[HOLY] Holy Sh*t!: Legion Edition

[Deleted]

So did you level to 110 as holy? Have you been stacking Crit gear? I have pretty huge crits as holy. So far I think they are close in speed. but until I have a dps meeter running I guess I won't know for sure.

Yeah i have reached 110 as ret and holy during alpha. Have not found it possible to do it on beta yet leveling as ret currently. Right now i think most people will agree that ret is undertuned. Yes i did go for full crit gear and my dps went up. But not by that much. And tbh i think it has to do with the fact that we use melee attacks and crusader strike. Which is based on physical damage. And as far as i know that is based on strength = attack power and not on our spellpower. I didn't research it a lot but i believe i had a fairly big static(5000ish) amount of strength to make that work during alpha. Haven't checked in beta yet and i'm at work right now but i'll do so tomorrow i guess.

Oke from the raid logs i had 10k strenght and priests/hunters with 6k. DH with 8k ret pally with 29k. prot pally with 24k

And if you look at this crusader-strike It's 160% for holy and prot.

[Valkaneer]

Yeah i have reached 110 as ret and holy during alpha. Have not found it possible to do it on beta yet leveling as ret currently. Right now i think most people will agree that ret is undertuned. Yes i did go for full crit gear and my dps went up. But not by that much. And tbh i think it has to do with the fact that we use melee attacks and crusader strike. Which is based on physical damage. And as far as i know that is based on strength = attack power and not on our spellpower. I didn't research it a lot but i believe i had a fairly big static(5000ish) amount of strength to make that work during alpha. Haven't checked in beta yet and i'm at work right now but i'll do so tomorrow i guess.

Oke from the raid logs i had 10k strenght and priests/hunters with 6k. DH with 8k ret pally with 29k. prot pally with 24k

And if you look at this crusader-strike It's 160% for holy and prot.

Consecrate, Holy shock, judgment, and Crusader Strike for sure work off Intellect as holy. I can switch out a 275 int trink for a 302 str trink and my Crusader Strike damage as the other skills falls. So I've been of coarse stacking Int and Crit and Haste for Leveling, as I think mastery is a completely worthless stat for lvling holy. I think I fair just as good if not better than Ret in multiple add fights leveling.

At first I thought for sure Holy was going to have sever issues, as it felt quite weak at level 100 but once I got a few upgrades dropped some mastery for haste and crit my damage seemed to go up a fair amount.

[Nihilan]

There is definitely something to be said about Holy's massive durability advantage over Ret. I just grab every mob in range using Shock/Judge while CS, self-prism macro, and consecrate whittle them away.

I get a special kick last night as i was about to engage this rare that had just killed Havoc DH. He whispers me "Watch out this guy hits like a truck." Then i proceeded to roll in and start wrecking up the place. The DH just stood there for a while. I think he was expecting me to get my ass handed to me. Eventually he joined in on the kill.

At L103/iL715ish, ive got 26% crit from quest gear. Regular mob HP is still in the sub-400k range at the player level. My Shock crits for about 115k, CS crits are a bit under 100k. Cons ticks are 12-13k.

[siccora]

What don't you like about the new play style? For us it's always been about who you target instead of what spell you cast. Beacon, Shock and a single target heal is a paladin staple.

I wouldn't look at the HPS meters in logs either, it's inflated by guardian druids.

I dont like the endless cast time of holy light. in dungeons right now i cast FoL all the way. maybe with a HS proc is do cast a fast HL. i dig the new 100 talent. this one is great for 5 ppl. maybe not viable in a raid (?). but i dont get two talents:

- crusaders might. maybe if there is no damage at all in my raid/group i could go melee? but this looks more like a solo farm talent.
- judgment of light. should i judge? isnt it better to do anything else? and the other talents looks way better. sanct wrath of course.

all in all i dont see "the paladin class fantasy". and really without major cooldowns i got 4 active spells. i shock, i FoL or HL and i got my holy shit martyr.

