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Our Class Writers share their expert opinions based on rigorous testing and theorycrafting in hopes of contextualizing the changes coming in future patches of the War Within. Check out all of our released articles in our Editorial Section.
Wowhead Editorials
Holy Paladin in the War Within So Far
Holy Paladin, for better or for worse, has had a very bumpy ride ever since the rework in Patch 10.1.5 half-way through Dragonflight. The otherwise decent rework was marred by a total failure to properly tune, not just the spec as a whole, but also our individual spells. We ended up with a playstyle that largely ignored Holy Power spenders because they were simply too weak compared to our generator spells, and you would ideally only cast them on 2 stacks of Blessing of Dawn.
Thankfully, that was fixed prior to The War Within, and we started out in Season 1 with a much better playstyle.
Season 1
Season 1 began with Herald of the Sun and Avenging Wrath being meta, but due to several bugs we were overperforming significantly on Heroic and the early Mythic bosses. The most notable bug was that Dawnlight didn’t have its healing reduced when healing more than 5 targets, in combination with Light of the Martyr’s healing absorb not being subtracted on Warcraftlogs this meant we looked 12-15% better than after those issues were solved. This in turn resulted in Holy Paladin getting nerfed, first by 6% and then by another 5%. Thankfully, both these issues were solved and the last 5% nerf was reverted.
However, the damage was done, and it left a bad taste in most players’ mouths when it became clear how absurdly overpowered Preservation Evokers were and how much slower Blizzard were to nerf them. Which is actually something we saw repeated with Discipline Priest in Season 2, but I digress; Blizzard’s aversion, or inability, to tune specs during and immediately after the Race to World First is not a topic for this article, but I do find it strange that they cannot at least buff underperforming specs more quickly.
The most impactful change of Season 1 for us happened with a mid patch tuning pass on 8 October, which saw several massive buffs to Lightsmith, and the meta builds quickly shifted to Avenging Crusader and Lightsmith. Avenging Crusader has always been an extremely divisive talent in the Holy Paladin community and this time around was no different. Most veteran players dislike it because of the low skill expression, while a lot of other players like it for that exact same reason.
One of the most significant ways to stand out as a great Holy Paladin player has always been having good target selection with your spot healing, but Lightsmith, and especially Avenging Crusader largely removed that as upwards of 90% of your healing came from randomly targeted healing effects, so you didn’t have to worry about looking at your raid / party frames as much, which made the gameplay more akin to a DPS playstyle rather than a healer playstyle.
Season 2
In contrast to Dragonflight and Season 1 of The War Within, Season 2 has been a much better patch to play Holy Paladin. While we might not have started the season as “meta” in neither Raiding nor Mythic+, we only received fantastic changes going into the Patch. We saw our random and uncontrollable healing reduced a lot, in favour of increasing the healing of Holy Shock and our Holy Power spenders massively, Herald of the Sun and Avenging Wrath once again became the go to playstyle, and from a gameplay and “feel” perspective, I personally don’t think we have had it better in very long time, and more recently we have seen several underused talents get buffed.
With Light of the Martyr no longer causing as much negative healing absorb, we can finally actually use the talent and Holy Shock just feels much more satisfying to cast with it. Although there still are some issues I think needs to be addressed, overall, the spec is simply really fun and fast paced to play. Holy Paladin has never had a particularly complicated rotation; our main skill differentiator has always mostly been target selection and making quick “gcd to gcd” decisions, and the current iteration of the spec feels closer to that than it has in years.
Current Issues for Holy Paladin and Healing In General
The largest issues Holy Paladin specifically has been dealing with recently have actually already been fixed. For example, Herald of the Sun used to cause raid wide lag due to the absurd amount of combat log events it would create during Avenging Wrath. This was fixed by preventing Sun’s Avatar and Dawnlight from transferring healing to Beacon of Light effects.
Divine Toll has also been severely bugged recently, causing it ninja pull enemies and preventing it from hitting 5 allies consistently, which was briefly fixed only for it to bug again a few days later. That latter bug has now been fixed for good, but it can still ninja pull neutral mobs for some reason.
