Paladins have always been known as the best single-target (tank) healers.  Holy Paladins have quick, powerful, and mana-efficient single-target heals, but lack any kind of AoE heal outside of the Glyph of Holy Light.  Priests, druids, and shamans have all been the preferred healers for raid-wide damage.

Despite this, it is very possible for a Holy Paladin that stacks spell power to heal raid wide-damage as well or better than someone of any other class with equal gear.  With Flash of Light, Holy Shock, Beacon of Light and scattered Holy Lights, a paladin can pump out a huge amount of heals per second to a large number of people and all of those heals get duplicated on the tank.  There’s absolutely no reason a Holy Paladin shouldn’t be assigned to heal raid-wide damage.  In fact, its probably the most mana-efficient healing strategy there is.  With druid and priest HoTs, Beacon of Light, and Sacred Shield all on the tank, a Holy Paladin can keep up a tank while also doing a good deal of raid-wide healing as needed.  More than any other healing class, a Holy Paladin has the tools to react to unexpected bursts of damage with short, powerful heals - the exact kind of damage that typically occurs randomly throughout a raid group.

However,  yesterday Ghostcrawler stated that Holy Paladins “shouldn’t need to do a ton of group healing in raids”, confirming that Blizzard’s vision for the class is to be single-target tank healers.  This is reinforced with their recent nerf to Sacred Shield to only be castable on a single target at a time.  This is unfortunate considering that raid healing is a much more engaging and entertaining way to play than spamming heals on a tank.  Hopefully Blizzard doesn’t continue this trend of giving Holy Paladin less tools to handle raid-wide damage and encouraging Holy Light spam and Intellect stacking and instead empower us to use all the tools in our arsenal, which are currently perfectly capable of handling the job.  As for me, as long as my tanks aren’t dying, I’m going to continue to do everything I can to keep everyone in the raid alive.