Unir

I have to say I'm fairly disappointed with the top end of the Holy tree as we're seeing it now. There are some good ideas in there, but right now their implementation appears flawed to me, at least in terms of pve raiding.

Enlightened Judgments and Judgments of the Pure - To my mind, they do not fit at all with pve raiding. Presumably you would spend all 7 points, so that a) judgments reach 30 yards, and b) you would spam a judgment within every 30 second window to keep 10% spell haste up for healing. The haste is a great idea, and very appropriate for a 45-point holy talent. The manner of getting it, however, leaves a lot to be desired.

1. Judging every 30 seconds ignores the benefit of having a ret paly. A lot of raids will bring a ret paly for their (yay ret players) utility and for the added benefit of keeping judgments refreshed. Why, as a healer, would I otherwise have any incentive to spam a judgment more than once if that's the case? Ideally I would throw a judgment up once and not look back while it got Crusader Strike'd repeatedly.

2. 30 yards is not 40 yards. Even if our raid did not bring a ret paladin, and I should ideally be judging consistently - for all practical purposes my healing range just became 30 yards, ignoring the benefit of healing spells being 40 yards entirely. As another range issue, many times movement and range restrictions will keep a holy player from judging the target consistently in any event.

3. This costs additional mana. Holy players already have issues with not having an active form of mana regen. It is possible to judge without having a seal up first in the new system, so I can gain the haste without invoking a GCD - however, I've also just spent additional mana every 30 seconds I would not otherwise have.

4. Repeated judgments are well, repeated. On the off chance that you have enough paladins to have JoLight and JoWisdom thrown up and kept up, why would I have any incentive to spam a judgment that is already up? It sounds as if seal+judgment will do some damage even with non-damaging seals, according to beta testers, but why am I as a healer now focused on damaging the mob / boss every 30 seconds as part of my rotation?

5. It doesn't fit the theme or playstyle of top-end Holy raiding. By and large, top-end holy raiders are just well, healers. That is to say, I typically do not do much to Brutallus, other than to throw up JoWisdom and let our ret player keep it up. I heal and that's it, and my hands are already full doing so. On Illidari Council I may or may not keep judgments up, but they simply aren't as crucial in that fight as they are on say, Brutallus. I'm probably not keeping judgments up consistently on Archimonde, as another example of where meeting the constraints of the encounter and healing are more important than keeping judgments in place. The haste, however, does not lose its value with those constraints.


All in all, I like the idea of haste as a 45-point talent. This method of gaining it, however, just does not appear to work in my mind. For all practical purposes, 10% haste is not something that can be ignored by top-end holy healers - it is a "must have" for maximum healing, so the question in my mind is why give us such an awkward tool to get it? Some classes get this sort of bonus passively and I would suggest at 45-holy points spent this is a good case for us to do so as well, just make it passive - there is a good precedence for this in Serpent's Swiftness for hunters, for instance.

What also makes more sense to me is to have it be a stacking buff based on casting a heal. Blizzard appears unwilling to give paladins passive abilities, but that would at least keep it in line with what we actually do - much like illumination, it would require "doing something" to gain its benefit.

Infusion of Light - presumably this is to aid in our difficulty at healing on the move. It's not nearly as valuable, however, as say a Nature's Swiftness heal, because I have to count on a crit. For the times when you need an instant Holy Light on the move - you need it now and without a "chance" to happen. I see the application of holding Divine Favor to force a quasi-Nature's Swiftness effect, but is this really the intention they had for Divine Favor? Seems strange to me.

I suppose you could work in a rotation of Holy Shock with your normal healing to keep the instant effect up and available as much as possible, but what has that just done to your HPS? Holy Shock is not a large heal.

I do appreciate that Holy Shock has a considerably lower cooldown than Nature's Swiftness - but dealing with emergency situations with a "chance to happen" seems poor to me. One solution could be to make the Infusion of Light buff an active cast, just like Nature's Swiftness - but make it only available after a Holy Shock crit, and perhaps with a timer of say 1 minute. That way it's tied to Holy Shock still, if that is the design goal, but instead of making it an auto-instant HL - make it a Nature's Swiftness that requires a Holy Shock crit to charge and is available to be used for 1 minute.

