Holy Paladin GuideMidnight Overview
Holy Paladin Changes in Midnight
Being a few weeks in to the Midnight Alpha, every spec has received tons of changes, and Holy Paladin is no exception. In this article we will go over the most important changes, what they mean, what is done well and what could be done better. Let's just jump straight into it with our new Apex Talent Beacon of the Savior.
Apex Talent
Beacon of the Savior is a "smart" Beacon that automatically applies to the lowest health ally within 30 yards when entering combat, and it will then continuously jump to the new lowest health ally when its current target is topped off, or if another target falls below 30%. It has two supporting talents (Beacon of the Savior and Beacon of the Savior) that, respectively, increases its transfer rate and causes it to grant an absorb shield when it jumps to a new target.
Combining its smart target selection with its incredibly high transfer rate of 50%, which is almost three times as high as your standard passive Beacons, this Apex talent is going to be very strong, in both Mythic+ and Raid environments. It might even be too strong and take away from our rotational spells, but we will have to see.
You are going to want to track Beacon of the Savior on your raid and party frames, as you want to avoid healing the person it is on and instead let the Beacon do its job. With the addon restrictions this is not going to be something we can customize, so we just have to hope Blizzard shows it properly for us.
90 Second Wings and Awakening
We have a new 2-point talent, Call of the Righteous, which reduces Avenging Wraths cooldown by 15 seconds and its duration by 2.5 seconds per point. This talent is implemented to partially offset a separate change to Awakening.
Awakening no longer procs Avenging Wrath, but instead just grants your Holy Power spenders a 10% chance to increases crit chance of your next Judgment (or Hammer of Wrath) by 100% and its damage by 30%.
I have never been a big fan of Awakening, so I think this is a good change. Being able to get Avenging Wrath down to a 90 second cooldown, will help a lot with our cooldown coverage. In the War Within, Holy Paladin has been lacking in the cooldown department compared to other healing specs, especially in Raids, so with this change and changes to other healers, we should have more parity now.
The 90 second cooldown is especially powerful for Herald of the Sun because of how frontloaded the burst healing of Herald of the Sun is. We do not care much about the reduced Avenging Wrath duration that Call of the Righteous causes because our strongest burst healing will already be over by that point.
Holy Shock and Crusader Strike
Crusader Strike is now replaced by Holy Shock for Holy Paladins. I think this is a great change that will help the spec focus a lot more on its core spells and procs. I am a firm believer that less can be more. By removing spells and reworking talents that were only used in certain builds or playstyles, Blizzard will be able to make what's left more interesting with spells and talents that now work for the whole spec, and not just for niche builds.
For example, Crusader's Might now causes Holy Shock to reduce the cooldown of Judgment, which makes it useful for all builds, because all builds will use both spells. Avenging Crusader now only transfers healing from Judgment, and because of the Crusader's Might change, we no longer ignore our most iconic spell, Holy Shock, during Avenging Crusader.
Here is what Blizzard themselves said regarding this change.
Developers’ notes: We’re making a change to condense the amount of Holy Power generators with a cooldown Holy Paladin has to track to see if this streamlines the rotational experience. There may be gaps rotationally for now while we tweak the finer details, but we want to try this and see how it feels to play.
In the following Alpha build, they reduced the cooldown of Holy Shock and Judgment by 2 and 3.3 seconds respectively, which has helped a ton with limiting these gaps in our rotation. The gaps were worst when you were trying to deal damage, but that has been addressed by making Shield of the Righteous reduce Holy Shock's cooldown by 4 seconds.
The spec plays similarly to how it plays currently in The War Within, but with shorter cooldown on Holy Shock and Judgment we have fewer empty globals where we have to cast Flash of Light without Infusion of Light procs.
That being said, Judgment is currently looking very weak on the Alpha, just like it is on Live, which likely means it would not be worth using as part of our healing rotation. The main issue is that it requires Truth Prevails and Empyrean Legacy to be worth using, but since those talents are in the extremely competitive final section of the tree, we are currently better off taking 2 different talents and just forgo using Judgment at all. I am certain this will change, because the rotation without Judgment is quite dull.
