The sordid history of holy paladin.
With the tentative removal of Crusader Strike going into Midnight, there has been a lot of discussion surrounding Holy paladin.
Are we meant to be melee? Casters? Based on instants? Cast times? Both?
Everyone seems to have an opinion, and everyone is so intent on maintaining their agenda that if you're even a little aware of the going-ons of the holy paladin spaces you will have heard many people throw claims every which way about what a holy paladin is meant to be. Usually this is defined by some throwback to "we have always done x!" or "the class fantasy of paladin is y".
In broad strokes I want to split World of Warcraft history into three eras; we have the early days where stuff was still being figured out, niches were being defined and Blizzard was finding their footing with regards to class and spec design. For no reason other than it feeling right this is Vanilla through Cataclysm to me.
Then we have the middle stages or the Golden Age where wow was at its peak popularity and where they really hit their stride. This is the Mists of Pandaria through Legion.
Finally we have the modern age of WoW which is everything onwards.
Now you may be surprised that Legion isn't included here, however Legion released during the Obama presidency and I'm sorry but when an expansion is about to graduate from K-5 I can't in good conscience call it modern. So without further ado, let's take a walk down memory lane, so we can all be better equipped to discuss the future of holy paladin together.
Vanilla holy paladin was centered around two main pillars
- Buffing the raid with blessings
- Healing through flash of light
If you were a paladin back in 2005 stepping into Molten Core you may have had aspirations of tanking or dealing damage, and heck you may even be allowed to do it since back in those wild days, information was scarce and optimizing was hard.
However if you wanted to keep your group alive, you would install your pallypower and decursive and toss out as many flash of lights as you could.
With authentic in-game lag for the true 2005 feeling
As a note, while researching I stumbled upon a large contingent of horde players loudly protesting the addition of paladins to their faction in 2.0 that the then-15 year old Frug was blissfully unaware of.