Beacon of Light I really appreciate that they have tried to give us an aoe heal, and a hot, but I am concerned that a 10-yard radius is very small. I think many will say that it is powerful because it has no limit of targets - but how often are people in a raid standing within 10 yards of each other for 15 seconds? The mana cost is quite high (higher than top rank Holy Light), and unless the healing coefficient is artificially inflated, the amount healed will probably be low. For a 51-point talent this is pretty surprising.

A solution would be to increase the radius, increase the base healing, and/or lower the mana cost. Any of those would help make it more usable for a 51-point talent.
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Those are my thoughts looking at what we are being shown now. I offer that not so much as a criticism of Blizzard as an analysis and evaluation of the tools we are being shown. At this point I am trying to figure out how I would make use of those tools in a raid setting and scratching my head a bit.

 

Nodrak

Assuming you still have to have a seal active, and they still have durations, you would gain 10% casting time on 30s, which is 3s, 1.5s of which is used to prime the seal. The result is in a full 100% haste uptime rotation, you only get 1 extra FoL, and you only get an extra HL if you let the haste fall off, meaning 16 HLs in ~30.5s vs 15 HLs in 30s. The mana costs of the seals will not be trivial, so as I holy paladin I would only do JoW, which if there is a ret is pointless.

Edit: It occured to me that JoW and JoL do not need seals active now, so you should be able to get the haste for the entire 30s, which makes it marginally better. With the focus to Holy Shock (HPS and HPM boosted), and Instant Holy Lights, I see a contradiction. Lost of haste for spamming heals, but we have alot of instant potential now?

 

Kigale

Unir, you are using BC rules to evaluate Lich King spells.

There is no rule that states the way it has been must be the way it will be.

This is also based on BC info, no one knows what the level 80 spell will be. Maybe it is exactly what you claim Paladins don't have. The speculation on this thread is interesting but not completely valid. I fell into the trap myself a few pages back commenting on the usefulness of Holy Shock. But the simple truth is we just don't know everything yet, and can't really make proper informed judgments (pun intended )

 

flyingtoastr

I think you completely missed the point that they are trying to get pallys to do something other than rolling their face across the Flash of Light button a few thousand times a night. I actually like the synergy between Judgement and Healing, it gives you a reason not to hide in the back with the clothies but get in there and do a bit of damage (depending on how SoV works holy pallys could actually do some decent contributing DPS considering Ret Pallys will most assuredly be rolling 5 stacks of it now). On that note, if you Judge Vengeance when someone else has stacks up do you get the damage on JoV or do they have to be your own stacks?

And looking at the prelim mined spell ranks Holy Shock looks to be more efficient than both Holy Light and Flash of Light (the two new ranks had a static mana cost). Combined with the fact that it now gets the bonuses from Healing Light and Sanctified Light I could easily see it becoming a staple in a Holy Pally's rotation.

Hell, now that I look at it, Infusion of Light says "Holy Light critical hits", not heals, giving a reason to cast it at the darn boss if you don't need it for healing to give some nice "NS" effects.

Save Atlantis!

 

Unir

Don't misunderstand, I'm not trying to start a war or asking everyone to rush in and defend Blizzard, so I'm not really sure how to respond that I 'completely missed' something.

I see that they are trying to give us more active things to do beyond healing with 2 spells of various ranks - that is obvious with the Hand spells, and with Sacred Shield, the intended usefulness of Holy Shock, and of course with the new healing spell at 51-holy - not to mention shorter LoH, and potentially a bubble that can mitigate raid damage.

I do believe, however, that the judgment requirement to keep haste up is trying to fit a square peg into a round hole - it just doesn't fit imo, and doesn't account for things like the shorter range and having a ret paly available. And to be honest, it's really not optional - that 10% haste is something all holy players in raids will view as a "must have."

To my mind, there is a big difference between saying 'here are more ways to heal and other healing things to do' (sacred shield, holy shock, 51-point holy spell, bubble/mitigate from prot, active Hand spells, etc.) and 'go hit the boss.'

