We break down all the reasons you should consider playing Holy Paladin in Patch 10.1 and even throw in a few reasons of why you might not. From all the changes since launch to the new tier set bonuses coming in 10.1, join us as we explore Dragonflight Season 2 Holy Paladin!
Why You Should Play a Spec in Dragonflight Season 2 Series
Blood DK
Havoc DH
Feral Druid
Guardian Druid
Preservation Evoker
Beast Mastery Hunter
Arcane Mage
Fire Mage
Mistweaver Monk
Retribution Paladin
Holy Priest
Shadow Priest
Assassination Rogue
Elemental Shaman
Affliction Warlock
Protection Warrior
Dragonflight Season 2 Paladin Tier Set
Why You Should Play Holy Paladin in Dragonflight Season 2 (and Why You Shouldn’t)
At its core Holy Paladin is all about building and spending Holy Power, and it can feel more like a dps spec than an actual healer a lot of the time. This is especially true with the Avenging Crusader build where Holy Shock falls below both Judgment and Crusader Strike in the cast priority, which is historically very atypical and can feel quite strange to both long time and returning Paladin players.
Barring any more changes, this will be the go to build in Season 2 for raiding. This playstyle has, in spite of all its many flaws, still been received as a much needed breath of fresh air. But in the long run this build does not make the spec more fun, it only further pushes the spec further toward the degeneracy of randomized healing and randomized cooldown uptime.
While the new Tier Set does have better interactions with the no-Avenging Crusader build, it still does look like Avenging Crusader will be the default build due to the increased single target damage, the significant increase in the proportion of your globals that actually do healing, and just numerical superiority in healing. With that being said, the no-Avenging Crusader build will definitely still be more than viable and it will still be the way to play in Mythic+.
Why You Should Play Holy Paladin in Dragonflight Season 2
Outside of its very good numerical performance in Mythic raids and the practically guaranteed raid spot, I can not think of many reasons people should play Holy Paladin over other healers. The spec simply has too many basic design issues that cause the spec to feel incredibly counter-intuitive and disjointed. I will attempt to cover at least some of these in the “Why You Shouldn’t Play Holy Paladin” section.
Auras
With the change in 10.0.7 to Retribution Aura, making it a damage increase, it is very likely that we will see most guilds run 2 Paladins to be able to bring both Retribution Aura and Devotion Aura. Holy Paladin will continue to be the best Paladin spec to bring at least one of these as neither Protection nor Retribution has access to Aura Mastery.
Fast Paced
Holy Paladin has a fast paced playstyle that requires the player to make a lot of decisions from each global to the next. This is appealing to a lot of players, and having such a playstyle while having to be in melee as a healer can be quite challenging to a lot of players in a good way.
Raid Viability
As always we will see a Holy Paladin or maybe even two this time around in practically every single Mythic raiding guild, so if you are a player that cares about being in on progress then this is certainly an upside.
This viability stems from a lot of factors. Firstly, as mentioned above, Retribution Aura and Devotion Aura requires at least 2 Paladins. But secondly and more important is the way Holy actually does its healing. Whereas some other healers focus a lot more on cooldowns, burst healing, and so called “ramping”, Holy Paladin instead has a pretty unique and important healing style that’s focused more on healing fewer targets at once all the time. This healing style is more important to our viability in raids than our overall throughput, but our throughput is also extremely strong.
And with Avenging Crusader and Blessing of Summer our single target damage while healing is among the best of all the healers.
Why You Shouldn’t Play Holy Paladin in Dragonflight Season 2
There are a lot of reasons to dislike Holy Paladin. Holy Paladin suffers severely from button bloat, ignoring procs and core spells, an awful talent tree, random healing, an awful Holy Power system, a lack of agency over its Mana usage outside of afk’ing, and worst of all: Awakening.
