Since my last update a couple of weeks ago, I’ve been grinding on towards my Keystone Myth achievement and slowly moving towards a potential 1% season for my new main Holy Paladin.

Firstly, check the current scores:

My prior best season score was Season 3 of The War Within, where I took my then-main Druid as Guardian through to the +10 level and then on Feral up to a high of a +14 key, leading to a seasonal score of 3040 rating. This season, I have already blown past that mark by reaching 3208, and while my previous best was Resilient +12s during that season (timing all +12s, which is the lowest keystone level Resilient Keys are available at), I have now completed, in sequence, Resilient 12, 13, and 14 on my Paladin.

At this writing, my Paladin just cracked the 280 item level threshold, meaning she is approaching the point where I will get the Myth of the Dawn achievement (albeit slowly, it’ll probably take the mini-Turbo-Boost coming next week and a couple of more weeks of Myth Crest capping to reach that!), meaning that I pushed all my +14s and my first +15 without the advantage of a heavy amount of gear (not to say that high 270 range is low gear, lol, although also this season it kinda is). My chosen spec has also been on Mister Blizzard’s Wild Ride with regards to tuning, which has been an…interesting experience, to say the least. At this point, based on the discussions I’ve seen in the Holy channels of the pally discord, Holy Power spenders have gained nearly 70% total additional power just from the tune-ups they’ve done post-launch, slowly adding 10-20% swings of power to all 3 healing spenders (well, two, but technically 3 because the Herald of the Sun Eternal Flame is just Word of Glory with a shinier icon but also still at its core the same basic idea).

The Meta Matters (But Also Not)

So this season, being the “easy” season and all, has meant that more people are pushing higher than ever before. This means that while the meta can be rigid, it more often is a loose suggestion, and so while Holy Paladin is pretty far from meta (although in keys it has been seeing higher representation than about half the healer specs, sitting pretty comfy near the middle boundary), I don’t really struggle for invites. Most of the time, once I set out to join a key group, I get into something worth rating in under 10 minutes. Healer role helps that a lot – if I was pushing a DPS, lord help me – but my experience with healing on a decidedly non-meta spec hasn’t been terrible.

My experience with the rest of the meta has generally been what it was in lower keys – people playing the flavor of the month are either good players and adapt quickly or are out of their depth and suffer for it. Inviting a Brewmaster Monk to tank has 50/50 odds of giving you an exceptional player or someone who will fail to purify their Stagger and just bleed out on the floor. Augmentation Evokers (a spec I have been alting for the last few days!) are either cracked key upgraders or certified dinguses without a lot of room in-between (and you can’t tell unless you log the run for real, because even though Blizzard used verified Aug DPS as a selling point that could be in their own damage meter, it STILL doesn’t show their proper damage with buff attribution). Devourer DH’s are supposed to be sturdy ranged DPS with a fast interrupt and amazing damage, but just as often you’ll find them crumpling under the slightest pressure and they also need a specific pull cadence and movement strategy to keep things rolling. My first attempt at a Pit of Saron +15 last night had a Brewmaster who crumpled on the first pull because of Stagger but also because of a failed interrupt (after the DPS had complained that they were failing keys because of their healers, lol).

Meanwhile, some of my best keys have been with off-meta specs. Vengeance DH’s can be squishy, but if a player on one understands that and how to work around it, they’re great. One of the best DPS I saw this season was a random Survival Hunter who popped off and did half a million DPS on the first pull in a Magister’s Terrace +14. Generally, if you invite on demonstrated track record (IO score, timed keys in the dungeon you’re doing, etc), you’ll have a better time than waiting for the just-right meta comp.

Dungeon Pool Opinions Version 2

I have come to love Magister’s Terrace. Firstly because I came to understand all the tech in there (wyrm pulls? got it. library book haste buff? oh yeah, we got it. crystal buffs in the golem room? know about those too!) and secondly because I think the diversity of healer challenges in there is fun for me to play through – the wyrm explosions, managing the Runic Glaive debuffs on the hall trash before second boss, the damage profile on Gemellus, and the precise dance of globals you have to send on Degentrius. Pit of Saron remains a favorite for the season because of the open layout and pull diversity – it seems pretty linear and kinda is, but the +15 I ran last night we did a specific dragon skip that was easy to do before Garfrost and then we had Warlock gate-tech after Ick and Krick to send us up to the first trash pack on the hill way ahead of schedule which was super neat. I’ve come to really enjoy Seat of the Triumvirate with good groups because people properly managing their chains and threading the needle on the various dodgeables is fun to see. While I think the dungeon pool is overreliant on some core gimmicks (snare removals are huge value this season which makes Paladin with double Freedom super potent for easing pain points), I’ve definitely found my groove and enjoy my dungeon time regardless of the dungeon. I do think Maisara Caverns is a little tough and I think Nexus-Point Xenas climbs sharply in difficulty at higher keys in a way that can be unpleasant, but they’re still fun in different ways and just require a bit more focus and stronger play.

