By now, most people have
encountered a 1600 resilience immortal healer. But they have they met
one that can DPS? The way holy paladins currently work is that
they're able to keep themselves topped up against multiple people
with very little effort due to the Blessed Life talent (100% chance
to gain a charge of holy power when hit by direct damage) and word of
glory spam. This leaves them in a situation where they can
effectively spam a lot of damage due to the now cooldown-void
Exorcism.
Back in the days of TBC there
was an often mocked spec known as the "Shockadin", the
shockadin would run around shocking and judging people for what could
sometimes take 20% off their HP. Now the shockadin was still able to
heal but often had half the actual healing power (remember, offensive
spell power and healing power were two seperate stats back then) of a
full holy paladin. Bring this aspect of the paladin forward to today
when they have a spammable nuke and are able to gear fully towards
healing without losing any DPS potential and you have what could well
be a monster when we come into Cataclysm. At the moment it feels like
a far stronger disc priest in terms of damage. What follows is a
montage of my paladin in the confines of WSG with mere Relentless
gear and 1000~ resilience, if I had closer to 1400~1500 then I would
be practically immortal while pumping out ridiculous damage for a
healer.
Due in the next patch is a
change which will add even more damage to what you saw above.
Exorcism now scales from 34.4%
of SpellPower or AP, up from 15%. Base damage increased by 15% from
2343 to 2741.
This would add 1100~ damage to
the Exorcism hits which is a 25-50% increase on most targets. With
the current way holy paladin plays it could easily be compared to a
disc priest with even more damage potential, my exorcisms are hitting
for as much/more than smites did. Holy paladins however do not have
the weaknesses of disc priests in the fact that they're vulnerable to
being trained by melee, run out of mana and get destroyed by dispel
spam. Blizzard have also gifted paladins with several incredible
talents to promote this playstyle which make Exorcism cost
practically no mana (Denounce) and +50% damage to holy shock/20%
damage to Exorcism (Crusade+Blazing Light). To add to this, at level
81 paladins gain a new skill which increases their holy damage done
by 30% for 12 seconds (4 seconds per holy power charge) called
Inquisition. In a comp where not much healing is needed due to
ridiculous amounts of control (e.g rogue/mage/holypaladin or a wizard
cleave of some kind) you could quite happily use 3 holy power on this
in a burst attempt and pump out some very respectable damage,
especially when combined with wings/divine favor and a heroism of
some kind for <1 second cast Exorcisms.
4.0 has seen the paladin go from
the class with the least offensive ability to possibly the best out
of the 4 healers, while it may lack a spammable CC or offensive
dispel of some kind it now has the damage potential to make up for
it. Also due to the lack of choices with other healers on whether to
dps/cc/offensive dispel etc. it's also a lot simpler to play when
it's effectively heal/hammer/dps. What we may see in Cataclysm is the
rise of holy paladins in offensive comps and teaming up with classes
they would normally never be seen with such as rogues.
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