bellator

Yeah ofc as prot spec in tanking gear you will have more hp, but I was talking about it in terms of it's power for a holy build, which is what I feel needs to be thought out.

Don't think it's necessarily the talent that needs tweaking, could simply have it heal for (as an example) 80% of target's health. Thus keeping it's power for prot paladins and boosting its power for holy palad.

 

Kigale

I had an interesting (hypothetical) thought regarding LoH. I don't think it would ever be implemented but as a mechanic it might be neat. What if the talent gave a bonus while LoH was on Cooldown?

"your heals increase the armor of the target by x% while LoH is on CD"
or
"your spell damage is increased by x% while LoH is on CD"
or anything else

This would force a decision, use LoH every CD to maintain the buff, or save it for when it's needed. I like mechanics that force people to choose between 2 equally powerful options.

 

bellator

Kigale, interesting suggestion. Couple of brief comments:-

1) When you look at it, couldnt the following:-

""your heals increase the armor of the target by x% while LoH is on CD""

be written as

""your heals increase the armor of the target by x% for 20mins"

as this is effectively what it is doing

2) I do like the idea of the choice between LoH been saved as a needed heal or used all the time to keep a buff running on the target, however with insta crit holy lights more common and the same size as LoH, then no one would ever save LoH as it's use ability is simply not strong enough.

 

Dekkar

Prot Paladins would most definitely save it. I know I will. There seems to exist many a time when the healers are feared, silenced, stunned, or out of range when the heal from LoH saves me. I'm excited to be able to have it available 3 times as often (basically, once per boss fight, or once every 2 attempts on progression).

EDIT: LoH already sort of does scale for Holy Paladins. I'm entirely sure every paladin here remembers that it can crit, and does so quite often for a Holy Paladin (moreso when certain buffs go raid-wide). It still heals for a huge amount. Our best prot paladin right now has 21k HP buffed, and the holies are sitting around 12k Sure, it may not be as powerful, but holy paladins can use it 1.25 times as often, and with an additional 25-30% chance to crit in comparison to prot.

 

Kigale

This is a much more elegant wording and implementation. In response to your 2nd comment: I agree LoH is just not big enough. Your 80% of target HP is a good solution.

 

levk

Infusion of light isn't NS. If you DF+HS then HL you're waiting on gcd off HS to get that heal off. And then you can't guarantee crit HL. Basically LoH is on the spot absolutely free heal, actually gives you mana if you glyph it. It's not bad at all even like it is, but they should really think about having it scale with spellpower and have it work with DF. I was thinking to maybe have it heal for your mana pool but this is more debilitating to rets and prots than the current is to holy. I forget, is AW on gcd? If it isn't that's going to be a good macro.

80% hp of target - think about the times when you have NPCs on your side. Raz's understudies had 90k hp and that was a level 60 raid. It's a very rare situation though.

 

bellator

I'm not saying it's bad, but in the early days, LoH could guarentee getting the MT up to 80% health. Now there is a 30% chance (ie crit chance) that it will do what it was guarenteed to do when it was first implemented, which is what i'm getting at with the reduced power. Baseing it off the holy palas health means its not scaleing as much with the content as it should. As for the argument that holy paladins can use it 25% more i'd argue that on any boss attempt both the holy and prot pala can only cast it once.

The question still that we need to see is how will healing be in Wrath. If healing is more along the lines of FoL/HS healing than HL, then by using HS on cooldown and having a reasonable amount of crit (35-40%), then one will have infusion of light active for 75%+ of the fight which makes it closer to NS (buf ofcourse not guarenteed)

They can always make it only work on party/raid members or put some cap, say 50k on the spell.

 

Aerynlore

What about: Improved Lay of Hands [2 pts] Increases the chance for LoH to crit by 50/100% and decreases the cooldown by 2/4 minutes.

Suddenly you aren't looking at 100% of the paladin's health, you are always looking at 200% health. Because this talent is in the holy tree, it vastly increases the usefulness (and reliability) for the tree with the (theoretically) lowest hit points. It will almost always do more healing that a crit HL, and can always be counted on for that once-a-boss big oh-shit heal. Thoughts?

 

Exewut

Don't forget that LoH is actually an important part of the prot paladins arsenal in wotlk, and that any changes (for example heals 80% of the hp) should not render the ability less usefull for prot paladins.

 

levk

I like 100% crit instead of the armor part actually. I'd still probably skip it but I'd be tempted. By the way heals crit for 150% by default.

 

turturin

I disagree with your basic interpretation of the talent....In my opinion, which I believe is validated by placement of the "improve" talent in the protection tree, It was meant to be a protection "oh shit" ability. As futher evidence, think of the corresponding situations after usage of the (pre-Wotlk) ability:
1. Healer uses LoH.....healer saves 1 person, but the raid also loses a healer (likely a tank healer). this is usually not desireable
2. Prot Pally uses LoH....prot pally saves either himself or another tank and is threat limited for a short time (due to mana constraints). This is a much more reasonable tradeoff given the abilitie's cooldown.

The ability is fine imho.

