Hpal hero talents and recent tuning

Classes Paladin
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Tempered in battle not applying while stunned doesn’t mean much. Getting stunned is rare in pve.
The concentration damage is welcome.
Is a 12% buff to veneration even impactful at all? I’ve always felt it to be a filler spell and the healing just happens to be a barely noticed side affect, similar to the talent that makes sotr heal.
The saved by the light buff is nice. Id love for it to reduce damage that would otherwise send you below the threshold, instead of applying the shield after the health threshold is crossed. So many time I see a burst DMG hit nearly kill someone, applying the shield, with no follow up damage for the shield to help with. Even for damage ticks could likely kill from a single tick after the shield applies.

I don’t use light Smith anymore because it’s damage doesn’t seem higher than herald (please show me some logs in 12/13’s if your DMG is above 400k overall so I can learn) and it lacks the targeted healing that can be necessary, which herald can address a bit easier. Herald also seems to manage AOE healing just fine as well.

I think herald needs to remove the beams that connect players. That passive healing is unengaging. It should shift that power into something else like shield debuffs enemies to take more damage or wog buffs the ally to take more healing for 6 seconds

Light Smith, for being combat/melee focused, doesn’t seem to provide a significant DPS increase over herald. With it’s lower HPS id love to either see the weaknesses of its healing profile buffed, or increase its damage done to be something that would justify the lower HPS.

There’s not much to say about the tuning since not much changed but what are your opinions?

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Echoing this:

While these are positives, specially because veneration is such a small % of our overall, this buff is probably meaningless either way. This buff doesn’t help with our ST tbh nor the issues like mana/Holy Shock being weak.

Buffing Consecration damage is of course great, welcomed, but feel like consecration was doing a healthy chunk of our damage (about 10% ish), maybe SoTR and Holy Shock would have been better for our active damage.

As far as I remember from some weeks ago, LS AC was still the highest HPS hero spec in raid (not sure anymore, havent checked), but I would love to see mana addressed for herald, then our ST buffed and for compensation Sun’s Avatar/Dawnlight nerfed. Like you said, passive healing is just not it imo.

TDLR:

These changes addresses nothing, Hpal needs help in other, more important areas.

3 Likes
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Sorry I always forget to specify the content my opinions are relative to.
I was thinking mostly in m+

In raid it hardly matters what damage a healer can do so the few PlayStyle considerations would be, single target vs aoe healing, or ranged vs melee (paladin has battle with that for a while which I wish it would just end already) or other things like utility vs raw HPS

While in m+ , considerations include, the same things but also, how much damage can the healer do.

Since damage doesn’t matter in raid balancing damage between the two (m+ and raid) wouldn’t matter.
Which means the hero talent trees or the talents themselves could implement more choice nodes/choices between play styles.

I’d love talents that let me choose between more single target healing and more AOE healing or more damaged versus more survivability (like shields and dr) as opposed to what we currently have which really just seems to be which hero talent tree provides more HPS

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My 2 cents on the Holy Paladin buffs from a M+ perspective

  1. Firstly, buffs are welcome
  2. The buffs are clearly targeted at M+ given Veneration isn’t taken in the raid build and Saved by the Light (SbtL) scales better in m+
  3. It’s clear they didn’t want to give raid hpal 1 iota of a buff
  4. These buffs don’t really change anything

If anything, Hpal currently have an issue in meeting M+ healing checks. Veneration and SbtL don’t really help with that at all.

Veneration is passive healing, it’s a proc and so not deterministic healing you can easily plan around. If anything, it lets you just focus on dps a little more during down periods by doing some minor healing.

This m+ season is all about living very specific healing checks. Veneration does nothing to help the hpal kit right now in doing that. HoW is gigga low prio during AC. Casting Divine Toll locks your next like 6 globals – HoW not being 1 of them.

Saved by the Light is probably slightly better in terms of helping when it matters, but also it’s so minor. A 750k absorb is now 860k.

I guess this is all we could have hoped for given the time of the season, and the lack of tuning knobs Blizzard has access to when trying to buff our spec in 1 game mode where our talent and gameplay is largely the same.

The most annoying part of this spec’s design is that all this random stuff and procs inflate our overall healing but make the spec feel worse because none of it is deterministic or reactionary.

I would like to see them shift power out of the beams too. Herald’s healing profile at the moment is infinite healing every 2 minutes and then nothing in between. They need to curve that somehow, otherwise that spec will only be good when massive healing checks are 2 minutes apart.

Redesign some of the passives on this tree to make them less rng and/or put the power into Prism/Barrier. Having a gigga Prism in DF from the tier set was so satisfying.

Obviously, none of this is likely until 11.1.

