Beacon of Light Ruined Holy

| Tuesday, December 9, 2008
It all made sense.

Paladins were not AoE healers. They were single-target healers. More specifically they make a /cast [target=nameoftank] Flash of Light macro and then poke that button for a few hours. It was amazingly boring. It was amazingly bad at anything else. It was amazing like a terrible movie that you somehow can't stop watching.

Then Blizzard ruined it all.

Paladins are sort of AoE healers. But they are still single-target healers. I blame Beacon of Light. It made everything backwards. Now the best way to heal is to heal everyone except the tank.

What's next, they turn into a melee spec and heal through melee attacks? Will they punch people to life? If you're confused on the concept, watch episode 15 of Red vs. Blue for a demonstration of the proper technique and effectiveness.

1 comments:

Heywood Djiblomi said...

I don't know that I would characterize "Bacon" as something that "ruins" the Holy paladin. Rather, it makes 5-mans with significant AoE damage "difficult" rather than "insane" for a Holy paladin.

One of the most frustrating instances I ever did as Holy was Heroic Sethekk Halls. You know which encounter I'm referring to: Talon King Ikiss. On normal, easy fight; on heroic, I finally gave up on it. It seemed that only EXTREMELY well-geared paladins could survive it with either HUGE mana pools, or high crit ratings, in order to spam max rank HLs.

I've specced Holy this week to help alleviate a temporary healer shortage in our guild while many others are leveling up to 80. I haven't run all the instances in Wrath yet, but I've got to say that the boss in VH with the AoE shadowbolt spam (reminiscent of Hex Lord Malacrass where everyone would clump on the priest for CoH) would be virtually impossible without Bacon (particularly on "Heroic" - I kept getting the damn debuff for three tries in a row, but that is another story altogether).

Along with Sacred Shield, it is more than the FoL spam on the tank to which you refer. We have a couple cooldowns to manage, and the ability with haste talents(JotP and the one that gives a super fast HL after a HS crit) to drop big heals in a hurry. I'm doing a lot more thinking about what I'm doing than I used to, which was just purely a reactive exercise; now, I get to be proactive with CD management and planning. It has become more interesting - though I do prefer to tank or swing a two-hander around.

Our bread and butter is still single-target maintenance, but we now have better (though still far behind other healing classes) ability to handle AoE damage. It adheres to Blizzard's homogenization of classes to be less-reliant on specific classes/specs.

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