[HOLY] Holy Sh*t!: Legion Edition

[Deleted]

I agree that is most likely what is going to happen but that will still make beacon of faith the better talent on a lot of fights and that talent has turned beacon into a zero skill ability this expansion and I would much rather see it removed.

[Archibalde]

They said that they want us to be in melee range, but there are no mechanics that seem to encourage that at all? The new mastery thing would seem to encourage standing in the middle of the ranged group, the new LoD encourages standing to one side of the ranged group and the new aura thing encourages standing in the middle of the ranged group. Did I miss something?

It's only a preview of what they have in mind for the spec, not the final list of spells we'll have. The beacon talent encourages being in a ranged group since your mastery healing will radiate from the tank when you heal him and radiate from you when you heal someone in the ranged group, but for all we know there might be another talent in that tier that will benefit being in melee range.

[Virsta1]

Was beacon really ever a skillful ability though?? I don't think it was really difficult of game play to swap it to the tank with aggro or the dps with a debuff. Idk.

[AndyJ]

It's only a preview of what they have in mind for the spec, not the final list of spells we'll have. The beacon talent encourages being in a ranged group since your mastery healing will radiate from the tank when you heal him and radiate from you when you heal someone in the ranged group, but for all we know there might be another talent in that tier that will benefit being in melee range.

Fair enough, it's just odd that they say they want us to be in melee range but then not reveal any of the mechanics that would make us want to be in melee range. Instead, they reveal a bunch of mechanics that make us want to be in the ranged group more than we already do! I do wonder how they intend to get us in melee range. I guess the easiest way would be some melee strike that heals for a lot or something.

[Deleted]

Was beacon really ever a skillful ability though?? I don't think it was really difficult of game play to swap it to the tank with aggro or the dps with a debuff. Idk.

For someone like you and me it was super easy but for the average joe that still hasnt cleared heroic it was one of our hardest abilities to use. Even if we take two equally skilled players but one of them was too lazy to beacon swap that person would instantly be 8% behind on healing done, I think stuff like that is great.

[Floopa]

Fair enough, it's just odd that they say they want us to be in melee range but then not reveal any of the mechanics that would make us want to be in melee range. Instead, they reveal a bunch of mechanics that make us want to be in the ranged group more than we already do! I do wonder how they intend to get us in melee range. I guess the easiest way would be some melee strike that heals for a lot or something.

design fights like they have done in HFC

[AndyJ]

design fights like they have done in HFC

How do you mean? Holy Paladins are in the ranged group in pretty much every HFC fight I can think of offhand.

[Zhere]

My main issue with this is not only the clunkiness, but rather how it absolutely do not do what Blizzard said they wanted to do.

But while Holy Paladins possess the heavy armor and strong defensive ability themes, in practice they spend most of their time behind the frontlines with the more fragile healers.

What I think when they say this is: We will be given reasons to be in the front, up with the melee. We would maybe be given benefits from auto attacking a boss, or melee range abilities on enemies that helps our healing (Thinking like Holy Prism changed to only useable on enemies, having melee range, but 40yd range on the healing). Melee attacks reduce cooldown of holy shock by 50% of our weapon speed. Lots of things that could be done that would be awesome. But instead, I am now a running ambulance, handing out hugs with my heals, still being in the back with the fragile priests on every encounter with a melee/range split. I definitely can't walk into melee during archimonde phase 1 to throw out heals. Nothing have really changed except we are given a super clunky mastery which sounds really, really unfun to attempt to maximize, because I am playing my char only but lots of reasons that the person I want to heal may move too.

I don't like the talent they have shown us either. It's like "We made a terrible mastery, we don't really know what we want to do, but we are trying to give you ways to ignore the mastery."

I really looked forward to being a paladin in the comming expansion. Now I am more interested to see what will be done to shaman/monk/druid and then probably pick a new main, this change is terrible.

[Floopa]

How do you mean? Holy Paladins are in the ranged group in pretty much every HFC fight I can think of offhand.

brilliant. so it's an insanely strong mastery.

good thing we've cleared that up!

