Dragonflight Retrospectives & War Within Wishlists
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Holy Retrospective & War Within Wishlist
In this article, I will go over Holy Paladins’ journey over the course of Dragonflight, the problems that continue to plague the spec, and our wishes for the future going in to the “The War Within” development cycle. I will go over why the rework in patch 10.1.5 was a huge success at first, and the problems with Holy Power spenders’ weak tuning that have now left the spec with a pretty unintuitive playstyle. I will touch on our lack of a clearly defined identity, and I will talk about my personal thoughts about mana as a resource and why I think it is about time the resource gets an overhaul for The War Within, not just for Holy Paladin, but in general.
Early Expansion
The initial Holy Paladin talent tree and playstyle at the launch of Dragonflight was disjointed and lacked synergy. The talent tree was filled with talents that did not interact with our playstyle, which was centered on generating Holy Power with Holy Shock and Crusader Strike, and spending it on Light of Dawn. The playstyle was too simple, and lacked healing when Holy Shock was on cooldown and when you had no Holy Power for spenders. Especially in dungeons, you very quickly ran out of healing juice and could fall behind within even a few globals.
In patch 10.0.5, we got a few changes, but the most important ones were to Avenging Crusader, which was changed from a 2 minute cooldown with 20 second duration to a 45 second cooldown with 15 second duration. Additionally, the mana cost was replaced by a 5 Holy Power cost. When we combined this with Awakening and Zealot’s Paragon, we could achieve ridiculous uptimes on Avenging Crusader, which meant that the meta playstyle quickly shifted in its favor.
Uptimes of 65-70% were standard and on lucky pulls you could even hit 80%. Due to the nature of Avenging Crusader, a majority of our healing now hit completely random people and came from a spell with largely random uptime. Naturally, as a healer, you want to control who you heal and when you heal them, which is why this playstyle was reviled by a lot of Paladins. It was a playstyle where you could genuinely disable your raid frames and still perform very well.
However, we cannot deny that it was also loved my many who found joy in the simplicity of the rotation, not having look at their raid frames, and the general fantasy of being a melee healer who smacked the boss and did a lot of healing and damage at the same time.
Just as with the playstyle before it, Avenging Crusader did not interact with a majority of our talent tree. We had a large number of caster focused talents intermingled in our tree. These were never considered, viable so they were completely ignored or were only taken because we needed to path through the talent tree. These talent tree problems were the single biggest reason that we needed the rework that we got in patch 10.1.5.
Patch 10.1.5 Rework
The rework made Holy Paladin incredibly over powered, both in raids and in mythic+. This was evidenced by the fact that we have had to be nerfed by ~30% since then. We quickly turned away from Avenging Crusader and now focused more on optimizing Holy Shock, Glimmer of Light, and Holy Power generation. This playstyle was fast paced and well liked, and it was possible to play both a caster focused build or a more traditional melee style with Crusader Strike and Holy Infusion. This meant the rework was extremely well received at first.
However, the spec has now been brought down to a more reasonable performance level, and most playstyles that focus on our relatively weak Holy Power spenders, are no longer considered viable. This has forced us to adopt a caster playstyle with a focus on Flash of Light to stay competitive, which has put off a lot of the players who had become used to Holy Paladin being a melee focused healer. This caster playstyle can be very frustrating to play in modern raids due to how much movement the harder fights tend to have, making it hard to stand still and cast. This playstyle relies so deeply on Infusion of Light procs, that not getting a crit with Holy Shock, even just a few casts in a row, is utterly detrimental and quickly causes our entire rotation to fall apart. We need a way to give us more consistent crits with Holy Shock, especially with the low crit chance we will have at the start of The War Within.
That being said, the rework is so close to being amazing. Even if we keep Holy Power, I genuinely believe that with just a few spell tuning changes to make Holy Power spenders stronger, the spec would be in the best spot it has been in several expansions. While I personally wish we got more focus on a fewer number of playstyles, the talent tree itself is filled with impactful and meaningful choices that, on paper, allow for many different builds and playstyles. The rework succeeded to a large degree in making talents that work for, and have an impact on, all playstyles.
