Holy Paladin - Lightsmith vs Herald in S3

Classes Paladin
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With the current iteration of Hpal having fix most of my issues with the specs detailed over months in previous post on these forums (Mana, Button Bloat, Weak spenders, Glimmer and passive healing vs reactive healing, Wings windows vs baseline healing), I’m still a bit baffled by the gap in power between Herald and LS (despite all improvements made to LS in the last couple of seasons).

Eternal Flame,Dawnlight and Stronger holy shocks vs Hammer And Anvil,Divine Guidance and Holy Armaments

Eternal flame being 25% of already strong spenders on yourself will always be a leagues ahead of RNG heals like H&A. H&A even with crit chances close to 50% are a unreliable heal which just takes the fun out of the spec because takes agency out of the player and ends up being overhealing, I personally love the idea of H&A being maintenance healing while you DPS, but since you dont know if you will had to spend an extra global to heal with a spender or not and as a healer you cannot rely on these kind of effects to be able to save your party.

Basically all Herald makes your baseline kit much stronger with talents like Luminosity, Blessing of An’she, Second Sunrise and Aurora with consistent results, while Lightsmith depends on their Armaments which are short CDs and have overall weaker healing/responsiveness/agency over your party Health Pools, while herald is just baseline stronger all around.

Abilities like Divine Guidance contribute little on demand healing and are mostly overhealing, this ability overall its also terribly designed from a healer PoV and numerically weak, while Blessed Assurance and CS are weak to keep AC builds and hpal dps in check.

Sunsear + Second Sunrise vs Laying Down Arms/Valiance
One of the main sources of healing while playing LS is FoL+ Infusion. Since Laying Down Arms makes infusions more frequent on LS despite the last buffs and changes to Second Sunrise for Herald, this again plays an overall detrimental role for LS because the infusions comes from your short CDs and RNG proces/rng Sacred weapon healing, while Herald have consistently higher healing power baseline which I discussed earlier. Abilities like Shared resolve its just 1% DR during armaments, which is again meaningless against the disparity of controlled healing that heral provides consistently.

Sun’s Avatar/ Dawnlight vs Blessing of the Forge and Tempered in battle

One of my favorite aspects of LS is the ‘external’ control they have over health pools with Bulwark and tempered in battle, allowing for health pool stabilization and damage prevention, however the equivalent of Herald capstone vs LS just outshines heavily these abilities despite tempered in battle being a powerful passive. Tempered in battle requires a lot of awareness to be used properly while Bulwark feels weak compared to the example that our dear oracle priest gave us last season and ended being nerfed for, and doesn’t offset the powerful passive HPS of herald Sun’s Avatar and Dawnlight which is amplified by our tier set.

Much Much Stronger 4 piece bonus
Herald 4 piece makes our already strong spenders even stronger for 10 additional seconds, making the hero spec to feel just amazing and easily the best iteration of hpal so far for me in a long, long time.

LS 4 piece provides an overall gain of ~1 overall healing, which is meaningless on top of some good numbers in DPS, that again are meaningless due to the power gap in the baseline kit for herald.

Conclusion
While this remain one of the strongest iteration of LS so far (personally I believe its better than late S1 TWW AC LS build) its still a bit behind herald due to core issues in the LS design philosophy for a healer but also an extremely weak 4 piece bonus compared to its counterpart.

LS its closest to being viable that its ever been but still its plagued but a lot of problems that are undesirable for healers and bad numbers for pretty niche talents.

I understand not every hero talent can be viable but wanted to write this anyway because it was a fun analysis to make on top or bringing more visibility to the terrible tier set bonus for LS.

4 Likes
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I know I don’t speak for everybody, but I almost want them to stop trying to balance the healing output of the healing specs, and just be up front and say, “This one heals better, that other one does a lot more damage and can be used when you trust your party more, or have enough full healers in raid and would like a hybrid option that is more of a support and less of a throughput healer.”

In this case, Lightsmith could be a lot more augvoker-y

2 Likes
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Because of group finder role restrictions, Blizzard still needs to balance out the 1 spot they allocate for healers in a 5-man dungeon group. Every spec restricted to queuing for that spot needs to perform similarly to every other spec doing that same job.

Ideally, all healers should be able to spec more towards damage or healing, or some hybrid of both. Not every healer’s talent trees permit that degree of choice though.

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The really unfortunate thing imo is that the issues with LS don’t feel fixable with tuning. They could buff the numbers and make it technically viable, but it would still feel awful to play compared to how rewarding Herald is.

LS leans so heavily on random procs and awkward interactions that even if it were competitive on paper, it would still feel dookie in practice. Healers generally want consistency and to feel like their healing decisions directly move health bars, but LS just isn’t built around that. Which leaves it basically dead outside of niche situations.

The only way I could see it feeling good is if they buffed the weapon imbue and made the healing proc while wielding a Weapon a 100% chance (ie stronger HoPo spenders). That would at least give it a reliable baseline. But as it stands, every other node on the tree feels awful, so it’s hard to imagine it ever competing with Herald in the playstyle, and healing profile department.

1 Like
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I actually like the damage rotation and big shield gameplay of LS hpala, reminds me of early disc. That being said, I was pretty excited to try out the 4 piece on my hpala and after 3 dungeons it’s been a 1% overall healing gain… tragic. How did this make it past ptr?

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I loved Lightsmith so much in S1 I nearly didn’t play HPal in S2. When I did pick it up the HotS healing was so good that I really enjoyed the spec again. In S3, it feels like LS is supposed to be an option again, except it isn’t. I mainly raid heal now, and go ret in keys, but I could try LS in keys to see if it helps my main issue which is producing the kind of dmg I used to while healing.

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Blizzard released the class tuning to be implemented in the upcoming weekly reset (9/9) and I’m a little bummed there wasn’t anything for Lightsmith Holy Paladin :confused: Feels like there really needs to be some tuning for that hero spec to be competitive.

3 Likes
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The problem is that Blizzard’s answer to these things is nearly always break the spec that works well so that it equals the one that is crap. There you go - balance - two equally sh!te healing specs. When it comes to “class tuning” I prefer to fly under the radar.

Right now we have a hero spec that performs well in raids and according to what some of you are saying, not so badly in M+ - albeit not the hero spec you want to be running.

What we don’t want is two equally bad hero specs. We don’t want a repeat of DF S3, and the massive over-compensation for the 2-3 weeks where we were over-powered.