Were Holy Pallies this bad originally in TBC?

[Prozach]

Mana efficiency isn't a problem. No one is complaining about going oom and all of our players actually use mana pots, flask, food, etc. Will the 10% less healing cause the other healers to flounder? Not likely. And if the main selling point of a paladin healer is spamming 2k heals and the occassional holy light because "they can for longer", it's lost on the fact that we're killing shit so fast it doesn't matter and would kill even faster with another dps. On reaver, our spriest was healing nearly as much. That's how irrelevant that heal spam is for us.

The blessings I get. And part of the issue may be that our other healers are just amazing. But as for the class itself, I think everyone has answered my question; holy paladins kinda suck. And since he's even parsing blue, with that low hps, the 'best' healing I can expect isn't going to be much better or more necessary.

Anyone saying hps doesn't matter just sounds like someone who consistently parses poorly, tbh. It is THE metric that most defines how much your raid actually needs their healing.

[tikcol]

Mana efficiency isn't a problem. No one is complaining about going oom and all of our players actually use mana pots, flask, food, etc. Will the 10% less healing cause the other healers to flounder? Not likely. And if the main selling point of a paladin healer is spamming 2k heals and the occassional holy light because "they can for longer", it's lost on the fact that we're killing shit so fast it doesn't matter and would kill even faster with another dps. On reaver, our spriest was healing nearly as much. That's how irrelevant that heal spam is for us.

The blessings I get. And part of the issue may be that our other healers are just amazing. But as for the class itself, I think everyone has answered my question; holy paladins kinda suck. And since he's even parsing blue, with that low hps, the 'best' healing I can expect isn't going to be much better or more necessary.

Anyone saying hps doesn't matter just sounds like someone who consistently parses poorly, tbh. It is THE metric that most defines how much your raid actually needs their healing.

You don't understand what is meant by mana efficiency. Are your priests max rank flash healing spam on a single target the whole fight? Are your shamans max rank chain healing the whole fight? No, they're not. They go OOM in 1 minute doing that

The holy paladin can and should be using FoL with 95% uptime on the tank with the rest being holy light on the tank. What this means is reduce drastically the chance the tank dies. If your holy paladin isn't doing this, then he's playing wrong and that's another issue. He also needs to gear properly to achieve this


Mostly will go into overhealing but it doesn't matter. His job is making sure the tank doesn't die and no other healer can do it better besides the druid helping with this job. It also means that if for some reason if you don't mess up mechanics and the tank dies, you can mostly blame the holy paladin. That's his only job.

[Mendzia]

How is measuring HPS "wrong"? We measure DPS the same way when deciding on who to take for progression, with some consideration for melee vs ranged. It is literally a choice between the extra blessing and an additional dps from what I can see. And only two of these fights are taking enough time for it to seem to matter.

Because you can do +1.5k HPS sniping low hp people and let your tank die at the same time.

That's exactly what I'm saying though; no one is dying (not very often anyway and it's usually their own fault) and we have a low-output healer. Ergo, we don't need this low healing raider when our other healers are obviously sufficient and 3/4 of his healing is overheal. He's basically just occassionally hitting the tank with a 2k flash when the tank is nowhere near death.

You said you finished both raids first day... so i do not see problem honestly.
Your guild seems to be more serious than 90% others (my is 4/6 SSC after yesterday and we consider ourselves as middle ground between casual and hardcore).
As it is first week of this content too so sometimes it is not easy to predict which boss hit hard or not so overhealing is nothing wrong imo.

[Enter Name Here]

How is measuring HPS "wrong"? We measure DPS the same way when deciding on who to take for progression, with some consideration for melee vs ranged. It is literally a choice between the extra blessing and an additional dps from what I can see. And only two of these fights are taking enough time for it to seem to matter.

because hps is capped by the current damage output of the boss. if there would be no damage incoming, all the healers would be at 0hps and 100% overheal. regardless of class.

dps don't have that problem because their upper dps ceiling is the boss hp.

[Xalvia]

please don't get baited by hps

[archelos91]

If your raid healers are having to have high hps it means your raid is bad. Pally healers are extremely valuable as when other healers are focusing on raid heals ive seen it many times where they let the tank take a dirt nap, where a pally would just be focusing on them and avoid this.

[Wilian]

At this point I am pretty sure the OP does not want to know why Holy Paladins are good healers but instead wants someone to agree that it is bad. It has been already explained thoroughly why these things are as they are but he stubbornly wishes to refute.

[Nak88]

Holy Paladin is the best single target healer in the game, if your healing output is not very high is because other healers are sniping you. Advice number one: uninstall Details or Warcraftlogs when healing.

