So the new build is up, one major change

While I'm not so sure about reducing the cooldown of Divine Protection (would love to have the same effect on Hand of Protection, though), reducing cooldown on Wrath looks pretty nice for burst healing situations. Enlightement Judgements now increase hit aswell, just like they should from the beginning.

So, with the new patch today things have gotten slightly interesting. I'm not sure how new this is, but the Protector of the Innocent talent appears to be bugged or the tooltip is wrong. Instead of healing "you" (the caster), it instead adds the stated healing amount as a bonus to whatever heal you cast. While it was very welcome for my heroic healing experience (we used a paladin tank, for reference), the results are undoubtedly too strong for 3 talent points:



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The heal is triggered by most "common sense" as one would expect from the wording (does not proc from ToR nor LoD), but I did find a rather interesting mechanic. Meleeing to cause Seal of Insight procs (judging no longer procs seals to regen mana, as an aside) will transfer a very small heal to your beacon target (~500 area), it triggers a full Protector of the Innocent heal.

On a more general note for the ones who do not have beta, the healing right now is quite rough. I'm currently average ilvl 330 (my SP stacking trinket doesn't work, though) and the paladin tank I run with is slightly higher. Tank deaths even when I was entirely "on the ball" using the best heal available* occurred frequently or I was working entirely on fumes by the end of a fight, even with roughly 5% overhealing and trying to squeeze in melee swings. The free extra 20% healing felt more like a necessity than an overpowered bug.

*: On the note of "the best heal", I ran some dry numbers and came to the conclusion that while FoL is the highest HPS by a decent margin, it was the highest mana/s by a huge margin. I'm more than willing to learn from the more seasoned holy paladins (I have actually not healed a thing since roughly half a year ago prior to cata beta), it just seems like there is no place entirely for FoL. I personally feel the change to FoL left a huge void with no proper way to respond to light group damage without spending a high amount of mana on ToR, meaning we're stuck spending 10+ seconds of HL bombing the group to get them back up.

Flash of Light downright sucks on beta; I've casted less than 10 of them as Holy in the past 4 months playing Cata. For it to serve its purpose of being an emergency life saver, both the healing done and mana cost would have to be increased tremendously through talents so that casting the fast heal actually will save a life but cripple your mana. I'd personally triple the healing done and mana cost to make the spell worth casting in emergency situations.

I'm hoping this will partially solve holy troubles as well. With Eternal Glory we're always going to be wasting some holy power, but it would be great if we could go from 3rd HL to WoG without hurting.

Edit: this is a brain fart. The only situation where banking holy power would affect holy would be if you wanted to cast HS as the 4th spell instead of HL (and WoG3 right after).

I'm able to follow up a HL with a 3pt wog now easily - my only complaint now is that if eternal glory procs, it delays and we're mid cast until we see that we can cast yet another 3pt wog.

I've found that in nearly any situation where a FoL would save someone (mostly aoe dmg or a dps being dumb, etc, since tank healing has been pretty easy) holy radiance is a better option both mana wise and healing output wise. Holy Radiance into either WoG or HSon the really low non tank target works really well. I've probably cast FoL 5-6 times total. Definitely have been using LoH as the emergency heal since emergencies don't seem to arise that much - at least, inevitable death emergencies. So yeah, FoL is fairly useless atm.

Having never played a Paladin before (planning on checking out a Tauradin in the expansion), I have a question about Beacon. And, just as a forward, this question is PvP related and how Beacon interacts wtih Tower of Radiance.

Let's assume that you're being attacked and you place Beacon on yourself AND you have both Tower of Radiance and Blessed Life. I would assume that every direct heal (excluding the impact of melee heals through Seal of Insight and the indirect heals through Enlightened Judgements and Protect of the Innocent) would provide a point of Holy Power through ToR as well as every direct source of damage from BL providing a point of Holy Power. But the indirect healing would not offer any benefit for ToR. Is that right?

I feel like that is a really n00b question but I feel compelled to ask just to satisfy my curiosity.

(Source). Looks like they want to make Rule of Law less interesting for Holy Paladins, making Divinity a more natural choice. Don't really have access to the beta now to test it, but would be awesome if someone could check it out.

It gives us two at large points to allocate anywhere (generally judgement talents, although this isn't remotely required), and 1 extra point if you don't want 3/3 PoTI for allocation in holy.

Judgment is considered a melee ability.
A bit odd how they made it spell hit and not hit all around. Maybe it is a bug.

The new +hit talent we got affects both melee and spell hit, so it's all good.

Rule of Law gives us 15% critical chance to our Word of Glory; using all 3 points. It may seem less attractive than what was Holy Shock, since HS crits give Infusion of Light procs. I've been using my remainder 2 points into Improved Judgments in the Retribution tree. Gives you a bit more freedom in placement from a boss and still being able to judge without hugging the boss. Although I do see that if you don't take the aforementioned talent, that when you do need to refresh JoTP, you could get some quick melee swings off for some mana return (default range on judgment is 10yds).