Light of Dawn
Light of Dawn has also been changed from a frontal cone to instead heal 40 yards around you, and it has been uncapped so it can now heal more than 5 targets. With such a soft cap, this likely means that in raids, we will go back to almost exclusively use Light of Dawn. Of course, this simply comes down to the tuning of Light of Dawn compared to Eternal Flame and Word of Glory, but as it stands Light of Dawn will be significantly better, and Eternal Flame and Word of Glory will just be used to spot heal people when you really need it.
At exactly which target count they break even will depend on a lot of factors and will definitely change over the course of the Alpha and Beta, but it seems intentional with this change that Blizzard wants Light of Dawn to be best in Raids while keeping Eternal Flame and Word of Glory best in Mythic+.
The new Light of Dawn animation.
Other Changes
Holy Prism has been moved to a choice with Divine Toll in the Class Tree. This obviously means we will only be able to pick up one of them. At the same time both talents now work with every talent that only worked with the other one previously. So Divine Toll now also procs Aurora and lets you apply 2 Dawnlights, while Holy Prism now also procs Rising Sunlight.
At the same time, they have both been made 45 second cooldowns, so we can bring them down to 30 seconds with Quickened Invocation.
Hammer of Wrath now replaces Judgment during Avenging Wrath, and it works with all the things Judgment works with, such as Greater Judgment, Avenging Crusader, Awakening, and more.
We got a new talent Ringing of the Heavens which causes Aura Mastery to cast a Divine Toll. This has been done to make Aura Mastery feel more satisfying and rewarding to cast, and I would say it definitely achieves that! Aura Mastery has often felt like a dead global, that you had to always use pre-emptively, but now it is actually going to be best used right after your group starts taking damage.
The above are the most important changes, but there are a ton more small changes that I really cannot cover individually here, or we wouldn't even be done in time for the expansion release! For those interested you can find the full change notes here.
Overall, these changes are great. The efforts to reduce button and cooldown bloat are exactly what we have been asking for, and it is being done in a way that does not compromise the integrity of the spec, and it maintains its fast pace and skill cap.
What can be improved?
While I am very happy with the overall changes, there are also have some things I would like to see changed. Most of the things I think can be improved actually relate to things that have not yet been touched much. Here I am mostly thinking about Mana Issues, and talent tree layout and pathing
Mana Concerns
Holy Shock is the driving force behind our core rotation, and by design you are encouraged to cast it on cooldown. The issue is that doing so inevitably causes you to run out of mana, and to save additional mana the only viable option is to cast fewer Holy Shocks, and instead replace it with hard-casted Flash of Lights.
You might suggest that we should just stop running Beacon of Virtue to save mana instead, but the fact is that Beacon of Virtue is strong enough that you are "forced" to play it, and if you need to save mana you lose less healing from casting fewer Holy Shocks compared to speccing out of, or just casting fewer Beacon of Virtue. Even if you do drop Beacon of Virtue, you will still run out of mana from casting Holy Shock on cooldown.
Even so, Beacon of Virtue is actually being buffed from 8 to 9 seconds duration, while its mana cost is being increased.
The problem here is that you cannot realistically prevent us from running Beacon of Virtue by increasing its mana cost. It is so strong that we will just need to find the mana somewhere else to keep shoehorning it in, so increasing its mana cost to counterbalance an increased duration doesn't really make sense.
The same issue is affecting our ability to spend Infusion of Light on Holy Light, even though it absurdly powerful and fast. We are simply already running out of mana. Even so, Holy Light has actually been buffed by over 20% on the Alpha, so now we will likely also have to shoehorn that in, which again means we will have to find the mana for that by casting even fewer Holy Shocks. The reason we have not been using Holy Light so far, is not because it is too weak, it is simply because we already spend our mana without casting it.