 

Spiry

What I'd like to add here, is that it is possible to trigger a critical Holy Shock via Divine Favour, with the correct macro, you could DF+HS+instantHL in the gap of the GCD (at whatever your haste rating has brought it down to) on a 2min timer, granted it's not as instant as NS+HT/HW, but is possible.

 

Aeonin

Some things I would like to clear up. First off Judgements cost ZERO mana. Secondly judgements are not on a GCD (they haven't been either), and lastly a Holy paladin taking a second to use JoW on a mob gives some more mana return for the holy paladin as well as places the judgement on the target for 20 seconds.

Since Judgements cost ZERO mana and seals are not consumed by judgement then retadins will have an amazing pool for mana return. They can use Judgement of Wisdom once and the rest of the time double use judgement of blood/martyr keeping SoC up. So in effect we are bit op. Art of War combined with the judged part of command is currently doing too much to stunned targets, and will probably be fixed soon.

Sheath of Light belongs in the ret tree simply using divine storm and the heal from it critting creates a good deal of life, and now paladins (like enhancement shamans) can heal for a decent amount in their ret gear so off healing is now offered when needed for 5 mans or raids without having to be forced to holy gear. Ret paladins are an awesome choice for a 5 man dps now with the 1 minute repentance CC, and the offheal ability combined with the bonuses to threat to the tank and haste to the group with sanctified/swift/imp retribution aura. Of course I'm not saying some holy paladins won't get swift retribution, but in effect there is not really a major loss on their part for doing so since they will have the increased range to their judgements and a reduced cost.

 

Nodrak

Free Judgments? That also put up JoW/JoL/JoJ? And also judge your active seal? I would have to see proof

On SoV/JoV. It is supposed to work that one stack is shared between all paladins and whomever started the stack gets credit for the DoT Damage/Threat. Atleast currently. I have experienced an occasion where we managed to have 2 stacks of Vengence up, with 1 DoT for each paladin. I can't recall if the Judgment got the bonus of 10 debuffs or not, so I won't speculate on that part.

 

Cathela

As it is now on live, all Vengeance procs go into a single stack; which is "owned" by whoever started it. Could be a nice threat trick to let a prot paladin start the stack and then have the ret paladin maintain it and periodically refresh it while the tank switches to SoR.

I noticed the static mana cost on the new ranks of Holy Shock; that's definitely atypical and I don't think we can draw any conclusions from it yet. If they wanted to make Holy Shock cheaper/more efficient, it seems far more likely that they'd simply reduce the cost of all ranks, rather than just stop increasing the mana cost at an arbitrary point.

Personally I have a hard time seeing the instant-heal-on-shock crits being all that useful as a PvE healer. Healing in PvE is all about being able to reliably deliver healing when it's needed. Randomly getting a Holy Light 2.5 seconds earlier than you expect doesn't seem all that likely to be useful, and it's very hard to see it being worth a GCD every 6 seconds or so just to get a chance at it. The "ghetto NS" trick with DF does seem useful though; maybe that's good enough for PvE.

Really, what I'm having difficulty with is Beacon of Light. Compared to Flourish at the same level, it:

• Costs twice as much mana
• Has a cast time, and therefore can't be cast while moving.
• Does less than half the healing per target
• Takes over twice as long to deliver its healing (resulting in less than one quarter of the healing per second per target as Flourish.)
• Has a smaller area of effect (radius only two-thirds, total area less than half)
• Only heals people who stay near the target, whereas the HoTs placed by Flourish stay on their targets regardless of where they move after the cast.

The only advantage to BoL is the fact that in theory it can heal up to 25 people at once, but it's really damn hard to come up with circumstances where this is going to be useful, especially given the tiny area of effect. It's certainly far inferior to Flourish for anything smaller than 10 people, and even in 25s, Flourish is going to be far more powerful and versatile for the vast majority of content.

Frankly, Beacon appears to be so hugely inferior to Flourish for every conceivable application that I'm wondering if there's some feature of Beacon that I'm completely overlooking.

