talented abilities and rolled into the Holy Paladin healing spec as talented or baseline passives.

Does any other WoW healing spec have useless non-healing, healing abilities like BoV and RoL?

I don’t know how much longer I can continue to try to heal as a Holy Paladin. I took two expansions off from healing after the massive post-Legion holy nerf. I was hoping Holy would be better but it is much, much worse.

Your Feedback Matters in This Thread!

Please provide your on thoughts on problems and solutions for the Holy Paladin spec in DF. I will add them to this post whether I agree with them or not. I will also upvote well-written posts that I disagree with.

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It’s really sad how it seems like 99% of hpal’s problems (the other 1% being that buff management thing) is because they just cast so SLOW. Holy has terrible survivability, sure, but it’s also harder to survive because it’s so slow to cast, which means you’re standing still, which means it’s harder to dodge things, which means your healing goes out slower/is less speedy to react to things, etcetc.

Just feels bad. I really enjoy some of the spec options, even if they’re not meta, like the Tyr skill on the right side of the tree that generates an absorb shield based on healing done through holy light…But it ends up sucking because holy light is so gdamn slow.

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Casting is slow for holy paladins even with 20% haste.

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Well I mean I agree Holy Light has a long cast time and sometimes is not easy to stand still casting for that long… But everything else here said in the OP is just wrong…

Holy Paladin is very viable in PvE right now… Just look at warcraftlogs, subcreation, or any healer rankings site and they all agree with this. It’s a really sought after spec for Raids (like No1 or No2 at worst). For M+ is standing solid at No3 just behind Evoker and Druid but one or multiple tiers ahead of the rest.

Survivability is quite good with Divine Protection on a short cooldown and Bubble to get us out of any trouble, things like BOP can also come handy and save us from time to time.

As for the casting issue you talk about maybe try the melee build if you are struggling with casting, it’s all instant cast spells so like there’s zero issues with movement, I may hard-cast like 3-5 Holy Lights per fight, usually with Divine Favor too which also makes it a bit faster…

So idk either your Raid Leader is for some reason very biased against Holy Paladin or that’s just the excuse he gave you and there’s some other reason.

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Holy paladin is viable, caster holy paladin is not.

Caster has no damage profile, and the only reason you would even think of playing it is because holy light generates 2 holy power if used on beacon. However holy light is extremely slow and this raid has heavy movement on almost every fight so it just isn’t working out. They have a fix for casting into beacons in 10.0.5, but yet again they do not understand that holy light is way too slow so using it on someone below 50% to generate holy power will be very rare, you’ll get sniped before the cast finishes.

They shoved caster talents onto holy paladin without fleshing it out at all. Judgement and HoW are your only ways to do damage from ranged (how isn’t active all the time either), whereas most of our damage comes from being in melee (auto attacks, consecration).

The gameplay for hpal overall imo is awful currently. But caster is just dead until they flesh it out more, they need to actually make it fully playable not just give us a few caster talents and hope it works out.

Also hpal is like 3rd or 4th best, not 1st or 2nd.

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Red flag 1

Red flag 2

Then I check your public information and I see youre 650 io and 7/8 normal raider.

Lmao holy paladin is extremely viable in pve, what evidence do you have that they’re not?

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I have a whole lot more experience as a Holy Paladin raid healer than you do. I have been healing as holy in raids since 2005 with two different Paladins. My other Paladins name is Blackweb. There were no logs and no achievements in Vanilla. You should know that. My guild leader does not like Holy Paladins and I cant say I blame him. The Holy Paladin healing spec is the worst it has ever been. Terrible survivability and worse healing.

1 Like
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I dont have an issue with holy in a raid setting.

We’re still really strong.

Though I do find that my healing throughput is substantially lower than it used to be.

Im struggling with healing aoe damage in m+ if my group doesnt stack so I can maximize my LoD. I also have to micro manage oDaD and unending light to have both up before a heavy aoe damage phase.

Without both buffs up I feel like my heals do nothing.

Specially if kicks arent going out or if ppl eat damage.

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My main problem with Holy is that, I have no way to pump out more heal other than using my limited CD (Wings).

Other healers can use more mana to pump out more heals. Druid can put more hots. Disc priest can put out more atonement. Holy priest can spam more AoE heal.

As melee holy pally, my holy power generation is limited and there are moments where I have nothing left to press and need to resort to casting to generate holy power which I really dislike. But then I am not a top player so maybe its just me

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You’re trolling

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I agree that Holy Light is too slow. I do not understand the intent behind giving holy Paladins so many talents that would lead them to believe a caster build is possible, only to pull the rug out from under them and have it not be viable. I have tried very hard to make a caster build work, but it’s either too slow for mechanics (Holy Light) or doesn’t generate enough holy power (Flash of Light).

The non-caster build really is the only way to go. In my opinion, this hurts the holy paladin talent tree, not allowing alternate play-styles room to take root; it ultimately makes it seem boring.