Bloat and Power Creep
An issue that I think plagues healing in general, not just Holy Paladin, is the reliance on cooldowns to be able to meaningfully move peoples healthbars. Over the last couple of expansions, we have seen a shift towards giving healers more and more healing cooldowns, small and big, and we have generally been getting access to those cooldowns much more frequently. In an effort to keep healers challenged, this insidious cooldown bloat demands numerous heavy burst windows to satisfy the amount of cooldowns, and it has now made it practically impossible to deal with any damage event without having healing cooldowns available. It has diminished the value of spot and rotational healing since your group is going to have raid wide throughput cooldowns assigned for any damage event, so if any particular player is in danger, they will be kept more safe by the random healing cooldown than by a healer actively trying to heal them specifically.
In short, the importance of target selection and rotational decision making has been watered down in favour of making cooldown timing the most important aspect of healing. It is not surprising that the best healers in recent patches have been the healers with the best and most frequently available cooldowns.
The topic of bloat and power creep is something that our Restoration Shaman guide writer Theun, has covered in several separate videos, and I think this bloat and power creep is the biggest issue that faces the game. Not only does it make it difficult to design interesting healing mechanics and damage patterns, but it also makes healing extremely inaccessible to new players or players who just want to try out healing for the first time, as the amount of things you have to keep track of as a healer these days is just too overwhelming. It makes healing feel like a puzzle that needs to be solved by correctly delegating cooldowns before you even pull a given boss, and it removes the feeling of having an impact on your group’s survival outside of your major cooldown windows.
In Liberation of Undermine, Blizzard have clearly realized they cannot reasonably put out enough actual damage to make healing challenging, so they have had to resort to the band-aid solution that is healing absorbs, which have been plastered on every single hard boss. This might make healthbars seem less spiky when looking at them, but in reality, the actual healing requirement is just as spiky, and it only deepens the importance of correctly pre-solving the healing cooldown assignment puzzle.
Rotational spells and gameplay these days lack the feeling of “oomph” and importance that used to make healing feel the way it did. Constant access to strong cooldowns is not a good substitute for the feeling and dopamine that good target selection and spell choice used to bring you.
How Do We Solve It?
In general, the solution to the problem is obvious. We need to have a massive pruning of healing cooldowns and their power level across the board in favour of buffing rotational healing. Going in to Season 2 we actually did received significant buffs to our rotational spells and it has been a great change of pace, so I don’t think Holy Paladin is the biggest offender in this regard, but the whole reason I am even talking about this issue in a Holy Paladin specific article is because it ties very well into one of the few remaining gameplay issues that we have left, namely Awakening.
Awakening causes several different issues for us. It more than doubles our uptime on Avenging Wrath which causes our healing outside Avenging Wrath to feel even worse. The more uptime any spec has on a cooldown, the less that cooldown will feel like an actual cooldown. In the most extreme cases you end up with specs that are in cooldown windows more than half the time; thus, being in those windows becomes the standard gameplay loop and power level of the spec, which in turn causes any downtime of that cooldown to feel extraordinarily bad. This was the case for Holy Paladin in Sepulcher and Vault of the Incarnates, and it was absolutely horrible.
I obviously think it is fine to have some specs be more cooldown dependant than others, but over the last few expansions, most healer specs have been given so many cooldowns that it is impossible to not be dependent on them, because you simply cannot allow non-cooldown based healing to be strong if players have access to this many cooldowns this frequently.
Awakening causes unfun friction in our rotational gameplay because you often want to hold your Awakening proc for a long time to make it line up with Holy Prism and damage events. This means that for significant periods of time, you simply cannot cast Judgment, which feels very bad since Judgment is an extremely important spell that, talking about bloat, does so many different things for us. It generates Holy Power, procs Empyrean Legacy, heals a lot with Greater Judgment, Judgment of Light, and Truth Prevails, it procs Veneration and Power of the Silver Hand, grants cooldown reduction to Holy Shock when consuming Infusion of Light, and it just does a ton of damage with Righteous Judgment. On top of this, if you’re playing Avenging Crusader it also heals via that, and for Lightsmith it also procs Hammer and Anvil.
