I'm not gonna lie, that sucks. I frikin love that glyph.

Doesn't change a thing given that you still have to judge every 20 seconds to keep your Judgement up. In a 3 pally situation its a buff, anything less than that and it's still just as "meh".

I'm going to guess that now that Holy Shock is utterly worthless it is once again going to be worth dumping points down Ret for healing, a la nyah. JotW is still a decent mana return (better than the shit that is Divine Plea) and the Sheath HoT can be the "moving heal" to replace Holy Shock. It also gives some CC (Repentance) and fun other utilities (Art of War combined with Fanatisism and Holy crit gear can lead to a fair amount of insta-FoL's, Pursuit of Justice is always wonderful).

I'm really sick of the PvE nerfs for PvP. This one really peeves me because IoL was really really fun.

I'm reminded of 1.1 MC raiding. "SPEC FOR ILLUMINATION THEN GO RET!"

What does this leave healadins with now (asking as a tankadin that only rarely specs holy)? Is it basically leaving you where you were in TBC, in terms of playstyle and single tank heal capability, or are other classes now as good at MT healing or better?

I'm wondering if we'll see three paladins in our raids only when we bring 2 prot or 2 ret at this point.

Most of the nerf Holy Paladin in Arena threads seemed to be complaining about Jotw . The same mechanics of Season 1 to 4 that as resilience improved the survivability of other healer clases they would become superior stil exist. They are still extremely vulnerable to spell lock and cc.

Their is no mechanic to maintain seals. If raid wants seals maintained in a 2 Paladin raid then the Holy Paladin is going to be wacking the mob every 20 seconds.. A 7 pt talent cost to do something that was given for free seemed a very heavy cost but it at least sort of made sense.

I had played a bit more on ptr as Holy and it was starting to grow on me asuming that beacon was bugged, Divine plea was bugged and Jotp would be improved in a meaningful way. Is it much of a upgrade from our current tree? No but blizzard seemed to have been equally unfair to other healers as well. But Divine plea has proven to a wrong tooltip and considering how long the bugs with beacon have been around it may be another case of just change the tooltip and call it working. Unfortunately all this patch does is make the ret healing abilities look stronger not weaker.

If they want Jotp to be taken something like your seal duration is increased by 10 seconds per point. ie at 5 pts your seal lasts 1 mi and 10 seconds

Ok Blizz makes no sense.

I've actually come the the conclusion that they are confusing holy Priests with holy Paladins. There is actually no other explanation.

For example: Divine Plea. Blizz have stated that paladins are going to be the tank healer, and someone else can do raid heals. It sucks, but thats their design philosophy. Yet in order to cast divine plea, the tank is without 1 healer for 15 seconds. To pop this every cooldown, paladins take a 25% hit to total healing. Yet what penalty is there for Innervate? Shadowfiend? Water Shield? Standing and regenning 500mp5 when not casting? On top of all the other classes having superior mana regen abilities (baseline, not talented) they all have a much wider range of available heals.

All i can say is... spec ret. its what uther wanted.

Wow. As a Holy Paladin, I must say that the recent changes are inexplicable. Flyingtoastr could be correct that Sheathbot is the spec to be as a _healer_. Question, though, Toastr. If that's true, why not dump 1% Holy Power to gain Crusader Strike? It gives another chance to proc AoW, or is the build not expecting to melee?

I must be very bad, for I see nothing good coming out of this change.

It leaves Holy paladins in the shitheap, is where it leaves them. Not only do you now lose all usefulness when forced to move, you also lost your one big "OH SHIT" button in the DF/HS+IoL/HL massive 1.5-second heal when the tank takes a huge damage spike. Now it's Lay on Hands every 20 minutes or bust.

Additionally, you now have to break Divine Plea even faster now since you can't sit on a big instant heal on demand, further straining your mana regen. And exactly why is it cool for us to effectively silence ourselves to use our only active mana recovery tool when we're probably most in need of healing throughput?

