I've been holy for arenas ever since the first week of season one for the past four seasons. Looking back, the biggest reason for the druid-like paladin dominance in the first season was the fact that no one could actually play arenas combined with the fact that paladins were an extremely scrub-friendly class back then due to how Improved Concentration Aura and Talisman of the Breaker stacked, making them the ultimate stand-still-and-heal-uninterrupted-bitch class.
However, come season two and things started to look awry. Both of the aforementioned things were put to death (don't get me wrong, this had to be done) and people had already learned to rotate crowd control and lock down a paladin who was standing still and spamming heals. I distinctively remember that people were already taking advantage of the paladin's major weakness at this point, and were constantly dragging your partners behind a pillar or out of range, making your life a living hell. I was playing moonkin/rogue/paladin (with success) during the peak of season two on Blackout, and when Illumination, Blessing of Sacrifice and Blessing of Freedom nerfs went live, it pretty much killed holy paladin viability in 2s and 3s.
Not much has changed in the following two seasons for paladins in the lesser brackets. Druids, however, have constantly been increasing in numbers (not hard to figure out why) in all brackets, and even 5s, which has long been considered as being the paladin premium bracket, has seen a decline for us.
I was extremely happy with the changes to holy prior to the latest patch. I actually looked forward to healing in arenas again (as 3s is the bracket I enjoy the most), but with the bitch slap they gave to Infusion of Light, my opinion has suddenly been completely reversed. I don't know what Blizzard is smoking when they give paladins a mana regen ability that is supposed to rival Shadowfiend, Innervate and Water Shield, only to give it a minor side-effect; it can't actually be used. Should a fellow paladin here know of a way to play the class without healing for 15 seconds in any bracket, I'd welcome the lesson warmly.
I'm at a loss with the class. From the looks of it, one would have to go retribution to be viable in Wrath. This is not something that I want to do since I've always enjoyed holy the most (raiding notwithstanding where I'd actually rather be protection or retribution), but it looks like it's something I'm forced to do to be optimal.
Healing as 28/0/43 isn't so bad, since you end up judging every 8 seconds anyways for JoTW (1100ish mana iirc) Art of War isn't that bad, and Sanctified Wrath giving you a 2m CD on Avenging Wrath, not to mention 16k crit Holy Light Sheath of Lights - deep ret seems even more viable now than before since deep holy is more unattractive than ever.
This also allows your raid to min/max and drop Ret Paladins in favor of more reliable/higher DPS classes, while maintaining the class synergy (Ret Aura, Crusader debuff/JoTWise) and keeping heals on the MT. With JoTwise, you won't have to Dplea nearly as often and you can keep huge hots on the MT. Instant FOL's due to Art of War help with raid healing quite a bit, and it doesn't feel like you are "Ret", it realistically feels like a real healing build.
Okay. I have never, ever, whined about classes. I have some basic faith in Blizzard in that they, as game designers, tend to know what results in a fun and somewhat balanced game for all. But this Holy nerf is just.. really weird.
What are Holy paladins actually getting in WotlK, compared to what we have now? A mana regen button that completely shuts you down, a gimmicky talent that requires you to weave in Holy Shocks for an occasionally useful 1-s HL (but didn't we already have Grace for that?!), and err.. Beacon.
I'm hoping this is a 'testing the waters' build, where they just want the numbers about Paladins without their new abilities. They have to slowly re-buff these talents, or add in new stuff, because at the moment, there's absolutely nothing whatsoever to look forward too in WotlK for healing paladins.
EDIT: Looking at 28/0/43-type builds.. that looks like more fun. It may in the end not be sufficient for raid-healing, but it is a definitely a good levelling/dungeon healing build. It even gives you Repentance.
Judgements of the Wise returns 33% of base mana now (4394 for paladins at level 80, according to WoWWiki), making it still return a whopping 1450 mana on each judgement. This translates into 906 MP/5 provided that you judge every eight seconds. Sounds good until you realize what you are going to lose by going deep retribution: Sacred Cleansing, Holy Shock, Light's Grace, Enlightened Judgements, Infusion of Light, Stoicism, Divine Illumination and a whole lot of lesser talents that would increase your healing capabilities. This hurts so much that I don't really see a deep retribution working as you being the sole healer in any bracket. Granted, it has some potential for 5s, but I think that's about it.
