Well well, patch notes are out.
2 Healers get some nice changes and paladin is still ignored with its bad caster-hybrid gameplay.
Would be lovely if they added some talents that reduced mana cost of spenders like they added talents to Castweaver.
Or if some of our utility spells got a nerf in mana cost like Evoker got.
Really just anything to not have to play another season of this crap.
Yeah, no kidding. Holy Paladin feels terrible to play in M+. I’m glad Holy Priest and Mistweaver are eating well, but hpal has been languishing this season. I wanted to go into S4 playing my pal but I don’t know if I want to deal with these issues another season.
I was hoping for something but it looks like I’ll just stick with my priest next season. May try Holy Priest tho, that seems to be pretty fun.
I was personally hoping for something that gave the finishers more oomph, but assuming there isn’t more coming for the actual Season 4 launch, I guess that’s a TWW update.
Yeah this is rough for Holy Pally players. Really its not the best of times for M+ healers in general, but they really need to revert some of the nerfs that happened when season 3 started. Holy Pally was a ton of fun S2, yes overpowered, but the gameplay was fun. Pres Evoker got some strange nerfs as well that need reverted. I know they are probably doing a lot for S4, but not doing anything now for them is just uncalled for.
Imo your expectations might’ve been set a bit too high for a patch like this. Hpal’s problems are likely going to remain unaddressed until TWW Alpha/Beta, but I’d be more than happy to be wrong about it.
I’ve been playing Monk/Priest primarily this season, so today’s changes are exciting. Past few weeks I’ve been gearing up my Paladin though, and the performance in m+ comparatively is just abysmal. Mana consumption, damage, etc are all notably worse in comparison.
I started catching the Paladin up because I like Prot and the upcoming Herald of the Sun hero tree seems to address most of Holy Paladin’s issues. I was hoping to not have to wait for 11.0 to enjoy my holy paladin again, but it’s looking like that is the case.
I mean tbf Holy Priest and MW monks got new and redesigned talents. I don’t know if turning a few tuning knobs so spenders are worth pressing is too much to ask.
I seriously dont know if S2 Hpal was stronger than MW/Disc/Druid this season. And if it was, it was probably not by that much either.
By the end Druid/MW were much higher HPS in raids and probably dungeons as well, but that was after successive rounds of nerfs.
Considering Brez, plate/shield… yeah id say they were a little stronger. You listed 3 specs, and Hpal was by itself at the top. Especially with the spike damage last season. Mana wasnt a problem, quicker holy shocks, stronger prisms, and free WoG… yes it was much stronger. Mistweaver had mostly tuning and a couple of talent point changes from S2 to S3.
Yeah, I logged in and actually checked the notes right after posting that. Whoops 
They are failing. They do not consider player feedback in their decision making on class design. If they did there is no way hpal S3 and how its looking for S4 would happen. So trash. They seem to be afraid to even balance healers out of fear of upsetting other classes and this fear leads to poor decisions. How do you redesign a class to be so fun and then poop on it so hard in such a short period of time leaving such an insane contrast over literally half a season.
They do consider player feedback I know that for a fact. However, the mistake they are currently making is trying to shove too many playstyles at holy paladin. We have melee, caster, glimmer, holy power, all of which can take over an entire playstyle by themselves. I don’t mind having choices but I think it is muddying hpal gameplay a lot, and is stopping the devs from being able to come up with something that is a lot more coherent.
The main reason I was excited for our rework initially was because I thought they were finally realizing the potential of glimmer gameplay and full sending that playstyle, but they really didn’t. Daybreak is awesome as an ability but glimmer is still capped at 8 targets and too much of our kit (like fol/hl) do not apply glimmer or interact with it at all. So that felt half baked, same goes for caster playstyle in general.
To be fair, pre nerf we had two major playstyles which was just melee (awakening talented, 2 hopo cs talented and you just blast holy power spenders to get awakening up a lot so you can have wings for every daybreak) and caster playstyle which is what we still play. Pre nerf was great because of this and is why people initially loved it, but they nerfed way too many things over time that just made every playstyle but casting kinda bad while also making casting itself not great either. Most of our buttons feel like they don’t do anything, you press holy shock and it practically does negative healing, you’ll almost always use it and watch health go down not up because it heals as much as HoTs typically do.
Theres so much potential with hpal I really hope to see something coherent in TWW. They have a great template for going all out on glimmer gameplay if they wanted to, but they also have the ability to allow for a great hybrid or melee focused playstyle too.
