Which fact was this? I'm fairly sure we didn't establish this already. One is a purely regen mechanic and the other is an efficiency and efficacy talent. As I've pointed out many times the potential uses of BoL are far greater than what many people here seem to assume. The potential use for extra mana is the ability to spam Holy Light on a single target.

The reason they gave for adding the stun to HoJ was that stuns crossed the line into "necessary for a tank," so no, they are not designed to be ignored as an option, no matter how suboptimal. I think the correct conclusion to draw is that any abilities that need to be interrupted (by the tank, for whatever reason) in a 5-man venue will have cooldowns at least as long as Bash/HoJ, and that the cooldown in heroics will be at least as long as talented Bash/HoJ, possibly at least as long as untalented version.

Not many 5-man fights last for longer than 1 - 2 minutes, so it seems more likely to me that interruptible spells will be able to be mitigated via LoS or just plain healed through; if one-minute+ cooldowns are enforced its too easy to trivialise that aspect of the encounter by just increasing party DPS (see Kael's pyro in MgT).

Imagine a prot Paladin casts DP while tanking, what happens to Earth Shield, Prayer of Mending and Lifebloom? Do they heal for 0? Can anyone test this?

Damage seals are not nerfed by 7% but by 20% (28% instead of 35%, 56% instead of 70%, etc).

If we assume that seals are doing 40% of total damage, the damage reduction is 8% of total damage, if we assume that seals are doing 25% of total damage (which seems more realistic), the damage reduction is 5% of total damage.

So it's a slight nerf to overall PVE DPS, even considering the unnerfing of 2H spec.

not sure why this hasn't been quoted yet but:
http://blue.mmo-champion.com/5/10043322049-gc-word-on-holy-blue-request.html

DP cancelling on healing casts may be difficult to code. It may end up cancelling on a JoL proc or a Divine Storm heal. /cancel macros probably wont work well either since it would cancel the buff at the start of the cast losing 2 - 2.5 seconds of regen, or more if cancel-casting. Can you cancel a buff while casting? This could lead to latency headaches. This implimentation isn't good.

You are delusional if you think JotW is not getting nerfed. 20% max mana returns on that short a cooldown is incredibly overpowered, and they are trying to make mana a real resource.

Vhex makes this post very clearly. Even if you buffed deep holy incredibly, you'd have to have some talents in deep holy that are better than 3000 mana/5 - and that's not ever going to happen.

Two points:

1) Most any reduction to JotW would break the newly fixed Retribution tree and its Blue-Rage-Bar(tm) mechanic. The proposed switch to Base Mana over Total Mana still leaves a very powerful mana regen ability, which may or may not address the problem.

2) Actually, no, you wouldn't have to outdo 3000mp5. You'd simply have to balance out mana cost/expenditure to have a working, healing paladin with appropriate HPS and longevity without that 3000mp5 in the picture, essentially making the extra mana wasted.

Like flyingtoastr posted earlier, spamming HL isn't sustainable, no matter the build. Yes JotW brings it closer to being a reality, but the bottom line is encounter design won't be based around HL spam, so being able to sustain it is kind of moot.

Once you've established that, you simply have to throw a few utility/fun healing talents in the deep holy tree. JotP seems a little weak to me personally, but its something. BoL is quite a fun mechanic and feels appropriate to a MT healer kind of class. Divine Plea in its current incarnation is a slap in the face and, frankly, if they introduced this change simply to add a deep holy talent to make it useable again... well I'll be playing as protection or retribution then. But give me another fun or useful deep holy talent I can get excited about and I'd be very pleased.

On the PTR Holy Guidance is currently giving 20% of int as damage spell power and 35% of int as healing spell power.
Naked I have exactly 100 int, 20 damage spell power and 35 healing spell power.

I added a point 3 to better illustrate this, but you see the contradiction in what you said?

2) Extra mana should be wasted

3) Even with the extra mana, paladins cannot sustain their maximum throughput.

If JOTW allows you to nearly sustain your maximum throughput, then you will take that over whatever else holy offers, unless holy allows you to take something that is better than sustaining your maximum throughput. Good luck finding that!

The 'infinite mana blue bar' mechanic is bad, and the idea that classes should use every ability they have on cooldown without any regard for mana is dumb and they are trying to move away from it.

