I think for most reasonable people, if they are quitting over this change, it's not the direct nerf to the class (which was probably needed), but the way Blizzard is handling it.

With this change, they completely changed the way we should gear up, with no changes being made to our end game raid gear to reflect that, and with pretty much no regard for all the gearing paladins have already done in TBC.

I have no desire to play a one-button monkey class with no discernible advantage over another healing class. I'll play a less efficient but more interesting healer.

People keep saying this.

Spell crit will still be useful.

#1: MP/5 doesn't increase your average HP healed and scale with +healing, crit does. So its not just a regen stat.
#2: Itemization wise, if you want pure regen MP/5 was worthless before since spell crit was almost 2x as good. Now Spell crit is worse for _regen only_ but not by huge ammounts. Thus, an item with 5MP/5 and 13 spell crit will always be better than one with 8PM5 or 20 spell crit (all three choices are roughly the same item budget).

Just like how priests optimally need both MP/5 and spirit, paladins basically just substitute crit for spirit and plate for cloth. Both are better than one or the other.

Yeah, the itemization changes to T5, etc combined with this are an instance of one hand not paying attention to what the other is doing. Take the long term view, it will get sorted out.

I find it extremely funny that some have actually deleted their characters. Seriously -- you've had one of the best healers in game for a LONG time. Pallies have had complaints elsewhere but not here. I played a warlock when it was cool to have 1 or 2 in a 40 man, and a druid when they weren't good at anything (patch 1.3 to 1.7). Deleting a character is a bad Idea -- patch 2.1 is NOT the last patch, FYI.

Personally I think deleting a character is stupid no matter the circumstances. If you really feel your fun got ruined, play something else, quit, whatever, don't delete your char to spite Blizzard or something, they won't care.

As for spell crit, I realize it increases healing too, but spell crit by nature is very unreliable. What made it desirable was the fact that stacking it would, to a point, make your heals more reliable (in that you can count on crits happening fairly often) as well as help your mana regen at the same time.

I was never a huge fan of stacking absurd amounts of spell crit while completely neglecting my mp5/healing due to it's unreliable nature, but now that issue got even worse.

You're right tho, it's way to premature to say you'd quit or delete your paladin because of this. I'm a bit bummed out by the way they handled the nerf, but I'm not doing anything until I see how things turn out.

I couldn't have said it better myself.

You quickly seem to forget that crit does nothing for your character when you are not casting. And all that time spent doing nothing over a fight (couple seconds here or there, etc) adds up to *alot* of MP5 lost. If the fight has any lulls, breaks or "down phases" MP5 shatters crit in all scenarios except for HP/S - but that isn't our strong suit anymore now is it? Priests can stack MP5 or Spirit without fear since FSR is such an important and intergal part to their overall raiding strategy. Paladins do not have anything like this - any time spent not casting is mana wasted since none of your crit is being put to work for you. Thus in the long run MP5 is utterly superior to Crit in all situations, whereas Crit only becomes equivalent to MP5 in some situations. I don't like equipping gear based on possibilites, only actuals.

Priests can achieve similar HP/S with 1k+ Renew ticks and max Gheal spam, espescially since they benefit more from +heal and generally receive more of it. Granted it takes them two spells to our one, but the adage remains true - on top of the reality that with the Illum nerf it isn't very viable to expect to maintain any serious HP/S for any duration with things the way they will be.

p.s What un-nerf? On test all I saw was that the talent was still unchanged, but the nerf was most definitely still live.

1k+ renew ticks require over 2k healing. I am not saying it is impossible, but if you have 1k+ renew, you are likely to have very little mana/5 and spirit.

Paladins pre-nerf outheal priests in both throughput and longevity on single target healing by significant margins.

1k+ Renew ticks? Wow, I'm running ~1750 raid buffed +healing and I'm only pushing 725.

1000 tick @ 5 ticks = 5000 total healing. Talents bring that down to 5000/(1.1*1.15) = 3952 and subtracting off the base healing we get 3952-1110 = 2842 required +healing

If you're seeing 1k+ renew claims you're seeing trinket + PI + tree druid buff on a warlock or a rogue methinks. If we're doing that I have a friend doing some nifty 10k+ HL crits without PI, I'm sure we can get some pretty insane HP/s numbers

A Priest with the same amount of +heal's renew ticks in the mid 600s, not for 1000, for a little over 200 hp/s. The same priest's Gheal hits for about 4500 -- 1800 hp/s @ 2.5s Cast, which even when combined with a renew ticking is still only 2000 hp/s. If you really like, I'll post HealPoints Calculator screenshots from both my Paladin and my Priest, both with 1350 +heal equipped... but the math isn't that hard to do.

