Sacred Shield should probably deserve more attention, because it is just not a very good skill compared to Mirror Image or Demonic Circle. It is neither as fun nor as useful. Even when it scales with spellpower, the crit buff will likely disappear very quickly on a hit in PVE. In PVP it is said to be of some help against rogues, I guess.

Also, there are many JoTW posts lately. It's an excellent talent, and we all love it as Ret, but Blizzard is likely to do something that we may not all be happy with, so let's just bear with it until we see some actual changes, ok?

A number of the posters in this thread (myself included) have supported this very idea. My post that you quoted was intended to say that it Blizzard can state their intentions until they're blue in the face, but it's on us to show where the holes in their system are and where reality truly lies. I can't remember who originally said it, but it's absolutely true that Blizzard developers will never have the gameplay experience that we do. They don't have the manpower to gather information like we do. They know that we can provide them the data regarding broken mechanics, and they should hopefully be able to see the problem and get it fixed.

@ toastr: Since you seem to be the most vocal advocate of leaving JotW as it currently stands, do you see a problem with them changing the talent to 40% base mana instead of the 20% max mana it is today? That would be a direct buff (albeit a small one) to ret DPS cycles, while being a substantial nerf to people speccing 33+ in a damage tree to arguably exploit broken mechanics for healing. That would be a win-win situation, would it not?

You have a good point about the hit rating spread, but since that only affects Exorcism, Holy Wrath and Consecration??? and those weren't included in my calculations, I don't see how it makes a big difference. I will get on updating that though so that spell hit is properly calculated for the next version though. At this point I don't think we really know exactly what (if any) effect hit rating will have on Consecrate damage and Exorcism and HW are fairly situational and not exactly high dps anyway.

You are quoting numbers with regards to Command, but you aren't looking at the whole picture. Command procs for twice as much damage as Blood, but only procs about 54% less of the time once you have the glyph. I tested this will a full strike/judgement rotation for 10 minutes and your proc rate will be something like 46% with a Glyph on. 8% less damage on your Seal and 5 % more damage on your Judgement is a minimal difference. If you look at the results on the sheet and multiply your seal damage by .92 and change the coefficient on the judgement to .30 you end up with a difference in dps of substantially under 1%.

I don't know about you, but when I raid I will happily take a 1% dps hit to avoid occasionally blowing up in high raid damage situations and to avoid putting any extra stress on my healers. They can handle it if they have to, but why make their lives any harder when the benefit is so puny? Every bit of extra help you can give your healer is extra insurance against a wipe. This isn't a concern with 400 damage Blood Judgements, it starts to matter a lot when your judgements hit 9k and your recoil goes as high as 3k, and those are level 70 numbers.

I'm seriously shocked that people seem to beleive jotw can remain unchanged, when simple solutions have been offered in this very thread to make it work for its intended purpose only. "Your build will not be optimal for Sunwell encounter X" is not a real argument. The talent is simply broken for Holy Paladins. It's almost like playing a different class when you take it.

Also, getting aggressive with people pointing this out is not worthy of this forum as I have known it.

The flip side to the blood v. command debate is of course that in situations where there is extra healing available (maybe you're in a shadow priest group, which is very possible especially in a 10-person now that most buffs are raid-wide), the healing you gain due to SoB damage gives you more mana (which can translate into more DPS through consecration, exorcism, hammer of wrath, etc.). If the two are virtually equal in damage we will ideally use command in situations where our own survival is in doubt (e.g. Sapphiron) and command in situations where it is not (e.g. Patchwerk).

It's a weak solution. Though it would make healers stop speccing ret entirely, it would do it by making ret worse at healing. I *love* the option as ret at the moment to slap on my holy gear and go heal a few heroics.

If people are rolling a paladin with the intent of going ret and healing, then it's overpowered.. but I doubt we'd out-heal any *other* class's healing spec, even on long fights. The issue really is that holy is just underpowered for normal healing situations.

I interpreted the tooltip as implying that the shielded person gets the 500damage shield and *completely independently* the shielding paladin gets the +50% FoL buff for 6s, in which case if the shield expired the paladin would still have the remaining buff time available, which makes it sound rather better than what you're implying.

Which interpretation is actually occurring in the beta?

JotW is the only way ret can maintain healing in a five man or quests, or even in a given boss - it very much does matter whether it's base mana or total mana. I still believe that nerfing this ability will not hurt holy - worse case, they go back to a BoL build. It will only hurt Ret. This is a temporary issue - it will only be an issue until people gear to the point where the mana regen is stupid overkill, but their overall healing ability is hurt by missing out on Beacon, JotP/EJ, and 4 points of Holy Guidance - obviously there's no way to prove that. Moving it deeper might alleviate this to some extent, and that's fine - it won't hurt ret to move it deeper as long as it's swapped with other points.

Another very simple solution is (as suggested) add a talent to deep holy (40 or 45 pts) that alleviates the healing penalty of Divine Plea from 100% to 20% - that allows us to use it every cooldown and will compete very well with the spirit builds but still simulates some amount of healing loss while regenning.

