Holy PTR Updates

Despite saying i wouldn’t i did pick up my mw monk again just to level it to cap. And uh yeah. It’s really funny when you can cast a spell and be confident it will 100% work the way you want it when you want it.

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Sounds like the same people making the same complaints as pre DF rework.

They don’t need to make AC unplayable, just improve the alternatives.

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I think there are some nuances that make these different. Disc and MW have their entire design based around their damage to healing. There’s a lot of built in depth and decision making around it and it’s their entire design with no way to get around it.

Shaman, I’m not entirely sure what you’re referring too but if you mean their totems do a lot of their healing automatically. Well that is supplementary, that is, when you cast a Chain Heal, it does less healing than it otherwise would because totems, healing rain and riptides are ticking away, however that’s their design, it’s layering and they are supplementary to their the healing globals.

Hpal doesn’t really work like that. Hpal have no real supplementary healing - no hots, no trees or totems or guardians that do healing. Hpal melee wings isn’t that and is a single talent with next to no other integration.

It’s a minigame for 30-40% of the time. Inside melee wings your priority changes, core spells like Holy Shock are diminished, historically spenders were also diminished, however Blessed Assurance has somewhat fixed that – although it’s being nerfed. Core tenants of the spec like infusions fall by the wayside too.

For some, Melee wings is a tack on to the core playstyle of a Holy Paladin. I think it’s fair for people to not like it given it’s not how the spec plays for 90% of the time. It’s either busted and you’re forced to play it, or it’s not and you don’t. When you do play it, then it’s only 30% of the gameplay loop.

When you play the spec and 90% of the time pressing direct healing buttons is how it plays to then you go to that only being 60% of the time and the remaining 30% is just pressing Judgment and CS and it choosing where the healing goes, you can understand why they wouldn’t like it.

The only way it’s supplementary is that it makes all globals do healing whereas outside it, CS does none.

Which is why Blizzards absolute refusal to properly separate the two comes in and breaks everything.

There absolutely could be a talent build that turns that mini game until an actual core playstyle.

Create a talent that makes standing in Consecration turn CS and Judgement into healing abilities like Monk.

Make another talent that lowers the cast time of FoL after casting a spender when standing in Consecration to encourage using spenders and casted heals. Make it explicitly tied to the CS/Judgement Healing talent to prevent it from being used from non-melee builds. (Then add another talent somewhere to bring back to imo far superior Infusion of Light casting speed changes for non-melee builds. Bring back HS crits into instant flash of lights or quick HLs plz)

Change Avenging Crusader to either just a 1 minute wings talent (no cd reduction and no melee healing) or just scrap it entirely.

These are bad and not well thought out but I feel the i get the point across. Melee feels tacked on because it is tacked on.

Its tacked onto a spec who’s entirely designed around healing one person really good but isn’t really allowed to anymore.

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PALADIN

  • Holy
    • Herald of the Sun
      • Fixed an issue that caused Second Sunrise to sometimes decrease the healing of Holy Shocks from Rising Sunlight.

Hpal is so back! Thanks blizz. /s

Yeah not much to discuss this week. Will need to see how it tests this week.

Looks like it’s still bugged anyways so GG.

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That’s hysterical. Maybe I should apply to work at Blizzard just so the spec can have someone who cares

To be fair though, in M+ MW and Shaman have either exceptionally strong utility and/or single-target healing that allow them to bridge the gap for lack of control via smart heals. This is exacerbated by the mechanics of this season.

MW can also deal competitive HPS without relying heavily on converting damage to healing. AC can’t.

Priests — historically — have neither but are exceptional in AoE healing that can extend beyond 5 people, which is great in raids.

Paladins, currently, have none of the above. Our utility isn’t great this season, our single target healing is lacking, and our strongest AoE is limited to 5 people.

AC is just really strong, but not strong enough to overlook the glaring problems the rest of our toolkit has. When your only answer to AC picking the wrong target to heal is LoH or BoP, there’s a problem.

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We are so back. this will bring the herald back for sure.

Yo drop that /s
No seriously you better drop that /s right now D;

I mentioned separating beacon transfer for Raid vs 5 man before.

The best solution, in my eyes, without having to redesign multiple aspects of the class, would not only be to separate beacons of faith and virtue, but also every ability that heals beyond 5 man in some capacity (like they tried to do with Dawnlight before, they tried…).