The Priest Gheal has a 2.5 second cast compared to 2.0 for light's grace HL, and heals for slightly less... so you're really talking about a HP/S increase of roughly a flat 20%.

Uh I'm "equivalently geared" with Priests who are running with alot more +heal than I am - why would you use that as a comparison as "equal" + heal? Sure I could equip cloth, but then it defeats the idea of playing a Paladin.

Don't forget to take into account the first HL is 2.5, plus Priests get 20% more from their +healing and are generally stuffed to the gills with it, along with rotating PW:S/PoMending/Renew into their single target spree . I realize it is all semantics but to call Paladins the "Masters" of single target healing is a slight falsification now, espescially with the advent of our longevity cut by more than half with the Illum nerf and holy shock bug being fixed. (You did cast holy shock every time the cooldown was ready right?)

Purely from a HP/S mathematical point of view yes we're slightly ahead of Priests, but from a realistic point of view Priests have more options to keep a tank at max health solo, longer than a Paladin - which is what matters in the end. (See: Inspiration)

I really don't care for HealPoints, or any of those mods since all I need is a decent amount of +heal, then I itemize strictly for STA and Regen. But thats my playstyle It still nets me top 3 effective healing/top 2 or 3 overall healing - depending on who gets the Shadowpriest, and I haven't seen any encounters where I can't keep the tank up solo when it is required of me, so I'm happy with it.

Why we're even arguing this point is beyond me now : Paladins playstyle completely changes with 2.1, and I've already tried incorporating HLR4 every 10-12 seconds into my FOL rotation to garner as much uptime with LG as possible - but it still feels like complete crap. I won't be able to solo heal a tank with any amount of efficiency post 2.1, I can't be innervated and I have no means to regen mana outside of potions. Other healers have options, we stand there and scream for a Shadowpriest. Other healers have varying tools for the job. We stand there and spam 2 buttons.

Yeah, my point was that I'd hardly call single target healing our weak area -- it's the only area we're relatively strong in (or can compete in at all, really). With no group heals, no HOTs, no PW:S, along with the fact that in BC raids it's very uncommon to have blessing of light on anyone but tanks, single-target healing (i.e. Tank Healing, generally) is what we're best suited to.

As for Healpoints and comparing what an "equally geared" Paladin and a Priest would be, we could make a 10 page thread to discuss it, but still never really get anywhere. For the sake of simply comparing HL11 to GHeal7, though, I don't see how it's unreasonable to simply compare their healpower with the same amount of +healing equipped.

I strongly agree, however, that it's irritating that our healing toolbox is so limited, and that it's really silly that they've applied a fifty percent nerf to illumination, considering the only thing we really had going for us, which was efficiency. If anything would be a good argument for a complete revamp of Paladin healing, it's that it's just too simple -- while other healers have 4 or 5 types of healing spells (PWS / Renew / POH / Flash/Gheal / POM for priests, Rejuv/Regrowth/Swiftmend/HT/Lifebloom/Tranquility for druids), we've really got.... 1 type of healing spell, which makes healing on a Paladin really boring. IMO, a lot of the reason that Paladins in general are fed up with their class is that their only options for how to play their class are either 1) the simplest, and most boring healer in the game or 2) a spec which isn't worth bringing to an endgame raid (Ret or Prot).

Anyways, I think the result of most of the 2.1 Pallyhealer theorycraft is going to be a demand for some sort of new healing ability. If we can't at least be uber-efficient, we should really have some other perks esides the blessings we bring.

Sorry I don't know, but what is the Holy Shock bug that is being fixed?

I thought it wasn't good for healing at all because of the mana inefficicy.


Ofc it is good for a quick damage finisher and for Holy Pally farming.

If you check the bug report forums, certain ranks of Holy Shock (4 and 5, I think) give the wrong amount of mana back when they crit heal.

This is a common misconception for DPS people. For DPS people, given whatever it is you do can crit in the first place, crit is more DPS. It doesn't work like that with healing. Think about it, let's take a boss with five million current hit points that you are DPSing and you fireball (noncrit) it for four thousand. Boss loses 4k hp. Now you fireball crit it for six thousand. Boss looses 6k hp, you just got 150% return on that fireball because it crit. Now let's take the same boss hitting your tank for 4k every 2 seconds. This works out very well for me because I cast holy light cast time is 2 seconds and it heals for about that much, a bit more. Now I crit for 6.8k on a tank missing 4k hp in the first place. I got no extra healing from that.

