• Avitus

Damn, I was just beginning to enjoy the new healing flexibility in beta instances with bol, the 2-3 times I specced holy, it was actually fun.

What really gets to me is this seemingly random introduction of new abilities, then frequently axing them for something completely different (and in many cases, hardly even equivalent, i.e. art of war, bol, jotw). I can't help but feel a strong sense of lack of direction from the devs whenever they do this, as if they're making it up as they go. If it's such a bad idea it had to be axed eventually, doesn't that reflect somewhat on the quality of the ideas to begin with? Sure it's a beta, but it feels more like aimless hopping around rather than progressing towards a goal.


Regarding the new BoL mechanic, with overhealing not working, it feels to me like an incredibly situational tool, when a paladin is assigned to raid healing (??) and is supposed to help a bit on MT healing? Or possibly to be used on self while spam healing raid targets during heavy AoE encounters?

However not something you can always make use of in an efficient way.


Anyway, again, it's the waiting game to see where we'll be taken next, lets hope things start making more sense soon

 

tarja

Fel/Demon Armor shouldn't really be a good reason to balance BoL around, since they moved the +20% healing portion over to Demon Armor (which otherwise sucks for PVE for the Warlock)

 

Puretide

I'd imagine the primary reason to stop overheal from counting would be pvp, specifically in 2v2, where you can go make your partner the BoL and you go stand behind a pillar and spam heals on yourself undisturbed.

Although I suspect BoL is a magic effect, putting some holes in this strategy.

 

GSH

If BoL took overheals, the optimum strategy would be to never, ever heal the main tank. You would always be spamming heals on other people, even if they were always at full health. This would be really weird.

I think Beacon is designed to let you heal other people if needed without completely punishing you for stopping heals on the main tank.

It might a bit better if it was more permanent and lasted longer (10~20 min). If it was more of a pre-combat buff that allowed you to "mark" the main tank before combat, rather than something you refreshed during combat. But that might cause issues with PvP.

 

Cathela

Touche!

Good points from everyone on BoL. Maybe the PvP abuse could be prevented by adding a LoS restriction to it? That wouldn't be hard, I'd think.

What's interesting about Kigale's idea of recalculating the heal is: Do you check the crit chance for each heal separately? If the secondary heal crits does Illumination apply? I can see how this could become imbalanced, but if they could find a way to balance it (maybe by increasing the cost of BoL?) it would add a really interesting wrinkle to the idea.


EDIT: Updated the OP to include all known info about 8885 so far. I'm halfway through removing most of the colors from the post (explanation there, if you care). Still need to add info on buff/debuff slotting and what doesn't stack.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

flyingtoastr

I don't see any PvP issue, given that every healer except paladins can "hide behind a pole healing" through HoT's and reactive heal abilities. It is still quite vulnerable to dispels and it doesn't allow you to judge, hand, stun, whatever. Perfectly fine as I see it.

The other main problem with the ability is that as a "only cast when you need to AoE heal" and the times you want a paladin AoE healing in a raid are... scarce... the ability just won't see much playtime. Taking a GCD and >1200 mana to put something on the target you're going to be spamming heals on anyway for possible "here and there" heals just isn't too grand.

As it is the ability is alright, but it clearly isn't worthy of a tree-topper. Having a "of marginal use" talent in the top point just leaves a very sour taste in my mouth. Some tweaks and it could be a very nice spell. As it is though I'm wondering if going "raidbitch" for the superspecialawesome BoSan is a better choice given that at the moment our prot pally isn't sure he wants to keep playing and it is just too good to pass up.

 

Resiana

Honestly, the buff shouldn't be magic. (It is at the moment.) It's better but the fact it cost so much mana and is dispellable/spellsteable make it suddenly less useful.

I'm all for not allowing the overhealing tough, but the magic effect should go away imo.

Currently, Beacon of Light:
- Receive an extra 12% bonus from Healing Light because it cast an extra (free) Heal.
- Has an almost 0.3~1 sec delay.
- Works on NPCs and work on overhealing if it's a NPC.
- Can be applied to more than one target at a time.

EDIT: Or perhaps make the ability much cheaper.

 

tarja

HoTs ticking while out of LoS can hardly be compared to being able to spam large, direct healing spells thru walls/pillars. But if PVP was really the issue then I don't see why they couldn't just make it so that you need LoS on the beacon target for the heal to jump to them.

 

kharen

Can someone else test something for me? And if it's confirmed, post it on the US forums where it's more likely to get some attention?

Right now (on the EU beta realm), my JoW tooltip says "...a chance to restore 178 mana to the attacker".

My combat log says "[Your] Judgement of Wisdom energized [You] 89 (Mana)."

One of these is clearly wrong.

 

Resiana

It gives you 4% of your total mana on a swing when it proc.

 

flyingtoastr

Wait what? They blew up JoW too?

E: MMOC has it listed:

SoW: Fills the Paladin with divine wisdom for 2 min, giving each melee attack a chance to restore 20168s1% of the paladin's maximum mana. Only one Seal can be active on the Paladin at any one time.

JoW: Unleashing this Seal's energy will judge an enemy for 20 sec, granting attacks and spells used against the judged enemy a chance to restore 20268s1% of maximum mana to the attacker. Your melee strikes will refresh the spell's duration. Only one Judgement per Paladin can be active at any one time.

Another nail in the coffin that is ret. Someone needs to stir up some hell on the beta boards.

