With Patch 11.0.5, we have seen a lot of fairly significant changes to the Paladin Class Tree, and Lightsmith got a small but potentially important change. The Class Tree changes are seemingly made with the idea to make the Tree less focused on throughput nodes, and instead give us some more niche choices. These choices are, sadly, in most cases quite lacklustre and underwhelming, and some seem more like PvP, or even Protection specific talents, than they seem like class agnostic talents.
But let's go over what exactly we are losing and gaining, and what it all means for us.
What Is Being Removed?
We will first go over the most important talents that are being removed with the Class Tree rework, then pivot to talking about what new talents we gain in their place and how good or bad these talents really are.
Seal of Removal
The most important talents that are being removed, are
Seal of Order and
Seal of Alacrity, and the removal of these two talents is a fairly significant loss that will affect our rotation a little negatively. While the healing increase from
Seal of Order and the cooldown reduction from
Seal of Alacrity is being made baseline, the 10% cooldown reduction from
Seal of Order and the 4% Haste from
Seal of Alacrity is
not being made baseline.
This impacts our rotation negatively by slightly reducing how often we can cast our best Holy Power generators, by increasing the cooldown of
Holy Shock,
Judgment, and
Crusader Strike by 10%. While this is a fairly minor change in the grand scheme of things, it will force us to fill some globals outside our cooldowns with significantly worse spells, which will definitely hurt since Holy Paladin already struggles with throughput outside our cooldowns.
That being said, I think it is a good thing to remove
Seal of Order as it will make it easier to better flesh out the rotation in the long run.
Free to Move
Something which will definitely please most players is the removal of
Strength of Conviction, which means we are no longer bound to stand in our
Consecration constantly. This is mostly impactful in Mythic+, as
Strength of Conviction was not really a talent that we picked in raiding. The damage and healing increase to
Shield of the Righteous and
Word of Glory is being compensated for by increasing these spells' baseline damage and healing slightly, and since we didn't pick
Strength of Conviction in raiding, this is actually a small buff.
These three talents are the only important talents being removed, but there are other unimportant talents being removed, such as,
Touch of Light,
Incandescence, and
Seal of Mercy, to which I can only say good riddance, as none of these talents ever did anything interesting or impactful.
What's New?
The main objective of the Class Tree changes, seem to be to make the Talent Tree less focused on "mandatory" throughput nodes, and instead try to give us more interesting and niche options to pick from. Let's go over the most important new talents, then finally see whether the changes actually succeed in that respect.
Selfless Healer
Selfless Healer is the first talent that stands out as potentially game changing, but for Holy, the effects of
Selfless Healer are only 10% which means that this talent is not strong enough to upset the balance between our builds and both the Melee and Caster builds will continue to be completely viable. This is probably for the better since a lot people don't like builds that cast
Flash of Light a lot.
Lightbearer
Lightbearer is a talent that sounds like it could have some potential in raiding, but as a healer, the vast majority of healing you take comes from yourself, and this talent will at most add about 1-2% throughput on a good fight. In Mythic+,
Lightbearer is a completely dead talent, and really makes it feels like it was specifically designed for Protection and not with Holy in mind. I definitely think this has to change since having a capstone talent actually be useless in Mythic+ just feels wrong.
Lead the Charge
Lead the Charge will be picked in most builds, but mostly due to the 3% passive movement speed increase. The cooldown reduction to allies major movement abilities is so undertuned that you will never play around it, and if you were to try, it only affects 4 nearby allies, making it practically impossible to control who you give the cooldown reduction to. The cooldown reduction is so small that I doubt your allies would ever notice it affecting them anyway.
Empyreal Ward
Empyreal Ward is actually a very interesting talent that makes
Lay on Hands a very strong tank "external", but it can also be used as a decent DPS increase for Fury or Arms Warriors as they have
Armored to the Teeth, which increases their strength by 5/10% of their armor. I personally don't like the prospect of having to use
Lay on Hands as a damage or as pre-emptive defensive external, and much prefer it be kept as a reactive emergency button, but we will see how prevalent that sort of thing actually becomes.
The second part of the talent makes it ignore healing reductions, which can be very useful on certain bosses or dungeon trash that apply such things to the tank.
The Rest
This is really the extent of our new
impactful Class Tree talents, but there are a lot more that I naturally can't go over in detail, or we would be here until Christmas, so I will suffice to briefly list them here, in no particular order, for anyone interested in
all the new Class Tree talents, good or bad.