[Deleted]

The only time hpally hasn't been a ST/cleave healer was during SoO while being spec'd SH. I really doubt they will get away from the single target/ cleave healing model. If you don't like it I would seriously consider rerolling

Yes I know, but it does make you helpless or even useless in some scenarios where everyone is taking damage. I feel that compensating by making the beacons and FoL OP is not beneficial for anyone, I just want the option to do more group healing and scaling down the ST/beacon healing to reasonable amounts. Maybe talents will adress this, getting 50%+ of your healing from mastery absorbs and beacons is not fun gameplay.

[Virsta1]

I mean what is fun gameplay to you. Every healer is more or less the same. Core abilities you spam and some utility. No healer is really complex. Everyone has stupid healing breakdowns at the end of the day.

[Jeathebelle]

Obviously IH was going to be a casualty of the War on Absorbs. But holy pallies are always blamed for tank deaths, so when beacon/hots/splash healing is insufficient and the tank does need direct healing it was nice that IH reduced the penalty of the inevitable overheal that happens when spam tank healing (e.g. when 1 tank is holding Xhul+Vanguard Flurry, or P2 Archi when 1 tank has Archi+Deathcaller, if your strat has a tank soaking domfire).

No one likes direct tank healing when there is a 50-50 shot any particular cast might end up being 100% overheal, and IH was a nice consolation prize in that situation.

I don't see this "hpal is the tank healer" mindset going away in Legion, since it didn't in WoD, so I would have loved a new mastery that still supported that by reducing the penalty of overhealing, just in a different way from shields--e.g: "XX% of your overhealing from direct heals is split between 5 nearby injured targets" or whatever.

Anyway, that said, I don't mind the new mastery concept. I do hope that the "minimum radius in which you will always receive 100% benefit" is reasonably large--say, at least the radius of standard ground effects ala Healing Rain.

The Talent that makes your Beacon target another loci for your mastery is interesting, but it's a little odd to have the viability of a talent depend on the boss model. E.g. a giant boss model (think Gruul) that puts the tanks, in front of the boss, at 10-20 yards from the melee who are stacked behind the boss will make this talent fairly futile; compared to a tiny boss model (e.g. Darmac or Tyrant) where the tanks and melee naturally stay closer together.

I'm very intrigued by the new Martyr heal. Trading your hp for mobility will make for some interesting decisionmaking, probably some orifice-clenching moments, and, inevitably, some hilarious accidental suicides. It'll reward fight knowledge (an AOE blast is incoming, now is NOT the time) and excellent dodging (I dodged the bad, I can loan some HP to the putz who didn't while we all run from the next bad). Looking forward to hearing more about how it works: any multiplier on the healing; fixed % of hp lost, or fixed or scaling amount; mitigatable by bubble/dp or not, etc.

Very interested to hear more about the Auras. Not much to say until we learn more.

Not much to say about the "rotation" i.e. our hopes for more spell-choice and decisionmaking (PLEASE rip HS-HL-HL-HS ad naseum) until we learn more about the spells we can talent into. I am sure (hope?) there will be some additional low-cd spells we can spec into. With Holy Shock going from 6 to 10 second base cd, if there aren't, then we are actually left with the somehow even LESS engaging 3-4 holy light spam between Holy Shocks instead of 2. E.g. if Eternal Flame is an available talent, I hope it is in addition to, not instead of, LoD; I hope it is a short-cd, or has X charges or "only x targets" can have it or something instead of a long 10+ sec cd.

I'm indifferent to Beacon of Faith being deleted or retained--BUT if it is gone, I really really really hope that Beacon of Light goes off-gcd baseline. /Pray that that's one of the major glyphs they are baking in baseline instead of just discarding. Beacon swapping on-gcd is torture, and if we only have 1 it'll be mandatory, unavoidable torture.

I'm personally glad we're apparently retaining a niche as a ST-cleave healer. On hpal when I see someone at 20% and cast a FoL on them I feel like I saved a life; not the case with most other healing classes currently. Very few healers actually focus on healing whomever is most in danger; instead focusing on hot blanketing, raid healing etc. It's nice to have some variation. If I want to AoE heal I'll play my shaman or druid. Not every healer needs the same toolkit.