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4 out of 5 ranking websitrs put HP at A tier. All 5 out HP higher than resto shaman and resto shaman didnt get ANY buffs whatsoever

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Here I was thinking Hpal was feeling really strong in pve. Been having a blast on it. Also

is not really a qualification for being good at a class.

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5/8 heroic raider here. After a couple weeks in Vault, here’s what I can say.

That is hyperbole. Just because a spec isn’t #1 flavor of the month does not mean it is ‘non viable’. A spec has not been truly non viable in a very, very long time.

In fact, holy is quite good right now. Our HPS is solid enough, we provide unparalleled sustain on tanks, Blessing of Sacrifice is one of the most powerful external CD for others, and Aura Mastery can mean the difference between a kill or wipe on progression fights. And we bring Devotion Aura if no other paladins are providing it.

It is better than most healers by simple virtue of having Divine Shield. If you are dying, then you are failing mechanics. I am usually last to die and have no issues surviving.

Again, if you are dying then you are failing mechanics. I play caster spec Holy and I can cast just fine without dying. Know where you can safely stand and when you have to move.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it is useless, but Holy Light and Flash of Light do make up a weirdly low % of our overall heals right now even playing as caster spec. I would agree that Holy Light can be 0.5 baseline faster either default or some trigger i.e. Infusion.

Then don’t stack mastery. I avoid it. I would argue more so that our mastery just isn’t appealing overall and should be revamped. I would argue our niche is cleave healing thus our mastery could be a Resplendent Light effect for all our single target heals + % boost to LoD, but others have suggested other solid ideas like making Glimmer our mastery.

In Summary
I disagree. Holy paladins are overall quite good right now. Yes, we can be a little better. I desperately want 2 charges for Holy Shock. Holy Light can be a little faster and Flash of Light can be a little beefier. And most of all, our talents need revamping and rebalancing because most of them are very bad.

But we are currently making up for our deficits with great utility, fantastic tank sustain, and solid HPS through Holy Shock, Glimmer, and Light of Dawn. I pulled 70k HPS on heroic Kurok just fine keeping up with our Pres Evoker and our Holy Priest (and that was without tier). However, I am behind them in more snap healing fights like Terros.

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Our healing is okay. Divine shield at least in high end content typically gets used for soaking mechanics or cheesing things, you don’t often get to use it as a defensive. Our damage is very bad unless you take blessing of seasons, which makes it okay but not on par with evoker or rdruid overall (and they have much better ways of doing damage). Our mobility is awful.

Also, aura mastery is definitely not the difference between a wipe and a kill, not anymore anyway. Fights aren’t designed that way (bfa raids) in vault and devo was nerfed pretty hard going into SL. It is a decent cooldown, but is not nearly as powerful as it was in bfa.

I think hpal feels like a mess. Performance wise it’s fine, but the gameplay is abysmal imo. Holy power is restrictive (can’t heal when I want to, have to pool, old holy power was much more flexible), Dawn makes that even worse. We now have mana and holy power to manage, something blizzard specifically listed as the reason for chi/holy powers removal. Cleave healing has been one of our niches for a while, but in legion/bfa we also had very good ways to heal the entire raid, even in sl with ashen. we’ve lost that in dragonflight entirely.

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I agree that our toolkit can be better, but I was just mainly disagreeing with OP’s assertion that Holy Paladin is ‘non-Viable in PvE’. It is odd seeing the majority of my healing being tied to just Holy Shock and Light of Dawn. Talent spells like Golden Path, Light’s Hammer / Holy Prism, Tyr’s Deliverance, etc. being 5% of our healing or less is a bit sad.

I will definitely agree that our damage profile can be better, but I have always hated DPS weaving as a healer so that is largely a non issue to me.

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Yeah that is a big issue with hpal. Our healing is basically light of dawn, and we spam it constantly even on full hp targets in order to proc awakening. We have quite a few bad gameplay loops imo and I just have found myself not enjoying it now which is sad because I have played hpal for a long time.

I think they really messed up with bringing back holy power. It was great in mop/WoD but their reason for removing it made sense, so bringing it back was just weird. It is also designed poorly in comparison to old holy power. We had so many heals back in mop/WoD, we had a few generators and quite a few spenders, we also had regular heals that didn’t generate but were useful in many scenarios. We had eternal flame back then which was super fun. We were able to spend from 1-5 holy power rather than just 3. Now all we have is LoD and WoG and a dps spender that is almost never used. it’s embarrassing in comparison.

Anyway, hpal is viable for sure. Every healer is currently viable, there isn’t a single healer not brought to high end mythic raiding. MW/rsham are more rare than the others, but they are still brought if a good player is behind the class.

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Yeah I feel like WoD was peak holy paladin personally. I really enjoyed healing as paladin in that expansion.

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I’d love to just have Shock Barrier back in some form so I felt like I had a little preventative way to mitigate a little incoming damage.

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I’m not sure what build you’re running, but the caster version of Holy is not really viable compared to the melee build.

I don’t have much time to raid anymore these days but holy feels good for m+. It’s definitely viable.

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