Holy Mastery and its utility

[Deleted]

Alright so I started playing holy paladin as my main in WOTLK, and I remember when we first got our mastery. (I didn't play MOP, and I only briefly played WOD so I can't attest too much to those expansions.)

It was terrible. We got a % shield on our heal target that lasted (8?) seconds, which ended up wildly ineffective compared with disc priests, and didn't really accentuate our healing in a meaningful way. I don't know how much it improved over time, but it was common to forge away from mastery for holy paladins, it was a fairly dead stat.

With Legion we got our 'battle healer' mastery, making our heals stronger the closer we got to our target. That isn't all that satisfying for a few reasons.
1) Some raids were incredibly movement heavy, or otherwise completely lacked a way for us to synergize our healing with the mechanics. We don't have the movement necessary to really make good use of it reliably in some of these situations. Avatar springs to mind as a fight that just... sort of sucked for mastery with all the running around required.
2) There isn't a good way to gauge how close you are to your target in tandem with the mastery's effectiveness. Without third party tools it is not reliable to say "I am under 8 yards away and getting maximum utility"; you can eyeball it, but it's not reliable.
3) It is entirely possible for our mastery to be ineffective. If the target doesn't need extra healing, then getting extra healing from our mastery isn't useful. We don't really have HOTs where extra healing would likely be dispersed across more sources of damage. It's mostly spot heals.
4) There was a lack of communication for the interaction of our mastery with certain spells, and this had to be figured out entirely by the community.

Now, I don't think the concept for our mastery was a bad idea, but I think it could've been executed better, and here's how.

Back in Wrath of the Lich King, as a holy paladin you could play as a battle healer. In fact it was much more effective to play as a battle healer than at a range. With a combination of high intellect, Seal of Wisdom (restoring mana on hit), and a very high haste rating, you could ensure you had an incredibly deep pool of mana to use.

From my understanding, having a very deep mana pool is what Paladins have always sort of specialized in; this is still partly reflected today by our single target heals being pretty mana efficient. However, these days we pay the price by having our AOE spells as more expensive casts for their output.

I think that in the upcoming expansion we should have our mastery revised, so that instead of increasing healing based on proximity, you instead reduce the cost of your spells based on proximity. Increasing mastery increases the maximum threshold your spell costs can be reduced by, so at maximum range we still get the effective 0% reduction. An alternative approach to this is that when you heal a player, your mastery returns some (a percentage of the cast cost) of your mana back to you, again with maximum range returning no mana.

EDIT just to clarify:
Method 1 = Spell cost reduced by range. If Holy Light costs 400 mana, and your mastery caps at 20% reduction, then at 8 yards your Holy Light will cost 320 mana.
Method 2 = Spell always costs the same amount of mana, but some of that mana is returned to you. If Holy Light costs 400 mana and your mastery caps at returning 20% of mana, then at 8 yards you will spend 400 mana to cast, but be returned 80 mana. This would function differently with spells such as Light of Dawn, as it would be easier to calculate the return of mana rather than reduction. This is also functionally different in that you would always need 400 mana to cast the spell.

The alternative would likely work better with spells such as Light of Dawn, but that may significantly offset the balance of these spells.

I believe this approach to our mastery:
1) Fits in with our long term specialty with healing
2) Is a much clearer benefit to the user, eliminating pure overhealing from our mastery
3) Reduces complexities with mechanics associated with the current system

By having this system, you could more freely utilize your expensive heals (in this case your faster heals) based on your proximity to the target. This playstyle would make you more capable of spamming Flash of Light to deal with any tank health spikes, but still ensure you're reasonably conservative with distant targets. As primary balancing would be around the spell effectiveness compared with other classes, paladins spells should not be more expensive to cast with the expectation of mastery mitigating costs.

[wombats23]

so basically you just miss WotLK so much you want to bring back spirit/mp5 by replacing the current throughput increasing mastery with it.

and i know you didn't play MoP, but hpally mastery was stupid (in the best of ways) with EF before they made the HoT no longer proc mastery.

[Deleted]

so basically you just miss WotLK so much you want to bring back spirit/mp5 by replacing the current throughput increasing mastery with it.

and i know you didn't play MoP, but hpally mastery was stupid (in the best of ways) with EF before they made the HoT no longer proc mastery.

It's more about changing the approach to the current class/spec fantasy. I felt that in many circumstances, I would've been happier being able to cast more heals than purely bigger heals. There are a lot of instances where the tanks health doesn't drop in large enough increments to make full utilization of the mastery, and a lot of fights that work actively against that mastery with heavy movement mechanics.

It's not really Spirit or MP5. With those you just gained mana back passively. This still rewards you for being closer to your targets, but instead of giving you a bigger heal, provides you with more resources to cast more heals.

[Supliftz]

This honestly seems like a worst version of the current mastery, and is much harder to balance.

Now you are forced to balance spell costs in relation to distance from targets, which makes the spec harder to play for people who are worse at paladin. I'll use your Fallen Avatar example to show you why this is a bad idea.

Right now in P1 Avatar, poor mastery effectiveness simply means your spells do less total hps to targets you are far away from. With this new mastery, you basically cast significantly less total spells over the course of the encounter because your mastery isn't going to refund high amounts of mana, which forces you to stand around and do nothing. Blizzard recently reworked disc priest because the spec encouraged inactivity. Your idea promotes inactivity on fights where mastery is poor.

