I don't see the interest of making protector of the innoncent a 2points talents.
If you exclude the leveling talent like denounce, blazing light, spiritual focus, you need to put 5 points between:
- protector of the innocent 3/3
- enlightened jugements 2/2
- blessed life 2/2
At first, I will skip blessed life, and see later on if I need more HP generation.

The 2 things that makes me dubitative is
- the range increase for jugements splitted between enlightened jugements and improved jugement
- the interest to boost the holy shock crit in rule of law: I agree that divinity and eternal glory seems mandatory, so no chance to get it as holy, and ret don't have holy shock.
I'd rather see crit chance of WoG and HS merge with eternal glory.

Well i was thinking with one point put into Spiritual Focus, i don't really like missing a judgment (and losing another gcd after or worst, losing haste if used only to refresh judgment of the pure), but it's true that skipping that talent make the 3-points PoI viable.

For the latter point i'm doubtful too, with this implementation the chances that we can reach Rule of Law are very low, and it's a waste considering the boost it give, a merge with Eternal Glory would be much better.

I'm curious about that hit. Does it affect judgments? I would assume it does but at some point I had the talent but still missed judgments, so I'm wondering if it's broken or not supposed to work at all. I could also be simply wrong and I haven't missed a judgment.

--

After the patch the question I'm asking myself is whether I want 6% more healing or 15% more crit on WoG and HS. Below you'll find my healing stats for heroics. I think these reflect rather well the stats you will have in raids, simply because the amount of mana you have won't allow anything else. I don't know how to calculate which would give you more healing assuming there is no overhealing. If someone can do it, you should know that I have base 11% crit.

Without math I'm thinking the 15% crit is better. It's more likely to change the need to do something mana-intensive (you are still healing single hits even with bigger health pools) than 6% more healing and I think it provides around the same amount of +healing.



Edit: As malthrin pointed out, at 1.5x crit modifier 15% more crit certainly gives you less raw healing. I forgot this when considering the difference.

It's less on the raw +healing - if 100% of your healing was from crittable spells, with a 1.5x critmod, +15% crit on all your spells would only give you 7.5% more healing. Since this 15% crit will only apply to ~half your healing based on the breakdown that you posted, it's less raw healing benefit than Divinity. Whether that's compensated for by the other benefits of critical heals that you mentioned is more subjective.

On Sept 20th GC basically said we shouldn't have 100% uptime on conviction.
With baseline crit at only 11% (assuming 16% with 5% crit raid buff), Rule of Law may become bigger healing boost (over divinity) simply because of the boost in Conviction uptime.

Of course, if PoI can crit, and proc Conviction, then Conviction uptime will probably be in the 80-90+% range without Rule of Law in a raid situation (since every heal will have a second opportunity to crit). Holy Radiance in melee also seems like it would result in maxed Conviction for the duration.

The only merit of the 15% crit - since really the numbers are against it - is Conviction uptime. There just aren't a lot of things keying off crit besides it. Illumination is gone and the proc from IoL is weird since it makes Speed of Light redundant.
The instant spells aren't really cast because you need them now. It's because they're very efficient and can proc stuff. You can them when you can, basically.
And finally if you find paladin healing a bit too swingy maybe 15% crit is not the answer

The latest changes, to me, reflect Blizzard's desire to make us make choices in how we spec. We have compelling options in both subspecs but we can't have it all. Sure there will always be theorycrafting to see which is better overall, but given how Blizzard likes to change things up we might run into encounters or even zones where certain talents are better than in another area. I'd say our cookie-cutter build will likely say "Pick whether you like Divinity or Rule of Law, or a bit of both."

I went with a group of guildies and tested a two tank situation where both tanks take really high damage* and what I've been thinking on was all but confirmed: Beacon of Light is going to be by far your biggest contribution to your effective healing done. The healing breakdown was Beacon at 32% followed by Holy Light, Word of Glory and Holy Shock at about 15-20% each and the rest as Divine Light**.


Another way to look at it is to compare the throughput between spamming the tank with Tower of Radiance and spamming the raid to maximize Beacon's healing.

Things should look like this:

For Tower: HS > HL > HL > HL > WoG***
For Beacon: HS > HL HL HL > HS > HL HL HL > HS > WoG

Using my numbers (HS:6500, HL:5500, WoG:9000), counting mastery (about 16% which is pretty low since I'm not using a lot of mastery pieces) and using napkin math (discounting Eternal Glory and Daybreak procs) you get about 4600HPS with Tower and 6500HPS with Beacon. A large portion of the difference is caused by our mastery's effect working at full potency on the Beacon heals, the other being Beacon itself. If you want to factor in Eternal Glory and Daybreak, Tower would end up getting an HPS boost due to more frequent Eternal Glory procs while Beacon would get a lot more Daybreak procs which would very likely even up things a bit, but nowhere near enough to close the gap that's present with beta numbers.

In any case, I don't see us as being "tank healers" on single tank fights: we'll spend all of our time healing the raid like we do on live and let other classes handle healing the tank - most likely Shamans or Druids considering how things are on beta right now. But we sure as hell won't do anything else than heal two tanks on any fight that allows it. Our entire setup is just too suited to that playstyle right now and wasting the full potential of our mastery by healing with Tower of Radiance doesn't seem like an efficient way to play. If Blizzard gets around to fixing the Holy Tree to not be divided between pure DPS talents and healing talents, I'll probably drop Tower of Radiance in favor of utility talents once I'm done with heroics.


*: We did the Beauty encounter in Blackrock Caverns. It's currently either way, way overtuned or bugged since the boss is linked to 3 powerful elite mobs, where the 3 elite mobs do enough damage to be a separate encounter on their own. We used one tank on Beauty, the other on the 3 adds and me and a Resto Druid went wild on healing.

**: This breakdown doesn't factor in my mastery at all. Considering how damage looked like, the vast majority of the shields were used up to soak damage instead of being wasted.

***: There is a long delay between when a Paladin finishes casting a spell on his Tower of Radiance target and when he gets the Holy Power from said spell. It's extremely easy to test this by doing the "rotation" I outlined above, after casting the Word of Glory, you'll end up with an extra Holy Power - this is corroborated by the Holy Power gain shown by Blizzard's scrolling combat text.

Not sure if that's what you were trying to do, but if you're trying to compare Divinity and Rule of Law, these numbers are actually in-line with the screenshot. Unless there's a reliable way to break down the healing buildup of beacon, that is to say which casted heal contributed how much to it, we can simply remove it to calculate the real healing breakdown. This, going your numbers above, still gives 50% to WoG and HS. Maybe not enough to push for Rule of Law, but not to totally kill it either.

I assumed that this was because of the lag (EU Beta is in the US), but if it stays that way in release it's going to bug me a lot. If you have a steady rotation of HS HL HL it's easy to circumvent though, because if you cast HS last, you will get the HP charge before you are able to cast WoG.

I'm certain now that spirit -> hit talent does not benefit judgment. I missed on two different trash mobs with 1/2 points talented. According to my character screen my melee hit is at 0% and spell hit at 9% or close, naturally more than enough to get 0% miss on a lvl 85 mobs. I thought this was worth mentioning since many are saying that they would take the talent to not miss judgments.