levk

A healer would value JotW more than ret since it's just a gigantic return for somebody who's going to stack int. The rest of the stuff like AoW flash and such - holy tools are better no question about it but speccing for JotW as a healer means you don't have a longevity problem ever. Maybe the encounters will get much shorter so you won't see much of this in pve, but for pvp this is huge you might actually stack enough int to make yourself immune to mana burn because you'll just regen faster.

I don't see why it should scale at all, but if it does then it should at least scale with a DPS stat not a healer stat. Maybe they should go back to damage based returns afterall.

 

Khaelarys

I don't disagree that JotW is a great concept for holy. I just disagree with the other guy that it's worth giving up so much of the holy's output. It's nice to regen 800 mana / 5, but if your heal target is dead then what's the point? Maybe it is viable - is that even a bad thing? That there's an alternate healing build?

But, what we're talking about now has absolutely nothing to do with my original point. I'm saying that, as a ret spec, I can throw on healing gear and use JotW just as it is to help make up for the lost mana regen that I don't get from Illumination and to be able to heal a five man, or help with a boss encounter. There IS a difference, to Ret paladins, as to whether this spell is based on total mana or base mana, and that difference has nothing to do with a Paladin in Ret Gear. That was my only point. I see some nice things going on in this tree that allow me to tank in tank gear, and maybe heal in holy gear - I'd like to keep it that way.

 

SanSul

I really do like the idea of healing, utility and dps buffs being given to every tree, which is something they said they planned to do for all classes. But it just doesn't seem all that balanced at the moment, maybe Holy needs dps talents far an above what Ret has, to compensate for the healing talents far and above what Holy has.

But I am visualizing a Ret Healer in PvP going around replenishing everyones mana, throwing instant flash of light hots (glyped) around, throwing holy lights around with big hots attached to many of them. Obviously not as versatile as a Holy healer, but maybe far more sustainable.

I guess that is the biggest issue right now, is simply mana. Give Holy Paladins a better regen mechanic then Ret, and you won't see very many giving up Beacon of Light.

 

Xequecal

800 mana/5? Try 2000 mana/5. And your target is not going to die when you can spam max rank HL the entire fight and never go below 75% mana. You sure as hell can't do that with a deep Holy build. Illumination? It's completely superfluous. Getting mana back on crits is irrelevant when your mana is infinite. Right now you can go 8/5/58 and get every relevant PvE DPS talent, and be the best healer and best DPS your class can be with a simple gear swap.

 

levk

If you have 30k mana JotW is 3750 mp5. Just for reference, max rank mana burn is at level 77 for 1500 average (doesn't scale other than haste) and if improved to 2 second cast (from 3 seconds) burns at 3800 mp5.

 

Fqubed

Wonder who will go out of mana first then, the pally who is stable at -50 mp5 with a 30k manapool (not counting mp5 from gear) or the preist burning 14% of his base mana per cast.

So too good to scale with max mana I guess is the verdict.

 

Khaelarys

Phaet, you're from Finale. No way you believe you can heal in arenas with nothing but a 2.5 s heal, and a Flash every 8 seconds.

I'd much rather be able to Justice a druid from 30 yards, Holy Shock / Infusion of Light, get the Cleanse talents, and the dispel immunity for my Hands in an arena environment.

If they modify this, it's only going to hurt Ret offspec ability.

 

SanSul

Wasn't there Blue posters saying they were not happy with how easy regen was currently in Naxx? and that they were far to lenient on the total lack of mana concern in TBC.

Its also not just a simple mana/5 scenario. The priest is doing nothing but spamming mana burn, while the Paladin is dealing damage via judgements. If he has the talents, his judgement crits would lower the cast time of his flash of light as well. You can spec for instant Holy light procs, or 0.75second holy lights (without haste) and instant flash of light procs (which could be a hot). So the priest if also the healer on the team, would have to compensate for all these things the Paladin is doing ontop of trying to drain the mana. 2 seconds of no mana burn would completely negate the entire process from a mana/5 point of view.