it is just my opinion. maybe some high end world class good bois can show me the way

[spikeh]

I dont like the endless cast time of holy light. in dungeons right now i cast FoL all the way. maybe with a HS proc is do cast a fast HL. i dig the new 100 talent. this one is great for 5 ppl. maybe not viable in a raid (?). but i dont get two talents:

- crusaders might. maybe if there is no damage at all in my raid/group i could go melee? but this looks more like a solo farm talent.
- judgment of light. should i judge? isnt it better to do anything else? and the other talents looks way better. sanct wrath of course.

all in all i dont see "the paladin class fantasy". and really without major cooldowns i got 4 active spells. i shock, i FoL or HL and i got my holy shit martyr.

it is just my opinion. maybe some high end world class good bois can show me the way

During early WoD before gear scaling ruined everything like it usually does, we had long HL casts and could only sparingly use FoL. We relied on IoL procs for a fast HL cast (didn't used to buff FoL healing done until BRF) which isn't going away in Legion.

Crusader's Might was changed to reduce the CD on HS and LoD. Could be good since we're so reliant on HS crits and LoD is a really good spell if it hits everyone. Problem is LoD is a frontal cone yet CS is melee range.

We never really had a lot of spells to choose from compared to the other healers. At the end of the day one or maybe two spells tend to define a class that ends up being spammed. For us it's a plain old single target heal.

[Deleted]

Consecrate, Holy shock, judgment, and Crusader Strike for sure work off Intellect as holy. I can switch out a 275 int trink for a 302 str trink and my Crusader Strike damage as the other skills falls. So I've been of coarse stacking Int and Crit and Haste for Leveling, as I think mastery is a completely worthless stat for lvling holy. I think I fair just as good if not better than Ret in multiple add fights leveling.

At first I thought for sure Holy was going to have sever issues, as it felt quite weak at level 100 but once I got a few upgrades dropped some mastery for haste and crit my damage seemed to go up a fair amount.

Yeah i just logged in myself and it does seem to scale on the tooltip from int. Haven't done any proper testing But that to me just tells me there hidden magic behind the scenes. Might be a good question for the theorycrafting thread.

[Mikkah]

I am a playing a Holy Paladin on beta, 110 with ilvl 819 atm running heroics and having fun.

I am doing the Paladin Campaign quest and am stuck at the "United as One" quest where I am supposed do the step "War command used" but the quest appears to be bugged. I have tried many things, have any of you on beta made it through this step? If so, when and how? I got it yesterday FYI.

[Taeldorian]

So far I have found Virtue to be clunky, and probably not competitive in raids at all. It can put out some serious burst healing in 5-mans, particularly with wings up, but that 4-second no-beacon window can be brutal if not timed right.

Is that necessarily a bad thing? I'll just start by saying it does do some really good healing in 5 mans which is wonderful. As for raids: having this ability require good timing and thinking ahead of time it can offer some really good skilled play. It's definitely not clunky (at least not in my experience, haven't raid tested with it yet) but it does seem to require a bit of skill to make use of it fully in a raid environment. In 5 mans it's definitely good though, I like it overall.

- - - Updated - - -

During early WoD before gear scaling ruined everything like it usually does, we had long HL casts and could only sparingly use FoL. We relied on IoL procs for a fast HL cast (didn't used to buff FoL healing done until BRF) which isn't going away in Legion.

Crusader's Might was changed to reduce the CD on HS and LoD. Could be good since we're so reliant on HS crits and LoD is a really good spell if it hits everyone. Problem is LoD is a frontal cone yet CS is melee range.

We never really had a lot of spells to choose from compared to the other healers. At the end of the day one or maybe two spells tend to define a class that ends up being spammed. For us it's a plain old single target heal.

