Just like the title says…why does flash of light with infusion heal more than literally everything in our spell book except holy shock?
Flash of light critical healing with infusion proc heals for 200k on my character.
Greater Judgment prevents less damage than flash of light heals, even if you add the Judgment of Light Talent
Veneration procs provide less healing than flash of light
Crusader strike only heals one target; the paladin, for 2% max hp.
Holy Light, while being slower, is an HPS loss compared to casting infusion buffed flash of lights
If talented, shield of the righteous heals 5 players for 1% of my health
This all adds up to an honestly BORING rotation. In raid, I am literally using holy shock if I have 2 charges, spending infusions on flash heal, keeping tyr’s and daybreak on cooldown, overcapping holy power until word of glory is strong enough to use, and then just nothing? The only reason ever touch the rest of my spellbook is if I have no infusion or holy shock charges and that just feels bad.
I get holy shock being the bread and butter of the rotation but something needs to change to make us want to use these other abilities. Talents like vanguards momentum could seriously use a second look because with some changes there could be some fun interactions with veneration but what use do I have for 2 stacks of hammer of wrath if I can’t use them outside of wings? Couldnt this talent simply increase the damage of hammer of wrath? Lastly, please help light of the martyr
The Holy Paladin talent tree is filled with a handful of a few cool ideas but the reality is that most of them can’t compete with old reliable flash of light.
Yeah you’ve hit the nail on the head. The whole Holy Paladin kit is mistuned relative to itself which is why there’s this situation where we have this whole kit but none of it is worth pressing because they’ve all been nerfed into the ground and other things have been propped up.
This happened because after the rework they kept nerfing the spec with flat aura nerfs and then at the very end of 10.1.7 and into 10.2 they buffed spot healing spells for all healers but only buffed Holy Light and Flash of Light.
Combine that with gear scaling, lots of haste, crit and our tier set and our entire kit dissolves and all you’re left with is: press Holy Shock, consume Infusions for big (relative to the rest of our kit) Flash Heals and to get Holy Shock CDR via Imbued Infusions, repeat. Add CDs to taste.
The spec needs to be looked at again, spells re-tuned and our class tree needs to be changed so there are distinct playstyles, choices and variation in our spell’s power so you can actually create multiple viable builds where the difference isn’t paper thin.
You mentioned a perfect example of it, Veneration + Vanguards Momentum is a clear build concept that exists but is just numerically too weak to consider.
Martyr is another one that is weak on so many levels. We’re global starved, why would you bolt on another heal that does no healing, hits you for 60% of the amount healed, adds a maintenance buff and doesn’t add or tie into the rest of the core spec via Holy Power, Holy Shock, Glimmer or Infusion interactions.
It’s a sad state of affairs at the moment. The concepts exist for interesting playstyles, they just haven’t been realized and so you press WoG without 2 dawn stacks, you fire Holy Prism off on CD, you change things up and press Judgment because you want nothing more but to feel something and press a button that isn’t Holy Shock and Flash of Light spam.
The tree is filled with historic spells and design choices and now it seems the class designers don’t want to commit to a specific design and they want to appeal to everyone.
I dont play Holy Paladin, but in PVP I have seen the healing reported by Details. For PVE and PVP, possibly with different values, how much would WoG need to be buffed to be made relavent, and how much more to be made a priority for Holy paladins rotation? When I played Prot Paladin in the past, if talented to do so, I could out heal some healers(not rare for a Blood DK) but more than half of my healing was on other people(for fun, because its funny). As Prot, at least in the past since I only pvp now as Ret, I was bringing players from the brink of death to full with one WoG, that would also heal me, and apply a HoT to the teammate I healed to help them stay topped off. I dont understand why Holy Paladin has a WoG provide 1/5 or less of someones total HP. Not looking to have Prot P nerfed, I like my healing to be quite noticable. I do feel like holy power healing on the healing spec should perform better.
It’s actually an insane amount in PVE. Comparing to other healers, I’ve estimated that buff should be somewhere between the 20%-30% range, which would look kind of insane at first glance.
There’s dawn stacks that we would have to account for as well and strenght of conviction, which results for a total of a 1.8 modifier with double dawn stacks.
My WoGs without modifiers were healing for 75k ish If I’m not mistaken at 483 ilvl last time I checked. With full dawn stacks and on consecration thats about 144k. Current health pools are around 850-900k, thats roughly 16% ish of someone HP, and a little more than 30% on a crit.
With 30% buff thats around 187k with the x1.8 from double dawn stacks and consecration, thats about 21% HP of a dps roughly on a noncrit, being fully buffed.
A instant vivify on my MW with enveloping mist/chi harmony is easily critting somewhere around that range, so its not unheard of.
I missed season 2, but season 1 was the same thing; spam crusader strike and holy shock non stop, and then spend HP on light of dawn, ignoring 90% of your other kit without literally ever deviating once.
I don’t know why they keep designing holy pally like this.
They also buffed WoG, but it can use another for sure.
It was a net overall of 2% buff to WoG. It doesn’t really counts taking into account every other single ST healing ability in whole the game got buffed by 25-40% except Light of the martyr and holy shock.
Didn’t say it was a big buff, I was only pointing out that Holy Light and Flash of light were not the only spells that were buffed (which is what the comment I responded to specifically said).
Ya I think you are spot on, this this is imo what broke Holy Paladin’s design.
I don’t disagree with the general idea the Devs had about nerfing the big raid CDs and instead giving more power to spot healing because yeah most healing specs were indeed relying too much on passive AOE heals and Raid CDs but felt pretty bad when it came to spot healing or trying to focus someone in particular.
