Lambi

Ahh didn't know we were talking about Najentus, thought we were talking about Gorefiend, Bloodboil, Mother, Council, Illidan, Kalecgos, Felmyst, Twins, M'uru and Kil'Jaeden and the majority of the hard raid healing fights... but ofcourse for Najentus I'll let the paladins sit out and bring some druids.

 

• Chicken

Council, Illidan, Felmyst, Entropius and Kil'jaeden all have mechanics in place in which you definitely do not want your raid to clump in a 10 yard area, or for that matter want to deal with the damage through a slow over time mechanic.

Clumping up on Council makes the damage taken from the various AoEs all the worse. Illidan's Fireballs need to be healed up fast, and for other AoE damage there's something wrong going on if your raid is close together. For Felmyst Encapsulate ensures you want to be spread out; it might be useful during flying phases as you're more clumped then I'll admit. Entropius has the gravity balls and the like to ensure people should be spread out, though melee is clumped up a bit. Kil'jaeden has the raid clump up temporarily for the shield against the bomb, but otherwise you should be spread.

The key part here is that there are a lot of fights with AoE damage, but on most of those fights you need to be spread out to reduce the AoE damage. That your Holy Paladin(s) now have Beacon of Light is unlikely to change this.

Edit: Though I'll add that judging it as useless is probably not wise either. A thing to consider is that with everyone getting raid wide heals, fights will also be designed to ensure they're useful. Look at Circle of Healing and it's importance now compared to when TBC's raiding started.

It is by no means an extremely powerful ability either though. It's not useless, but it's also not amazing.

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

 

flyingtoastr

You sound exactly like priests last expansion when CoH was revealed. They were going with something along the lines of "WAAAAA IT DOESN'T HEAL FOR ENOUGH!!!" Is CoH bad?

My guild runs an incredibly caster heavy raid and our melee group on Felmyst is Rogue x2, DPS Warrior x2, Enhancement Shaman, Prot Pally and Feral Druid all standing easily within 10 yards of each other. That's 7 right there, not even counting hunter pets. Hell in the air phases when she's breathing the entire raid is within 0 yards AoEing down the skellies You're also failing to account for another melee class in the expansion to add to the melee group.

Regardless, there are a lot more fights that you can have people standing on top of each other. Our strat for Kalec has 9-10 people on top of each other continually, and twins have every ranged and healer on top of each other (16 people). Bloodboil easily takes the cake as the single fight where BoL would destroy every other heal in the game. There is a lot more use for this than you're giving it credit for. Just as many cases there are for not stacking there are for doing so.

Honestly the only fix I would suggest for BoL would be to extend it to a 20 yard radius. Even that would have the ability to be pretty broken though.

Save Atlantis!

 

Kigale

I don't want to start sounding like a broken record, but it's pretty unproductive to compare 2 spells we have very little information about. Using BC raids as evidence to support your opinion is also faulty. Maybe there will be several encounters in the expansion that take place in a 5x5 yard room where everyone must stack. This is a bit extreme, but the truth is there could be many occasions where people will stack and benefit from BoL. Also the Beacon could move sharing the healing love. Maybe a Paladin can cast BoL on him/herself while judging something at close range. He/she will heal the tank and melee, he/she will then use Holy Shock then an instant HL while running back to heal the ranged dps. We simply don't know enough.

Some questions that seem important to answer before continuing this debate would be:

Can BoL stack? Can it stack when cast by different paladins?
Is it a traditional HOT?
Does it put a buff on the people receiving heals, or is it a pulse effect coming from the Beacon?
If it's a buff can people get the buff after the effect has begun, or will it drop if they move out of range before it completes?

Another question I'm interested in is: Can the healing effect from Divine Storm crit? and does it grant the Sheath Buff?

 

Cathela

The raid damage on Gorefiend is spiky and hits individual players; you can set up a BoL so that it hits the whole raid (minus ghosts obviously) but it's going to do very little worthwhile healing. People who eat shadowbolts will probably take one tick of BoL before being healed back to full, which will be about 750 points of healing assuming 2500 +healing with raid buffs.

