I'd enjoy a change to Sanctified Light
It'd be around 30mp5 for the average paladin - an amount not very far off from the Intensity/Meditation amounts and an amount that gives a reasonably close mp5 value to the 6% chance to crit HL lost.

If nothing else.. it'd give a decent transition for all the paladins who relied on nothing but spellcrit due to current itemization.

Since Illumination is our unique version of regenerating mana while casting, for the priest you should include Meditation as a cost reduction. I am not sure on the amount of spirit a raiding Priest will have so I won't do the math on how much mana he gains in 2.5 seconds, but it seems to me that the Priest will be ahead of the Paladin on net mana usage even when chaincasting (i.e. maximum benefit of spellcrit).

Is a 31 point in the restauration tree.. And helps the paladin as well. :P

The problem with the 50% illumination is that it completely destroys spell crit on the current budget.

For 1% spell crit, I could get ~9mp5.

With the 50% illumination deal, even if we chain cast max rank holy light, 1% spell crit would equal out to 10.5mp5. That's in the very best case scenario for spell crit, a situation that will pretty much never happen in game. With this change, spell crit will simply not be worth item points.

Like I said, I can see the need for a change, but the way they did it destroyed the mp5/spell crit balance.

Yes, but not every Paladin is going to have a Shaman in his pocket, will he? We were speaking of personal sources of active regen. Seal of wisdom is insufficient, beyond not being FaF like the rest.

And I do realize Mana Tide is simultaneously both the worst of the three while also being a deep talent.

Not going to comment on the shaman stuff but I will on the paladin. You say that at a certain level of spell crit our most powerful is also the least expensive(by that I assume you mean most effecient, as HL is never truely less expensive then FoL unless using DI). I'd like to see where your idea is that at some point HL becomes more efficient comes from. Somehow I doubt it's a reasonable number. 50% spell crit on a paladin is excessevily high and even at that point FoL completely blows HL out of the water for efficiency(with 1500 healing your looking at 10hp/m for HL and 16 hp/m for FoL).

You are correct as our crit increases our endurance goes up rather quickly because the mana we got back from a crit can be used towards another heal that can also crit and it just skyrockets. This is basically required for end game content though. Paladins are the healers with likely the lowest usage of mana pots, I do not need to chug mana pots regularly on a boss fight that's on farm unless something goes wrong. The other 3 do, I feel most people have got the idea that chugging mana potions for every fight is what should be happening, I tend to disagree and perhaps blizzard's vision of raiding entails chugging mana pots for every fight but I would hope not.

Indeed, changing itemization would be big. At this point the 50% nerf to illumination is fine, it's the fact nearly all my gear is drenched in spell crit and blizzard's recently retuned epic armor has even MORE spell crit on it. If we had a better balance then the nerf would not be nearly as bad, as it stands I have higher mp5 then most paladins simply because I believe in a good balance but I'd recently started dropping some of it in favor of more spell crit because it was simply more effective, now I have to go back and get old items again, redo gems, likely grab all the mail shaman gear out of karazhan... it's quite frustrating that blizzard basically just threw away my last few months of item progression in kara.



I hope so, although my faith in blizzard is not very high.

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.

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.