I think the priest and the paladin would run out of mana at the same time, but the priests mana was all spent on mana burning, while the paladins was spent on healing, doing damage, etc.

 

flyingtoastr

Given the way BoL is currently acting with the doubling of heals you're actually losing a lot more than 11% crit.

Sheath doesn't scale still.And the big thing everyone seems to be forgetting: JUDGEMENT IS ON THE GCD. You can not just "lolspam Holy Light!" and be successful. You will have healing gaps of 4 seconds when you judge (1.5 second GCD, 2.5 seconds to wind up another holy light). Tanks can die in 4 seconds (ever done Brut?). The problem is that if you don't Judge every 8 seconds your mana pool goes kaput. Assuming you have something like 20k mana you only regen 4000 per Judgement. The 3 Holy Lights you can fit in between Judgements cost about 3600 mana. If you have to push that 4th Holy Light in you're in the hole by 800 mana. 5 holy Lights between Judgements? 2000 in the hole.

Think.

Holy hasn't even received it's revision yet. For all we know the new talents are going to be so incredible you wouldn't in your right mind ever even glace at the ret tree. Until then this discussion is pointless.

Some people's minds are like cement: all mixed up and permanently set.

 

Xequecal

For PvP you can just go 38/0/33 if you need your instant heals and Light's Grace. You don't get Sheath, but you still get the infinite mana.

 

levk

I don't like arenas personally.

If they leave JotW based on max mana you'll see a lot of it in arenas. When I left the game the standard tactic against healing paladins was bloodlust with mana burn. Can't say I wouldn't do the same since it was very quick CC against healing paladins with indefinite duration after gear changes were disallowed in arenas. There are plenty of other ways but this is by far the easiest and takes the least resources. And if you think ret can't do anything without mana, try holy.

So if they leave JotW like this, giant scaling for holy, you'll definitely see a lot of this in the beginning. Eventually people will adapt to this and basically take healing paladin with JotW by his weakness - throughput. But when I left it was hard to deliver enough pressure in 3s for example with the right composition. Now I assume it's only worse since gear with pukka resilience is far more available.

 

Khaelarys

It's not about just throughput - it's about the throughput against cc's and interrupts. You give up all interrupt protection and dispel protection -

At 2.5 s cast as your significant output, EVERY cc has a faster cast time. I'm not talking interrupts, which are generally instant and will stop your casting for 5 seconds. I mean CC. It's bad now with Shock and Flash.

I'm sorry. I just don't agree that will be the Flavor. But again, with what they give up for it, I still question if that's horribad. If someone wants to give up pretty much every healing ability to support infinite holy light, and they squander most of their ret points by using holy gear - there's a word for that. Shockadin minus the shock.

Let em do it. Just don't pretend to be a healer.

 

mdokane

I must be using a different talent calculator because I am getting to 3/3 JotW at 33 points in Ret. That leaves 38 talent points. For pvp, you would want repentance because you are that far down in ret anyways. That leaves 37 points for holy. How exactly is that giving up throughput when the only thing I don't have that I did at 70 with 41 in holy is DI, a mana saving timer. I don't get range on judgements but I've been at this whole getting in close to judge the druid thing for a while and I think I've pretty much got it down.

 

levk

Actually you're right I didn't even look at that. Umm I must've been going off the level 70 talent cap. Yeah like this I doubt you'll see anybody without JotW in arenas.

EDIT:

This is the build more or less: http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...00000000000000

I think the discussion started that JotW could be at 51 ret and healers would still get it. It's just that imba.

 

Khaelarys

The build we're talking about is in this post. It just sort of trickled down into a JotW build discussion.

 

Xequecal

Well for PvE, they definitely would. For PvP, you're right, it's less likely

 

mdokane

Well no doubt it is extremely powerful but I wouldn't zone into an arena without light's grace or imp conc aura at this point. I've lost a few matches as a 4pc/4pc pve geared holy paladin due to mana, but any mouth breather can pummel a 2.5 sec cast. I would, however, zone into a raid with 51 in ret if that's where JotW was, as long as it was with the stipulation that other healers would have to pic up the spot healing.

