I have recently got onto the healer train, I’ve found it very satisfying and engaging gameplay. Whilst I like healing, I was drawn more to holy pala due to it’s use of plate armor, shield and weapon.
I understand that I am not a damage dealer, but will I still be able to quest and do world quests at high lvl and take mobs down with ease? Also, if I get jumped by an enemy player will I stand a chance at taking them down or will I just have to heal myself until they get bored?
Like I said, I know I am healer, but I’d like to be able to deal some DPS so I can hold my own.
Followed, I’d like to try Holy again someday but the rotation looks really complicated for healing. But with essentially 3 buttons for DPS it looks even weaker than Prot, would like to know if that’s true ! Retribution is boring to death so changing specs is my only way to keep playing Paladin.
The answer is yes to all of those. Hpal right now, has arguably the highest DPS of all the healers by a significant margin.
Once you get the proper stats, azerite powers and corruptions, you can pretty much solo anything. I don’t see a reason to go ret most of the time. And while your CDs are up, your burst dps can keep up with DPS specs.
It’s quite fun if you ask me.
I used to play it a lot in Legion and use it as alt in BfA.
The AoE killing potential is rather slow. What you do is consecration and attack things one by one, potentially getting holy prism talent and using it on yourself (So it hits 5 enemies near you). While doing this, if you have glimmer, get it on several units and keep it going. Twilight devastation really helps.
In single target however, paladin is pretty good. Very good in fact. You can do 80% of performance of a dps spec to a single target, specially with cooldowns.
Given this, yes you can do solo content with ease. Rexxar is very easy to holy paladins, as entering visions as solo healer reduces the damage and healing of all enemies in vision by 40% and as holy you can burst him down like no other class. If you divine shield when he summons the first boar, you can kill him before divine shield duration ends. The same goes for rest of vision of N’zoth. Don’t pull too much, and focus on bosses. Its easy.
WQ are easy as well. Its slightly slow, but you can never die and single target is as good as a dps.
Can’t really know right now, but holy gets access to shield of righteousness, which uses 3 holy power and deals aoe damage in front of you and increase your armor, it could be quite huge for its solo content potential.
I sustain around 50k dps on my holy paladin without dmg corruptions. But I am very well geared. I recommend stacking haste and crit and you should be good. Holy shock is you’re big dmg dealer so pump as many of those as you can into mobs useing Cs to reset it. Heal useing your infusion procs and you should be good
I use holy a lot for questing mainly when I can’t be bothered to change spec. It dose work but it will be slower the ret or port
The healing rotation for holy is very simple as it stands right now
It’s all about getting as many holy shocks and glimmers out as possible with all of your other spells being filler.
I expect this will be the same in shadow lands too as the only change to our rotation is swapping lod for wog
As a general rule of thumb it’s holy shock > crusader strike > filler spell ( you can use pretty much anything to fill be it dps or healing spells) all of our cooldowns and really short so we can pop them on almost every pack
We also have a great training wheels talent in the form of bov which helps a lot in dungeons and m+ as you get used to the spec
Unless you are planing to push really high keys or high mythic bosses I wouldn’t worry too much about the optimisation of holy
so the mastery lightbringer, works by increasing healing to a target based on proximity.
at 10 yards you get 100% of your mastery which drops in a linear fashion until you hit 0% at 40 yards,
however the other thing to keep in mind is your aura is a 15 yard aura, so really you want the raid to be within 15 yards of you
in addition you will need to be in melee to reset holy shock to play optimally, so really what happens is you just plant your self in melee and dont worry too much about your mastery
personally i dont stack mastery on my gear at all preferring to take versi instead which gives about the same amount of extra healing on average.
also there is a talent you can take called rule of law which increased the rang of you heals auras and mastery by 50% for a short period of time. which is awesome when you want to aura mastery or heal someone who has just gone out of range. overall i wouldn’t worry too much about positioning, just make sure you can hit something to reset holy shock and you will be fine.
also just to add a little extra about shadowlands, so far from what we have seen on the alpha the game play in shadowlands is going to be exactly the same as it is now. with shocking to push out glimmers and crusader striking to bring that shock back round quicker. our holy power spenders are very weak right now with word of glory not really being worth the global it costs to cast it. i expect that to change but essentially its going to be the same as it is now with the occasional holy power dump into either WOG for single target or LOD for aoe.
its worth noting that in shadowlands wog only hits 1 target.
Holy pally is far the most fun and less clunky of the healers in my option, as i do love to go full shockadin with range dps trinkets with int. Sadly right now Corruption takes away the dmg flex some Hpallys can pull off in M+.
And for the ones that use Twilight D in m+ as Holy, it seems like putting glimmer on more targets gives a big chanse to proc TD so can easly top the meter by that , so haste isnt such a big deal while running Divine Purpose