Ignoring Core Spells and the Lack of a Clear Design Vision
Since the introduction of Glimmer of Light back in the Battle of Dazar’alor raid in Battle for Azeroth, Holy Paladin has been in the weird spot of simply ignoring a core part of our toolkit, namely Infusion of Light procs, and Holy Light and Flash of Light in general. Back then the Glimmer of Light playstyle took over from the widely disdained Avenging Crusader playstyle we had in Uldir. The fact that people now welcome Avenging Crusader back, while it still for all intents and purposes, has the same issues as back then, says all you need to know about the extreme staleness that paladin has devolved in to over the course of the last 3-4 years.
In Shadowlands, Blizzard decided that Holy Paladin should once again have Holy Power as a healing resource. But it was so utterly shallow and thoughtless that it brought nothing of value to the spec and has practically removed any agency the spec used to have. It has devolved in to a dull, boring, and mindless dps spec, and it has brought about an apparent paralysis in any further design and has lead to total lack of a clear and coherent vision for what Holy Paladin is supposed to even be about. The spec desperately needs a confident developer who has a clear vision for what Holy Paladin should be and who is ready to take drastic steps to achieve that vision. The devolvement of the spec in the last 3-4 years is frankly embarrassing.
Unacceptably poor Spec Talent Tree
The Holy talent tree has not seen any changes since its introduction. However the tree has an absolute ton of problems. In the entire tree there are 43 talent nodes, out of these there are a total of 20 talents that either do absolutely nothing and are only picked for pathing, or are literally never picked. This means that almost half of our talent tree is just straight up dead talents. Besides those, we also have several talents that are just “XYZ spell does 5% more healing or has 5% more crit chance”. The new talent system in Dragonflight has been nothing but a failure for Holy Paladin.
This issue is a result of the talent tree trying to conform to way too many playstyles that are way too distinct from each other. The tree could be a lot more interesting if it was more focused on fewer playstyles instead of trying to satisfy every possible way Holy has ever historically played. It is impossible to balance so many playstyles, so having this many talents that only work and affect certain playstyles just ends up making those talents completely dead for all other playstyles. The class design has to be more narrow to allow it to be more interesting.
Random Healing and Avenging Crusader
When most people think of Holy Paladin, they think of us as great spot healers with a serious emphasis on Holy Shock. But Holy Paladin has strayed far from its roots of being a spot healer. If we exclude Beacon of Light and Beacon of Faith which are simply something you cast before the pull and then never think about again in the vast, vast majority of cases, then as little as 10% of our healing actually comes from spells that we actively need to select a target with. The current Avenging Crusader meta has made Holy Paladin a spec that you could legitimately perform well on without your raid frames enabled. The issue with random healing is not limited to the Avenging Crusader playstyle though, because, while not as extreme, having Light of Dawn as our main Holy Power spender makes any possible build suffer from the exact same issue.
The Avenging Crusader playstyle is far removed from being a healing playstyle and it mostly resembles an extremely simple dps rotation that wouldn’t have been out of place 10 years ago. This issue is enhanced by Awakening which causes us to have over 70% uptime on wings. Awakening encourages us to always be casting as many spenders as possible to have as high an uptime on wings as possible. This is very degenerate and not at all limited to Avenging Crusader. It makes it so you always want to have as high Casts Per Minute of your generators and spenders regardless of if healing is required or not, making agency over Mana and damage output an afterthought in the spec design.
The Restrictive Nature of Holy Power as a Healing Resource
Holy Power is in its nature restrictive, that is the whole point of combo point systems. It is restrictive in an attempt to create “interesting” choices on a GCD to GCD basis. And at its core, Holy Power, does succeed in that attempt relatively well. The choice between whether to cast a generator or a heal someone with a spender is fine in theory.
However, it falls seriously short when you think more about it and you realize that there is actually almost no choice to be made ever. The amount and the timing of your spenders is entirely decided by the cooldown of your generators. You do not make your decision about when to spend Holy Power based on when it is best used for healing. It is, in fact, dictated by when your generators are ready. Your spenders are simply spells you weave in between your generators in an effort to maximize your overall spenders.