----

P.S. I don't understand all the crying about the mastery being "clunky," or needing some heat-seeking GPS addon so you can go leeroying toward your next heal target so your next heal hits for 10% more on them, or "but what do I do if a mage blinks out and takes 95% of his hp and is about to die." Um--just heal. If the mage is 30 yards away and about to die--heal him. That's your job. It's ok that your heal won't be +30% that far out, save his life. I'd rather a +0% mastery heal that has 0 overheal on that dying mage than saying "fuck that guy he's outside my mastery" and casting a +30% heal at the ground-effect drenched melee at 90% resulting in more overhealing. Just like the resto shaman should cast a healing surge on him, even tho that means he misses a GCD spamming chain heal at the stacked group. And it'll never be worth it to spend 3 seconds charging at someone 30 yards away to boost your next Holy Light by an extra 10%--just stand and cast as per usual.

Sensible raids spend as much time as possible stacked up anyway, for healing rain/efflo/RJW/Dstar/chain heal/etc etc etc. If our mastery is that potent--and especially if Auras are potent and desirable--that will only improve the incentive to stack well. And keep in mind that while it will be at 100% effective in 10 yards or w/e the number turns out to be, it won't be useless at 20. It will scale out linearly and continue to provide benefit. Sure there will be some times when mastery will be more effective, and some times when it will be less. Reaver comes to mind as a particularly shitty example where our mastery will blow giant troll dick. But that's actually a good thing, not a bad thing--another thing to think about pre-fight, and improve over series of pulls, or have a few extra pieces of gear to swap out to reduce mastery, instead of the current "meaningless extra line on my skada" of IH.

We have no numbers or tuning yet, so no idea how strong any of our stats are going to be. Worst case, the mastery is too unreliable or too unsuited to the raid in question, and we avoid it on gear. Won't be the first time a class has avoided mastery in favor of 2-3 other stats. RIP Versatility; MW mastery, etc etc etc.

Go cry to the R shams who have a mastery that is more or less effective depending on stuff even less in their control than this new one.

[MCC]

What's actually way worse than the mastery is LoD being a cone again. That doesn't actually work in WoW because cones don't have the visual targeting that they need to effectively pick the right targets. The worst feeling in the world when using a cone is to think you can get someone but they're just outside its range. Cones are just really bad for healing, unusable even. I don't really get how they plan on making that work.

Just a technicality, but it wasn't a true "cone". It was a rectangle: 30 long, 10 wide (5 to either side of you) with you in the middle of a short side. Easier to code for, but makes little sense.

[Deleted]

What I think when they say this is: We will be given reasons to be in the front, up with the melee. We would maybe be given benefits from auto attacking a boss, or melee range abilities on enemies that helps our healing (Thinking like Holy Prism changed to only useable on enemies, having melee range, but 40yd range on the healing). Melee attacks reduce cooldown of holy shock by 50% of our weapon speed. Lots of things that could be done that would be awesome.

I agree with most of everything else you've said, but I just don't see how any of the above would be fun in any way, let alone awesome.

- Auto-attacking - boring and unrewarding as hell. We've had so much of that pre-Cata, that the sheer thought makes me gag.

- Holy Prism being only usable offensively and in melee - absolute nerf to an ability which is fine as it is. Why would you want to have less flexibility in how you use it?

- Weapon speed is probably the last thing I want to worry about as a healer and it's not like you can play around with it in Legion, given that you only get the one weapon.

If they want us to be battle healers, then maybe they should give us a version of HolyProt, which was fun as hell to play, but mostly because it pissed off everyone else so much. However, it should be a 4th spec so we can swap to it for fights which require half a healer and half a dps. Worst idea ever, I know.

I just think they need to stop thinking in terms of Vanilla archetypes and focus on creating a fun and varied playstyle which is also intuitive and smooth. This mastery is none of the above. "We made a terrible mastery, we don't really know what we want to do, but we are trying to give you ways to ignore the mastery" nails it exactly. So maybe they need to go back to the drawing board, decide exactly what they want us to be doing, and design a mastery which supports that playstyle rather than punishing us via boss mechanics or player behavior which we have no control over.

[dextersmith]

Fucking finally, no more holy power \o/

Lucky you, ret still has that garbage.

