Andrast

I found that most often I'd get light's grace up from an IoL proc. You get very used to the clock ticking sound if you use holy shock almost every cooldown. I very rarely found myself casting a full 2.5 second holy light. It seemed far more efficient to keep the tank up with FoL and wait for holy shock again. If I found myself in trouble I can always pop wings or use lay on hands.

With regards to focusing on enemies I think it feels weird depending on your healing style. I've been using Clique and mouseover healing for a long time and would often judge/shock/HoW/HoJ enemies in the middle of healing a 5 man. Also as a raid leader I would always have the boss targetted so I could determine what percentage his health was at. I know I could have used a focus frame for this but targetting felt more natural to me due to my 5 man style. I can see how it might feel strange for someone used to targetting and then healing people. Your focus has always been on friendlies and now it needs to be on enemies aswell.

 

Kigale

Has anybody tested how the -healing from divine plea stacks with the +healing of AW?

100 - 50 + 20 = 70%

or

100 * .5 * 1.2 = 60%

 

Valerys

To go slightly off tangent, has there been any move to increase the stacking of Symbol of Divinity to 10? At the moment on progression nights you can use DI 3 times in a raid, with the lower cooldown it can be up to 9 times, so not having to dedicate an additional bag slot to it would be a welcome change.

 

burghy

Divine Plea is not listed as magic buff for me. It's just a tooltip bug?
Atm the only thing I see wrong with BeoL is that looking at parses it's top healing is higher than the individual spells, that means either it can still crit or you get healing coefficients applied twice. Also the group buff it gives seems to have an inconsistent duration.

Reading the latest blue posts it's a bit concerning how they associate DP with evocation and aspect of the viper.

 

Halion

Some of our minor glyphs have been released. Most are rather unimpressive, however [Glyph of Sense Undead] seems nice for Ret / Prot with all the UD in Naxx. Not sure how many UD are in the other instances, but I'm going to assume that UD will populate a rather large portion of Icecrown.

Edit: Not sure why the item isn't in the database yet, but http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?item=43368

 

Hylo

One thing about our anti-UD skills and Naxx irks me, and that's balance. Using Exorcism and Holy Wrath on every cooldown is very much possible now with our mana regeneration. These do make non-trivial amount of damage (almost 6% of total damage in this parse) and pose a balancing problem:

1) They balance retri dps around the assumption that Exo and HW can be used, leaving us in situation we're doing lower damage agains non-demons/undeads than other classes.

2) They balance retri dps around these abilities not being usable which leaves us in dps-advantage in the first raid dungeon.

The glyph Halion mentioned is certainly not making balancing easier (glyph being *minor*, every ret will have that)

 

Aquaman7

I hope that you are right, but somehow if we are comparing to the situation of Healing Priests in the begin of TBC, then we are worse then in TBC or near that.

I think that someone should ask directly to GC if the Holy Paladins will still be the best Tank Healer in the next expansion.

And the Class we should be careful in this matter is the Discipline Priest.

Many people need to know that before taking the decision of continuing to play Holy or not.

 

Qalor

Paladins by the very nature of how their spells work make very good tank healers and poor raid healers. So yes, that is still your niche. Disc priests as you noted have also become very good tank healers. If I had a paladin and a disc and one had to raid heal, I would put the disc on it, as they have more tools to help in that. However, a disc priest and a paladin would make a mighty fine pair to heal a tank with so you could put your other healers on the raid.

 

Palados

It sucks to go against the crowd , but I would agree with GC that BoL is awesome 51pointer, almost OP (assuming it will be bug free in release). What other 51pointer has a potential to double your throughoutput? I believe that shamans got their 51pointer reworked purely to not make BoL overpowered in raids (it would trivialize the MT healing). To understand why BoL is so good, people should realise that it is not AoE heal but a new tool in single heal arsenal that makes us stronger (but in non trivial way) in encounters where we are weak. What do we have:

1. BoL has no use when only one target is damaged or damage on raid is really low. But in this situation paladins are (and will be) the kings.

2. The more damage on non tank we have, the more effective BoL is. With the potential to double the HPS by a single talent.

3. You could argue that priest healing 5 people for 2k is better than shammy healing 3 of them for (averaged) 3.5k that is better than paladin healing 2 targets for 5k. If group got 10k damage AoE, then priest needs 5 GCD to completely top it, shammy - 6 GCD, and paladin - 8 GCD (that is 2 GCD less than nowdays btw, thus 20% faster). However, BoL is NOT an AoE spell. But not being AoE spell it WILL raise our healing done for AoE fights. For something like twins fight I would expect 40-50% increase in my effective healing done. That will move me from the middle-to-bottom part of healingmeters to the very top in that fight.