We also got new, interesting, and fun spells and effects such as Daybreak, Rising Sunlight, and Glorious Dawn, which all help make Holy Shock a great spell to play around. Divine Toll and Daybreak is a very satisfying and simple combo to use, allowing us to immediately put out 5 new Glimmer of Lights after consuming them with Daybreak, which is then followed up by a virtual machine gun of Holy Shocks with Rising Sunlight.
Post-Rework Spell Tuning Problems
A major bug at the moment is that Holy Prism double dips our negative spec aura, causing it to do around 20% less healing than it should. With the return of the Season 2 set bonus in Season 4, it is imperative that this gets fixed, or it will continue to have a serious impact on our performance in raids and dungeons.
Other than that, there are a lot of issues with Holy Paladins current spell tuning, which can mostly be boiled down to “Holy Power spenders are too weak.” This problem stems, in part, from a stated goal to make us care about our Infusion of Light procs that has lead to an issue that becomes apparent as you read through our talent tree. There are a ton of talents that buff or in some way interact with Flash of Light or Infusion of Light, while there are almost none that buff our Holy Power spenders.
This would not really be an issue if our spenders were simply tuned higher as a baseline, but they are undertuned because of two talents in our class tree, Of Dusk and Dawn and Seal of Order. These combine to buff our spenders by up to 60%, so to keep our power level somewhat sane, the healing of our spenders, without at least one stack of this buff, is low enough that they are not worth casting over an Infusion of Light empowered Flash of Light. This causes us to not care about wasting Holy Power, which is extremely unintuitive and jarring, especially for new players.
Columns show raw Holy Power gained, amount wasted by over capping, and actual Holy Power gained.
This picture is from my own first kill of Mythic Fyrakk.
I believe this problem can be corrected simply by significantly nerfing the power of Blessing of Dawn, and buffing our spenders to compensate. This would increase the power of our spenders baseline, and we would be more inclined to care about our Holy Power. This would enhance the power of builds that do not heavily focus on casting Flash of Lights by potentially making use of Holy Infusion instead. This simple change would instantly restore the spec to the level of fun people had immediately after the rework, before the weakness of our spenders was known to the broader playerbase.
That being said, we have seen some players start leaning in to Awakening in raids, which requires them to care about Holy Power. This playstyle tries to get an Awakening proc in time for every Divine Toll and Daybreak window, which can, in theory, net more overall healing than ignoring Holy Power if played perfectly. We have also seen a general shift to Beacon of Virtue and Reclamation instead of Beacon of Faith and Barrier of Faith, which has also resulted in Holy Power spenders gaining value on Flash of Light. This has still not been enough to make spenders feel good; casting them just to proc Awakening doesn’t make them actually heal more.
Make Spot Healing Great Again
Over the course of the last few expansions, our most iconic spell, Holy Shock, has become a spell you cast to make other stuff happen and not for the healing done by the spell itself. Even if we ignore the Holy Power it gives, the healing from Holy Shock only makes up for about a fourth of the total healing that occurs when you cast it. Most of the healing instead comes from Glimmer of Light, our 2-set Holy Reverberation, and our Beacons. A non-crit Holy Shock heals about 3-4% of a DPS player-s health-pool, which is so low that you will barely notice your target’s health-bar move, and it makes the spell feel very unsatisfying to cast when it does not crit. This problem is not limited to Holy Shock, but it affects all of our spells due to the immense power level of our Beacons and especially Beacon of Virtue.
With the rework, Beacon of Virtue was significantly buffed for raids, compared to Beacon of Faith, by making it hit 5 players instead of 4. At the same time the healing transfer of all beacons was nerfed by a third. Beacon of Faith and Beacon of Light now each transfer at a rate of 24.5%, while Beacon of Virtue transfers at 35% to every target it hits. The trade-off for playing Beacon of Virtue is that it requires more globals and a bit more mana to play around, and it has a higher skill floor, but it is also so far ahead of Beacon of Faith in potential output that it has become the default go to Beacon in Mythic raids for most players. Beacon of Virtue often does upwards of 30% of our total healing on a given fight, and forces all of our spells to be tuned with this in mind. The spell is too powerful and dictates our rotation, cooldown usage, and feels clunky to use.
