So I’m trying to get better at holy healing and I was looking at some builds and I saw that some recommend doing the melee CS build, while others have said playing a pure caster (no CS) is better. I’ve been following the Icy Veins melee healing build, but I wanted to know if a caster build is also viable or if I should just git gud at using CS more often.
Well it’s just that some of your abilities requires holy powers and you can generate more through melee…
You can try and you will see. It’s not like monk where both range spec or melee spec are totally viable.
Would read to understand basics of each build.
Caster is easier to play but melee can be difficult and take time to learn. Mostly all builds avoid lower right hand side of talents due to caster abilities being terrible and only for caster.
Holy paladin does a lot of degenerate play though. Like using Light of Dawn on full health players to proc Awakening and casters healing beacons for more holy power.
I would also check the little changes to Holy for patch 10.07 which can be tested on the ptr right now. Not sure if you need a 70 holy pally or if you can make a premade now.
Depends what kind of content you plan on doing.
If you’re pushing anything difficult then the caster build is basically non viable, but if you just want to mess around in normal/heroic raids and low keys then you can definitely play the caster build.
I’d recommend getting used to melee though if you want to play it seriously at all.
Caster is pretty awful. Casting slow holy lights repeatedly into your beacons (and sometimes on regular targets) just to generate holy power (HL is very weak healing wise) is a bad playstyle imo.
You also do much less damage as caster, the healing is ‘okay’, movement hurts caster far more than melee as you have slow casts to get off while melee is all instant. I would say caster is annoying to play with not a single benefit over playing melee hpal. If you like caster and don’t plan on doing anything too difficult, you can do what Caffeination said and just play whatever you find fun.
Melee playstyle is largely better if you are speaking purely from a performance standpoint.
There are different variations of melee hpal as well, like in my logs (Warcraftlogs) right now it’s mostly avenging Crusader because I find it very fun at the moment, but for progression I played regular melee paladin.
For what content?
People have strong opinions either way. I’ve only gone so far as clearing heroic vault, and usually farm some 16’s every week, though I’ve gone higher. Caster build is easily viable at least through heroic raid and M+20’s. If you’re trying to do +30’s for bragging rights or something, forget both builds and just roll a druid lol. Melee build will do more damage, but paladins don’t do much damage no matter what build they heal with. I don’t understand the “casting holy light into full health beacon target” meme that people throw around. With Tower of Radiance (1 single talent point) you will reliably generate holy power healing anybody, with FoL or HL (100% chance when healing someone below 50% health, but pretty good chance when healing someone with any damage at all). Plus you can reduce Holy Shock CD by eating infusions, which you can generate with holy shock.
Your biggest dps ability, by far, is consecrate, and you can use that in caster build with no issue. Likewise, you can still hit Crusader Strike in caster build if you want to. Nothing is stopping you. You can generate with CS no matter what. The only thing is, even in caster build, Glimmer is preferable to the bottom-right corner of the tree, Tyr’s is not worth using.
Thanks for all the responses. Just to clarify, I plan on only doing low level mythics and normal raiding. I’m not big into pushing late end game stuff like heroic raids and high mythics. I heal very casually and used to primarily do Shaman healing in the past but just wanted to try something new.
I’ll take a look at that wowhead build and the advice to try out some new talents. It seems the consensus is that it sucks for high level content, but is fine for low level. Appreciate the help.
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Reiterating my post above, you will have ZERO problem as caster holy paladin if that’s what you’re doing. There are some issues at the extreeeeeme high end, but it functions PERFECTLY fine for 95% of content.
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Because it generates more HP on a Beacon and it’s a chance without beacon. What they should have done is make HL and FoL give you a HP and stop having where beacon gives more. Plus Tower of Radiance not to long ago did not have its current effect.
Depends what you mean by functions i guess? It heals alright, damage doesnt matter in that content, but a functional playstyle is kind of not really there imo. Sure you can sit there and cast hl/fol all day and call yourself a caster, but the impact of those spells is far too minimal, all your doing (like with the rest of our builds) is maximizing holy power gains by casting HL onto beacons. Even if you didnt cast hl onto beacons, i have tried caster and 50 casts of HL on non beacon targets with 25% overheal did 7k hps. That is so so bad i dont even know what to say, thats leech healing lol. They have made our generators so weak, casting those spells outside of divine favor feels awful. Not to mention it is way too slow for a spell that does no healing and is only a generator.
Anyway thats subjective i guess, if your goal is to cast hl/fol and thats it, you could have been a caster holy paladin at any point in history even bfa. Is it functional? eh, that is up for debate.