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

 

flyingtoastr

Flourish only lasts 7 seconds as well, which means it will be getting a much smaller coefficient than BoL (IIRC Lifebloom, which lasts 8 seconds, only gets roughly 50% of your bonus healing, so I would assume Flourish would be even less) which means the HPM gap closes rapidly between the two. And lasting only 7 seconds has downsides as well; take Felmyst for example. Every 15 seconds we will waste 1 GCD to throw BoL up on the 8-9 people in the melee group. The druid has to use 4 GCD's in that time period to keep all those people up with Flourish. Both spells will have their own pros and cons.

Regardless, I really don't think the idea of BoL is to make Paladins the penultimate AoE healers. Rather it is simply to give us something to deal with multiple targets taking damage. Of course someone is going to be better at it than us, it is not what our class was designed for. The direction they seem to be taking us is that of the utility healer, we have all sorts of debuffs (judgements), mitigation (Sacred Shield, Divine Guardian), tank "oh shit" buttons (LoH, HoSac) and even a bit of off-DPS (Judgement of Vengeance if a ret or prot pally is maintaining stacks).

Save Atlantis!

 

Nodrak

WoWHead lists Judgments with 5% cost still.
MMO-Champion doesn't mention a mana cost.
I hope for a 0 mana cost, but its unlikey.

As for Beacon of Light, the only benefit I could see over Flourish is if people can be affected by multiple Beacons. The sitatuon I am thinking of is 5-6 melee, stack 3 beacons on them for 6k mana in 4.5s (3k is more feasable with DI). The change to spell power should give almost double coefficients if they keep their word. 1K SP ~= 2K heal.

Under an ideal 5-6 melee in range, you could get 4000 * X * Y / 15 = ~266xy where X is the number of Beacons, and y is the number of people. (I based it off 2k heal/1k SP). For our 5-6 with 3 beacons, we get almost 5000 HPS, from HoTs. Meaning we still have 10 free seconds of casting.

Flourish would have 5 targets as well, meaning it would get rougly 6k healing done each flourish, requiring 2 to come near the 15s duration, would give ~60k healing on 5 targets, not even breaking 4500 total HPS, but costing less mana too. Interestingly enough, I think druid's Nourish is going to be the FoL of Lich King. The druid would have 11 seconds of free casting, with the ability to roll HoT if desired.

Beacon will get alot stronger the more it can affect, but only if you can stack it.

Edit: I thought all HoT's had near 100% coefs? And math correcting.

 

GSH

Giant, glowing bears?

My thought on Beacon is that it's meant for small group content (5/10 man) where you may not have another healer to cover raid damage. I don't think it will be a raid tool. I think the Sheathbot build will be the more standard raid healer build.

Although, remember that another melee class will be added. So that will weight the numbers closer to the melee. 2-3 Deathknights + 2-3 rogues + 2-3 warriors + 1-2 paladin + 1 shaman + 2-3 hunter pets + 0-1 felguard (maybe), means around 10-15 targets fairly easily.

 

Selenia

On Sheath, remember the drawbacks to it.

1. It doesn't stack.
2. It's a three second tick (making it fairly useless for Holy Light spamming)
3. The size of the HoT is based on effective healing. Unless you're the only healer spamming that tank, a lot of your crits'll be overheals anyway.

 

Rasputin

The Judgement changes combined with Judgements of the Pure(and to a lesser extent, Enlightened Judgements), makes me wonder about Crusader Strike. As it stands currently, I would claim that Crusader Strike is the lion's share of our reason for being in a raid, since it allows us to maintain multiple beneficial judgements. However, given the new judgement mechanics, the judgement-refresh portion of Crusader Strike is obsoleted. You at most will want JoWisdom and JoLight in a raid(and maybe some JoJustice in trash situations or 5-mans, but I'm mostly concerned with raids and raid bosses). Now your Holy Paladin will be chaincasting Judgement of Wisdom. He could even just macro it into every spell he has if he's lazy. As a Ret Paladin, I will be chaincasting Judgement of Light with my Seal of Blood. Both Judgements will be refreshed infinitely with no help from Crusader Strike. So, why does Crusader Strike need to refresh Judgements anymore? You can always have as many Judgements as you have Paladins, Ret Paladin or not.

