Hot take: It's not melee vs ranged

Classes Paladin
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Tl;dr: It’s caster vs. instant casts. You are a melee class regardless of whether you emphasize your casts or your instant skills, and Midnight is not changing that.

I’ve already stated this a few times in responses to other posts. So i decided to start my own thread on the thought process.

Paladin is coded as a melee class. You are targeted by melee mechanics in fights. Just like monk. Nothing in the development notes have indicated that that is changed.

Crusader strike, while a skill I enjoy greatly, was just an instant cast generator in the grand scheme of the gameplay. With HS’s cooldown being significantly reduced and effects that used to be tied to CS now being tied to HS, all that’s been effectively done is having your buttons combined.

The so called “melee” style still exists with more flexible positioning. Sotr still existing as it is with is effects improved tell me that the devs still intend on optimal hpaladin gameplay still revolving around instant casting and a melee positioning.

On the side of casting. Even if you utilize more casted heals, the de-emphasis of Holy Light not interacting with the infusion of light mechanics and being a stand-alone skill tells me it is not intended to be a spell you are intended to use regularly.

The intent from what I read is that it’s meant to be an expensive and powerful heal to utilize as a back up if something interrupts your flow of quick and instant healing or to immediately triage someone.

Your main casted heal is flash of light in this case. The one that still interacts with infusion of light and becomes an instant cast in those scenarios, which means the emphasis is still on instant cast healing. As far as concerns of positioning FoL still has an incredibly fast cast to allow that flexibility. However. The emphasis on the toolkit is still your instant cast healing.

On the matter of the ranged/caster centric favoring paladins: Even with the removal of rebuke and crusader strike, you are still reducing your overall effectiveness by refusing to utilize your full toolkit and the positioning your instant casts utilize. Even if 90% of your gcds are casted heals you are still melee and treated as such.

From my own experience, when I played during DF and the rotation was more heavily about casting I still found that I wanted to melee heavily to utilize more holy shocks and kill mobs faster. Even in raid when I rarely touched crusader strike it was still better for me to position with the melee for my optimal skill usage.

The issue I tended to have with caster hpaladin gameplay wasn’t that they where casting, it was the fact that even when I was mainly casting I still found I was meleeing and contributing damage while still keeping my group alive.

So quite frankly? My bias is that I tend to view “ranged” hpaladins as being players who refuse to utilize their toolkit when my own experience said that even caster centric builds are still optimally played weaving instant damage from melee ranged.

So that’s my rant/hot take. Hpaladin is still a melee healer that primarily deals in instant cast healing and the removal of crusader strike is not changing that. And the players who already primarily cast and stand at range are still not fully utilizing their toolkit.

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While this might be a topic of concern for how people want to use their healing abilities, I rarely hear it come up when discussing melee vs range discussion. I can cast and instant cast healing spells anywhere on the battlefield so it’s whatever.

The melee vs range discussion has more to do with damage abilities and positioning around that. To use your melee abilities (and some casted abilities) you need to be facing your target. Melee characters have to frequently reposition to achieve this as mechanics and tanks move mobs around. Range players still have to reposition for mechanics but not as drastically to ensure in range of target and properly facing targets like melee. This is the real issue and why it IS about melee vs ranged.

The issue for me is that you spend a lot of your GCDs on mouseover targeting your party members. Doesn’t really matter where you stand for that. But to properly melee you need to be more frequently adjusting to movements to ensure you stay in melee range and facing targets. This frequent movement while trying to mouseover heal is just a jarring play style. Melee DPS classes have few to no mouseover abilities so it allows for a soother gameplay with the constant repositioning.

And to the last point, as I mentioned in another post, this is why you don’t see hpallys really playing melee. Yes they get in there to crusader strike when they can, but if you watch streams or them in group they will play more of a fringe melee and focus more on the healing instead of the constant movements you’ll see the warriors and rogues doing. Why because it’s a jarring (not smooth, aka not fun) gameplay to focus heavily on melee damage and mouseover at the same time.

It doesn’t sound like SotR is going anywhere and you are correct that there’s been no mention of coding change out of melee, so it is still a melee class. Side note wishlist item - create a new choice node ability that replaces SotR with a 2H ability.

The other half of that choice node? Replace SotR with something thing like Avengers Shield so they keep their shield but damage from range! That sounds crazy dope btw. I should be on the development team lol

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At the risk of sounding harsh, is this really that severe of an issue? You keep the boss targeted and strike when it’s safe and heal when it isn’t. It may be a little janky at first if you don’t mouseover but alot of healing is like that in general, not just melee or instant cast healing.

In my own experience: being focused on instant casting is the ability to move and resolve these mechanics, so this scenario you’ve described is not one I’ve had.

