GSH

Alright, full results on Art of War and Righteous Vengeance. Many boars died to bring us this information.

Righteous Vengeance is additive. Crit Multiplier = 2 + 0.25

Art of War is multiplicative. However, it is bugged, and is only giving a 2% increase instead of 20%. Crit Multiplier = 2 * 1.02

Meta-gem is multiplicative. Crit Multiplier = 2 * 1.03

Crusade is bugged and against humanoids is currently giving out a 3% bonus to crit multiplier as well as 6% damage increase. Crusade does not give the crit multiplier bonus against beasts, only a 3% damage increase. Crit Multiplier (against Humanoids) = 2 * 1.03

Put together, it works like:

Crit Multiplier = (2 + RV) * AoW * Meta * Crusade = (2 + 0.25) * 1.02 * 1.03 * 1.03

 

Aquaman7

I know that the problem lies in Holy Tree, and the fact that it lacks power and usefullness. People here think that this a mere phase, we will have another pass, things will be good.

I'm not so optimistic right now, from my pointview we are in the same spot where we were before TBC. Holy Palas didn't like Divine Illumination, there was a very good talent in Retribution called improved Sanctity Aura that gave a bonus to healing taken by the players affected by the aura.

What happend is that instead of revamping Divine Illumination, Blizzard took away the healing bonus of improved sanctity aura, and gave another damage bonus, and Divine Illumination remained the same that it is now (the weakest 41 point talent of any healer Class ingame).

Holy Paladins have serious problems that need to be adressed, like mana regen that needs to be solved by either changing illumination back or giving other new regen. Divine Plea is one possibility but it shoudn't have that healing penalty because that way it seriously hit Paladins when healing Tanks at Raids.

Holy Paladins need new spells that can make it a viable Raid healer, like a new Hot, or group heal, that isn't a 2-player heal like Beacon is right now.

The top talents in Holy Tree need some rework, because it's too weak right now.

Sacred Cleasing should garanty a period o immunity to some debuffs, not a mere 30% or at least a reduction in the time of debuffs.

10% haste is good but worthless if we don't have mana to use it.

Beacon needs some work on it, like the way it is now i'm afraid it will only be used in 2 Tank encounters. One possibility would be to let overheal jump to other targets.

Well, sorry for the long post.

 

Razr

Well the idea at the moment is that TBC paladin "role" will be vastly differentiated in wotlk for the very many reasons that have been mentioned above, (divine plea and so on)

So according to the TBC raid compostiion philosophy of healing selections, where paladins were The Single Target Healer bringing along the so-wanted blessings, things will alternate. Shamans attemtping to address both Single Target and raid healing with a fairly decent success. Therefore, paladins are bound to adopt a more "resto-druid" role, aka SWP style of one resto druid and its "sattisfactory"

 

flyingtoastr

Don't sign your posts.

Divine Illumination is an incredible ability... I pop that thing every single cooldown in Sunwell because it does make a large difference for mana. Sure, if you're just doing kara where your largest heal is a Flash of Light it isn't great but it sure as hell is better than some abilities (see: Readiness (Survival Hunter), Force of Nature (Balance Druid), Slow (Arcane Mage), Shadowfury (Destro Lock), Endless Rage (Arms Warrior)) which aren't even specced into ever.

The reason Improved Sanctity Aura was changed from 6% healing to 2% damage has nothing to do with Holy Pallys picking it up. When it was healing guilds would put their ret pally in the tank group to get use out of that extra healing. A physical DPS in the tank group, especially one as gimp as ret pallys in 2.0, doesn't do much DPS. So they changed the aura to a 2% damage boost, giving a valid reason to throw the ret pally in the melee group and get much better synergy.

I won't argue that Holy Pallys need some help, but I don't think mana regen is a major problem. The reason Holy Pallys have such large mana problems in Sunwell is because we are forced to spam downranked Holy Lights in order to keep up with the outgoing damage on tanks. As most ranks of Holy Light have a pretty terrible HPM it is natural that we run into mana problems.

