Again, the 8% crit is in every holy spec. All you gain from JotW is JotW.

Now, chain casting LG'd Holy Lights is 29% of base mana every 2 seconds. At level 80 that is roughly 1200 mana every 2 seconds.

Assuming you have a 10 second Judgement you would have a rotation of Holy Light x4, Judgement, repeat. Your JotW has to make up the cost of 4 Holy Lights (4800 mana). For this to happen you have to have a mana pool of at least 24000. Doable, but I don't think we have that much mana in Naxx level gear.

What happens now if you start getting haste? Haste pushes down the cast time of HL (so you can fit more in) but doesn't affect the returns from JotW (you get the same amount on the same cooldown). So with say 25% haste your Holy Light cast time drops to 1.6 seconds. That means you can now dump out 5 Holy Lights in the space of 1 judgement cooldown. To make up for that your Judgement has to return 6000 mana, or you have to have a 30k mana pool. That just isn't happening.

So no, you're pretty much wrong. HL spam is never sustainable.

JotW won't be nerfed. It works wonderfully for ret. All that they need to do is make deep holy worth speccing into over JotW.

Ah, but remember, priests try to reduce their threat generation from VE, and it still comes out to a significant portion if it's not overhealing most of the time. The fact that it's any added threat at all (even with paladin innate 50% reduction - does that work on this?) is wonderful. That would mean that ideally, the prot paladin should be using JoL, while the ret uses JoW (for consistent uptime) and the holy uses JoJ.

Ok, so let me see if I can get a summary of our situation, and correct me if I’m wrong, please;

In live right now Holy Paladin is the weakest healer ingame (in general terms – pve + pvp) - not my words but from Flyingtoastr - but we are still the best tank healer because other Class's don't have our tools in single target healing (quoting Avitus).

In WOTLK we trade the best tank healer spot, or at least we are competing with Disc Priests and Restoration Druids for it, for a little better group healing (beacon) in 5-man and maybe 10-man, because in 25-man we could only benefit the most if there is a 2 Tank situation. And we will only be fixed if we get pawned in WOTLK, which I translate to not getting any raid spot in 25-man raids, like it happened to Holy Priests in the start of TBC.

In relative terms, comparing to other healers I think we will still be the worst healer ingame overall (unless we go deep into Retribution, that will be good for pvp, if that isn't nerfed like SOL), and for sure in a worst situation then on live now.

In my opinion, I repeat, I think we should ask GC if we are still going to be the best Tank Healers ingame, in the sense that any Guild trying to progress in 25-man raids doesn’t choose other healers instead of Paladins to Tank heal. Explained in other words, if Paladins are still 10%-20% better Tank healers then everybody else so only being replaced for that job when not available.

It's worth noting though that your haste scenario is sustainable for ~400 seconds assuming the same 24k mana pool when you add in the regen from Replenishment (spending 6k every 10 seconds or so, regenerating 4800 from JotW plus 0.25% per second). And that's not counting Divine Plea or mana pots. That's straight HL spam with no breaks, which is almost always overkill unless you vastly undergear an encounter.

I'm not saying it's smart by any means to restrict yourself to just one healing spell, but restoring 20% of your mana pool per judgement is pretty substantial. I'd personally tweak the talent to restore 30% base mana instead of 20% total mana, but ultimately it's on the Blizzard devs to make sure it's balanced across the board.

I'm certainly not a fan of the JotW mechanic for Holy Healing, but I think you're forgetting the mana returns from Illumination and Divine Plea (though DP is going to change). I'm not sure if this gets past the breakpoint of JotW-Holy being self-sustainable with Holy Light spam but it should change the calculation appreciably.

Assume a crit rate of 30% for HL, Illumination returning 60% of mana on crit. This effectively reduces the mana cost of HL by 18% to 984 mana. At a spell haste of 25% this means a total mana consumption of 4920 (24600 Total Mana Pool to break even). But every minute you can also regen 25% of your total mana pool via Divine Plea. Doing the math I think this requires a total mana pool of 20359 Mana to be self-sufficient.

I've probably made a mistake in there somewhere but you get the point: it's pretty close to be self-sufficient given not unrealistic stats. I still however think the idea of healing within 10 yards of the Boss, and missing out on the talents which make us more mobile, moderately bonkers. I wouldn't say no to a change to JotW making it restore 40% of base mana rather than 20% of total mana, but if healing Paladins want to hamstring themselves then I'm certainly not one to stop them.


EDIT: Saving me from double-posting, MMO-Champion reckons they have the updated talent calculators up and it appears the Retribution nerfs from 8970 have been reversed. I can't see any other changes just now.

30% of base mana doesn't allow for a sustained Ret rotation. It would have to be >37% of base, and that only works if you're being perfect with your Judgement cooldown and getting all the raid regen crap.