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Honestly in the current min/max culture a good chunk of the high HPS people will be chain heal spam, circle of healing spam, and HoT blanketing from druids depending on encounter. It's virtually impossible for a single target healer like a paladin to compete directly in HPS unless they resort to sniping and you have to ask is that what you want your holy paladin to be doing? Because if that holy paladin is tunnelling the tanks it means those other more effective group healers can continue to hump the HPS and keep the group threat free. If they turn to sniping to get into some sort of HPS arms race the tank will become more vulnerable in the end. I am not sure that is really the desired goal.

But usually really low holy pally HPS is a sign of bringing to many healers probably. Because they are usually the first squished. Think about it, if you have 2 druids rolling HoTs on the tank, 2 chain heals flowing through the tank, and a priest popping a renew/shields/circle chips a lot of that tank healing is getting chewed up almost automatically.

Look at activity and over healing. If they are high then they are doing everything they can but the availiable healing for them is getting crushed. Then check the utility stuff. Do they maintain thier buffs well? Do they keep targets judged? BoPs and freedoms being used? If the answer is yes then you have a lot of intangibles that go beyond HPS that are helping the team.

[Dhrizzle]

Mana efficiency isn't a problem. No one is complaining about going oom and all of our players actually use mana pots, flask, food, etc. Will the 10% less healing cause the other healers to flounder? Not likely. And if the main selling point of a paladin healer is spamming 2k heals and the occassional holy light because "they can for longer", it's lost on the fact that we're killing shit so fast it doesn't matter and would kill even faster with another dps. On reaver, our spriest was healing nearly as much. That's how irrelevant that heal spam is for us.

The blessings I get. And part of the issue may be that our other healers are just amazing. But as for the class itself, I think everyone has answered my question; holy paladins kinda suck. And since he's even parsing blue, with that low hps, the 'best' healing I can expect isn't going to be much better or more necessary.

Anyone saying hps doesn't matter just sounds like someone who consistently parses poorly, tbh. It is THE metric that most defines how much your raid actually needs their healing.

How do you get people saying "Holy Palas are the best single-target healers with amazing mana efficiency" and turn it into "Holy Palas just suck."

Explaining it in DPS terms, imagine a character who puts out awesome single-target damage while the other damage dealers are spamming AoE everywhere. On logs it might look like the s-t character is worse because their raw DPS isn't as high, but in practice the boss might not go down in time without them focusing their fire.

BTW you're also playing at a level where (at least when I played back in the original) Shadow Priests are just amazing. As you gear up with tier 5 kit and start looking towards tier 6 you'll notice they scale poorly and do a lot worse on the meters.

[Prozach]

At this point I am pretty sure the OP does not want to know why Holy Paladins are good healers but instead wants someone to agree that it is bad. It has been already explained thoroughly why these things are as they are but he stubbornly wishes to refute.

I have yet to hear a reasonable argument. It also might surprise you to know that everything I've read in the past two hours away from this thread indicates that they're the crappiest healers in TBC. So apparently my curiosity and concern has been shared and analyzed by many others. We're running without him next Tuesday and will see what happens but I suspect it will be a non-issue. I'll report back here afterwards and will be happy to admit we needed him, if that's the case. If not, then hey, five healing without a holy pally is easy and it'll be food for thought.

[WaltherLeopold]

Was starting to wonder how this guy would do in 25s because his Gruul/Mag numbers were always pretty low but even with full t4 bis he's our worst healer on every TK and SSC fight by a huge margin. We run with six heals, a mix of 2 shaman and hpriests, one resto druid and the paladin. Even if all he has to do is spam holy light on the tanks, shouldn't he be pulling more than 400-500 hps at this point? Or are the other healers "sniping" his heals? Don't want to lose him because of the blessings but also seems like kind of a wasted spot. fwiw they always parse high in Kara

Holy paladins got hit really hard with nerfs in 2.3 historically, we're on the 2.5~ patch which uses the 2.4.3 talents, mechanics etc.

Up until 2.3 hpalas were very strong healers even after downranking coefficients were implemented mid tbc, they kept 100% mana back from illumination for a long time.

So, to sum it up, hpalas were hit with repeated direct or indirect nerfs throughout TBC and the current state of the game means that they are at their most nerfed state in TBCC.

[Prozach]

Then check the utility stuff. Do they maintain thier buffs well? Do they keep targets judged? BoPs and freedoms being used? If the answer is yes then you have a lot of intangibles that go beyond HPS that are helping the team.