With the removal of downranking and some of the other tools we get (IoL, Holy Shock, Sacred Shield) it is quite possible that our regen will be fine. Sure, we won't have the priest/druid ability to literally last forever because of how stupidly broken spirit is right now, but we don't need it. All you need is enough mana to keep your tank up for the duration of a fight. Anything else is wasted.

And if worst does come to worst we do have 25% of our mana pool every 60 seconds. You trade some short term HPS for longevity. Just make a macro to inform the priests and druids to use some of that extra mana while you're out of it.

If you don't have enough mana to judge for the haste you don't have enough to judge for the regen. Bad argument.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

◊ Cathela

Hell no! 17/32/0 gave you all the useful healing talents, plus 15-minute Salv so you could be lazy in raids, plus Reck/Repent so you could have fun in PvP.

Well, let's hope that's a bugged implementation and not a bugged tooltip. Nice work, though.

Or possibly Ghostcrawler started a feedback thread for Holy talents on the beta forum for a reason, and there are actually changes coming to Holy.

If you want to discuss this stuff, be constructive about it. Point out problems, discuss solutions, etc. But whining about how your spec is screwed if the current trees go live doesn't accomplish anything, irritates other people, and will get you an infraction if it's brought to the attention of a moderator (which people can and will do, very easily; I've done it twice myself in the last 24 hours).

EDIT: In fact, while new posters are great and bring fresh opinions and insights to the thread, I'm noticing a lot of you don't seem to be familiar with some of the basic rules regarding post signing, etc. Check the announcements posted by Boethius at the top of this forum and make sure you're familiar with all the rules and guidelines posted therein.

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

 

Aquaman7

Sorry Mate, i said 41-point of healer Class ( Tree of Life, Circle of Healing, Earthen Shield) the talents you refer are from dps Classes that don't have any possible comparation to Holy Paladin. I'm not saying it isn't usefull but has 41-point talent is lackluster.

I too run Sunwell sometimes, aswell as BT, MH (less often), and what i see is that the best Paladin in my Guild will have 8% to 10% of the healing done in metters and the best Priest / Druid will have 15% and more. Paladins are poping up super mana potion at every cooldown available and the others sometimes don't need it.

Also i'm not refering to the mana to judge for the haste, but instead that we will do 10% more heals in the same amount of time, which will turn to spending your mana faster (10% faster). I do see it usefull in the way that we can replace some haste gems with crit or regen gems however.

 

Shandara

Quick question,

I noticed the first page now lists JoW as restoring 2% of BASE mana. Is this correct? Searching wowhead/thottbot yields so many conflicting versions of the same spell.

I don't know when it was edited, but I believe it used to be 2% of TOTAL mana?

What is the current state of beta on this? It's quite a massive nerf if it was changed from total to base mana.

WotLK Hunter DPS Spreadsheet

 

Noctivagant

One other followup comment.

I now have a 59 DK to go with my 70 Ret Paladin. The DK is incredible fun, and if they wouldn't have changed the Ret Paladin, I just cant see many people who wouldn't have just gone DK.

Having both now going a little in Beta, I can testify that it's now a tough choice of which to play, which is a very, very good sign, to me at least.

As I said before, and it bears repeating, this is not an auto-attack experience at all anymore. AT ALL. Nearly every GCD you have something to click, and *can* w/o holding back. If you aren't clicking you are losing effectiveness. The onus is now on Blizz to balance this against other classes, numbers wise, without losing the new feel.

 

Corronach

I agree 99.9%, the new playstyle really is a ton of fun. You can significantly help heal if really needed, then go back to dpsing. I really feel like a hybrid, and completely worth bringing to any instance.

 

Noctivagant

Right now the tooltip says maximum. I just popped one on a green, and got 964 mana back which is exactly 20% of my current mana, and since I have some int gear, its definately max and not base on beta this exact moment of posting on nothrend.

 

◊ Cathela

Nah, that was just my mistake. Fixed the OP.

