#0 - Oct. 31, 2008, 7:16 a.m.
A lot of healers seem to think that Holy Paladins want to be able to heal as well as Shamans and Priests in terms of AoE, or HoT as well as Druids.
They're argument is that we are better at single target healing than they are, so we shouldn't be good multi-target healers.
Well, no.
...
Okay, I'd LOVE to be able to heal like a CoH priest while not losing my single target healing ability, and also be able to solo Kil'Jaeden wearing nothing but Winter Veil gear, but, well, being REASONABLE now...
Right now, there are two ways for a Holy Paladin to effectively heal multiple targets:
1: Use the FoL glyph as a pseudo-Regrowth spell, keep the HoT on everyone in the party in AoE damage situations and use Holy Shock and Holy Light as primary heals on the tank.
To really see if that'll work, we'd need Sacred Shield. Who knows? The nearly auto-crit proc for FoL on Sacred Shield might just make this a feasible strat. But:
FoL is our spam heal. Holy Shock is on a 6s CD. Holy Light is our "HOLY F***ING GOD THE TANKS GOING TO DIE NOW NOW NOW AAAAAAAAAAAH GOTTA HEAL HIM HUGE!" spell. Turning FoL into a regrowth makes it quite poor for spamming on a single target.
Waiting for a tank to lose a third of their healing before throwing a heal off is not exactly the most effective way to deal with spiky damage...
But, who knows. Maybe the FoL glyph, JoL and SS will combine to let us do this strat for 5 mans. Honestly, tho, I doubt it...
2: Heal each damaged target individually.
Shamans, CoH Priests, have you ever tried to do this when everyone is taking significant damage? Seriously?
Holy Light with Light's Grace is nice for this, and the Glyph does help out a bit, but it's not remotely mana efficient and is very, very, very, VERY slow. If Bacon is on the tank, you have to heal four people in a 5 man, one at a time. That's 6 seconds total with FoL/Holy Shock, 8 if you're using Holy Light because the damage was too much.
It's not always, but someone often dies when we have to do this.
Light AoE and targeted non-tank damage, we can deal with. But for a lot of bosses, it's nearly impossible to keep up.
We have a problem.
What we (okay, I and probably a fair number of other Holy paladins, given the #*!!*ing) is a moderate to high throughput AoE heal. Something that puts out high enough healing that it allows us to heal through heavy AoE damage. This would have to be balanced by a rather insane mana cost.
Think of it like this. We want an equivalent to Druid's having to spam Healing Touch on the tank for fights with heavy tank damage. Not mana efficient, not effective in the long term, CERTAINLY not effective in raiding unless it's that or death.
Something that lets us do the job that's in front of us, at any cost.
Is that really too much to ask?
