My issues with Glimmer + Suggestions/Fix

[Daisu-tarren-mill (Daisu)]

Hello, before I state my opinion I’ll save people time and explain where I’m coming from.

I’m a pally main since TBC . Been playing paladin and all of its specs since ~2.4.3. I’ve been doing PvP, PvE and I’ve been collecting stuff, such as achievements, mounts, pets, transmogs etc since then. I try to do literally everything in my free time.

Now, I wanna explain my concern for the trait that is gonna be our talent in Shadowlands. Glimmer is fine, it’s a quick fix for the issue that holy paladins have. But I think it can be much better.

The issue: Holy paladins have always lacked aoe healing, in specific, raid healing. In legion we had sac aura that was the strongest raid cooldown. It was honestly fine, it just needed a bit of balancing so that it wouldn’t be that much stronger compared to other raid cds. But apart from that, holy paladins have never had any reliable aoe healing spell. I know they had one in cataclysm iirc, but it just felt weird, I’m glad they gave up on that, I barely remember that spell.

Single target healing has always been fine, that has never been a concern. But let’s actually talk about Glimmer, what it does and how it works. You use holy shock and it puts glimmer on the target, next time you us holy shock, it will heal that target that you holy shocked before, if it’s an enemy, it damages it. You can only have 8 glimmers up in total.

Remove the limit. Lower the power. Having a limit on glimmer just feels so bad, there’s no other way for me to describe it. If priests get to have as many atonements as possible, why don’t paladins get to have as many glimmers as possible? It’s way easier for priests to put atonements on targets and they have a better version of glimmer.

Being able to put it on enemies doesn’t make up for the downside, in fact, it is irrelevant. You can only cast so many glimmers in 30 seconds, which is the duration of the glimmer effect btw. The players that are experienced and do their rotational flawlessly won’t get rewarded 'cause they simply can’t have more than 8 glimmers up at once.

If you were to remove glimmer, this is what I would suggest, since I don’t think that glimmer has become one of those abilities that paladin cannot be played without anymore. An example is Legion, where Wake of Ashes was introduced for retribution and it built itself into the gameplay of ret paladin so hard, that the spec cannot be played without it, it just feels like it’s missing its core ability. So far glimmer does not feel like that. In fact, it feels like a really cheap solution for the problem (aoe healing).

So if holy paladins didn’t have glimmer, this is what I would suggest. You know how they get a talent that extends the duration of wings and allows you to have lower cd on holy shock in wings? Allow that talent to also reduce the cd of Light of Dawn the way it reduces the cd of Holy Shock.

Holy paladins have a pvp talent: Darkest before the Dawn. It increases the healing of Light of Dawn every 5 sec whenever it is not on cooldown. Stacks up to 10 times iirc. This is not used. This talent has no priority over other more important ones for it to be used in pvp, even tho it seems like a decent talent if you wanna focus on aoe healing in pvp. Make this a passive effect, just give it to every holy paladin, or make it a normal low lvl talent that everybody can use. Make it so that paladins can choose between this and some single target focused talent.

Make the (currently) lvl 15 talent Light’s Hammer stronger, it is too weak, it is not viable at any point. Make that stronger and/or give it a 2nd charge.

Add a talent in the glimmer talent row that would work like Grace of the Justicar. A talent that would compete with glimmer, since glimmer is so strong, there is barely any other talent that can come close to that. But if you add a talent like Grace of the Justicar, which allows judgment to heal nearby units by a small amount, it would be a strong competitor vs glimmer build and it would be a strong aoe healing talent, whereas glimmer would dominate the midrange, since applying glimmer to many targets would be difficult. So let’s say on 15-25 targets, glimmer would start falling behind, it will depend on the player’s haste, this is where Grace of the Justicar will come into play, a talent that will either all, or a fixed amount of targets for a certain amount (this is something that will need balancing).

Also, this talent must not be in the row of melee wings, cause this suppose to work with melee wings if it gets implemented in holy paladin’s talents.