Edit: Naturally you would still have to subtract the mana it takes for you to judge, keep a seal up, move within 10 yards of the target and so forth of JotW's utility before drooling over the fat MP/5 it provides.
It appears that Retribution and Protection are very competitive with other classes. Can a Holy specced Paladin even be justified in raids now?
I have had so much hope for this build. I don't even know what the fuck to spec now. 33% base mana could still cover some basic 2.5 sec HL spam but without the crit talents, Light's Grace, or even Infusion of Light, this is simply unthinkable in raids. Holy is, as it is now, an actual waste of a slot.
Unless you really want Imp BoW, in which case this spec here offers all four Blessings, all Aura talents with Aura Mastery, Divine Guardian for AE damage reduction, all Hands talents along with Pursuit of Justice so you can run faster when you are swapped in to rebuff. All you could ever want from a paladin, in one handy build.
EDIT:
Originally Posted by Fordel
Question about Sacred Shield: Does the 50% FoLight Crit apply when the spell is on a target, or only when the spell 'triggers' from a Hit, inside that 6 second window?
As of the last build, the crit chance only applied when the actual shield effect was triggered and only until the shield disappeared.
My largest concern with GhostCrawler's latest 'stance' on Holy paladins, isn't so much the numbers, but the seemingly unwillingness to budge on the base play style of a Holy Paladin.
Holy Paladin's have been using the same 2 and 1/2 heals since release. I doubt you will find many players that actually enjoy that super spammy style of healing... yet some folks at Blizz seem to love it. It's disheartening.
I also find it wonderfully ironic that seemingly every attempt to make deep Ret undesirable for Holy paladins, seems to push them further in.
Question about Sacred Shield: Does the 50% FoLight Crit apply when the spell is on a target, or only when the spell 'triggers' from a Hit, inside that 6 second window?
Source
Holy on the other hand was and continues to be an amazing healing spec. We didn't need to make Holy paladins good healers. That was done. The problems we wanted to fix occur when you're forced to heal in non-optimal situations. This was virtually the same thing we wanted to do to the other healing specs by the way.
Running around is non-optimal for a Holy paladin. So is healing a group. Mana regen can be a problem since you don't hot and sit like priests and druids can do. The changes we've made, like Beacon and Divine Plea, are specifically to address those problems.
Number of heals -- aside from the old stand-bys, we tried to work Holy Shock, Sacred Shield and BAcon of Light into your arsenal.
Mobility -- Holy Shock helps a lot in this department too.
Beacon of Light -- If you poke around a little bit, you might find that a lot of paladins do like this spell. It requires some babysitting -- no doubt about that. But we also figured with your relatively small number of healing spells, you could afford (perhaps even welcome) the distraction.
Mana Regen -- Divine Plea is what you use when you run out of mana. It's not there to make mana go away -- it's supposed to have situational use. If there was never a decision to use Divine Plea, then we would have just doubled your mana pool. Losing healing effectiveness is supposed to be that decision. Now if you just don't have enough mana to do your job, that's a different problem.
Source
Holy -- You're still the best high-throughput, single target healer in the game. I suspect you're still going to get called on to heal the tank a lot. Holy was in a really good place in BC, so much so that other healers (probably priests more than anyone else) began to get overshadowed. To shift things back a little, as well to just challenge the player base, we introduced a lot more fights with AE damage and movement. Unfortunately, those mechanics hit Holy. Hard. At the same time, CoH and CH seemed to be able to handle any encounter. Beacon of Light isn't a panacea to solve all of those problems, but it is designed to help. It still needs a little work, but I think the basic spell design is sound.
Ok, GC:
You acknowledge that Holy was great at the start of BC, so you specifically created encounter design that was detrimental to paladin healing.
You want Paladins to be acceptable healers and not get benched.
You then create enocunters that mirror the same mechanics that were specifically designed to harm Holy Paladins in the first place.
You note our issues compared to other classes: Mana Regen, Mobility, Number of Heals, AoE healing.
