Just finished leveling a Mistweaver through dungeons…what a ton of fun and an effective healer so far (lvl 49). Holy Paladin, by contrast, has been utterly painful. Slow as molasses, and weaksauce heals. I’m lv 38 now, and my big heal feels like it moves the tank’s health bar less that my monk’s maintenance hot. Flash of Light - what a joke. Holy Light - lol. These heals need to be doubled at these low levels for this healer to be fun. I hope these are scaling issues that the spec grows out of.
healing is actually very easy as holy pally, you are just doing it all wrong from the looks of it. What I’ve been doing leveling up, now that I got light of the martyr is; just use that as my main heal & beacon myself and holy shock whenever its up. Whenever I cast anything but light of the martyr, its mainly to heal myself; it heals pretty nicely and doesn’t cost as much mana as flash of light. Also I took crusader’s might to get more up time on holy shock; since if needed I’ll use that on some1 and also get some self heal due to beacon.
1 Like
I was comparing actual gameplay of the Hpal pre-lvl 49 to my mistweaver at equivalent levels, and there is no comparison atm: the Hpal’s effectiveness is laughably worse. This may be an effect of scaling issues in the random dungeons I queue for, or it may be a general tuning prob. Beaconing myself instead of the tank is not going to make much of a difference, because the prob is Hpal’s throughput, and light of the martyr I found to be laughably weak.
Holy paladin scaling has always been wonky since even before the level squish. We we’re hilariously bad before until around level ~100 so it wouldn’t surprise me if that continued to be the case.
I had no issues leveling. I spammed dungeons 50-60 and it was a breeze. I believe your issue here is that you are trying to cast which just isn’t the play style. Flash of light is AWFUL, don’t use it. Light of the martyr is a better triage heal than it by a considerable margin. Holy light should only be cast when you get the buff on it from landing a crit shock. Other than that you should be smacking things with crusader strike to build holy power and lower the cooldown of holy shock, which should be used off cooldown. Right now holy paladin is basically a builder spender class with hard casting being absolutely not worth it in the slightest. Taking beacon of faith and putting it on yourself will also make undergeared scenarios where you might need to cast martyr more often a lot more bearable because when ever you cast your holy shocks and spenders you’ll be keeping yourself healed.
There have been some rough patches.
I find myself particularly susceptible to certain styles of tanking. The marathon runner tanks and the ‘I can’t sit still’ tanks.
If they’re constantly running behind you or running out of range and then pulling. These tanks can make building up holy power with melee attacks more difficult, and they’re getting the weakest version of your heals because they keep running away to outside the benefits of mastery.
If you’re coming from another healer the switch to meleeing is going to be a ‘reset event’ level shock. Like when I switched from using a keyboard and mouse clicking buttons to a keypad and keybinds about 12 years ago, and when I went melee DPS 2 years ago after tanking since even before WoW… you will spend some time being absolutely bad at it, and just have to live with people being mad at you, until one day those same people are asking your friends to convince you to unblock them so you can heal for them because it all finally clicked for you and now you’re amazing, and they can just [woops] off. 
(I’m not there yet, but I’m starting to see my performance ramp up and my ability to time my procs flowing better)
There’s a guide another person posted about glimmer of light healing from WingsIsUp, a website for mythic+ and raiding as Holy.
I was struggling as holy but I did everything in the guide including copying Ellesmere’s UI and settings for Vuhdo and it has worked wonders. I was very competitive healing the Nathria fights last night up to Innerva. You really have to get used to melee dpsing because the cd reduction of holy shock with crusader strike makes a big difference. Cooldown management is also very important as an Hpal like everyone is preaching.
I was talking specifically about my leveling experience pre-lvl 49, and I did research into the glimmer builds that you seem to be referencing here, and that are not avail to an Hpal prior to I think lvl 50 (it’s a talent dependent build). I can tell you that in no way shape or form are you going to keep an avg pug up pre-level 49 with just beacon, shocks and light of the dawn. If glimmer is the viable heal spec, then make it gd baseline. Why teach paladin to hard cast their heals for their first 50 levels if it’s all just BS for heals afterwards?
Because the paladin dev team have no idea what they’re doing. Rather than fix the problems which made the GoL playstyle necessary in BFA (extreme nerfs to caster playstyle), they nerfed caster further by nerfing IoL and then had the audacity to turn GoL into a talent and pretend it’s okay.
The spec is a broken mess with no sign of improvement on the horizon.
I enjoy healing as holy, it feels fine if you time your cooldowns appropriately.
I don’t use glimmer. I use beacon of faith which, to be fair, is on the same talent row. I ONLY use the second beacon so I didn’t have to worry about healing my self though and healing an entire group without either of those talents through just beacon, holy shock, crusader strike (to lower the cd of holy shock), light of dawn, and infusion of light procs. So unless there’s a massive scaling issue you’re doing something incredibly wrong. If there IS a stat scaling issue here it won’t be fixed either because it’ll mess with current content.
Also I don’t know why you’re leveling as holy in the first place. As you stated earlier you aren’t learning how current content plays out since high impact abilities and effects are locked within talents. Your best bet is to play prot and just go speed through WoD with aap. Btw they won’t remove high impact talents from talent rows and make them baseline because then everyone’s automatically locked into a specific build with no choice and even then some effects that ARE baseline aren’t unlocked until after 50 even.
This seems like an unserious response. Paladins are healers, so I’m leveling as holy because I’m healing dungeons, duh. But I finally gave up because scaling issues sometimes made healing with that toon impossible. And no it’s not learn to play: look, you don’t have many buttons to press when you’re a lowbie, and there’s healbot etc. If your lowbie pug requires any type of challenging healing, the paladin is not viable (the monk meanwhile had no prob). IF Blizz wants folks to enjoy the leveling exp as holy, then its class progression needs a re-design.
I agree but this has been an issue stemming back to cata/mop/wod. Holy paladin has always been one of the weaker healers when leveling up. If they cared about that I’d imagine they would’ve fixed it by now, it’s been almost a decade.
you chose to hard cast, while leveling up you can get Crusader’s might and go the light of the martyr & holy shock route.
but pretty much this, blizz is creating stuff for endgame and doesnt even care how holy is like lvling up so ability scaling is straight up stupid. Also blizz needs to just make consecration an aoe heal or have beacon of virtue be the baseline beacon because the biggest issue with Holy pally leveling up comes to when they need to aoe heal and beacon modifiers are all the way at lvl 50. if they don’t want to make it baseline, the whole lvl 50 holy teir needs to become their lvl 25 tier.
Of course I went Crusader’s might and used strike on CD and used LotM liberally, but it’s not nearly enough, with the cd and pathetic delve the heal has. First off, for shock to have such a pathetic heal, it should have a much shorter CD. I think people that are commenting on this haven’t leveled a Hpal recently. This might all work at higher levels with haste and better gear/talent/whatnot, but it’s hot garbage at low levels - and you will have to hard cast something while you wait for shock to come around again. Sadly, the best way to level an Hpal in dungeons is to switch to Ret or Prot.