Purpose: To show blizzard that in general the community is against further nerfs to hpal for good reason.
I’m sure many of you will be able to present even better reasons than I. Please do so. Lets get this reversed.
How to do this:
Don’t post random complaints. Instead offer suggestions about ways that they could accomplish the same goal without doing an overall flat nerf.
Current Problems:
Looking at overall numbers after last week it looks like hpal has dropped quite a bit in the healing arena. While there are still a few fights where hpal is performing well, in the majority we are underrepresented in the top 100.
One of the reasons that this is so problematic is because there is a known bug with Dawnlight. Which means that that the top players with guilds that specifically play around it can abuse the bug to increase their parses. But… that means the majority of players and guilds are not able to abuse this bug which means that the numbers you’ve been basing things off of aren’t accurate. This represents a huge pain point as it suggests that the majority of hpal players are performing significantly worse than the parses would suggest (except when fights force grouping naturally). Adding a 5% nerf to this feels particularly bad to the majority of us for this reason.
Solution: Fix the dawnlight bug instead of nerfing us. Or increase the range of dawnlight healing in addition to the 5% nerf.
Many of our spells do not feel powerful or good outside of healing cooldowns. To effectively track these cooldowns we HAVE to have advanced UI. This leaves out a huge number of players. To really perform as a holy paladin in raid or mythic + scenarios the skill cap is incredibly high. We must track divine purpose and infusion of lights and awakening and the ingame UI is not sufficient for this. This creates a HUGE gap between the best and worst hpals.
If you’re going to nerf us okay, but at least make it a little easier for us to perform by making the UI easier for the majority of players to use.
Spell interactions are not always straightforward or clear or have too many complicated requirements. For example; casting judgement can grant your next WoG the ability to cast Light of Dawn at 25% power, once every 20 seconds. That’s extremely hard to track and when you’re in the middle of a raid watching the boss, checking player locations, tracking divine purpose, infusion of light, AND awakening is needlessly overcomplicated.
Solution: Remove the 20 second cd. Light of dawn at 20% is already such a small boost in healing that it’s not likely to make large changes to our throughput and it will make it easier for players to accurately use.
Light of the Martyr does not feel good in m+. It creates a situation where you are more likely to die during damage spikes and the damage spikes currently are so severe that you often you only have 1-2 gcd to not die. It can be extremely punishing and makes it harder to play around.
Solution: Maybe we could cap it at a certain percentage or even change it so that overhealing is not counted.
Light of Dawn - Come on. This is one of the most underused spells in raid and m+ because it feels incredibly weak. In almost all situations it’s more healing to cast beacon of virtue and WoG/EF. There are no interactions with Light of Dawn that materially change this. It’s a spell that should feel good to use, it looks cool, it’s fun, it just does not provide the throughput to make it worth it except in situations where you’re just trying to top off 5% health.
Solution: Give it a more powerful interaction, more range, or simply increase the healing that it does. Or have it do something different entirely, like shield 5 players for 5% of their max health. It’s consistent - we can already create barriers of light. Light can travel with less loss and more speed than sound.
These are some immediate things that could really improve the hpal class experience. Think about how complicated it is to play this spec already due to the UI and please please please reverse this 5% nerf or give us something to balance it for the rest of us.