On Bloodboil you can spread groups apart in such a way as to get vastly more efficiency out of Flourish than you ever could from BoL.

Mother, I'll give you.

You missed RoS, where BoL would be very nice in phase 2 and extremely nice in phase 3, so I'll give you that too.

I can't conceive of a Council strategy that will make the current version of BoL even remotely worthwhile. Same for Illidan, unless your phase 2 strat involves the entire raid taking splash damage from meteors.

On Kalecgos, you've got spreading-out requirements for a good chunk of the fight. I can see using BoL in the demon realm, and in the central clump in the dragon realm for people still with the debuff. The main problem is that paladins tend to get assigned as tank healers on Kalecgos, and healing the tanks is a fulltime job in a raid wearing T6 gear.

BoL could be nice on Felmyst during the flight phase after both beams are out and the raid is clumping up. It absolutely can't be used on more than 5 people during the ground phase without exposing extra people to encapsulate damage. If you start casting it on an encaps target, it will tick once for about 800 healing before the encaps expires. If the encaps group starts running at the same time, they'll be more than 10 yards away by the time you finish the cast, and you'll end up with a very expensive and very weak HoT on the encaps target.

I haven't seen anything beyond Felmyst, so I can't comment on Twins and beyond.

----

The two main problems with BoL boil down to:

1) It favors clumping when most raid design encourages spreading out. In other words, it's highly situational.

2) It doesn't heal very fast at all, even with favorable assumptions about spellpower scaling. If it got a 100% coefficient over the duration of the HoT (as is standard for HoTs) then a T6+ geared holy paladin with 2500 +healing would heal about 750 per tick, or 250 per second. It's rare that kind of healing is going to make a noticeable difference; it's always going to have to be supplemented with something else, and in most circumstances the "supplemental" healing is going to outshine BoL. Basically it's not noticeable, and it doesn't feel special.

----

I have an idea for an improvement, which I'll post soon.

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

 

Smurrf

Simply put:

Current Pally AoE Heals - 0

Future Pally AoE Heals - 1

1 > 0

Keep in mind that there will be such things as 10 man events in WotLK. Sure, in a 25 man, one can expect to have a Resto Druid along. Can one expect that in a 10 man? No. What this now means is that Blizz can more tightly tune ALL encounters, not just 25's, for some amount of AoE healing expected, and be assured that there will be an AoE healer in the raid or party. Will it be *as* effective as Priest, or Druid? Of course not. But it's a damn sight better than what Pallies have currently, and allows for far more flexibility of raid and group makeups. (As a last note, how many times did we hear Pallies gripe about having to heal MgT?)

 

Anedris

Any heal that is not limited in the targets affected is going to be fantastically overpowered in a few select situations. This is why is has such a small radius. Eredar Twins and RoS p3 are the absolute ultimate examples of this.

Is it too situational? Maybe. But anyone arguing that it will be bad is gambling that Blizz never makes another Eredar Twins.

 

Corronach

Or they don't feel like respecing for Twins in between Felmyst and M'uru where Sheath is superior.

 

novasphere

This is what the whole matter boils down to, I think. You can't compare similar abilities across different classes, because Paladins are not Druids and vice-versa. Comparing Beacon to Flourish is like comparing Fire Blast to Shadowburn; thematically (and mechanically) similar, but serve different purposes to the classes they belong to.

 

Cathela

I'm Prot and plan to stay that way, so it's not going to matter a hill of beans to my personal enjoyment of the game what happens with the 51-point Holy talent. I also think I've been reasoned in my arguments and provided ample supporting evidence for my claims, so can we skip the "crying" accusations please?