Since when is this a concern? Blizzard has made it pretty clear that a paladin's role is determined by spec. Go Holy if you want to heal. Go Prot if you want to tank. Go Ret if you want to DPS.

I'm not thrilled with this idea, but it's been the operating plan since patch 1.9. Justifying JotW in terms of Ret healing makes no sense given Blizzard's prior actions for the paladin class.

It's fairly simple.

You cast the spell Sacred Shield on someone. This is just a buff, it does nothing.

If the person takes damage they then get a second Sacred Shield buff. This is the actual shield. While this buff is up the crit chance of FoL is active. Once the person takes 500 damage this shield breaks and the crit bonus is lost.

I've seen people make off hand mentions of Command scaling with haste now, but I can't find any direct mention of that. Is this true or not?

If Command does not scale with haste (ie, has the same PPM no matter what your buffed haste is), it's easy to see how this damage falls behind Blood. (In fact a few weeks ago people humorously pointed out that Seals from special attacks actually decline as you get more haste.)

Anyway, with bubble, divine protection, instant flashes of light, and armor, ret really looks like it's going to have the least trouble staying alive of all DPS classes.

Only if no one is going holy to heal. There is absolutely no reason why we can't have two viable healing builds. Why are we fighting about this? It is only an issue if deep holy is not buffed, and JotW becomes the only viable healing build. I'm not even sure if that is true currently.

Priests get two healing builds with different strengths in PvE/PvP, why can't Paladins. Others have drawn parallels to dreamstate druid healing vs deep resto. If both options have strengths and weaknesses it enhances the paladin class for healing instead of breaking it.

A lot of people have mentioned this on the forums, myself included, but GC's recent posts indicates they're happy with this mechanic. I absolutely agree, its awkward, not exciting, and overall a very 'meh' ability. I don't want to say mediocre, because that would imply it's being used. When you look at the combat break downs from beta WWS paladins are not using this ability.

It's an ablative effect like a HoT. Except it doesn't continue to heal after damage stops. I imagine this is Blizzard's way of giving us a HoT that is not a HoT. But mathematically, it's very similar to a HoT on a target that is taking continuous damage.

The problem is that you shouldn't have a healing build by going through halfway of the "damage" tree. Ret wasn't conceived as a healing tree; a priest's holy and discipline trees were. JotW was meant to help ret pallies have a full rotation and actually help as an offhealer from time to time (that's why SoL has a healing component).

*I won't comment on druids because I am unsure if a dreamstate build has healing potential (though some posters commented that it lacks enough througput to compete).*

I agree that this should be looked at more as a HoT than a PW:Shield. However, we still have to look at how this affects tanks in the same way PW:S affects tanks: rage/mana starvation. Warriors already complain about PW:S affecting their rage regeneration, and that's just just 2230 damage (unimproved, without scaling) every 30s (15s with two priests).
With one sacred shield, this has the potential to absorb up to 2500 damage (arguably only 2000 damage). Is this going to be a spell that we only toss out on non-tanks? If so, it's a pretty lousy "HoT", as it doesn't allow us to toss out a quick protection, then head back to the tank.

So... basically, my concern is that Blizzard's attempt at giving us a pseudo-HoT (but not a HoT) is going to end up being barred from use on our tank, which is where (theoretically) paladin heal is focused.

Alright, if JotW is necessary for offspec healing, then how is Protection supposed to heal?

We'll have to see. Disc Priests are looking like heavy shield users too, and Koraa has explicitly said that they've tested for rage-generation problems in Naxx and that it is fine (except if you shield at the very beginning of the pull).

Flash of Light spam, as indicated by the +30% healing on crits part of Touched by the Light. Should be fine for normal-mode five mans with that bonus, though obviously Heroics are a different matter. That's fine though, because Blizzard explicitly drew the line at Heroics, that's supposed to be where spec starts to really matter.

Mention of Touched by the Light immediately makes me wonder why the simplest (best?) solution to the perceived problem with JotW isn't simply to swap it into the same spot in the Retribution tree where we find Touched by the Light in prot.

Swap JotW and Swift Retribution. They are both three point talents.

Of course, that is the "we don't feel like making the bottom half of holy strong, so we are moving JotW truly out of reach" solution, but it seems an obvious one.

But ret paladins can't fol spam? Especially with sheathe?

I did some not entirely scientific testing with about 30% haste in total in Blasted Lands and got a 44.5% proc rate without using any specials.

Later testing with almost no haste gave nearly a nearly identical proc rate.

My tests were only 10 minutes long mind you, but they sure support the theory that Command works happily with haste now.

The Sheath heal-over-time doesn't stack, so it's wasted unless you're changing targets constantly. Additionally, healing gear has stamina on it but not strength, so prot healers get more out of that aspect of their talent as well (maybe no in a raid-buffed situation).