Despite my desinterest with the game in its current state, my bias against the overall direction the game has taken and the heavy pruning that we’ve suffered, I’ll try to keep it as civil as possible in hopes that the problems with holy paladins finally get addressed and eventually fixed. I know fun / interesting / boring / bad, are subjective words that the devs don’t like, but I believe there’s some common sense that can help understand them as legitimate concerns. I don’t feel like I should have to write an essay of why the holy shock coin flip for our overall gameplay isn’t fun. Less is more as long as ‘less’ is well thought out when designing a class.
Note: I’m not going to talk about numbers here. Frankly I really don’t care about it at the moment and numerical adjustments can always be fixed in much simpler ways than overall class gameplay.
Problems with Holy Paladins:
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Mastery:
Our mastery is bad. I’d prefer a boring mastery (like WoD) than a counterintuitive, bad mastery. Possibly the least mobile healer has a mastery that heals more the closer it is to their teammates. We have no control over other players, we only have control of our character, so if we wanted to maximize our mastery we’d have to literally move like a slug closer to the players that need healing. Might be doable with light of dawn, otherwise it’s a waste of time and an uninteresting mechanic. With Beacon of the Lightbringer (removed in BFA and replaced with Divine Purpose) I could least play around it. -
Talents:
Some talents are useless, far below the talents they compete against, or just don’t make sense in the talent row. For example, why is an RNG talent like Divine Purpose that has no interaction with beacons in the same row as the Beacon talents? With the kit my class has, I even feel forced to run it every time to potentially have that proc to do something else because the class is that boring. -
Auras:
Auras are just boring. At this point I don’t even feel they should be talents and just baseline abilities that we can change (like they used to). Make 2 more engaging talents that are competitive with aura mastery. -
Passives:
We currently have 3 and I’m being generous to say 3: Infusion of Light, Mastery (if you want to count it as a passive), and an Increased mounted speed (lol).
Passives that enhanced our gameplay (artifact & legion legendaries) were gutted from our kit. I still find myself judging for the Ilterendi buff and damage reduction from our artifact. Instead I just deal X damage. Ilterenti, Maraad, Vindicator, Protection of Tyr, Power of the Silver hand, even old Daybreak (you could’ve made it work with LoD or something). Things you could’ve made baseline but instead decided to remove them entirely. -
GCD:
GCD really, really hurt us. Holy paladin has been a very ‘reactive’ healer for a long time. There’s very little setup involved other than our aura mastery when running devotion. We’re great at healing damage spikes and single target healing. I can understand the logic behind you wanting to prevent cooldown stacking, but ours was always very situational (think Holy Avenger and Avenging Wrath with a fast holy shock). I can’t do that anymore. I can’t do a quick holy shock after any of those GCDs either. Both in PvP and PvE it feels more frustrating than interesting. Subjective words again. But put yourself in the thought process of the player: My teammate is dying, I need to use a CD here but with one second downtime this player might die. Do I use it and risk him dying, or do I keep healing with my most expensive spell to make up for the fact that I can’t use my CD in hopes that he doesn’t die. Minor note, but cooldowns for mana efficieny is also a thing. I’m forced to make a decision that isn’t fun that makes my gameplay artificially slower for (in my opinion) no good reason. -
General Gameplay:
Way, way too stale. The overall gameplay revolves around holy shock. If it crits it can maybe give me decent gameplay. If not, it’s just a “heals for X”. After that, plain, flat, boring heals until the next Holy Shock or ocasional LoD. That’s it, no other interactions whatsoever. In WoD I was casting Word of Glory with holy power (and building it up was part of the gameplay). In Legion at least I had a reliable infusion of light proc with every Holy Shock because we could crit cap it. That’s no longer the case.
Suggestions:
Maybe a good start could be giving us Divine Purpose as baseline to make up for the pruning and lack of synergy between abilities. Make the old daybreak work with Light of Dawn. One or two relevant passives from from a Legion Legendary / Artifact. And no ‘rental’ stuff. The class should feel interesting at level cap. Period. That would at least be a step in the right direction.
I don’t know what else to add now. To be honest, I don’t feel like doing an even more extensive post with the problems the class has spell-by-spell. Things like this usually go unnoticed but given that my sub ends in a couple of days after not playing for months, I just wanted to put this somewhere (since you can’t post in the forums when your sub runs out).
I was able to have fun in WoD despite the lack of content because I had fun with the class. Now it doesn’t matter if you give me 5 different raids, I know I just won’t have fun. This is the first time in 10 years that I don’t look forward to the next tier or patch. Maybe they fix the classes next expansion, maybe not. Even if they fix the azerite system, they will pull the same ‘rental’ model they pulled from Legion to BfA, so I’m not even looking forward to the next expansion. I just want my class to be fun again.
Thanks.