As far as your 10-man/animal melee clump, if you start casting BoL when Felmyst starts an encapsulate, you'll have one tick of BoL go off before the encapsulate finishes (assuming that BoL functions like other HoTs and doesn't tick immediately when it starts,) So in T6 gear you're basically going to get one 750-point tick off on the 10 people in range. That's assuming that you have 10 people stand in the encapsulate range for 5 seconds after it starts, which I doubt you're doing unless your healers are superhumanly skilled and geared. If the melee are running away from the encaps, the only target that will get healed by BoL while encaps is running is its primary target.

The last three-quarters of the flight phase is, yes, an absolutely perfect demonstration of BoL's real potential under nearly optimal conditions. There are other moments like that here and there, but they don't happen often. Basically, 25-man raiders will occasionally get to really have fun with BoL on a fight here and there. The 95% of the player base that doesn't do 25-mans will never get to really enjoy it.

I really just don't agree with your statement that stacking is encouraged as much as spreading. Spreading is just more inherently interesting than stacking; it leads to prettier and more interesting fights, and the devs realize and encourage this through mechanics like targeted AoE raid damage, chaining raid damage, etc.

Sure, it's better than what paladins have now, but anything is better than nothing. A spell that healed everyone in the party for 100 damage every 10 seconds would be "better than what Pallies have currently" but it would be regarded (correctly) as an utter piece of crap. It's a question of opportunity cost: How does BoL compare to other things that might be in the 51-point Holy slot? Couldn't there be something less situational, more effective, and more fun there?

And yeah, funny thing about MrT: The complaint was about trying to heal the floating phase of the Kael'Thas fight. Which is where you have to spread out to avoid chaining damage from the orbs. So BoL basically does nothing there.

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

 

Kigale

This is where my problem is. With all due respect you have not done this. You have provided a valid argument why BoL may not be very good in BC, but you have not provided any evidence (aside from comparing to another spell we know very little about) that prove it will be bad for the portion of the game it is designed to be used with, namely Wrath of the Lich King.

 

Raggsokk

Isn't situational skills what we have been crying about all the time? BoL will always be useful as long as there's people in melee range.

 

flyingtoastr

We're talking abut 2 completely different things. In case you've forgotten, Felmyst has this nasty aura that deals 1k nature damage every 3 seconds. With a 100% scaling (which I would assume will be the coefficient) and only 2000 healing you'll be looking at 900/3 second HoT's. In other words, your 1 BoL can keep the melee group up through the aura much much much easier than a Flourish can. Yeah, Flourish will work wonders against Encapsulate damage, but it will be far less optimal for aura damage

It isn't encouraged to stack right now except on a few fight. It isn't encouraged to spread right now except on a few fights. However think of all the fights where you could stack where you're not if only for "vanity". There is no reason not to stack on those kind of fights.

Save Atlantis!

 

Slyness

I don't think we should judge BoL by itself. It seems that builds that go for BoL will forsake Sheath of Light in the Retribution tree and will go for Divine Guardian in the protection tree. By itself, BoL doesn't look too hot but coupled with Divine Shield negating 30% of raid damage within 30 yards, it looks to be a powerful tool in certain situations. I think the last thing Blizzard wants is to create another spell, like CoH for priests in BC, that is powerful enough to be spammed no matter the situation.

 

Corronach

But in this instance, BoL seems only useful for select situations in an already select portion of the game. Not exactly something to break up the monotony that is paladin healing. But you're right in that you must compare Sheath versus Divine Guardian and BoL. As it stands, I can't imagine they would design encounters around having 30% reduction at any given instance, because you may not even be able to assume a holy paladin in a raid. So to me, Divine Guardian sounds awesome, but if you're other healers aren't slacking it may not be necessary. Sheath on the other hand, greatly increases the effectiveness of the role we're supposed to fulfill.

 

flyingtoastr

Sheath is useless if there is a resto druid in the raid. It really is as simple as that, a random proc HoT is worth almost nothing compared to their arsenal of HoTs that tic harder and faster.

Save Atlantis!

