Holy pally isn't fun

Classes Paladin
82

Let me tell you why numbers matter.

When mechanics eventually get buggered up in a raid, the whole raid will typically take damage. For example, say a pulse from Zuls puddle gets off because someone didnt soak. This shouldn’t necessarily be a deal breaker and an auto wipe. So if the group does wipe, this very obvious large source of damage gets blamed because it puts high strain on the healers to catch back up with the incoming damage. If you can’t as a healer, then you are less important in the raid and you could be kicked from the raid, especially in pugs. If you can’t keep up with the output relative to others, you are more of a liability than an asset.

Heal sniping is an (unavoidable) issue because it feels bad in a raid setting. Example, if you spend 3% of your mana to try and heal someone and lose 75% of the effectiveness because someone else picked it up, you’ve essentially wasted ~2% of your resource pool and potential output. Do that 10 times in a fight and suddenly you’ve lost 20% of your possible output into over healing. This feels even worse if you’ve spent 2 seconds standing stationary only to have to cancel your cast or swallow the overheal because someone else beat you to it. This is really only an issue (if you consider it an issue) with Holy Light and is fairly minor relative to why numbers are important. But the numbers for holy pally output are fine if you can use the kit properly.

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83

I do see your point, makes a lot of sense. However I think that occasionally when doing pug or organised raid, things do messed and strain is put onto all roles, not just healers. But that’s where we see some really clutch saves or great tank plays, which essentially sets better player apart. Just simply running through macros is a tad boring isn’t it? Not that I want Leeroy Jenkins in my raid.

I’m under the impression that Holy light is used during the tank and spank phase? Anyone casting it when facing a 75% deficit on their target deserves the wipe if they can’t heal in time, especially with 3 sec cast time. That said, it’s common that we overheal since it’s cast normally when they are near full, I believe I am preaching to the choir here.

But if we do take the 10 times holy light, which actually equates to 30 seconds, based on the mana regeneration (which is why I said Holy light is virtually free to cast) Per holy light shouldn’t take up more than 1% of your mana, when compounded, it shouldn’t take up more than 7% of your mana after 30 seconds, not really the 20% that you’ve mentioned.

If all the healers can withstand a 15 minutes boss fight without going OOM (correct me if I’m wrong, but raid heals always deplete faster than HPally)
Carry on and heal snipe, because when push come to shove, Hpally have the bigger heals if it calls for it.

Mana management is why raid heal is raid heal, and if the fight drags out and they go oom, they will know better to not heal target that’s not theirs again.

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84

Thats part of the issue, outside of infusion of light, holy light is only valuable to use in niche scenarios when you’re trying to conserve mana because it’s cast time is too long to make it valuable in any other way. And if you’re trying to conserve (usually because its a mana intensive fight) you really don’t want to lose effectiveness to an overheal or having to cancel the ability (which is still a healing loss because you now have to cast more expensive skills to try and catch back up).

No, holy light consumes more mana than you passively regen if you spam cast it in combat. Even if it just held you steady, it’s stopping you from regening mana and thus effectively consuming mana. We have a 100k mana pool and holy light costs 2.6k mana and 2.2 seconds to cast, which is 2.6% of our current mana pool before considering regen. We get mana back at ~0.7k per second, so for every 2.2 second cast of Holy Light we’re losing ~1% of our current mana while also losing the amount we just passively regened. So you’ll see a loss 12% of your apparent mana over those 10 casts/22 seconds, but effectively you’ve actually lost 26k of your total available mana. This is why I said ~20% as a ballpark rounded number, and it’s not wrong.

No healer can stand for 15 minutes in a non-farm fight and not run oom unless you’re running with way too many healers, fight are tuned for a specific length and healers will be oom by that point. That being said, we established that holy light is not free to cast, nor is it reliable to cast as a filler because of the overhealing/cast time issue. Raid healers don’t run oom faster so long as they properly use their mana pool and dont use their more expensive spot heals. Same with us, where if we spam nothing but flash of light we’ll go oom in 30 casts or just shy of 1.5 minutes). So having an effective filler that feels good to use is important because flash of light is very expensive to use, and Holy Light as a filler does not feel good to use imo because of the cast time (unless with a infusion proc). I’d rather see it with a shorter cast time and mana cost that breaks even with regen, I trust there’s a reason it is the way it is, but it still feels like butt.

My monk can channel soothing mists non-stop and never exceed the mana regen rate in combat, and it can heal for close to the same amount as holy light depending on mastery procs. Holy light as an ability needs to be tweaked so that casting it doesnt feel punishing.

