Anaram

Unless I'm mistaken Blizzard is no longer going for the 2.5 of each class per raid but rather with "you don't need more than 1 of each class per raid". Pretty much no other class currently can claim that 2 are "needed" for a raid (except perhaps shamans with bloodlust).

You "need" 1 priest for fort, 1 druid for motw and 1/2 shamans for bloodlust. Everything else you can get from multiple classes.

That said I'm not sure if the Blessings currently warrant the claim that 2 paladins are "needed" though they probably are. Even with current raid utility consolidation 10-mans feel quite crowded if they are ever supposed to be "properly" challenging.

 

bellator

Personally I don't feel Blizzard was ever going for the 2.5 class per raid. End game raiding has always favoured flavour of the month class stacking because of buffs/debuffs/dps etc. I think from the offset Blizzard has simply been trying to reduce number of needed classes to 1-2 and increase equality after that so 2.5 classes per raid is as effective as class stacking, thus allowing guilds to raid based on who they have on their roster rather than forcing guilds to recruit flavour of the month classes to improve their raiding effectiveness.

 

Selenia

In raids, not really. Everyone is fully expected to have it there and the content has been balanced on that assumption. If the blessing was removed and the content re-balanced, noone would even notice.

However, in solo/5man/PvP I would most definitely miss it and it does give us a noticeable advantage.

 

Synbios

I'm surprised you would use Kings solo. I know that when I'm playing solo, I very rarely use Kings. I almost always have Might or Wisdom, depending on my spec that day.

5-Mans I could see, but at the same time, it's not like any class is going to refuse Might or Wisdom depending on their spec. Plus, again, if content is designed assuming no Kings (5-mans included) I don't necessarily see the big deal. Most classes tend to scale better or receive better up-front benefits from Might or Wisdom anyway; for example, on Live a Rogue would deal more dps with Might than he would with Kings (but obviously the most with both).

I think PvP is a big clincher. Kings is definately a pro pvp buff; anything that increases your HP is. If Kings was to be removed, imo, you would feel it most in pvp.

But even still, I am of the opinion that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

 

Kigale

Aside from the name I've always felt ret aura is poorly placed. Ret (the spec) would benefit from Devo aura. Bonus healing is a huge advantage in pvp, as is armor for a squishy teammate. In a 25 man raid the tank will get the bonus healing regardless of which paly spec has it, and in 10 mans the encounters cannot be balanced around the buff since it's not always there.

 

flyingtoastr

Devo doesn't give bonus healing. Improved Devo (15 points down the tree) gives bonus healing. Devo as it is gives you extra armor. Don't hold me to it, but that just screams "tanking" to me. Ret aura is nice to have as a tank, but being the only "offensive" aura that we have it fits with the ret theme.

I also still wish they would just consolidate the resist auras already.

 

Zed

The Master Demonologist buff for Felhunters was changed to -10% spell damage taken, probably to reduce randomness in PvP, it would only make sense to change Paladin auras the same way. I would also include it in the Improved Devotion Aura talent, changing it to Improved Protective Auras or something, since all these auras are meant to do the same thing to different damage types. This would mean -14% damage taken for the selected damage type, for a price (mainly Conc/Ret aura in PvP); as far as my experience goes Paladins are struggling against magic damage anyway and could use some help.

 

Rasczak

I actually really like the idea of a blessing of power. It might be a bit too powerful for 5 man situations though since a single paladin could cover a lot of utility. Personally I think its the best to the whole 4 blessings 2.5 paladins problem, especially if the talent could be reasonably picked up by any spec.

I've been thinking about the prot tree and I would really like to see a tier 2 or 3 talent that would give a nice boost to damage, and preferable be something other than a simple damage multiplier since those are boring. Maybe something like an on next melee add +X holy damage ability akin to heroic strike, or next melee attack becomes holy damage and does an extra X% damage. This would do a number of things for us, first increase prot dps so we don't need absurd scaling abilities like a 240% SotR and it would be based off weapon damage so it would push us more towards using 'tank' weapons over spellpower weapons.

Second add another button to hit so we feel like we are doing a little more than just getting beat on. Assuming it as like heroic strike and wasn't on the gcd it wouldn't interfere with our normal tanking rotation. Maybe instead of heroic strike's set threat bonus it could do something like give us +% threat for a couple seconds.

Third it would add a real incentive for ret to go below divine strength and get dps for it. This would help the css of ret having all their dps tools at 70 instead of 80. It would also give them something to think about, Can I afford the threat of popping this ability?

Last it adds something other than watching auto attacks and judging ever 8-10 seconds when people are leveling (at low levels).

Any thoughts on this?

edit: Yeah I was meaning really low levels. Remember blizzard needs to keep the low levels interesting and reasonably balanced for the new people coming in. While we thrive on the end game its those hundreds of thousands of other people who are 'casual' that pay the bills for blizzard making us sweet raids. Leveling up to 60 before having something over than judgment (or 50 for ret) and to a lesser extent consecrate is generally considered really fucking boring and thats not a good way to keep new players around. And are you mixing up hammer of justice (stun, 1 min cd) with hammer of the righteous (holy cleave thing, 6 sec cd)?