However, I imagine this plays into why we are using sotr as our damage dump as opposed to Denounce or even divine storm.

The conal range and not needing to target to use it would mean you can stand near the front, swipe with the attack, and either stay put and swing for auto attacks (another benefit for having an instant heavy rotation is the ability to swing your auto attacks through them.) Or fall back to heal.

If you aren’t too heavy on the use of mouseovers you would target your allies to heal and just position for sotr when you want to use it.

I don’t need all that, I just need to be able to use sotr with a 2-hander or to have hpal not get 2-handers in their loot tables.

Edit: Clarified my response a little cleaner in the first section

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The worry, at least my personal take of it, is that the removal of Crusader Strike and Rebuke and relying on SotR is our only reason to remain in melee range. We now gain nothing there, aside being able to use SotR which could be removed or changed to not require being in melee range at any moment. It wouldn’t even be hard.

Then we’d be in a position where there would be no reason to not stand as far away as possible and heal safely. We may get targeted with melee mechanics, but that wouldn’t be an actual reason to stand in melee range when we can still perform our primary job 40 yards away, at best.

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Spot on, it’s about the incentives to do the job. If people can half a$$ something and it is still ok, they will do it; that’s why it is very stupid of blizzard to remove crusader strike and rebuke. They were doing such a good job too, and now they’re going right back to the same bullsht they were doing prior to Dragon Flight.

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I don’t even think that’s a hot take, it’s just objectively true. We’re coded melee, and our Mastery drastically increases our healing power based on close proximity. Even though we’re down to a single melee ability in Midnight, it’s going to be our mana-recovery ability in an expansion where a lot of our mana-recovery talents have disappeared, and I think that’s going to be vital in a lot of cases.

All my damage abilities on my healers used a tiered priority macro, to first target my mouseover target, or my selected enemy if I’m not mousing over another target, or my ally’s enemy target if I’m selecting an ally. My heals work the same way, prioritizing mouseover, then prioritizing selected ally, then finally prioritizing the ally being targeted by my enemy target if nothing else is selected. It sounds chaotic but it works so well.

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One thing that worries me is that the devs will decide to take Denounce and turn it into a PvE talent…by putting it in Rebuke’s place. Honestly, I think it’d ideally be a choice node with Shining Righteousness (even more ideally, they’d replace Shield of the Righteous with Shine of the Righteous so Holy 2H and Holy 1H+offhand-frill would be viable again).

That said, losing all strikes does take away a lot of paladins’ melee flavor; it’d make more sense to me to retool our kits so that Auras are triggered by strike abilities that have instant support effects, like a Strike of Resistance that activates a spell resistance aura that also grants damage shields to nearby allies that block non-physical damage, or a Strike of Devotion that activates devotion aura that only reduces physical damage and provides damage shields to nearby allies that only block physical damage. There’s plenty more where that came from, like Strike of Mercy to pulse out a group heal and activate a healing aura.

Maybe there’d be ways to talent out of having to be in melee to activate these auras on allies, but having them be melee by default would make more sense and feel more paladin-ish.

Honestly, though, that’d be the kind of thing that paladins should’ve had when we were first created in Vanilla; giving us these kinds of strike+aura spells now would basically be reinventing the class from the ground up.

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If they did something like that, that would have at least been something to actively encourage staying in melee, but you are right doing so at this point would require rebuilding the whole spec from the ground up which…not realistic.

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Good news there is that we got the confirmation of what the Rebuke replacement talent is now, and it’s VERY interesting. It gives a chance to block spells while equipped with a shield and the ability to parry (block) when equipped with a 2hander.

The optimist in me hopes that means we’re going to get the ability to wield a 2hander and either use sotr or get an equivlent skill (like shine from legion remix).

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Shine of the Righteous feels like it’s quite likely for Midnight; the devs are aiming for simplicity and minimalism, and allowing us to spend Holy Power while we’re not wielding a shield qualifies as simplicity!

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for those complaing ranged vs melee, why are we not just taking the mistweaver approach to this matter? just make these choice nodes instead allowing the player to choose between melee and ranged playstyles.
this would allow people to play the way they want without screwing over the other players. for instance im a melee healer playstyle enjoyer myself (and yes playing this way does take more effort) but just cause i like melee doesnt mean another player cant sit in the back and press heals pretending to be a priest *gags trying not to throw up* I know from a Mistweaver point of view from just the last tier in karesh our raid ran 2 mistweavers with me in melee fistweaving and then the other in the back castweaving. Both of us topped heals all the time and were completely viable while playing opposite styles with the same class. Paladin could easily follow suit and do the same.

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I have been harping on that for years at this point. For whatever reason, Blizzard wants paladin to be the “special ones” that do a mix of both at the same time, but then will nerf one side giga-hard so we’re forced into one or the other whenever the fancy changes.