 

• frmorrison

Talents or procs that make non-instant spells instants have never been affected by the % reduction of instant cast talents.

Be happy it works on a lot of spells already!


With the new change to Ret mana, which Seal is best for leveling? I would think Blood.

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.

 

Vhex

That's why you stack haste. With 1.8~ish second HL's and a ~1 second GCD the issue becomes far less prevalent. There's 4...maybe 5 fights total in all of TBC where I couldn't stand in melee range and on those fights I'll just go respec. Hell, you could just as easily do this:

http://talent.mmo-champion.com/?pala...00000000000000

Now you're only giving up 5% crit. You keep illumination to help when you can't give up a GCD to judge. Even if you only judge every 20 seconds you're still pumping out 1000ish mp5. What deep holy talents can even begin to compare?

It's worth discussing, even if it's not totally fleshed out, simply because it gives you an idea of just how powerful holy needs to be to compete. If we just all sat around with our thumbs up our bums going "Lalalala...it's only beta!" we end up with the atrocity that was original wow. Ever do Molten Core? It's only beta guys, they'll have it all sussed out before it pushes live!

I'm not crying doom and gloom. I'm not saying there's no hope and that blizzard fails at balance (although...). It's just worth pointing out that the current iteration is terrible and needs work.

Or we can just all sit around and say, "Hey it's all going to work out." Each to their own I suppose.

 

Antmanton

I am inclined to believe that the flat-out double healing from BoL is almost certainly bugged. No other spell or ability in the game even comes close to that kind of benefit, and I have trouble believing that Blizzard would leave the other healers so far in the dust. Even if it is indeed intended, it still is mostly useful as a buff to single-target spam healing for raid situations, since almost every 10 man and certainly every 25 man will bring an AoE healer to handle general raid healing, leaving a paladin little reason to jump off his tank assignment to try to spot heal.

As for the "pointlessness" of this discussion, I couldn't disagree more. Blizzard has stated that they will be making many more passes before release, so it is imperative that we get our feedback out there as soon as possible to maximze the number of tuning opportunities to get us into shape. Waiting until "the next pass" will lead to BC Crusader Strike syndrome, where bad decisions are hastily made based on limited feedback, ultimately leaving the spec broken for a long time until it's finally incrementally patched up to usefulness (again, see Crusader Strike, or Circle of Healing for priests). The ominous silence from Blizzard on the direction of deep Holy is not helping on this, either, aside from teaser "this BoL revision you may or may not now be playing with is almost too good" type posts which really don't provide anything substantial to base feedback on.

Again, the here and now is that deep Holy is critically weak in terms of variety and effectiveness. People are still jumping over to Ret not because Ret is so overpoweringly good, but because Holy offers so little. The desired solution should be to buff deep Holy instead of nerfing the last few synergistic talents from Ret, which is why the decision to move Sheath and JotW rankles so much.

 

pope master

You don't get Blood and Vengance until 64.

 

Tilted

Just because you spec into JotW doesn't mean you need to judge every 8 seconds. And just because you're healing doesn't mean full-burn HL spam. The 38/0/33 build that keeps getting cited still allows for HS crits to proc an instant HL cast. That means you can wait for a HS crit, pop your judgement, then have an instant megaheal lined up 1.5s later if needed. 2000-3000 mp5 or whatever is entirely irrelevant when you clearly don't need that much mana to keep someone alive.

They either need to change how JotW works or make the bottom tiers of Holy much more appealing. For what it's worth, I vote for the latter.

 

• Avitus

I'm leveling (78->80) at the moment with SoB. Pulling packs and using Divine Storm usually heals enough to mitigate most self damage done through SoB/JoB. Also with AoW instant cast FoLs you can throw yourself a quick heal every now and then (keep in mind it does reset the swing timer). It feels pretty fun/dynamic.

 

◊ Cathela

Just to repeat my advice from earlier:

The developers are by and large very good at coming up with good ideas to solve problems and address issues. Sometimes they use an idea suggested by the players, (e.g., the story about Titan's Grip), but that's not common. More often, if a player idea has any impact, it's in giving the developers a good starting point to start thinking from. When a player-suggested idea shows up in the game, it's usually in a form very different from the initial suggestion.