You give us Divine Plea - compared to the mana regen mechanics of other healing classes this is appallingly bad. Priests get shadowfiend + spirit regen. Shamans get Water Shield/ (Mana Spring/Mana tide). Druids get Innervate and Spirit. Each of those allows regen whilst on low/zero mana whilst still outputting a reasonable amount of healing. Divine Plea gives decent regen, yet it silences us - 25% healing reduction if used every cooldown.
Mobility:
Blizzard Giveth, and Blizzard taketh away.
Mobility whilst healing comes from having HoTs and Instant-casts. Holy Shock buffs have seen it become a decent healing tool, yet it is only one heal on a 6 second cooldown.
Infusion of Light gave us almost enough mobility not to complain - being able to 'sit' on a HL instant cast improved out ability as MT healers, whilst giving a few more options for mobile healing. It also synced nicely with Light's Grace- you were able to alternate Flash/Shock and then if you got in trouble, light's grace could be up instantly.
The new 1sec reduction cripples holy healing.
Number of Heals:
Compared to the number of heals that Shaman or Priest has in their arsenal, paladins still really have only 3 heals. Shock, Flash and HL. Beacon just means that you cast HL on a different target.
AoE healing.
All other classes are being brought up to par on tank heals. Yet paladins are specifically singled out as intended to be bad at raid heals. If other healers can fulfill either role, and paladins can only fulfill one, is it any wonder why paladins are wondering if 'lolholy' is going to be the new phrase in /4 ?
Paladins need an AOE heal now. You're mostly doing away with 'niches' for all other classes- why are paladins the only ones who can't do what the other classes can?
I've been scratching my head over the Infusion of Light change and it makes absolutely no sense to me whatsoever outside of a 37/0/34 build that includes Judgements of the Wise combined with Holy Shock and Infusion of Light. If this is truly what drove Blizzard into curb stomping holy's best talent (and most likely the only reason why holy would be viable in lower brackets to begin with), then all I can say is that I'm at an awe of their "balancing" choice. There is no reason whatsoever why the original Infusion of Light would be overpowered for holy; healing with Holy Shock costs a ton of mana, as does healing with Holy Light. It was the answer to our mobility in arenas - an answer that proved to be short-lived.
However, if this was the reasoning behind the IoL change, then why not move JotW out of reach of holy paladins specced into Holy Shock? Can't seem to figure this out for the life of me.
Sounds good until you realize what you are going to lose by going deep retribution: Sacred Cleansing, Holy Shock, Light's Grace, Enlightened Judgements, Infusion of Light, Stoicism, Divine Illumination and a whole lot of lesser talents that would increase your healing capabilities. This hurts so much that I don't really see a deep retribution working as you being the sole healer in any bracket. Granted, it has some potential for 5s, but I think that's about it.
Stuff you lose that actually would hurt your arena healing:
Utility Spells:
- Holy Shock (replaced by instant FoL on crits).
- Beacon of Light: in arena, from experience, split DPS doesn't happen often in successful setups so this spell, while cool and workable (though the ignoring overhealing thing bugs me still) doesn't cream arena to me (although if it ignore LoS and overhealing we could talk ;p).
Sacred Cleansing: yes, I would miss this, but the talent still doesn't fix the GCD war that cleansing/debuffing has become. With all the passive debuffs that classes apply and spread, often in a single category (rogues/DKs/mages/druids), cleanse comes up short even with this very deep talent.
Throughput Talents:
- Light's Grace (with no reliable way to keep this up at a decent mana cost, it now would be used reactively... I don't know about you, but usually I want the first reactive heal to be the fast one, not the second.)
- Infusion of Light: without its mobility component, it's just a new flavor of LG, minus the controllable aspect. Removal of downranking effectively destroyed LG as a reliable increase in throughput ability, so we're left with 2 horrible talents. Don't get me started on the fact it reduces HL to below the GCD when stacked... which is oh so useful.
- Holy Guidance: more than made up for by the increased SP from Sheath.
- Judgements of the Pure: arguably the throughput talent we'd miss most... but honestly, as good as haste is, the 10% increase isn't worth the 7 talent point expenditure it requires to work.