Completely removing Awakening would thus be a great place to start the pruning for us as it would hit two birds with one stone, but it should obviously be done as part of a larger pruning across the board for every healer.
To be clear, Holy Paladin is really fun to play right now, it is better than it has been in years, and the current possible variety in talent options and different playstyles is simply great. The issues above are more just an issue with healing in general and not an indication that the spec isn’t actually still fun to play.
Holy Paladin Hero Talents: Lightsmith vs. Herald of the Sun
Hero Talents have undeniably been a major cause of the bloat and power creep in the game, and for Holy that’s also the case. Again, I don’t think Holy Paladin is the worst when it comes to this, but around 20-25% of our overall throughput comes directly from Hero Talents.
Our Hero Talents have been a bit of a mixed bag. Herald of the Sun is definitely the more fun of the two as it focuses on enhancing our already existing kit and cooldowns, and it comes with very thematic animations in the form of the beams from Sun’s Avatar. Lightsmith on the other hand adds more random healing and damage effects which don’t interact with our core toolkit in particularly interesting ways.
Lightsmith
While I can appreciate the fantasy and theme of buffing and bolstering you allies with Holy Bulwark and Sacred Weapon, the spells fall short of living up to that ideal. Due to Divine Inspiration, Holy Bulwark will mostly be up on tanks where the extra shielding is rarely needed, as tanks are usually self-sustaining. Holy Bulwark stacks up its absorb every 2 seconds making it feel really weak an unimpactful, even if it does do decent healing over its whole duration.
Sacred Weapon just procs random damage or healing which you would never notice without looking at your healing breakdown. There is some interesting dynamic with Tempered in Battle, but last time Lightsmith was meta in PvE it felt like it would kill someone just as often as it would save people.
Casting Holy Bulwark and Sacred Weapon also doesn’t feel great because they have no immediate effect. I wish they would at least give a Holy Power or something to cast.
Hammer and Anvil was also a major issue for Lightsmith in Season 1 where it was simply way too strong for how random it was. A Judgment crit was like a 5 man Lay on Hands, so it felt awful when your Judgment just refused to crit. In Season 2 it has thankfully been nerfed by more than 50%, but it still has an issue with its range. It has a 20 yard radius from the targeted mob, but the radius starts at the center of the enemy’s hitbox, so on very large enemies it will often hit 0 players.
Something that says a lot of about Lightsmith is that Laying Down Arms, in my opinion, is the most fun part of Lightsmith. In combination with Tirion’s Devotion it can bring Lay on Hands down to a 2-3 minute cooldown, but beyond that, Lightsmith is honestly super bland.
Herald of the Sun
I love that Herald of the Sun is more focused on making our core spells and gameplay more interesting and fun to use. A small favourite of mine is the Aurora talent which just makes Holy Prism so much more satisfying to cast and is exactly what I would want from a Hero Talent. Blessing of An’she while inherently random, is not so strong that it is frustrating when it doesn’t proc, but it actually just feels great when it does. Luminosity, Second Sunrise, and Solar Grace are also all fine filler talents that aren’t trying to do too much so they don’t feel like pointless bloat.
That being said, I do think that the capstone talent Sun’s Avatar is a little problematic. While I do love how thematic the beams are, I also strongly dislike how much it makes us rely on people being stacked for it to be effective. For example, it could be a lot less restrictive and annoying, but just as thematic and cool, if casting a Holy Power spender during Avenging Wrath would cause a Chain Heal style beam that only healed the players hit and not players standing in the actual beams. This would keep the thematic animation and would go a long way towards reducing the delta between our stacked and spread burst healing, which absolutely needs to be addressed.
The current version of Sun’s Avatar’s beams are too powerful for stacked burst healing, while being practically useless for spread out burst healing.
It is pretty “funny” that with the current design, we are relying on other players to stand in beams that they cannot actually see as the beams are only visible to the Paladin themself.
