Really frustrated. Do not get the reasoning at all. Are we really going to pretend that crusader strike was a burdensome cooldown for hpals to track?
8 Likes
Where do you see that? I don’t see it anywhere in the midnight devlog
1 Like
PALADIN
- Holy
- Holy Shock now overrides Crusader Strike when learned.
- Developers’ notes: We’re making a change to condense the amount of Holy Power generators with a cooldown Holy Paladin has to track to see if this streamlines the rotational experience. There may be gaps rotationally for now while we tweak the finer details, but we want to try this and see how it feels to play.
- Holy Shock now overrides Crusader Strike when learned.
3 Likes
I am thrilled by this change. Love it.
12 Likes
Why?
I do not understand people that want Holy (and MW) to lean away from being melee healers. We already have a bunch of conventional ranged healers.
13 Likes
Much appreciated for the link.
I’ll be cautiously optimistic. Crusader Strike for Holy was incredibly weak, and only served to build holy power and (if talented) reduce our other cooldowns.
If its functionality is being replaced by Holy Shock, it does a lot of positive things for us:
- Rather than filling a GCD with a super weak single target attack to reduce our cooldown on judgement, it lets us choose to damage OR to heal with that GCD with a Holy Shock.
- Avenging Crusader is somewhat more viable, as it allows us to do our healing strictly from range, rather than having to get in melee hits, freeing us from the burden of some mechanics during high-stress, cooldown-requiring scenarios.
- Saves a button on the hotbar (I know some people are against this on principle, but it’s a positive for me)
Edit: also regarding Avenging Crusader, this change means there will no longer be any tension between Holy Shock and Crusader Strike while wings is up.
10 Likes
Holy already has mana problems going in to Midnight with BoS being removed. Leaning into a playstyle where we’re casting HS significantly more is just going to exacerbate that even further.
My complaint is not that Crusader Strike is a particularly impactful button, but that Holy Paladin being a melee healer is good, that a Holy Shock-heavy build is not great given current mana concerns, and that I’m already concerned with their general approach to re-tooling healers in Mdinight.
5 Likes
I’m not too concerned about mana. If we overlay the changes we know they’re making onto the class we have right now, sure, it looks bad, but mana is a continual balancing game and I don’t believe for a moment we’ll have unviably bad mana efficiency by release.
Edit: I understand not wanting to move away from a melee healer role, though, and between this and all our beacons affecting our mastery, and LoD being a circle instead of a flashlight, we’re definitely moving away from the hard melee role we’ve had.
1 Like
This is extremely concerning. The flow between Crusader Strike, Judgement, Holy Shock, and Shield of the Righteous is what makes it fun. We are already losing a conditional rotation builder with hammer of wrath, which is fine imo. Turning HPal into a two button builder rotation could work, but we can already have builder downtime due to them all being on cooldowns. I’m very skeptical with only having holy shock and judgement we would be given enough rotational builders without having to rely on hard casting flash of light. I don’t want to be generating holy power by hard casting flash of light. Maybe increasing the proc rate of infusion of light could work, but they you would have to dilute its power and it feels great at the moment.
Ideally Blizzard should remove either flash of light or holy light. What they could do is make holy light the instant cast spender for infusion of light procs. Since Blizzard really likes the caster vs melee builds for some reason, make a talent that replaces crusader strike with flash of light or something.
On a side note, keeping Shine of the Righteous from Legion Remix would be awesome 
7 Likes
Actually with Lights Conviction and Reclamation we get a lot of mana refund especially when used offensively.
Now all they need to do is remove SotR…
1 Like
My initial impressions are extremely negative about this, because it definitely hurts class fantasy and I think its just gonna make the playstyle boring. Holy already has a very simple DPS/builder rotation and simplifying it further to just Holy Shock and Judgement is gonna be really boring in my eyes.
Plus its just gonna be weird, unless they’re removing HPal as a melee classified healer, we’re gonna be using fully ranged abilities but then only be standing in melee to bonk with our shields when healing is low and you can SotR? I’m sorry but thats just goofy.
I’d be okay with this being an optional node or a choice node between this and something synergistic with Crusader Strike, but this just kills HPal as a melee healer in my books.
Edit: Mistweaver is getting a bunch of choice nodes to support both ranged and melee playstyle, I’d be fine with them trying to support a ranged HPal playstyle but don’t kill off melee.
7 Likes
My only concern is how this changes melee healing, but I’m willing to wait and see how it plays out in practice. We still need to be in melee for SotR, and I suppose Avenging Crusader would still functionally work with Holy Shock.
So we’ll see.
Maybe it might work out better? we’ll have to see. However if anything I would rather we focus more on meleeing and bring back 2hpower on crusader strike. That is what in my opinion created a good rotation flow.
The long answer is that I have been a holy paladin player for 21 years, and 15 of those years I was a range healer. I did not ask to be forced to melee dps to heal, I do not like it, and it has largely made the spec a mess. Furthermore, the heavy gameplay around crusader strike was an accident unintended by the devs that they themselves have been trying to fix for multiple expansions. For those curious here is the history of the issue:
Going back to the post WOD period, the devs made several blue posts on the different specs. For Mistweaver particularly, they stated how big a problem melee healing was and how they would not do more of that if they could help it. Obviously things have changed, but you see the context of the time, that they were not looking to build a melee healer.
