My "main," the character that I prioritize in WoW, bringing him first into any new expansion or patch content, eager to get him leveled up to the current level cap and then geared up as best I can in the current season fastest, is a Paladin. While I generally play Protection, the tank-focused spec, most - especially as they've leaned into allowing tanks to deal decent damage so that it's not that tedious to "solo" on them (while WoW has a lot of group-focused content, a lot of the game can be played on your own, especially with the introduction of Delves in the previous War Within expansion) - I have also had a fair amount of experience playing as a Retribution Paladin, their DPS spec.
Having played this character since my first days in WoW 20 years ago, and having spent about 19 of those years with this character firmly as my "main," you might ask me: how's the healing spec?
And my answer would be... No clue. I've never healed a dungeon on him.
See, in WoW, group roles are much more clearly delineated than they are in D&D. While healers do have damaging abilities (in part to help them when soloing,) their real, primary focus, is on casting healing spells to keep the party up. You're expected to keep every character at max HP, or as close as you can, and only if things are going very smoothly do you ever turn your attention to the bad guys.
This means that the game of a healer is very different than that of a tank or DPS character. DPS characters just try to most efficiently kill the enemies, while tanks will work to ensure that all the enemies are focused on them through a mechanic called Threat - but the way that tanks generate threat is by... damaging enemies. So ultimately, if you're used to playing a melee DPS character, tanking isn't really all that different, except that because the enemies are paying attention to you, you need to be the one pulling them into proper positions, as well as more closely monitoring your own HP and using damage-mitigation abilities to help your healer keep you alive.
Healers, though, are playing this weird triage/whack-a-mole game that I have never, in 20 years, gotten the hang of (largely I'm sure due to the fact that I don't really enjoy it and thus don't get practice).
I put all this forth to say that healing is very different in WoW as compared to D&D. D&D healing spells, even after the buffs in 5.5, are more about slowing down the gradual draining of HP over the course of a day, and often it's more efficient for a healer, be they a Cleric, Druid, or in this case, Paladin, to kill monsters rather than top up their allies. After all, if you do a Cure Wounds for 15 HP, and then the monster does 20 damage to your target, would it not have been better to hit that monster and potentially killed it before it could hurt your friend?
Now, the Paladin has always had a bit of healing available to them in D&D. In 5E, they both have a fair number of healing spells like the Cleric that they can prepare, but also their Lay on Hands pool, a predictable and very flexible healing feature that can be perfectly titrated to the amount of healing that is optimal for the situation (such as slapping a friend with just 1 HP to get them up if they're still making death saves during a fight).
Now, here's another nuance:
In WoW, your spec can change a lot of the fundamental ways your class works. Since 2012's Mists of Pandaria, which revamped how specs and talents worked (there another major revamp in 2022's Dragonflight, but these changes remain,) a Holy Paladin has, for example, more Mana to spend on healing spells.
In D&D, though, subclasses (even the big Death Knight and Demon Hunter ones) really can't mess with some of the class fundamentals (for one thing, it'd be a nightmare for multiclassing,) which means that Paladins are always going to be a half-caster. This means that they won't have any kind of resurrection magic until level 9, and won't get something like Greater Restoration until tier 4. And with slower spell progression, even their basica healing spells like Cure Wounds can't be upcast as much. Like the Alchemist Artificer, this kind of hamstrings them in comparison to something like a Cleric to be a really dedicated healer.
So, can this subclass make up for it? With all that preamble out of the way, let's take a look:
Oath Spells:
1st: Cure Wounds, Healing Word
2nd: Lesser Restoration, Prayer of Healing
3rd: Dispel Magic, Mass Healing Word
4th: Aura of Life, Death Ward
5th: Greater Restoration, Mass Cure Wounds
This is a healer's toolkit for sure. It's not terribly exciting given that these are all spells a Paladin could prepare anyway - while that "frees up" a bunch of other Paladin spells... you could have prepared those instead anyway. This will, obviously, make sure that you're always packing a ton of heals. Is it maybe redundant? Yes. Will these spells come in handy? Sure.
Level 3:
Beacon of Light:
As a magic action, you can expend a Channel Divinity to wrap an ally within 60 feet in holy energy. For 1 minute, any time you heal a creature other than the affected ally with a spell or your Lay On Hands, the chosen ally also regains half as many HP.
Note here that you can't actually target yourself with this, as it's an "ally," and I think the game defines that as someone other than yourself (while "a willing creature" would include yourself). This lets you do a kind of half twin-spell for a minute on healing spells. I think the ideal use case here is actually out of combat. You pop this and then start running Aura of Vitality (another spell that's actually really great outside of combat) and then put this on the person who needs the most healing, then go around healing all less-injured allies. To maximize this in combat, you'd need to be healing kind of every turn and then also hope that the target actually needs that healing each turn.
As an out-of-combat heal-booster, this is actually pretty sweet, though.
Level 7:
Lightbringer's Aura
Whenever you cast a spell or use Lay on Hands to restore hit points to a Bloodied creature within your Aura of Protection, the creature regains an extra 1d6 HP.
