Isn't retri in holy/retri gear mix better for healing heroic 5mans now btw compared to holydin? AoE healing by retry 51pointer is better than aoe healing by BoL, there are HoTs for encounters with silence. Single target healing may be not that great, however heroic bosses aren't tuned around holydin single target healing, but rather around the weakest class in it. You could still have Illimination with 51 points in ret. You just trade some throughoutput for a MUCH better versatility.

Zed, I believe this argument was already addressed. Holy Shock doesn't do enough without Infusion. Remember, the Infusion change isn't the only influence here; there's also the Plea issue.

And, to state it bluntly, it looks like Sheath _does_ compete well with 'everything in Holy past 25 points'. _That is the problem with Holy right now_.

Point is, that without mobility issue fixed (and no, in current state Shock alone isn't enough), much deeper ret with a right mix of gear is more viable healer than holy in situations where you could trade your burst HPS for a bigger versatility. I don't see a point in speccing deep holy for anything except progress 25mans. Does it make a sence?

They will either nerf retri healing to the point where with just 15 points in holy it is not viable in 5mans (and 10mans). Or buff holy. Or see 90% of non raiding paladin healers going ret and healing just fine.


Even if some deep holy talent tripples your healing, you will rather heal heroics as retri simply because healing is just fine, but you got AoE heal and HoT to cover our weakness on top of fine healing.

Here is the link for possible offensive healer build - link

I would rather say that the choice was between 37/0/34 and deep Holy. Most people agreed that the flexibility of IoL was superior to Sheath, which Holy now just lost in the current build. As of now, there is no point in not speccing into Sheath, from that point of view. Does that make more sense?

Divine Favour, Holy Shock and IoL can now all be dumped, being just gimmicks, freeing up points for Sheath and JoTW. JoTW has obviously been heavily decreased in efficiency, but it's still an extra chunk of mana here and there. Also note that you do not even have to use JoTW if the fight does not allow it - it is not like there are any additional or crucial mana efficiency talents anywhere in Holy, are there? So a deep Holy build would have to heal under essentially the same mana conditions as the Sheath/JoTW build, basically only gaining Light's Grace. (Also, ~2 JoTW returns pretty much cover DI as an approximation)

With the build I linked, sadly, CS and AoW are a better investment of points than anything you could spend those points in Holy for.

EDIT: I'd spec deep Holy in an instant if all talents beyond DI were replaced with something as retarded as copies of Holy Guidance.

Palados: Re: progress 25man, we are also the worst healer for that, of the options.

On a somewhat different note, people have talked about Sheath builds, but what about the option of picking up Touched by the Light? Something like 15/43/13. If Combat Expertise affects your spell crit, then you don't lose _that_ much crit chance on your heals, you gain Divine Guardian and Devotion Aura, along with all Blessings that a Paladin will need. Also, of course, when you do crit, you'll crit for more.

Just move one step further. There is nothing above Illumination that would beat an AoE heal from Divine Storm for 5-10mans.

But it's still a good offtanking build, if you remove one point from Convinction and put it into Avenger's Shield. You will be able to heal when you're not needed, which is what Blizzard is so keen on encouraging.

You do have to be careful how you use a shadowfiend on some fihts. I'm just a prot warrior, but I distinctly remember hearing spriests complain about their shadowfiends getting killed by random raid damage from time to time.

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The Divine Plea nerf makes perfect sense in light of >this< blue post. Thread title: Incoming ret nerf for pvp

I believe the only change we are making right now (aside from some general bug fixing) is a change to Divine Plea. Divine Plea will have a longer duration but the same total percent mana returned per cooldown.

They intended Divine Plea as exactly what it is: Blood rage for a retadin and protadin's blue rage bar. It's not FOR healadins, they just happened to get some use out of it. They still can -some-; it means you wont have to drink as much when clearing trash, you can still sneak some ticks in on some bosses (e.g. gothik) and if you actually run OOM, you can pop it and get back into the game.

