Holy Paladin Worth It?

Hello All,

I am trying to get back into WoW in 9.2. I am trying to determine what healer I want to focus on in 9.2. I am looking to move away from this Restoration Shaman because I mained in the past and the playstyle is kinda slow and I want to move on now I am more comfortable at the game. So my questions are: Is Holy Paladin worth maining in 9.2, I heard they were hit with significant nerfs so is it worth my time? Why do you main a Holy Paladin? Is it fun to you? Thanks for any responses.

hpals are fun to play. I mained as one in 9.0-9.1 for keys. But in 9.2…ugh…they nerfed them into the ground dps-wise.

As a melee healer, you’re obviously a lot more engaged to deal with all the melee mechanics and affixes. Paladins are reactive healers aka you heal after the damage goes through, unlike Druids who have to be pro-active and prehot ahead of time.

It was fun for me. I enjoyed it.
Mistweaver is fun too. Has its own perks. I actually think playing fistweaver Monk is more fun.
Both hpala and MW are at the bottom of damage in keys though.
I don’t raid much, but AFAIK Mistweavers are babes in raids.
I don’t PvP at all so I can’t comment.

PS. Just because I found it fun, doesn’t mean you will. Best bet is to play as one a little. Get it to 60. Run low keys and see how it feels. Same goes for MW. Both got pros and cons.

Yeah I am very disappointed with the damage nerfs to Holy Paladins in 9.2. The problem was ASHEN HALLOW; the ability was OP because once every 3 minutes you could do an insane amount of both damage AND healing without really any effort, other than timing it appropraitely.

So Blizzard saw this problem and - in a typical fashion - they decided to nerf our CORE toolkit instead. Wings is 33% less powerful than it was. Holy shock, crusader strike, judgment, they already did bad damage outside of Wings; now their damage has moved from “bad” and into “pathetic”. This sucks for both M+ and soloing content.

Blizzard, I want to see you buff our core damage toolkit in 9.2.5 AND restore wings back to its full glory. If that means you need to nerf Ashen Hallow further, fine by me! I preferred playing Kyrian anyway.

…yeah I’m salty about this. it caused me to unsubscribe for 9.2. I’ve only recently rejoined and I’m giving Resto Druid + Mistweaver a try. Neither of them are as fun as Holy was though.

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It’s certainly worth it. The nerfs were tough, but top level players are still doing very well with it. Although I would submit to you that this patch is probably the best time to be a Resto Shaman in a really, really long time.

I find Hpal alot of fun still I preferred Kyrian myself but, the necrolord build has been a blast that gives that aggressive battle medic feel more then venthyr ever did. Plus a 30 second cooldown for burst burst healing is a better pay off then losing 2 cds to do massive damage & healing. 4 set procs wings so much its been great. Just revert the wings nerf and give us a damage buff sucks to be a melee healer losing to a holy priest…

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They really took a dump on our damage…but I don’t think I’d complain about it because it was really fun in 9.1 and 9.2. Wish they’d just kept it as is and just buffed other healer’s damage instead to make it more in line with ours (rn in keys just about every class does more damage it feels. Kyrian shamans and hpriests a lot more). We had two things going for us that made us viable as a choice in any pve meta: an immunity and our damage. Now we have just the immunity. Every other healer still has two things.

If the want to move away from this dps dependent iteration of hpal…I really hope they redo the whole kit. Give us some form of actual raid wide healing or pure throughput spells. It’s been bad for a long while.

It’s not fun to have to be in melee yet doing crap damage. I want to feel like I make a difference, and I want to be able to do world quests without switching to Ret (which is gross).

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No, turn back now lol.

I went from a character that is 276, to creating a different healer alt which turned into a temporary main.

So many other specs got buffed this patch, some obscenely buffed, while Holy Paladin has seen only nerfs this whole expansion.

It’s a lot of triage healing capabilities (if you enjoy that or not), with no real decent cooldowns compared to the other classes. Unless you enjoy pressing an invisible button that has the least interesting aspects to gameplay ever in Aura Mastery :expressionless:

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I just went prot. Any time I’ve touched holy at all so far it’s always felt like “well I see I’m doing things which is nice…but just how is literally every other healer not doing this better? What is it I bring to the raid again?”

