Parahelios

To derail the Holy discussion for a moment, I have a question about Protection for those paladins who have played one for awhile. I'm excited to see what the 3rd-tier 1-pt talent will be, but coming as a Warrior pre-TBC and Mage for most of TBC, I don't have enough experience with paladins to really know what a paladin tank would really want there.

AoE tanking seems just as strong as before (which I admit is what sounded most fun to me, as a vanilla wow tank), and the rework looks pretty solid for the single to small group tanking. Personally I hope it's not a Last Stand clone, but is that whats really needed at this point? To me it seems it would be far more "fun" to have some of adaption of Lichborne - but instead do something like "Removes and makes you immune to Curse, Disease, and Poison effects and regenerates 1% of your total health every second for 10 seconds". A holy Avatar, if you will.

Or in other words, is Prot well off enough to hope for an interesting / fun dynamic, or does it still need something really core that the one-point-wonder should provide?

 

Anauel

Maybe. It depends if you think of it as making it a last 20 seconds instead of a 10 and a 1 min cooldown (giving 1.25% mana per second instead of 2.5%) or if it's now a 10-second ability with a 2 min cooldown (giving 5% mana per second instead of 2.5%). I'm thinking it's the latter.

In both cases the mana return per minute is the same, but they're two completely different abilities for a holy pally. The first one is terrible (20 seconds of 50% throughput). The second one would probably be a buff from what it's on beta right now.

 

Khaelarys

Really? All I read was Ret nerf. I spend so much of my time bouncing back and forth between ret and holy that the ability to heal with Spell Power gear in a mostly Ret build makes me drool every time I think about it. Right now - I can give up a few points in holy and still single target heal if I have decent gear. Maybe that's not intended, but I'd still hate to see it be "fixed". Fixed like a car, hopefully, not fixed like a dog.

 

Lunkhedd

Has anyone from Blizzard actually said they'll add a talent there? It does look like a hole in the talent tree, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have any particular desire to fill it.

I doubt paladins will get a Last Stand clone, since Ardent Defender is more or less a passive version of Last Stand already. There's quite a list of tanking-related things warriors can do that paladins can't (offensive dispel, enemy attack power reduction, taunt backup, single target taunt, fear break, intervene, enemy armor reduction, and possibly threat transfer if they ever got around to adding that to Vigilance), but none of those look critical to me at this point. My guess would be they'd try to add something that would make the tree look more attractive to Holy and Ret builds as much as something to help tanks, since it's about the right spot in the tree and would make Kings look less out of place.

 

flyingtoastr

Hrfm.

Holy Shock is the only one in there that is a heal, and it is suck on a cooldown. Not only that but we still have nothing to address the massive HPS gap between Holy Light and Flash of Light. That is the reason we downrank right now, because we need something in between the huge heal that is HL and the tiny heal that is FoL. Holy Shock can not fit this bill on a cooldown.

We need a third heal baseline to fit in between the two or something to cover the downtime caused by having to switch between low HPS spam and high HPS nuking (a HoT). That's all there is to it.



I love this spell. I don't mind the babysitting. If they are going to do it this way though the mana cost needs to be lowered. Dumping a tenth of my mana pool every minute isn't fun, especially when combined with the next comment.



Combined with her comments about "balancing DP for PVP by lengthening the duration" this means Holy Pallys are pretty much fucked for regen. My solution: nix PvP, balance for PvE. Given that they won't do that for fear of losing a few subscribers over how "OP pallys are" (hi there, press your purge button and DP disappears dumbass) they absolutely have to put in a reduction to the MS effect under the holy tree.

I like the Holy tree. It has a lot of fun ideas. But combined with the news that the devs feel it is "viable" without adding some good major throughput deep holy talents and the news that DP is being smashed with the nerfbat in order to "balance ret PvP" (who aren't especially reliant on it given JotW) it is really going to be a tough sell to say that 51+ is better than a JotW hybrid spec, regardless of how crappy everything in that tree is for healing.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Rasputin

I actually see the main problems in Judgements of the Pure. There isn't enough bloat in Holy ot ignore it, and it's not good enough to take to get you to Beacon. Beacon itself is one point, and for that single point, sure it's reasonable. What's not good at the moment is all the talents you have to take to get to it. GC has said they're fixing JotP, so hopefully that resolves some of the issues with the tree.

