I cast Holy Shock, Rising Sunlight, and Divine Toll offensively a lot.
This is my idea of what a Holy Paladin should be.
Highest DPS healer ← we are martial warriors with healing abilities.
Lower HPS throughput. - Due to the instant casting concept and fast phased GCD rotation, DPS rotation (The Better you use your rotation, the better healing you will do)
Damage reduction / Shielding allies <— We are WARRIORS, we can harness the light to do combat trick mechanics (new Paladin does this)
Auras that do multiple things ← (Not only one stationary aura, different auras, different situations). Like in Dungeons and Dragons.
Melee > Tops Midrange
1st. I wish that people would just get it in their heads: this is not vanilla wow anymore. Paladins are not running around in leather armor (or whatever they were using that wasn’t plate), people don’t have only one mechanic to take care of, npcs are not only spamming bolts, raid has evolved from training dummies to complex engaging mechanics and mythic plus exists as a group challenge and it’s a pillar of content. Even solo content is more engaging that old classic questing.
Imagine depending on a group just for doing DELVES, because “healers are not here to do dps”. It’s asinine. We already need to either waste time trying to kill stuff on our own, or keep up with 2+ specs because it takes half the time to just swap to prot or ret. I just want to do my weeklies without dedicating a full afternoon because I can’t kill anything, and without having to keep up with two or more sets of gear just for QUESTING. It’s not much to ask.
In modern wow, DPS are not a brainless machine gun, tanks are not just a meat shield, and healers are not a heal spambot. We all have utilities, healing spells, and damage spells. In a wow with solo content as a third pillar, and having mythic plus being an absolute challenge as a group, it’s expected for everyone to know their class and use their full toolkit if necessary. Standing there spamming overheals or just doing nothing is no longer part of the game.
2nd. We’re a PLATE wearer class. Why would we be in range? Are we more scared than priests so we need a plate armor and shield to stand 40 yards from the action? It makes no sense.
3rd. Losing CS without replacing it with anything made the whole thing clunky and not engaging at all. Having to spam flash of light in melee doesn’t work.
We have Shield of the Righteous and Rebuke as melee abilities, Light of Dawn that now requires you to leave melee in order to reach the DPS standing at exactly 40y from you in every direction possible, and the rest of the ranged abilities.
Please Blizzard, decide what you want first. Decide where you want paladins to stand and go from there.
What do I want?
I like standing in melee, and I don’t like hard casting abilities while in melee. I wear plate armor, a sword and a shield, I want to be in melee.
I like the change to light of dawn, but it would require ranged dps to actually stand closer to each other in order to actually be an AOE healing (it will never happen, ranged will never not be in a perfect triangle from each other at the absolute longest distance possible), so it would be nice if we could have a talent to extend its range a bit, just so we can reach at least 3 people when casting it, without requiring a full melee group.
And I would like to have crusader strike back, or something else that can help with damage, so I don’t have to be in a group or swap specs if I want to do content on my own.
You will still have damage available to you as HPal. They are only taking away Crusader’s Strike. You still have:
Holy Shock (Dmg/healing increased by 20%)
Judgement (which will also proc Consecration)
Shield of the Righteous (dmg/healing increased by 20%)
Holy Prism
Hammer of Wrath
Talent that bakes in Tyr’s Deliverance with Holy Wrath
Im absolutely gonna be the 'UHM ActUALly" guy here.
Its Lightsmith for hpal not templar. Though yes you do summon a hammer during your wings.
Hopefully the next batch of patch notes will address this. But right now the issue is that theres a gap in the rotation from the crusader strike removal. Im of the mind that if they are determined not to make it a generator then it should at least be the filler spam for when you dont need to heal. Using FoL as a filler when no ones taking damage feels awful.
Judgement becomes hammer of wrath during wings, so thats another button down. Technically with a talent node, judgement places consecration as well and that gets removed as well. (I think it gets removed as an active)
I’m feeling alot more optimistic with the current development notes, if they shift the incentive to melee into a sotr that feels rewarding to use for it has the potential to make a solid compromise for both playstyles. Caster Hpal lovers get to hang back with their FoL spam and melee hpal lovers get more sustain and shock cdr by weaving sotr in downtime.
If they mess it up though im gonna be screeching to the high heavens for crusader strike back.
Some of the notes in question. These changes are very big in regards to filling those GCDs with Crusader Strike gone. This is a significant number of extra available button presses on our remaining buttons
Think the rest should be included to provide further context.