I'm baffled and more than a little upset at the direction Blizzard's going with Holy now. Almost everyone's feedback was pretty much in agreement (for once!) that deep Holy sucked. Why then did it need such a crippling nerf?

Eh, CS doesn't give any healing while 1% more crit is decent, but like I said on the beta forums CS is a great little soloing tool that could work out. I'm not honestly expecting many pallys to be healing if the tree doesn't get a massive overhaul soon.

Well, I can see a fundamental problem. We should be made a best single target healer (for PvE) without being OP in arenas. They can't fix it. If our HPS/burst is big then PvP palas are too strong. If it's small - then PvE palas suck...

So...

I'm not even holy and I feel terrible for holy paladins. Are they honestly trying to eliminate the spec as a viable healer in raids and PvP? They remove mobility, they refuse to give any area of effect or heal over time abilities, they nerf throughput, they make the tree as unattractive as possible. This is the most confused set of changes yet. Holy Paladins cannot regenerate mana AT ALL while casting. Every other healing class can. Holy Paladins active mana regeneration ability reduces their healing to 0; no other healing class has any restriction on their healing during their active regen abilities. Holy Paladins can heal at most 2 people at a time, when using the 51 point talent only. Every other healing class can heal multiple people simultaneously using only baseline abilities.

Direct ability comparisons are not always useful, but these are huge general problems. Why is the Holy Paladin unable to perform the same basic healing functions that all other healing classes can?

Rasputin: This is going to be slightly bitter, but Paladins do have an ability to heal multiple people at once. It's called Divine Storm. ><

This is making no sense to me. This is the equivalent of making Priests spec past Shadowform in the Shadow tree to do the best healing they can. I'm tending to think that they have indeed confused Priests and Paladins here. Anyone noticed anything similar in the Shaman/Druid Resto tree?

I would expect the large base of non raiding paladins to still be healing just not holy. The can run around soloing at with good dps, If a normal 5 man is lfm healer then they are fine to put on a holy set. Heroics would just be a matter of the skill level as the only ability that makes a signficant improvement is Beacon. I could see it being a fun,popular playstyle. What its not is raiding holy.

Of course they can fix it.
I understand paladins running around throwing instant 8k HL crit at lvl 70 is overpowered in a Pvp situation, and there was a simple way to handle that: make this instant HL provided by IoL unable to crit.
There, probleme solved.

Just wow, my condolences go to Holy Paladins. I'd love to find something here to say along the lines of "hey stop whining it's not so bad", but I'm at a loss of words this time. Holy just went from "somewhat weak" to "stupid".

I'd really have to scratch my head in confusion if someone asked me what Holy Paladins have to "look forward to" come WotLK in this state. IoL was the main key stone that everything revolved around. The main bragging point that gave the feeling that "hey here's an upgrade in WotLK". It just went from awesome mobility buff to random mediocre throughput gimmick that you can't really depend on anywhere where it counts.

And Divine Plea, the best solution at this point would be to change the description to: "Holy Paladin becomes a useless Sack of Potatoes for the next 15 seconds".

Cards on the table, what's left for Holy going from level 70 pre-3.0 to level 80 WotLK?

-Buff to HS
-BoL
-Long range Judgements
-10% Haste

That's it?

And why would they move completely the opposite direction in what needs to be done and nerf a tree where almost everybody seems to think it needs more desirability?

I've stopped being Holy by trade for some time now and it won't be my spec of choice in WotLK either so I would have no personal gain in buffs to Holy, but I really have to say at this point: It looks pretty dire and I hope something very significant is coming down the line for Holy to make up for all this.



How is this a "nice buff"? It was 50% initially and 200% of the initial effect over 15 seconds. You have your information crossed somewhere.


Edit: I stand corrected about Holy Guidance (passing comment was made in haste).

They really are some odd changes. Some seems like just messing with stats to see what happens (like the 3% 2 handed nerf a few builds ago), some their trying to make Holy spec out of Ret (like JotW) and well...DP I have no idea...Be nice if they added a holy talent that does for DP what Fanaticism does for RF.

