It used to same "damage absorbed by your shield increased by 30%" versus now saying "increases block value by 30%". Given that the damage absorbed by your shield is your shield block value it is the same exact thing, it just sounds prettier.

Doesn't this flat-out double our throughput? Beacon the tank, then spam the raid. Seems almost absurdly powerful to me in any situation except where no one but the tank is taking damage.

It doesn't solve our inability to AoE heal if we're the only healer, but I think it represents a massive increase in throughput for any raid fight.

In a 10-man context, the new BoL seems powerful. In a 2-healer 10 man, this should allow paladins to effectively raid heal while maintaining consistent tank healing.

This sounds very similar to the rumored priests' "Mark of Divinity" which at 30% was deemed extremely OP. Clearly paladins don't have the same level of raid healing throughput that priests do, but I'd say that calling this extremely weak may be a bit of an overstatement.

It either had to be improved by a lot or removed entirely. 1 of 3 so far ain't bad...now to see if Kings goes baseline.

Yes, but it still only allows you to heal 2 targets at a time. Again, even spamming Holy Lights you're looking at at least 2 seconds in between heals on raid members. So yeah, in situations where only the tank and one or two other people are taking damage it's great. In raids where you have 25 people taking damage it doesn't fix anything.

It has potential in some situations, but I don't find it especially worth speccing 51 into holy now.

Actually the latest build has both BoM and BS at 550 AP untalented, both also having a 25% increase talent. So yes, they're both exactly equal now.

I suppose it will be a while before anyone can confirm either way, but does the new Beacon of Light require LoS?

If not, I can see a lot of PvP scenarios where that would become devilish.

Let's take a random 5-man fight that paladins have a lot of trouble with.

Vexallus - NPC - World of Warcraft

What is the reason Paladins have trouble with this fight? Well lets see. I would guess it's this combined with this little beaut.

Does the "new" BoL help? Sure. You can keep up the tank and someone else for a little while. It doesn't help you keep up more than that though. It is not an AoE heal. You will still be constrained by only being able to hit 1 (2) people every 2-2.5 seconds. In that time other people are still taking massive amounts of damage, which this BoL doesn't do one lick for. Let's say you spam Holy Lights with BoL on your tank.

T=2.5- Holy Light 1 hits, heals tank and group member 1
T=4.5-Holy Light 2 hits, heals tank and group member 2
T=6.5 Holy Light 3 hits, heals tank and group member 3
T=8.5 Holy Light 4 hits, heals tank and group member 4
T=10.5 Holy Light 5 hits, heals tank and group member 1

So you have 8 seconds of no heals on any given person while you're trying to keep their friends up. It doesn't help with keeping the group up terribly much. In fact, in those 8 seconds Group member 4 has taken at least 4700 damage, if he's got a DoT on him he's dead. BoL doesn't change that at all.

I'm not saying it's a bad talent (and situationally on say Twin Emps it would be stupidly powerful) but it doesn't especially address our major problem with still only being able to hit one person per cast.

E: spelling

Being able to hit 2 targets with Flash of Light at the same time, 2 targets with Holy Light at the same time, and instantly hit 2 targets with Lay on Hands in an emergency doesn't exactly suck.

Edit: So now Haste become a must-have for pally healers...anything at all possible to get that number down as low as it can.

I thought it didn't scale directly with block value or something? I remember it having a weird mechanic unless it was changed and I didn't see it.

Now it appears to directly effect our block value, which is threat!

I approve of these new prot changes!

Just need some more love in the ret and holy department.

Also, is it just me or does STR feel kind of... semi-useful?

It's not semi-useful...it's now a requirement. Go back a page or two, Cathela did some threat numbers that put Str at the top of the heap.

Edit: Sorry, wrong thread...it's over in the mainline Pally tanking thread. Link: http://elitistjerks.com/f31/t17089-p...79/#post873678.

Well, doing some quick napkin math, in my haste gear right now (233 rating) and with Wrath of Air, Improved Boomkin and Judgements of the Pure we'd be looking at a 1.46 second Holy Light cast and a 1.09 second Flash of Light/Holy Shock. For HL group spam that is still nearly 6 seconds between heals on individuals (aside from the BoL'd target) which is far too long in today's AoE fights, but much better than the 8 seconds without haste.

So yeah, Haste might become the premier Holy Paladin stat depending on how encounters work out.

Think about this: Spamming HLs on a dpser who has a 20% more healing received from talents/buffs while beacon is on the MT.

Ding ding ding?

It depends.

Something that really needs to be tested asap:
Take this situation.

My group is 3 people: myself, Jane the Warrior and Hummer the Rogue.
-I cast BoL on Jane.
-Jane takes 3000 damage. Hummer takes 1500.
-I cast a Holy Light on Hummer. It heals him for 1500 effective and 1500 overheal.

Question: Does BoL heal Jane based on the effective heal (1500) or the total heal (3000)?

Depending on how that works out your idea could have some serious merit.

Hrm. Divine Favor->Holy Shock raid member A. Tank A gets heals. Instant Holy Light on next target. ~1 second (GCD limited, pretty much) HLs let you ignore the tank and just heal the DPS, putting your rotation down to 5.5 seconds or so.