As of right now, it looks like what they are trying to do is lower the cooldown Holy Shock and Judgement enough to keep something resembling a steady combat rotation going, with SotR now returning mana (although I think .5% mana for how much everything costs is far far too low but we’ll have to see in practice).
The change of Light of Dawn back to 40yrds means we don’t need to straddle the line between melee and range like the 25yrds dictated.
I’m terrible at math so I don’t know what the cooldown of all these are looking like tho so I could be horribly wrong.
Doing my healer duty and commenting on yet another Holy Paladin post regarding Crusader Strike.
Removing this for Holy does not ruin class fantasy, and the removal of a “forced” melee play-style is a good move. If you want to be a light wielding Paladin who smashes their foes, there’s two other specs to do that with called Protection and Retribution.
I’m not against a melee healing Holy Paladin, i am against Blizzard half-implementing melee healing Holy Paladin that doesn’t have a proper full toolkit and talents to support it. The same applies for a caster Holy Paladin.
If Blizzard can successfully support both fully that would be great, but not once in the entire history of this game have they successfully done this.
Looking at the latest Alpha build we are one change away from the Melee Healing build dying completely. All they need to do now is remove Shield of the Righteous and give us a range DPS spender in its place.
All Blizzard needs to do now is:
Remove Shield of the Righteous and give us a range DPS spender.
Bring back Hammer of Wrath, separate from Judgment.
Give us a filler ability. MoP style Denounce for example.
Ya, I don’t understand removing crusader strike. If anything just remove the Holy Power from it. I’d like to see them implement shine from lemix into retail. I finally can use a two hander again.
Which again, is insane because they have clear divides with MW, they are adding such a divide with Devourer DH.
They have been trying to straddle this line for years and have failed and I have no idea why they keep insisting they can get it right.
If they decide they want hpal to just go back to pure ranged, it’s fine. I’ll just swap specs, but I’d much rather they not kill the last thing holding me to the paladin class in general lol
Which is really funny the more I think about it. One of the things that keeps me bouncing off WoW is how they keep changing paladin every other patch that completely warps how it plays, more often than not in baffling ways.
So after seeing the changes, I can fully stand by your previous suggestion of Exorcism being ST and if used in target with Consecration it becomes AoE.
It seems Judgment is going to essentially allow us now to have multiple Consecrations up at all times at every pull with Righteous Judgment talent.
Holy Paladin looks to be a Holy Shock, Judgment machine gun, which honestly I’m all for, I love how I’m not going to be tied to melee anymore. The only problem now is SotR needs to go in favour of a mid range spender.
Crazy that they can’t get a worthwhile talent spread for paladin specs that allows different builds/playstyles like they do with pretty much every other spec.
Paladins, the class that stands directly in front of enemies according to blizzard’s own description from https://worldofwarcraft.blizzard.com/en-us/game/classes/paladin are a class that has more ranged abilities than melee abilities in every single spec.
Which imo is mostly because their long standing fear of giving paladins proper ways to close gaps for decades.
Paladin can’t reach a target, well they have Seal/Judgement of Justice to slow their target. Target blinked away, well…you slowed them with Justice right?
Oh that mob is half way across the room? Better start hoofing it. A instant gap closer? Paladin, you have Freedom, that’s the only gap closer you need. Enjoy running.
Hey we realized that Paladins can never reach their targets, so decided to bump upthe range of a bunch of their abilities to like 30yrds so they can actually hit stuff. But Crusader Strike ain’t changing. Instead you get a divine steed. Giddy up.
Yeah, at first I thought we were losing double consecrations, but with such a short cooldown on judgment and cooldown reduction to make it even shorter, we’ll have multiple consecrations just from casting judgment at this rate
Ellesemere put out a video on this weeks build and it looks better than I had initially feared.
The massive amount of cooldown reduction funneling into Judgement and Holy Shock mean the damage rotation is pretty solid, with minor gaps here and there. The primary thing being that it hinges on SotR, which is the only thing outside of Rebuke keeping you in melee.
He mentioned you’re likely not going to be using SotR in raid, so I’m not sure how that’s going to work there or what it will do with what looks like the intended flow.
Now if Rebuke gets 15yd range and they fix SotR with same range or preferably I’d completely replace it with a mid range spender, Holy Paladin gonna be amazing.