I don't know why LoD went back to being a frontal cone, I prefer the way it is in WoD but having to position yourself isn't too bad. The bolded part is correct but I wouldn't look down on our heal, other classes like druids have Hots that define them, mistweavers have a somewhat AOE/ST heal (jade statue with the mistweave things), disc priests have atonement, etc. Spamming flash of light or having that be the defining ability isn't bad for our fantasy.

I do feel like they mixed our fantasy up a bit, they never really stated we were going to be battle healers, they did specifically state we're plate healers that help keep our allies alive on the front lines, so I guess that's our fantasy? I'm not too sure because it originally was battle healer (never confirmed, just felt that way, I didn't like it personally) and that was scrapped.

[Valkaneer]

If I could have Blizz change one thing for a lvling Holy Pali it would be the CD on Judgment, it's to long, It should be the same or slightly shorter than Holy shock. I don't care if they lowered the damage on Judgment to balance it, but that would be pretty beast, my dps would go up for sure just due to the debuff.

- - - Updated - - -

I think it's the one main thing right now that gives holy a clunky feeling for leveling.

[Unir]

Is that necessarily a bad thing? I'll just start by saying it does do some really good healing in 5 mans which is wonderful. As for raids: having this ability require good timing and thinking ahead of time it can offer some really good skilled play. It's definitely not clunky (at least not in my experience, haven't raid tested with it yet) but it does seem to require a bit of skill to make use of it fully in a raid environment. In 5 mans it's definitely good though, I like it overall.

- - - Updated - - -

My impression playing with it is that in raids it will likely be the case that no amount of skill is going to make up for the clunky design of the thing, yes. I will also be surprised if numerically it works out to be better than Faith or Lightbringer, but that is just my intuition speaking. I have done no number-crunching.

There are also some unknown factors that will affect its performance in raids, for instance how is it going to target the four other beacons? There will be a huge difference, for instance, if they are landing on characters at 70%, 80%, 30%, and 90% health - compared to landing on characters at 20%, 30%, 35%, and 25% health. In the first scenario you are pretty likely to end up in solid over-healing land and stay there. In the second scenario, less so. Remember, the beacons will stay in place for 12 seconds, and be healing for 8 seconds. That's an eternity in raid healing time.

In 5-mans my impression is that it can do some impressive group healing, but it can also leave you wanting in that 4-second no-beacon window. For a skilled group it probably would not be an issue and would work well. Pugs, though, do not take damage in nice neat chunks such that you can afford to have a window of no transfer going on regularly. That could turn out to be a problem even for a skilled group as you move through the higher ranks of mythic difficulty, depending on what those suffixes are.

It seemed to burn a lot of mana the few dungeons I ran with it, but that ultimately is just a tuning issue. It also has no mana return baked in like regular beacons, and you will probably feel that, too.

It may work out fine, but I have a skeptic's eye at this point. I think it's going to need some thoughtful tweaking to be raid competitive.

Edit: That's just my impression of it so far. At this point I am still leveling and using it when I run dungeons here and there, nothing super intense or with diagnostics for performance.

[Taeldorian]

@Unir I'm in the same boat as you. No theorycrafting here or anything, just speaking from what I've tested. If we have to choose other talents instead of this one depending on the raid situation that's not bad. Virtue might be good on certain fights and bad on others, swapping out talents is totally fine, it'd be boring to have a talent that's the go to 100% of the time.

[soulkeeperx]

Does anyone have even a vague idea of what our stat priorities will be yet for raiding as Holy?

[Unir]

Last I heard it was looking like crit/mastery, with crit ahead by a mile. Haven't seen much theory-crafting about it lately though.

I was hoping haste would be competitive enough to get in good measure, so that slow cast time on HL could be reduced. That thing is slooooow.

[Dreamguard]

As of right now, it's Crit > Mastery > Vers >> Haste, but that could change. Also, trying to give a weight to mastery is going to require an addon to actually calculate.

[Deleted]

As of right now, it's Crit > Mastery > Vers >> Haste, but that could change. Also, trying to give a weight to mastery is going to require an addon to actually calculate.