Lets face it, no matter what we theorycraft on these boards, the majority of guilds will judge healers by healingmeters. Even many SWP guild leaders said that palas sucked by looking at healingmeters and not at their actual effectiveness as tank healers. Blizzard stated that it was intended due to paladins dominated early TBC raiding. Now they gave us a funny tool, that will make us look good in those types of fights without giving us an AoE heal. And, to be honest, if I would have to choose between current BoL and some clone of CoH or CH I would choose BoL. Sometimes '2' is better than ace just because it match other three '2' in your hand. I don't like unification of clases and I really want different healing classes to be very good in specific roles, while being able to do basic healing things (heal all 5mans and heroics for example, that isn't a problem in WotLK at all).

If people still are not convinced, then let me ask you one question: when is aoe healing more effective than single target healing every single person? Only when damage is high enough for AoE heal to be spammed (and single target healing just isn't fast enough to top people) or effectiveness of aoe heal is better than single target topping by a big margin. First reason is eliminated to a big extent by Blizzard encounter design. They stated they don't want any sort of chaincasting and they won't create encounters to encourage it. So if priest or shammy will have to use AoE heal each 5-6 sec or even once in 10sec it would be almost viable for pala to keep people up by single target healing for a bigger mana cost (thats a trade off of being good single target healer). Second reason is valid, but actually paladin HPM is not THAT far behind AoE healers HPM to make pala raid healers unacceptable.

By the way, look at KJ fight, when most guilds spread out enough to make CoH and CH useless. If you have enough palas to put one on raid he will easily be one of the top healers in that fight.

I cba to search now, but I clearly remember him mentioning that paladins should be the best tank healers. And if it is our intended role, Bliz will buff us if needed till we really are the best in it.

Blue quote for people who are worrying about their role as healers:

 

Andrast

Just as a point of correction.

Shaman didn't have Spirit Link removed because of potential synergy with Beacon of Light.

WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Spirit Link

I do agree with your central point that Beacon of Light is a very powerful talent. This is what I have been saying in many of my posts here.

I'm sure people here have already realised the great synergy between Beacon of Light and Hand of Sacrifice. With BoL on the tank, put up Hand of Sacrifice for 30% damage mitigation and heal yourself. Even with another paladin in raid you can use this technique provided you have some communication. Keeping in mind the ability to prov Infusion of Light from BoL and our 51pt becomes an extremely powerful talent even in single tank, low aoe fights such as Maexxna. So Palados even your claim that BoL has no use when aoe damage is low or only 1 target is damaged is false.

Basically I've no doubt that BoL will be an excellent 51pt talent. The talents below it need some work and all indications point to these getting some work which is really nice. I'm very much looking forward to switching back my main to being a Paladin and running with Ret as my main spec but collecting Holy gear too.

 

• Avitus

Tooltips: On a slight off point, I was reminded yesterday during a beta raid of just how stupid non-updating tooltips are. 3 years into the game and they still don't update with talents.

I had one of the raid members complain how BoK got nerfed (as the tooltip only shows up as 2% now) and I had to remind him how tooltips never updated with talents and that it's still 10% with points.

A bit further in the discussion I added how "the useless reribution aura you see giving 112 holy damage feedback is also giving everyone in raid +2% damage, +3% haste and actually ~170 holy damage feedback" and to my surprise, a whole bunch of people were amazed and had no idea that this was the case.

I really think this is one of the very major shortcomings of this new expansion, tooltip mechanics should have been revised years ago. Not everyone sits on forums and reads theorycrafting discussions in depth for each and every class. If this is the state of people in raiding guilds (though admittedly this is still beta), I wonder how knowledgeable the average joe pickup will be?


The reason why this is a much bigger problem now than it ever was is that the more the game progresses, the more "tweaks", "side effects" and what not are added to base abilities, which are not reflected at all in tooltips.

Say in classic wow if I see a buff giving me 100 AP (tooltip says so), it's not a big deal if it's in reality giving "125AP" due to talents.

However the current case as illustrated in the above examples is just a mess. 2% - > 10% means the tooltip is off by a factor of 5x. Sanctified Retribution, Swift Retribution and Imp Ret Aura have NOTHING to do with the tooltip of Ret Aura.


The main problem here is that in many cases it's not only what you actually bring to raids/groups, but what people "know" you bring that decides how your class/spec is perceived. I really think something should be done about this.

