I don’t expect them to buff LS to compensate if I’m being perfectly honest. With the way LS is designed (largely passive, uncontrolled healing), I expect it’s “supposed” to be the weaker spec of the two. Functional yes, but not the spec you will be taking to say, RWF or +12 keys.
Now Herald, as far as I can tell will still be crippled by high mana costs which they don’t seem to have addressed at all. So the cost of being far better at keeping everyone alive will be running dry faster, and spread out fights.
As someone who actually liked the fantasy of LS since beta of shields and supporting allies, LS is looked really grim now. Effects like H&A and Tempered in Battle were added to compensate the difference between Herald HPS and LS HPS at one point, before the unintended AC blessed assurance buff ofc.
Now we have little to no reason other than mana to play LS over Herald unless you are still playing AC paired with LS which will still be more mana efficient. The issue here is AC LS have heavy GCD issues due to holy armaments and also AC taking so much GCDs on abilities that are not HS/WoG which were the targets of recent buffs.
A step in the right direction, but I think we still need to figure out:
Mana management for Non AC builds.
LS direction going forward.
Class Tree and Spec Tress could still use improvements (builds between Raid and M+ are almost the same, as Westly has pointed out)
Probably still DPS. SotR likely needs a buff if we look at other healers DPS for M+ since its an active ability/spender.
From what I’ve seen in the class discord, there may still be room for LS + AC in spread fights in raid where getting good value out of Dawnlights is impossible. This may have changed with the recent nerfs but I can see that still being Lightsmith’s niche.
I think, in a perfect world they would buff LS via a buff to the weapon imbue or the Sacred Weapon healing. The Weapon does a disproportionate amount of healing imo.
AC is so much free healing which makes it so hard for them to balance.
If they balance this spec’s mana economy around AC, non-AC builds are unplayable. If they balance the mana economy around non-AC builds, then AC builds would use 0 mana.
The other thing is that LS is so much free healing too. Bulwark costs no mana and does a large chunk of your healing. You get more Infusion procs as LS which is even more mana. People just take less damage and so require fewer healing globals. You get more LoH casts which is even more mana.
On the other hand, Herald simply has no connections to any of our mana mechanics. A mana mechanic or talent for Herald would be kinda nice and may go some way to fix this I guess.
edit: actually I just found a bug where Divine Purpose doesn’t make Eternal Flame cost no mana but it does make Word of Glory free so Hearld, if anything, has bugs that actively make it worse mana.
I think Glimmer should have stayed, and beacons should have been removed instead of vice-versa.
At that point, we are essentially playing a similar mechanic to shaman’s Whispering Waves, MW’s Invigorating Mists, Hpriest Trail of Light, Atonement(ish)-- i feel like the balancing will be much, much easier.
Pull the ripcord. Put Glimmer of Light into the Beacon of Faith/Virtue choice node, and put Daybreak into the Blessing of Seasons node.
The current state of watching paladin’s flounder at the mercy of beacon balancing and rework after rework for the last few patches has been misery.
Enabling glimmer to be more that an additional hps source only through holy shock but instead provide some additional interaction.
Glimmer stores 20% of the healing from the last ten second in the target. Casting “new spell” removes the glimmers and heals the target for the stored amount.
Stuff like that.
Old glimmer and beacons have no dynamic interactions
Shouldn’t be too hard to resolve. Just have AC increase the mana cost of affected spells while active.
I much prefer Beacon over Glimmer.
I dislike Glimmer for the same reasons I dislike Druid healing. I don’t like pre-emptively setting up effects in the event that players may take damage. It often feels like a lot of wasted effort and resources when no one takes damage, but if a mass damage event happens before you’ve set up, you struggle like crazy to recover.
Beacon didn’t really cause this feeling because the Tank would generally be the player taking the most damage and was almost certain to have some missing health to be restored when you cast a heal at any other member of your party. You just set it up at the beginning of the instance and you were good to go with permanent effective cleave heals.
