Rhythm'n'Heals - My thoughts on the holy paladin changes.

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Blizzard has clearly been putting a lot of thought into how to rework holy paladins in order to give them the same level of excitement and uniqueness that other healers are experiencing. The most obvious change is that Blizzard wants us to be doing more than just spamming one or two heals, and they've been busy improving our toolkit in order to let us do so.

By improving the effectiveness and mana efficiency of Holy Shock, then tying it in to our new Holy Power system, it almost goes without saying that we'll be hitting it every time it comes up. The art of timing out Holy Power for free Words of Glory will add a new layer of complexity to paladin healing: rhythm. Instead of just managing global cooldowns, we'll now be thinking in waves, planning for the next Word of Glory, working on our timing. In many ways, the excitement of playing a rogue -- biding your time and waiting for the right opportunity to use your big "finisher" spells -- will now be part of the holy paladin experience.

The only thing I could ask for is at least one or two alternative "finisher spells" to Word of Glory, so that we are presented with a decision on how to use our Holy Power instead of simply always hitting the same spell. A few quick ideas: "Word of Enlightenment - Restores mana to the paladin over time," or "Word of Faith - Reduces the target's damage taken by X% for Y seconds."

The new Healing Hands spell seems to push us further into the "melee healer" role that so many holy paladins were already conforming to with Glyph of Holy Light spam and Seal of Wisdom regeneration. It's now very likely that almost all holy paladins will be right where they belong: standing with the melee, on the front lines, in the heat of the battle. I don't know about everyone else, but when I very first picked a holy paladin, that's the image I envisioned: a holy knight fighting with his comrades in the midst of the brawl, more like a combat medic than a traditional healer.

Perhaps the most interesting new skill we're be receiving is Dawn of Glory, which (as far as I can tell from quickly browsing over the other healers' information) will be the first and only directional heal in the game. I'm already envisioning a massive, surging wave of light rushing over the raid... *drool*

With a 30-yard range, this should prove to be an extremely useful burst-AoE-healing tool, something that paladins have desperately lacked, and it also syncs up well with the design of Blinding Shield, another paladin ability with a facing-direction mechanic. It's obvious that they want paladins to be paying more attention to the battlefield around them, instead of simply locking onto the raid frames and zoning out while they play whack-a-mole with HP bars.

We're all obviously waiting with bated breath to hear more about the Guardian of Kings. Somewhere in the very darkest corner of my mind, I can't help but notice that the spell has not been mentioned since the very early class previews, and is nowhere to be found in the datamined spellbook, but I'll keep on believin' that Blizzard won't scrap such an awesome idea.

Most importantly, I'm excited beyond belief that Blizzard didn't name our new spells "Holy Divinity", "Holy Righteousness", "Light of Holiness", and "Holy Holiness". When I first saw "Divine Light", I was beginning to think that Blizzard was running out of ideas, but some of the new spell names are absolutely tantalizing:

Word of Glory? Awesome.
Guardian of Kings? Epic.
Light of Dawn? I almost passed out.

[Ronark]

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