This is the only thing that really concerns me; yes, the utility is nice but I have no idea how it will factor into group performance. Bosses are always judged and bops/freedoms are done well. We do main a holy tank and have our token ret pally, though, so the latter are less of an issue in most situations. We're actually pretty range-heavy for our comp with only three hunters; I don't think the imp might is going to be an issue but we'll see.

- - - Updated - - -

Holy paladins got hit really hard with nerfs in 2.3 historically, we're on the 2.5~ patch which uses the 2.4.3 talents, mechanics etc.

Up until 2.3 hpalas were very strong healers even after downranking coefficients were implemented mid tbc, they kept 100% mana back from illumination for a long time.

So, to sum it up, hpalas were hit with repeated direct or indirect nerfs throughout TBC and the current state of the game means that they are at their most nerfed state in TBCC.

That's pretty unfortunate--as I said early, it seems like a pretty non-fun class to play but everyone was asking for a holy pally so we picked one up. In Kara they were great. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to replace the guy, it just seems like there isn't a need for him as holy right now. I remember them being "essential" to our group when TBC initially launched but I was just a fledgling warlock back then and didn't really dig into the healing world.

[WaltherLeopold]

That's pretty unfortunate--as I said early, it seems like a pretty non-fun class to play but everyone was asking for a holy pally so we picked one up. In Kara they were great. Don't get me wrong, I don't want to replace the guy, it just seems like there isn't a need for him as holy right now. I remember them being "essential" to our group when TBC initially launched but I was just a fledgling warlock back then and didn't really dig into the healing world.

Well, hpalas are still very efficient healers but with the fight lengths as they are and how optimized even the poor players are compared to 2007, it's a rather moot point to have safe picks, when you can just roll the loaded dice and almost always land above average.

That said, there's no telling of how much raid healing will be required on gurtogg or later fights when shit is hectic and everyone needs to be healed ASAP, a hpala who is guaranteed to keep your tanks up for long periods of time might end up being very important.

[Gorged]

Honestly you don't understand healing properly, you just said the pally was 75% over healing because the other healers are sniping tank heals because there are 6 of them drop one of the holy priests. I play a holy pally and the worst bit of t4 was when we insisted on 6 healing most bosses i would stand there with nothing to do, as the other healers just healed the tanks passively. as soon as we dropped to 4/5 healers I actually had something to heal.

[ellieg]

H pals are fine. They should be assigned to the tank. You cancel cast HL rank 9 the majority of the time. If hps is low, its 1 of 3 things. The tank isn't taking a lot of dmg, the healing is getting sniper by the raid healers, or you are comparing his HPS to raid healers that are spamming aoe heals.

You should have 1 prot, 1 ret, 1 holy. 3 blessings is the ideal. Crusader and wisdom judged on the boss at all times. Run without any of these and your dps are gonna suffer.

If you dont like h pals thats fine, but they aren't awful and they are included in the ideal raid comp for a reason. Standard spec not only picks up kings, but also improved wis and might. Be sure to factor that in when thinking of kicking him

[Stainless]

Clears SSC and TK week 1. H pal performs well on Vashj with 6 healers. Decides to bench H pal instead of a Priest and lose a blessing, JoW, etc. Can’t go down to 5 for at least a month. Does this make sense?

[Malania]

Holy paladins have no aoe healing, they're pure tank healers and very mana efficient. They aren't bad, they just fill a certain role and aren't there to top meters, it really depends on the fight. 500 can be pretty low on something like void reaver. Our weekday group had 3 holy paladins and the lowest hps on void reaver was double that, and the top was almost triple. Like I said though, it depends on the fight. On some of them 500 hps is fine, on others it's low. If they're just tank healing and the tank isn't dying then it doesn't matter how much they're doing though.

The most dangerous part of VR was the tank switch anyway as it was a spike in damage on the aggro reset to the next tank. Holy Paladins were good to make sure it wasn't lethal to the tank if they precast before the switch and the tank doesn't immediately lose aggro.

To OP: Certain healers (and all classes really) exceled at certain things back in TBC, it was the design philosophy of the game at the time. Expect your Hpally to be the lowest for the rest of the expansion. It doesn't mean he's not performing his role well.

[Daymanmb]

Having 3 paladins is bis for blessings, judgements and hpaladins reign supreme tank healing.

[Malania]

Having 3 paladins is bis for blessings, judgements and hpaladins reign supreme tank healing.

Yeah I used to love Blessing of Salvation as a BM Hunter. I'd have to ask the paladins to swap out Kings or Might for me to get Salv if we didn't have enough pallies. God bless it.