Divine Plea should be changed to tick for 10% every second. And probably add one instant tick at the start to return 60% mana in total.

What the beta poster complains about is with removal of salv/light there's little reason to stack paladins past two which is something I brought up already. Ofcourse his opinion on it is his spot is being threatened, I don't see it quite so bleak. I think the flexibility of having 2 or 3 paladins is great. Comparing divine plea to the muru trinket is a shallow argument with muru trinket returning 2k mana and divine plea returning 8k at the level of gear where you find the muru trinket, it's all out of proportion. Divine plea shines a new light on stuff like the morass trinket the massive haste gladiator weapons from the s4 PTR that never made it live. They should fiddle with it as far as the manner of regen goes - I think it should be smooth gain over duration, it's a very long cooldown after all.

EDIT:

Amera - I don't think there should be ret and prot required with holy being the flex spot. I think there should be two paladins required of whatever differing roles and I think that's the spirit behind the trees the way they are now. And obviously you may bring a third.

Currently, it ticks twice for 25% of your mana.

You're taking the comparison way too literally; I'm just pointing out that often if you have two members of a class filling the same role; it's better for them to take divergent specs. If you have two healing priests, you probably want one CoH and one DS. If you have two dps warriors, one BF and one full Fury. Two hunters, one Survival and one BM. Et cetera.

Nobody's going to deny that BoK is an essential raid buff, but the value of BoK for a second paladin is zero. Same for Imp. Dev Aura. And unless the new BoL has some provision that makes it illegal or impractical for a single paladin to have multiple beacons up at a time, there's no reason to have a second BoL paladin in the raid. At the very least, Holy/sheath is going to be a good choice for a second paladin healer in a raid. I'd argue that it's a better choice even as the only holy paladin in the raid if you have a prot paladin but no ret paladin.

Sure, and I'm willing to believe it might be a mistake. It looks to me like a case of designed synergy at a price, but it could be just a brain fart. It wouldn't be the weirdest thing I've seen from the developers.

I guess what I don't understand is why you're so certain that it is a mistake.

Then you're dropping some other threat talent, or skimping on important mitigation talents. Post your build if you like and we can take a look at it, but I don't see any way to chop 11 points out of Prot without taking a substantial hit somewhere. (But then, I'm not the smartest person to ever play this game.)

I just ran some numbers on three builds, with all the highest-level tanking gear I could find on wowhead. Essentially, all the Tempered Saronite stuff, + whatever offset pieces I could find.

I found, in total, that on tanking gear, there's roughly 1 point of str for every 2 points of stam. In the gear set I played with, I ended with the following numbers:

Strength: 479
Stamina: 902

[Note:] I couldn't find a well-itemized tanking weapon, and had to stick with Lydia's Sharpened Swordbreaker as a weapon.

I think compared the following three specs (these are probably pretty bad, but they're what made sense to me at the time):

TbtL + SoL: 0/47/24
SoL w/o TbtL: 0/47/24
TbtL: 4/56/11

[Note:] I attempted to prioritize mitigation across all three talent specs, including Redoubt, Shield Spec, AD, and both the stam talents in all three specs.

I generated the following table of values:

I then pushed all these numbers through the various skills used in tanking, and came up with the next table, of damage values:

Finally, I pushed these through with their multipliers to get, assuming every ability is used on cooldown, their TPS

[Note:] Ret Aura assumes a 2.0 attack speed boss. Obviously it scales only with SP, so it will tip the balance in favor of any SoH build. Also, since the HotR threat modifier is unknown, I did not include it (obviously a huge oversight)

TPS values w/o Ret Aura:
So, my conclusion is that they are pretty close in terms of scaling. You gain 15% on ShieldoR and AS and an additional threat ability, but lose on double-dipping of scaling on AP->SP conversions.

To see how the scaling goes further down the road, I ran the numbers with 800 Strength and 2k Stam (before multipliers) and got the following TPS values (with and without Ret Aura)

All this is assuming the itemization stays the same on gear (in terms of ratios), and that pally tank sets don't get any extra SP on them. All this, of course, is subject to change. Might provide a little insight, though.