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

 

• Avitus

Not getting too involved in this, but I thought I'd mention two things wrong with this statement:

1. You can't compare tank healers (which I'm assuming your paladins are) to raid healers on the meters, that's just absurd. Every class has its job, how successfully you do that dictates how valuable you are, not your position on the healing meters (as opposed to DPS meters for DPS specs once utility is taken out of the equation). Other classes (at least pre-3.0) cannot heal single targets as well as you can.

2. With Potion Sickness being introduced in WotLK your second point is moot. All healers will be using 1 and only 1 potion during combat. If paladins go oom, they will be adjusted. This is not wishful thinking or optimism, you're getting this from someone who's usually very much on the negative side when "hoping blizzard will fix it", however this one is non-negotiable common sense.


--------------


On a completely different note, I just did some testing on Glyph of Flash of Light as I wanted to use it with instant FoL AoW procs and found some interesting results.

The following at level 80, using FoL rank 9, unbuffed in full ret gear, standard WotLK ret spec, 0 points in holy (2384 AP, 720 SP).

Throwing a FoL without the Glyph gave me the following:

FoL 1550
FoL 2350 (crit) + SoL 352.5 x4 = 3760

Throwing another FoL with the Glyph gave me:

FoL 788 + Glyph 276 x5 = 2168
FoL 1142 (crit) + Glyph 400 x5 + SoL 172 x4 = 3830

We can extrapolate that each Glyph tick does 0.35 of the initial heal.

Adjusting for numbers of the first FoL (the ones without Glyph) to reach a more accurate conclusion (50% initial value + 5x 0.35 ticks) gives the following result:

FoL 775 + Glyph 271.25 x5 = 2131.25
FoL 1175 + Glyph 411.25 x5 + SoL 176.25 x4 = 3936.25

Conclusion/things to note:

-For some reason, the heals from the Glyph are only worth 175% rather than 200% of the initial heal, it's possible I'm missing some detail as to why this is the case.

-It seems the SoL HoT is always calculated from the actual initial heal (50%), rather than what it should have been without Glyph (100%), meaning the Glyph cuts the usefulness of SoL HoT in half.

-Looking at this from a pure numbers perspective for solo/pvp/self-healing (rather than a discussion about "direct heals vs hots" in a raid environment): Without SoL the Glyph increases the total worth of all your FoLs by 37.5%

-With SoL the Glyph increases the worth of your non-crits by 37.5%, but is almost worthless on your crit FoLs (increase of <5%)


Due to the SoL issue, I feel like it's somewhat less worthwhile than I expected it to be for my purposes. It feels like taking a big hit on initial cast for no overall gain when it crits.

 

◊ Cathela

Hmm, it looked to me like the glyph was giving the full 200% of the initial heal amount last time I checked, but that was awhile ago.

Regardless, I'm personally not liking the FoL glyph much. FoL isn't a big heal; in my normal gear mine hit for around 1.2k each without the glyph. Getting five ticks of 240 healing over 15 seconds isn't much of an effect; generally if I'm going to take the time/mana to use FoL it's because I want the whole thing there right away. Or, I want to cast two FoLs in a row to get 2.4k worth of healing cheap, and the glyph just slows that up by changing 1.2+1.2 into 0.6+0.6+(1.2 over 15 seconds). Other people may have different opinions of course, and if other people like the glyph then it's a good glyph regardless of what I think.

The HL glyph, on the other hand, is pure awesomeness.

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

 

Blutelf

Especially with the downranking changes, I do not see myself using the FoL glyph at all in PVE. It was probably more of a PVP glyph design decision? To get some HoT effects for Ret? I can see how that could be attractive.

 

Arthaal

I completely agree that the experience at 70 and beyond (which I recently had a chance to start experiencing with my new BETA key ) is just as you say not autoattack country at all... In fact, I found myself scratching my head at what some of the damage numbers showing up where until I realized I had retribution aura and white attacks still!