So, given that that chunk of utility is effectively neutered, does CS not need some sort of change? I guess they could just give it an effective nerf like this without compensating for its obsolescence with some other utility or damage, but that seems like an odd choice. Should CS get a different sort of utility, a damage increase, neither? If it's left as is, it turns into an extremely underwhelming ability(and I know we shouldn't compare like this, but it just looks like a completely terrible MS). With the new types of utility they're giving us, including mana and life return on damage, they have an open door to change CS in some way, either to increase our damage or alter our utility to make us more desirable.

 

Anedris

Re: Beacon, it obviously gives paladins an AoE healing tool and a HoT which is important for making them viable in smaller group content. For raids... consider RoS p3, Shahraz (port onto the raid), and the big one - Eredar Twins. There are encounters where the conventional strategy is to stack all non-melee in one spot or even the entire raid in one spot, and in such situations absolutely nothing is going to out-heal BoL. In more "normal" encounters it will only hit the melee group of course, but it still gives paladins the capacity to handle that kind of assignment, whereas without it they simply lacked the AoE throughput.

 

Nodrak

I guess time will tell if its powerful enough to use 3-4 holy paladins in a 25 man and just hump the boss

 

Lambi

Beacon heals the whole raid, all 25 people at the same time if you read the tooltip... It will be a huge help to raidhealing with a few beacons active although it won't be the kind of direct healing that's lifesaving.

A great support tool from the looks of it.

 

• Chicken

The problem is that it's currently not so much a Beacon as a Candle of Light. It's area of effect is only 10 yards, so while it can potentially heal an entire raid by itself, in most fights it'll probably heal 5 people at most.

buff /bʌf/ Pronunciation[buhf]
–verb (used with object)
- to reduce or deaden the force of

 

flyingtoastr

5? Even assuming a small melee group of Rogue x2, DPS Warrior, Ret Pally, Enhancement Shaman and Blood DK you're looking at 6, and in all actuality it will most likely be a whole lot larger than that. I think BoL has some damn great potential as the melee group heal of choice over CoH.

Save Atlantis!

 

Lambi

And hunter pets, demons plus maybe even a moonkin. You're probably looking at a spell healing 10+ at the same time, not too shabby.

 

Cathela

Since max rank Flourish lasts roughly half as long as BoL and costs less than half of what BoL does, the application of +healing isn't going to close the hpm gap, except where BoL can affect more than 5 targets (which again, is made difficult by the tiny radius). And the Empowered Rejuvenation talent will from 50% (we assume) to 60% per cast, so spellpower is actually going to widen the hps gap on 5 targets or less.

I dont' know of any strategy for Felmyst that involves stacking more than 5 people within 20 yards of each other; that's just asking for extra encapsulate damage. In fact, that fight is really the textbook illustration of Flourish's advantages for encapsulate healing:

• It does far more healing over 5 people.
• It delivers the healing in half the time.
• It frontloads the healing towards the beginning of the HoT period, when people are in the most danger.
• It's instant-cast so the druid can cast it even if he's running from encaps himself.
• It costs a good deal less (even at level 70), which is important on a fight where you need to keep your potion cooldown free for arcane protection pots.
• It's got a larger radius of effect so there's less chance of people running from encaps moving out of the target area.
• The HoT buffs from Flourish stick to the targets, so they continue to receive healing even after they've run away, whereas they'll lose BoL healing when they run away from the encaps target. In fact, given the cast time, you'd be lucky if a BoL on the encaps'd person even got one tick of healing off on the other members of the group.

It's also going to be better for general raid healing against the nature damage aura, due to the group-spreading requirement.

Not all of these factors will come into play on any given fight, but most of them will hold true most of the time. BoL only really shines when 10 or more people stand in a very small area and stay there for a full 15 seconds, and the number of fights where that's going to happen is vanishingly small. Flourish is more efficient on 5-10 targets, it's faster, and it's far more versatile.

Even when you have as many as 10 melee dps, you can split them into two groups with 15 yards between them (very few bosses have hit boxes too small for this) and use a Flourish on each group to do more total healing in a shorter time with greater mana efficiency. This is actually preferable for many fights to mi