Nice to see blizzard going forward with Avenging crusader as the better option. I love that playstyle , melee wings feels good in the class fantasy. Blizzard nailed it ! I guess though not everyone will be happy about it,but cant please everyone.
Its AC season Baby!
Calm down, holy spec is still trash tier.
Definitely bait
Not a bait. Some people enjoy other stuff,some enjoy wings,others melee wings,a third may enjoy caster,some even play football manager and are hpal experts. Cant please everyone.
While true, AC is the one I think is the most problematic. I’m actually fine with having a melee and ranged spec with talents that support both play-styles. My issue with AC is that it completely destroys our agency as the player. We cast Judgment and CS as much as we can to heal 5 injured targets at random. Holy shock falls down the priority list so you use it a bit less meaning less agency there, and you still ignore infusions. As stated in the write up, you can play without group frames and still perform decently well. While he was way more doom and gloom about the spec than me, he’s not wrong there.
It’s not as if Avenging Wrath is some big brain play-style, but at least it really prioritizes making choices on who gets holy shocks and , in turn, glimmer.
I’ll still play Holy, I just think it’s going to get extremely stale very fast.
While not exclusive, Two fairly major issues we as have as melee holy paladins is that we have quite a few required globals that do zero healing and that we ignore infusions. AC corrects one issue while killing choice. I’d much rather see Avenging wrath be the standard but make it so CS is also a spell that gets infused. For example, if you crit with HS, your next crusader strike heals for the same spell power as a flash of light split among 5 targets.
With that small change, we now do some additional healing with some of our crusader strikes and we are now using our infusion procs. It also wouldn’t affect the ranged play-style because they would normally use an infused FoL or HL unless they chose to be in melee and use a CS.
I tend to disagree on that. You didn’t really have much of an agency anyway ,in many previous iterations. Spamming LoD is pretty much the same as what AC does now
The main issue i find with hpal is holy power. I dont like how crusader strike is a generator. Basically you need to press 2 nothings and waste 2 gcds before doing anything else relevant. AC fixes that for me since both judgement and crusader strike do nothing meaningful besides hopo generation and fluff. bit they fixed the issues AC had ( or most of them) . Ive bothered to read the wowhead article and oh boy what a doom and gloom article that is. Hpal has a secured spot,pulls good numbers with AC, is all around competitive even in the highest of m+ keys, suffers a bit in pvp but overall its in a great spot. It also offers playstyles that cater to everyone, although i agree the tree has many dead talents . Im a bit sad how the spec traditionaly revolved around infusions and holy light/flash of light but since we have crusader strike as a generator,AC fits perfectly. Overall im happy with hpal,for sure could use improvements but its NOT doom and gloom,like some wanna present it to make their case( or prefered playstyle) relevant
If i was new to hpal, i would be terrified to go into the class,if ive taken seriously the wowhead article. Class discord also doesn’t help, toxicity there is rampant.
I’m confused by these replies, everything i read from high level players testing AC on the PTR said the new changes made the ability the go to for all content in 10.1. Is this not true?
You won’t play AC in M+ because the damage is quite low compared to AW:M
The fact that the playstyle is sticking to the “Spam LoD and pray for awakening” to do ANY meaningful damage or healing is really bad. The two-piece for 10.1 will at least stop me from ignoring HS for healing…it was basically useless.
Glimmer? Dead talent point IMHO. Sub-3% damage overall in a dungeon, even if you’re only using HS offensively.
should have no cooldown and Awakening should be removed.
Our damage is among the worst of the healers either way, so it doesn’t really matter that much.
Combine BoV with AC and now you have another big AOE healing burst additional to divine toll for every judgement and substancial aoe healing with every CS
I wish they would remove the Holy Power cost for AC, or at least lower it to 3 Holy Power.
Imo holy power cost and no cooldown or give it a cooldown with no cost. Either or not both
delete melee wings
You’d be giving up probably 10k overall DPS by going AC over regular wings with might. It’s pretty significant.
It’ll be nerfed soon. Hopefully blizzard can thread the needle and not make it completely trash. We’ll have to wait and see.
I tried AC for the first time yesterday in a Raz LFR just for kicks (and it wasn’t as easy as you think since the 25% healing nerf) and I liked it a lot! It did nearly double the 2nd place healing with similar ilvls despite having barely any idea what I was doing, so I think there will be a higher ceiling on performance, especially as gear improves in tier.
It’s a shame you can’t use AC in M+, though (none of the guides say it’s a damage issue, they probably should)
Random question: what’s the effective range of AC healing? Ancient Teachings for Mistweavers explicitly says 30yds but for Paladins it doesn’t give one. Just going from the target dummy it definitely is not 30yds.
In terms of what? AC in raid is far more damage than AW:M and also every other healer in the game aside from maybe disc. You can’t actively dps with AW:M in raid without giving up a large portion of your healing so AC pulls ahead a lot.
In m+ it’s the opposite because you get to use AW for dps
Edit: Sorry I missed half that convo, i see it’s about m+. So yea ur right
Both builds are problematic. Agency matters a lot less when your holy shocks heal for 20k, and in wings for 70-80k. AC pulls ahead because the regular builds strong point is no longer strong. You just spam LoD the entire time and you play around that entirely. It’s also even worse now with the 25% health/damage change, holy shocks healing didn’t change much yet health bars are bigger while AC now has more beacon transfer and better healing if you stack mastery.
AC does have the issue of looking at frames less, but AWM has the issue of just constantly spamming CS HS to use LoD.
I prefer AC a lot because it’s fast paced and I think it’s actually more difficult to play correctly due to how many globals are happening at a time. Decisions between pressing HoW to extend AC or pressing CS again or spending if you have legacy up feel pretty good, I feel like I actively have to decide how to optimize my globals. Not saying it’s a difficult playstyle though, just more difficult than regular build.
However every build has big problems, they could use our spec tree to fix it (like they did with rshams) but they will probably just nerf hpal and call it a day
Edit: Just to add, my ideal version of hpal is a mix of mop and legion. I want to go back to being a cd based healer. Hpal used to be the healer with the most cooldowns in the game and our skill ceiling involved rotating through them properly (Guardian of ancient kings, divine favor, holy avenger, avenging wrath in mop). Holy power also used to be far better implemented. Now we literally have 1 bland raid cd and almost permanent wings uptime via spamming spenders to proc awakening
Personally my fav version of pala healer was cata hpal (namely firelands version) . That was close to perfection for me. But nowadays i vastly prefer AC vs Aw:M and overall im happy its better now. It has still to go a long way in order to be amazing, because playstyle is kind of degenerate but looking at the other options,they are more of the same. Like the post above says, agency has long left the conversation. But good thing is that you can play both builds in different content ( both are “optimal” in their respective content)
A good overall fix imo is to just remove awakening. That is the root of the issues i currently find with Hpal.Or make it that sotr procs it so you dont feel like a degenerate spamming LoD 24/7. Something has to change to awakening atm . Its actually sad to think that its a dps loss to use a dps finisher instead of just spamming LoD .Its also sad that melee wings is not a dps increase over AW:M in mythic plus which doesnt make sense. Rearrange the tree a bit to get rid of the useless talents,and make infusion a useful thing