The utterly shallow Holy Power system we got in Shadowlands added nothing of value to the spec and has not seen nearly enough itteration since to make it good. While on paper a Combo Point based healer can sound interesting, Blizzard has repeatedly failed to deliver on this front and have had to backtrack every single time they attempted to create one. I firmly believe that Holy Power is the root cause of most of Holy Paladins current issues and it has to be fundamentally changed in functionality and purpose or simply removed (again).
Mana Agency
This is for some reason a controversial fact to state in the broader healing community. But the fact of the matter is that Holy Paladin simply does not have a way of turning excess Mana in to more healing. This is an issue in two very different ways that are often misunderstood.
The first problem is that to avoid running out of mana on long fights we simply have to start skipping globals and legitimately just stop pressing our buttons for extended periods of time, needless to say, this is completely terrible class design in 2023. This issue is seriously amplified by the nerf to Potion of Chilled Clarity, at least until we can get our hands on a Rashok’s Molten Heart trinket which will help to slightly alleviate this issue. It is a matter of fact that Holy Paladin will have to afk to save Mana which is counter intuitive to the whole specs design.
The second problem is that if we do have excess mana to spend then we have no way of actually converting that extra mana in to extra healing power. What this means is that the floor and ceiling of Holy Paladins hps output cannot be altered in any meaningful way, we simply do the healing we do when playing our rotation. If more healing is needed then we simply fall behind, and if less healing is needed then we simply overheal.
It should be noted that currently the nerf to make Potion of Chilled Clarity affect the gcd, does not affect the gcds of Hammer of Wrath, Judgment, and Crusader Strike. So we could in theory continue using this potion, but we have to assume that it will get fixed as this hardly seems intended.
Button Bloat and Tier Set
Especially with Avenging Crusader the spec suffers from button bloat. There are too many spells that we want to press, and adding Holy Prism (with new Tier Set) and Judgment to the mix makes us down-prioritize Holy Shock. While this in itself is already an issue it is also directly counter-intuitive to the design of the Tier Set where we get cooldown reduction from Holy Shock crits. Between needing to cast Judgment and Crusader Strike on cooldown, and spending Holy Power it becomes very clunky to have to fit in Holy Prism, Holy Shock and Hammer of Wrath.
With the recent buffs to Light’s Hammer, Holy Prism and the 2-Set bonus, casting Holy Prism on an enemy target is the numerically best way to play. However it will now also be useful for spot healing as it will do quite a bit of healing that way. Light’s Hammer will still be a viable option for the no-Avenging Crusader build on stacked fights with a lot of healing requirement that lines up with the cooldown.
I think the Tier Set for Holy is interesting and it is clearly an attempt at innovating Light’s Hammer and Holy Prism. These two spells have been a very long and stable part of Holy Paladins toolkit but neither have ever seen any changes and have never been more than very low impact, filler spells. I believe that going forward that this is the kind of stuff that we need to make Holy Power a more interesting system, and I only hope to see more like it in the form of baseline changes to the talent tree instead of only through borrowed power, while also addressing the issue of button bloat.
Final Words
This post might seem overly negative, but i want to reiterate that Holy Paladins performance is more than excellent and you will have no issue having a raid spot, so if that is what you care about then Holy Paladin will continue to be the spec for you. But, in my opinion, Holy Paladin simply have way too many issues that all need to be addressed before the spec can be considered to be in an acceptable state.
The recent changes and buffs Holy Paladin have seen in the last few weeks to spells like Light’s Hammer and Holy Prism are obviously very welcome and it does help make those spells feel much more rewarding to press. But as said the issues are with the design of the spec not the performance.
For more information on playing Holy Paladin, please see our class guide updated for Dragonflight:
Holy Paladin Guide