List of the rest of the new Talents (Click to expand)- A Just Reward, simply heals anyone you successfully dispel for a small amount.
- Light's Countenance, reduces the cooldown of Repentance and Blinding Light by 15 seconds.
- Wrench Evil, makes Turn Evil an instant cast.
- Stand Against Evil, on a choice node with Wrench Evil, makes it affect up to 5 targets.
- Holy Reprieve, reduces the duration of Forbearance by 10 seconds.
- Divine Spurs, reduces the duration of Divine Steed by 40%, but also its cooldown by 20%.
- Steed of Liberty, on a choice node with Blessing of Freedom. Makes your Divine Steed automatically cast Blessing of Freedom on yourself for 3 seconds.
- Divine Reach, is an old PvP talent that simply increases the range of your active Aura by 20 yards.
- Consecrated Ground, simply increases the radius of your Consecration and makes it slow enemies in it.
- Sacred Strength, increases the healing of your Holy Power spenders by 2%. On a choice node with Divine Purpose.
- Worthy Sacrifice, will automatically cast Blessing of Sacrifice on any ally that falls below 35% health.
- Righteous Protection, makes Blessing of Sacrifice remove and prevent Poison and Disease debuffs on the target.
- Holy Ritual, allies targeted by your blessing spells are healed for a small amount when the blessing is applied and runs out.
- Blessed Calling, increases the movement speed of anyone affected by your blessings by 15%.
- Inspired Guard, increases your healing taken by 15% while Divine Protection lasts.
- Stoicism, reduces the duration of stuns by 20%.
- Vengeful Wrath, increases the damage of Hammer of Wrath when used on targets below 35% health.
- Eye for an Eye, makes enemies take damage when directly attacking you during Divine Protection and Divine Shield.
- Light's Revocation, allows Divine Shield to be cast during Forbearance, and makes it heal you for 10% for every negative debuff removed.
Lightsmith
The final change I want to cover is not to our Class Tree, but instead to Lightsmith. Since its first iteration the Lightsmith tree has had two talents that felt like placeholders,
Fear No Evil and
Excoriation. These two talents are now being replaced by something far more interesting and potentially quite good,
Authoritative Rebuke and
Tempered in Battle.
Tempered in Battle is the one we are interested in here as it could prove to be very good or indeed very detrimental.
The first effect causes any overhealing done to players with your
Holy Bulwark to be redirected to the other player with
Holy Bulwark. This is all fine and dandy and it's basically an extra
Beacon of Light effect. Since you will always have
Holy Bulwark active on yourself when you have any
Holy Bulwark active,
Tempered in Battle will help a lot with self-healing.
The second effect is more interesting, but because there isn't any raid or dungeon testing done on these X.5 PTR patches, it is hard to predict exactly how impactful or detrimental it will be. It is easy to imagine the health redistribution being fatal if someone with
Sacred Weapon falls below the threshold immediately before a big hit, and I imagine it would be very "fun" to play this with a Blood Death Knight as your tank, but if this doesn't prove to be a major annoyance then it could turn out to be a very good life saving talent.
Problematic Talents
As mentioned in the introduction, a lot of the new talents genuinely feel like PvP talents or talents that were specifically designed for Protection Paladin, which I think is a major problem that really makes this whole rework leave a sour taste in my mouth. Combine it with the overcrowded mishmash of random talents that is the the final third of the Talent Tree, I don't foresee this rework being a success for Holy Paladins in the long run.
While I appreciate the tree having fewer mandatory throughput talents, I fail to see the point of these changes if the rework fails to make the tree work better than before for all three Paladin specs, and I hardly think it is much of an improvement over previous iterations of the Class Tree for us. For the sake of argument, I'll go over the most problematic talents as I see them.
Detrimental Automation
In the list of bad talents
Worthy Sacrifice takes the 1st place. This talent is honestly just completely atrocious. Firstly, since it activates
Blessing of Sacrifice's cooldown, you gain no benefit from this talent as you just lose the ability to use
Blessing of Sacrifice yourself. Secondly, it only applies
Blessing of Sacrifice once someone has dropped below 35%, which is an awful way to teach new players to use this external.
Blessing of Sacrifice, like any damage reduction should obviously be used before people drop that low.
With the PvP talent
Ultimate Sacrifice, I can see this being potentially "useful" for lower skilled players, but that is a PvP talent, and we shouldn't need PvP talents to make PvE talents even remotely useful.