Regen/Efficiency Talents:
- Divine Illumination: eclipsed by JotW regen.
So you give up some abilities, but I would argue most of the throughput losses you describe are amplified by TBC expectations. I doubt LG will be easily maintainable anymore, infusion is unreliable throughput increase and replaced (equally unreliably) by AoW procs, holy guidance is trumped by sheath. I would be willing to drop 10% haste for the huge increased in mana regen afforded to me by JotW, which, as a side note, might allow me to gem for haste to passively close that haste gap anyways.
I also gain huge burst potential, a second form of CC, flat 15% increased runspeed, a junk debuff and a short cooldown stun break that I can apply to others. Oh, and a shorter cooldown on an ability to increase my healing output by a flat 20%.
Edit to comment on:
Mana Regen -- Divine Plea is what you use when you run out of mana. It's not there to make mana go away -- it's supposed to have situational use. If there was never a decision to use Divine Plea, then we would have just doubled your mana pool. Losing healing effectiveness is supposed to be that decision. Now if you just don't have enough mana to do your job, that's a different problem.
So someone explain to me what the decision is on shadowfiend? Or innervate (should I save it for the paladins?)
Aye, talent utility will scale backwards with haste. I even see how they could fix it - make LG and IoL unstackable...
If they want to solve our mobility without making us overpowered in PvP - remove 6sec CD from shock and decrease it's effectiveness. So that it isn't worth spamming, but it could give us something to keep people up while moving a lot (nexus/saph). Or just redesign the encounters that make us close-to-useless. I don't want to be the best single-target healer in game if I can not effectively heal my single target during silence or movement.
What also strikes me - we are the best single target healing if we could spam heals. Otherwise other classes can do our job just fine. And Blizzard decided that spamming heals is not what they want. By that decision they effectively nerfed LG. Now, what is the purpose of IoF? No, really, if it isn't our mobility spell, in what situation would I want to use /RANDOM almost non controllable proc that reduces one (!) cast of my HL. Maybe 1sec difference in random time will save MT once in 100 raids. Maybe. And they want me to spend 2 talent points for it? Look, if tank got a burst we already partially countered it with shock crit. If 1sec should save the tank after the shock crit, than what do we have? Situation where healing the tank by the 'best' tank healer is completely luck based? While classes with nature swiftness will just top him and laugh in our face.
I'm not sure you even need JotP to be up to reduce the casting time of HL below the global cooldown. A Lights Grace HL takes 2sec to cast, and IoL reduces that to 1sec. With a GCD of 1.5secs this is always going to be less than required. In fact, what is the point of even taking 2 pts in IoL in PvE when 1 will take you down to the GCD?
I'm really wondering if they simply haven't done much testing of Holy healing in Heroic 5-mans because that seems to be the only way that their claims can add up. From the sounds of things those Holy Paladins who tried these changes out last night failed Epicly in Occulus and Malygos encounters when previously they were holding their own.
Anyway... does anyone know if Touched by the Light scales Sacred Shield as it appears that Sheath doesn't? And do we have any confirmation on the other mad change of this patch: JoW having a raid-wide internal cooldown?
(If the change to JoW is confirmed [and similar for JoL], can someone please explain to me if there's a point to Judgement debuffs in Raids?).
Stuff you lose that actually would hurt your arena healing...
I can see your point in mana-efficiency in going deep retribution. The spell power from Sheathe is actually something that I also completely overlooked. However, arguing that Holy Shock is replaced by instant FoLs from Art of War is pretty asinine. Holy Shock does not need to be primed in any way, has a 40 yard range and a six second cooldown, whereas Art of War requires you to have crit with a Judgement that is on an eight second cooldown with a 10 yard range in the past 15 seconds. Even with the current 15 second cooldown on Holy Shock it has won us the match countless times (not counting the times it bugs out when spamming it coming out of Cyclone), so I wouldn't give up on it so readily.
Repentance is awesome to have, but I fail to see the awesome burst potential you mentioned? Holy Shock is the primary nuke we have, so where does a holy paladin's burst come from that doesn't have it, or are you simply implying the added 50% crit chance on Hammer of Wrath now that it's usable earlier on and has no cast time?
