Holy Paladin - Lightsmith - Useless Tier set

Classes Paladin
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As everyone knows (I guess) blizzard buffed Blessed Assurance for Prot Paladin in almost 100% of it power. But by accident they buffed it for Holy Paladin as well. It comes from 40% to 120%. Casting a Holy Power ability buffs your next Crusader strike in 120% instead of 40%. It made the Lightsmith+Avenging Crusader the huuuge strong bis build since we got this strange accidental buff. Otherwise, blizzard kept this buff on and didnt chage or fixed anything.
The bad side of this is our Tier Set

Paladin Holy 11.0 Class Set 2pc - Holy Shock's healing is increased by 10% and its cooldown is reduced by 10%.

Paladin Holy 11.0 Class Set 4pc - Holy Shock increases the initial healing of your next Word of Glory or Light of Dawn by 8%, stacking up to 4 times.

We dont press Holy Shock anymore during the Wings window because theres no GCD or timing to spend doing that. We arent using even half of what our tier set does because the build changed completely to a way that is counter intuitive to press holy shock.
The 4p buff is completely useless as well, because we just have the full power of it when we press Divine Toll (another useless spell during the Avenging Crusader window). Is that correct? Theres any point to have a tier set doing negative Healing Increase because a accidental buff made a completely change on our build or playstyle at mid of the patch?

Feels like i have 4p of tier set for nothing because during the AC you CAN NOT press Holy Shock, otherwise youre losing healing doing that

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While this is obviously a problem, it could be worse. Both Herald and LS/AC could suck. /s

The issue here was raid balance, in order to maintain Hpal in check, they nerfed our spot healing power greatly, if that accidental buff to Blessed Assurance didnt happen, we would most likely be the worst or second worst healer in the season.

Blizzard needs to figure out a way to differentiate Hpal in Raid vs M+ like Disc has, because everytime we are good in M+ or Raid, they weaken the core kit of the spec in attempts to balance it.

As it stands right now, our spenders are mid or useless in the case of LoD, and Holy Shock is too expensive of an ability to spam and too weak as well for both dps and healing. On top of all that, we dont really have a proper mana management mechanic other than going AC for free healing.

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And here in lies a core issue of the Holy Paladin kit and Blizzard’s long-standing inability to address it.

Melee wings doesn’t buff your healing like normal wings does and so while in AC, you’re only really encouraged to press Judgment, Spenders (to buff Crusader Strike) and Crusader Strike. Blizzard sort of doubles down on that by making Judgment and CS cooldown faster, and with 2 charges of CS and with Crusader’s Might which makes CS reduce the CD of Judgment. This all sounds like a nice little package and a well understood rotation and playstyle, however, the rest of the Hpal kit just takes a backseat during this period.

Well, that’s fine - right? Except that with AC you have 25% uptime with the 15 second duration and 1 minute CD. Take into account Awakening procs and that goes up to 30-40% uptime.

So, for 30% - 40% of the time, the rest of the kit including the tier set and like 95% of our talent choices just don’t really matter.

IDK. I think AC is a cool idea, but in it’s current design it really does mess with the core design space for Hpal and it creates somewhat odd outcomes like this.

Best case is that AC is really just a tuning thing, if it’s good, irrespective of what it invalidates, then it’s good. AC tuning really needs to surpass all of that to be worth it.

100%. I don’t know what that looks like, but hpal is currently in a really awkward spot. We’re really well tuned for raid but really need buffs in M+ but because the playstyle and build are largely the same, their hands are tied.

I think the biggest culprit is Hammer and Anvil able to find 5 injured allies in a raid which massively inflates our healing. That’s not really ever the case in m+ unless they buffed the range. Even then it would be a 1:1 tuning and not what we need which is bigger heals in smaller groups.

Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s an easy solve, like there was for Disc.

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I love this post. it describes perfectly what the Holy paladin is right now.

I would love that blizzard to make AC to cast holy shock (using the cooldown of the spell) on the nearest target when you are pressing CS and Judgment maybe it would help the core

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