Some people latch onto a particular spec (particularly among the hybrids) and these people expect to be invited to the raid every night. On one hand, you have pure ret paladins who are likely utterly demoralized after years of rejection from everything between 40-man raids to 5-man instances. On the other you have Holy Paladins who are going to have an entitlement complex because they've been absolutely necessary for raiding from the very beginning of Alliance raiding all the way to Sunwell. So now the Holy Paladins are demoralized because the only thing keeping them in Sunwell groups is the necessity of three blessings, and now with no salv they could become the Moonkin of healing specs.

Blizzard's right in making no class require three slots, but the viability of the hybrids needs to be such that any combination of two of the three specs needs to be viable in some raid setups. In addition to BoL being rolled into heals, the changes to Holy Shock, and a useful version of Beacon of Light, I could see them throwing healing specs some of that redundant raid utility. For instance, make Judgements of the Pure add a 1% spell damage vulnerability per talent point, non-stacking with Misery. That still leaves Shadow Weaving unmatched, but it at least makes Shadow Priests somewhat replaceable by Holy Paladins.

Before I get started, this thread has actually become three different threads merged into one. Its fairly difficult weaving your way through the theorycrafting for the discussions on each tree and its changes. With that said, I'd recommend splitting the hybrid posts into three separate posts for more meaningful future reference.

To the topic at hand, specifically the healing aspect of changes to come, right now as it stands there is absolutely no reason to grab the 45+ talents in the holy tree. Never have we needed the extreme amount of haste that Blizzard is advocating for us in gearing options, nor have we or will we ever really need an AoE heal. Paladins are the champions of single target healing (if only because of being pigeonholed by our selection of healing abilities). I would advocate the continuation of this trend because it is a role I would wish would be preserved in WolTK.

To that end Beacon of Light has significant changes forthcoming (blue posts tell us this), but whats missing is an overall direction for the paladin holy tree. Why are we getting additional haste? Why do we need an AoE heal? What advantages does this give us when other classes can make far better use of haste, and have far more effective AoE heals at their disposal? I will say this, having specialized into holy/ret for sheathe of light last night, I found myself wishing this talent exists in live as is (and exactly where its currently placed too). This is such an extraordinary ability for main tank healers that I feel this is a perfect sacrifice for many to make to maintain the roles BC gave us. I am in love with the +atk power scaling I have as a holy paladin.... got upwards of 1500 spell power on my own last night with holy light rank 11 landing over 10k hits on my tank.

Man, nice work. I don't have time right now to look through your numbers, but I fully intend to examine them thoroughly later on.



In other news, I got into the beta so I'm going to try to do a few tests to supplement bellator and Coriel's work and maybe give them some relief.

First impressions playing as Ret in Howling Fjord:

Either Ret is really powerful for soloing, or this zone is tuned to be extremely easy. I'm wearing a cobbled-together Ret outfit that's half raid-surplus epics and half total crap (and by total crap I mean such un-Ret items as spelldamage rings/trinket, tanking boots and chest, etc) and I'm chewing through mobs in 10 seconds or less. Frequently just an opening autoattack+JoC+CS+DS is enough to drop a mob to 20% or less. Basically what everyone said earlier about insane mana/health regen is true.

Also, re-sealing after a judgement is a really hard habit to unlearn.

This thread is a little mixed up with posts about all three specs, but because of the massive changes (when compared to other classes) each Paladin change can change all three specs, so it is best to be all in one thread.

Why get 10% haste? Because haste is a powerful stat, and encourages Holy Paladins to do something different (dps) and helps with soloing (assuming the 2 spec idea has limitations).


Really the answer to most of these issues is "Wait and See", since tooltips did not always work out how they are in practice and changes are the only thing you can count on in this stage of Beta.

I think Blizzard is trying to make that tier have both PvP and PvE viability. Compare with the Ret talent at the same level. Haste off judging might be pretty useful in PvP. (Though what I would *love* to see for PvE is a talent that reduced the cast time of FoL to instant for 30s after judging.)

As for the AoE heal, we need it for 5 and 10-mans, where we don't have the other classes to back us up.

The first zones were tuned for a green geared level 68 player, so even with half raid gear you really out gear the zone.

Regarding the resealing, a simple /cast reset=120 Seal of Command macro should do the trick.