1. #1

    How are Holy Paladins doing at the moment?

    Hello fellow light bringers!

    I'm almost 90 with my paladin and I've got an offer to join a guild on another realm, but I've read some discouraging things about the holy paladin's status in raiding at the moment. Is it still fun or is it just cataclysm priests where you aoe heal -> aoe heal -> aoe heal?

    I'd like to play something efficient and I would hate to be performing excellently and then being unable to do as much of a difference as the other healers solely based on the fact that my class isn't as powerful.

    How about pvp? I guess they're still strong. It's healing in plate!

    Cheers,
    Ghettoringerbeast
    Last edited by Ghettobeast; 2012-12-03 at 09:11 PM.

  2. #2
    Field Marshal jmac28083's Avatar
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    I haven't pvp'd as a holy paladin since wrath of the lich king, but I hear that they're doing well.

    For pve I've been having a lot of fun. Throughput can be really good if you take advantage of the best talents (depends on fight). For mana regen were doing decent if you take advantage of divine plea on cd (doable if glyphed and have some haste), and a potion of focus. With those reminders in mind I've only run into one fight where I ran out of mana.

    There are some things that you need to take advantage of otherwise you'll fall behind. Daybreak, Sacred Shield/Eternal Flame usage, and Light's Hammer/Holy Prism. Learn to love them and use them to their full potential.
    If you fall back on just using divine light, flash of light, and holy light you're going to fall behind and be lackluster.

    Use your new tools first then fall back to the basic single target heals.

    If you can do all that then you'll do well as a holy paladin and have a fun time with it.

  3. #3
    Holy paladins are extremely strong healers at the moment. With the recent mistweaver nerf, I would say only disc priests have the kit that required to say that they may be better (not that mistweavers are terrible now, they're just no longer godlike).

    Paladins feel very well-rounded right now. Pretty strong aoe spam heals with radiance, daybreak, HP usage, and light's hammer every minute. Extremely strong aoe on-demand burst with light's hammer and cooldowns (alternating cooldowns, naturally). Great single-target 'off-healing' on the beaconed target during normal raid healing as well, and lay on hands is as amazing as ever... well, not quite as amazing as it used to be when it healed the beaconed target as well, but still very good. Devotion aura is also a strong cooldown. HPala cooldowns aren't as strong as something like shamans' ascendance or healing tide totem, but we have a lot more of them, and the class' kit is stronger otherwise.

    Mana regen is also very strong; almost overpowered with all the holy power we're able to generate with PvP set or 4p pve set.

    We also have luxury abilities like bubble, which is basically a get outa jail free-card for many mechanics, and divine protection, which is amazing with its short 1 min cooldwon (optimally as low as 30 sec with enough holy power usage and the right talent) and the 'Hand of'-abilities are situationally very strong; HoP still lets us purge physical debuffs, and HoSac is still strong on tanks or to deal with some of the damage that you don't want to be healing (we're not anywhere near as good as disc priests on that, but it's better than nothing).

    In my opinion, I think that HPala sustained single-tagret healing is kind of weak. We're very strong when it comes to constantly healing the beaconed target with pretty good heals, but in situations where you're just single-target healing a tank I wish we were stronger. That's pretty rare to be doing in raids, though.

    Another downside, I guess, is that unlike several healers (like priests, monks, druids with gift of the wild, and even shamans with elementals), HPalas don't have any real ability to do DPS without also sacrificing their healing potential. Denounce and glyphed holy shock and WoG is "dcent" damage, but it costs a lot of mana to do and will set back your healing potential by a lot with all that mana, those cooldowns, and that holy power, spent doing damage; where, for example, a disc priest can keep healing while dpsing (are even rewarded for doing so), and druids don't even have to spend mana to do damage. This probably shouldn't be such a big deal for a healer, but it's going to annoy you if you find yourself sitting around without anything to heal for a decent period of time, knowing that one of the other classes could be DPSing right now without really sacrificing their healing to do so.

    Haven't really done any pvping except 10 arena wins a week, but except for the times where I've dropped from 100% in 2-3 seconds I haven't lost a game... well, that I didn't leave, anyway. Healer + off-healer = zzzzzzzz. I do see holy paladins in thet arena a lot, though, so I assume we're fine.
    "Quack, quack, Mr. Bond."

  4. #4
    We are fucking OP!
    IM TEH RET! er... teh holy... or it was teh prot?!
    This bro told a cool story on 2009-12-03 and proudly took part in the banfest.

  5. #5
    Yes, yes we are aquilesmagno.
    Topping above all the other classes easily most of the time D:

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Cattlehunter View Post
    Mana regen is also very strong; almost overpowered with all the holy power we're able to generate with PvP set or 4p pve set.
    Yep, all you have to do it abuse set mechanics and wear a PvP set in PvE and you're golden! Working just as intended!

    Meanwhile, for those paladins who don't turn themselves into zombie HoT'ers Eternal Flaming the raid with said abuse still have to deal w/ the very real fact that our regen is completely broken. Ghostcrawler has admitted to the fact that it is bugged with no idea on how to fix it. That means that 95% of the time when you try to auto-attack a boss for seal of insight procs instead you get to see your character stand there for 8-10 seconds not doing a thing.

    So yes, thank you for perpetuating the notion that everything is working as intended with Holy Paladins and the seal of insight/eternal flame bug is nothing of concern. Enjoy your PvP exploits in PvE environments.