I feel bad for Holy, but I also want to see whats going to happen in the next few weeks. You can't give that many nerfs without a few buffs. I just don't see this build as an "end all".

Count me in on the speechless crowd. The JOTW nerf was expected, and the Judgements of the Pure buff is welcome (if still a little lacking due to 20 second Judgements), but Infusion of Light? That totally came out of left field.

Not quite. 35% of 100 INT is 35 healing, which is worth +15 to Flash of Light using Live coefficients.

In contrast, 20% of 100 INT is 20 healing, which is worth +20 to Flash of Light using WOTLK coefficients.

I would just like to submit that this is sig-worthy.

This is ridiculous. I wish there was an MMO out there that had a good PvE end game and did not have a PvP game at all. Over and over we see an interesting and fun mechanic (or spec) get completely gutted because of arenas.

Holy needs something huge. They have always been the most limited healer - limited to no mobility, single-target healing only - and to be viable in that role they need to either be unmatched at it (which is unbalanced in PvP) or infinitely sustainable (also unbalanced in PvP, plus conflicts with Blizz's "mana matters" philosophy). I just don't think it can work - Blizzard cannot make holydins powerful enough single-target healers to make them raid-worthy without overpowering them in arenas.

So they'd better roll out something new - an AoE heal is fast approaching a must at this juncture I would say. Consecrate is an obvious place to put it, since no one else has a location-limited AoE HoT so it would be new and unique. It has to be powerful though such that it can hold its own against CoH, wild growth, or chain heal (because the other three healers can hold their own against paladins in the tank healing department, more or less). The mobility issue has to be dealt with too in some fashion if descriptions of Sapphiron are accurate (i.e., you don't get to stand still much but spend most of the encounter running from blizzards).

They're running out of time though. I'm beginning to suspect that this is going to cause a mass exodus from the holy tree (hey, ret's fully viable now and it's fun!) and then two months into Wrath they'll make some hamfisted buff and overpower holydins and then they'll spend the rest of the expansion trying to balance them back into line.

Well, Blizzard has been shown to overreact with nerfs/buffs before (flametongue MS anyone?), and I hope this is one of those moments. Otherwise, yeah I'm speechless as well... my condolences to the holy paladins out there.

I'll point out that druids were left in their ridiculously imbalanced PvP state because they didn't want to nerf Lifebloom in PvE. Most changes they have made have not significantly affected PvE, and by contrast they are so hesitant to do so that PvP balance is left poor. They need to implement some separate mechanics, but they have said repeatedly that they don't like doing this.

My guess is they nerfed IoL to make Light's Grace more attractive. IoL + Light's Grace = instant heals. It seems like they expect us to use HL as part of the regular healing rotation, rather than as an emergency heal.

That's the only explanation I have.

The thing is that Light's Grace was still attractive before that (if it wasn't for JotW). Light's Grace has always only benefited the second HL, never the first. That's why IoL was so nice. It started the combo, working on the first HL, and we had Light's Grace for successive HLs, making the two talents work very nicely together.

Edit: Oops, didn't realize the extent of the nerf. Thought IoL would make HL 0.5s cast.

Why not just make Light's Grace passive or proc off from any heal, and reduce Infusion of Light to 1/2 sec instead? :/

0.5 + 1 = 1.5

2.5 - 1.5 = 1

If the intention was to make light's grace more attractive then they should have reduced IoL to 2 seconds and then it would function as you describe. As it stands now holy paladins have 2 talents which reduce holy light cast time. Probably the more annoying this is that even with a 1 second Holy Light you can still be interrupted but the GCD will remain at 1.5 seconds. You gain no throughput advantage for casting faster but lose all the mobility that IoL offered.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but LG drops .5s off the HL cast time of 2.5s, making it 2s. The new IoL drops 1s off that cast, making it a 1s cast. Where are the instant heals? Or did you mean before this change?