Season 3 Holy Paladin Wishlist
Besides the issues talked about earlier in the article regarding Awakening, Sun’s Avatar, and Lightsmith in general, I already think Holy Paladin is in a great spot playstyle wise, so I don’t have a long laundry list of things I wish would change in that regard, but I do think we have quite a few poorly designed or very undertuned talents that really could use a helping hand for Season 3, and I wish all the talents listed below would be looked at.
Class Tree Talents
With Patch 11.0.5 the Paladin class tree received a major overhaul, which implemented quite a few new talents that just don’t do much or anything for Holy, and I think it bears repeating just how bad some of them are.
- Worthy Sacrifice – Automatically casting Blessing of Sacrifice on a random player and putting it on cooldown is already bad in itself, but Worthy Sacrifice also casts it after a player has already dipped low. This is just an atrocious way to teach players to use their defensives.
- Steed of Liberty – Eliminates your ability to use Blessing of Freedom on its own, almost doubles its cooldown by tying it to Divine Steed, reduces its duration by more than 50%, forces you to use your Divine Steed to gain its benefits, and it prevents you from casting it on other players. A talent like this just never make any sense to pick. It is atrocious in every single way.
- Faith’s Armor – Only buffs your own armour, regardless of who you cast Word of Glory on. This is almost completely useless in PvE as 90% of damage you take is Magic damage. It only has some minor value in solo content like Delves.
- Eye for an Eye – I really don’t understand what this talent is doing in the Class Tree. If you ever get aggro as Holy or Retribution you are almost certainly going to die unless you press Divine Shield or Blessing of Protection. Yes, Eye for an Eye does work with Divine Shield, but using Divine Shield causes you to lose aggro for the duration, so it is completely pointless.
- Sacred Strength – This talent is just laughably undertuned. It could be increased by 500% and you still wouldn’t take it. The fact that is taken over Divine Purpose by Blizzards own in-game “Starter Build” is honestly just detrimental to the unknowing players who might actually use the Starter Builds.
Spec Tree Talents
Our Spec Tree is thankfully not as crazy as the Class Tree, but there are still a couple of talents I would love to see changed a little.
- Liberation – I think the design of this talent is pretty cool. Usually increasing you Haste will come at the cost of your mana economy, but Liberation works to off-set that. Sadly, it is just way too weak to ever be considered useful. I think it needs to be buffed and changed to affect Holy Shock instead of Crusader Strike since Crusader Strike is already super cheap.
- Power of the Silver Hand – When this talent procs you can get some giant Holy Shocks, which feels extremely good. However, it only procs from casting Judgment, Flash of Light, or Holy Light, which we simply do not cast often enough to proc it as much as it should. It consistently falls short of the 2 RPPM it’s supposed to have. It would be better if it was changed to proc from all spells in general like a Trinket or Weapon Enchant, or at least just from spells we cast more often.
- Tyr’s Deliverance / Relentless Inquisitor – Relentless Inquisitor is a very strong talent, but it is locked behind Tyr’s Deliverance which makes it very annoying to pick up. It could be great if Relentless Inquisitor was moved to Tyr’s Deliverance’s spot and Tyr’s Deliverance was moved down a slot.
Additionally, I’ve always found it strange that Tyr’s Deliverance and Boundless Salvation do not work with Word of Glory and Eternal Flame. They would be a lot more competitive if they did. It seems like a hold-over from Tyr’s Deliverance’s introduction in Legion, where we didn’t have Holy Power.
All in all, I think Holy Paladin is a very well rounded and well designed spec currently. Apart from the Avenging Crusader and Lightsmith bump in Season 1, the spec has only improved and gotten more fun to play since the end of Dragonflight. I hope that we can continue that trend going in to Season 3 and beyond!
About the Author
This guide or article is written by Clarius. Clarius is a long time Holy Paladin player of more than 15 years, he plays in the Danish guild Sabotage, and is an active staff member of the Paladin Discord. If you have feedback or questions, feel free to ping him there, or DM him.
About The Author