Seeing how worthless deep holy is now outside of Holy Shock and Light's Grace - both of which we already have - I'm willing to re-evaluate my stance in going deep retribution for arena healing. If one manages to keep people up without Holy Shock to fall back on, then I can, in fact, see deep retribution prevailing. I'm still very, very doubtful about this, seeing how you're required to maintain close range of your enemies for judging, making you even more susceptible to focus kicks and pummels than before, thereby making you waste a lot of time that could be otherwise spent healing by having to fake heal and judge more often than your deep holy counterpart (basically a holy paladin would only judge Justice on druids and Blood on mages to prevent polymorphs).
I'm sick to my stomach currently, and this is the exact same feeling I had in season two when they announced the Illumination, Blessing of Sacrifice and Blessing of Freedom nerfs which killed holy paladins in arenas completely. I'm inclined to say something here about how paladins get knee-jerk reactions from Blizzard and druids get a slight, gentle pat on their back, but I'll refrain from doing so.
Hail, my retribution brethren? But seriously, even with the complete lack of utility in the deep holy talents, I think that losing Holy Shock will prevent you from healing effectively in arenas. It might be that retribution-y holy paladins will be successful teamed up with another, proper healer to cover their weaknesses up, but I just can't see it being the new paladin solo-healer spec, so I'm still clinging onto my hopes of actually getting to play a proper holy paladin no matter how slim they might seem.
Edit: Beacon of Light will be useless for arenas simply due to its staggering mana cost combined with how easy it is to dispel and it doesn't work on overhealing. When you say that "the most successful arena setups don't rely on split dps" it simply shows that you haven't played 3s in a long, long time. Druid/warlock/warrior relies solely on split dps by dot-rotting and then making the swap, and I think that even the current Beacon would be simply amazing against that specific setup if you play a setup (double melee) that forces the warlock into using a Voidwalker. On a larger scale, Beacon is a useless talent that needs a lot of love to be viable in arenas.
Hehe, Sacred Shiled will be nerfed after lvl 70 testing I bet. Imagine a Felmyst fight, where one paladin is keeping 20 Sacred shields on all healers/ranged people. It will eat at least 25k (20x1250 for 1k spellpower) damage each 6-7 sec from her aura. It's around 110-125k 'healing' per minute with 0 overhealing. I don't think I have as much effective healing on MT per phase now. Not even close I think. Now let us look at twins. Due to the mechanics of the sear, absorbed damage won't trigger a debuff counter. At the moment priests use PWS to counter the first ticks and single paladin could do it more effectively since sacred shield can be applied on many people.
I have a gut feeling that they tested paladin in AoE heroic and 10man encounters by shielding all the members. And no one died at the end so they thought it's fine as it is.
Maybe all we have to do is to find that weird playstyle that they tested and decided that palas are fine? :P Though it may be that some guy tested retri healing, found it close to OP and decided that holy are even better (because they are holy). /sarcasm off
As fas as I remember, in the previous build the premiere holy/ret hybrid spec was 37/0/34 and many of you were arguing that the deep holy talents + the ability to stay out of melee range made a BoL build better in a bunch of fights even with old JoTW. Sheath was not worth taking vs the middle tier holy talents.
Now, fixed version of JotW is not really competitive, and people are all for the Sheath build. You're basically saying, that Sheath was worse than old IoL + HS + LG but now Sheath is somehow better than nerfed IoL + HS + LG + Holy Guidance + Divine Illumination + JoTP + BoL + the ability to stay at 30yards? Isn't that a bit far-fetched?
Divine Plea: now, this has some interaction with IoL as you could sit on a proc and use DP even at high mana%, but anyway it seems the developer intention was that this should be used only when oom. They seem to think that Paladins don't have a problem going oom too early (perhaps they shouldn't just spam with absurdly high overheal%), but that they have no options when it happens. They will certainly look at it if Paladins run into mana problems more often than other classes. The other regen ability, Illumination is getting a nice boost with a Ret secondary spec and the raidwide buff system. Am I off saying Paladins are going to have 40%+ crit chance already during the first tier of WotlK raiding?