4 Likes
85

@OP

I’m having a similar experience but was always a healer on my pally and it was feeling pretty weak and even worse: it was boring.
Then out of the blue I tried tanking and found out Prot Pallys are awesome.

I´m only doing old world farming stuff and WQs though, havent gathered courage to do group stuff

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86

Where to even begin! Firstly, if you find HPally boring healers, try re-tuning your talent spec/item composition to something that gives you more versatile abilities to keep up with healing. What do I mean? I’ve been healing since early Cata and absolutely LOVED the way HPally handled fights and mana management (dear lord I miss divine plea) and noticed the devs were gearing HPallies to be, almost exclusively, tank/OT healers. Plain and simple. The changes WoW devs have made since then have really shown that progression (with the removal of abilities and nerfing others), UNTIL the introduction of Light of the Martyr.

Yes LoM it is a risky heal, especially during heavy dmg soaking phases, but with racial passives like Gift of the Naaru (for Draenei), Divine Shield, Beacon of Faith, etc… the dmg soaked is mitigated by around 30-100%, and basically makes the detractors of the ability, moot. I’m loving my martyr talent build because it gives me complete mobility in healing. LoM heals for around 14k - 25k and costs 53% of what Holy Light costs, at a cost of 7-14k HP. I’m constantly running into situations where I need to help raid/whole party heal, during heavy dmg phases, so I pop divine shield, or Gift of the Naaru and a trinket effect (e.g. Inoculating Extract), and spam LoM, Bestow Faith, HS, and the Infusion procs with Holy Light, and watch my burst heals approaching 20-23k HPS, with overall encounter being around 14-18k (depending on proc/crit RNG) and I’m only ilvl 353. The major drawback to this build is that I have to spam more Bestow’s and HS on the tank(s)/me, since LoM doesn’t heal either beacons, but that’s partly what makes HPally healers exhilarating; you have to maintain a tighter cooldown rotation to manage the added 15-ish% increased encounter damage to the healer.

Putting aside all the raving about the versatility of HPallies, we were never developed, as far as I have seen, to be ideal or effective raid healers. We have primarily been tank and OT healers. We have some AoE-style effects that we can acquire, like Grace of the Justicar, and inherent abilities like Holy Prism, Beacons, Aura of Mercy/Sacrifice (especially with aura mastery active), and LoD that give us those AoE-like cooldowns that make us especially important for offsetting raid healing during heavy dmg phases.

All in all, it’s up to how you wanna play a HPally because we have many options available. Whether we wanna be melee-ranged Crusader healers that heal through dmg and Holy Light/FoL spams, or mid-ranged martyr healers, like me, that sacrifice a small portion of health to maintain mobility and stay viable when sh*t hits the fan, without sacrificing excessive mana with FoL spams.

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87

Also hung up my hpaly cape after playing some of the other heal classes. Also agree I found prot pretty fun.

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Seems your healing class is as boring as almost all the other but there is another way. PLAY DISC PRIEST TODAY!

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89

I mained Holy Priest and Resto Shaman in Legion and enjoyed them. Wasn’t loving them in BFA so I’m maining Holy Pally and MW Monk. Loving both of them. Have been mostly on my HPal lately.

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if you use Light of the Martyr more than once or twice in a fight you are a terrible Holy pally…

I looked at some of your recent logs and I saw you cast it 29 times… it makes me want to cry.

You use aura of mercy over Devotion which should only ever be used if you want to parse because Devo is 1000000% times better than mercy in every situation.

smh

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91

This isn’t true. Devo is entirely dependent on incoming damage and doesnt scale with spell power. Mercy will out perform it consistently in lower damage output content, and has niche value on fights like Vectis where you need to deal with the add heal absorb bubbles.

Other then that, yes Martyr is a low output emergency heal that you shouldn’t be using unless you absolutely need an instant cast heal to save someone.

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92

Buddy… stop stalking me. Mercy performs better in Farm content… hence why i said you only take it to parse…

Otherwise Devo is always king.

https:// sacredshielding. wordpress. com/2018/07/23/reading-the-color-of-your-aura-in-battle-for-azeroth/

93

If you don’t like people talking to you I suggest not posting on the forums :thinking:

To start, the person you said Devo > Sac to is doing normal at the moment and hasn’t gotten to heroic where devo aura will start to be more useful. Moreover, parse =/= farm content, you can parse on progression content.

  1. The spellpowers used in that article are outdated. With the current scaling. Revival currently heals for >800k (not 470k) and tranquility is healing for >1000k (not 600k). So you can safely assume that their assessment of the value for Mercy is about 1/2 of what it actually heals for in the current tier - Say 200k raid heals over 8 seconds. So Devo would need to be used when 1 mil damage would be taken over 8 seconds. Arbitrary examples - Heroic Mythrax’s damage doesnt exceed this by much, and Zul straight up never exceeds this on heroic. So you can bet that on Normal, Mercy will outperform devotion aura (outside of Mother and only if you’re cheesing it).