Note that this is not a perfect solution of the core problem (and I do agree with you), but I'm considering some use of /focus and /targetlasttarget macros can at least make this process considerably easier.


A few more issues I'd like to touch upon:

-Aura range: I can only echo what other people have said. 30 yard range is just a relic of old times, there's absolutely no reason why they can't all be bumped to 40-45 yards as well as removing the 1 point talent in holy.

-BoK: Considering the recent post about wanting to help "selfless buffer" talents, I really think this one should be changed. You might argue that you benefit from having BoK since you can cast it on yourself, but that argument holds no water considering any other paladin can be the one sacrificing 5 talent points and allowing you to get BoK for free.

-Improved BoK = BoK+BoSanc: My suggestion would be to roll BoK and BoSanc into one through talents. BoK has been traditionally a prot blessing (well speaking after the ancient days where it was the 31 ret talent). Make BoK (giving 10% stats) a one point talent where BoSanc is right now in the prot tree and then add a 3 point talent for "Improved BoK" which would add the effects of BoSanc into it (10% + n% damage reduction + rage/mana/runic power restored, where n is the number of talents spent).

Obvious alternatives which have already been mentioned in order of preference:

-Make BoK baseline
-Remove BoK

-4 blessings over 2.5 raid spots: I know that not every blessing is mandatory and you can get around it by throwing some 10 min blessings, but it's still an unnecessarily complicated/annoying system, more so if you want to consider improved versions of the blessings. I think reducing the blessings by 1 would make things a lot more manageable.

Suggestions:

-"Blessing of Power" (BoM+BoW in one) as someone suggested.
-"Improved BoK (BoK+BoSanc)" idea mentioned above.
-Remove BoK.

-Blessings in general: The last issue that I still consider should get some polishing is how blessings are still a drag compared to priest/druid/mage buffs. Raid wide, 1 hour long buffs vs our pain in the ass system is inexcusable.

Something should be done here. A lot of suggestions would tie in with the above blessing reduction system:

-If we had "Blessing of Power", you could make blessings raid wide 1 hour buffs (same as the other class buffs) and you'd have one paladin put up a raid wide BoK and one paladin throw a raid wide "Blessing of Power". BoSanc would have to be dealt with on an individual basis.

-"Blessing of Power" and the "Improved BoK (BoK+BoSanc)" idea and you'd only need 2 paladins putting up a raid wide 1 hour version of each.

-A more complicated solution would be something I suggested before: They would make an ingame, server side pally power where you assign your blessing assignments in a grid and press "buff all" and it would buff the whole raid.

I think all solutions require a minimum of effort, but they are necessary unless they want to keep us as the only class with this ridiculous buffing annoyance and I don't see how you can "exploit" them in any way. Even Shamen had their totem duration increased (from 2 -> 5 mins), while putting up set and forget totems has never been as much as a burden as constantly juggling buffs with other paladins in your raid through deaths and what not.

 

Yenadar

I was reviewing the daily email, and it seems like this got skipped over without much comment. This is actually something to keep in mind, with regards to threat.

(My next comment is making the assumption that DPS threat will start catching tank threat into T8/9, and our massive threat at the moment is just similar to D3 / T4 threat, if maybe a bit farther ahead)

If a ret pally is generating enough threat from DPS that he is frequently near the top of the threat meter, then if that ret pally judged Light, I could easily see an over-threat issue similar to shadowpriests have experienced in the past. ~400 healing every 4 seconds per non-healer, is around 1700 hps across the raid, if you have 8 healers. (A rough number, could be high from procs less frequent than 4 seconds due to spell/attack timing, but could be low if AP/SP climb more than Beta numbers by T9, which I expect would be a true statement)

The flip-side of this however, is that a prot pally could use this as another threat source effectively, including while offtanking, especially as RF will be boosting the threat from this ~1700 hps.

Holy could be a backstop if there is no prot pally, since it is unlikely to generate enough threat for Holy to cause problems, though could also be used to boost their threat as a magnet for waves of adds (like lurker's murlocs)

Just something to think about.

 

Russta

I cannot agree with you more on this. Have they ever actually given a reason as to why tooltips aren't updated? I'd be amazed if it hasn't occurred to many of the devs seeing as they appear to actually play the game with a degree of love. I could only hazard a guess that it's some nasty technical bug but, still, after all these years you'd have thought they'd have ironed it out by now.

Maybe next time there's obvious blue (read: Tigole) movement on the beta forums someone can go in and post this. Even if it doesn't get fixed it'd be great to know why not.