 

Demonseedx

On the topic of Protection's 11 point talent, I'm not really sure if anything will be sitting here since from what we have heard they are crunching numbers at this point and not talents. We have LoH and Ardent Defender to cover Last Stand, Divine Protection for their Shield wall, & Hammer of Justice gives us an interrupt. I suppose I could see a talented 1 point Taunt, if they find we need it, but I don't really see that as being to pressing. Personally I'd love to see something that gave a boost to mitigation when taking those big hitter mobs that another class is probably avoiding.

 

flyingtoastr

2 quick notes from running around IF testing stuff:

1) BoL doesn't double heal the beacon anymore, at least when the beacon is you. I'll test it out in a group later.
2) BoL refresh bug is fixed.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Khaelarys

Can DP be dispelled?

 

Ngita

Divine Shield can not be dispelled
Divine protection can be dispelled
Divine Plea can be dispelled
Hand of protection can be dispelled

Which DP are we talking about again?
Bol not double healing was posted as a bug fix perhaps a week ago?

 

Andrast

I don't have immediate access to the computer I have beta on. Can you, or anyone, please test if Infusion of Light can proc from a Beacon of Light heal.

How to test:
1. Party with someone (a warlock would be ideal)
2. Put beacon on yourself
3. Get them to lose health
4. Holy shock them causing Beacon to heal you
5. Repeat 4 until the holy shock doesn't crit but the Beacon heal does (shouldn't take long)

Do you still get infusion of light from doing this? I can confirm that 2 beta builds ago this did indeed work (the build where everyone was naked)

I'll test it myself as soon as I have access to my beta machine but I haven't had a chance to test it yet on this latest build.

 

Prinsesa

I can confirm that this was working for me as of last night (Sept 23, 11 PM PHT):

1. My Holy Paladin partner cast Beacon on himself
2. He cast Holy Shock on me
3. The Holy Shock on me did not crit
4. The Beacon-redirected Holy Shock on him DID crit
5. Infusion of Light procced for him

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

allythepally

Apologies if this isn't the time or place for this, but what're your thoughts on pre-WotLK-post-3.0 specs? I'm looking specifically at holy (since healers are always needed), thinking that something like this might be about right.

JotW is totally too far down to even think about for a 70-capped spec, and as much as I'd like to play with BoL I can't see getting as much use out of it as the 8% crit. What do you all think?

 

Andrast

If you're in Sunwell/BT your crit rate should be more than enough by now. I'd strongly recommend getting Beacon of Light.

Assuming a 40% Holy Shock crit chance if BoL is up then you have a 64% chance of proccing Infusion of Light from every Holy Shock cast (assuming it isn't on the Beacon).

 

Khaelarys

I think you probably could have told which one I was talking about from what toaster was talking about...

I have to tell you guys - I know you all say it can be dispelled, and I don't disagree it makes sense - but I say again, it's not a magic buff - it doesn't say magic, it's like an Aura - it doesn't have a type. I can only test this with a warlock (not many of my crew are in the beta) - but he can't eat it off me.

So again, can anyone actually confirm that DP (divine plea) can be dispelled?

 

Thorgred

Its very sad news to see that the Devs think Holy is fine.
Considering that they know they created raid mechanics specifically to harm us, realized what was going wrong in BT/sunwell and have done nothing to change it... I'm a little bit worried about what is to come.

Holy needs some other type of healing mechanic.
I think that something tied to Judgement of Light would be fantastic - heal raid members within 20 of the target, or JoL can proc off ranged, or causes a HoT to 5 needy group members.
I'm still not a fan of BoL. Sacred shield needs to be better and needs to scale. Divine Plea needs to be balanced for PVE, not PVP. JotP needs to be less talent points. Sacred cleansing needs to be more reliable.
Maybe as the 11pt holy, cleanse could give a HoT for a few seconds?

 

Blutelf

If I am looking at the same parse, he is a JoTW Holy.

Without having done any raid testing on the PTR, I feel this is probably the best investment of points at 70 with the current build. Given that JoTP, EJ, and Beacon may be updated very soon though, it may not remain so. Just give both specs a try once the changes hit live whatever they may be, I know I will.