I initially had a long write-up about the retribution talent tree, talent placement and leveling written up, but I decided to gut it to the essentials:

50 plus on a paladin is probably fine thanks to CS, but anything earlier is likely going to be painful. 1-20 in particular is awful. In addition to an essentially boring combat system with no instant attacks, relative damage with SoR is low, while Judgement damage is high but on a long cooldown. Net result of this is waiting 10 seconds for a second Judgement for any kill. This feels sluggish... with no AoE ability before 20, multi mob pulls without the old DP are almost impossible (the loss of full immunity made healing very difficult. Though this was before the pushback changes...)

We can alleviate this situation to some extent by providing good DPS increase talents in tier 1... benediction is great at 70-80, where spamming abilities can get costly mana wise, but both tier 1 options are utterly useless from a grinding perspective at 1-20. You won't go out of mana because JoL is all you have to spam and it's on a 10s cooldown.

I think this alone justifies moving conviction down to tier 1, much like the warrior's cruelty talent. Benediction can be eliminated and a new, crit related talent put in conviction's place.

- Conviction appeals to both holy and retribution and moving it up to tier 1 isn't unbalanced.

- Prot recently received a +crit talent deep down it's tree, so more crit isn't out of line and they can always spec deflection is they prefer.

- The new tier 3 talent's appeal can be more heavily tailored to retribution, reducing the tree's appeal to holy builds who can now spec shallow to get the crit increase but are then left with a number of "useless" tiers. If we're being lazy, I suppose we could simply adapt benediction's old effect to the vengeance mechanic and have the vengeance buff reduce the cost of instants by 2/4/6/8/10% while active (maybe more to account for vengeance downtime - 3/6/9/12/15%?) Or simply introduce a new mechanic.

EDIT: to add that the FoL glyph, if AVITUS's numbers are correct, seems to have been intended to provide holy with a hot to quickly stack on targets in arena (a mini-regrowth) to add to their HL spam HPS. If it plays so poorly with SoL then it's clearly not intended for ret usage.

Edit2: apologies to Avitus... I confuse you two because you both post so much

 

• Avitus

Edit: Arthaal, unless you're talking about some other post, I'm not flyingtoaster :P And yes, the numbers are correct.

As said in my post "Looking at this from a pure numbers perspective for solo/pvp/self-healing (rather than a discussion about "direct heals vs hots" in a raid environment)"

Even then (in pvp), with the way it almost cancels out SoL when you crit, I'm questioning how useful it is there to suffer the 50% initial heal.


On a side note (something that may or may not be out of the scope of this discussion): I find the way replacing Glyphs works somewhat annoying as a hybrid class. I was expecting that you can remove Glyphs and shuffle them around like gear, however it turns out you can only destroy currently equipped Glyphs (like gems) whenever you put in new ones.

Some Glyphs will become almost required if you want to optimize your role (which you will want to in any decent progression encounter), meaning at some point you'll have to carry around stacks of Glyphs with you or in the bank like consumables to replace every time you respec.

Sort of a big "meh" considering they said they wanted to streamline respeccing.

Examples are the 10% more damage on Judgements Glyph for Ret/Prot and the 10% more healed (and splash healed on people around the target) with Holy Light for Holy. I can't imagine not having those equipped (they essentially become requirements) in a progression encounter if you're filling those roles.

 

grayrest

I had the FoL glyph equipped when AoW changed (I was using it for a flash between fights) and quickly replaced it with the HL glyph. While it does increase the power of your non-crit FoLs, you have more than one opportunity to drop an AoW FoL in the 12 seconds it takes the glyphed FoL to fully tick out. As a result, you get lower healing throughput if you heal the same target more than once every 12s, which happens when you're doing multi-mob pulls or killing elites.

 

Jaegan

With regards to the instant-cast AoW flash of lights, I was curious what the GCD involved was. Seeing as how the casting cost is not reduced through benediction, it seems likely it would only cause a .5 second GCD instead of the standard 1.5 for instant abilities.

 

flyingtoastr

1.5 seconds modified by your haste rating, at least from what I can tell (with the current lag on the beta realms I might be off).

