I agree with the overall sentiment of Holy Paladin not being fun. The class is lacking depth, much of our depth in legion came from Legendaries, Artifacts and Set bonuses. The Azerite traits available to us are pretty well all just your abilities do more healing. Without any change in game play at all. On top of poor balance (many of them rely on Crit, which we don’t have enough of, and will have even less of next tier due to poor itemization in the raid, and no Re-origination array). We even have one trait (Moment of Compassion) that basically lower’s your healing, I would value a damage trait is more valuable than that one in raids at least.
On the topic of overall performance of paladins. There are a couple of issues at play here, i think the most Salient of all is the Aura row. So much of our power comes from Devotion Aura, which does not show up in any form of meters, or logs. The only way to see its value is to upload a log, then run that log through another third party website to get an approximate value of it. A lot of hoops just to see how effective you are no?
Or you can take mercy, but by doing so you get branded a padder, and ostracized by the community because it is widely known at this point devo is just always better. Which also means, if you play correctly and take Devo, you will look worse on logs and if you are someone who likes to get good logs is incredibly demoralizing because a simple talent will improve your logs substantially. But if you take mercy, your guild or other players will label you a padder, and you are being less effective. I have had some paladins even come to me just so frustrated because they feel if they take devo, they will get benched, or may as well play another healer. But if they take mercy their raid leader/guild gets upset and benches them for being a padder anyways.
I also see that sentiment (even in high-end guilds) where a tank dies, and everyone looks to the paladin, not realizing that paladins are literally the only tank that loses efficiency by directly healing the tank. Every time you heal a tank directly something is lost, yet no other healer loses anything by healing a tank.
All in all, Paladin is not in a great state for me right now, the constant debate between Mercy/Devo knowing that 10%+ of your power with devo doesn’t even appear on logs, the overall lack of depth in the core rotation making the class not feel rewarding to play. How overpowering Avenging Crusader is forcing you into melee (even if its too crowded), and if someone cooldowns over your Avenging Crusader you just feel so powerless. Because nearly 30% of your healing happens in a 20s cooldown window. Because Avenging Crusader is the only option, and so powerful if you get a mechanic during your wings, whether that be soaking a boil on G’huun or a debuff on Mythrax you lose so much of your value. The envy I get when I see other classes getting awesome new traits that do change their game play in a meaningful way, but knowing that all of the Paladin traits could not exist and we simply saw a flat % increase to healing I wouldn’t even notice. Needing crit to feel good, but not being able to get enough of it as is, and knowing we will have less in just a month’s time is demoralizing.
I don’t think in the 10+ years I have played paladin I have ever been this unhappy with the state of my class. What makes it worse is knowing that other classes are in worse shape, so I don’t expect much change. Not in the next 6 months at least. Maybe not until the next expansion. I also feel demoralized as these complaints about paladins being boring have been something myself and others brought up nearly a year ago now in early Alpha and there has been no movement on that front.