 

Altirias

I did some testing yesterday night in kara with a pick up group on ptr. I know it's not 70, not very challenging content and all, but yet, I had time to notice a couple of things.

- BoL is good. Actually, I was raid healing with flash of light and HS, with the beacon on one of the two tanks, and it worked quite well. I don't even think it should take overheal into account, that would be convenient, but it feels good as it is.

- JoTP is also great, but it still doesn't feel complete. It is great to be able to judge from 30 yards away, but I feel we could use 2 tweaks :
* have a talent to increase judgement duration to 30 seconds, so that the seal uptime is 100% even if there are only holy pals. Increased duration of the seal would also be a good thing, so maybe a "increase judgement and seal duration by 50%" could be a nice addition to it.
* As a healer, I don't really care about the ennemies. Of course I keep an eye of who is drawing aggro, stun a loose mob and such, but 99% of the time I have a friend on target. Judging the ennemy to get the JoTP could be macro'ed to not have to switch to an ennemy, but I feel that if judgement could be cast on friendly targets for whatever effect we would need (hot, give the seal to the judged ally for 30s, with the same effect for exemple), it would be convenient. It seems that with those judgement talents deep holy they want us to go in and to damage a little, but I'm not buying it. There are many times where you have to focus on your healing, and in those time you can't really benefit from the 10% haste that would really help you in a stressfull situation.

- Light's grace : With downranking, it was very easy to keep it up all times. But with the new power of flash of light and HS, I was barely using HL, so I never had light's grace up. and it's quite costy to refresh the buff just to afford you 0,5 cast reduction on your big heal. Basically, it was never up when I needed it, and it felt quite pointless. So maybe this talents needs adjustement as well (procs on HS as well ? on sacred shield ?). Maybe HL has more use in lvl 80 raids, and thus keeping light's grace up is not an issue, but in easier content, It might be a good thing to have a way to get the buff up before it is needed (therefore, before casting HL). I understand it is not supposed to be up any time, or they would just cut HL cast time down to 2 seconds, but another way to proc the buff would be good still, so that it's not 100% uptime, but not never up when you need either.

 

watersrog

A quick observation: with 30 yards range Auras, it's unlikely all raid will benefit of the haste and damage increase from Retribution Aura. And Aura Mastery is out of reach for a Retribution (or Protection, for that matter) build. Now, since Tree of Life, Trueshot Aura and all Death Knigth's Auras have a default of 45 yards range and are similar mechanics this seem odd. Why would most of Retribution raid utility be reduced in such an arbitrary way?

 

allythepally

Not true in my case - my gear's T4/5/badge. But still, crit is crit - 8% should give the same HPS and mana bonus no matter how much you already have. Of course, the effect will be proportionally less.

You're right, that's really the best way to go about it. I think I'll spec BoL second, because I have a feeling I won't want to lose it once I go there.

 

Antmanton

I came to that conclusion as well. What they'll probably end up doing to "fix" Holy is move JotW even further down, possibly along with Sanctified Seals and Conviction to discourage dipping into Ret at all. On the Holy side, look for Healing Light and Illumination to drop back down a few tiers to make sure 30+ in Prot or Ret can't get to them at all.

Unfortunately, this is exactly the kind of ham-fisted treatment I was afraid of when it was revealed that Prot scales on Stamina and Ret scales on AP. Looking at the three specs from a gearing perspective, they now have pretty much nothing in common with each other save perhaps crit and haste. Compounding that error is the fact that upon realizing that all three specs did need some stat crossover, Blizzard took the easy way out by making three completely disparate conversion talents, none of which are equally potent nor even really comparable to each other. Ultimately, these imbalances along with the craptacular state of deep Holy combined to create 43/0/28 (and later 31/0/40) kinds of builds, which were actually good for healing paladins as a class, but very bad for deep Holy as a spec. Now, in order to justify deep Holy's existence, Blizzard is forced to systemically break every iota of cross-tree synergy in the early talent tiers to force people to spec deeply into Holy to be an acceptable healer. This will result in further division between roles, compromising our hybridity and general utility (and I fear, more shitty early-tier talents in all trees to discourage cross-speccing).