[Wolfblud-stormscale]

We where aoe healing gods in MoP Holy radiance and mop mastery is all we need.

[Alexiefish-doomhammer]

ok i hear what you are saying, and to an extent i agree with some of it

but i feel like you haven’t seen the shadow lands class changes for paladins, LOD no longer has a cd and is tied to holy power. so your sanctified wrath and darkest before the dawn points confuse me. i expect that glimmer will likely be the default raid talent. and bov will likely be the default m+ talent. with that talent row you are picking between 2 target passive healing, 5 target passive healing and 8 target passive healing. with glimmer being tied to spell power and the way holy power works with beacons i think we will see a much more balanced set of talents. and the amna cost tied to CS will help to balance out some of the more silly paladin raid healing.

if we are talking about the current expansion, the 8 targets is more than enough, people very rarely need more than 8 ticks from glimmer to be topped.

my glimmer heals for 24k (48k crit) on 8 targets that between 200k - 400k hps jsut from glimmer, i will always have 8 up regardless of how bad my rotation is because im stacking IT to the point where HS and wings dont really have cool downs any more

when glimmer was uncapped, as a holy paladin you have this single moment of huge burst that was very punishing if you messed up your rotation, the 8 target cap with IT makes it so you can get similar hps but sustain it with a much more forgiving rotation.

now obviously im talking about a PVE perspective. anyone looking at my armoury can see i dont really pvp.

now as we have established you are talking about the current exp lets talk bosses

Mythic nzoth : as the paladin you will take the first inside phase which means the number of targets you can heal is capped to 8. the targets available go from 20 > 8 > 20 >10 >20, both of the difficult healing periods occur on the 10 and 8. making the target cap irrelevant in my opinion -> side note my team hasn’t hit the secret mythic phase yet so i cant talk about the heal req there.

carapace: you spent almost the whole fight split into 2 or 3 groups with a max of 10 targets at a time only coming together at the end granted the healing req is very high at the end but our throughput it more than enough

ilyganoth: on mythic we used the 0 dispel tactic which means you can only really hit about 8 targets for most of the fight so an 8 target cap dosent really hurt too much (side note i was on holiday when we killed this boss)

drestagath: the paladin usually gets regulated to the melee tenticals so that keeps us for healing many targets, that said you can easily snipe people with a holy shock if they are going down. there is a lot of aoe burst here especially towards the end from throes and en tropic crash, where we could benefit from hitting more targets, but actually more often than not if you prio the 8 people with the lowest hp then you will prevent deaths, you have a lot of time to top up after each burst of dmg

ra den: probably the 1 fight where glimmer will cause a lot of deaths, players need a glimmer cancel macro for the last phase or they explode. the healing req here isnt too bad but i suppose having 20 glimmers would let you more easily deal with healing absorbs and the vita nightmare overlaps, tank healing is much more important here and controlled healing will prevent deaths (i prefer to use LOM in the last phase it lets me much more carefully control players hp)

vexiona: another weird one. a lot of the time you are focused on the melee prioritising them over the ranged due to how the raid splits. but most of the time there just isnt a lot of raid healing. the tank healing is much more important here and thats where the paladin really shines

hive mind: a fantastic healing fight. this encounter layers damage in such a way that if you mess up 1 mechanic the next one kills you either by increasing the damage you take or preventing all healing you receive by 100% a high healing fight for sure but one where you arnt really in danger unless you mess up and if you do mess up only a chunky external or an immunity will save you

shadhar: probably the 1 fight where i would love to have 20 glimmers, high constant and consistent raid damage this one is my Favorited to push healing on

xanesh: you can afk this fight and still be top hps lets more on,

skittera, maut and wtatheon all have super low healing req even considering mauts reflection mechanic. you dont need glimmer here just people to not be brain dead and the boss will fall over.

so why did i go on this rant, well the plan was to illustrate how the bosses have been designed with the glimmer cap in mind, particularly those harder bosses ilyganoth carapace and nzoth. if you weaken glimmer while the paladin can only physically hit 8-10 targets what you end up with is a much weaker paladin overall