 

Tpyo

This is exactly how I'm feeling at the moment, not to mention all the nice prot talents you miss out on that I'd go crazy without(5m CD BoP? Divine Guardian? Imp Devo? Kings?). Sure you get Imp Might but a Ret or Prot Paladin can get that.

An uncontrolled HoT that ticks every 3 seconds will get very little done with all the random little heals Tanks take, and if it does heal.. likely just prevents a druid hot from ticking.

 

Corronach

Then I think there is a problem, if you think that sheath is useless because it's role is fulfilled by others (except in 5/10 mans, where you might be the only healer or just one of two), and I think Beacon is worthless because it's roll is fulfilled by others (Except in 25 man fights, where a large number of people bunch together).

 

Cathela

What are the two different purposes served by Beacon and Flourish, then?

I've said several times that I wouldn't be surprised if there was some feature to BoL that we don't know about yet that changes the whole picture. At the moment, I can't think what that is, but I admit it could happen. If you can think of anything I might be missing about BoL (or Flourish for that matter) I'll listen.

Can you think of any changes that might happen in WotLK that would make BoL look a lot better than it does now? I can't, but if anyone else can I'll listen to those too.

I don't really see any reason to think that raid encounter design will trend towards more clustering and more static fights; having the whole raid clump up and stand in one spot for a long time isn't conducive to interesting play; it can be made to work for the occasional fight with other interesting mechanics (Mother, P3 RoS, etc) but I don't see the developers increasing the fraction of encounters that follow this pattern.

Yeah, I'm sure the reason why they set the healing so low was out of fear of making it incredibly overpowered in those rare situations where you can stand the raid in one spot.

Maybe the answer is a cap on the total amount healed, like the AoE damage cap? Could be hard to implement, since this seems to work through a buff applied to people near the beacon.

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

 

• Avitus

I don't know whether this has been mentioned here (I've skimmed the 14 pages posted so far and couldn't find it, as I haven't been actively following wow updates for a while), but I've just finished posting a pretty extensive writeup of wotlk changes for ret and came to the following conclusion:


Given the current state of the paladin trees and unless something significant is changed or added before this goes live, there will be no point in taking a retribution paladin to raids anymore.


-Consider this Holy spec, which I'm pretty sure will be very popular (or variants of it): 47/0/24

-A holy paladin will be able to mirror almost all benefits of a wotlk ret paladin (+2% raid damage aura, +3% crit on target)

-In contrast to what has been the case in TBC, a holy paladin is now encouraged to use judgements frequently, by adding the "judgement of the pure" (haste buff every time you cast) talent

-With "Enlightened Judgements" talent, judgements can be renewed at a 30 yard range.

-Given the above two points, the role of judgement upkeep traditionally attributed to ret paladins in TBC will not be needed anymore (though it might be more stable, I don't think that's enough to warrant a spot for a retadin if a holy paladin can emulate the same benefits and a higher DPS class like a rogue can be taken instead).

-The points spent in the ret tree are almost all beneficial, the holy paladin is only gaining: 5% spell crit, 60% HoT every time you crit a heal, Imp BoM


The only remaining benefit of having a ret paladin is "Swift Retribution" (+3% haste buff from retribution aura), deep in the retri tree, which is by far not enough to validate a raid spot.



Now just to avoid any misunderstandings: I spec holy frequently and I welcome any buffs we get, however I see these changes (if they make it to live, I know this is still very early beta) equivalent to a death sentence to retribution spec in 25 man raids.

Ideas, comments?

 

teeny

Sure , but consider this :

Current Holy Paladins with Holy Shock : all of them
Current Holy Paldins actually using it on a regular basis in pve situation : non a lot of them

0 = 0

Yes , having a new spell , Aoe heal at that is great , and there will probably be a lots of encounters tuned to get the benefit of it , but i'm more worried about how well spell power will scale on that spell , not to mention the mana cost for such a small radius effect.
Kudos to the OP for the nice sum-up of our talents / spells , well done.