Also if you really think about it, from a feedback standpoint, balancing mastery around a hps increase makes much more sense. Firstly it is in line with literally every other healer masteries in the game, as well as all other stats in wow (all stats increase your output). Secondly mana fluctuating from encounter to encounter, and even pull to pull sounds horrible from a gameplay pov. Unless you are completely stacked 100% of the time, it would be incredibly hard to gauge your mana bar across an encounter because it is always in flux. Consistency is very important for healer gameplay in wow.

[Deleted]

This honestly seems like a worst version of the current mastery, and is much harder to balance.

Now you are forced to balance spell costs in relation to distance from targets, which makes the spec harder to play for people who are worse at paladin. I'll use your Fallen Avatar example to show you why this is a bad idea.

Right now in P1 Avatar, poor mastery effectiveness simply means your spells do less total hps to targets you are far away from. With this new mastery, you basically cast significantly less total spells over the course of the encounter because your mastery isn't going to refund high amounts of mana, which forces you to stand around and do nothing. Blizzard recently reworked disc priest because the spec encouraged inactivity. Your idea promotes inactivity on fights where mastery is poor.

Also if you really think about it, from a feedback standpoint, balancing mastery around a hps increase makes much more sense. Firstly it is in line with literally every other healer masteries in the game, as well as all other stats in wow (all stats increase your output). Secondly mana fluctuating from encounter to encounter, and even pull to pull sounds horrible from a gameplay pov. Unless you are completely stacked 100% of the time, it would be incredibly hard to gauge your mana bar across an encounter because it is always in flux. Consistency is very important for healer gameplay in wow.

I think this works under the assumption that spells would cost more to cast than they do now because the mastery could offset it, and in my OP I oppose that.

The idea behind this is that it allows more liberal use of our burst healing spells, especially on people in close range to us. With this, the mastery could reduce the amount of overhealing done. This means on fights where we're able to stack on melee, we're more proficient at burst healing tanks. We're still as capable as before at healing ranged targets.

[capri sunset]

I do think it's a neat idea, particularly how it would shift the punishment for spot healing people doing odd jobs 40 yards away from doing less healing, because I could see that being more of an issue if we ever stop doing a superfluous amount of healing. However I don't think you really addressed suplift's points, and I can't see a world where it's tuned such that newer players don't feel awful and better players aren't overpowered.

[Deleted]

I do think it's a neat idea, particularly how it would shift the punishment for spot healing people doing odd jobs 40 yards away from doing less healing, because I could see that being more of an issue if we ever stop doing a superfluous amount of healing. However I don't think you really addressed suplift's points, and I can't see a world where it's tuned such that newer players don't feel awful and better players aren't overpowered.

So, looking at the Avatar fight specifically..

Right now, if you want to output more healing on the tank *you must be closer to them*. You're likely going to have one tank doing Maiden somewhere else, and your main tank in the middle. On lower difficulties, it is unlikely your mastery is going to be effective because the bonus healing isn't providing any benefit. The damage spikes aren't large enough for it to feel consistently helpful. Without knowledge of how much your heal will do at a given range, it is also difficult to determine how much of it is effective healing, and how much has gone into overhealing. So with Avatar, in situations where the tank is low on health, it is more difficult to determine if your heal will be sufficient or not.

They could be at 40% health, but you're at maximum range, and your heal isn't enough to top them up. So you have to cast a second heal anyway.
They could be at 80% health, but you're at minimum range, and your heal does 30% overhealing.
The effective point is when the tank is at 40% health, and you're at minimum range.

With this method, nothing changes in the 1st scenario.
In the 2nd scenario, instead of doing a larger amount of overhealing, you gain more resources to cast again.
In the 3rd scenario, in theory you will have to cast more times to heal, but at approximately the same efficiency. In this sense it is a debuff, because you are using more GCDs/casts to heal.

It moves the healing more towards the central point, where we're dealing with general healing better, but have to use more of our toolkit for burst healing (HoS, LoH, Holy Shock).

You would still have the choice between using slower casts, or faster casts. This isn't a skew towards only ever using Flash of Light again, but making it substantially more viable for burst situations as it won't be as much of a mana drain if you're close to your tank, or the group that needs healing with something like LOD.

With regards to feeling overpowered or underpowered, I think this is pretty difficult to say off the bat. I think it would ultimately make our healing more consistent, and give us greater flexibility with using our resources for burst healing. Like on Avatar, if you're in the melee range and being efficient during the fight when no mechanics are going on, it allows you to be significantly more liberal with your expensive heals when the harder hitting mechanics occur. I think mana management is a general skill all healers need, and this type of mastery would emphasize that skill.

Higher skill players will be better at healing targets closer to them, or rather staying closer to their primary healing targets. In turn, this will result in better mana management. With better mana management, you're able to use Flash of Light in burst situations without being as worried about your mana situation. Where the current mastery would dump that higher efficiency into overhealing, this direction would allow them to heal other targets instead.

[Nuniqt]

I honestly think paladins are in a great spot stat and mechanics wise. There isnt a lot on my wish list and changing the mastery isnt close. If you are not a fan of mastery stack verse instead after 50% crit. You will take less damage and verse healing increase is static, not ranged dependent. Also lightbringer beacon is always an option to get a second point of origin on the map for mastery.

But that said the toolkit thrives in melee with LoD and potentially crusader strike/concecrate dps anyway.