Entirely true. I also think that there would be some interesting pvp implications of this type of build.

Another interesting die effect of the 2x/0/4x builds (especially if we get CS) is that we can be healers that not only put out relatively good DPS, but we have reason to be close to the mob.

Puretide: I'm not so sure. Consider that if you go with Sheath, you're most likely going to wear actual DPS gear to get best use out of it. However, if you go to Wowwiki, AP is worth 0.5 itempoints, while Stamina is worth 0.67 itempoints. If you take all of the stamina increasing talents, plus BoK, then 1 stamina on gear is equivalent to 1.236 stamina on your person.

Thus, you can get 1.34 AP per Stamina on items. I can't think of any AP-increasing talents (like Deadliness) for Ret Paladins, so 1.34 * 0.3 (from Sheath) means that 1 AP = 0.402 Spellpower. 1 Stamina = 0.371 spellpower. This gives AP the edge for the moment, but then consider the gearing issue. A build with Touched by the Light can wear _healing_ plate and just gain a more or less passive bonus to spellpower from the stamina on the gear, whereas a Sheath build cannot do the same (i.e., there's little/no Strength/AP on Healing plate).

Now, I understand that the raid buffs will help out Sheath 'upfront', and that should be analyzed.

However, the Sheath build doesn't have the survivability of the Touch build, and is more crit-reliant.

I'll do more analysis on this, but right now it would seem that the builds have compensating strengths and weaknesses.

Just a quick question to other beta testers, but has Sacred Shield always had a 75% coefficient with SpPower? Just been testing it now, and this does add some value to the ability as it's absorbing in full holy gear about 2000 per 6 seconds.

Oh, wow I didn't realise that stamina had such a huge advantage, points wise, to AP in ivalue. Thats interesting.

I'm really curious to see what this turns up. If you don't have a beta account I can go test out whether or not CE affects spell crit later today.

It is awefully strange that the discussion over the past several pages is about how healing from a non-holy spec will (could) be better than healing with a holy spec. This is akin to a warrior speccing prot to dps, or a druid speccing Resto to tank. I hope people are blowing this way out of proportion, or Blizzard is reading this, because going into an expansion needing buffs makes for a long wait. As most paladins understand.
These changes really worry me. They show that Blizzard is less willing to make deep holy attractive and would rather make deep ret unattractive.

I was about to say that in my post, but didn't want to sound overly negative. So I pretty much agree with you on all fronts there.

I do plan on doing some sheathbot testing tonight to see what its like.

Wanna bet they will balance our mana usage assuming we use it each CD? :P Because smart pair of paladins with 2 beacons could rotate their DP and use it each min. Then in not so smart groups paladins will be sitting oom because the balance was done assuming that DP is actually used.

Well, imagine a situation when prot is extremely nice tanking build for some niche (for example tanking undeads) while other specs are almost on par in all other tanking jobs. Thats how holy palas are now. Nice in single target healing and suck in everything else. There is nothing in deep holy that makes us better in non single target healing that is not negated by deep retri with their aoe spell, hot, etc. There is no point to spec holy for the content that 80% of the players experience - 5mans and 10mans. Since retri with illumination will be 'just fine' in single target healing (worse than holy but on par with some other classes), but have additional group utility as well as some things in healing department that holy doesn't have.

I must agree with the sentiment that the current situation is rather ludicrous, but I'm trying to make lemonade.

Okay, here's some base stats.

Base Strength at 80: ~150 (confirmation needed)
Strength of Earth Totem (talented): 178.25 Str
Strength Subtotal: 328.25
Apply BoK: 361.075
Apply Divine Strength: 415.23625
AP from Strength: 830.4725 AP

Talented Battle Shout: 685 AP

Total AP: ~1515

This is before gear, of course. However, this is analyzing the difference between Sheath and Touch based on wearing Healing gear.

