Holy Paladin in CataFollow

Hoping for some feedback on what others think.

2 situational AOE heals with long CD's make us **** poor raid healing. The holy paladin community on cata are claiming that the reduction to efficiency at tank healing has not been offset by the type of raid healing we are given.

Seems that despite additional spells we are going to be spamming HS and WoG.

Divine Plea is a troublesome talent and has been nerfed hard. Currently we lack a viable mana regen source compared to other healers. Mana Tide + Waters Shield, Innervate or Shadowfiend etc are pulling back mana respectably. The 50% debuff on healing while DP up is a significantly larger hit with Cata model healing than it is in WotLK.

BG and Arenas we are very hard to kill, but are entirely incapable of keeping anyone alive from a focus fire.

Nope. Seal of Wisdom is gone. We get Seal of Insight, which is a percent of base mana on melee attack.

I have a shaman and a paladin.

DP in its current form is a powerful tool, 25% ever minute is too much. As opposed to my shaman where 12% on a longer cooldown felt like too little.


They have geared it back down to 10% mana on a 2 min CD. 50% is still there though, and 50% in WotLK =/= 50% in Cata. The effect is much more significant based on how cata healing is.


Where now on a mana intensive fight you can pop DP in a low healing part of the fight perhaps with AW to offset it, in Cata its just going to equal 15 seconds where you can't heal. Basically a 15 second evocation, it's terrible.

The AoE heals are situational in a bad way.

You basically have Area of Effect heals, which means you are going to have fights where it is beast, and then you are going to have fights where it will be completely useless. Then there are GCD's on the AOE heals that are so long that it doesn't help. So basically they have gutted our talents focusing on our niche on tank healing. Then they give us some really poorly designed AOE heals with fugly timers that are situational and mana intensive and are like "we gave you raid heals why can't you be happy".

Frankly it is the same poor design that tried to push for the FOL hot on Sacred Shield. Whoever came up with that one should lose their job.

By the way, to be fair, Priests do have a mana-regeneration ability that (completely) gimps healing output - Paladins aren't alone in this. It's just that Paladins don't really have anything BUT such an ability, while (while Priests do need to use it), Divine Hymn is only a part of their mana-regen 'rotation'.

I whole heartedly agree, however the push to 10 man raiding will never accommodate the niche healing we had in say T5.

What I liked about TBC was that healers in a 25 man raid had their strengths and weaknesses however as a group you played to your strengths and weaknesses and overcame. Which for me was a microcosm of what raiding is about in the first place.


However in a 10 man raid, certain combination of classes work better than others, much like the limitations of 2v2 in Arena lent itself to group comps that were inherently more powerful regardless of actual skill. So we see a hamfisted homogenization of healing classes much like tanks were homogenized in WotLK. Holy Priests and Shamans feel good, the rest are half finished.


We've got this weird dynamic where FoL is a useless spell, Holy Light is called Holy Light but is essentially FoL, Holyshock will be a new major part of your rotation as will WoG. Then you have the already mentioned terrible AOE heals. Beacon has been nerfed so we are no longer primary tank healers, or at least you will have to have 2 paladins in a 25 man cross beaconing tanks and healing nothing but tanks and spot healing. We really really really feel like the class as a whole is only halfway there.