Let me start off by saying that I rolled a Holy Paladin at the beginning of Burning Crusade simply because I wanted a healer, and I was tired of my rogue. I've always enjoyed healing as a Holy Paladin, but always wished for a little added complexity, especially after being able to play other healing classes throughout my time in World of Warcraft.

I have killed Heroic Lich King 12 times. I just killed him again as a 4.01 Paladin last night. While it's certainly possible to do this as a Holy Paladin, we are basically being carried by Disc Priests, Resto Druids, and Resto Shamans. At no point in the fight did I actually feel that if I had died they would not have been able to continue. That fight used to revolve around good Holy Paladins, and now we're basically there for support.

Well we certainly got some complexity to us, but I don't believe it was added in the correct way. So here goes my list of problems:

Word of Glory: While I like the whole "Heal without using mana" this creates many problems. Word of Glory is now basically essential to our healing because without it we are guaranteed to go OOM quite quickly.

Holy Shock: This is where the main problem with holy power arises. Holy Shock generating Holy Power means that we are compelled to use this spell on CD. Which means that all of the utility that Holy Shock used to have is now gone. It went from being an "Oh sh*t" heal to being a "Nobody needs healing but I still get Holy Power so whatever" heal. Holy Shock was essential to Holy Paladins on high damage / high movement fights. Without it, we never would have been able to move, and whenever we did move Holy Shock would be the first button we hit. Using this spell on CD means that much of the time that we have to move Holy Shock is on CD, and if we don't have 3 Holy Power to cast Word of Glory then this could cause some serious issues.

Another problem arises when you make an instant cast heal the basis of a healer. While it's great in some situations... If you were to throw a Holy Shock, and it hit mere milliseconds before the tank took a big hit... (Assuming you don't have enough Holy Power for a WoG, which you probably don't) you would then have to wait for Holy Shock's GCD to finish, then cast either Holy Light, Divine Light or Flash of Light. It could take up to 3 Seconds to get your next heal off, and people can die in that amount of time. For those of you that say this is going to change in Cataclysm, you obviously haven't played the beta.

Holy Power: The main problem with this is that it forces us into a sort of Healing "rotation."
Holy Shock > Holy Light > (Divine Light/Flash of Light/Holy Light)x2-3 > Holy Shock > Holy Light > (Divine Light/Flash of Light/Holy Light)x2-3 > Holy Shock > Word of Glory(before Holy Shock comes off CD)

While procs and such change this rotation a little, it doesn't change it any more than a proc would change a mages. I feel like I'm playing a DPS class with a different colored target rying to move the bar in the opposite direction. This isn't how a healer is supposed to feel.

Light of Dawn: This is one of the few things I see as having potential for Holy Paladins, although it is not perfect by any manner. It's very situational, and the long CD only increases the "situationalness."

Divine Light: As soon as it's changed to work with Infusion of Light on live servers I will have little to no issues with this.

Flash of Light: I don't like having a spell with a cast time as our new "Oh sh*t" button. This should have it's cast time increased a little, and have it's mana cost and amount healed reduced.

Holy Light: This spell shouldn't exist the way it is now because the only thing Holy Paladins use it for currently is for a button to hit in between Holy Shock and Word of Glory when nobody is taking much damage. The healing is more than mediocre and the cast time is abysmal.

Divine Plea: This still kills me. I understand reducing the amount of mana gained from Divine Plea, and I even understand increasing the cooldown, but after both of those things Divine Plea retains it's 50% healing reduction. Healing reductions in this game have taken on the term "Mortal Strike Effect." Well, Mortal Strike, the first of it's kind, doesn't even have a 50% healing reduction anymore, yet we retain our 50% self healing reduction from a mana regen ability. This forces Holy Paladins to use abilities like Divine Favor and Avenging Wrath to counteract the healing reduction rather than to use those abilities when they should actually be needed.

Beacon of Light : The fact that this is now 50% of our healing, and that our tank healing in general has been nerfed is rather ridiculous in my opinion. I already can't keep a tank up alone without receiving several innervates throughout Heroic Lich King because of 4.01, but now I can't even keep half of the other tank up. If Beacon was going to be nerfed, it should have been prior to 4.01, and buffed back in 4.01.Not the other way around.

Let me finish this by quoting Ghostcrawler.

"I was running Halls of Lightning with a paladin healer at the time, and he had no trouble keeping us alive and even emailed me that he couldn't understand why so many paladins were having trouble with it."

I've run Heroic Halls of Lightning as ret with 4 other melee dps and managed to keep everyone alive with an occasional Flash of Light. Does that mean that I can go in and raid heal as ret?

Blue Poster Ghostcrawler reply:
I feel like we have done this several times and what many paladins are looking for is not an explanation, but buffs. Nevertheless, I'll take you at your word and try and boil down our design intent.

The Past

The BC and LK design of the Holy paladin was basically to use one or two spells and get a lot of use out of them. This is sort of like the mage dps design, where there aren't a lot of sources of damage, but there are a lot of other factors (cooldowns, procs etc.) that make how you use those spells more interesting. So rather than the paladin having 5 different heals, they pretty much used Flash of Light or Holy Light (depending a little on what gear stats and encounters looked like at the time) but with other spells to boost those heals, such as Beacon of Light and Divine Favor, and then all the paladin support abilities, like the Hands.

