heh thats basicaly what I thought... Sounds like I had a case of know it alls :P

I cba to read through the whole thread so i'll just ask this.

I recently played some 2v2 arena with a resto shaman and we ran into a rogue/paladin team.

Now, everything was going smooth etc, but when my shaman finally went oom, the paladin still had over 6k mana left.
The shaman is pretty well geared with over 1400+ heal and a nice amount of manaregen. Mostly in karazhan etc level epic gear.

I found it really strange that after the fight was over, we both had done about the same damage of slightly over 90k, yet my shaman was completely oom, having used a mana tide and everything, while only casting the most efficient heals.

How is it that a paladin can outheal a very well geared shaman by such a large margin?
I mean..the shaman was completely oom while the paladin had over 6k mana (60% of his mana pool) left.
What rank of heal can they use to actually never lose mana and how much does it heal?

btw, at start we were doing really well, shaman at 40% mana, paladin at 40% mana, but then he started using some different heals and actually started gaining mana while spam healing.


(we did several matches, winning some by dumb luck, like getting very large crit series in so the paladin couldn't react fast enough, but still had about 6500 mana)

Anyway, seems pretty off balance to me.

It's mostly due to the illumination talent. Heal crits refund 100% of the heal's mana cost. Our top rank Holy Light can crit for at least 4.5k in mid-range +heal gear - and if it's a crit, it's free. In PvP, a few crit heals in a row will accomplish a *lot* of healing at no cost to one's mana pool. (much like your large crit series killing your target before the other healer can react).


If you look at Holy talents, you'll also find lots of mana saving talents like: Sanct. Light (+6% crit to HL, so 6% of your HLs are free), Divine Favor (guaranteed crit every 2 minutes, so used on a max rank HL, it's 840 mana every 120 seconds), Divine Illumination (half mana cost for 15 seconds every 3 minutes, allows spam-healing; illumination still returns full mana cost on crits).


Total it up, and Holy paladins have ridiculous endurance.

Not for long if you believe the rumor mill.

Yeah, glad I've been retaining my mp5 instead of going whole hog for spellcrit...but we can continue this if/when the notes are official.

The paladin's strength is longevity, whereas the shaman has faster heals, ns, interrupts, bl, etc. The problem is that 2v2 isn't even remotely balanced and shamans are kind of weak in it (as opposed to 5v5 where they are the third or fourth most represented class). Someone in guild listed the top ten 2v2s on the BG and shamans were the only class missing and eight of the teams had a priest or paladin on them (priest:5 pal:3).

Unfortunately, I've heard this from a fairly reliable source, but it's a long way from any chance at making it live yet. Hopefully it won't even make it to test.

Instead of healing spell cost reduction equal to your spell crit%, it is now equal to your spell crit% divided by 2. Say we can push 20% spell crit pretty reliably - that's a 10% mana cost redux to heals.


Oh, and I think that it'd be reasonable for it to return mana on offensive holy shocks now... = P

I have a great big grin over the three ret changes. This is nice.

Ret specific changes:
- "Vengeance" (Retribution Talent) now increases Holy and Physical damage
by 1/2/3/4/5% for 15 seconds following a critical hit, but the effect
now stacks up to 3 times.
- Fixed some data errors that caused "Seal of Command" and "Seal of
Blood" to generate more threat than intended.
- "Sanctity Aura" now increases all damage caused by affected targets
by 1/2% and no longer increases healing done to affected targets.

Vengeance is now 15% again, except now it's a rolling buff by 5's. With a 15sec duration I'll nearly always have it fully powered...
Threat cut. (by how much? who knows. Any is good...)
New imp sanc is offensive!

I totally missed that Sanc aura change. If SoC's aggro was being artifically boosted - maybe we've actually reached the crossover point where retadins are useful dpsing?

2% dps for the party and 3% offensive crit is actually fairly huge when totaled up....

The amusing thing is that Vengeance is still 10% per application on the current PTR. +30% DPS, go go go?

Well, I imagine this is going to completely shift the gear schema from what it currently is. Once you hit a pretty solid healing threshold (1500 or less), crit was worth stacking wherever you could get it. I imagine now +heal will once again remain the best overall stat, with mp/5 and +crit being much more competitive with each other.

As a talent I imagine illumination is still the best passive efficiency talent in the game, which is no doubt why it was nerfed, it's just a tough blow to eat when it will totally change the value of stats on gear for us.