What they don't have is the massive amount of playing experience with the class that most of us have. I'm sure they all play the game in their spare time, but most of them haven't put the time in with this class that we have. (By simple math nobody can be a true expert in all 9 classes; even being really good at 3 of them would take a lot of time, and these people have jobs that involve more than just playing the game.) Because of this, the greatest impact we as players and testers can have is in pointing out issues.

And look, for your own personal sanity and health, there's a point where you need to just accept that you've done what you can, you've laid out your case, and either the devs are going to agree with you or they aren't. I'm convinced they do read this forum and this thread, and in any case they definitely read the beta forum. If you state your opinion and make your case in a clear, rational, thoughtful manner, that's really all you can do. Accept it and hope for the best.

As an example of all this, look at the recent changes involving crits for Prot spec paladins. I was saying last week that Prot would be more fun with more crits, and I suggested moving Conviction to Tier 1 as a way to help with that. (I saw other people on the Beta forums saying similar things, so I'm not claiming personal credit for this, it's just a good example.) I laid out my case in this thread and in the suggestion forum, explained my thinking, and basically left it at that.

Last night the patch rolled in, and it turns out that the devs agreed with me that Prot needed access to more crit. But they didn't take my suggestion about Conviction; instead they kept Conviction where it is, made the path up to Conviction smoother for a prot paladin (Deflection + new Benediction), slimmed up the Prot tree so the points would be available to a tank, and then just to top it off they added 6% crit into a core Prot talent. In other words, they took my concerns into consideration, and came up with their own idea for fixing it, which ended up being better than my idea (which I still think was good, just not as good as what we got).

This is what I'm suggesting: Describe the problem, explain why it's an issue, why it can't be fixed by X or Y, etc. Make a suggestion about how to fix it if you think you have a cool idea. Discuss it back and forth a bit if other people have some feedback. But don't worry about debating it back and forth endlessly.

If you're still reading this, I'm not saying that debating and arguing back and forth a bit on the exact nature of the problem is a bad idea. A bit of criticism and back-and-forth discussion can sharpen up the ideas. But for the most part, your first post on the topic is going to tell the developers 95% of what they need to know. It's fun to discuss things and toss ideas back and forth, so feel free to do it; I know I like to. But recognize it for what it is: basically just something you do for fun that won't have much effect after the first round of discussion. If talking about it is just getting you more stressed, anxious, or frustrated, then stop. It's not going to make any difference anyway.

Disclaimer: None of the above should be taken as telling people what they can or can't talk about in the thread. I don't presume to do that, and it's certainly not in my power. I'm just offering my two cents.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

Aquaman7

Hello,

I'm sorry to say but this latest build was a big nerf to Holy Paladins, and more precisely to Shockadins.

SOL is now impossible to have with Holy Shock.

It's really sad to see Retribution Paladins calling for nerfs for Holy Paladins. It isn't new because Retribution Paladins were together with Priests in the begin of TBC and were responsible for the nerf to Illumination.

For me a fellow Paladin that calls for nerfs in Holy is a traitor!

After taking nerfs in every patch in TBC i'm not willing to continue in WOTLK if HOly Tree isn't fixed.

It's a shame that Divine Plea was buffed to Retribution and Protection but made worst for Holy Paladins. Blizzard should remove the spell for Holy Paladins since they didn't want to give us something good in the first place.

TBC was know for the lack of Tanks, and WOTLK will be know for the lack of Paladin healers, good job, Blizz.

The question is that Holy Paladins still don't have a good regen spell that complements the nerfed illumination, that should back to 100%. While the other healers have a much better way of regen, like spirit.

Also other healers are getting very good single target heals, while Paladin doesn't have a good group heal or hot.

We are the worst healer in TBC right now and will be the worst healer in WOTLK.

I'm sorry but fixing Beacon won't be enough, the other top talents need to be better too.

After 3 years of Holy Paladin, maybe it's time to quit, and i know many are thinking the same, gl Retribution!