Maybe this would be too complicated, idk, but imagine having beacon transfer, H&A, Dawnlight passive AOE, Tyr’s and AC all as tuning knobs for Hpal in Raid vs M+. We could have best (or at least good enough) for both worlds.

Maybe this would be too effort for the devs, idk :confused:

Additionally, feel like the class is way too Reliant on Rising Sunlight and Awakening at this point. (Though since they buffed HS in PTR RS is the strongest is has ever been since 10.1.5, giving more power to CD windows but on a really short CD now in S2).

Personally, I think that would be too much. Adding specific tuning knobs to 5 different things would be overkill. It probably would give them the tools to tune the spec between the two environments but I can’t imagine they would actually ever use all 5 effectively.

Having said that, it would probably be easier than redesigning the spec, however I would much rather they focused on fixing the underlying design issues and add natural tuning knobs via choices on the tree.

If you look at nearly every other healer, they are tuned in both forms of content via different talents and gameplay. Monks are picking up more renewing mist and enveloping mist talents and dropping talents like Sheilun’s Gift. Druids are picking up Rejuv spreading talents, talents that increase the number of effected targets, swapping out talents for spot healing and dropping talents like empowered Lifebloom. Pres take more green dragon abilities like Dream Flight instead of more Fire and Bronze abilities which are more 5m focused.

Hpal isn’t because we play almost exactly the same between the two game modes. We swap into more LoD talents like Empyrean Legacy and maybe Unending Light. But in M+ we swap out of those to take more SotR damage and that’s about it.

They need to delete unused talents like Power of the Silver Hand, Liberation, add some new ones, move some talents and slightly redesign some and I think you’d get the same effect of being able to balance this spec effectively.

  • Redesign Breaking Dawn to increase the range of LoD and increase the number of targets. Having a 7 target LoD and a much bigger range. Just having range is a joke of a talent.
  • Add a choice node where Boundless Salvation is. This new option would turn Tyr’s into a much bigger heal upfront but no longer extend.
  • Move Beacons and Commanding Light away from being a gate to Rising Sunlight.
  • Delete/Redesign Power of the Silver Hand.
  • Delete Liberation. Mana talents are boring AF.
  • Redesign Commanding Light to make WoG, Holy Shock, and Holy Light transfer to beacons at x% increased effectiveness.
  • Move or remove HoD or perhaps bake it into Tyr’s and replace it with a new talent that makes HS apply Refracting Light. When Holy Prism hits a target with Refracting Light, it bounces an additional time.

Bingo bango, you have talents that enable them to tune this spec independently of raid and M+. Spot healing talents like Commanding Light and Divine Favor and Beacons for more smaller group content. More bursty healing available via a different Tyr’ s. Long duration raid trickle healing via Tyr’s, LoD talents and the new Refracting Light talents for raid.

We just have so many talents that are dead in all forms of content. When they need to tune this spec for m+ or raid, they hit the same things we use in both and we’re cooked. Imagine a world where improved Beacons were really only taken in M+ and they wouldn’t need to nerf them to give us compensatory buffs in Raid. Having 2 Beacons in raid is stupid anyway, 2 target cleave healing in a 20 man group is clearly not how this spec is supposed to work and in recent history Blizzard have taken multiple swipes at it to make them effectively irrelevant.

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Here’s the thing; they have shown that they don’t have to.

For Disc, they realized how broken trying to balance Atonement between raid and dungeon. So they changed it so that that it has flat out different scaling inside a raid vs out. That way, they don’t have to worry about breaking the specs back and keep buffing or nerfing Atonement to make up for any other issues the spec has.

They absolutely can pick abilities and have them scale different depending on the content it’s being used it. Them not doing it, and continuing this seesaw approach is just lazy in my opinion.

If hpal’s biggest problems stem from them being afraid of how much healing we can do in raids, then they very much can just change how the scaling works. They just don’t want to and would rather cripple us or buff us to gods every other patch instead of actually spending the time to fix the issue.

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Yeah I’m aware and I’m not denying that it would be easy but imo the Disc approach is lazy and boring.

At the time they apparently came to the realization that they couldn’t tune Atonement between raid and M+. The argument was that the spec is tuned around having 7-10 Atonements out for their healing output. In 5 man content, they cannot reach that and so the argument was that they will do 30%-50% less healing. I personally think they had better options but they went with the approach of adding a flat % outside of raid. Disc also had precedence for stuff like this via the Sins of the Many passive.