Holy Paladin, Build Options, and Continuing to Push

I’ve continued to play a Holy Light and Word of Glory-focused Lightsmith build with Avenging Crusader as my choice of wings buff as I push. With current tuning (and the buff to Holy Power generation from Sacred Armaments) in 12.0.5, the overall flow of the spec feels really good to play and the tools have some specific answers to problem points, like absorb shielding I can place to slow the fall of tank health while they also spread to the party and provide a strong backstop for rot damage. However, as I continue to push higher, there is some value to potentially switching builds.

The main switch would be to potentially consider Herald of the Sun as my Hero Talent choice, because it offers higher sustained healing throughput and healing-over-time effects with cleave that can be effective for the scaling rot damage in higher keys. On Murlok.io, only 10% of the top-ranked Hpals use Lightsmith, so it feels pretty obvious that at some point in the future, I will need to consider the switch to meet increasingly harder heal checks. I’ve hit as high as 205k HPS in my current build, but that was largely a well-setup burst combo with Holy Bulwarks rolling and an abundance (GLORIOUS ABUNDANCE) of Holy Power to spend on topping everyone up. Herald’s main advantage is that the Hero talent is pure healing throughput, and it also retains Divine Toll instead of replacing it with a Hero ability, so you have a potent, low-cooldown burst ability that can top people up pretty well. It also has more synergies and buffs to Holy Shock, which is hugely beneficial especially with the tier set this season also buffing Holy Shock.

The other interesting development is that more high-ranked Hpals are taking Light of Dawn builds in the spec tree to use on rot damage as that begins to scale more out of control. The normal build in the spec tree for Mythic Plus, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, relies on Word of Glory talents and uses exclusively your single-target healing (plus Beacon transfer) to keep everyone happy, meaning you play a lot of whack-a-mole with health bars as people drop. This build is strong because Holy Light and Word of Glory are very potent bar-movers, but it also demands higher accuracy with how you place your heals as keys scale, because picking the wrong target for a cast can often mean another player simply dies to rot damage. The Light of Dawn build is stronger against rot damage because it allows you to hit everyone for a burst of healing when spending Holy Power, so while your whack-a-mole targets still matter, you get a reprieve when spending Holy Power because everyone will get a strong hit of healing.

I think my answer will lie in the composite of these ideas – if it remains true that the Light of Dawn build offers specific aid against a weak spot for Hpal this season, it will be worth taking as scaling makes that problem more glaring, but while Herald has some specific power that is worthwhile…I’m reluctant to switch away from the Lightsmith style I have come to enjoy so much. I feel like I’ll probably start testing a bit as I push towards Resilient +15s to see what makes the most sense – and as we approach that 1% mark I intend to try for, I think the actual answer is going to be that I have to start optimizing my build per-dungeon for the specific healing profile that best suits damage curve in each.

This season has some benefits to come to aid my push, though. Next week, we finish the Nilhammer quests and are able to start empowering trinkets and weapons, which means I should be able to push 285 on my raid trinket loadout (both Gaze of the Alnseer and Locus-Walker’s Ribbon from Heroic, joy!) and I can then empower my crafted weapon to 294 and my shield to 298. The order will likely be flipped from what I just said, but I guess it depends on sims. The second thing, coming in patch 12.0.7, is our late-season boost power, which is this time not an item but instead a talent tree on a quest that rewards a mix of throughput and survival boosts over the course of around 5-6 weeks of play. At the point I’m likely to be pushing far too high to attempt the 1% achievement, this should be handy to ensure my late-season prog remains possible as gear will be plateaued at that point.

More Streaming (and VODs too!)

I’ve been streaming a lot more of resilient pushes on my Twitch channel and saving the VODs to YouTube for posterity. It’s been fun to watch them back to look for little points I can improve upon and I think it has added to my gameplay this season to keep a better record of my play and watch it back for tweaks to make in order to keep improving. Here’s a vid of my push to resilient +14s if you’re interested:

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This season has been the most fun I’ve had in a while in WoW, because even with the bugs and other gamewide issues we’ve seen, I’ve been enjoying my lane of just continuing to push towards my Mythic Plus goals and slowly progressing the raid (Heroic Crown with my team is going to be a wall, even though I’ve personally already done it myself in a PUG) and I am excited to see how close to that 1% goal I can get. Right now, it still feels far enough off to be perhaps undoable, but at the same time, 2-chesting my first timed +15 key in the post-squish world is a hell of a motivator to keep rolling and see how far I can take this journey.