 

Spenda

I really do think this is the best solution I've seen to this problem. Perhaps keeping talents in Ret to improve the AP, and talents in Holy to improve the MP5, so with the new holy/ret synergy Holy paladins would be passing out this buff.

This problem has already been solved with Hammer of Justice, and the new Blessing of Sanctuary returning enough mana to allow regular use of consecrate while leveling. And then obviously adding Shield of Righteousness when we hit 75. More abilities are nice, but we certainly aren't limited to auto attacks and judging. Unless of course you are speaking strictly of low level leveling.

 

◊ Cathela

Didn't do anything for me the other day when I healed Halls of Lightning. I think the patch on Friday (or whenever it was) that nerfed SotR also broke BoL. The spell in my book was called "Light's Beacon" if that means anything.

I think the thing that's really hurt Holy the most has been the fact that the talents have never been all implemented and functioning correctly for any decent period of time. JotP hasn't been working for most of beta. It's fixed now, but the latest patch seems to have broken BoL. Based on flyingtoastr's report a few pages back, it sounds like everything was working (for him, at least) last week, but outside of that small window the tree has always had at least one major talent that's broken or unimplemented. And that really makes it impossible to have any kind of serious tester-feedback cycle. All we can really do is theorycraft at each other about whether it's going to work, but that doesn't help the developers at all; if they want theorycrafting they can do it themselves just fine.

So, if we're optimistic we can hope to get Holy into a fully-functional state this week and start getting some real testing feedback. That would really be just fine if WotLK were coming out sometime in January, like a lot of us were assuming. But with a release date in 7 weeks (and 3.0 presumably coming at least a couple weeks before that) it doesn't leave time for many iterations of the test-feedback-develop cycle.

Of cours if we don't get a working version of the current holy talents this week, then that's another week of beta wasted.

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

 

Antmanton

What I find most distressing about this situation is the near-complete lack of commentary from Blizzard regarding the Holy tree (aside from a short paragraph in this post). It seems Blizzard was completely aware of just how badly all the AoE and mobility fights in TBC hurt paladin healing, and deliberately took no action because of our relative strength in tank spamming. Now comes Wrath, and while a six-second Holy Shock and Infusion of Light greatly relieve the mobility issues we have, it seems Discipline priests are emerging as quite competent replacements for main-tank healing, while a paladin healer still can't effectively cope with large amounts of AoE damage.

That said, however, regarding Beacon of Light's (and maybe even JotP, for that matter) on-again, off-again buggy status; drawing precedent from what happened to Spirit Link and Heroic Leap, I would not at all be surprised if Beacon suddenly ended up being dropped soon. Blizzard is less than eight weeks from Wrath's street date, and will probably be entering feature freeze or even going gold in about five weeks to allow duplication time. Any ability that has been broken or NYI for all but one week of testing to date is not likely to survive a QA pass. Other than these kinds of "unfixable" abilities, though, it seems the talent trees are more-or-less considered as finished, and Blizzard is engaged full-time with tuning content and swatting bugs to make the release date. All we can do now is theorycraft on the assumption that what we have now is what we'll end up with for the next three or four tiers of raiding.

[e] Edited to add:
Certainly, a zero-day patch is almost inevitable, and I would be very surprised indeed if we didn't get some kind of mini-patch or at least a bundle of hotfixes within the first two weeks. But even with that capability, I can't see Blizzard actually deliberately shipping a class with NYI or obviously broken mechanics. The potential for something to go wrong with a patch in QA or something does exist, and the damage to Blizzard's reputation for leaving part of a major selling point of Wrath broken for an extra week or two would be catastrophic.

 

• frmorrison

The advantage of an MMO is that you don't have to worry too much about freezing current abilities. The game ships with the art and other static files, and the spells can be patched as late as Nov 13th.

You have it right, the devs have a set of stuff they want in, but I it seems they feel Beacon can be ready in time.

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

 

Anauel

This is partly true. They can definitely do that, but the last thing you want to do when you get the game and finish installing is downloading a patch.

I'm not sure if Beacon will make it in time. I expect it to feel rushed since the release date is so close. Hopefully the silence that's been going on for a while regarding holy is a sign that they're testing an internal build.

 

ZulazeeluIcecrown

The patch downloads using the Background Downloader the week before release day. Trust me, they don't have to (and will not) freeze things for duplication. That's exactly the way it worked for Burning Crusade. I think... you may, in fact, have had to download a patch after installing, but if so it was a small one.

 

Aquaman7

Just wanted to agree with you and say that the content patch before Burning Crusade was released 1 month and 4 days before the expansion (05-12-2006 till 09-01-2007). So 2 weeks maybe wishfull thinking and the devs maybe much more stressed then we think right now.

However, like it or not, we may conclude that if Holy is like this in beta is because of the importance it was given by Blizzard, which in my opinion was too little.


Well it was nice to hear from a developer that they hited hard Holy Paladins in TBC. However it wasn't only by changing the design of fights, but also by constantly nerfing holy capabilities in every patch of TBC, and that wasn't still acknowledged or explained (not that it matters much by now).