I assume that's due to how our mastery works with positioning. With that in mind how actually using our mastery looks at beta? With LoD being cone and our mastery requiring to be near people are we hard pressed for more movement than before or does it look roughly the same frequency wise just need to put more thought into positioning?

[Kaslia]

Help me here but how is mastery even that high on stat? It's far worse then what we have in WOD and its totally based on positioning. So prob half the time you don't even benefit from it with mechanics in raid fight and especially not in 5 man. Any fight where you are spread out means you have a mastery that is not even worth much. I can't see putting that much value in a stat that you will not benefit from very often. Basically we are more turret healer then ever before and limited by positioning. Myself, I do not like being limited in value as a healer bec I have to be in the perfect position in order to benefit. I don't know how I will ever get use to being so stationary and penalized if I have to move. We have for years benefited from when the raid was spread we shined. Now we are only good if stacked? From what I am hearing we are no longer the great tank healers, druids have us beat and they can raid heal. The final tuning passing hasn't happened but it does concern me. So help me understand how these stats in the order you listed are in that order. I am not on beta so I only know what I read. I do not understand how haste is above vers under any condition. Unless Vers was buffed compared to how it is now in WOD, I do not understand.

[Deleted]

Help me here but how is mastery even that high on stat? It's far worse then what we have in WOD and its totally based on positioning. So prob half the time you don't even benefit from it with mechanics in raid fight and especially not in 5 man. Any fight where you are spread out means you have a mastery that is not even worth much. I can't see putting that much value in a stat that you will not benefit from very often. Basically we are more turret healer then ever before and limited by positioning. Myself, I do not like being limited in value as a healer bec I have to be in the perfect position in order to benefit. I don't know how I will ever get use to being so stationary and penalized if I have to move. We have for years benefited from when the raid was spread we shined. Now we are only good if stacked? From what I am hearing we are no longer the great tank healers, druids have us beat and they can raid heal. The final tuning passing hasn't happened but it does concern me. So help me understand how these stats in the order you listed are in that order. I am not on beta so I only know what I read. I do not understand how haste is above vers under any condition. Unless Vers was buffed compared to how it is now in WOD, I do not understand.

Mastery being better than vers stems from the fact that it requires fewer rating for 1%:
Crit: 350/1%
Haste: 325/1%
Mastery: 233.3/1%
Vers: 400/1%

This means that if you average 58% benefit from mastery (233/400), mastery will be better than the throughput portion of vers. This gives an average heal range of over 20 yards, without rule of law. In raids you stack as much as possible for healing in general, and as Hpalas count as melee for some mechanics that only hit ranged, it's fairly simple to just stay near melee, giving a lot of 100% mastery targets. You also want to stand near melee if ranged is spread as they offer a clump for LoD to hit 5 targets.

Of course if you are on a fight that is heavily spread and aren't able to take rule of law for whatever reason, mastery does become bad, but from testing this doesn't seem to come up often.

Haste is terrible as so few of our heals benefit from it. Tyr's deliverance is the only ability whose healing actually increases with haste, and HS is our only cooldown that is reduced by it. The changes from live->alpha shift large portions of our healing away from HS/IoL healing into LoD/Talented cooldowns, which significantly drags down the value of haste. The reduced gcd on these cooldowns only gives you extra HLs, which are very low amounts of healing per cast time, and moderately low healing per mana.

Haste also has a worse conversion ratio in legion, on live haste gives 44% (130/90) more %/point than vers (not counting any Hpala passives), whereas in legion it only gives 23%(400/325) extra.

[Valkaneer]

Mastery being better than vers stems from the fact that it requires fewer rating for 1%:
Crit: 350/1%
Haste: 325/1%
Mastery: 233.3/1%
Vers: 400/1%

This means that if you average 58% benefit from mastery (233/400), mastery will be better than the throughput portion of vers. This gives an average heal range of over 20 yards, without rule of law. In raids you stack as much as possible for healing in general, and as Hpalas count as melee for some mechanics that only hit ranged, it's fairly simple to just stay near melee, giving a lot of 100% mastery targets. You also want to stand near melee if ranged is spread as they offer a clump for LoD to hit 5 targets.