The problem is that Holy Paladin was already good at spot healing and in-line with the design they wanted to achieve for the other healers… But instead of realizing that and leaving it alone (or maybe just minor tweaks) they just went ahead and forced the changes anyways, but then they ran into an issue with WoG because if you buff it then it becomes always better than LOD which they didn’t want to buff, so they just shoved everything into Flash of Light and Holy Light (and added mana costs to the spenders) so yeah now here we are…
The spec is still strong but it’s just not fun to play. I have now in fact dropped mine this tier (I also no longer had the time to keep up with two tons cause of IRL reasons but it was a clear choice on which one to drop between the Pally and Priest).
I mean, if you are playing the low HP build, the spenders are still worth it to press, you just have to wase HP, which I agree doesnt feel good.
I just don’t get why people keep saying FoL and HL were the only spells that were buffed. It wasnt anywhere near as large, but WoG did get a buff in 10.2.
Looking at my last mythic council logs (ive since switched mains to Aug for guild necessity), my avg FoL cast was 114k, and my avg WoG cast was 138.5k How much does WoG need to get buffed for it to feel good, is the question.
Alright. Limited testing as it takes ages to get low health Vs the raiding tanking dummy, non crit WoG on my pvp geared 447item level outside of pvp Prot pally consistently can reach near its maximum non crit of 534,590, as long as a target needs that much healing. Had a crit of 582,871. This is with Divine purpose procing for the bonus healing, and useing Strength of Conviction Talent - passive, while in you are in consecration, your Shield of the Righteous and Word of Glory have twenty percent increased damage and healing.
I also had but could not benefit from hand of the protector healing people other than myself up to 100% more. And Seal of Charity- passive, when you cast Word of Glory on someone other than yourself, also heal yourself for 50% of the amount healed. I did use Light of the Titans talent And anything else I thought could modify WoG.
It was a 2% net buff to WoG which amounts to about +2k. So yes, it was technically buffed by 10%, but given the 8% flat nerf in that same patch, it’s almost the same as saying it was not nerfed.
It’s more about the full package. With an Infusion, FoL is free (very minor but has some value), it reduces Holy Shock by 2 seconds or 1/3 of a Holy Shock cooldown and it generates 1 HoPo via Tower of Radiance which gets you closer to a Dawn stack and therefore a Dusk buff which is even more HoPo generating spell CDR (ie more Holy Shocks).
If, for example, you just take the fact that FoL Infusion reduces Holy Shock by 2 sec or 1/3 and try to account for how much value that is. Take your Holy Shock average healing amount (with Glimmers and Reverberations etc) and multiple that by 1/3. Add that to the FoL cast amount and FoL is actually doing a lot more than the WoG itself.
In my case from a recent Nymue kill my average FoL was 114k. Holy Shock average 247k. WoG 124K.
114K + (1/3* 247K) = 196K
WoG and LoD have some things in the background that I haven’t taken into account in this example but you can see how it’s a little more complicated than comparing raw healing amounts.
The crazy part is, only a hand of divinity holy light feels like a useful heal, at a 1.5 min cooldown, and a divine favor flash (with an infusion) is… acceptable at best.
Outside of that, the triple holy shock is okay, only if at least one of them crits.
Even with flash and holy being buffed and whatnot, or single target heals feel horrible, most noticable on the heal shield debuff from the trash in TotT
I think its because the whole design is flawed, or maybe not flawed, but maybe intentional? Whenever I heal on my pres evoker, it pisses me off when I throw a living flame out and watch it effortlessly heal for 250k, meanwhile on my pally, im lucky if I can get a FoL or a hand of divinity holy light to crit for like 201k…then I calm down and realize that I can maybe cast 10 targeted living flames on pres before going oom, yet I can cast upwards of 80 FoLs on pally and end mythic raid encounters at 30% mana…
It sucks, but im beginning to think that if they buffed any of the spells to any meaningful degree, it would make pallys too OP, which make them bound to their current high CPM design. Holy Pally casts per min is some of the highest of any healer, just to be able to keep up HPS wise.
If you want to say that WoG needs further buffs, or that the buffs it got in 10.2 were not large enough, then cool, but don’t get bent out of shape when someone points out the following statement as factually incorrect:
But I digress.
In any event, I honestly think the reason it didn’t get more of a buff, is tied into what I wrote above, regarding Pallys high CPM design.
Because Inflorescence of the Sunwell is too good, and to make up for it they nerfed the entire spec, by a lot, every single week for two months straight. Inflorescence of the Sunwell is still too good, but because it’s an overpowered ability on an underpowered spec, it evens out to being viable. Unfortunately, every other ability we have is still giga-nerfed.
edit: my main is a Holy Paladin, and my main alt is a Restoration Shaman. I know there are lots of differences between how they heal and it’s not right to compare things 1-to-1 like this, but the difference between pressing Holy Shock and pressing Riptide feels immense. Part of this is because Shaman just got a pretty major buff to a Riptide talent, and their set bonus buffs Riptide significantly. I won’t complain too much until next season when/if we get our Season 2 set bonuses back. Those Holy Shocks are going to be monsters again.
Like I alluded to earlier, I think its less related to Inflorescence (or any specific ability or talent), and more to do with the sheer amount of instant casts/CPMs we have. We have the ability to dish out 600k-700k worth of spot healing in like 3 seconds of instant casts, so each one of those heals cant do too much healing, or else pallies become broken (as was the case after the rework pre nerf). I have to remind myself of that when I heal for 250k a pop on my evoker with living flame, where as not a single holy pally cast even comes close to that.
I think the only real way to fix this and make our spot heals actually feel strong, is to slow us down a bit. Maybe buffing Holy light or word of glory to do 300k healing, or give holy shock a higher CD or cast time, instead of being able to cast four “weak” 75k heals in that same timeframe.
edit: I realize I knid of described pre cata holy lol
I’ll make sure to mention WoG was buffed by 2% next time.