When the new talent trees came out I was a little disappointed with Holy. The Beacon of Light sounded decent enough (more on that in a future post), but getting up to Beacon required taking a lot of other talents, and the new talents leading up to Beacon looked… lackluster to me. Still, I was thinking of PvP when I was respeccing myself and one thing that always bothered me was failing to judge the old Seal of Justice on a druid or a shaman before they travel formed or ghost wolfed away. 10 yard ranged attack = suck.
Enter Enlightened Judgments from the Holy tree. When I first saw it, I was not impressed. I couldn’t see any reason I'd really use this in PvE. After all, for solo-ing I'd pull with Holy Shock. For boss fights? When would I find the bandwidth to throw out, let alone maintain, a Judgement?
But for catching those nasty druids and shaman… I could use the extra range. (Much as I love being a druid, I absolutely loathe facing one in 2v2.)
So that was pretty much the reason, the only reason, I took Enlightened Judgements.
Now that I have it, I find myself actually happy to make use of it. My guild did Kara for the Scourge event boss (and then some) and since I didn't need to heal full time I was actually able to help dps with a JoW/Holy Shock rotation in between heals. I didn't work on maintaining the Judgement. Heals always came first, but while I wasn't healing I was still able to contribute, whereas before I couldn't do anything aside from tossing out the occasional 15-second cooldown Holy Shock unless I was willing to risk getting into melee range. In older days even priests could contribute to burning a boss down by doing a little wanding.
And then last night we went out Necrotic Rune farming. Even though it was no longer the weekend, it was still a madhouse with people fighting to tag kills. I had a lot of trouble on Hana because moonkin only have dots and the 1.5 cast time Wrath with which to tag mobs, but as a holy paladin with Enlightened Judgements Gillien had three ranged instants; Exorcism, Holy Shock, and Judgement of Wisdom (I was tagging so many mobs so fast I needed to keep my mana up). I never had felt so completely overpowered as a holy paladin as last night. I ended up with 50+ Necrotic Runes after my first undead spawn point.
So the verdict on Enlighted Judgements? I'm gonna keep it. I can't say I like its companion Judgements of the Pure yet (with the idea that holy paladin uses Enlightened Judgements to judge from afar for haste bonus), but doing ranged dps in raids and 5-mans is welcome, and for tagging as many mobs as possible without dragging them all over the place. Rounding up mobs for AoE farming's going to get easier with this and it dovetails nicely with my desire to be able to do more as a holy paladin.
Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred
1 day ago
2 comments:
How are you finding the performance of Holy compared to other healers (in PvE) - is that going to be part of your 'future post'? I know [druid] resto seems pretty neat (being able to solo-heal most of Kara is nice), but Circle of Healing makes HoTs pretty much redundant (with all the regen floating around).
And I know that playing a druid in arena, I absolutely hated going up against good ret paladins (pole dancing: no longer working).
Also, can't you use Moonfire to tag stuff?
Holy is a little difficult to judge in PvE at the moment just because heroics and Kara have been snooze fests and my guild hasn't done anything "tough". We did a two-healer Kara run earlier this week though and I out-healed a much better geared resto shaman. But... it was also a Kara that we were able to complete in two hours so nobody was taking it seriously.
I'm still trying to master when to use Beacon of Light, but aside from that I like Holy better post-patch. The new six second CD on Holy Shock is fantastic. I usually will Holy Shock the DPS for a quick heal and save the FoL and HL spam for the tank. Infusion of Light is also good for saving someone's hide. Guaranteed HS crit followed by a 1 sec HL can save someone's life.
As for Moonfire, I think needs to tick before it'll tag the mob. I seem to remember hitting zombies and then losing them to other players who hit them after me. It does do upfront damage though, so maybe I was mistaken.
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