Maybe I don't get it since I've only experienced non-red paladins for a few months and I hope noone takes too much offense but considering each new paladin gives me buffs way better than two old world buffs why would their efficiency need to be so much better than mine? My only guess is my "spectacular" 15% incombat spirit regen and I definitly don't get it to add up. at 400 spirit that gives around 38mp5 which is a decent amount for sure but it's still only one superior mana pot during a whole 5min encounter.

Let me start off by saying that the Spirtual Attunement nerf was a step in the right direction in balancing Paladin healers with everyone else. The amount of mana return that a geared, raid buffed, and potted holy paladin could achieve with a shadow priest in his group was near laughable levels, and it was indeed op. I could sustain spamming holy light rank 8 indefinitely (580 mana/2s), you could imagine the mana regain there. So as much as this hurt prot paladins the synergy holy paladins got here was too much, and this was a good fix.

On the other hand, I really feel that without some other type of compensation in the holy tree and on our plate healing gear just gutting Illumination by a flat 50% is not a good change. What this does is completely screw over all the paladins who have geared up for spell crit gear, it screws up our itemization, to me the value of spell crit is now half of what it used to be. I'm annoyed that this change has occurred 3 months into TBC. Most Paladins have geared up with the mindset that crit is what we want and what we need. Just look at the plate healing gear, it nearly all has +crit on it in hefty amounts. A lot of us have gone through the extent of picking up the spell crit quest rewards items, picked out the spell crit heroic items over the mp5/healing counterparts, socketed and enchanted our gear with more spell crit, our whole play style was balanced around spell crit only for that to be thrown out the window next patch. I know personally I’m going to be pulling out the old blue mp5 gear, re-socketing, re-enchanting to maximize my gear with post-nerf illumination. It's just a big headache.

If Blizzard goes through with a full 50% illumination nerf then they have got to realize that we will have some serious issues with this class if they keep balancing gear around spell crit and not giving us the mp5 we're going to soon need. I'm looking at Lady Vashjs’ newly itemized plate healing gloves. All it has is a measly 1mp5 from the socket bonuses, this is not a step in the right direction here and it is quite annoying to see that they buffed this item knowing that illumination would be 50% and spell crit half as useful to a paladin, yet they don’t add any mp5 to it. New paladin gear, including our teir 4/5/6 should be compensated for the change and some of the spell crit should be turned into mp5 or mp5 should just be flat added. I think we can all agree its frustrating to put the effort into raiding only to now have to replace crit focused raid gear with mp5/+heal gear. Which is in a lot of cases replacing my raid epics with 5 man blues. This is not what I consider proper character progression.

Personally I saw this nerf coming, cause as most people said there are serious problems with crit based mana longevity, and if this stayed the same you can bet in 3-4 months we would ALL be in and I quote "LOLZOPTIMAL crit gear" I'm accepting of this change, as are most other paladins, but please, throw us a bone here. Give us something new and unique in the holy tree. I liked the idea of lights grace adding mp5 based on a % of our intellect, that change would help quite a bit. Possibly a new heal, or a new spell, and above all else, take a good, long hard look at the itemization of this class and realize that throwing crit/healing on plate healing gear just doesnt cut it anymore. If you dont do any of the above there are going to be a lot of disgruntled holy paladins, including myself. Just my take on the whole thing.

Quote from OP:
This will make the situation even worse, because you won't likely have Blessing of Light on your healing targets if you use only 1-2 paladins in your raid.

The Illumination nerf is justified because it has scaling issues. But there should be an compansation. Sigurd's idea is fine, but I prefer an talent like "Improved Healing".

My suggestion will an change of "Sanctified Light" from 6% Holy Light Crit-Rate to flat 10% reduced mana cost for Holy Light. It's still less than "Improved Healing" but good enough to use Holy Light as main heal.

I'm still using Flash of Light very often because the HP per second is better/equal than most medium ranks of Holy Light, if you dont have the Blessing of Light bonus. I fear the time where upcomming raid encounters force me to use high ranks of Holy Light and nothing else.

The MP5 from gear alone wont pay this price. I hope to get an lucky spot in one of the the Shadow Priest or Shaman groups. Time will tell.

Because the only reason to bring Paladins is for our "spectacular" single target healing. Which doesn't exist after patch since we can only maintain those HP/S for drastically reduced amount of time, on top of utterly terrible itemization.. there really is no purpose to bring a Paladin except for Imp LOH and Imp Devo - which one Paladin can do. Bring another Ret Paladin to keep two Judgements up and that right there is an optimal raid setup.

I think the change to spiritual attunement hurts protection paladins more then holy, its a talent that now gets worse as your gear gets significantly better (imo anyways).

I reserve my opinions on the change to illumination for when more trials and testing can be done. I sat infront of the scryer bank when the PTR came up and with just BoW spam healed rank 5HL on a warrior with BoL. I didnt notice anything really that horrible.