Screenshot of a Smolderon kill, playing Beacon of Virtue
On this log it might seem that Holy Shock itself does fine, but notice how I have 192 instances of Holy Shock healing but only 90 casts. The majority of Holy Shocks healing comes from Divine Toll and Rising Sunlight, which do not count as casts, and this makes it imperative that we align these cooldowns with a Beacon of Virtue window, because our healing outside those windows is extremely weak.
Beacon of Faith and Beacon of Light is one of our single strongest “niches” from a healing perspective. Being able to keep 2 players alive just by putting a beacon on them is one of the most underrated strengths of Holy Paladin, so it might be strange that I want this to be nerfed.
But the fact that you can just keep two people alive like this really speaks the power of Beacons, and I would like to see more power taken out of our Beacons, especially Beacon of Virtue, and have it be put in to our spot heals such as Holy Shock, Word of Glory, and Flash of Light to compensate. I think this would make the spec feel better and more responsive to play, and would help rebuild our long standing identity as the spot healer. It would reduce our ability to make two players “immortal” to rot damage with Beacon of Faith and Beacon of Light.
Our healing as a Holy Paladin feels completely inconsequential and unimpactful outside our Beacon of Virtue + cooldowns combo. I believe this has to change going forward to make the spec’s spot healing feel impactful again.
Lack of Identity and a Clear Vision
Since Battle For Azeroth, and since Glimmer of Light was introduced, the spec has felt like it lacked any sense of vision or identity, and it has lost its soul. From the perspective of the player, it feels like a text book case of “design by committee.” The spec has been all over the place, going from a playstyle focused on ramping and putting out as many Glimmer of Lights on the raid as possible, to having Glimmer of Light be target capped and split its healing on affected targets, thus being a mere afterthought today. You only really care about it because of Daybreak. The satisfaction you got from playing well and getting 16-17 Glimmer of Lights, or more out at once in Battle For Azeroth, is something that has never been replicated in the spec since.
In Shadowlands, we saw the reintroduction of a Holy Power system that was utterly shallow, and like a rain puddle on a hot summers day, any hope of a more in depth system quickly evaporated, as the system has had very little iteration since then. It still boils down to a binary choice between a boring single target healing spell or a boring, short range, frontal cone AoE healing spell, neither of which produces healing which in any way makes up for their mind numbingly archaic design. Holy Power added no depth to the spec, and it only limited the spec by leading to lack of healing when Holy Shock was on cooldown, and when you had no Holy Power for spenders. This was further exacerbated by Ashen Hallow, which, while kept on a pedestal by many players, was never anything more than a giant fire-and-forget healing cooldown that meant the rest of our toolkit had to be nerfed around it.
During Shadowlands we started playing around with Light of the Martyr and Maraad’s Dying Breath, which gave us the strongest spot healing we have had since Legion. Many Paladins loved the playstyle because of this. Nothing can ever beat the feeling of just gunning out giant single target heals. Although, there were also many opponents of this playstyle, who thought it was clunky, and thought it was strange that you had to cast your AoE spender, Light of Dawn, to gain access to a spot heal, as opposed skipping that step and just spending the Holy Power on Word of Glory instead.
We have already gone over how our playstyles have changed over the course of Dragonflight, going from spamming Crusader Strike, Holy Shock, and Light of Dawn, to the randomness of Avenging Crusader, to a heavy caster focused playstyle that relies too much on Holy Shock crits to let us cast Flash of Light.
