In Legion and BFA Avenging Crusader was part of classic Holy Paladin build. Crusader Strike could be used freely and AC felt like a “safe button for relaxing heal”.
In SL with CS costing a lot of mana and clear existence of Glimmer Build and Beacon of Virute builds Avenging Crusader feels like a lost talent. It requires solid mana resources to use, nothing synergize with it and complement it well enough. Picking it up is pretty ineffective since it just replaces Avenging Wrath. Its way more profitable to just pick alternative talent that directly influence Holy Shock CD.
Imo the best solution would be moving it off Avenging Wrath spell and making it its own talent that gives Crusader Strike the passive healing effect. That way it would be picked in classic Holy Paladin build and give another healing spell in form of Crusader Strike. With proper tuning the numbers and mana cost it will be so much needed AOE heal, extremely satisfying to use between HP spenders.
Paladin in Shadowlands feels like a lost class to main, as long as they keep this holy power obsession, imo.I haven’t been having fun with my pala for a long time.
So…it’s unsalvageable anyways.With Avenging crusader fixed or not.Unless a class rework comes.
While I understand your concern we haven’t had the tuning parse yet.
Also I always understood the original design of AC to intentially be the talent designed for a more DPS orientated healer. It makes sense if they are going back to that then it would be less healing than its competitors
Now in response to some of your concerns directly. They made glimmer a talent so that they they could better balance it bymakeing it scale off spell power in addition they altered the mana cost of crusader strike specifically to handle the fact that the glimmer build didn’t use very much mana
I don’t fully understand why you are concerned about the existence of beacon of virtue or glimmer. Avenging crusader competes with sanctified wrath and awakening I understand that if you were playing the glimmer build then you would want to take sanctified wrath. But if you were playing with either beacon of faith or beacon of virtue. Why does that prevent you from taking avenging crusader.
With the talents as they are right now I could very easily see myself taking both beacon of virtue and avenging crusader into a mythic plus situation. Both of very expensive spells but mana it doesn’t matter mythic plus
Naturally your covenant and legendaries are also going to affect this but I don’t think it’s black and white and I don’t think that avenging crusader is as dead as you seem to think it is
I just want to add that you said in legion and in BFA avenger crusader was part of the classic holy paladin tool kit I played both of those expansion and my overall memory of legion was aura of sacrifice aura mastery with either beacon of light or beacon of faith in raids and bacon virtue in mythic plus, with a lot of holy shock and flashing. My overall memories of bfa was avenging crusader was cool in the first tier then it was glimmer for 3 content tiers
Finally as you can probably see from my character profile I don’t really PvP so naturally I’m tackling this from the perspective of a cutting edge raider and someone who enjoys the occasional high key so naturally my comments are going to be bias and I’m not going to sit here and pretend I understand how pvp healing works
P.s. I actually really like your suggestion of turning the talent into something that applies passive healing to crusader strike. I want to go one step further and suggest that the effects of avenging crusader should be our mastery
Holy power is fine for holy Paladin it really doesn’t affect us very much and actually gives us more tools to aoe heal and aoe dps.
My only concern is locking too much healing behind spending holy power but right now all of the healing is locked behind wings to the point where when you don’t have wings you might as well not bother so any change to that is a good change in my book