Outside of MS type debuff situations spellcrit doesn't result in higher healing output except in very rare circumstances. Outside of pvp, I'm talking handful of situations in the entire game. If tank hp pools were to drastically increase, say over sixty thousand, this situation would change.

Now using spellcrit as a primary regen mechanism, and all the tier 4 gear and up is centered around it, was always a double edge sword. Spellcrit is only good when you are spending mana. Moreover, the faster you are spending mana, the better it gets. Take a t5 geared paladin with all the stuff from paladin test box you're looking at like 35% HL crit and at 100 mp5 after BoW (very rough). Which is all great until you run out of mana at which point you just sit with a thumb up your butt waiting for pot cooldown with pathetic 100 mp5 and 150 spirit regen out of 5sr (because if your gear has spirit on it these days lol at you) and all that spellcrit helps you exactly zero. That's given the fact you can actually afford to sit like that.

Now people are always up in arms about HL11 spam and getting a metric assload of mana back on crits. I'd love a play profiler that would show people how much of exactly this they are not doing.

Compare this to mp5 where you never have to worry if you're getting the most of it, because you are always getting everything there is to get from it.

I have to have higher throughput because my tools can't even compare to priest tools. Any type of group wide damage in a 5 man situation my throughput is the only thing I have.

rank 5 was funny. Sometimes i would get 180 mana back from forcing it to crit, other times when it crit on its own it would give me 840 mana back. There were also times it would not register any mana being returned.

No i didnt test this in combat either, just during the long trip back up the karazhan tower.

As far as I'm aware, Holy Shock used to give you back however much mana you got back from your last crit, so if the last healing spell you crit with was a max rank Holy Light, if you crit with Holy Shock you'd get 840 mana back. I never really used that trick, but it was a valid method of regaining mana.

I have a question about the gloves Thomase mentioned though. (Not trying to derail the thread, but I'm fairly new here and am not really familiar with posting etiquette and didn't want to start a new thread). Assuming the changes made on the ptr are going live, I'm planning on switching from a Destructive Skyfire Diamond (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=25890) to an Insightful Earthstorm Diamond (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=25901). In order to do this, I have to get one gem slot more than what my gear will allow. The only two pieces I've found to be good enough to switch in for gem slots are the Justicar Pauldrons (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=29064) and Attumen's gloves, the Gauntlets of Renewed Hope (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28505).

My question is as follows: assuming that I will use one of these two gemmable items, would I be better off replacing Pauldrons of the Justice-Seeker (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28666) with the Justicar, or replacing Gladiator's Ornamented Gloves (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=31614) with the Gauntlets of Renewed Hope? Once again, I apologize if this post is not in the right place or if it's derailing this thread, please forgive this noob his naive transgressions.

I would replace your shoulders, since Justicar is (gemmed) a bigger upgrade then the gloves. (Which I actually consider a side grade in your case)

Related to this though, I was under the assumption that you needed at least 8 gem slots to be able to use that Meta gem? Or am I misinterpreting the requirements? (with 5 gems slots you can only get 2/3 of the requirements)

edit: nvm, forgot about void spheres. Still wouldnt want to fill all my gem slots with void spheres for this one (not to mention the cost related to them), you'd be giving up way too much for 10-15 mp5.

edit: yep, void crystals.

edit: delete plz

It's theorycraft, so I'm assuming I'll have the Legplates of the Innocent (http://www.wowhead.com/?item=28748). I mean, they've gotta drop at some point, right? Thanks for the advice though, that's the decision I had been leaning towards.

Again, this is completely false. Paladins never ever ever had better throughput than priests prior to TBC, yet absolutely nobody even dared suggest that paladins were 'broken' as healers.

Paladins beating priests in single target throughput is a very very recent addition, and paladins were still extremly desirable addition to raids with that considered. With TBC though priests took a 15% nerf to their in-combat regen (about as big a nerf as the illumination nerf now, although admittedly 3 piece t-2 was stupidly overpowered, priests had come to rely upon it) and paladins started beating them in throughput. The only niche left for priests was AoE healing, which is completely non-existent in today's raiding enviroment.