With regards to holy paladin in post WOD, the devs decided that the holy paladin shield mastery was too strong, and they replaced it. That change and several others did a lot of damage to holy, but Legion gave them a few toys, like aura of sacrifice, to keep the spec competitive in Legion. However, more changes came in BFA, and the spec was undertuned in the first season, to a point where raiders questioned if they even wanted to take a holy paladin (unheard of at the time). They were barely surviving on the hps meters, and other healing specs were phasing them out of other content.
Everything changed, though, 1 month into the second season of BFA. An unnamed player randomly realized the new glimmer trait could break the game if you fully played into it. That player dumped everything conventional about holy paladin and converted the spec into a dps crusader strike / holy shock / light of dawn spammer. It worked absurdly well from a math standpoint, but it made 2/3rds of the spec basically defunct. To a dev, this is like when a cat owner buys their cat a fancy bed, and they find the cat in the bed’s cardboard box instead. They built all these abilities and spells, and the [competitive] players, thanks to bad math, were not using any of them.
The second half of BFA didn’t touch glimmer or crusader strike too much because any real changes had to come with an expansion, and nerfing those skills would expose the undertuned warts of the spec still lingering from the days of Legion. When Shadowlands was in testing, the devs tried some more serious changes to pull back the melee gameplay they were not fans of, but glimmer fanatics and somewhat of a lack of creativity inhibited real fixes from manifesting. Factor in the problems of the covid period, and the devs eventually decided to continue to depend on glimmer as a tuning band aid.
Once Dragonflight and its giant reworking of many classes came in, the devs finally had the space to work on this melee issue. They first tried to go the mistweaver route of having melee and range share the talent space, but it just hasn’t worked for paladin. The range side keeps getting starved by the melee, creating a terrible imbalance that cannot be fixed without a more serious change.
This all brings us to Midnight where a bunch of specs are seeing bigger changes, including holy. Number of spells is getting reduced, gameplay is getting cleaned up, and specs are being made more crisp and clear. So this change to crusader strike makes a lot of sense, and I really hope they stay this route or something similar.
14 Likes
Do i misunderstand this or is it just a massive nerf to Holy power generation with no compensation?
3 Likes
Well, in my opinion, holy paladin has always been intended to have SOME element of melee to them, since they are heavily armored battle priests.
For how infamous classic/tbc paladin was, the design philosophy of the seal and judgment system was to augment their auto-attacks so that they could melee and support at the same time. It was more the fact that players not only optimized the class to be a FoL spam bot and the lack of gear support for hybrid roles that pushed hpal into the ranged healer role.
with WOTLK buffing seal of wisdom, meleeing as a hpal was even more of an optimization tool. While yes, eventually gearing made it to where you could spam HL til the cows came home until you reached that point you gained alot of mana from weaving melee whenever you had the down time for it.
I would be more willing to accept that the cata through WoD era was the most range oriented of the eras, but this was ultimately out of player interaction instead of class design, the fact that crusader strike was in the toolkit could be argued as simply a solo only tool but it was a part of the paladin toolkit ever since hpower was introduced and it was something you could use for your hpower generation.
And then Legion, with it being the devs putting their foot down and deciding on what the class fantasy should be, made it such:
.Holding the unwavering belief that any battle waged to eradicate evil in the world is righteous, these paladins stands on the frontlines in service to all others dedicated to the cause.
So we come to the current era, I believe melee was always intended design of hpal it just wasn’t fully realized until legion. It always had elements to it intended to encourage melee play but they where not fully utilized by the player base for one reason or another.
Is it possible we’ll still be frontline healers without crusader strike? Absolutely, but I’d rather them focus on making it feel more valuable to the toolkit then cut it.
Crusader Strike going away is one of the better changes in all of Midnight. Huge W for Hpal.
Being a true “melee” healer and also a fast paced GCD to GCD spamming spec with few casts is antithetical. It’s just too clunky to always have a melee target you can hit without delay.
Any tank or mob movement, any player movement away from melee and needing to constantly switch between ally centric healing and enemy centric damaging on a second by second basis is awful. In PvE it’s high APM but doable, in PvP and other content it’s bad. Having a rotation dependent on other peoples positioning or a mob moving 3 feet is clunky.
I like the change overall because Hpal is becoming even more of a melee centric healer in Midnight but without clunky positioning requrements. It looks to be a true battle-healer who wants to position on the front lines but it won’t be required to stand 2 yards from a mob at all times.
6 Likes
Ew, holy is my main spec for paladin and they’re getting rid of the melee component? I get that it makes you stronger being able to do it from range, but I’ve always loved the idea of a holy pally being a melee healer. SoTR is basically worthless for the damage, at best you’re using it to spend holy power faster, so crusader strike and consecration would the two things actually tying the melee fantasy into game play.
Now I can sit at range and swing my shield impotently since the damage is negligible while still building up charges for the free WoG and still get consecration from ranged from judgement.
I’ve always liked how the plate clad shield/2h wielding knight stands in the back slinging spells. /s
At this point we might as well classify all specs of paladins as a mid-ranged class, not a melee. not /s
I think with the new Dusk & Dawn, Lightbearer, radial LoD and options to focus heavily on Judgment, Hpal won’t want to be standing back. Optimal positioning will likely be in/around melee.
1 Like
I want to share your optimism, but any pruning towards skills we use in melee range is going to feel like it runs counter to your point.