The conclusion from all this is not that Beacon of Virtue or Holy Light are too strong or expensive, even though they may be, because even if you cast those spells 0 times, you will still inevitably run out of mana. Choosing to spend your Infusion of Light on Holy Light or not would be the perfect mana throttle for us, if the rest of our mana economy was tuned for it.
The only viable conclusion is to realise that Holy Shock is core to the spec and that it feels awkward and unintuitive to not use it on cooldown, and then implement changes that facilitate our ability to actually do so. Holy Shock needs to be made much cheaper.
It is apparent that Judgment is also supposed to be a core part of our rotation, but its high mana cost and its reliance on hard to pick talents, makes it unviable as a core rotational generator when healing. Hopefully, this also changes.
Infusion of Light for Herald of the Sun and Lightsmith
We do not yet know what changes Lightsmith is getting, but currently there is a huge disparity between how many Infusion of Light procs you get as Lightsmith compared to Herald of the Sun due to the Laying Down Arms talent. Lightsmith is actually getting so many that it feels overwhelming and you never have time to spend them all. Herald of the Sun is a lot more balanced, and the procs actually feel important.
With how integral Infusion of Light procs have become for our rotation, it simply doesn't feel right that one Hero Talent tree gets so many more than the other for no reason.
Cooldown Manager and the UI in General
There are a lot of procs and buffs missing from the Cooldown Manager for Holy Paladin at the moment. With the addon restrictions this makes it super annoying to properly test and get a feel the spec on the Alpha.
Current problems with the Cooldown Manager are:
The Infusion of Light buff is not trackable.
The Avenging Wrath buff is not trackable.
The Divine Favor buff is not trackable.
The Hand of Divinity buff is not trackable.
Empyrean Legacy is greyed out even when specced in to it.
Along with the very poor UI customizability in general, this makes it frustrating to try to properly test the spec and the game as a whole. The base castbar, Holy Power tracker, and the raid frames are quite frankly in an unacceptable state and hopefully they get some love before the expansion launches.
Holy Paladin flows well and feels really fun to play, but the awful state of UI customization overshadows it, and it drags the rest of the game down with it and negatively impacts every part of the game.
Talent Tree Layout
It is hard to pinpoint exactly what the issue is here, but when I try to come up with talent builds, it is just very awkward to path through some parts of the spec tree. Talents that synergize with each other feel too spread out, while talents that don't synergize are kept together.
For example, talents that synergize such as Truth Prevails, Awakening, Veneration, Empyrean Legacy, and Divine Glimpse feel disconnected from each other, and the last section of the tree just feels super disjointed with talents that don't synergize spread out all over the place. The last section is overloaded with powerful talents that are very hard to pick up, which might seem interesting, but it really just feels annoying that you cannot get what you need to put that finishing touch on a given build.
A talent such as Divine Favor feels misplaced and alone. I think Extrication and Divine Favor could swap places, but even so Divine Favor also has some issues of its own, where you really want to only use it with an Infusion of Light to cast a big Holy Light, but it always ends up being consumed by natty Flash of Light casts while you are fishing for procs, which is obviously a total waste. Perhaps it should only be consumed by Holy Light.
The choice node of Sanctified Wrath and Awakening feels really annoying to have to path through because both talents are quite bad. Crusader's Might makes the rotation a lot smoother, but it is also very hard to justify going for it with its current position.
It is also strange to me that the talents that buff Holy Shock have all been shelved off to the most right column. With how core Holy Shock is, it is very annoying that these talents are difficult to take.
Most of the talents are fine design wise, but parts of the Talent Tree layout just feel quite random.
Conclusion
I am very happy with the changes we have received. The changes universally improve how the spec feels and how we play. As mentioned, the issues I highlight are mainly things that Blizzard have not actually touched on the Alpha, so there is a very good chance that most of those problems, if not all, are already planned to be addressed.
All in all, how Holy Paladin feels on the Alpha is simply a direct improvement over how it feels on Live, which already felt pretty good, and the goals stated by Blizzard in the Developer Notes have been accomplished well.