2 Likes
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I’ve actually been leveraging that, by heavily playing around proccing awakening exactly when I need it, can get it 1-2 times between main wings. Highly recommend over LS of you are interested.

Definitely sick and tired of passive healing tho. I want to be in control!!

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Yeah I think that’s basically the way you have to play it. The issue I have with Herald is that you just have far less passive healing outside of wings. LS just has healing all the time. Weapons are passively going out, Judgments crits are healing for like 5m total. You have more LoHs. 2% int means everything is a little stronger. I have like 60% uptime on a weapon so most of the time I have a chance to just proc more healing.

Compare that with Herald and you have lines during wings, and HS has a chance to cast again, and HS crits heal over time for a tiny amount and ET heals for 20k a second. Spenders after Prism applies a strong hot (140k per second). You’re far more in control of the healing, but it just seems a little weak relative to LS. I feel like the 5m heals from a Judgment crit would easily make up all the passive value you get from Herald, but LS just gets more on top.

I really should do a key as Herald and the same key as LS and compare the breakdowns because it doesn’t seem close in my experience.

2 Likes
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I suppose your right. Managing awakening allows things to work in a playstyle that gives more control. While judgment Crits feel amazing, the RNG is horrible and make it feel so bad. The change in rotation during wings and the roughly 60% uptime means you have far less agency over single target heals.
Herald also allows for you to still heal affectively while line of sighting many abilities
(Abyssal blast on dawn, hook from multiple mobs in siege, slam from golems in stone vault ECT)
Doing get me wrong, I love LS but it’s weakness seem harder to play around over herald weakness

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I get you. I’m primarily a M+ player, though this season just didn’t decide to push above 12 due to time and also all the bad changes (imo) regarding gearing, m+, alts, etc etc

I try to consider raid when I’m talking about balance as well, but I see it the same way as you regarding tuning knobs.

This is why so months ago we created post about changing how Hammer and Anvil works, changing it from crits only to always healing, but of course reducing the amount it heals. While the argument against this its that reduces the value of the crit stat, its so powerful, that we have to consider its healing no matter what and in my eyes : stat value >>> gameplay of spec no matter what, it should never be like that.

I wonder that would happen if they just buffed Holy Shock and WoG to near Beta levels. Sure raid balance would go to hell, but I wonder how much stronger would Herald be vs LS AC. Since LS AC ignore its kit like almost half of the time, would love how much would it buff LS AC as a whole in comparison, which would come on top in that world, which pros and cons for each, interesting mental exercise I guess.

We are close for both playstyle to be playable and balanced, we may just need some more spot healing and tuning here and there.

Holy Shock and WoG are roughly 10-12% of my overall as LS AC and from what I remember used to be significantly higher as Herald from season start, I think a good solution for Herald would be buffing both abilities a fair amount, like 15-20%, and then lowering down just a little bit passive healing. Then a nerf to hammer and anvil and maybe tempered in battle would be needed to keep LS in check, though I think the buff for this hero spec would have less of an impact.

Also while LS AC is fun for me, its incredibly GCD intensive and crowded compared to Herald, and thats a hero spec that was GCD intensive enough to begin with. Specially if you are actively trying to get more armaments with spending double infusions procs with high (ish) crit all the time (30+%).

I’m talking that I’m currently playing with 29% haste and sometimes I even used RI to get to 34% just for it to feel fast enough. That’s an issue in my eyes, and while Herald too needs high haste (more than 20% at least) is nowhere near as bad as LS AC if you are trying to maxime armaments out.

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Also, this often leads to overall nerfs later on if for one or other reasons the spec performs good. We saw substantial nerfs to HS and WoG because of how much passive healing Herald was doing in raid.

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Oh good lord yes, LS takes way too much haste. The problem I have with LS is needing that much haste AND crit that you can’t get enough vers needed for the higher keys.

16% vers with divine protection barely survives wretch from first boss Necrotic. That’s ridiculous first of all. I’m now sitting at 22% vers in herald which feels very nice in the 13’s I’m running. Can’t imagine going back to LS with the way it plays and it’s stat preference ATM.

For the love of God, let hpal be kings of single target healing, I would love that :stuck_out_tongue:

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After thinking mlre about all of this, probably Hpal just needs some buffs to Holy Shock, Virtue changed back to 4 targets (nerf to raid, net neutral ish for m+ and mana cost reduced), and SotR damage buffs and would be mostly fine (SotR is far too low dmg for active ability imo).

And WoG too, we are not that far from the same relative healing both HS and WoG did back during S3/S4 but our tier set is helping us out.

310k average for a HS in a almost 7 Million health pool is so crazy, same for a 1 million WoG. Its still better than DF but definitely not great by any means. Specially compared to other healers.

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