Soloing as a Holy Paladin has never been particularly fun, but it was once an acceptable experience. Over time, it has just gotten more and more painful though. Frequently we have no buttons to press, as well as no decent AoE damage. Here a few suggestions that will make Holy more fun to play when soloing, without changing the balance too much:
(1) Increase the damage on Shield of the Righteous. It is far too weak for a “spender” spell.
(2) Increase the damage on Glimmer of Light. This will allow it to actually be a moderately useful AoE damage talent.
(3) Increase the damage on Holy Shock. A 25% damage increase would be very reasonable.
(4) Give us back Denounce. Given the high cooldowns on all of our offensive spells, it would be nice to have a good “filler” that we can use.
(5) Give us back Rebuke. If we’re going to be in melee, it’s only fair that we should have an interrupt.
None of these changes should throw Holy out of balance in competitive content, since using these spells offensively would negatively impact our healing throughput. They are just useful quality-of-life increases for those times when we need to clear solo content as holy.
Sidenote: Could we also get Judgment to generate a holy power? It would be such a nice improvement to how the spec flows in general.
At least in M+ holy paladins do use a lot of their spells offensively. Even when I’ve healed 20’s I’m still consistently using ShoR for aoe damage, along with offensively spreading glimmer with holy shock. It might not be a lot, but overall it all adds up. Highest I’ve pulled in a dungeon was around 4.5 sustained doing so, and holy pally dps is already powerful compared to most other healers.
Yeah, I understand that. These changes should only help holy paladins who choose to do damage instead of healing though, so I think it’s a fair trade-off that wouldn’t make us unbalanced.
If you’re a holy pally and not doing damage in dungeons/raids, you are doing it wrong.
Most of your proposed changes would have a much larger impact on balance in group settings than you are implying here. How much damage healers can put out in groups is something they try to balance as well. Holy pallies are already OP compared to other healers in terms of damage, these changes would skew that even more.
Could holy pallies use some tweaks for solo questing? Absolutely. But you can’t just add damage to abilities with no regard for how they would impact dungeon/raid performance and balance.
A lot of Holy Paladin’s damage in PVE group content comes from Crusader Strike, Judgment, Ashen Hallow, Consecration, and melee autoattack. These changes that I’m proposing only affect that abilities that will cause a loss of healing throughput if you use them offensively.
You still have to consider the disruption to balance on the damage side in group content. Just being a hps loss doesn’t make okay to buff the crap out of the damage of an already OP spec (in terms of healer damage in group content).
I use glimmer offensively all the time, so up goes damage with no decrease to hps. I use Shield of Righteousnous pretty regularly, so if I change nothing I currently do, up goes damage with no change to hps. In mythic+, I’ll holy shock enemies if everyone is good on health, so up goes damage with no decrease to hps.
Denounce and rebuke should both come back. But judgement giving holy power (as fun as it would be) would be too much of a healing increase, unless you nerf holy power generation in another way. For healing we use holy shock and judgement pretty much on cooldown so we’d never have to worry about building power for our spenders. We wouldn’t even have to try to build holy power, we’d just constantly have 3-5 hp to spend.
Sorry if this isn’t the response you want, but I would just encourage you to try and solo with a different spec. I just feel like holy was never really intended as your go to spec for solo content.
Like others are saying, if you amped up the ability of holy to solo you would create a massive landslide in holy’s contribution to group content.
Paladin is an amazing class that lets you play almost every role in the game. Learning each of these will greatly help you in being a stronger player in general.
I have been pining for these kinds of changes—well, most of them: I don’t use Glimmer myself, but SotR deals less damage than our holy power builders unless we have a lot of enemies to hit, which does not feel good. Lacking a damage ability with no cooldown also feels bad, which is why I’ve been pining for Denounce since Legion. Rebuke would be really helpful while soloing, too.
I would really like rebuke. Please blizz give healers back our interrupts.
Judgement not giving holy power when it does give it for the other specs feels odd to me but it’s hard to argue that we arnt strong enough already.
Other than rebuke the only major annoyance I have is the periods of down time when there is no one to heal of no other button to press. Even if we had a single target almost Jo damage something to press it would probably feel better even if it didn’t effect dps significantly
This is the truth of it. and I say that as someone who has stubbornly played as Holy almost all the way from level 1 way back in Burning Crusade. And even though my Ret spec is more powerful and can easily melt through a lot of enemies in a short time, I still play Holy 95%+ percent of the time in the open world because it’s just more comfortable for me. I accept the fact that it will take me longer to do anything, but the tradeoff is ridiculous survivability and the ability to tackle more mobs at a time (or in a row) than Ret, which definitely feels squishier.
The problem with all the changes that Tirelle wants is that Holy is already capable of doing significant damage in group content; unless you want these abilities to toggle on and off when in a group (so “ability does 1000 damage (solo); 650 damage (group)”). I guess Blizz could do that, since there are abilities and talents keyed to PvP, shard bonuses tied to location, etc.
I would love Rebuke, though. I’d also love Exorcism. And Holy Wrath. Remember that one? That was fun.
Exorcism had a lot of flavor, and since I cared more about having a damage ability with no cooldown than I cared about having that no-crits-for-you debuff, for a few years, I was advocating for Exorcism to come back instead of advocating for Denounce, and for Exorcism to be in about the same form it was in during Cataclysm: no cooldown, had a cast time, and could be upgraded with a talent to be Denounce.
But now that we have the spellbook casting animation, I just keep fantasizing about how awesome the old Denounce projectile would look when being cast with that spellbook casting animation…! I mean, your hand swings out in the direction of your target: that’s just begging for a projectile to be added in!
I just leveled a new paladin to 60 and started my questing in korthia and doing world quests in sl, and honestly I had a very good experience. The one point I want to talk about that I agree on is holy power generation. I wish blizzard would change infusion of light back to what it was before sl, and put holy power generation back into using judgement. I use all three specs on my paladin, and it feels weird and “incorrect” that for prot and for ret judgement is a generator, but judgement is not a generator for holy. Then at one point blizzard realized that holy needed another holy power in their generation rotation somewhere, and instead of just putting it back into judgement, they twisted infusion of light into what we have now. They created a completely unnecessary situation in my opinion.
I don’t think the intent was “Holy needs another generator;” rather it was “Holy is pretty much ignoring Infusion of Light procs so they should be more valuable”
I am surprised anyone thinks doing solo content as Holy is painful. Just out of curiosity, were you playing Holy in Legion when the spec only had Judgment and Crusader Strike?