Final opinions:

Again i think that healing nerfs being made at the same time where consumables were being nerfed didnt really give a chance to adjust. Just going to see how it plays out.

This is completely untrue, and i really hope that a a single bad patch like this doesnt deter you from the pally you leveled. We have had many nerfs before. Although other the tree restructuring, I cant recall there ever being a nerf to our healing capabilities.

But hey, when they itemize too well, nothing less can be expected.

Reading a post earlier about a pally spam healing rank 11 to keep up a tank on tide walker... (Have i been to tidewalker? no. Nor do i pretend to know the mechanics of the encounter, nor will i comment on it) If a paladin did have the ability to sustain rank 11 HL continously (yes of course not spamming) over an encounter it just goes to show you indeed how much this change was needed.

Correct. I deleted my paladin tonight and rerolled to my 42 BE Mage, not looking forward to a couple weeks hard grinding but, even with the monthly mage nerfs, I will at least know I am still useful beyond my buffs in raids and heroics.

As it already has been stated numerous times in this thread Paladins derive their felt infinite
mana from the double synergy with Shadow Priests and Spiritual Attunment. If you run without
a SP Paladins have to use Mana Pots like everyone else (at least its the case on a T4-equivalent
gear level, where most of the Paladins are right now).

The nerf to Spiritual Attunment was badly needed, but nerfing Illumination leaves us with a
huge gear gap, i cant see the point of changing that talent now and leave Paladins crippled
until they get around and fix our Itemisation.

The fact that the Illumination change is in the same patch as the Tier5 revamp (which removes
some mp/5 in favor for +spellcrit on the Crystalforge Raiment) is a slap in the face.

Oh, thats an infraction if I've ever seen one. The paladin gear gap is there now, as spellcrit was a huge part of paladin gear choices. Illumination did need to be fixed, but, not without maxing mp/5 on paladin sets, like the poster above me said. Would of rather seen a cooldown on illumination, or something of the sort.

To Kiron, you claim to use a ton of pots but complain about shaman heals. Chain heal is simply amazing. On fights were it can't be used properly, you shouldn't beat the best single target healer. The fix to illumination will hopefully be remembered when blzzard retunes some bosses based on consumables.

We already use consumables now, the whole no consumable thing is a myth unless you have 2 shadow priests feeding you mana.

You should see my bank alt, I've got enough herbs to make hundreds of mana potions (without procs), 20+ flasks, etc. I don't mind farming consumables, being on a relatively low pop server, I farm herbs constantly anyway because it's good money (and crusader aura + epic mount is incredible for gathering netherbloom).

If I thought the only thing this patch would do was increase my consumable use a little, it wouldn't even bother me much, consumables have never really bothered me much. It's that I'm worried spell crit will turn into a stat we hate to see on gear, because it takes away valuable budget points from mp5 instead.

Here's a list of TBC plate +healing gear with spellcrit and no mp5.

I left out plate with +damage/healing, since it could be argued that the crit is still nice for HS and JoR.

I've been playing around with an excel spreadsheet to show amount of healing possible after next patch w/ the illumination nerf and thought some of you others would like to try it out. It seems like a pretty good calculator but I'm sort of questionable about some of the calculations. Some of the things are understandable come next patch (such as Mask of Pennance > T4 Helm , Breastplate of Many graces > Gladiators BP , Fathomheart Gauntlets > T4 gloves, etc) but i think the spreadsheet might favor too much towards int and mp5.

For example : 6mp5 to bracers enchant > 30 healing enchant. This one could be argued both ways and I could see 6mp5 being more useful in a longer fight. One thing I find stranger tho is 30 int > 81 healing. Considering the mats needed for each enchant and what I would think would be the better chant, the 30 intellect comes ahead by a few thousand healing during a fight. Can anyone prove/disprove this spreadhseet or post your own Pawn values for int/crit/mp5/etc? My pawn values i have for each stat and the link to the healing calculator are listed below :

["Intellect"] = 1.1,
["SpellCritRating"] = 1.25,
["Healing"] = 1.15,
["Mp5"] = 5,

Edit : These values are for 1 point of the Stat in the brackets. I might have intellect and healing switched by a bunch since supposedly 30int>81healing. But I'm JW how everyone else rated their stats. Also i made 4 spell crit worth 1 mp5 for next patch, was jw if anyone had better math to make a better estimate.

http://wow-en.curse-gaming.com/downl...ng-calculator/

Speaking of the T4 helm, I had a destructive skyfire diamond as meta (14 spell crit & 1% reflect), besides some of the funnniest moments ever in PvP thanks to that 1% spell reflect, it was a great meta due to the requirements being fairly easy to meet. Next patch it'll require 4 gems of each color rather than 5 or more reds, ruining my T4 helm even further. :/

That's definitely the part I hate most about this patch, it feels like the effort I put into my gear has been thrown away by poor planning on Blizzard's part, and I know they sure as hell aren't going to fix it by giving me back melted gear that is now superior or the gem I socketed under the impression the requirements to activate it wouldn't suddenly be changed.