Any one of these playstyles has players that subscribe to them and see them as the pinnacle of the spec. You have the ardent defenders of Avenging Crusader who hail the “battle healer” identity. You have the faction believing that spamming Crusader Strike and Holy Shock and barely having anything else matter, was a great playstyle. You have people who genuinely believe Holy Power is a fun system, even with all its flaws and limitations. You have people who will say the peak of the spec was playing around Light of the Martyr with Maraad’s Dying Breath, while thinking that throwing down a huge Ashen Hallow every 4 minutes was fun. And lastly, we have the people who just want to sit back and hard cast spells like Holy Light and Flash of Light to their hearts content while sipping their preferred beverage between casts.
The only thing all agree on, is that Holy Paladin needs to be, predominately, a spot healer. Even the strongest proponents of Avenging Crusader will admit that Holy Shock was too weak during the playstyle’s time.
Having had this many different playstyles over the course of just a few expansions has fragmented and divided the spec’s community, and left many feeling like the black sheep of the community, simply because they preferred one playstyle to another. With the reworked talent tree, they have clearly tried to accommodate players from all these factions, which is noble, but it is also impossible to properly design a spec with a clear identity when you have this many, wildly different opinions you want to satisfy. I believe you could do so much more with the spec if you simply chose to focus on one or two playstyles and cut out all the unnecessary fluff from the spec.
Where Did Our damage go?
During the last few years, prior to our rework, Holy Paladin was known as one of the best damage dealing healers, because we had a playstyle that had us do damage while healing. This was especially true when we were playing Avenging Crusader, where our DPS while healing was way over the top. With the current playstyle, this is no longer the case, and we have seen our passive DPS output take a severe blow. This is not a problem in itself. The gripe I have is that our active DPS is also quite lackluster.
We have always been in a rather unique situation where our healing resources are the same as our damage resources. To do maximum damage as a Holy Paladin, we need to sacrifice more of our healing than other healers have to. You have to use Holy Shock, Glimmer of Light, Divine Toll, Daybreak, Avenging Wrath, and your Holy Power offensively, and you would think that your DPS would be amazing when you choose to sacrifice this much healing power to do damage, but that is not the case whatsoever. Spending your strongest healing spells to do damage and then still doing mediocre damage is incredibly disheartening, and feels backwards. Of course, other healers also have to sacrifice globals and time to do damage, but no one has to sacrifice their actual healing cooldowns to the same degree as we do. We also run in to the problem of clearly being tuned around our external damage buff, Blessing of Summer, because, as opposed to spells like Power Infusion, it actually shows as our damage on the meter and on logs. The inconsistencies in how external damages buffs are treated needs to be addressed going in to The War Within, especially as our revealed Hero Talent Tree, the Lightsmith, almost entirely revolves around external buffs.
I do not think it is bad design to have a lot of our healing resources also be able to be used for damage. I think it increases the skill ceiling of the spec, and knowing when to use cooldowns for DPS instead of healing is one of the most important skills to learn as a Holy Paladin in Mythic+. I just wish that when we then do choose to commit all these healing resources to do damage, that we are also be rewarded with a DPS output that matches the commitment.
Mana, oh mana
The stubbornness of trying to force an archaic gameplay design of keeping mana a relevant and limiting resource for the spec and for healers in general, whilst making modern and fun raid fights that do not accommodate the need to play around this resource, has become a problem that has created frustration in the healing community; the mantra, “just cast fewer spells to save mana,” feels very unhelpful when your raid is dying around you. At the same time, creating fights with more lulls in damage intake on the raid to allow healers to conserve mana, would not be a solution, as you would just have to create more bursty damage patterns which would go directly against the stated goal of reducing healers dependency on large raid cooldowns, and it would exacerbate the problem of fights being easily overhealed, as in Amirdrassil.
It is very telling that the single most fun boss fight to heal this expansion was Magmorax. This was a short fight with a high and ramping healing requirement. It had the perfect balance of spot healing requirement on the Molten Spittle targets, large raid wide damage events that you needed assigned cooldowns for, combined with permanent rot damage on the whole raid. This was not a very difficult nor high pull count fight, nor will you find many DPS players who would find this boss note worthy, but I think a lot of lessons can be learned from it. To have fun, healers do not always need intricate fights with a lot of movement or long fights that require us to conserve mana for significant periods of the fight. Nor do we need fights where we have to dispel on cooldown or heal NPCs that do not show up on the boss frames. We do not need the mechanic vomit that some fights seem to spew out. We just want to play our class to the best of our ability while the DPS players feel like the raid is about to die any second, but you and your co-healers know full well that you have the situation under control.
