I think if it's worth it to you to bring four paladins to get K/M/W/S for everyone with all glyphs, then you can do that. But it's a pretty big stretch to say you need all that for any raid.

Just a quick note. Finally got onto PTR, and noticed SoR is bugged. I'm not exactly sure whats going on, but the SoR damage is a reasonable bit less than it should be. I don't think its an intended change to make it a less damaging seal since the judgement is doing the same damage as is SoV. But it is currently bugged.

Not necessary.

You can go with Seal of Wisdom + Judgement of Light and happily spam Judgement, Crusader Strike and Divine storm without going below 90% mana. Occasionally you can want to heal yourself, but that's all.

How is this possible? It's 33% mana to use those three abilities - Replinished will return 10% of it in the time it takes probably to kill a mob - is an SoW proc really returning that much mana? Or is this with BoW on?

Also, if that were true, you are basically saying that damage seals are out, or are we talking about seal swapping into damage seals, and then that's a whopping 14% base to swap in, and 14% to swap out, which is 28%.

Those abilities use more than what is returned not to mention a damaging seal does more damage than adding DS to your rotation.

Mana right now on Beta sucks, plain and simple. What I find funny though is people are still bitching about our crazy burst which is basically Command still doing double damage on stunned targets (+8k crits)...sigh.

BoM, SoW, JoW and just spam your abilites or BoM, SoComm, JoW and Judge/CS only both works fine at lvl 70 vs 70/71 mobs withouth having to drink for a long time. My draenei doesn't need to heal therself with mana but a bandage should do the trick for other races. Maybe my kara gear is too good for those mobs, is it really that much worse on 80 with questing greens/blues? Because at 70 at least grinding is totally fine, not many downtimes and at pretty fast kill speed (no comment on PvP or instances, haven't tried)

Couldn't they give us Mana return with benediction?

In it's current form, benediction is pretty useless, as Judgements are already pretty cheap, and we only re-seal every 2 minutes, making the mana saved pretty much negligible. I was thinking something that restores mana on a judement. It's at the top of the tree, so it might be worthwhile for prot to get it too, even holy.

They could always scale it based on level or base mana instead of maximum mana to make it not so useful to Holy paladins, but since it's at the top, I suspect it's intended to be useful for all paladins, since they appear to want everyone to use judgment now.

I was thinking something like .5 points per level every second for 8-10 seconds after every judgement. That's 200 MP5, which is very much needed for ret and prot, though might be too much for holy. Probably way too much for a tier one talent all around, but numbers can be tweaked.

I'm using Sunwell/BT gear at 78. I find the damage from SoCorr, which works out to 1k+ ticks and stacks very quickly when spamming abilities, makes the mobs drop extremely fast, and I'm pretty sure the less than 10s I take to drink after several mobs is worth the decreased killtime from using a dps seal.

I'm not really concerned with farming. I learned on live that things work out really well to just hop a BG for some biscuits then go All Holy Fury on stuff while farming and just eat occasionally.

I'm more concerned about a 10 minute bossfight, where you don't get to sit and drink.

Sure, too much for a T1 talent. So kill two birds with one stone: move Deflection to T1, move Benediction to T2, and give Benediction a mana-return effect.

Have you seen the new Tier 1 Balance and Discipline talents? "Increases the power of your DoT and HoT effects" and "Increases your spell power and healing" respectively. Quite powerful talents in the first tier that give people a valid reason not to dump 71 in their main tree.

It seems Blizzard wants most classes to have a reason to drop a few points down a tree and gain some benefit for their main spec (not like Holy Pallys going down prot now, that doesn't help your healing one lick). Giving nice Tier 1 talents that benefits every spec is a wonderful idea. Instead of Priests picking up "extra wand damage" to get to Inner Focus they're getting a nice boost. Balance Druids get some sweet Insect Swarm and Moonfire lovin while Resto Druids who want to pick up the new and improved Nature's Grace for even more powerful Nourish spam can get further down and get something more useful than ".5 seconds off Wrath casts".

Prot wants to go down for Deflection. Holy Wants to go down for Conviction. It makes sense to give them a talent or two along the way that actually helps with their main spec's job.

As Judgement is our bread-and-butter spell for all three specs I see no reason why it couldn't be worked out to do something useful.

That works too. I was suggesting what I did because it seemed like a very conservative way to get a lot of good things done in one swoop. But if the developers want to improve the overall utility of the first-tier talents (god knows they need it) then I'm in all in favor of that.

Regarding Benediction.
Currently, only affecting Seals and Judgments, it saves us roughly 551MP every 2 minutes (assuming you don't change Seals). That's beyond pathetic.
If Benediction were to be changed to be a 20% mana reduction to all Retribution spells, that number would jump to 3865MP saved every 2 minutes - over 7 times as much.

I was looking at the new flasks earlier, and was thinking about the changes to % based mana return.
The new flask Flask of Pure Mojo gives 38mp5.
Then I looked back at Flask of Distilled Wisdom, which gives 72 intellect (65+Kings).
That 72 intellect increases maximum mana by 1080MP, increasing the return from Replenishment by ~26mp5. Pure Mojo has 12mp5 more than Distilled Wisdom, but doesn't have the extra 1080MP. It takes 450sec (7min30sec) for Pure Mojo to outpace Distilled Wisdom. Considering Distilled Wisdom is a level 60 Flask and Pure Mojo is level 80, I'm assuming they'll implement a level 80 Intellect flask instead of an Mp5 one.