I understand the disappointment comes from nerfing "THE mobility talent", and Paladins really needed help in that department, but what if it was indeed too powerful and this is not coming from old JotW? Perhaps changing it to reduce next HL by 1s _OR_ make next FoL instant would be an acceptable middle ground?
Ah, right, at least one new ability won't be nerfed till we hit lvl 80 :P.
@ Zed
IoL wasn't too powerfull per se. That combo of shock crit plus instant HL was powerfull only on PvP and ONLY assuming that you had unlimited mana because of JotW. Otherwise you can't spam it as much anymore, you will simply go oom too fast even without mana drains.
My mistake. The internal cooldown on JoW procs is still 4 seconds, the proc rate still seems to be 100%. However the cooldown is linked to the debuff, not the player.
This is a rather serious claim. If true it's a very major nerf to JoW (and considering this was the traditionally more useful one out of the two judgements we can do, you really have to wonder how weak is too weak).
Anyone else have similar experience?
Originally Posted by Andemoni
Holy in Arena
One more thing I'd like to add is Resilience:
In Season 1, no one had any at the start. Comparing a Disc Priest/Druid with 0 resilience and a Paladin with 0 resilience, plate was naturally far superior, of course we had the advantage here.
This continued somewhat until healers started stacking mass quantities of resilience at which point Holy Paladins' "natural advantage" (plate = survivability) started becoming irrelevant in the face of our "natural disadvantages" (very easy to lock down, limited healing options, virtually 0 utility).
The very nature of how Priests/Druids (and Shamans in relative terms to paladins) are designed is that they have low survivability but gain a large amount of healing options/utility for it. Throwing Resilience into the mix means that while we gained nothing in relative terms, all other healing classes now suddenly had "high survivability + high utility + a lot of healing options" completely throwing things out of whack and in their favor.
Originally Posted by Ngita
[Sacred Shield] scales from gear, it scales from holy guidance and it scales for avenging wrath. It doesnt scale from Spell power from Sheath, perhaps deliberately considering their stance on ret healing.
Some good news for Holy, yet it doesn't make too much sense not to work with Sheath especially since someone is reporting it works with TbtL for prot (logic??). A ret healing full time will be wearing full healing gear anyway. This feels like a limiter for Ret PvP I guess, though it just feels like unnecessary gimping.
Originally Posted by Fordel
Question about Sacred Shield: Does the 50% FoLight Crit apply when the spell is on a target, or only when the spell 'triggers' from a Hit, inside that 6 second window?
Only when it triggers, which is much less than 6 seconds. I think a lot of people are not understanding how Sacred Shield works, it's actually much worse than advertised.
This is how Sacred Shield works:
-Someone with Sacred Shield gets hit.
-"Nothing" is absorbed on that first hit, but a secondary "Sacred Shield" proc comes up.
-At this point, FoL would gain 50% crit.
-As soon as the next hit on this person lands, the secondary "Sacred Shield" is consumed, absorbing 500 + some more from spelldamage.
Things to note:
-Very fast hitting mobs will consume the proc BEFORE any FoL can land. This means that the FoL 50% crit bonus is almost negligible, especially while tanking multiple mobs. It's gone in the blink of an eye.
-As mentioned previously, the first hit is not absorbed, it only "activates" Sacred Shield, then the next hit is absorbed.
Those things combined really almost ruin the ability for me.
Glyph of Exorcism - Your Exorcism also interrupts spellcasting for 2 sec.
I'm still confused as to what the purpose behind this one is. It feels like it will be some ultra situational fight where it will be used once and that's about it.
Since there's a Glyph vendor finally this beta build I've had a chance to test it and it still only works on undead.
I hope you're just having a laugh and making some obscure joke here, but if this is really how it works, then Sacred Shield, amongst the rest of holy's new tools, is pretty much a complete waste. Thanks for making my day with this post and further swinging my mood into hopeless depression. Makes me want to level up that druid again...
<snip>
-Sacred Shield proc works like a "buff" and not like an actual "damage shield". If you get hit for "10" damage while the proc is up, that's it, there goes your shield, even if your gear should make it absorb 1500.
