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
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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
Awakening is definitely the root cause of a lot of issues and I will -always- support it’s removal but if you removed that right now they’d have to buff sotr or add another damage spender (harsh words for wog??) because then we’d have absolutely nothing to do with our holy power if healing isn’t needed, we’d probably still end up using lod on full hp raids because there’d be nothing else to do with it, that’s how bad our design is foundationally. Removing awakening would have to come with buffs too in some way, or at the very least it’d have to come with a spec tree rework.
That’s what happens when you slap holy power onto our bfa playstyle that already had a ton of issues (that they were aware of) without reworking holy paladin at all. Legit just turned HoW/HS/HL/CS into generators, made LoD a spender and added Wog from prot to holy and made it a spender. That was -all- we got lmao, it was so lazy. Not to mention bfa playstyle was hard carried by glimmer ramping.
I do like AC more as well like I said before. I don’t think it’s good that healers don’t have to look at frames often (fistweaver/avenging Crusader) but I really enjoy the fast paced playstyle and the choices you have to make between globals
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Alright, everyone in this thread is saying AC is worse than AwM for M+ as it does significantly less DPS but looking at the numbers I don’t understand why the damage isn’t atleast comparable.
Avenging Crusader:
- 15s duration / 45 second cooldown (33% uptime)
- +30% damage to auto-attacks/CS/Judge
Avenging Wrath: Might:
- 25s duration / 120 second cooldown (21% uptime)
- +40% damage to all abilities (the 20% crit chance has roughly an expected value of +20% damage)
Just looking at higher uptime for AC, the damage should be roughly equal for a long fight. Since HPal doesn’t have any passive damage aside from Consecration, the damage increases should be roughly comparable.
That’s not even considering the extra Class talents buffing CS/Judgment (and Zealot’s Paragon extending AC uptime more proportionally), the 30% cooldown reduction for CS/Judgment, and Awakening which extends AC uptime more proportionally.
I feel like I am missing something, although I admit I have not done high-level M+ on a HPal and don’t know how valuable Consecration is there.
man this is straight facts. needs to be removed and compensated for.
The problem is fights arent really long like that in m+ to get enough value out of constant AC procs. Trash dies too fast for chain procs to have heavy impact. You get more aoe damage out of AWM (increased crit/daamge for cons, constant holy shock+glimmer spamming) and cons is our highest damage spell in m+ on top of SOTR if you do good sized pulls (the only place sotr is decent). AC is largely single target damage contribution but it isn’t high enough to be worthwhile over awm that has far better aoe damage contribution and on top of that you have to deprioritize holy shock and cons globals to fit in more cs/judge globals which is not great for m+
That makes more sense: I forgot about SotR (easy to do!) and the opportunity cost of not spamming Holy Shock during Avenging Wrath: Might.
What’s going to tell the story here is data. I looked at a few of the top HPal logs in AA since the patch (since AA is the most favorable toward AoE damage), and it does seem the top builds doing AC were hitting 13k-18k DPS while the top logs with traditional HPal builds are doing 20k-30k DPS. The flip side of that extreme comparison using AA is that healer DPS is far less of an overall contributor when the party is doing 400k DPS overall.
It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a slight movement toward AC for M+.
I think we’re going to see a huge shift towards a DPS healer meta the way they’re simplifying m+ this season.
From what I’ve seen on the ptr, Hpals will be non existent again due to how low our damage is. Picking AC will make it even worse. I’d love to be proven wrong, but we’ll need some help to make that happen.
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huh, well that stinks
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Instead of improving our damage we are recieving a nerf, and not a single core issue of the spec is being addressed. This is depressing
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Ngl this tuning pass is cringe. It must be targeting only raids ,but it takes down with it everything else. Understandable that their tuning priority is raiding since its relevant in the first 2 weeks of the new season but serious tuning needs to happen after WF race is over( and honestly who cares about WF race anymore its not relevant for anyone)
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When I saw there was class balancing incoming and we were included, I actually got hopeful for once. I will remember not to do so in the future.
The AC healing nerf was expected and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it get more over the next couple weeks, but the blanket dmg and healing nerf is just unnecessary and nonsensical.
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It will widen the gap between healers in m+, specially when active damage healers are doing x2 damage than us right now before the nerf. Also they way this impacts AW:M builds and AC niche in M+ is disheartening.
Know we now they dont look gameplay/class design issues and just raw numbers from raid, not even taking into account other content.
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They’re obviously looking at healer damage because they buffed holy priest damage a few weeks ago.
But if they’re looking at healer damage, how are they nerfing ours again? I just can’t wrap my head around it.
They are nerfing ST damage for raiding purposes. Its always like that,before the raid release they tune just for the raid. Hopefully they will not forget that WF race is meaningless and tune properly after
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH7xNctiyeE
This Hpal performance lasted for 1 week and in the old raid. With this “tune” for the raid, our overall score would be even below RDruid apparently, since it’s around a 7-8% loss in HPS for raid? . This is not even taking into account our m+ mid-low tier performance 