Thus, spellpower from AP: ~610.

Thus, amount of stamina _on gear_ needed to reproduce this from Touch = ~1650

Subtract ~120 for base Paladin Stamina = 1522

If I missed anything, please let me know, because I'm quite new to TCing. However, based on this, the inflection point between Sheath and Touch (for wearing pure Healing gear) occurs when the Paladin can gain ~1500 Stamina from sources.

Here's a link jow_procs_9014.txt - FileFront.com to the (filtered) combat log I took while testing the JoW procs.

I basically grepped to only show SPELL_PERIODIC_ENERGIZE + Judgement of Wisdom.

I was in the same party as the Paladin (Zaffion). The character I was on at the time was Swede.

There's also procs from Azsharand and Danutwo. Neither of which were in the party and didn't stay too long.

(At one point Zaffion hit another dummy that another Paladin Volkmar had JoW on and got a proc from him. Otherwise all the procs were from Zaffion's JoW).

Zebra: Going over the items currently in Wrath (end-game), there is about 530 Stamina on the healing gear that a Paladin would use. (That is PvE gear... PvP gear that emphasizes Stamina over Int might actually be better for this.)

Now, I did forget Mark on both cases (which would move Sheath even more).

If Divine Strength is not taken into account, currently that means the inflection point moves 120 Stamina downward.

I do plan on factoring in everything on the heals, but I need to find out what the spellpower on either case looks like before I can actually look at the heals.

You're right, this was an error on my part. The rest of the description is correct however.



Lets be realistic however. Besides as a passing joke comment, DS is not really an AoE heal. It's 20% of total damage spread out over your party. So it's 4% of the damage you do to each person.

Worst case: On single target that means a 2000 hit will heal each person for 80.
Best case: On max (4) targets, assuming crit of 4000 on all targets, will heal each person for 640.

This is every 10 seconds.

Those are just random numbers to prove a point, I know they're not accurate, however with "mixed" gear it will probably be even worse than this.

DS heal is nothing more than a Retadin's version of Improved Leader of the Pack heals. Nothing more, nothing less. You are not going to be "instance AoE healing" with DS.

It doesn't make sense in light of this blue post:

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 a Holy Pally's regen is based around completely wiping out his throughput. As a tank how would you feel on Patchwerk if your Holy Pally typed in raid chat "lulz I'm OOM, shield wall while I attempt to regen" or tell your other healer "hey it's all you bro, I can't get fair regen with the other healing classes". How would that go over in your raids?

IoL used to help this, as we could sit on a proc when DP was up to dump a big instant heal when the tank gets low enough (much like a Priest cast-canceling Gheals during a clearcast). Once again PvP struck and Holy Pallys are back to today's method of "Spam FoL and hope to god you have enough mana".

Losing a shadowfiend due to an unlucky ae is not even close to the same thing as being completely unable to heal while it is up. Just for the sake of an argument, imagine if they changed innervate so that it reduced the target's healing by 100% for the duration. I'm pretty sure the druid community would scream bloody murder. And their mana regen without it is BETTER than Paladins.

As to Divine Plea only being intended for Prot/Ret...... If that is true, then blizzard is even more ignorant of how Paladins function than I thought. Ret with JotW has no mana issues. I haven't heard anything from Prot Pallies in beta bemoaning their lack of mana. The changes to downranking destroyed much of Holy's mana efficiency, so it is the only spec that was desperate for a way to regen mana. I really can't see anything that substantiates your ideas.

Wouldn't about the only thing a healadin has going for him in Wrath, at this point, be tank healing throughput thanks to Beacon of Light doubling the strength of his FoL against the tank?

Other than that and perhaps providing Imp BoW, wouldn't any other healer be categorically stronger? GC mentions in his justification that all other healing classes are crying about being the worst healers right now. I do wonder what consolidated arguments are out there among other healing classes being used to paint themselves unfavorably next to healadins.