IMO Hpal does not have that problem.

If you successfully made the argument for Hpal to have a 5 man tuning knob, firstly I don’t know what ability you’d choose and secondly you’d have all specs asking for the same thing because there’s not an obvious explanation for why Hpal need one like Disc.

I’d much rather a talent tree that has options on it that solve particular healing problems and offer different throughput profiles. That’s what they are supposed to do. At the end of the day, even if they separated M+ tuning for all specs in the game, I’d still want them to revisit our tree. If you look at the MW Monk changes over the last few patches, it’s a masterclass in how to give the player agency over their spec and the output style they are achieving by making those decisions. A flat x% buff is a lazy way to dust the problem of a poorly designed and one-dimensional spec under the rug.

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Both would be solutions. I agree with you thats the easiest/most boring way to do so though, it’s just a solution for the time being since they have been struggling for seasons now to keep Hpal balanced AND fun to play simultaneously for too long.

This sounds badass, and I personally never liked Caster Hpal/Tyr’s but remember the days where it actually served some purpose.

This talent has been unused since its return in DF S1. I dont know how it has survived 2 reworks so far.

Always thought the same, specially since its a 2 pointer. This was terrible ever since its inception in the mess of the S2 DF rework. I would give it a choice node, 7 target longer range for raid or just straight up stronger AOE healing in a circle (or cone, but then it should be noticeable stronger or leave a small buff behind to make it interesting).

Not sure if that would lean in into the issue of Hpal spot healing vs HPS in 5-man only. I have seen many content creator these last weeks talking about how Hpal need an 5 man HPS buff, but I do agree we need a redesign/placement change, specially regarding capstones.

Awakening is too impactful and I think it aggravates the issue of Hpal “feast or famine” playstyle that has plagued the spec for the last expansions except maybe S2 of DF, and its always taken. Same with Rising Sunlight, I agree that we need a redesign of the spec that dictates we take stuff like idk Tyr’s over RS for Raid, or just different capstone for different builds, creating more diversity of playstyle and natural tuning knobs for the spec.

I also agree that talents like liberation, PotSH, Breaking Dawn, Boundless, HoD need to be go or be baked into some abilities.

Also, add a cap to LotM absorb as a small QoL.

This would require editing two macros… replacing “Holy” with “Flash of”, reducing the life of my mechanical keyboard by 0.000024%, so I oppose.

Cross posting for visibility and I’m curious if anyone has opinions on those last suggestion

Holy paladins need sooo many things.

better balance between generating spells and spending spells
not just a rebalance of modifier talents, but a complete removal
more skill expression: abilities should have meaningful controlled interactions. (Like prism boosting holy light or giving a divine purpose proc with herald, or look at literally ANYTHING in the mistweaver kit for an example)
stronger choices for high/low HPS output in regards to our mana ( actually, screw mana management, it will NEVER be enjoyable ever.)
removal of one of the two wings variations in favor of making it a passive. The other remaining wings type can have a choice node to modify it’s duration and cooldown
I would really love see to holy paladins lean into being insanely defensive style healers. More shields and damage reduction.
Adding a buff applied by holy shocks, that gets removed by wog ( or a new ability) that has some interaction would be cool

stripping the buff echos 20% of the healing in the target from the last 10 seconds
the buff can stack, increasing the affect (whatever that might be)
the buff allows X% of damage from cs and judgment to heal that target
healing on targets with the buff fills a pool. You can extract from that pool to either shield a single target for a ridiculous amount, or the whole group (5 man)

  • Holy
    • Word of Glory healing increased by 15%.

    • Hammer and Anvil healing decreased by 33%.

    • Light of Dawn healing increased by 12%.

I don’t hate this. I would have buffed WoG to 20%, but better spenders is always good.

Although at this point they should probably just remove Hammer and Anvil and replace it with something else. Been reading someone suggesting changing it to grant a charge of instant HL or something to that effect but something with more control.

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I’m curious how they intend on buffing Lightsmith because that tree has taken a few heavy nerfs at this point and Herald has only been buffed by the fact that HS, LoD and WoG have all been buffed.

I agree with this direction in general. I don’t know if I fully understand your concept but they need remove the random procs and boring talents and add things that are more deterministic and skillful. Buffs like the one you described also gives them hooks for more interesting talents like longer duration, increased effect, additional effects etc.

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