 

Astalion

What about simply doubling the amount healed by LoH? Maybe not the most elegant solution, but unless the scaling of healing/health numbers changes in a way similar to the change in BC (as in, stamina getting cheaper/more stackable, etc) I think it should make it more useful to non-prot paladins, while not really changing anything in most cases for a prot pala (since it's basically a full heal already)

 

Kigale

Off topic slighty: I've wondered why there aren't talents that increase healing crits to 200% similar to damage spells. This would create a nice synergy with Illumination. This would help arena paladins more than pve paladins, since more times than not a crit is an overheal in a raid setting.

 

levk

Touched by the light does it. Like you said it's not very useful unless you're dealing with MS effects.

Imp LoH is out of reach for prot anyways and being such a long cooldown I doubt any prot would spec for it whatever you do to it.

 

Blackthought

It seems rather odd to me that the two best healing talents (Sheath and Touched by Light) are in the Ret and Prot trees, respectively. I dont think Holy paladins would have many complaints if they gained the extra healing on crits that Touched has and/or the HoT from sheath. I cant understand why such desirable talents are wrapped into talents that are good on their own (AP->SP and Armor->SP). Can anyone rationalize this design decision.

 

flyingtoastr

Both of those talents are designed to give Ret and Prot pallys offhealing in Holy gear (which is heavily itemized with spell crit) something that the crit is used for instead of it being a completely wasted stat. Neither talent is quite as good as Illumination (from a healing standpoint) but they make Holy Paladin gear at least a little more desirable instead of "look at all those wasted itemization points in crit".

As for why they're tied into the conversion talents my guess is because not many pallys would simply pick up a talent in deep prot/ret that says "increases the benefit your heals get from spell crit". They're just supposed to be nice little perks for the spec.

 

Khaelarys

I wouldn't think that prot itemization will be terribly crit based. I wonder why the secondary effect is what it is.

 

flyingtoastr

No no no.

When you're stuck in the odd situation that your guild needs an offhealer you typically throw on healing gear, right? The problem is that Holy Paladin gear is itemized heavily with spell crit. That crit is pretty much worthless to a ret or prot pally as they don't have Illumination. But with TbtL and SoL they do get something out of that crit, making it less of an "eww" stat.

It's bringing some hybriditty (yes that's not a word) back to the specs.

 

Blackthought

A follow-on question: why arent there comparable Holy talents that add hots to your crits and/or increase crit healing? It also seems odd that sheath and touched do not have similar placement in their respective trees. Lastly, would it be overpowered or simply unwated to have a Holy talent that increases your attack power by a multiple of your spell power.

 

GSH

An AP talent would be less wanted. Remember that we don't have any special attacks unless we're specced into them. So a Holy Paladin wouldn't have abilities like Crusader Strike, Divine Storm, or Hammer of the Righteous that AP would boost. It would just boost white damage, and maybe Seal of Blood. But Holy already has spell power tools like Seal of Righteousness and Holy Shock if it needs to do damage.

Now if such a talent gave Strength, that might be interesting, as Strength will convert to block value, which would power Shield of Righteousness, which might help out with off-tanking, soloing, and doing damage. The talent would still need to benefit healing, otherwise healing builds would skip it. Note that both Sheath and TbtL benefit the main purpose of their trees, as opposed to the old druid Feral healing talent, which pretty much everyone skipped.

As for why there aren't equivalent talents in Holy, I guess the designers feel that Holy healing doesn't need them. To be honest, they're probably just to make Holy and Ret/Prot healing "feel" slightly different, while still utilizing the same stats. As for the placement of Sheath of Light, it does enable an alternate Holy build, and maybe will encourage some people to fool around with Shockadin-like specs.

 

flyingtoastr

As I'm not a dev I'm not quite qualified to say why there aren't additional crit talents in the Holy tree. The best guess I can have is that it just isn't the direction they wanted to take Holy Paladins. The new deep holy talents are definitely geared towards a more active healing style than the traditional "spam with lots of crit to make up the regen difference".

An AP > SP conversion in the holy tree isn't particularly useful as a Holy Paladin gains no AP from gear. It would basically remain a static "x additional healing" regardless of whether you are naked or in full tier 6.

As for why sheath is where it is in the tree, I can only guess that it is an oversight. It really should be much deeper in the tree to discourage holy paladins from taking it or much shallower to force it as a required talent for all three specs. Right now it's sorta just caught in limbo where it's a little too deep for prot but a little too shallow.

New beta push is today, we'll see what happens.

 

Khaelarys

Spend mana to make mana. Meh.

I obviously am no more qualified than you are to make assumptions about what they're thinking, but I attributed the secondary effect of Sheathe of Light to a benevolent overlord who's been watching my futile attempts in pvp to save my teammates.

Admittedly, at this point, that amount of optimism borders on naivety.

 

◊ s4dfish

What are folk looking at for potential builds in 3.0 but before WotLK? Prot seems to be wanting to take all but 5 of my points (well, all if redout proves useful). Something along the lines of: Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

And on the Seventh Day, Tank Time rested.

 

bellator

We're talking about lay on hands here? The "improve" talent is in the holy tree, and i find it hard to believe that an ability which has been around since the start of wow when palas never tanked was meant as a protection "oh shit" ability. It has always been a holy "oh shit" ability which with the age of pala tanks has become a prot "oh shit" ability as well. Unfortunately the holy "oh shit" ability of it has reduced in power.

 

Kigale

The prot spec will be very dependent on whether the gear gets redesigned or not. If gear changes to have a whack of strength then HotR and Shield Spec will both be very powerful. Without the strength on gear neither may be worthwhile.