Over the last few expansions, healing as a role has felt more and more like the game is actively working against us. A lot of this comes down to boss design and private auras, especially in Amirdrassil, which is littered with unfun healer mechanics such as, low healing checks, dispels, NPC healing, and people being out of range. I also think mana is an obvious example. Mana used to have a very clear role in the game as it was the single most important thing to manage as a healer, but today the most important resource for healers has become the same resource that is important for a DPS player, namely time, or rather, globals.
Very simplified; as a healer, just as with a DPS spec, you want to fill as many globals as possible with your best available spells to get the best performance. This fact does not synergize with the continued and sustained efforts to make mana a limiting factor in healers’ potential output, as it is simply not fun to intentionally “play poorly” just so you can keep playing the game five minutes in the future. Healers have most fun when they can go all out and just blast healing, while focusing on their rotation, cooldown usage, who to heal, and playing the mechanics of a given fight correctly. I feel, quite strongly, that mana as a concept and a resource needs to be reimagined and redesigned from the ground up.
For a long time Holy Paladin has had the issue that our highest healing rotation is also our most mana efficient rotation. This is still largely true to this day, and this might be clouding my perspective on this issue, as the spec has little to no agency over our mana expenditure other than to “cast more or fewer spells,” which is just not a fun way to manage mana.
Other Wishes for the Future
Looking ahead to the new expansion, The War Within, there are several things I hope to see changed, besides the things already talked about above. We have already seen a preview of our first Hero talent tree, the Lightsmith. This Hero Talent tree would have us buffing other people to proc random damage and healing, and has been received negatively by most people. I already wrote a piece reviewing this tree, so I wont go over it here, but suffice to say that I hope the Herald of the Sun Hero talent tree will not focus on external buffs.
Another wish would be, if the choice to keep Holy Power is final, that we get more talents that interact with or enhance our spenders in some way. Our combo point system has always been basic, but it boggles my mind that, for example, stuff like Tyr’s Deliverance and Barrier of Faith does not also work with Word of Glory. But even if these did work with Word of Glory, our combo point system still boils down to a completely binary choice between an AoE or single target heal; I really wish that was elaborated upon somehow. I am categorically against Holy Power, but if we are going to keep it it then it needs some serious help, both tuning wise and depth wise.
With the rework, we got a significant number of new spells that we needed to have a dedicated keybind for. This does not just include new spells introduced with the rework such as Daybreak and Hand of Divinity, but also spells and talents that were previously never used but have now became meta. Such spells include Barrier of Faith, Tyr’s Deliverance, and Holy Light. Combine this with Holy Paladin’s already extensive toolkit of spells and various other things that need keybinds, such as potions, Healthstone, warlock gateway item, the extra action button, and the new ping system, and you need over 40 individual keybinds before including specialized macros for things like trinkets.
Because the new Hero Talents is going to introduce at least one extra spell to keybind, and because this issue is one of the most common complaints I hear from new Holy Paladin players, I would strongly suggest this issue be looked at.
While I might come off as negative, I genuinely have a lot of hope for the next expansion because the spec is so close to being amazing as it is; we basically just need some fairly minor tuning changes to Holy Power spenders, as the rest of the problems talked about here pale in comparison. World of Warcraft’s gameplay and class design is still unparalleled in the MMO universe, and I have massive respect for any one at Blizzard working on combat and class design. They are doing the Lords work, and I hope that my passion is not mistaken for malice.
About the Author
This page is written by Clarius. Clarius is a long time Holy Paladin player, plays in the Danish guild Sabotage, and is an active Templar in the Paladin Discord. If you have feedback or questions, feel free to ping him there, or DM him.
