If they wanted to bring back Holy Power and Word of Glory back for Holy Paladins then I wish it would’ve been the way it was originally. You could cast it with 1-3 holy power and not strictly 3.
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Word of Glory is actually the least of Holy’s problems. The entire spec is a clunky, broken mess.
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I wouldn’t say it’s a broken mess. It’s clunky right now because of some minor things like the flow of holy power generation. This is because Blizzard doesn’t know what to do with the healstyle of paladins. They have this weird philosophy that holy paladins are these frontline melee dps healers now when in reality paladins were, and should just be the kings of single target healing. We need to propose some solutions to this rather than saying that the class is trash or a mess or whatever.
I never received a beta invite and so I have no choice but to provide my feedback here as it won’t allow me on the feedback forums specifically for Shadowlands, but the additions of the covenants abilities, legendaries and soulbinds won’t change the fact that the “clunkyness” of this spec can easily be remedied with some simple proposed solutions.
I’m not asking for a total revamp of the spec because it’s clearly too late now. I just recently decided to main paladin so I really don’t want to hate my class for 2 years.
Again, these simple changes could make holy paladin not only feel FUN(main thing here), but perform at neither OP or weak levels because numbers can always be tuned.
-Infusion of Light changes reverted
-Holy Light/Flash of Light casts under Infusion of Light grant 1 holy power
-Light of Dawn: 10 second CD, 15% base mana, Generates 1 Holy Power instead of costing 3
-Word of Glory: Now heals depending on amount of holy power consumed (1-3)
-Awakened ( Level 45 Talent) removed: Eternal Flame replaces Word of Glory.
-Beacon of the Lightbringer baseline
-Beacon of Virtue (Talent) either off GCD or generates holy power upon cast
This one I highly doubt they will ever put in but I just thought I’d add it for fun because I LOVED cheesing this in MoP when Beacon of Light was off gcd lol.
*Glimmer of Light removed, New Talent (Beacon of Hope) Causes Beacon of Light to be off GCD)
what blizz needs to do are
make consecrate generate 1 holy power & heals those inside the zone & if the person steps out they get a HoT equal to the amount of time remaining on the consecrate(something similar for ret but as a dot instead) & that any heal down to people within consecration generates 1 holy power or 1 additional holy power.
Make Beacon on Virtue baseline & generate 1 Holy Power whenever it’s activated.
Have WoG off the GCD, it already takes 3 GCD to make it work.
Make Holy Light instant cast, and heals for only a fraction of what it does now but effectiveness can increase for by 50%/125%/200% for every holy power we currently have, up to 3 Holy Power and restore 5%/10%/15% mana to the Paladin over X sec.
(this way unlike WoG Holy Light can be use whenever, and is a way to get mana back since other healers have a mana management system while pally doesn’t; also helps with being a melee healer because as a melee healer our only hard cast heal should be Flash of Light to be use as an emergency)
Reintroduce Holy Strike, does holy dmg & does AoE heal on hit to 1 person under the effect of our Aura, generating 2 Holy Power & gives the paladin a buff that makes their auto-attack, Crusader Strike, & Judgement heal up to 3 Allies for 150% of the potential damage done(this way it doesn’t work as a leech & not heal when there’s a bubble) for 15 sec. A weaker version of Avenging Crusader & Holy’s version of Blade of Justice.
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I like this one! Pretty neat idea and could give us some AoE heals.
Baseline Beacon of Virtue is not going to happen simply because it would be way too powerful to include with our current toolkit. Agreed with the holy power generation!
No heals have ever been off GCD lol. I love casting it so I want to be able to generate lots of holy power so that I CAN cast it a lot.
Interesting idea! But it could be too late to test something like that now. Word of Glory is basically our way of replenishing our mana since it costs Holy Power instead.
Hmmm I think to make avenging crusader much better they could just make it so that Holy Shock, when used offensively will also heal 3 targets for 150% of damage done
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I would take a look at the Kyrian Paladin Holy Conduits before you give up on SL Holy.