In today's AoE fights, useless, but great for top off after a Najentus-style sporadic massive AoE.

I had forgotten that they mentioned specifically fixing Ret's mana issues, but that's a very good point and I hope you're right. Certainly nobody with a clear head can consider a Replenishment buff on yourself to be a full solution to the mana issues. (Have I mentioned how damn cool the old JotW was to play with?)

That's too damn cool. Aside from the obvious awesome tanking benefits, this also changes the gearing game for Prot soloing and makes it a lot more fun to grind with. Previously your best gear for prot soloing was basically Ret gear with a shield; now you're going to want to just fill up the hit table with whatever avoidance you can get your hands on, be it dodge, block, or parry. This is awesome.

I think so, because the equivalent warrior talent had its tooltip changed in the same way for the previous patch, and that turned out to be the meaning of it. (Plus, it's the obvious change that the talent needs anyway.)

Not that it matters, but assuming you mean Eredar Twins.

This is a very different mechanic from anything I can recall seeing before, and I think we're going to have to see it tested in practice before we can say too much about it. It does address one of the major complaints about the old BoL, which is that it didn't synergize at all with any of the other holy talents (save Divine Illumination, obviously). This new one literally synergizes with everything.

EDIT: I'll try to test BoL re:overhealing as soon as I can (still downloading patch at the moment). It's a very interesting question.

EDIT AGAIN: ... and with respect to Rasputin's post below, that's unfortunate but I can't say I'm surprised.

Initial tests from the beta forums show that Beacon healing only works with effective healing.

Bleh, that reduces the power of the talent pretty dramatically, especially the "cast it and heal 2 tanks!". Given that that tank you're actively healing might have an avoidance streak while the other one gets repeatedly crushed (thus leading to tank 1 living with full health while tank 2 gets no heals and splats) it kinda removes the reason for using BoL in the first place. Pitty.

Also, new Glyphs according to MMO-champ:

• Glyph of Blessing of Kings -- Reduce the mana cost of your Blessing of Kings and Greater Blessing of Kings spells by 50%.
• Glyph of Sense Undead -- Damage against Undead increased by 1% while your Sense Undead ability
• Glyph of the Warhorse -- Reduce the casting time of your Summon Charger and Summon Warhorse spells by 0.5 sec.
• Glyph of Lay on Hands -- Increases the mana restored by your Lay on Hands spell by 5%.
• Glyph of Blessing of Might -- Increases the duration of your Blessing of Might spell by 20 min when cast on yourself.
• Glyph of Blessing of Wisdom -- Increases the duration of your Blessing of Wisdom spell by 20 min when cast on yourself.

So, by my count, that's two glyhps that save you a reagent for soloing, one glyph that saves you mana when you're out of combat anyway, one glyph that's perhaps mildly useful in PvP, and two glyphs that have effects that might be useful if they weren't so tiny. I hope the ones that apply to spells that already had glyphs don't replace those glyphs, because a lot of the previous ones were very nice (the blessing glyphs for example).

EDIT: Dammit, double-post. Sorry.

I think that's going to seriously hurt it for a lot of applications. If the raid is counting on you to be healing the tank, you can't BoL the tank and help with raid healing: if someone beats you to a target and turns your heal into overheal, the tank loses healing. Same if you're going to heal someone and they pop a healthstone. In other words, you can only safely use this if raid-healing is your job anyway, and all it'll give is some sporadic healing at random times and for random amounts on the tank.

I can understand they're worried about BoL being used as a tool to pipe all your heals through a warlock with Fel Armor or whatever, but this restriction really kills a lot of its potential.

I was just testing Beacon of Light. Some notes:

- 1 minute duration.
- only works on effective healing (as noted above)
- currently seems to be doing an extra 12% healing, probably a bug with the Healing Light talent.
- healing is attributed to the target

Edit: I was testing with a Retribution paladin (which was hard because she killed stuff too quickly to hurt us) and she was running out of mana very fast. But I got some regen from Replenishment, which was very nice. Also, the haste from the judging talent is still not in yet.

Getting away from the BoL discussion for just a second, apparently SoC is "bugged" (perhaps it is intentional) and now provides enough power to light an entire city for the activation animation.

And back on BoL!

Assuming it gets polished to where it doesn't suck what kinds of specs are we going to be looking at? Now that ToL blows Improved Devo out of the water again I can't bring myself to blow the points in Prot for it and Divine Guardian when the oh so sexy Conviction and Pursuit of Justice are staring me in the face. I was thinking something along the lines of 54/0/17. The nice thing though is those extra "filler talents" in holy like Purifying Power and Improved LoH can be shuffed around as needed.

Of course that's also assuming BoK is moved to baseline.

E: Just realized that between Toughness and Divine Purpose ret paladins are going to be incredibly difficult to kite. Coupled with Freedom and PoJ that def means we don't need a charge effect anymore.

I can't see this standing as is. As Cathela mentions if someone beats you to a heal and yours becomes an overheal the beacon will be receiving 0 healing. You would then be forced to heal the tank directly completely defeating the purpose of the talent at all. If Fel Armor is the problem I'd think they could code it so the Beacon's heal is recalculated instead of a direct transfer.