The change to Beacon of Light seems great for Arena healing (akin to Druids popping Tranquility underneath Blade's Edge). Put Beacon on a partner, stand behind a pillar, and spam heal yourself. Of course, you need to make sure range isn't an issue. Could someone check if this method keeps you in combat?
I haven't thought of any amazing uses for PvE though. Putting beacon on a tank and healing other people seems more auxiliary - not exactly useful if the tank is taking any spike damage. I'd be interested to learn how it interacts with the Holy Light glyph (Glyph of Holy Light - Your Holy Light grants 10% of its heal amount to up to 5 friendly targets within 5 of the initial target).

Speaking of the new Holy Light glyph, does anyone in the beta know if the splashed heal itself can crit? If so, does it trigger Illumination?

Current reports have this only work if you both are taking damage - overheals are not transferred from a few posts back.

It's just MMOC not updating. They have it right under the Holy tab.

Beta servers are usually right, MMOC is just a non-affiliated website.

Yeah, it's actually a more fundamental issue than flasks; Replenishment in its current form means that mp5 is dead as a raiding stat. I did the math a page or two back, but basically 1 mp5 costs the same in itemization points as 2.5 intellect, which gives 41.25 total mana (including BoK), which is roughly .2 mana regenerated per second, or 1mp5. So provided you have replenishment and BoK (i.e., pretty much any 25-man) intellect gives you more replenishment regen than mp5 gives you. (In addition to all the other benefits of intellect, of course.)

I had a splash heal crit off a non-crit primary heal last night. I didn't have Illumination at the time though, so I can't answer that. (But if they do trigger Illumination right now, I doubt they'll let that go live.) Also, as I mentioned earlier, the splash heals are also hitting the original target, effectively making this libram a 10% buff to Holy Light's single-target healing.

Beacon is also behaving kind of oddly. For one thing, I'm not sure it's working properly at the moment. I specced holy to heal a group for the "Ring of Blood Part II" event yesterday; it was 3 DKs and an enhancement shaman, so there was a lot of melee-range splash damage on the harder fights. I BoL'd the DK tank at the start of each fight, and I can't say I ever noticed the BoL effect happening. That is, I never once healed a non-tank and saw the tank's health bar go up. Now, that might have just been incoming damage wiping out the heal before I could see it, but it seems strange that I didn't even see it work once.

The other thing is that another paladin (not grouped) cast it on me and tried healing me, and BoL seemed to keep proccing itself over and over. Even though I was fully healed I kept getting a string of one-point heals over and over for a good ten seconds or so (maybe 3-4 heals per second). So this is clearly still quite buggy.

Oh, and those one-point heals occasionally crit for two points, so maybe that means that BoL heals can crit separately.

To put a finer point on whether and when BoL becomes useful in its present incarnation, it looks like

(1) for the reasons mentioned earlier in this thread, it appears unreliable and hence largely not useful for an MT healing assignment; and

(2) for raid healing, BoL costs 35% of base mana to cast, while HL costs 29%, FoL costs 7% and HS costs 18%, so,

(A) to achieve the same efficiency as the base spell cast, you'd need OH adjusted heals from BoL, over the course of one minute, equal to (i) for HL casts, a little over one HL (but HL casts to trigger a doubling with BoL seem unlikely unless an MT damage spike happens to occur at the same time as a raid member has taken sufficient damage to justify a full HL cast), (ii) for FoL casts, five FoLs or (iii) for HS casts, two HSs;

(B) at these breakpoints there would be equal efficiency but HPS gains and increased mana costs; and

(C) above these breakpoints, there would be both efficiency and HPS gains, accompanied by increased mana costs.

Does that seem right or am I missing something?

Are you sure you're using the right spell? There's like 3 beacon of light spells that get put in your spell book when you get the talent, the one with the cast time isn't the right spell. The correct spell is instant cast and says Rank 1 underneath it. It was definitely working for me, I just got into beta and healed UK with it today.

The talent currently seems very powerful for 5 mans, especially with the new FoL glyph if other people in the group are taking damage you can just cycle FoL and the beacon will heal the tank easily from all the renews ticking. It would also randomly proc twice if I cast a heal on the tank, the 2nd heal crits individually and I got like a 12k HL crit in my very crappy (650 spell power) gear. I don't consider myself an expert Paladin or anything, and I haven't played seriously in a year+ but I really, really like Beacon of Light.

Can crit. Don't know if it can proc Illumination since it's broken atm.

For what its worth, Ghostcrawler commented on the uproar over JoTW at least to some degree. The important part

"We haven't done much work on mana generation or sustainability in part because we were working on the massive buff changes and the mana battery mechanics in general. While managing your mana is something we want you to have to consider (else why have mana at all?), ideally we don't want to balance a class around "well this guy can do a lot but runs out of mana really fast." That's not a fun mechanic. "

WoW Forums -> PLEASE stop making illconsidered changes