Thank you for that suggestion. I genuinely appreciate it, but I already took into account the legendaries, soulbinds/conduits, and covenants abilities. I even played with the soulbinds calculator that Wowhead has to offer. This is why I wanted to give these suggestions because I wasn’t lucky enough to receive a beta invite. I understand that of course someone actually being level 60 and playing with the actual features may trump my credibility for suggestions.
However playing as a paladin now and taking into consideration what I’m going to receive in place for what I’m going to lose (Azerite Traits, Azerite essences), I can tell you that these changes are warranted. It’s not like they are game breaking or a complete overhaul either, they are fairly minor.
I’d also like to say that at the beginning of the BFA, Holy Paladins were again, terrible, and then they ended up being okay with the glimmer of light in 8.1/8.2 (can’t remember when introduced), and then BROKEN for 8.3 because of the ineffable truth corruption. Now Blizzard wants to basically FORCE this glimmeradin gameplay on us, (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing) because it just happened to work well when paired with the azerite essence Vision of perfection and corruption Ineffable Truth but then limit our healing when in situations that won’t allow us to safely be in melee.
The thing is, we are losing what made glimmer of light work well in the first place. I don’t understand how they don’t see that. I get it, Divine Toll will cast 5 Holy Shocks every minute, that’s an ABSOLUTELY wonderful synergy for glimmeradin, but you have to realize we are capped at 8 targets. What worked before glimmer of light was that there was no cap before things got out of hand with corruption and the highest skilled paladins made it work super well with the crusader strike build.
This is also why I am okay with the fairly high mana cost of crusader strike so long as they add in other ways to generate holy power so that we don’t have to feel FORCED to be in melee always. This also rewards the higher skilled players that can adapt to either situation.
I very much disagree. I’ve been playing holy on the beta, and it’s a blast.
The only issues are crusader strike’s mana cost, and HL being a bit too long of a cast in high keys. FoL (and maybe LoD in dungeons) could use some work too.
The holy power changes play well, and WoG feels weighty and satisfying. Also, and this is huge, holy has one of if not THE BEST talent trees in the game.
It’s a big play style shift form what we had after uldir, but it’s pretty great once you get in the swing of things. Just a few small tuning buffs, and CS mana cost tweaked and paladin is more than g2g.
My two big things besides infusion of light are:
- Make Judgement generate HP
- Make Light of Dawn not require HP
That’s kinda debatable.
Light’s hammer
Useless, and it has been since it was put in the tree, absolutely nothing they do to it will make it a contender to CM so long as it offers no HP and provides little to no healing at that cool down.
I personally think it’s one of our more cooler looking abilities and I’d absolutely love to use it as it’s aesthetically pleasing. But its only purpose currently is to let others know you might not fully grasp how your spec works, which is truly sad.
Bestow faith
Useless, unless they add 2 holy power on heal it will never be a contender against CM, honestly not even then. If it gave you the Hp on activation of the ability and not when the heal hits it might have a niche spot. Even with the cost of CS being stupid high it’s still better to have CM for shaving down your HS cd.
Holy pris
Numbers feel off and the healing and damage is subpar compared to what JoL can give you over a fights duration. It also doesn’t require micro management as it’s a passive compared to pris.
Saved by the light
while helpful in rare occasions that your beacon target dips, Judge of light will always perform better in all situations as the shield isn’t impressive numbers wise and you’d have to juggle your beacon around to get the most value out of the life saving mechanic, assuming you could predict who needs it for an incoming potential kill. It also just feels like a waste when if your target gets that low and you need that to recover, chances are they might still die a few seconds later because the shield, unless scaled stupidly for max level will be abysmal compared to what things were hitting for when I was testing beta.
This will more than likely be used most in pvp for a small barrier to prevent your partners death, but unless Holy gets big changes nothing will prevent peoples deaths in pvp because the Hpally is currently on another planet and stuck in a traffic jam trying to get its name on the list. The infusion change along with the mana cost of CS makes Holy absolutely useless in pvp as they run out of mana so fast and if they attempt to hard cast they will most likely die anyways.
