Helping the poor Holy Pally - A suggestion

[Kadi]

I want to post something here and get some feeback before I go posting it on the Blizzard Beta forums and sounding like a noob. I think you all know that I sometimes have a knack for missing the obvious, and I'm fairly new at this theorycrafting stuff, so please take a read and let me know what you think!

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I have played Holy ever since I leveled up to 68 at the release of Burning Crusade. At first, it was a challenge to see how many targets you could heal through an AOE before everyone died. But as dungeons became more difficult and raiding started requiring more movement (ie: more challenging) the weaknesses of the Holy Paladins really started to show. The mere throught of Healing Heroic MgT as a Holy Pally, while it is indeed doable, makes me want to go get a stiff drink.

I was looking forward to the expansion, and new toys. All we get is Beacon (no, not Bacon. I love bacon. It is yummy).

The suggestions for an AOE Heal have been numerous, and I don't know if the lack of having one is a deliberate move by Blizzard, or simply a glaring oversight. Either way, we still don't have one, and I thought I would add a couple of different suggestions here that I think would make Holy a bit more fun in a way that I think would be able to be 'balanced' while using skills and talents that are already in the game... thus hopefully making it easier to implement than something that it completely new to the class. I'm not sure if these have been brought up before, and apologies if they have.

First, with the apparent emphasis on Judgements, even for Holy Paladins (like the Judgements of the Pure talent), I think that adding a component to judgements to have them do HEALING instead of damage if cast on a friendly target would add incentive for Healing Paladins to use it, even with the global cooldown. Since that would make Holy Shock pretty much obsolete, Holy Shock could possibly be removed altogether (or revamped somehow), and the talents that affect holy shock could be applied to healing judgements instead. The talent points used to gain Holy Shock could instead be used to gain this new aspects of Judgement and thus not 'breaking' the Ret and Prot Trees. I think this would take more pressure off of the movement issues that Healdins have than merely relying on Holy Shock, especially with the reduced cooldown and haste buff talents that are already available.

Second, adding 'healing' or 'spells' to the 'melee attack' component of seals of wisdom and light. With seal of wisdom, it would give us mana regen based on HASTE (which seems to be the current trend of Blizzard talent trees and equipment) instead of just on crit with the Illumination talent. I've had to hold back on the amount of Haste I use, because if I use too much, my mana pool cries. A lot. This would help with some of the mana issues we have been experiencing. Or, alternately, in groups that have a lot of extra mana regen, such as a raid stacked with shadow priests, ret pallies, etc, seal of light could be used to do tiny heals to ourselves while we furiously try to heal everyone else in the raid. While I COULD heal myself, obviously, it's just a little extra burden off of our shoulders after that AOE hits and help us make sure our tank lives without falling over. Keeping the tank alive, IMO, is still the one thing that a Holy Pally should be able to do well.

I realize that there is no way that something like either of these suggestions would be able to be balanced before Release, but a little light at the end of the tunnel would be a good thing for us all.