I'm probably misreading you here Avitus but that line doesn't seem to tally up with Galoheart's experience:
Now, fixed version of JotW is not really competitive, and people are all for the Sheath build. You're basically saying, that Sheath was worse than old IoL + HS + LG but now Sheath is somehow better than nerfed IoL + HS + LG + Holy Guidance + Divine Illumination + JoTP + BoL + the ability to stay at 30yards? Isn't that a bit far-fetched?
To be more precise, with the 37/0/34 you did not go down to Sheath because you would have had to give up Holy Shock, IoL and Light's Grace. Holy Shock only was a strong spell with IoL and all HL buffing talents. On its own it is still rather mediocre.
Now you can theoretically give up not only IoL, but Light's Grace, Holy Shock, Divine Favour and 3 points in Holy Power to go down to Sheath of Light, pick up Fanaticism and AoW, and even Crusader Strike. You still get +8% to HL crit, which is really all that matters with this HL spamming build.
Also note that Sheath is stronger than Holy Guidance and DI, JoTP, BOL and Enlightened Judgements were not in the 37/0/34 build anyway, so I am not sure why you are mentioning those in a direct comparison of the two builds.
My mistake. The internal cooldown on JoW procs is still 4 seconds, the proc rate still seems to be 100%. However the cooldown is linked to the debuff, not the player.
Which means that if multiple people are casting spells at the target the procs are shared between those people. So people who cast more spells in a given period have a higher chance to "steal" the proc. And the more people hitting it the less regen each person gets because they can miss out on procs.
(Saw this from 9 minutes from a combat log).
I am sorry but has anyone else tested it?
if yes plz confirm or deny it.
Also does it apply to judjement of light also?
Seems like a huge bug if true.
I explained why I was mentioning them: JotW is no longer a particularly strong talent for a holy Paladin. The old choice was between 37/0/34 and Sheath build, the new choice is between a BoL build and Sheath build. People passed on BoL because of old broken JotW, and didn't take Sheath, but now they are going Ret for Sheath exclusively - thus Sheath has to compete with basically everything in Holy past 25 points. CS is definitely no healing ability and the use of AoW is severely limited in my opinion.
Palados points out IoL was not very powerful per se, but JotW was, with only these two toned down the logical step would be to go deeper in Holy, not Ret (??)
With regards Sacred shield As per the picture Zebra posted, speaking with a pala in my guild this is my experience too. After the shield is up, a single hit of 10 afterwards wont remove it. It will stay for the 6 sec or until it's completely absorded.
However the point Avitus made, which in my opinion is the key point, about the FoL crit increase not staying for the whole 6 seconds but only being there when the shield is up is spot on. It makes the uptime of the crit buff a lot smaller and makes the ability a joke.....but then looking at the recent changes it appears blizz has hired a clown for holy tree development, so it all makes perfect sense.
Originally Posted by Zed
I explained why I was mentioning them: JotW is no longer a particularly strong talent for a holy Paladin. The old choice was between 37/0/34 and Sheath build, the new choice is between a BoL build and Sheath build. People passed on BoL because of old broken JotW, and didn't take Sheath, but now they are going Ret for Sheath exclusively - thus Sheath has to compete with basically everything in Holy past 25 points. CS is definitely no healing ability and the use of AoW is severely limited in my opinion.
Palados points out IoL was not very powerful per se, but JotW was, with only these two toned down the logical step would be to go deeper in Holy, not Ret (??)
Previously, IoL and JotW were both very powerful, but JotW's power was pushing people down Ret. If they had nerfed JotW and not nerfed deep holy, then yes the logical step would be to go down Holy. However they've nerfed both which still asks the question which is better. With mana a serious issue, replenishment only 0.25%, Divine Plea a joke for holy paladins, 33% of base mana / 8 seconds is still extremely powerful.
Personally with the deep holy tree nerf, i find Ret even more appealing. Maximise FoL size via sheath, spam FoL and use sacred shield (which whilst still a joke in terms of uptime of crit buff, does synergise well with sheath), and judge as required to keep mana topped and create some insta FoL.
10/01/08, 4:44 AM
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