5.4 Holy Paladin Concerns

#1 - June 21, 2013, 11:19 a.m.

I am not a frequent forum poster, though i often read them both official and unofficial ones concerning my class. I decided to post to see how the rest of the pve paladin holy community feels about the upcoming suggested changes and express my concerns.

(as a side note - i play on a semi hardcore 10 man guild having finished progression West 66)

Divine Plea no longer reduces the amount of healing done by 50%. : Very welcome change , saving us also from a situational glyph slot. Was it needed ? Cant say . Having to plan the downtime on the encounter to use it was a challenge imo and now its pretty much faceroll on cd.I assume the reason behind this change was the fact that our regeneration mechanic doesnt scale with gear compared to other healing classes.(rapture from spirit , tea from crit etc) so they felt like paladin needed to be able to fit more DP usage.

Eternal Flame: Initial heal down 30 % . A direct throughout nerf . Probably to bring the paladin down to the desirable output. Not much of a concern imo, healing meter was never the point anyway.

Sacred Shield (New) : Holy: When the Paladin or their Beacon of Light target falls below 30% health, that target gains a Sacred Shield absorbing damage equal to 30% of their maximum health. Sacred Shield can only occur once every 2 minutes. A very weak pve cd , assuming that many tank deaths caused directly from higher % (reminds me of the old AD prot talent which was on most fights many times ignored) In total ,nothing special , might prevent a tank death on some small degree but cant say it was something needed and generally imo looks mostly pvp oriented.

Sanctified Wrath : Holy: Now also increases the critical strike chance of Holy Shock by 20% A very interesting and clever change imo .Redesigning SW talent makes it desirable since HS during AW ll gain almost a guaranteed crit (50 base + 20 telent + ~20 your general crit= >90 % ) As a result , HS ll be giving constant Infusion procs, thus making the talent a viable choice (also giving a good sunergy between this and the new tier 16 2-set bonus.)

Mastery: Illuminated Healing no longer activates from periodic healing effects. Testing on the ptr showed : No mastery shield from EF, No mastery shield from Light's Hammer.Overall the entire changes account to 30-35% nerf to Holy Paladin Healing. I would even go higher assuming that in 10 man environment EF usage compared to LoD is way more frequent.(thanks to Aladya from Method for the numbers)

So , here are my 3 concerns :

1) Are you planning to switch the gameplay of the holy paladin back to the tbc playstyle when paladin was there just to endlessly spam tank frames having insane amount of overheal ? Are we going back to that braindead model , spam the tank -> assist a low % raider -> spam the tank -> use a hand -> spam the tank etc ? I m asking because i personally like the ''something between druid and disco model'' ( as GW named it) that we have now , requires thinking before and while acting.Cant understand why we would go back to a primitive healing model when there s no longer healing assignment , only healing priority assignement according to the strs and weaknesses of each class.

2)Was it wise to remove our blanket tool and a huge component of our healing while constantly moving ? (absorb from EF) Having already seen more or equally hardcore paced 10 man guilds replacing Holy Paladins on Lei Shen progress ( for mainly overall dps requirements - only monks and priests could viably assist on that + for the intense and constant raid healing requirements on last phase ) Are we going to see more holy paladins being benched /forced to switch to alts on 10 man environment during progression , raiders that their guild are far far from the world first race ?

3)Will the 30-35 % output overall healing nerf cause holy paladins to tremble about being replaced by other healing classes assuming that there s no compansation for it. Dont get me wrong i hate meters . I ve found myself below paladin tank many times this tier and constantly way below our discipline priest and that doesnt really bother me . However there s an output minimum limit below which you feel as being a burden to your team, as another class would perform so much better that would even allow to lower the number of healers giving you the huge advantage of an extra dps.Taking into account that paladin has no raid healing tools ( has plenty tools and mitigation tools which however all 3 spec bring but no healing ones) i wouldnt like to feel im starting heading below that minimum limit.

Suggestions: Nerf the output of the class like you did last patch if you feel that its overperforming. (cant help not saying though that there s another absorb class whose absorb tools are a 'no go without' during progression and keeps staying out of the change radar.)

I m hoping till 5.4 is close to be released you will come up with clever and challenging gameplay changes instead of kripling the class and sending its playstyle back to the boring spam age.

Sincerelly, Cvl Ravencrest EU

#2 - June 21, 2013, 11:41 a.m.

Heya Self, there was some information that was posted recently on the US forums by Rygarius that may alleviate some of your concerns. I definitely suggest that you take a quick read through them :)

Intent behind the Eternal Flame change

We’ve made some changes to Eternal Flame because we feel the talent was being overrepresented within the Holy Paladin population.

Our intent for was for Holy Paladins to pick Selfless Healer if they like to Judge, Eternal Flame if they like heal-over-time spells, and Sacred Shield if they liked damage absorb shields. As it worked out, most every Holy paladin chose Eternal Flame, and we don’t want every Holy paladin to be a heal-over-time machine. (That’s a niche best served by Restoration Druids and Holy Priests.)

We don’t think Holy Paladin’s healing throughput is too high overall (though we’ll gather more information from testing on the 5.4 PTR), so our intent is not to nerf but to reduce reliance on Eternal Flame. One of the biggest problem with Eternal Flame is the way it interacts with the Illuminated Healing mastery, which turns the heal-over-time spell into a potent shield as well. If needed, we will compensate by buffing healing elsewhere.

Our plans for now, are to revert the nerf that was done to the initial healing component of Eternal Flame, but we are unlikely to change the Illuminated Healing back to the way it was.

Sacred Shield

Regarding Sacred Shield, we tried giving the talent as a baseline ability to Protection, but we’re unhappy with that experiment and are likely to revert the change. We agree that the current (old) version of Sacred Shield is more attractive to Holy than the (new) version. We also would likely have to nerf Protection to compensate for getting Holy Shield in addition to another talent. Overall, we think the current (old) version of Sacred Shield is a better design. Perhaps we can still make Sacred Shield more attractive for Holy and Retribution, and make the other two talents (Selfless Healer, Eternal Flame) more attractive to Protection.

Our goal

We understand that Selfless Healer requires a certain playstyle that not every Holy paladin will find attractive. So we want to make Eternal Flame and Sacred Shield feel like viable talent choices as well.

Mastery not benefiting from Execution Sentence or Light’s Hammer isn’t intended and probably just got caught in the change to make Eternal Flame’s heal-over-time not benefit with mastery. We will correct that.

Remember, at this early stage in the PTR, our designers’ focus are on implementation changes (mechanics) first, and tuning changes (numbers) later. Your feedback at this stage will be more helpful to be focusing on the mechanics (e.g. “I liked using hots” or “I like to Judge and wish I could use Selfless Healer more”) and less on “OMG 30% nerf.”