But my point of view is that to have any kind of balance back in healers we need not only new things to add to our abilities (beacon of light , judgements of the pure, infusion of light, divine plea, sacred shield), like other healers got till now, but also something to recover from the huge nerfs we had, and that i think is still to be done.

 

Anauel

Definitely true. What I was trying to say is that it isn't so much the fact that it's a small patch but that we shouldn't be getting a patch to hotfix things that should've been tested in beta. Antmanton's words are much clearer than mine:

I think Blizzard caved in to Activision's demands. Having a game ready before the Holiday's is a lot better than having a January release.

I do, however, think the devs can handle it. I've been watching the changes to Ret and I think they at least have the right idea in mind for what our class is supposed to be doing (barring the constant changes to Art of War, which in the end resulted in a pretty good talent).

 

Demonseedx

There was a patch to be downloaded after installing BC IIRC, and certainly expect there will be with WotLK.

My biggest concern is actually about the patch before WotLK as it will surely flavor peoples opinions going into the expansion if we all have buggy talents. At some point before Patch Blizzard should focus on squaring everything up for live or just skip it.

 

Deris

Beacon is working fine now on Beta, and currently I just do not understand its use... I can place Beacon on a target, heal myself and it heals the targeted player.

I hope this isn't the intended "fix" and that this is no way, shape or form the final version of this 51 point talent. Currently the only real use I can think of is on heavy AOE fights when I have to watch the tank and myself maybe, and then in those situations I can heal myself/others with no fear that the tank is going to die immediately.

 

Arthaal

What don't you understand? That's been the working mechanic for BoL for the last few patches... Unless it now accounts for overhealing? Is limited to only the healer/his beacon? Ignores LoS? Has anything changed at all compared to the previous implementations or is it simply a working version of the tooltip description?

 

Rudegirl

I think thats pretty much the intended mechanic for the spell. Unless it changed in the last patch, i don't think it works for overhealing and that sort of limits its usefulness for PvP at the very least. In addition, it's dispellable and has a 1 minute duration - they should consider lowering the duration and/or manacost (by alot) to make it more dynamic.

 

Spenda

This sounds like the state of Beacon for quite some time now (aside from the idea that it is actually working now). Are you comparing it to the initial version that caused the beacon to emit an AoE heal?

 

Deris

Only a working version now. Still follows LOS, still doesn't account for OH.

What I don't understand is how we basically have the worst 51 point talent in the game, that is nigh useless minus a lot of pvp implications. While yeah, it is going to rock in Arena, it doesn't help our complete lack of usefulness in raids. If raiding keeps going the direction that Sunwell took, Paladins are going to be represented by Ret/Prot, and holy will be an afterthought. Beacon doesn't fix any of the problems we currently have in its current incarnation, 1200 mana to gain a 2 hop Chain heal that doesn't apply Ancestral Fortitude?

EDIT: I'm comparing it to something Holy Paladins need. The first iteration wasn't too bad, the current idea/mechanic is just "wtf?" in terms of creativity and use. I'll definitely be getting Judgments of the Wise over anything deep in Holy. The devs had the right idea, giving Druids an AOE heal as a 51 point. It really defines "I'm a healer. I heal." Holy sadly won't get anything resembling this, in as much that we'll continue to be "The best single target healer, minus the fact that we do not apply a 25% armor buff to the main tank, which trumps basically every healing spell in the game."

Not looking forward to raiding as a healer in wotlk.

 

flyingtoastr

A 2 minute (or a multiple thereof) would be the perfect duration. Why? It syncs perfectly with resealing. Shamans have always taken breaks from healing every two minutes to poop out some more totems, we're going to need the same for Seals, might as well make Beacon play along as well.

If you haven't I would strongly suggest trying it out before blasting it. I used to think the way you did, but it actually is a quite strong and fun mechanic, at least in the 5-man experience I've had with it. With a few tweaks it could be great.

We don't need an AoE heal as our 51 point talent. If we're going to get one it should be baseline.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Deris

I've been "trying" it out, I can see myself using it absolutely 0 in Sunwell, except maybe that it would make healing the reflection tank easier, but that wasn't a challenge to begin with for a Shaman, Priest or Druid. What we need is a 51 point talent worth getting, not an underwhelming overrated talent like Divine Illumination was for TBC, and not what Beacon of Light is currently.

Also underwhelming is the utter dearth of useful talents post Divine Illumination. Increased Judgment Range and JOTP just seem very iffy in a raiding context.

 

flyingtoastr

That's quite odd. I can see myself using it on Eredar Twins to a massive degree, and it could have uses on fights like Kalec.

I would also suggest you don't compare Sunwell experience to Wrath stuff. Sunwell rewarded retarded levels of raid stacking and abuse of game mechanics (downranking). I'm pretty sure Blizzard learned from the fiasco that Shamans have been.

What we need is a 51-point talent, not Chain Heal. Shamans get that baseline and us speccing into it won't help our healing at all. Think.

Divine Favor still costs mana.