Now, the good thing here is that you're more likely to be healing allies if they are bloodied. Once again, though, this becomes insane when you're out of combat. There is nothing stopping you, if you aren't worrying about 6-second-to-6-second intervals, from just hitting an ally for 1 point of Lay on Hands at a time, which means that this turns, again, out of combat Lay On Hands, from a pool equal to 5 times your level into a pool equal to basically 4.5 times your level, which makes it far more efficient at healing. Just... only out of combat. If you're pumping in 15 points of LOH, this winds up boosting it to 18.5 average, so rather than a 350% increase, it's only a 23% increase.
Level 15:
Infusion of Light:
Whenever you cast a spell that deals Radiant damage, you refresh your Lay on Hands pool by a number of HP equal to the total rolled for the spell's Radiant damage, up to a maximum of 5 times your Paladin level.
Given that your max LOH pool already is 5 times your Paladin level, this feels redundant unless this could push you over your max, which I don't think it would.
But this is actually a really cool idea: If you use Divine Smite on a crit (and Divine Smite, remember, is now a spell, and of course it always did Radiant damage,) you could get a whole lot of LOH back. Now, there is a sight bonus action traffic jam here, but if you healed a friend for your full 45 LOH pool on turn 1, and then you do a 3rd level divine smite, that's going to look like 18 (or 22.5 against a fiend or undead target) LOH back to you.
Genuinely, this is a very cool idea, and the ability to recuperate your LOH does help a bit with the fact that you're still a half-caster.
Level 20:
Holy Deliverance:
As a bonus action, you can imbue your Aura of Protection with holy power for 10 minutes (or until you end this for some reason). You can do this once per long rest, or restore a use by expending a 5th level spell slot. You gain the following benefits:
Healing Power: Whenever an ally starts its turn Bloodied in the aura, that creature regains HP equal to your Charisma modifier plus your proficiency bonus.
Sunlight: The aura is filled with Bright Light that is sunlight.
By level 20, you would really prefer not to let anyone go unconscious, but this will prevent friends from having to roll death saves. More to the point, it's going to give them a moderate heal. How big of a heal? Well, at best we're looking at 11, or possibly 12 if we go for a second epic boon that boosts Charisma. That's not very much healing, to be honest. Also, sadly, Healing Power doesn't work with Lightbringer's Aura because this isn't a spell.
So while it's not as bad as the Death Knight level 20 ult in that it actually does something on its own, I can't say it's the most exciting thing.
Overall Thoughts:
There's a cool idea here: building a subclass that can make a Paladin act as a true full healer. The problem, again, as I said in the preambles, is that "true full healers" aren't really a thing in D&D. Even a Life Cleric is probably going to be doing some offensive stuff unless they're fully RPing as a pacifist.
The best idea in this subclass is Infusion of Light, which rewards the Paladin for doing what the class is best at (smiting the hell out of monsters) by letting it do what it is decently good at (healing) more. But that doesn't come until level 15.
Truly, I do think that this is a good healer, if you're talking about healing as specifically "restoring hit points," but it thrives after the battle, not during it. And other things a healer wants to do, like removing conditions or protecting allies from taking damage in the first place, are not really something this subclass gives you, at least not at a time that makes up for the slow spell progression.
Funnily enough, while this was before even my time (I only played at the tail end of Vanilla WoW,) there was apparently a time in the early days, when the very first raid, Molten Core, was current, when people would bring Paladins into their raid purely to buff everyone outside of combat, and then have them leave and hop onto other characters who were better-optimized. So, here, that "these guys are useful when we're not fighting anything" identity is actually preserved.
(Blizzard got a lot better at balancing the game over the years, and all three Paladin specs have had their moments as the top-tier performers in their respective roles.)
I will say, though: given that D&D Clerics get to wear serious armor and wield big old weapons, I really feel like if you truly want to play a heavily-armored healer-warrior... just go with a Life Cleric?
So far, to be honest, the only WoW subclass that has blown me away is the Mystic Brews Monk, and while some are doing really interesting things, I again feel that the desire to replicate WoW gameplay in D&D holds a lot of the design back. Mystic Brews shares nearly nothing in common with the Brewmaster Monk from WoW on a mechanical level, but it captures the flavor (so to speak) of the spec excellently.
Much as I feel that 5.5 would have benefitted a bit with a less slavish devotion to rules established in 2014, I think this book might have benefitted a bit by striking out on its own with new mechanical ideas inspired by WoW's lore and vibes more than its game mechanics. And, look, that is a bit of this to an extent.
Also, to bring some perspective here: this is a truly unique Paladin subclass that is doing something very different than other Paladins do, and I applaud that. But it's also evidence that I would love a design for half-casters that allows subclasses to turn them into full-casters, which I think would be a bold new avenue for subclass design that would also really help with a lot of subclasses that seem to gesture toward that without actually accomplishing it.
We're nearly done with our WoW subclass round-up, and by Tuesday I should actually have access to the book myself. For now, thanks again to Insight Check for posting all of this. I believe the only ones we have left are the reprints/revisions, the Swashbuckler and Spiritual Guardian (formerly Ancestral Guardian).
No comments:
Post a Comment