Genuinely struggling to understand why FoL ought to be healing for more than WoG.
because being in melee sucks, relying on HP for everything sucks, moving towards a traditional caster is 100% better
Why? Holy Priest always exists – what even is paladin class identify if we’re “Holy Priest in Plate Armor?”
I’ve been thinking about making a big writeup with what I believe blizzard’s intentions are with all of the changes to paladin, but regarding this particular question, my opinion:
Blizzard has been getting nonstop complaints about the entire system of holy power for a healer. We’re the only healer that uses combo points at the moment. Mistweaver started with combo points, but lost them because of all the issues they present for healers specifically. The problem is obvious: when you have Holy Power, you have access to strong and impactful heals, and when you don’t have holy power, your heals are much weaker, but the most efficient way to build back more holy power is to use abilities that aren’t even heals (crusader strike).
I think the nerfs to LoD and WoG (in conjunction with a lot of our other changes) are meant to minimize the need for holy power without completely gutting the system and remaking the entire spec from the ground up. By frontloading more healing into our builders and our casted heals, we’re better able to keep up with our responsibilities while building that holy power up, and by reducing the power of our spenders they’re turning holy power into something you use more for utility heals and abilities than pure throughput. WoG, on its own, isn’t very strong now, and it’s more useful just as an instant heal (although there are plenty of talents and synergies that buff it situationally). So it’s good to have holy power before you need to move, so you can get a WoG out while running, but not making you dependent on its throughput.
Damage to healing on classes that aren’t specifically Disc Priests is something that Blizzard has historically developed healers away from, especially the smart healing we used to have in MoP on several abilities for non Disc healers.
Mistweaver gets away with it because fistweaving doesn’t leave their core spells useless. Holy Light and Flash of Light largely being useless is degenerate spec design and needs to be fixed.
Well to be honest we were always ranged in heals until recently they changed holy into melee casters. A lot of people do nto like having to be in melee range and the fact that key abilities are locked behind holy power is just bad for all 3 specs. But ret has had hopo the longest. They tried to do that with prot and then removed it only to return it again.
I hate hopo 100% so if its being remove then thats a big win in my book.
It makes sense for spender healing to move to other spells, but if you test on ptr and check out some math it hasn’t worked out this way at all. Our builders got stronger by virtue of our spenders (mostly lod) getting nerfed a lot, but they didn’t get that much stronger from current patch. We’re in a place where a lot of our heals have minimal impact (objectively, you can see this yourself) because they haven’t translated the beacon nerfs and lod nerfs into our other spells properly. At least not yet, it’s just a tuning issue so can be fixed any time really, but realistically that healing has not been made up for.
For example, holy light got an extra holy power added to it in iol but it doesn’t matter much when spenders are as weak as they currently are. Both fol and hl received some numbers buffs but didn’t really do much for those spells, the only time they really heal decently is with Tyrs up.
Also a big write up sounds cool, but if a Paladin figure is going to be doing a big write up about paladin it would be nice to see them posting or doing so on their actual paladin
I never post on my actual characters. I don’t even know how this guy got selected, he might be a classic character or something.
I’ll defer to you on what the actual numbers are doing, I hate math and refuse to use it. I’m confident if there’s a tuning issue, Blizz will get around to tuning it eventually. I just think that’s what their intent was with tuning down the spenders, to make us less reliant on them and move us more towards using our base kit. Whether it works or not will depend on how good they can balance.
thank you blizzard going back to caster paladin is AWESOME
I think that despite the recent tunning updates that might suggest that they are trying to move the spec to more of a caster style, if we look at the actual changes to the talents and mechanics of the spec I really don’t think those are showing that.
So my guess is that they probably do want to give more viability to the caster builds but I seriously don’t think they would actually make that the primary or most effective playstile. What I think is probably happening is that they added the rework and then realized the spec turned out too strong and now they are struggling to find a good way to balance it.
So idk I’m kind of in a “wait and see” state. I feel pretty confident on that the intention is probably not to turn Holy Paladins into plate wearing Holy Priests but I’m not as confident on the execution, so I feel there’s some risk that they miss the mark on the tunning and we end-up there for a bit. It’s not live yet so I’m still hopeful they will figure out the balancing and tunning before releasing it.
Both playstyle are usable. You aint forced to be range caster. They just made it a viable option for people who wanted to. Melee healing is still a thing if that what you want
It’s been like 8 years
I couldn’t remember when holy went to melee. I never play holy. I have tried but failed that was before they forced hopo into it. I hate hopo I think paladins should get the Enhancement treatment how enhancement went from a poor mans fury warrior to just awesomeness I think paladins should have hopo removed. But that is just me.
Holy priest and holy paladin have nothing in common about how they heal or how they feel to heal on, other than, both using light-based spells.
Yes, and I would prefer that it would stay more distinct.
Why do people act like flash of light and holy light, the least interesting and worst-feeling buttons to press in our entire kit, are so core to the identity?
Personally when I think holy paladin I think holy shock. Not flight of light or holy light
Is PTR Holy actually weak though? I am not really familiar with Holy to say if the rework is a nerf or not, or if the spec is weak in comparison to other healers. As the only other healing capable class i have at lvl 70 is a very undergeared priest that i haven’t even touched this season.
But that said, Holy doesn’t feel weak in my opinion. Sure the individual spells doesn’t heal for much, but all those little things we have really feels like they add up to big numbers.
For example, new-Glimmer heals a bit less on 8 targets than current Glimmer. But it feels like it goes off 3 times as often, if not more.
Slow casting, mana efficient healing spell and fast casting, mana inefficient healing spell has been a core healer design since the game first came out.
Yes, and all of the healer classes have moved beyond the archaic simple design of “do I primarily cast my fast, expensive heal or my slow, cheap heal?”
It’s boring. It’s boring to play in classic nowadays.
Somehow Shaman have progressed beyond healing wave/lesser healing wave.
I played Holy Paladin in vanilla like 18 years ago.
Flash of Light and Cleanse are more core to my identity than my bubble is.