 

kharen

I have 4470 total mana. 4% of that would indeed be the tooltip value. It's actually returning half that already-pitiful value.

 

Noules

Wait, what? You can have multiple Beacons up at once? And a single heal heals EACH Beacon target?

If this is true, things suddenly look MUCH more interesting...consider FoL HoT + multiple beacons up for the efficient throughput.

 

Resiana

Oh yeah, sorry about that I tought you meant Seal of Wisdom.

Seal of Wisdom is 4% of total mana.

 

flyingtoastr

Going with an Attack Rate Constant of 1.548 giving you an effective cooldown for JoW of 4.64 seconds (just trust me on this, that's a 3.5 speed autoswing timer with a CS = DS > J cycle) and a fully buffed mana pool of 7100 JoW is worth a measly 160 Mp5 for ret pallys.

A CS = DS > J cycle with resealing on the dot costs 827 Mp5. Even with every improved regen buff possible:
JoW: 160 Mp5
BoW: 109 Mp5
Mana Spring: 62.5 Mp5
Replenishment: 177.5 Mp5

Total regen, 509 Mp5. To do a base cycle a ret pally goes 318 Mp5 in the hole. With that 7100 mana pool that ret pally hits OOM in just over 111 seconds, less than two minutes.

Assuming you pop both Divine Plea and a runic mana pot you can extend that by another 47 seconds, giving you about two and a half minutes of DPS time under perfect circumstances. With everything we can possibly do short from wearing cloth armor with intellect a ret paladin can no longer DPS for any raid encounter in the game.

Raise. Some. Hell.

 

Crossbones

So, new toughness + divine purpose. Possible 80% reduction to movement slowing effects?

 

ficelle666

Now im worried

they nerf 2 of our mana regen mechanic at the same time

 

Cathela

What's disturbing about this (the SoW/JoW/etc change) is that it's part of a larger trend of removing the gear-scaling from raid utility abilities.

For example, the previous version of JotW gave back mana proportional to the Judgement damage you deal. Hence, not only are you responsible for dealing damage and providing raid utility, your raid utility is actually tied to the damage you deal. Under the new system, your raid utility is tied to the size of people's mana pools.

In other words, previously your raid utility scaled with your gear; now it scales with everyone else's gear. It pushes raid-utility abilities away from "Damn, you're one of the best ret paladins I've seen; I never ran out of mana!" and more in the direction of "Well, it doesn't matter if you're undergeared, as long as you're keeping replenishment up it's all the same for us." That's bad for a number of reasons.

EDIT: And just to drive the point home, it's not just Ret paladins. It's Shadow priests as well. It's also Survival Hunters, whose raid utility in TBC (Expose Weakness) depends directly on their agility, but whose raid utility in WotLK (replenishment) is the same no matter what their gear is.

We have a survival hunter in the guild, an excellent raider who takes his utility role very seriously and does everything he can to max out his agility. He doesn't mind losing the personal dps because he enjoys pouring all his effort into the utility side of his spec. But in WotLK that whole side of the game is going to be gone for him, so he'll just be optimizing his personal dps like any other raiding hunter, except that he'll have less. That just isn't going to feel special in the same way.

Instead of eliminating the last class of raid utility that actually scales with gear (mana regeneration) they should be figuring out how to make more raid utility abilities scale with gear.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Hephaestius

Apparently they do not stack. If you take both, you get the 50% from toughness only.

 

Fiola

If it's returning 2% mana per JoW proc, it'd be working almost identically to the Replenishment effect when you factor in the 4 second CD. (0.5% total mana / second)



If they're going to change JoW like that, then we lose our AP-based mana regen scaling. They should either give us some way to increase our mana pool, or some new mana regeneration effect. Otherwise, we're back non-scaling SoW/JoW - with 0 int from gear, the naked paladin's SoW/JoW has an identical benefit to that of a Ret paladin in the best possible gear, just like Live.

 

GSH

I would argue that this is actually necessary because mana costs don't increase with gear. So having scaling mana regen leads to weird feedback effects at different levels of gear. The classic example of this is Life Tap. Because Life Tap scales with SP, the proportion of time spent Shadowbolting actually increases as SP increases. This means that SP has this odd "double effect" on Shadowbolt for warlocks, instead of the standard linear effect you would expect.

It's different for health, because damage increases as your healing increases (as you move through content).

 

• ZulazeeluIcecrown

How come nobody else has reacted to this yet? I think, if this is true, it seems a pretty good AoE healing ability... put it up on everybody else except the tank, heal the tank! Obviously the mana cost would have to be reduced... and probably the effect, heh, 100% would be a trifle broken if you were doing this.

 

Khaelarys

I remember how much fun this discussion was - but with the non scaling judgements, JotW changes, the non stacking Swift Retribution, and the wonky new BoL, we're back to a Sheath build being able to cover a lot of ret utility.

I don't think we're going to get the BoL effect removed from the magic domain - lots of talents are dispellable. Anyway, this is interesting for 2's and 3's especially - Shield, BoL yourself, then heal your team mates while the shield is up to bring yourself back to full. With the new HS/HL combination I really think it will be fun to pvp as holy for a bit. Seems like, if nothing else, that toolkit is rounding out nicely.

Edit: I'm not quite ready to talk about the real implications on ret yet. The hurt is still just too much.

Edit 2: Is it possible those glyphs are the lesser glyphs?

 

Fiola