I miss Aura of Mercy

Top off health with its small healing.

Was different from the normal stay away from everyone because of aura mastery would amp it up to compensate AOE stuff.

Cleanse the Weak which anyone standing in your aura of mercy would also be cleansed when you use it on your target.

Wasn’t all powerful but it was a nice top off here and there and they could’ve made Holy Pali something more. I hope it gets added as an option in the new talent system for people who wanna be more of a passive healer then battle healer and might get me to like playing paladin because atm it feels so clunky and boring.

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It would be better than the current Auras

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aura of sacrifice was nutty in the right scenarios, ;legit better than devo aura if you played it right

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Aura of Mercy? Never heard of it.

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Ah the good ole days of AoS. God tier.

Hey with the next expansion it might make a comeback.

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That’s cause it was a talent for one expac and removed because whatever reason.

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I took Aura of Mercy myself in Legion; it helped to cover the weakness of losing Holy Radiance…a little.

Personally I miss Holy Radiance more than I miss Aura of Mercy, but either one of them coming back would be a welcome.

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Well if they have this planned huge talent system coming then why not add them both as options? We shouldn’t be limited to one or the other bein the only option for Holy.

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Some part of me is thinking that, in a few more expansions where the new talent system gets too bloated to be sustainable, they’ll change it so that there are a few specific categories of abilities, and you get to pick a limited number of abilities from those categories—like maybe there are a few group healing options: Holy Radiance, Holy Prism, Light’s Hammer, and Aura of Mercy. We’re allowed to pick up to two of those.

I like the idea of having both Holy Radiance and Aura of Mercy in my toolbox at the same time, but…I’d understand if Blizzard wanted some healers to be stronger at group healing than others. I just wish they had a way of making that happen that didn’t take an ability as nifty as Holy Radiance!

Well as it stands for holy pali is single target heal or battle heal with spending a lot just to top people off. You don’t get a nice little supplementary HoT that’s cheap to heal what is equal a bruised knee.

Either gotta spend health for instant heal and then use a heavy heal to get your health back or hope one of your cooldown isn’t needed for a specific moment.

And then there are the talent like prism and the one that puts the thing on enemies you hit with judgement. I wanna DPS when i feel like i want to not feeling like i have to DPS to heal, hence why I don’t play disc priest.

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I would love to see Aura of Mercy come back; paladins don’t have any passive healing and i really feel like we could use it. Particularly when there are redundant Paladins and auras overlap.

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I’m pretty optimistic we may get another aura or it may be a talent in the new talent tree. I’m hoping all our auras get a bit of a rework like with Druids getting MoTW back with 3% crit & 3% speed. I’d also like to see our pvp talents get introduced in the ret tree. Aura of Reckoning/Vengeance.

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I’m glad. I would love to see more ways to play Holy Pali. I don’t want it to be boring. I want something fun to work with that is not overly complicated.

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I agree with the sentiment that the auras need to be improved in the next expansion. I find the idea of swapping from one to the next has not really worked, and I’d prefer some talent system where you end up with just one buff on, and not make it an ability. Perhaps all paladins have devo by default, and then somehow you can get enhanced versions of it. Like maybe prot paladin can get a moded sac version where they share players pain, ret would probably be crusader but better, and holy would get concentration. I know everyone wants something flashier, but the reason why that is unlikely to happen is because of balancing. For example, if I gave ret a dps aura, I would then probably have to take a ret to all raids, and the ret’s damage would have to be much less because i am buffing a bunch of people. But if its a talent and he doesn’t take it, then how do I tune his damage? And then what if he has it but its pvp/content with less people to buff? How many people do I tune around? This all leads to why a dev avoids making things like old ret aura. Regardless, I do hope there is some change, because right now they are boring.

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I feel like Ret used to have a Sanctity Aura that boosted nearby players’ Versatility. Treating the aura like it’s a standard raid buff…did that work in the past, or did they take it out because it didn’t work?

So you can click here if you would like the full history of Sanctity Aura. Basically, in BC it was a talent to give 10 percent holy damage (not all damage) to all party, not raid, members, and another talent made it add 3 percent additional full damage (not only holy). The talent was removed in wrath, and the vers version was tried in WOD where all party members (all raid members) got 3 percent vers as long as they were in meleeish range. Legion hit, and it was removed again.

As to why it was removed, there are a lot of reasons. For starters, the devs change from expansion to expansion the overall mindset of how raid buffs should be handled. Does everyone get one? Do only some specs? So sometimes the removal is for a broad policy goal surrounding the game, not because it didn’t work for one spec. With that said, though, it is generally bad design to try to give a spec (not a class) a raid wide buff for 2 reasons. First off, if it translates into enough damage/power, you brute force require that spec in all raid comps. Think about, for example, something like mages right now. Regardless of how good they are, because they have an int buff, a raid would be foolish not to take one at least. Now imagine if that was only frost mages who had the buff? Fire and arcane would probably see the bench a lot more just because of that, even if they parse higher on average.

Now, the second reason is that once you give a spec a raid buff, balancing them becomes a nightmare. A dev has to purposely tune down the spec’s overall power because the spec is making all its teammates stronger. But what if I’m solo? What if I’m in a 5 man party? 10 man? 20 man? The buff can’t scale to all these situations, and then the problem compounds if it is a talent, because then you have to balance all that wonky math against whether i take the talent or not in the first place.

These issues I have listed are why historically you rarely see these sort of buffs implemented in the game at all. I would argue that the reason why the devs tried the vers version in WOD is because vers had just then been added to the game and the devs, somewhat naively, viewed it as a largely tanky, survival stat, so it would not impact dps too much. Legion came along, and the devs did a large overhaul to raid buffs, so the aura got chopped out, but if it had stayed, it would probably have become a bigger issue than it was in WOD.

Did it work in WOD? Well we already know devs didn’t like how raid buffs were pre legion, so the fact that it got chopped out tells you already that it wasn’t valued that highly. I think it was unimportant to the vast majority of the players, but for the high end raiders, it was a nuisance uniquely because it forced range to be in melee for the buff, creating degenerate gameplay. So overall, I’d say it was a wash or worse.

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Thanks for the full history; loving this commentary!

Some part of me wanted Sanctity Aura to come back as a replacement for Retribution Aura, or for Retribution Aura to be replaced with a Sanctity Aura-like effect, but…well, you’ve done an excellent job showing why that probably won’t (and even shouldn’t) happen!