Rogues gain more than 20% energy every 8-10 seconds. Warriors gain more than 20% rage every 8-10 seconds. 20% max mana isn't too much to expect for a melee class. Having it scale on max mana was an intentional choice allowing ret spec paladins to equip healing gear and heal 5 mans without respecing, since healers are in short supply. Making holy more attractive, or moving JotW higher is the solution. There is no reason JotW couldn't be a 50-55 point talent.

I agree with Arthaal: 3000 MP5 is probably excessive for the most part. You only need x MP5 to have enough mana to last through any given encounter, and x is usually less than 3000.

The problem we're facing now is that when you compare Deep Holy to Excessive MP5, Excessive MP5 looks a damn sight better.

The Judgement duration definitely needs to be increased to 30 seconds to match Judgements of the Pure, at the very least.

JoTW will probably be changed to work on a higher % of base mana, or changed to be a shamanistic rage clone ability. The overall returns should scale with melee damage done over a long enough time.

Is mana a resource for enhancement shaman? It wont be for Ret paladins who follow a basic rotation that does not include healing and our other utlility spells. Your post is reminiscent of the blizzard forums.

Did you read what I posted? They will change JoTW so ret can keep up a basic rotation (not the highest dps one) forever without using mana potions, but so that it will be useless for holy paladins.

That's what I said.

Actually, Seal of Command has a substantially higher Judgement damage now. I logged onto the PTR last night to check, and SoC is definately larger. It has the same AP/SP coefficients but gets more of the weapon damage: 30% instead of 25%. I did some testing on SoC proc rates and it seems to proc about 44% where there is no chance of a collision, but proc rate went down to 39% overall when I did a full dps rotation. As such, when you add in the Glyph for SoC it ends up doing a little less damage than SoB does, but the Judgement is higher.

The overall effect is that for a Ret paladin doing 3500 dps in Naxx 10 gear SoB gives a 18 dps increase and does 350 dps to you. Because that damage does spike as high as 3000 on huge AW JoB crits, I personally would sacrifice the 18 dps and just go for SoC if I was choosing between the two.

Since SoR did not get nerfed in this last patch and everything else did, it would appear to me that it is the highest dps option of all though. You do need 3 points at least in Seals of the Pure to get above SoB dps, but you avoid both big aggro streaks and self damage so it seems worth it to me. This does depend on how your raid shapes up though and whether or not you can afford to skip some buffing talents. It may end up that SoR is your best greedy dps option but that due to talent point constraints you end up going SoC instead.

Art of War is still bugged to hell and back as far as the 20% crit damage goes at the moment. My sheet assumes that it will end up being implemented as 20% more critical strike damage bonus, but until they get it working it is difficult to know.

Spreadsheet

Should be updated and good to go for 8982 build, barring the AoW madness. Still using Naxx10 gear for comparison.

It was suggested multiple times here and I guess on beta forums as well - changing JotW to scale with just base INT, not INT after added buffs and gear will definetly end whole issue. All the sudden hollies have no motivation whatsoever to go for this talent - although it's still not enough to deal with all holy paladin problems, as deep holy talents are bit of a wash.

As for your comments on "blue rage" mechanics, it's just trolling. It was explained multiple times why there is no other way for mana based melee DPS to be competitive and make sense in both PvE and PvP, especially IF it shares gear with classes not using INT.

You need to fix the hit ratings on your spreadsheet.

To get 1% melee hit you need 32.78998947 hit rating. To get 1% spell hit you need 26.23199272 rating. You have them set as both being the former number.

The difference between the two Judgement damages is 5% of weapon damage. That's it. If you have a 2000 base weapon damage JoC will hit for 100 harder. It's not a big difference, and when you bring in raid buffed haste and the internal cooldown for SoC Blood pulls ahead massively.

Why can Rogues, Warriors, Feral Druids, Death Knights, and Enhancement Shamans maintain a full DPS rotation then? Why is it always overpowered for ret to have the same system as every other melee class? Oh yeah, it's not.

GC said that it is not intended for the best holy spec to be half ret. It will be changed somehow. You can go now and stop trolling the thread, mmk sugar?

My solution to Divine Plea: change it to reduce your your spellpower to 0 for the duration of the effect. You can still heal (poorly) but there is also now a consequence for Prot of Ret using it (albeit still nowhere near as significant as for Holy).

Just ran around and checked. At the moment Sacred Shield is not getting a spell power bonus. However it is absorbing SoB recoil (and proccing off it too).