It certainly kills Avenging Crusader, which was already weak.
In almost every piece of media using paladins, paladins are on the frontline as heavily armored melee combatants. The initial usage of the word, as per wikipedia, comes from a court of knights. DND’s interpretation is holy magic using plate wearing melee combatants. Warcraft RTS games had paladins as melee combatants as well. A class that uses holy magic through casting prayers is called a priest. You’re confusing class fantasy’s.
I don’t care if being a melee healer makes it a little harder. The point is to have different classes play differently. One class that stands in the backline casting holy magic = another class that stands in the backline casting holy magic.
Holy… this is who blizzard is listening to. Insane.
Healers are so cooked is not even funny
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They are never going to make both sides happy, they tried for awhile to give us a choice between melee or range but ultimately that choice is holding the entire spec back.
I think the best option is to make us a feel like a melee healer without actually being a melee healer. For example, Judgment feels like a melee ability but it has a thirty yard range.
We all hate Shield of the Righteous, but what if it looked and acted like Prots Avenger’s Shield, feels like a melee ability but has a thirty yard range.
Holy desperately needs a spamable filler ability, what if instead of giving us Crusader Strike back they gave us something like:
Holy Strike - Raise your weapon high and empower it with the light, striking forward inflicting holy damage. 1.5 second cast time. 30 yard range. Useable while moving. Infusion of Light procs make this ability hit multiple targets. Give this ability an animation similar to Rets Final Verdict.
Lower its range to 8-15 yards to force a more frontline/midline range and I would consider this idea more. If anything i would consider an 8 yard crusader strike to be a solid compromise. I know that it isnt quite pure melee but the few minutes we had it it felt much better to position for it
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I’m with you on the fantasy, and it does sound like it will make melee range feel awkward without CS. I personally loved the fantasy of being in melee and attacking while I also heal.
With all do respect, if you want to play a healer and want to do it from range. Go ahead and play a different one. There are multiple fantasy concepts for that. Also, Paladins are melee healers. That is why they wear Plate armor.
Want to be a light one? Holy Priest
Want to heal with the Void - Go Disc
Elements? - Shaman
Nature - Druid.
All ranges.
I don’t understand why Healers nowadays want to limit themselves to just being a healing bot. Why do you guys not understand that if no one is taking damage, you should be proud of pumping an extra 1.6m DPS in a key, even tho is not a lot, you have to heal first, yes. But faster packs are a way of damage prevention, CC is a way of Tempo damage prevention, and Interrupts are definitely damage prevention.
What kind of fun do you have standing there doing nothing while you wait for people to take damage? I see no fun. Get out of your comfort zone and DPS, Interrupt, CC, and heal. It’s a lot, but you play this role due to the difficulty; don’t create excuses out of complexity.
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It’s not just that they don’t want to do it. They want to take away the capability of better players to play better than them.
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Absolutely. I will not be playing HPal this expansion unless something radically changes. Frankly, I probably won’t even be playing Midnight at all – their entire philosophy and approach to healers is the opposite of what I enjoy.
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The canned response they pull out is that ten years ago hpals were ranged hard caster healers, so therefore they’re right. It’s such a ridiculous argument.
People will genuinely celebrate the fact that our playstyle has become “Spam hard casting Flash of Light” thanks to these changes. And they’ll pretend that’s fun or satisfying or somehow living up to the class fantasy.
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for me it’s to early to say. If damage is going to be like the third boss of halls of infusion, that it’s sustained, you need to know how to rotate stuff and push your limit.
I am fine with it. I rather have that than rotate CDS in a 4 AoE spawn of a Paladins pull in Priory of the Sacred flame. yoying the bars like crazy while you make sure a single cast don’t go out before the AoE cause if not you can’t bring up someone before the AoE massive blast.
Losing CS for me just stops your holy power generation. and i don’t want a range spell that generates Hpower from range. please Healers of the light you have holy priest to be healing bots. Paladins are about protecting infront taking damage for your allies, preventing damage and inspiring with you auras. this is like this in every fantasy set up with the same concept. Melee fighters.
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please blizzard give CS back to holy paladin in midnight
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I don’t get all the doom and gloom, they said they are removing CS, they also acknowledged it’s gonna feel bad for now but more changes are coming.
Personally I think they are going to try move Holy to be more mid ranged, which I think be solid, to be able to build HP and heal without the restrictions on having to be in melee is a godsend.
But… we have to wait and see, I pray they remove SotR for a 15yd damage spell, god I hate SotR.
Let them cook, if it’s burnt then let’s complain.
To be fair, there have been plenty of times where they’ve acknowledged things looked very rough for paladins, then leave it like that until about a week before launch, where they toss in some pretty big changes that have a 50/50 chance of being so good it’s broken, or so broken it’s unplayable.
Best to make it loud now that losing CS makes the spec feel bad and why it feels bad, lest we imply everything is good and they double down on it.
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i mean if they do that they need to make our kick ranged and make Sotr ranged as well
Rebuke getting range I don’t think would be an issue, 15 yards be fine, honestly that’s even if rebuke stays for Holy.
Oddly they removed Skullbash completely from the Resto Druid class tree only literally just empty. So it seems they limiting healers that interrupt.
As for SotR, get rid of it, hate it, despise the spell, so clunky. I’d take a mid range version of a new dps spell any day.
If they are dead set on not making Crusader Strike a part of our rotation for building holy power, the least they can do is make it a spammable attack that we can use in downtime, as it stands currently paladin has no downtime filler, at least CS being a part of flowing rotation reducing the cd of HS and Judgment and also being reduced by SotR meant that we had a rotational flow that reduced if not removed that down time.
“But you should be healing in that-” Between needing the ability to solo as a healer AND not every group scenario requiring you to spam heals non-stop you need something in the rotation for downtime, and while I know Exorcism/Denounce has been suggested I personally do NOT want that downtime tool to be a ranged cast spell when most of the healers already have that.
Edit: With it being the downtime filler it gives the melee favoring hpals something to do when we’re optimizing our damage for M+ content and the like and making it something our ‘ranged’ and ‘pure healer no dps’ friends can completely ignore.
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Saw an Ellesemere video earlier which pointed out the problem of having no filler spell. Basically as it stands, our filler is spamming Flash of Light, which I don’t have to explain is…problematic.
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Blizz just needs to get their act together on pally. It was around 9 different talents that offer meaningless drip healing on a holy pally between the two trees? That’s just lazy and bad design, offering talents that doing nothing worthwhile as nodes to sink points into to make the tree look full.
Give holy pally a talent spread that accommodates a melee play style and a ranged play style, like they did with monks. I’m definitly not buying Midnight if holy pally becomes full caster. It’s not the class fantasy of a paladin.
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So our only DPS spell would be judgement, I mean, we have holy shock, but in higher-end content, you are probably always using that for healing