Of course if you are on a fight that is heavily spread and aren't able to take rule of law for whatever reason, mastery does become bad, but from testing this doesn't seem to come up often.

Haste is terrible as so few of our heals benefit from it. Tyr's deliverance is the only ability whose healing actually increases with haste, and HS is our only cooldown that is reduced by it. The changes from live->alpha shift large portions of our healing away from HS/IoL healing into LoD/Talented cooldowns, which significantly drags down the value of haste. The reduced gcd on these cooldowns only gives you extra HLs, which are very low amounts of healing per cast time, and moderately low healing per mana.

Haste also has a worse conversion ratio in legion, on live haste gives 44% (130/90) more %/point than vers (not counting any Hpala passives), whereas in legion it only gives 23%(400/325) extra.

What are you talking about? Holy Shocks CD is reduced with Haste. Holy Lights cast time is reduced with haste, FoL cast time is reduced with haste... Are you even playing Beta? Half of our heals are effected meaning improved by haste, and there the ones were using all the time.

[Deleted]

What are you talking about? Holy Shocks CD is reduced with Haste. Holy Lights cast time is reduced with haste, FoL cast time is reduced with haste... Are you even playing Beta? Half of our heals are effected meaning improved by haste, and there the ones were using all the time.

I took that as implied, and whilst you spend a significant portion of your time casting HL, it doesn't make up a large portion of healing done relative to the time/mana you put into it. There are a large amount of spells whose contribution to your overall HPS doesn't increase with increased haste, ie. adding haste only gives you more HLs when you cast them. These are:

Baseline:
Light of Dawn

Talents:
T15: Bestow Faith, Light's Hammer (in raids you will be running one of these).
T60: Aura of Mercy (tick rate doesn't increase with haste, or increase with mastery, but can crit and does scale with vers).
T75: Holy Prism

On top of this, getting the extra HPS out of the extra haste requires mana, which isn't a huge problem for paladins right now on beta as we're quite efficient as a class, but you have to take into account that you would've had the the option of replacing HL casts with FoL casts with that extra mana if that haste was another stat. This option actually removes a significant portion (~40% by my account in my legion spreadsheet, see sig) of the value of haste. A quick explanation as to why:

1 HL heals for the same as 1 FoL, replacing 1 HL with 1 FoL gains you 1s of time (40% of a HL) at 0 healing cost. This saved time can then be spent on 40% of a HL, gaining 40% of a HL overall in healing done at the cost of 1 FoL's mana minus 60% of a HL's mana (19360 mana).

If we build a simple rotation where you only have HL and FoL, and just cast 100 HL's in a row for 250s, 1% haste will gain you 1 HL over the duration, at the cost of 26400 mana.

If you didn't have this haste, that 26400 mana could be spent on 1.36 (26400/19360) instances of the FoL->HL swap above, equalling 54% (1.36*40%) of a HL in healing.

Thus 1% haste only really gave you a 0.46% healing increase under this simplified rotation, the rest of the increase comes from the extra mana required to make use of that haste.

Now of course the actual game and real rotations are more complicated than this, but it gives a rough idea of why simply getting more filler (HL) time from haste isn't worth it.

[Thundering]

As long this is what wow delivers i quote Darien Shields form wowikki
"Despite Paladins being traditionally known as Holy Warriors, Blizzard’s game mechanics have formulated them more of ‘Priests in Plate’. This has been disdainfully referred by many that the class should not be called Paladins, but Clerics.
Many started Paladins (myself included) anticipating to play a Holy Warrior, a strong character with combat moves, but also having the ability to heal."

I think they have failed whit legion since they have been talking alot of addressing this, if something big does not happen soon.