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It’s the best! Necrolord, kyrian, and venthyr are all fun to play and you can alternate among them depending on dungeon/affix. Although the damage output has been significantly nerfed (admittedly it needed it although they went over board) our actual HEALING throughput has increased dramatically as well. As far as FUN? Fantastic! With tier we get over 60% wings uptime in keys, which feels really great.

I take issue with both of these. I don’t think we really needed any damage nerfs since the 9.1 ones since other classes were going to scale up and catch up to us anyway.

As far as the throughput buffs go as well, they don’t feel like buffs because the kit feels so strange. I think it would all make more sense if we had a raid wide cd again baseline like Aura of Sacrifice broken as that was. Because right now the big issue is most of our big healing is limited to 1-5 targets at best. Glimmer heals like a nothing burger and is capped at 8 targets anyway and only viable on kyrian. Hopefully they actually address this in the next expac. More than any damage changes, fixing this would be nice.

If there were no nerfs, and I had the ilevel and tier plus the double legendary that I have now, I would be so absurdly powerful it would break the game. I was doing 6k DPS overall in keys at 252 ilevel with a single legendary and no tier. Something had to be done. I know it doesn’t feel good to be hit with a nerf bat but it was absolutely necessary. Again, I think it was too excessive and should be revisited, but if nothing was done the scaling would be too much. I think it’s great that all of the healers are viable options now. Unfortunately after nerfs, everyone cries bloody murder and community perception swings. Hence the death of the holy paladin this tier…. Death, taxes, the Yankees win, and the meta changes baby but it’s all good!!

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I have a Love Hate relationship with my Holy Paladin.
Effectively, he’s my main, as I’ve consistently been a Holy Paladin since Wrath, bouncing between main or main alt.

The current play style is a lot of fun, but it’s also incredibly punishing in certain circumstances… and when those circumstances arise, it can be incredibly infuriating knowing that it’s a “Paladin” specific problem… groups spread out, starved for HP, can’t get into Melee to hit anything…

Sometimes you just want to step back from the current pull that’s gone wrong and Heal… but you can’t, you need to get into the thick of it, not get cleaved in the face, and generate HP so your heals are more effective than bandages.

Some weeks, I look at the affixes and just say “nope”.

Being able to swap Covenants based on your Comp definitely helps, (i.e. I had 3 Ranged the other day so went Kyrian), but again, it doesn’t help the fact that in stressful situations, we can’t just stand back and Heal due to the reliance on HP.

At times, even if it’s not my fault that things start falling off the rails, I get incredibly frustrated knowing that this particular pull wouldn’t have been a problem on any one of my other healers.

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I feel that things are generally OK as long as every healer has their own issues in that regard. Or on the flip side, the “man, if I wasn’t a (x healer) right now, that would’ve been a wipe for sure.” moments.

True, I just find those moments arise more often on the Paladin than my other Healers, although I don’t play a Priest, assume Disc might have similar problems.

In short, I’d say it’s the Paladins inability to burn through their Mana in exchange for effective healing that I find frustrating as FoL and HL are almost dead abilities… Having 100% mana is of little help if I can’t generate HP.

I played hpal a lot in s1 and some in s2. It’s not just the damage the nerfed, they crushed our mana usage. Before you might get to around 80% mana in a heavy healing situation now you’re down to 50% or less in heavy healing. It’s brutal what they did to holy pallies over ASHEN HALLOW. Kyrians got taken to the woodshed because of the venthyr ability.

This part of it really feels unfair tbh. The full combination of these things (mana cost nerfs over time, damage nerfs over time, and the continued absence of any real raidwide while also nerfing the healing per target of the only actual raidwide borrowed power ability) just makes the spec feel dog to play. 4set doesn’t even really feel that fun because we have nothing to leverage it with or for. There are only so many situations where 1-5 targets will be taking heavy damage to really leverage that set up with Maraad’s. And there are almost no situations where you can use finishers well enough now to leverage extra wings.