Paladins (all three specs really) were designed to be a really passive class, with Protection doing a lot of passive threat generation (e.g. Consecrate) and survivability (e.g. Ardent Defender), Ret doing a lot of passive damage (e.g. Seal damage, Vengeance) and Holy doing a lot of passive healing (e.g. Judgement of Light).

It made paladins play really differently for sure, but it was also kind of boring. Because so much of what the class did was passive, players weren't making a lot of choices. Because they weren't making a lot of choices, there wasn't a huge difference between good and bad paladins except gear. I don't really think any of the specs were as "faceroll" as they often get labeled. However, the deltas between the good and bad player weren't large enough -- great paladins were great and bad paladins were pretty good. Honestly, the group to whom that is the most unfair is the paladin -- you can work and work just for a marginal gain above the guy who just picked up the class.

We made some pretty radical changes to the paladin class for Cataclysm. There is another resource to master. There are opportunities to do the wrong thing. A great paladin will have earned his or her greatness.

The Holy paladin niche, especially in Lich King, was to be the single target healer. In a raid, this almost always meant the tank healer. We designed boss damage to tanks specifically around what Holy paladins could heal. It was okay for paladin healing to be overpowered, because they really weren't competing with anyone for tank healing privileges and we could just make the bosses hit harder. The paladin tree wasn't very sexy though. It came with a lot of passive, boring or downright useless talents. Paladins were at the forefront of our mind when we decided to change talent trees.

Being in the same role all the time also gets boring. Imagine only one melee class (say rogues) had a reliable interrupt, so rogues were always given interrupt duty. Imagine mages had the only form of crowd control -- every encounter that's what the mage would be doing. When the Holy paladin can only heal the tank, then every encounter starts to feel similar to the poor paladin healer. They never have a chance to offer to stick with the second group or to raid heal or to watch the melee. With our attempt to make 10-player raids feel more legit, we wanted to handle the possibility that you might end up with two paladin healers (or perhaps a Disc priest and a paladin healer). We'd prefer you to run with a diverse raid comp, but we understand that isn't always possible.

There are Holy paladins who are used to being overpowered, because frankly that's the way things were for a long time (again, metered by the fact that your niche was very narrow). For them, anything is going to feel like a nerf. Likewise, there were players who were attracted to the class because it was very simple. We heard for years from the paladins who wanted something more to do, so it doesn't surprise us that now that we're delivering on that, some of the paladins who were fine with the status quo are now voicing their displeasure. Overall, we're very happy with the new design. We think it's fun to heal as a paladin. The numbers might not be quite right yet, but that's the kind of thing we're still tweaking. Perhaps two years from now there will be a lot more going in with Holy Power, but we think we have a good framework from which to iterate.

The Future

We think Holy paladins are good at 85. Holy Radiance is a powerful AE heal. Light of Dawn is too, though it's more situational. It really shines in larger raids. (Maybe we should have switched which was the talent and which was the core ability, but we knew Light of Dawn could have a more dramatic graphic effect since it was instant, which we wanted to reserve for the healer.) Paladins have more choices now about how to heal single targets -- they have a similar arsenal as the other healers when choosing between efficiency, speed or throughput. They can choose to avoid healing the Beaconed target or go ahead and heal the Beaconed target, with different results for each. They still have a little bit of self healing with talents light Enlightened Judgements and Protector of the Innocent to try to keep that feel of them healing two targets at once, as well as being sturdy healers, as fits someone wearing plate and carrying a shield. Mana efficiency is something to keep an eye on, but we have a lot of knobs to turn with things like Seal of Insight and Beacon of Light. We recently made a change to make Judging Seal of Insight provide more mana to the paladin. Paladins can heal fine in 5-player dungeons and are doing great in raids so far, though we're about to get a whole lot more data on that.

The Present

Unfortunately, many of these strengths don't show up at 80. Missing Holy Radiance is huge. Mana isn't much of a problem on live today partially because health pools are still much smaller. There isn't much of a choice about whether to use Holy Light because the comparatively low expense of Flash of Light, coupled with the risk that someone may die at any second makes the decision about which heal to use not too challenging. We haven't seen too much evidence yet that paladins are much poorer tank healers than other classes, though I understand many of you feel that to be the case. (It also doens't help that the popular logging programs and websites aren't showing Holy mastery yet.) If we do decide Holy can't competitively tank heal any longer, then we will buff them. This is tricky though. Too much of a buff and paladins and raid leaders are just going to conclude "Oh, Holy paladin = main tank healer" again. Contrary to what you might suspect, our blue posts reach a very small fraction of even the raiding community. :( Mana may be a bigger problem at 80 just because we tended in the past to avoid putting regen stats on healing plate, and many paladins are sticking with the old models of stacking spellpower or haste, even when faced with mana problems.

Also contrary to how you might feel, we think we did pretty well with healer balance in Lich King. All 5 healing specs were represented. We think we can erode their niches a little, such that the two druid raid can heal fine, or such that you can put a Holy priest on the tank and a paladin on the raid, without having the healer that nobody will want. We haven't been in a situation where a healer gets sat for a long time. I don't think it will be that way in Cataclysm either.

As a footnote, it's always hard to talk about the "average healer," let alone the "average WoW player." There were paladins struggling for mana before this most recent patch and those who balanced their Flash of Light and Holy Light use. There were probably some who healed the raid and doing an awesome job. We have to look at lots of different players and often talk about you in more general terms than you actually possess. Just because any of the above doesn't apply to you personally doesn't make it an invalid conclusion. Just keep that in mind.