I mained Holy Paladin through thick and thin for over a decade, pretty much until the glimmer melee build became meta in BFA where I started to dislike the gameplay, but never has Hpala felt so bad than in DF.
The gameplay and numbers just do not feel good at all. Being Melee was at least offset by Glimmer and Ashen Hallow cheese in the last 2 expansions but without that cheese in DF it’s just a downside, Hpala damage isn’t that good and it’s certainly not fun to do the least interesting part of the retri rotation in order to heal.
In an expansion where some of my favourite classes are getting multiple situational builds for their specs with the return of many of their best spells and passive effects, Holy Paladin has fallen short. The spec tree is split in 2 where you make a gameplay decision rather than a situational talent build by choosing caster or melee and there really isn’t a return of any iconic Holy spells like Eternal Flame, Holy Radiance or Daybreak. In fact Holy just continues to be the same controversial BFA Glimmer build but without being overtuned enough to be fun. Oh and the mastery is still awful.
It’s great to see Prot doing well, Retri is getting a lot of love in .7 with it’s rework but can we acknowledge that Holy is not in a good place and should definitely be in the line up for a rework too? There needs to be a unified direction for Holy Paladin, as much as I would like that to be a return to more standard Holy gameplay, at this point we just need to choose one and stick it out rather than trying to force 2 vastly different gameplay builds into one tree.
Maybe this is just an “Old man shouts at cloud” post but I’d like Blizzard to remember this spec was a caster for the vast majority of the game and many Holy Paladin players like myself still want that to be the core gameplay rather than a weird clone of Uther from HOTS, leave fist-weaving to the monks.
I desperately just want my old main back and when I heard there was a caster build in DF it got me extremely excited but after trying Hpala, it’s still melee only if you want to be viable and it feels like it’s in beta compared to everything else I’ve played this expac, especially in PvP.