[Bodelightbringer]

For the first pass announcement for an expac, the Holy Paladin portion lacked anything that popped and contained only things that are polarizing the community.

LoD changes - Positional casting presented challenges in a class with low mobility which is why it was removed. That along with a long cool down, short range and a cast time make this seem like more of a "Why?" change.

Holy Shock - the spam is gone. Reservations on hold on the longer CD until we see how hard it heals for.

Mastery: Lightbringer - as someone else was keen enough to mention, whether this is the 'best ever' or a 'turd blossom' is based entirely on the range of the mastery. 10y it will be useless, 30 yards it would be beast mode. That being said if I had to explain it to someone who never played the game before it comes off as a clunky idea.

Other thoughts,

Any attempt to force us into a melee healer position without providing immunity to range mechanics will mean we won't be in melee. Given that the word on the street is that MW is losing it, it is safe to assume we won't be getting it. So we won't be in melee, regardless of what they want.

Anyone think of beaconing themselves and spamming LotM on raid? Then think that they would balance health loss around that, then start thinking about how much health it will have to take and how they would scale that as ilvl increases and how it would effect spell use on fights like Tyrant Velhari with health or healing reductions? Or if two paladins could double beacon each other and just go all out? Then think that this is what people in this thread should really be fighting about :P

[Deleted]

Armor isn't even a relevant stat for anyone but a tank since MoP. Unless you are talking about PvP.

Point.

I guess I am biased, though. Don't want to lose my beloved shield.
Shields compliment and complete so many transmog sets. xD

Oh, and joining the discussion; I'd love to see different judgments make their return. Light for healing increase, Wisdom for mana return. I loved that SO much in Wrath. Also, Divine Intervention for laughs, just because of the "wwaaasssddaaaWTFICANTMOVE??!!" derps in chat!

[Dreamguard]

Obviously IH was going to be a casualty of the War on Absorbs...
No one likes direct tank healing when there is a 50-50 shot any particular cast might end up being 100% overheal, and IH was a nice consolation prize in that situation.

I don't see this "hpal is the tank healer" mindset going away in Legion, since it didn't in WoD, so I would have loved a new mastery that still supported that by reducing the penalty of overhealing, just in a different way from shields--e.g: "XX% of your overhealing from direct heals is split between 5 nearby injured targets" or whatever.

I'm really hoping that Discipline will work out to alleviate some of our tank healing duties. It's really hard to make assumptions based on the limited information we have, but atonement appears to be something that Disc will want to keep on tanks at near 100% uptime. I think Blizzard has a really difficult challenge to create interesting gameplay for tanks wanting to not die and yet still not relegating specific healers to making sure they don't actually die. Passive (or near passive) healing is a much more enjoyable solution in my opinion, I just hope they start to give it to other healers as well so we aren't as crucial to every raid (or Disc for that matter).

Anyway, that said, I don't mind the new mastery concept. I do hope that the "minimum radius in which you will always receive 100% benefit" is reasonably large--say, at least the radius of standard ground effects ala Healing Rain.

Agreed. I would be very surprised if it wasn't at 100% at around 10 yards and then linearly decreased until 40 yards.

The Talent that makes your Beacon target another loci for your mastery is interesting, but it's a little odd to have the viability of a talent depend on the boss model. E.g. a giant boss model (think Gruul) that puts the tanks, in front of the boss, at 10-20 yards from the melee who are stacked behind the boss will make this talent fairly futile; compared to a tiny boss model (e.g. Darmac or Tyrant) where the tanks and melee naturally stay closer together.

Hopefully this is an indication that there will be other worthwhile options on this row. I think it's also important to remember that it increases your mastery by a certain amount. It seems like it's a static 24% because they didn't mention anything about being in current gear, so this might be incredibly strong earlier in the expansion. I guess it depends on if their "typical gear" mastery is calculated on beginning Legion gear or end of WoD gear. Either way, the additional mastery might be really good on fights where everyone but the tanks are stacked together. Again, this all feels kind of fruitless without knowledge of the other talents.