Again, just leave JotW alone. All they have to do is make deep holy kickass. Give a talent that increases throughput or DP regen or something by such a large degree that you gimp your healing by going JotW and it isn't worth it.

This is the other big problem. What happens on fight like Felmyst, Eredar Twins, KJ, etc. when you can't stand on top of the boss for whatever reason? You're now stuck with an absolutely gimp healing spec and gained nothing.

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

New things so far in the new push.

Protection
-Shield of the Righteous Rank 1 is now trainable at 75 and deals 100% block value + 300.
-Hammer of Justice interrupts spellcasting for 3 seconds.

Retribution
-Two-Handed Weapon Spec back up to 2/4/6%.
-Fanatisism back up to 5/10/15/20/25% judgement crit chance.
-Seal of Blood nerfed to 28% of weapon damage (from 35%).
-Seal of Command nerfed to 56% of weapon damage (from 75%).

So... more sustained damage nerfs? I'm holding out for the big announcement: "seals are baseline undispelable and now Sanctified Seals increases the damage done by Seal of Blood and Command by 25%."

I can dream, right?

Also, why are we getting SotR past 70 still? Prot is going to be gimp as hell between 3.0 and Wrath if one of our main TPS abilities isn't around until after we level up.

Well, they have to do something like this if they still want 40% of our damage to be white (their number, not mine). Right now, that's definitely not the case.

What did they do to Divine Plea? I though that was the only thing they were going to 'change'.

Shield of Righteousness is now "Rank 1" and does 300 base damage plus 100% block value. No Rank 2 according to MMO-Champ.

Apparently nothing.

EDIT:

No apparent changes to:

• Hammer of the Righteous
• Sacred Shield
• Enlightened Judgements
• Judgements of the Pure
• Beacon of Light

Looks like the focus for paladins was some Ret tweaking and the new SotR.

If the MMO-Champ talent tree is to be believed, Seal of Command was nerfed from 70% to 56% weapon damage.

EDIT: SoB is 26% weapon damage now. Haven't compared other seals yet.

No change to Divine Plea.

If they want to reduce seal damage they should make it so they don't proc off instant attacks anymore (there's CS's new flavor, procs the active seal). Knocking off 20% of a quarter of our DPS is not balancing us.

EDIT: I didn't look hard enough, they nerfed the damage of all Seals and Judgements by a fairly massive degree.

They're trying to get us closer to 40% white damage. They need that ratio to be similar for all specs/classes so that haste rating won't be over-/under- itemized for some.

Heh, the new cinematic rather neatly highlights the futility of cleanse-spam.

I'd honestly include SoB as part of the white damage, since it also scales perfectly with haste. It's just the proccing on CS/DS that should be toned down.

Then we're right back where we started, with low end of the pack DPS again unless they can introduce some new ability or mechanic... which they don't seem to want/have the time anymore to do.

Edit:
Down from 6... we already knew about the interrupt (which is really only a PvE raidboss bandaid)

There is a major glyph which increases the length of HoJ by 1 second, so it is not a very large nerf.

Full list of changes now up at MMO-C.

EDIT: fixed HoJ length

I don't understand why they are nerfing coefficients related to tanking. I don't see us doing even 50% of the DPS of a pure DPS class while tanking right now, with the new coefficients. Nerfing TPS through a reduction in the bonus RF provides would seem more intuitive to me.

And SoC appears to scale with haste now as well. If they're trying to balance "white" vs. "yellow" damage by getting all melee classes close to 40% white damage, the end result isn't going to be even close. Seal damage for pallies, Heroic Strike for warriors, Combat Potency energy gen for rogues... all of these scale with haste and alter the balance between white and yellow damage.

So yeah.... wtf.

They want Holy and Ret to be able to tank 5 mans while leveling up, so nerfing RF threat modifiers would hurt that scheme as well. Also they are planning on buffing HotR so you always want to be using tanking weapons so that should offset any dps lost while not tanking.

If they're going to reduce the base stun duration, I think they should reduce the base cooldown and reduce the effect of the cooldown reduction talent. 1 minute for a 4 second stun/3 sec interrupt is pretty iffy, even if every paladin picks up the glyph to make it a 5 sec stun.

The talent has too much of an effect right now, since it reduces the cooldown by 40 seconds when combined with the PvP set bonus, increasing the availability by 3x.

Rank 4 HoJ -- the one you use for your "adult" life -- is still a 6-second stun (plus the 3-second interrupt).

I think someone jumped the gun and read Rank 2 (the level 24 version).

EDIT: MMO-C's front page now correctly shows that the only difference is the added interrupt.

Edit: referred to 4sec HoJ - please delete in light of corrections on MMO-Champ

You know, the tooltip does seem to indicate this, but it doesn't really make sense to me. Can anyone confirm if Holy Wrath is the same as in live but with an added stun?