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Malleus

Yes, but it does open up different paths for Glyphing rather than Healadins automatically taking Glyph of HL, Glyph of Flash and Glyph of BoW. A deep Holy Paladin may take Glyph of Flash because it synergises well with Beacon, giving them the rolling HoTs of Sheath without having to sacrifice throughput talents. A Sheathbot may not take the Glyph because it only does something they already do better, but they can instead take another Glyph that increases their healing or raid utility in other ways (e.g. Glyph of BoM, which is good for a Sheathbot as they can readily take max rank Imp BoM).

 

Herzak

A little off topic... but I think the way they design how the glyphs work is probably intended to help the profession keep a level of demand, if they allow glyphs to be removed and stored in your inventory and lets you put it back on when you need it again... the market demand will eventually grow small very fast,

People are constantly getting new gear and require new gems and enchants, for glyphs, once people get all their class glyphs, thats it, they are set for life, and the only way that Inscription can get new customers is from new characters/alts.

Which I think is why they make you destroy glyphs

 

Phunk

I can't imagine Sheath/JotW will be able to stay as is for much longer. Ret builds in holy gear will be healing way too much for too long (so much that raid holy pallys will want to spec Ret?)

In my the premade pvp holy gear self buffed with a Deep Ret/Some Holy build I get:
Flash of Light -- ~3000 normal heal
Holy Light -- ~9200 normal heal
25% Crit
15000 mana
~2000 Spell Power

In a 10 second block you can get off 3 Holy Lights, 1 Rejudgement, with some padding for lag, reaction time, movement etc. That is 3 * 1.125 (25% crit for 150% heal) * 9200 = 31050. I'm not 100% sure how the Sheath HoT mechanics work, but I'll assume that the HoT can't stack but will be up most of the time. 60% of a crit Holy Light would be about 8400 over 12 seconds which would be 700 HPS. Add those together and you have a pretty insane infinite mana 3805 Healing per Second with all the ret spec pally utility that scales well with gear. Plus you can basically ignore Mp5 on gear leaving more points for your other stats Some of that is going to be overhealed but still for single target consistent damage it seems pretty outrageous. Combine that with Beacon's lack luster raid performance (doesn't work with more than one paladin, and not working with overheal, high mana cost and low time etc). Maybe deep holy is better than I looks on paper, but Deep holy is going to need to pack some serious punch to get people to spec that deep and skip this Sheath/JotW/Holy Light spam build.

Anybody have any off the cuff guess as to the Deep Holy Pally's raid HPS?

 

Xequecal

Another thing that worries me about Ret is Shield of Righteousness swapping. Not only will it be incredibly difficult to execute efficiently, (switching weapons resets swing timer, so you always want to do the swap right after a white hit and never right before, and you also need to avoid having the 1H equipped when Crusader Strike/Divine Storm light up) but it probably pushes Ret DPS far into overpowered territory.

SHoR does a LOT of damage in Ret builds that stack STR. If executed perfectly, you basically lose 1.5 seconds worth of white damage in exchange for a strike that does ((0.5 * STR) + Shield Block Value) * 2.4 damage, and ignores armor. If you REALLY want to min/max you can make sure to swap in a really fast 1-hander that will swing before the GCD that switching creates allows you to use SHoR and switch back, so you gain back some white damage.

 

flyingtoastr

Switching weapons also incurs the GCD while in combat. You'd be looking at at least 3 seconds using a crappy weapon, not including possible pushback on real damage abilities (it would be at least 4.5 seconds between getting a real weapon on for CS/DS). It is quite improbable that you will ever see this happen in PvE.

In PvP it's actually an excellent idea against melee to throw on a Sword N' Board and shield slam/ret aura them into submission.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Khaelarys

Auras and Divine Plea are the only abilities I see that don't say Magic on the buff. Has anyone tested to see if it actually can be dispelled? I haven't been very lucky finding someone to help me test abilities against in beta.

Right now, the damage seems really high, but I have nothing of the other classes to compare it too. (Especially since everyone and their mother has pets now). SotR does make up for some of the lost damage, but you're talking about taking a hit on seal damage, white damage, and your ret cycle to change out for a SotR - I think you have better things to do with those cooldowns for damage.

The change to push back also makes concentration feel much more useful baseline.