  2. The value of the passive is highly dependent on how mercy scales with spellpower, so that observation is outdated. Currently Mercy is healing for base ~900 per 2seconds, or 1400-1800 HPS with crit (this is backed up by logs for a 370 ilvl person on Taloc). You’d need 13 people stacked with an average 4k DTPS, that doesn’t happen with the way fights are structured in Uldir.

  3. The stacking scenarios are highly variable and will typically fall apart on a lot of fights because the mechanics prevent you from permanently stacking or permanently spreading, so you can say that X is better than Y without explaining how they are situational, otherwise you’re spreading misinformation.

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94

I mean… you’re clearly stalking me.

But either way stop trying to prove a losing point.

Typically Parsing is Farm content. If it was progression you really don’t parse in the same bracket as people who’ve killed the boss and have the mechanics committed to muscle memory.

  1. Spellpowers are relevant to the gear you have. Seeing as he is only in normal and he has low gear… the stregnth of his spells will be low. Thats why when you get mythic level gear, going into heroic an especially normal would basically merit mery over Devo because that is what is fam/parse content. During any type of progression devo will always beat out mercy.

2&3) Not sure where you are pulling those numbers out of your butt, but again a 370 on taloc is basically farm content. And Devo outperforms mercy if there are less than 5 people or more than 10 within range. Seeing as most pally will use rule of law, distance becomes almost moot for both.

you realize you’re arguing against every top paladin right…

95

Really not, I post on the pally forums a lot and have been in this thread longer than you have.

I used 370 because it was an easy value that I have. So lets look at the guy - he’s at 352 ilvl. Looking at 352-354 ilvl range, mercy still passively heals for ~1300k HPS passively without aura mastery (go look at logs, theres some examples below if you can be bothered). The numbers don’t significantly change with ilvl.

Here’s an example of a Heroic Fetid Devourer kill - two paladins, similar skill, 354 and 356 ilvl, same raid, same kill, same use of aura mastery. Spoiler alert: Mercy outperformed Devo by >50% (1000 eDRPS vs 1700 HPS). It’s completely scenario dependent and you saying “Devo is 1000000x better” is hyperbole and objectively wrong because it changes depending on the fight. Here’s the link to the numbers if you actually care.
https:// wowanalyzer com/report/7YPVy8vCawJqHzFZ/3-Heroic+Fetid+Devourer±+Kill+(2:51)/15-Soaley
https:// wowanalyzer com/report/7YPVy8vCawJqHzFZ/3-Heroic+Fetid+Devourer±+Kill+(2:51)/5-Sulpomato

You cant just arbitrarily say that devo out performs mercy at specific “X person within range” thresholds because again it’s completely dependent on damage intake. That article you put up uses 4k DTPS (which matches typical DTPS in logs) as a reference point, so I’m doing the same. As an example of how an arbitrary 5 people or less is Devo>Mercy is wrong, 4k DTPS with Devo has a reduction that equates to getting 400 eHPS (10%/up to 5 people* the number of people *4000DTPS), mercy ticks on average for ~1000 every 2 seconds at 355 ilvl, 1 person will tick for 500 HPS, 2 people for 1000 HPS, 3 people for up to 1500 HPS. (again, proven by logs - https:// www warcraftlogs com/reports/7YPVy8vCawJqHzFZ#fight=3&type=healing&source=15&ability=210291)

Every top Holy Paly knows this, its acknowledged in that article you posted and acknowledged on Icy Veins. Here’s a quote from your article (that was written before the expansion had released and final number tuning was done): “There’s no clear-cut answer for which aura’s passive is outright better”.

You’re spreading the following misinformation:

  • “Mercy performs better in Farm content” - False, depends on the difficulty level and the fight.
  • “You use aura of mercy over Devotion which should only ever be used if you want to parse because Devo is 1000000% times better than mercy in every situation” - False, look at the logs. This is again dependent on the scenario.
  • “And Devo outperforms mercy if there are less than 5 people or more than 10 within range” - False, completely depends on the damage intake.
  • “you realize you’re arguing against every top paladin right…” - False, you’ve taken a simplified message of Devo aura tends to be better for progression content and completely ignored the very important message they all throw in of it depending on the situation and the answer not being clear cut.
96

Where did that Paladin use Devotion aura? In order to get max value out of devo it needs to be used correctly and preemptively as opposed to using mercy reactively which is a fair bit easier.