Finally, for those in the beta who are raiding Naxx, can you comment on the healing requirements? Is it true to the old Naxx, or did they add more required movement or AoE damage to the encounters? How about the Eye of Eternity? A big concern for me is that, assurances to the contrary notwithstanding, later raiding tiers will reintroduce TBC-style mobility and AoE elements that may be missing from Naxx, which has been the primary focus of raid testing so far.

 

◊ Cathela

If that mechanic is intended, it means that even in single-target healing situations you can drastically increase the proc rate for IoL simply by putting the beacon on someone and then healing your target like normal. With Benediction, BoL is 31.5% of base mana, compared to 29% for Holy Light. If you're specced 51/0/18 + 2, then your crit rate with Holy Shock will be something like 30% even in fairly basic gear, in which case the extra crits from BoL will boost your IoL proc rate up to 51%. I don't know if they'll allow that to stay in, but it's a pretty cool effect.

Also, I figured out why BoL wasn't working for me. It seems that at some point beta-Cathela got some kind of permanent glitch as a result of speccing Holy while they were screwing around with different versions of BoL. As a result, whenever I spec for BoL, I get five different spells: three spells called "Beacon of Light" that do basically nothing, one spell called "Light's Beacon" that has the same tooltip as the real BoL but does nothing, and one spell called "Beacon of Light Rank 1" that's actually the real BoL. Normally the real BoL gets hidden behind "Beacon of Light" in my spellbook so I don't see it, but it shows up if I turn on the "show all ranks" option. So, it's been there all along but I've never been able to find it.

So basically, if for whatever reason you can't get BoL to work right, set your spellbook to show all ranks and see if something else shows up. If this is just a glitch resulting from patching and switching from one version of beta to another then presumably (hopefully) it won't show up when 3.0 goes live.

---

Re Altiras: Your comments match up pretty well with my 5-man healing experiences in beta (except that I've never gotten BoL to work right; see above.) LG was designed for the "old world" of spam-healing and it doesn't mesh well with the new reactive-healing/no-downranking model. I think it still has a place (speed is good for reactive healing) but it needs some adjustment to really "fit". As it is right now it's just never around when you need it.

And yeah, it feels weird to be paying so much attention to the bad guys while you're healing. My healing interface is actually designed around targeting mobs (I use assist and mouseover macros for healing) and even with that it's still not comfortable to be spending so much time targeting mobs and judging. Too often I find that I need to do fast healing just as JotP is going down, and at that point I really don't want to blow a GCD to set it up again and fall further behind on healing. This is probably something that I could improve with better discipline (e.g., always judge when the cooldown is up so it'll be there for emergencies) but for now at least it feels awkward.

I like your idea about being able to use judgement as a mechanic to aid friendlies by transferring a seal or whatever. Obviously it's way too late for something like that to be implemented now, and aside from that it would be a major new mechanic with a lot of balance implications, but it's a really cool idea that could totally redefine the role of a holy paladin in groups.

EDIT:

I would hope this means our auras are going to be buffed to a 45 yard default range. I don't see any reason why they should be different from anyone else's. Of course if they do that they'll have to come up with a decent talent for 11-holy, but in my mind that's something they should have done a long time ago.

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

 

Blutelf

I may be mistaken, but I think BoL has been like that for everyone when they've changed it from the AE HoT, so your char should be perfectly fine.

 

Deris

Well, GC's comments officially lock in that I'll be raiding as JOTW spec Holy at 80. Beacon of Light isn't needed as it is just a "dumb" Chain Heal, that only hits one target and has a high variable depending on others within your raid. Raid healers can cover the raid healing, I'll be busy restoring 20% of my mana every 8.

 

Thorgred

I'd like to see Reckoning changed also:
even if the 'backwards scaling' is not changed, i think that the 4 charges should be removed.
Basically, 4 charges creates a situation where the optimum weapon for the talent is 2.0 speed or slower: tanking weapons designed for warriors are generally much faster.

If the 4 charges were changed to either 6 charges or simply 'your melee attacks within the next 8 seconds' this would be another push towards getting Paladins to choose warrior tanking weapons.

(Ideally, the talent would be changed to working on dodge/parry/block/resist instead of taking damage, but what can you do )