 

Deris

BoL in my eyes will never come close to JoTWise for a use, since BoL is entirely too situational. Sorry, but if you think topping other people off with BOL on the MT, or healing yourself with HoSac on the MT is going to provide effective MT healing, you have another thing coming. Healing the MT for 3k is a drop in the bucket, and with the disparity between MT health and caster/DPS health, topping off a Caster or DPS or yourself is only going to be a minor heal on the MT, not to account for Chain Heal bounces, Flourish heals, PoH/CoH/PoM bouncing around. If you want to use HL on raid members, and hope they lose some health quickly, or they stay that low, be my guest. I'll be replenishing massive amounts of mana while you do so.

I still could never justify having an ability that -may- be useful in limited situations (2 Tank fights it'd be pretty damn good I admit... hell this is the IDEAL situation, screw stupid raid patching, if you are raid patching, your raid fails.) over returning 20% of your mana every 8 seconds. It just pales in comparison seeing 2336 (for me anyways) every 8 seconds. I can just throw Max HL's with impunity.

 

Sharlos

I very much doubt JotW is going to be particularly useful for holy paladins by the time Wrath goes live.
Not to mention they are buffing JotP. BoL is a perfectly fine 51 point talent, The talent points you have to spend to get there however isn't.



On an unrelated note, I'm beginning to wonder if the missing half of the protection tree is going to have any testing done on it before going live. The whole paladins not even being in the alpha and now getting rushed through the beta is a major source of irritation.

 

Fiola

Does anyone know if the JoL heal has half-threat like other paladin heals have? From the reports of the threat lead tanks have, I doubt this'll be an issue. We'll have Hand of Salvation too, in the case that it is an issue.

Alternatively, how would JoW compare? Does the mana regen effect cause threat? For whom?



BoL doesn't have to amount to anything in your eyes. It just has to be attractive to a significant number(majority?) of Holy paladins. I personally think it's fine. A few tweaks and bugfixes to the highest tier Holy talents should make 51 Holy attractive to "enough" Holy paladins.

 

Tilted

A couple quick questions to the people comparing 3.0 holy paladins to priests:

1) How was the "original" Circle of Healing bad? From my perspective the talent hasn't ever changed (well, it won't until 3.0 hits), and it was simply the community lauding it as garbage when they first hit 70 because Kara has very little AoE damage in it, and getting CoH meant losing (improved) Divine Spirit. Of course, as time went on and people stepped into 25-man raiding, they got to see the potential of what the spell could really do. Now, if you want to compare the two because a lot of people are passing judgment on 3.0 holy paladins without actually trying it, I could agree...

2) How is a discipline priest going to compete with a holy paladin in the realm of tank healing any more than a holy priest? From what I understand, the 6% buff from Grace does not stack with Improved Devotion Aura or Tree of Life from druids. And even if it did, that pales in comparison to Empowered Healing, and they're missing out on massive mana savings from Improved Healing, Holy Concentration, and Serendipity. And you can't cite Pain Suppression as the difference between the two because Guardian Spirit is better in any situation with multiple healers. That just leaves Penance, which certainly does appear to have potential, but it appears to be more of an emergency tool than something to increase throughput. Keep in mind Binding Heal and Prayer of Mending are both stronger for holy builds, and speccing into Circle of Healing doesn't mean you need to raid heal 24/7.

Sorry to derail this into a discussion on priest healing, but if you're going to compare the classes in any meaningful manner you need to get the facts straight.

 

flyingtoastr

1) CoH has a nonstandard coefficient that was changed in a previous patch (2.3) to make it heal for even more with higher gear levels. In addition it has had it's mana cost reduced and base heal increased (2.0.10 and 2.1 respectively). The CoH we have now is pretty different from the original.

2) The +healing part of Grace is a self buff that increases your (the priest's) healing done on the target by 6%. The damage reduction is the part that does not stack with BoS. In effect it's just a fancy way of "buffing the thankless buffer" by making grace into a 6% all healing percentage modifier. Dis Priests also have much better regen than holy pallys (via Spirit and Rapture), but their snap healing (Pennance) is less effective than a Paladins (HS, IoL). Of course a Dis Priest can AoE heal too and has many more diverse options for healing while paladins are still stuck with only 2 and a half heals.

The real competitor with Holy Pallys for tank healing is resto druids. At the moment they are winning pretty handily.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Tilted

Thanks for the clarification on those points, and I totally agree regarding druids. They're getting some monster buffs that are easy to miss if you don't understand the playstyle.