If you wanna link his log that’d be great. I could grab you a log of my old heroic fetid kill and show that it certainly does more than mercy, I’ve used both.

However obviously there are niche situations. Devo wont -always- be better, but currently it is. Vectis is a bad example because healing off the shield is very easy to do and reducing the incoming damage from that contagion will make sure nobody drops low enough for the absorbed healing to become a concern.

This is like saying beacon of faith is always better. In “99%” of situations in raids it will be, but theres most likely going to be a niche outlier like mother or even zek. Aura of sacrifice for example is better than devo when you combine it with bubble and you can definitely use it in specific cases where that extra dr might be valuable enough to consider giving up bubble. We haven’t really seen that yet and I believe WoWanalyzer is somewhat broken with AoS currently but not 100% sure about that.

Anyway in the example you provided, devo was still better even though mercy healed for a bit more. The fact devo is preemptive and will reduce healing needed from the reduced damage as opposed to mercy healing it up very slowly after the fact is value that you need to consider as WoWanalyzer won’t lay that out for you. There’s quite a few things to consider outside of just the calculations that need to be included in your choice of talents.

Another example is AC vs SW. AC heals for a fair bit more than SW but a lot of Paladins chose to go for SW on early fetid/mythrax progress so melee wasn’t clogged up making SW a viable choice on these fights even though it mathematically does less healing than AC. Things like that should generally be considered.

In terms of the passive, unless you can guarantee standing with 2 people to get ~6% DR there’s really no point in worrying about that. Same goes for mercy, the passive isn’t bad if you can guarantee standing with all 5 or so. However you really don’t play around the passive as you can’t guarantee how many will be standing in your aura throughout the fight especially on encounters like mythrax/ghuun/fetid. On fetid you can opt to stand with the tanks to give them each 6% DR which is good but other than niche situations like that, you aren’t going to focus too much on the passive. I’m not saying the calculations are worthless, I’m just saying they aren’t considered too much when deciding which aura to take outside of niche situations.

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97

I don’t disagree you, however everything that was discussed was dependent on context. The point was not get into the nitty gritty of how to squeeze max performance and instead to focus more broadly what can have a better impact for players at that skill level. Especially considering that it was a response to someone who was asserting that devo is the almighty god king to a normal difficulty raider.

In general the DTPS from normal raids doesnt generate enough damage over 8 seconds to make a 20% DR cool down a necessity or even necessarily better. Moreover, the examples were that for people in Heroic content it can actually be a net benefit to use Mercy just because the player isn’t able to maximize devo. Just as another arbitrary example that’s more contextually accurate - normal Zekvoz DTPS doesnt exceed 100k DTPS when you need 200k DTPS over 8 seconds to get 200k eHPS out of aura mastery. And typically that damage intake is low enough that it will never put much kill pressure on multiple people allowing for the healers to easily catch up with spot heals if necessary. At these lower content thresholds mercy also becomes a larger portion of your overall healing thoughput (~1k HPS for someone doing 15k HPS isn’t as insignificant as 1k HPS to someone who can pump 25 - 30k HPS). It’s also more of a thing when considering some people just don’t do well with predictive use abilities. So in this specific persons scenario, I honestly think that using Mercy is the best tool for what they are doing. Just generally speaking, I also wouldn’t consider something performs better in an entire tier of content as a niche use item but that’s just me but thats just being nit picky about diction.

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So I’ll just respond to the zek’voz example of devo vs mercy there.

You don’t take devo on zek because it’ll reduce more than mercy can heal, you take it because it drastically reduces the chance your raiders will die due to a bad overlap IE beams+surging. There were arguments in the past of taking mercy on zek and honestly you probably can without worrying much because mercy comes very close to being able to heal through most of surging. However if 2 or so people die due to a bad overlap just know you could’ve prevented them (or at least 1 of them) from dying with devo.

I understand not wanting to get into the nitty gritty but realistically you should because this isn’t all about calculations. You need to compare the abilities and pick based on your current raid needs (like the SW vs AC example earlier) and adapt.

I also don’t think it’s a good idea to recommend mercy to a heroic level player just because it’s easier and therefore will be worth more to them. While that is true that’s only the case if they don’t want to improve. Learning how to use devo even if they’re just a heroic level player will bring a lot of value to his/her raid spot.

I understand the math your showing me here, it’s just not all about that. Just because mercy may heal slightly more than devo can prevent based on the math you have there doesn’t make it better. Other factors need to be considered as well.