Steed of Liberty is another automative talent that is actively detrimental to play with and will have 0% pick rate. Firstly, It is on a choice node with
Blessing of Freedom it self, meaning you completely lose the ability to use
Blessing of Freedom on other players if you pick
Steed of Liberty. Secondly, since the
Blessing of Freedom only lasts 3 seconds with
Steed of Liberty and the cooldown of
Divine Steed is much longer than the cooldown of
Blessing of Freedom you gain access to its benefits much more rarely. Thirdly, the movement speed from
Echoing Blessings and
Blessed Calling does not add to the movement speed from
Divine Steed, making these two talents much worse, and giving you significantly less mobility overall.
Actual PvP Talents
Stoicism is at best an extremely niche talent in PvE as it is very rare for such content to stun you for any meaningful amount of time unless you make a mistake. While this talent is borderline useless in PvE, it is also nerfed to a 10% reduction in actual PvP where it could have been good, so it is really just a headscratcher for me as to why this talent exists in the first place.
Eye for an Eye is another talent that will never be useful for us in PvE. Even in a situation where you get fixated by mobs, which is the only time you take direct attacks, and you are able to face-tank the mobs, the damage from
Eye for an Eye is frankly laughable.
While I don't think such talents should exist in a spec and content agnostic Talent Tree, I understand that both of them are very easy to avoid with their positions in the Talent Tree, but to have them be in the third and already overpopulated section of the tree while being so bad, is really quite strange to me.
Conclusion and Thoughts on Reverted Nerfs
I find it hard to be excited about these changes as a Holy Paladin. Besides the decent quality of life improvement in Mythic+ with the removal of
Strength of Conviction, there really isn't a whole lot to write home about. I don't think the Class Tree changes succeed in making the tree better for us, and I think the final third of the Tree is a bit of a mess of random talents with too little thought given to pathing and decision making.
The patch also fails to try to address any of the more pressing concerns for Holy Paladin at the moment, such as the continued lack of agency over our mana, and the
extreme disparity in our healing output when the raid is stacked compared to spread out. This problem will haunt the spec for the whole expansion if something is not done about it soon. Comparing our throughput on bosses like
Rashanan to
Broodtwister the difference is stark, and I think something has to be done about it, sooner rather than later. The new fix to the
Dawnlights AoE effect not doing reduced healing above 5 targets, is certainly a good start for lowering the ceiling of our stacked healing slightly, but it doesn't go far enough to fix the issue of our spread-out healing being so weak. A large part of the problem is obviously also our
Mastery: Lightbringer, but with
Dawnlights AoE and
Sun's Avatar, the problem has been exacerbated this expansion.
It is also sad to me that Blizzard has still been unable to make our spot healing feel good, and that it is still nerfed around having fluff like
Dawnlight and
Sun's Avatar just automatically shoot out 7 million HPS when you press Wings (but only if the raid is stacked). Increasing the potency of our spot healing was a major objective of the changes to the spec in The War Within, but it has sadly not really been enough. I find that the 5% nerf to our overall healing, which has now been reverted, showed a slight ignorance of Holy Paladins current situation. The tuning has to be more targeted, so it doesn't affect our already weak spread and spot healing.
Flat aura nerfs hurt what we are already weak at, and it would have continued the trend of uninspired nerfs that sadly ruined the spec for so many players in Dragonflight. It is super frustrating to have someone on Nexus-Princess Kyveza die with the Queens Bane DoT because none of the
Holy Shocks or
Eternal Flames you threw on them happened to crit. It is honestly a bit embarrassing for a spec that used to be the King of this type of healing. I am glad that the 5% nerf has been reverted, but the fact it was considered in the first place is a little concerning to me with how weak our spot healing is, and with how low our representation has been in Mythic+.
In my opinion, with the new
Dawnlight changes we will be one of the better overall raid healers, but it will continue to be skewed by fights where we are stacked, so I think that going forward, we will need more fairly significant nerfs to things that are too strong for stacked healing, but with some partially compensatory buffs to our spot healing, which will also help increase our viability in Mythic+. This may not be realistic to happen with the 11.0.5 Patch, but perhaps in future patches.
But credit where credit is due, the reversion of the 5% nerf is great and show that they clearly listen to feedback, and that gives me a lot of hope, and even if I don't think the 11.0.5 Patch solves much of anything, I still think Holy Paladin has the best playstyle options it has had in years and that the spec is incredibly fun to play in The War Within. It should also be kept in mind that none of this impacts our actual playstyle to any appreciable degree, so if you, like me, enjoy the current playstyle options then you will still enjoy Holy Paladins playstyle in Patch 11.0.5.