Rerolled. Ret is super strong stm and so was prot just a few months ago.
And if you wanna play melee healer MW is superior and also more fun to play in almost every scenario by a wide margin. If you wanna play caster, every other option is also better at the moment and more importantly, less frustrating to play/better designed. No reason to play hpal until TWW.
I’m getting really tired of thinking that surely this week there will be changes and there just aren’t. It’s exhausting. 
Each week it’s a new reason.
The new one: well maybe they are waiting to see results from the PTR.
It’s so sad being a Holy Paladin who is waiting for an attempt to retune this spec.
Idk I rerolled to ret I just don’t think hpal will be for me anymore unless there is some bigger changes that aren’t only tuning based. Far too many clashing playstyles for me, took me a minute to come to that conclusion because I was riding on hype that they would go full glimmer and finally settle on a playstyle but it just ended up being a mix of caster/melee/holy power/glimmer and feels real weird. Like when I log on mistweaver it feels so fluid its unreal, both melee and caster playstyles.
When I play hpal it feels like half my kit still doesn’t interact because theres too much. For example fol/hl/judge doesn’t interact with glimmer but does interact with holy power, holy power only interacts with glimmer via rng nothing direct, melee doesn’t interact with glimmer or fol/hl (like maybe CS could give us a buff and after 3 CS uses your next FoL/HL is instant cast or something).
It just feels really disjointed and for me tuning will not fix that. I enjoy ret a lot though so I will just be playing that, it is unfortunate (for me at least) that hpal has gone down this road. I really think the main issue is just too many playstyles shoved into one spec making it so none of them are really fleshed out. Like they need to remove one of them fully whether its casting, melee, glimmer or holy power, and then full send on one main playstyle while allowing the spec tree to branch out into the other (like maybe melee is default and then casting is a route we can take in the tree, or glimmer is an alternate route, etc).
I’m inclined to agree. Holy Paladin has so many “gimmicks” (mechanics, playstyles, whatever you wanna call it) tacked onto the specialization. The devs keep trying to appease everyone and make them all balanced and necessary, but it just kind of plays like a jumbled mess now.
There’s glimmer, beacons, holy power and infusion of light all as main mechanics for the spec. On top of that there’s an attempt to bridge the gap between melee and caster healer playstyles, with melee emerging from the addition of glimmer interactions in BfA. They could honestly break these into their own specializations at this point, because balancing all of them together is making the spec feel incredibly disjointed. Hot take, but I really think they should go all in on the glimmer/melee playstyle, since Holy Priest fulfills the caster holy healer fantasy.
For comparison, most other healers have only one main gimmick/mechanic to play around. Holy Priest plays around Holy Words. Disc Priest heals around Atonement. Preservation maximizes their heals through Echo. Holy Paladin just has too many things tacked onto it, and it’s a balancing/design nightmare.
Hear me out. Avenging Crusader Build Make Crusader Strike great again.
I wouldn’t want avenging Crusader itself back at all, but I absolutely think there is a way to build that gameplay into the foundational melee playstyle. They could even delete AC and rework the spec tree again to build into melee/glimmer gameplay. For example:
Make a 2-3 talent row dedicated to Veneration (would need a buff tho) leading into a capstone. “Warrior of Light” will be the name of the capstone in this example.
So it’d be like Veneration>>>Lights guidance (“Reduces the cd of Hammer of wrath by 2 seconds and gives you 2 charges”)>>>Warrior of Light (“During Avenging Wrath, your Hammer of Wrath triggers glimmer at x% effectiveness, cools down 30% faster and extends the duration of all active glimmers by x seconds”)
Then they can have other talents in the tree further dedicated to enhancing melee+glimmer hpal. A talent that does this: “Every third Crusader strike makes your next Holy light or Flash of Light instant cast and applies glimmer to the target”
Then uncap glimmer or cap it to 15 targets and remove light of dawn. Then add a capstone that does this “Word of Glory or Eternal Flame now apply glimmer of light on the target”
I could keep going, didn’t even touch on infusion yet but this is long enough already. This is the direction I’d want hpal to go. Straight into a melee glimmer playstyle.
I agree with all you stated. I am a firm believer of WE HPALS should heal doing damage. We are Knights before healers. the concept of a range holy paladin that casts range is in my opinion wrong. Glimmer with AC plus the interaction of Judgment and CS is fire.
Love the concept you are creating sounds super fun.