99

The Zek damage intake again is contextual. From a mythic perspective the DR is more valuable because of the numbers, just purely because the increase in damage intake that creates that death risk. In normal I don’t see value in the very few scenario’s it’d save someone and make the difference in a kill.

  • Mythic: eye-beam hits for 83k and surging for 4x 22k per tick. - 171k total
  • Normal: eye-beam hits for 44k and surging for 3x 9k per tick. - 71k total

Health pools for a 15 ilvl deficit from the dropped ilvl for a WW (lower health pool class) are ~126k at 340 ilvl and 156k at 370 ilvl. Respectively the damage from mythic can outright kill a player without healing while a normal raider will take just over half their health from the whole combo and still have enough for a second eye-beam without receiving a heal. Add in people healing and this becomes even less of a risk. This is why Devo as a tool on this fight becomes unnecessary, unless you step into surging darkness and simultaneously get hit by an eye beam (both of which are about 2x slower on normal than mythic) then you will not die. So, the death risk in normal is really only if you screw up several mechanics simultaneously, which is the whole point I was trying to get at by saying that devo’s utility is dependent on intake. The numbers are indicative of the risk of dying, and without them it’s just subjective in terms of how much you value DR to make a save vs the responsiveness of healers to get a cast off to make a save.

I don’t disagree that DR is incredibly valuable because it is, especially at a high tier, but it’s not a necessity for the content at the level that most people raid at. My guild went all of Uldir without a DR ability in our raid utility and managed fine which why I’m not putting a huge emphasis on it - especially in normal difficulty and less in heroic. Even more so, as stupid as it is, the pug community does value healer throughput and having Mercy can serve as a crutch to keep them from getting booted when the raid runs into wipes. Screaming “but I’m running devo and it’s doing more” isn’t going to save you from stupid. So if you’re not running in an organized team trying to aggressively push content there’s a very strong social argument for running mercy. There’s even a social argument to made for someone who’s with an organized guild and they have a toxic raid lead that puts HPS over DR.

The nitty gritty of it doesn’t help anyone who doesn’t want to put the effort in to understand the nuances and differences. Concise writing sometimes requires leaving out those finer details, if they want to know more about it they’ll put some extra effort in and go read guides that do a better job of summarizing it. Other wise they’ll be happy with the executive summary and dip. This is more so true for people who are responding to a forum without a question and making an assertion about a particular playstyle they find fun.

100

No don’t get me wrong I’m agreeing and disagreeing with you. I’m agreeing that devo will not “always” be the choice, even if not the case right now there will almost certainly be times when you might need the extra DR from sac for example. I’m disagreeing that the only thing behind these choices is the math. You’ve presented me with a lot of calculations and I understand what your saying but that isn’t the only factor going into what talents you should choose.

The current devo vs mercy problem is definitely annoying especially at those levels of play. I’ve talked to plenty from here and the pally discord that ran into troubles from either their raid leaders or pug groups telling them to pick mercy because it’s what “all the top hpals use“.

I even explained to someone from my last guild about their holy Paladin using mercy during mythic progression. He switched afterwards but it gets confusing because there’s so many parses with mercy it’s hard for people to tell unless they know what to look for.

Either way, I’m not telling you you’re wrong I’m just saying there’s a ton of things that factor into which talent needs to be used when. You can’t know what each individual poster wants unless they tell you (IE “I only wanna parse good”) so recommending devo is generally a good idea.

And again about the heroic vs mythic thing, yeah you can go through heroic using mercy and there will be no trouble. You can go through mythic and it might get rocky but really it won’t be much of an issue either. I know a few people who went through mythic using mercy at the world 100 level. That doesn’t make mercy better than devo though.

TLDR: All of my posts have been long so my bad, I’ll sum this one up. I fully agree that telling people to use 1 specific talent without knowing their current raiding situation is bad but it’s also hard for posters to know exactly what their situation is, so recommending devo as a general “this is better” talent makes sense. It’s the same as recommending beacon of faith as the “this is better talent” however that won’t always be the case depending on the situations (IE double or even triple Hpal). I like the math you’ve presented but it doesn’t change what I’m saying about talents especially mercy vs devo, mercy might mathematically be better in certain cases but that doesn’t make it situationally better.

In the end people will have to make those choices based on their own raid teams realistically, if you ask a poster here to recommend you the best talents devo will be present almost every time, it’s then up to that person to decide if that will work with his/her current raid team.

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Yea all that’s entirely fair, and I can see where some of the message may have been lost in between posts because the intent wasn’t to say that one is explicitly full sum better than the other, and just wanted to provide numeric examples as a way to say that it requires a bit more thought and that devo isn’t always the be all and end all.
Thanks for the discussion, it’s been enjoyable!

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