  7. #7
    Quote Originally Posted by Avengeance View Post
    Yep, all you have to do it abuse set mechanics and wear a PvP set in PvE and you're golden! Working just as intended!

    Meanwhile, for those paladins who don't turn themselves into zombie HoT'ers Eternal Flaming the raid with said abuse still have to deal w/ the very real fact that our regen is completely broken. Ghostcrawler has admitted to the fact that it is bugged with no idea on how to fix it. That means that 95% of the time when you try to auto-attack a boss for seal of insight procs instead you get to see your character stand there for 8-10 seconds not doing a thing.

    So yes, thank you for perpetuating the notion that everything is working as intended with Holy Paladins and the seal of insight/eternal flame bug is nothing of concern. Enjoy your PvP exploits in PvE environments.
    This bug that "Ghostcrawler has admitted to the fact that it is bugged with no idea on how to fix it" was fixed with 5.1. The PvP set was also nerfed, and was only one of the two set bonuses that I mentioned, so the majority of your whine is out of date.

    You shouldn't rely on melee for your regen.

    The set bonuses are "working as intended"; classes are balanced around them for contemporary content.

    The set bonuses only push it into 'borderline overpowered' anyway, it's still more than fine without it.
    "Quack, quack, Mr. Bond."

  8. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by Cattlehunter View Post
    This bug that "Ghostcrawler has admitted to the fact that it is bugged with no idea on how to fix it" was fixed with 5.1. The PvP set was also nerfed, and was only one of the two set bonuses that I mentioned, so the majority of your whine is out of date.

    You shouldn't rely on melee for your regen.
    The Eternal Flame bug is not fixed as you seem to think. Unless it's been fixed in the last 24 hours, I still saw it happen multiple times last night just running a heroic dungeon.

    I'm confused about that "not relying on melee for regen" part. You play a healer right? We have a mechanic that is supposed to allow us to regen additional mana when we aren't casting. That is taken into account when balancing our healing and mana useage by the developers. If we're not able to use it, that is a serious problem. You wouldn't tell a resto shaman that they shouldn't depend on telluric currents for mana regen would you? Or maybe you'ld like to explain to a disc priest that rapture no longer works. They're all secondary mana regen mechanics that we do depend on to some extent.


    OT: Holy is in a really strong place right now, both PvE and PvP. We have enough tools to be good on pretty much every fight. Group healing, HR/LoD coupled with daybreak procs on holy shock make us competitive with or better than other healers on a stacked group. Raid healing when everyone is spread out can be covered by EF blanketing and spot healing, and we still have some of the most powerful single target healing in the game thanks to beacon.

    PvP we still have a huge amount of utility, especially with clemency that allows us a double set of Hand spells. Not to mention we have fairly good damage potention for helping a dps burst down targets.

  9. #9
    [QUOTE=Kurzior;19326604]The Eternal Flame bug is not fixed as you seem to think. Unless it's been fixed in the last 24 hours, I still saw it happen multiple times last night just running a heroic dungeon.

    What "eternal flame bug" are you talking about? there's a bug with eternal flame?

  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by Kurzior View Post
    The Eternal Flame bug is not fixed as you seem to think. Unless it's been fixed in the last 24 hours, I still saw it happen multiple times last night just running a heroic dungeon.
    I tested it right before I made the post; with EF on 7 people I was still able to attack a target dummy uninhibited.

    Quote Originally Posted by Kurzior View Post
    I'm confused about that "not relying on melee for regen" part. You play a healer right? We have a mechanic that is supposed to allow us to regen additional mana when we aren't casting. That is taken into account when balancing our healing and mana useage by the developers. If we're not able to use it, that is a serious problem. You wouldn't tell a resto shaman that they shouldn't depend on telluric currents for mana regen would you? Or maybe you'ld like to explain to a disc priest that rapture no longer works. They're all secondary mana regen mechanics that we do depend on to some extent.
    It's a mana regen mechanic that reduces your ability to heal and puts you in needless danger by having to enter melee (including wasted time spent moving into melee, unless you're in a fight that allows casters to just sit in melee all the time). I would not suggest a shaman use telluric currents either, no, a much better glyph choice is totemic recall, which regenerates massive amounts of mana if used correctly, at the cost of one, at most two, GCDs every 30 seconds; a shaman'd have to spam 8+ lightning bolts to get the same effect (taking 10-20 seconds), which in turn forces less mana efficient heals to compensate for the huge amount of time spent not healing, much in the same way that meleeing to proc insight does.

    The comparison to rapture is bizzare? TC or insight procs are nowhere in the same league as the ability to proc anywhere from 20k to 100k mana every ~12 seconds just from casting a normal healing spell. Maybe if WoG/EF gave us back 5k mana per holy power used it'd be analogous. The priest spell you're looking for is PW:Solace, which is about as perfect an analogy as you can get... though it's still way better than insight or TC could ever hope to be (2100 mana every 1.5 sec before haste, vs. TC's 1740 every 2.5 sec before haste, vs. whatever it is that insight averages out to return with its low procrate, high avoidance chance, and slow attack speed, accounting for the time it takes to move in and out of melee in order to utilize it)... and priests still don't pick it.

    I was a fan of TC when it scaled off damage, but right now it (and similar abilities) only really help on fights with damage lulls, or if you find yourself without anything to heal (in which case you don't need the mana, and should probably be bringing less healers anyway).
    "Quack, quack, Mr. Bond."

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