Fixing Holy pallies the "Blizzard Way"

#0 - Dec. 4, 2008, 6:58 p.m.

OK, so we got some cool new stuff in LK. BUT we have a ton of trouble with group damage - gimping us for 5 mans - and worse creating a trend toward avoiding grouping with Holy pallies. Nobody seems to be thinking we fail at single target tank healing. We certainly don't have a perception problem in the community at large so e'll always have a raid slot to heal the tank(s)

Many of us want a group or AoE heal. However, Blizz's vision for the paladin seems to be to try to be more creative than further homogenizing classes by just giving us that straightforward solution.

If I could try to connect some dots...this seems to be the Blizzard Way for Holy paladins...

1 - Niche in larger groups is best single target healer - meaning we will need both high mana efficiency and very large single target heals
2 - Solution to 5 man AoE healing is Beacon. Idea is to allow us to heal others with beacon keeping the tank up.
3- Group or AoE heal is not allowed, probably at least in part given #1

Now this is a bit of a problem, because it does not quite work well enough. Even with Beacon making the tank "safe", trying to carry 3 dpsers through AoE with our one at a time heal spam is not always possible. Also if a dpser pops a cookie or a pot at an inopportune moment it can steal a heal from the tank.

So, trying to stay in Blizz's target zone, maybe some of the following ideas might work...

Overheal Storage Talent - Maybe have a talent that lets us overheal our targets for X health which is held for Y period of time, and then applied when said target reaches full minus X...or Z% health, or some threshold. Maybe even 5%.

Talented spell that temporarily removes the cooldown from Holy Shock. Would probably need to have this spellon a short cooldown - as short as a typical bosses time between AoE attacks. If this seems OP there maybe could be a penalty like no chance of crit while in effect - something that makes it good for group healing without putting us too far over the top on single target throughput. So we still have to "serial single target" heal, but at least we can do it fast enough to be effective.

Allow beacon to include overheal within a certain time window - e.g. transfers effective healing that would have been done vs. target's lowest health in last 2s - or even better based on their health when the cast was started instead of finished.

My point really is that maybe there might be some ways to solve our problems that are neither OP, nor overly homogenizing. There are some quick ideas, there must be many other approaches that could be considered that would work.

Ghostcrawler

#11 - Dec. 4, 2008, 7:54 p.m.

Personally, I have run every heroic with a paladin healing but I realize antecdotal data only goes so far.

There are certainly situations where paladins have to work a bit more. But I haven't encountered anything where I wished we had a priest, druid or shaman healing us instead.

The same is true of nearly every class. Mages are better at CC in a lot of dungeons than other classes. Paladins are still probably better AE tanks than death knights. But that doesn't mean that only the best death knights can handle those dungeons.

Now here's an extreme example. Before druids had an out-of-combat rez, many players did believe it was a liability to bring a druid healer, especially whenever they were going to be faced with a respawn situation. We don't think paladin limited AE healing is anywhere close to this degree of problem, but I'd certainly be interested in hearing more.

Ghostcrawler

#182 - Dec. 5, 2008, 7:42 p.m.

Q u o t e:
GC will probably never read this, but I will post my idea here anyway.

I read all of these threads.

There is a continuum with “I can’t heal this encounter” here, and <-------------------------------------------------> “all classes have the same abilities” here. We need for “bring the player not the class” to fall somewhere in the middle without cozying up too close to either extreme.

Q u o t e:
GC there are only 2 heroic instances where I will take a druid, shaman, priests above a paladin healer. Heroic Halls of Lightning and Heroic Halls of Stone. I'm not saying paladins can't do it, I'm saying its easier with one of the other healers.

Sure, and a paladin probably is a better healer on Patchwerk than a druid. It only gets to be a problem, in our eyes, if the paladin struggles so much to heal that paladins have trouble getting groups or you start to see “LF1M healer – no pallies." I’m sure people will respond that on THEIR server that happens all the time, but overall we don’t think it’s a problem. Yet.

Heroic Loken is hard. He’s the hardest heroic boss. Having a priest may make the encounter easier, but it doesn’t make it tirival and having a paladin doesn’t mean you are almost certainly doomed to fail. Honestly it has a lot more to do with what the rest of the group is doing to minimize the damage they take than what the healer has to do to keep everyone up.

Malygos is a slightly different situation. We kept amping up the damage of Vortex because CoH and WG could just easily heal through it. We finally decided those two spells were just OP and pushing priests and druids into just relying on that one spell too much. With the cooldown on COH and WG we will probably nerf the Vortex. I say probably because players are farming the encounter already so I’m not 100% that things will go from farm to impossible with this change, but we’ll be sure to test it out a lot and watch for your feedback.

But I wouldn’t turn this into (another) thread on CoH and WG. I would focus instead on whether paladins have the tools they need, especially for 5-player heroics.