i test 5,7,10 min encounters thru the spreadsheet (theres a box to change the fight duration) and in all 3 durations 30int>81healing to weapon and in all 3 durations 6mp5 > 30 healing as well. Also maybe I misread it or im a total noob but I thought the max int to weapon was 30, not 40. I could see 40 int being greater than 81 healing, but 30 int just seems hard to compare especially with the difference in materials, althought you do get 33 int from the enchant from Divine Intellect and another 3-4 from BoK making it 36-37 int vs 81 healing. Also these Pawn values I just made up and im trying to be VERY generous with the spellcrit making 1mp5=4 spell crit rating and 1int/1healing being worth a little less than 1 crit rating. If anyone uses pawn could you include your awn values for int spell crit healing and mp5 (with the illumination nerf takin into account for patch 2.1.0). Also I used to rate 1healing and 1intellect to be close to equal for deciding gear and value crit much more than both these stats where it looks like 1int=3healing. 6healing = 1 mp5. 1mp5=5-6 spell crit rating(after 2.1.0). Could anyone dispute/give reason for or against these numbers?

Sorry to say but this is utter crap.

Before TBC, Paladins were running around with 8-9k mana pools fully buffed, with a max rank of holy light costing 660 mana. Now Holy Light costs 840 and the mana pools for paladins are about 10.5 to a 11.5k buffed. If the reason for this nerf is scaling then I just don't buy it. Mind you these are very rough numbers from my paladin, but using these numbers and some logic, their is no way this nerf is justified. Frankly, casting a 840 mana spell with a chance that it could a) overheal or b) not crit, is a fairly big risk in fights averaging 8-10 minutes. Iillumination always diminished that "risk".

You can do things like change the way spiritual attunement works (already done) and remove the full mana gained from divine illiumination crit heals and I think paladins are brought back into the fold in terms of a balanced healer. The illiumination nerf is unacceptable.

Sidenote: It took Blizzard until Naxxramas and to a lesser extent the early parts of AQ40 to get paladin healing itemization right. When TBC launched and I saw items mixing crit, mp5, healing, and all that jazz I was completely stoked and built a half and half set of mp5 on certain gear and crit on my other half. Again, to whine about illumination some more, if this change goes through, half my gear goes out the window and is replaced by heroic plate with mp5/healing.

This patch is really making me glad I generally wait before getting rid of old gear. I almost pitched the mail kara healing shoulders when I got my gladiator ones, which would've been a huge mistake.

Thankfully I kept my helm from steamvaults because I love how the set looks (I almost melted it too cleaning out my bank a few days ago). The rest is gone tho. :/

I don't have a paladin, but couldn't this simply be done by placing blessing of sacrifice on a shadow priest or warlock. Either class hurts themselves frequently enough that the paladin should theoretically be under 100% hp enough to still get a good amount of benefit from VE healing -> mana conversions. Better than nothing anyway.

Even if Blessing of Sacrifice worked on self-inflicted damage (I don't think it does), that means you are replacing whatever blessing you had on the person with Blessing of Sacrifice, plus you'd have to refresh it every 30 seconds. This is not a really a viable option for Paladins unless you happen to have 4-5 in your raid, in which case one Paladin can do it - if they even remember to keep it up all the time.

Blessing of Sacrifice basically absorbs x amount of damage on the blessed player and transfer the damage over to the paladin. X is based on rank, I think at max rank it absorb about ~100. BoSac is a highly situational blessing, mainly used in PvP to counter to crowd-control on the paladin. Like what Shallistra stated, the timer is only 30 sec, making it cumbersome to continuously recast.

Vanstrider: the issue isn't scaling to date, it's that much like warriors (damage begets damage) for paladins 'crits beget crits'. As gear progresses crit rates only climb, leading to a non-linear increase in effective mana pools (compared to everyone else who gets effectively a linear benefit from mp/5). In short, the problem isn't 'today' it's 'how insane life will be in 9 months'

The OP's analysis was very slick. I'm a bit surprised to see that it only results in a ~20% decrease in total healing possible, but anecdotally that's about what the lead they had before was. Even if pallies have roughly the same maximum throughput as the other main healing classes, they are still going to be raid slots for them--the different classes shine at different things and that's as it should be.

I do feel bad for all the people who have essentially had the rug pulled out from under them on their gear selection though, I don't want to even imagine having to go back and get stuff I passed/sold/disenchanted because some game mechanics have changed substantially

The real problem is there isn't any stuff to go back and get other than like 2 blue items, the rest is spell crit itemized. So unless you want to wear a ton of cloth.... In any case why should a blue helm from the 2nd boss in normal mode steamvault be superior to the epic arena helm, T4 and probably T5?

Wow, if anyone seriously deleted and/or rerolled over these changes, then that truly gives new meaning to the term "flavor of the month".