Holy Paladin Changes in Midnight
Being a few weeks in to the Midnight Alpha, every spec has received tons of changes, and Holy Paladin is no exception. In this article we will go over the most important changes, what they mean, what is done well and what could be done better. Let's just jump straight into it with our new Apex Talent
Beacon of the Savior.
Apex TalentBeacon of the Savior is a "smart" Beacon that automatically applies to the lowest health ally within 30 yards when entering combat, and it will then continuously jump to the new lowest health ally when its current target is topped off, or if another target falls below 30%. It has two supporting talents (
Beacon of the Savior and
Beacon of the Savior) that, respectively, increases its transfer rate and causes it to grant an absorb shield when it jumps to a new target.
Combining its smart target selection with its incredibly high transfer rate of 50%, which is almost three times as high as your standard passive Beacons, this Apex talent is going to be very strong, in both Mythic+ and Raid environments. It might even be too strong and take away from our rotational spells, but we will have to see.
You are going to want to track
Beacon of the Savior on your raid and party frames, as you want to avoid healing the person it is on and instead let the Beacon do its job. With the addon restrictions this is not going to be something we can customize, so we just have to hope Blizzard shows it properly for us.
90 Second Wings and AwakeningWe have a new 2-point talent,
Call of the Righteous, which reduces
Avenging Wraths cooldown by 15 seconds and its duration by 2.5 seconds per point. This talent is implemented to partially offset a separate change to
Awakening.
Awakening no longer procs
Avenging Wrath, but instead just grants your Holy Power spenders a 10% chance to increases crit chance of your next
Judgment (or
Hammer of Wrath) by 100% and its damage by 30%.
I have never been a big fan of
Awakening, so I think this is a good change. Being able to get
Avenging Wrath down to a 90 second cooldown, will help a lot with our cooldown coverage. In the War Within, Holy Paladin has been lacking in the cooldown department compared to other healing specs, especially in Raids, so with this change and changes to other healers, we should have more parity now.
The 90 second cooldown is especially powerful for Herald of the Sun because of how frontloaded the burst healing of Herald of the Sun is. We do not care much about the reduced
Avenging Wrath duration that
Call of the Righteous causes because our strongest burst healing will already be over by that point.
Holy Shock and Crusader StrikeCrusader Strike is now replaced by
Holy Shock for Holy Paladins. I think this is a great change that will help the spec focus a lot more on its core spells and procs. I am a firm believer that less can be more. By removing spells and reworking talents that were only used in certain builds or playstyles, Blizzard will be able to make what's left more interesting with spells and talents that now work for the whole spec, and not just for niche builds.
For example,
Crusader's Might now causes
Holy Shock to reduce the cooldown of
Judgment, which makes it useful for all builds, because all builds will use both spells.
Avenging Crusader now only transfers healing from
Judgment, and because of the
Crusader's Might change, we no longer ignore our most iconic spell,
Holy Shock, during
Avenging Crusader.
Here is what Blizzard themselves said regarding this change.
Developers’ notes:
We’re making a change to condense the amount of Holy Power generators with a cooldown Holy Paladin has to track to see if this streamlines the rotational experience. There may be gaps rotationally for now while we tweak the finer details, but we want to try this and see how it feels to play.