Rule of law
I consider a tragic talent as some raiders are forced into it if they wanna be effective at all ranges when they should just design us an actual good mastery. I’ve never taken it over unbreakable spirit, and I imagine I never will as it’s just slightly enhancing a terrible mastery that we don’t even try to get secondary stats for.
Seraphim
Will probably go untouched by most average and probably all above average Holy paladins. I suspect DP will see some play given what it offers passively, while Holy Avenger will see tons of play in high content when you learn all the dungeons or fights where you’ll need a powerful cool down as you progress further and further. The 3 minute cd does make it less desirable to most people though.
I just can’t see Hpallies with our current clunky healing style trying to make time for a small buff that will cost us 3 gcd’s worth of HP.
Avenging crusade
Adding this to the list as if our current mana issues are here to stay then this talents cost, along with cs cost, will murder your mana and be completely useless in fights where you cannot maintain melee uptime or any fight that will go on longer than 3 minutes.
Awakening
I could possibly see some play with this with a DP build for some rng slot machine style, but with your procs being wildly random I suspect sanctified wrath will still be king if you want reliability from your casting over rng.
This next one is just a personal one for me and I know others feel differently
Beacon of virtue
While it’s powerful when it’s up, it feels absolutely awful during that 7 second window where your HP gen is lower for not having a constant beacon target. This will be especially harmful to those who don’t believe Holy paladins are melee healers and refuse to use CS properly. It will gut their HP gen significantly if they pick this talent and don’t utilize it correctly.
There’s no argument to be made that it’s not our best form of aoe healing, because it totally is. My issue is with the extreme amount of dead time picking this talent gives. It’s also extremely punishing if you use it to top your team off and more aoe damage comes out and it goes away, then you’re stuck triage healing with no additional beacon on anyone for the remainder of those 7 seconds.
I’d consider it a much better choice if it was 10 seconds duration and 5 targets instead of 4.
Beacon of faith
Is extremely meh imo. Usually one full time beacon is enough to maintain your tank. I guess with this setup you could put the secondary one on yourself to take your health out of the picture and only have to focus on 3 dps in 5 mans. But at that point glimmer would out perform double beacon. With enough haste glimmer out performs virtue too pretty heavily if you can get your HS cd on the lower end.
Most of the talents I listed are utterly dead to the vast majority of holy paladins that play due to how little they offer to us healing wise. A few I listed could have arguments made for them in niche situations, but ultimately the current picks we take for high end keys will still be the dominate picks in shadowlands if nothing changes.
I’m stoked you actually think the Holy pally tree is amazing, but after 15+ years of playing one I must respectfully disagree with you when I’ve experienced this specs highs and lows. This is honestly as low as its ever felt in my experience and our tree will have a very specific path with very minor alterations to none at all between the 3 forms of content.
Ultimately yes, the class can still perform and a handful of Hpallies are still performing in super high keys, doesn’t change the fact that it feels super clunky and mana intensive to play whereas other healers have smooth rotations and are very mana efficient. If you watch any of the top paladins heal they let infusion procs completely fall off most of the time because it’s more efficient to just Light of the marty hit a few times over casting a HL for an eternity. Really speaks to the feeling that our spec needs a bit more work.
We also have to keep in mind that the scaling from season 4 to post season 4 is nearly cut in half. So while it’s still impressive watching those top tier players crush keys and are currently going even higher, the scaling was cut in half whereas a 25 before was around 800% compared to now where it’s around 400%.
We will probably see some timed 35’s if this delay goes on long enough.
Edit
Also a funny little side note. If some people were hoping we would become ST healers again we’d just be replaced by a prot paladin as they never go oom doing their rotation for HP and mine can personally crit for over 50k with a word of glory with wings up. I can heal for over double of most peoples health and do it very consistently.
I’m honestly waiting to see a high end key pusher try it in a 20+ key as I honestly think with how well coordinated they are they could avoid most damage to where the prot could keep up in triage healing. I guess they could do it even faster with enough stacked haste. Highest I tested in was an +8 as I didn’t wanna go much higher with my group as they weren’t experienced in mid to high range keys. But I’d love to attempt it sometime before the patch.
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