Regarding the usefulness of LG, I don't think it's as bad as it looks. Provided you have 2x the chance to proc IoL when using HS through BoL, you're going to have a lot of instant HL casts available to you (dear god we have a lot of acronyms ><). The instant HL can be used surgically to trigger LG. This may appear to decrease the value of LG, but for sheer HPS nothing competes with HL spam (EDIT: by "nothing" I mean "nothing a paladin can cast" -- not sure yet on other classes), and 0.5s off the cast is the main reason why this is the case. There are some fights where this is needed, like Bloodboil, and I think you'll be glad you have it when the time comes to dump massive amounts of health into a single target. IoL is simply a different tool that can be used to prep LG so it can be ready when it's needed.

 

Suicidal Zebra

I'm now pretty much convinced that the Talent Trees as they stand now will be what we are faced with at Wrath Launch. Individual talents will almost certainly be tweaked slightly but there will probably not be functionally new and different ones, especially in Prot and Holy (11pt talents, I'm looking at you). I had high hopes that this wouldn't be the case but the indications seem to be that Blizz are happy to go forward with a wait and see policy which will no doubt lead to heavy changes in the first content patch after 3.0.

I'm also still not convinced that BoL will be anything other than an unreliable pile of awfulness, especially come the hilariously titled 'bug fixes' otherwise known as 'yeah, that proccing of Infusion of Light... not intended'. Needless to say that I don't think that a 53/0/18 Paladin with BoL will be significantly more successful than a 53/0/18 Paladin without BoL, but of course the litmus test will be Holy Paladins in a [i]tuned[i] Naxx-25 (and harder instances) discovering whether BoL makes their job A) easier, or B) more likely to be successful.

That said, I am looking forward to Wrath, just from a 'new content' perspective rather than excitement over new talents.


EDIIT: Oh, it's worth noting that a new Beta build is on it's way this afternoon:

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - All Servers Down

We shall see what the evening brings .

 

flyingtoastr

The problem is that HL chain-casting is still just as unsustainable as on live. Remember that while IoL gives you an instant HL it still costs 1300 mana to cast that HL.

I really wish they would just make LG proc off Holy Lights and Flash of Light criticals.

Divine Favor still costs mana.

 

Deris

It sure is sustainable with JotWise! ;D. (Yeah it'll be nerfed eventually, but I still love it, not to mention the 8% base crit we gain going that deep.)

 

Helot

Wasn't RF changed to only Holy Damage (ie. not healing)?

This would create problems with fight like Lurker, where the best way to aggro the mobs is by Healing-Threat, but I seem to recall this change being in place.


Regard Holy Wrath:

Reading the tooltip gives me the impression it does : holy damage to all targets. Stuns to Undead/demon targets.

So, if 1/2 of the mobs your fighting are demons, and the other 1/2 are beasts, you'll do HW to all of them (beasts&demons), and stun all the demons.

Chaith logs on
<zyl> Actually, I do like my paladin. He's fun to play, but don't tell Chaith.
<chaith> Looks like i logged in at the right time
<zyl> ....
<zyl> I pressed enter half a second after you logged on.

 

Lunkhedd

I don't actually think it'd take too much work for Blizzard to fix up deep Holy enough to make it a very attractive alternative to Holy-JotW. I think it'd be a better risk to overpower deep Holy a bit than to break Holy-JotW, since I think it's a really attractive idea to have multiple distinct builds for a role within a class. Right now, Holy-JotW is the only viable healing build with Replenishment, and that's potentially very useful, especially in smaller instances, even if the mana return from JotW takes a hit.

One idea I've been thinking about for awhile for fixing Holy would be to change Divine Illumination from -50% mana cost to +50% spell crit. I think that would address many of the complaints people have about the tree: it'd provide the option of a powerful throughput boost or a partial counter to the Divine Plea dampening effect, it would be much more useful soloing, and it would still provide mana cost reduction via normal Illumination. Changing DI to a crit boost would also simplify the relationship between DI and Illumination, which might make it easier for Blizzard to scale up Illumination mana return (and speaking of Illumination, if Holy paladins are supposed to be judging regularly, wouldn't it make sense for Illumination to affect Judgement?).

 

Malleus

True. But if you cast Beacon on yourself then heal the MT, you're giving him 30% damage reduction and healing all the transferred damage. Unless there's a significant chance of being gibbed or the tank is taking three times your health pool in damage in the time it takes you to throw off a heal, this feels like a very powerful strategy.