I'm very intrigued by the new Martyr heal. Trading your hp for mobility will make for some interesting decisionmaking, probably some orifice-clenching moments, and, inevitably, some hilarious accidental suicides. It'll reward fight knowledge (an AOE blast is incoming, now is NOT the time) and excellent dodging (I dodged the bad, I can loan some HP to the putz who didn't while we all run from the next bad). Looking forward to hearing more about how it works: any multiplier on the healing; fixed % of hp lost, or fixed or scaling amount; mitigatable by bubble/dp or not, etc.

I really like this new ability. Just like you said, it allows from some really intelligent decision making, but I'm also worried about us taking collateral damage now that we're going to be in melee more often. In addition to the normal melee we have more DK pets, more hunter pets, more demons, SV Hunters, and us in the fray too... I'm scared. I think we can guarantee that the damage portion will scale--it would be really strange otherwise--but I'm also curious as to whether or not it scales off %HP or %SP. The wording says "moderate" for both, so I'm assuming it's close to a 1-to-1 trade off.

Not much to say about the "rotation" i.e. our hopes for more spell-choice and decisionmaking (PLEASE rip HS-HL-HL-HS ad naseum) until we learn more about the spells we can talent into. I am sure (hope?) there will be some additional low-cd spells we can spec into. With Holy Shock going from 6 to 10 second base cd, if there aren't, then we are actually left with the somehow even LESS engaging 3-4 holy light spam between Holy Shocks instead of 2. E.g. if Eternal Flame is an available talent, I hope it is in addition to, not instead of, LoD; I hope it is a short-cd, or has X charges or "only x targets" can have it or something instead of a long 10+ sec cd.

I obviously can't speak for the rest of you, but I enjoyed healing during BC/Wrath specifically because I wasn't restrained by a set "rotation". I really enjoy making choices that impact our mana, rather than worrying about getting in a set number of casts between cooldowns. I think the 20 second cooldown on Holy Prism is about as short as I would want. We still have to worry about using it on cooldown, but it doesn't dictate what we do between those casts. Now that Holy Shock no longer builds any sort of resource it will either be worth casting, or it won't. Most likely it will still be worth casting and we'll be shoehorned into a set rotation of spells to fit between it. I would much rather make choices based on mana and the current situation than have x charges or cooldowns.

I'm personally glad we're apparently retaining a niche as a ST-cleave healer. On hpal when I see someone at 20% and cast a FoL on them I feel like I saved a life; not the case with most other healing classes currently. Very few healers actually focus on healing whomever is most in danger; instead focusing on hot blanketing, raid healing etc. It's nice to have some variation. If I want to AoE heal I'll play my shaman or druid. Not every healer needs the same toolkit.

Agreed, though our mastery would make a lot of sense in tandem with AoE healing being centered around us. I don't necessarily want that, I'm just pointing out that it would make sense and we might see some talents that reflect it. Like a talent that is essentially a beefed up version of Holy Radiance that emanated from us.

Also, it looks like they may be lowering the AoE cap to 5. Both LoD and Prayer of Healing say 5 players. I wonder if that will be the same for Healing Rain and Efflorescence (assuming they stay).

- - - Updated - - -

Given that the word on the street is that MW is losing it, it is safe to assume we won't be getting it.

I think we should wait to see what Mistweaver looks like. My thought would be that MW may not be a melee healer anymore.

[Virsta1]

For the first pass announcement for an expac, the Holy Paladin portion lacked anything that popped and contained only things that are polarizing the community.

LoD changes - Positional casting presented challenges in a class with low mobility which is why it was removed. That along with a long cool down, short range and a cast time make this seem like more of a "Why?" change.

Positioning for LoD is not difficult. With LotM I don't really think we should consider ourselves low mobility, but i'm not certain about that one. Who knows. I bet with all these talents coming out, Hpally will get some sort of Spirit Walkers Grace.

[Bodelightbringer]

Positioning for LoD is not difficult. With LotM I don't really think we should consider ourselves low mobility, but i'm not certain about that one. Who knows. I bet with all these talents coming out, Hpally will get some sort of Spirit Walkers Grace.

Healing Halion Heroic 25 man when the only other top healer died was difficult, positioning lod not so much, I agree. However, when the community as a whole panned the positional requirement, and cheered when it was removed, what is the gain from returning it?