Zul, it's not rocket science.

Assuming 2000 absorbed every 6 seconds for 30 seconds, you can't "keep up" anything taking direct damage with that. Even if we assume you will spend all 15 seconds of Divine Plea spamming Sacred Shield, it still feels too gimmicky/weak.

On paper: You'll get around 10 Sacred Shields up during DP, that's worth 20k damage absorbed every 6 seconds under perfect conditions. Or 4-5 times that (80-100k) over the whole duration of the Sacred Shield buff (30 seconds) in a perfect world.


In reality: You spend 12% of your base mana per cast (=474 mana), those 10 casts will cost you 4740 mana, pretty much killing most if not all of what you're supposed to regen from DP.

To add insult to injury, as explained previously the "absorption effect" from Sacred Shield is extremely situational. What if your raid takes damage every 7 seconds? SS will reduce 0 damage. What if out of those 10 people you wasted ~5k mana shielding only 2-3 people take damage? It's not a HoT you can stack on everyone who's not at full health and KNOW its doing some good.


Astronomic usefulness on paper does by far not represent actual benefit in realistic scenarios.



I'm not saying it's completely without use (though I doubt anyone would miss it if it was completely removed from the game), but what I'm saying is: We know exactly where it stands in usefulness and it's NOT the missing link to justify how underpowered holy is (as a matter of fact it has nothing to do with how weak the holy tree is as it's a baseline ability from trainers).

It's the same argument as saying "hey your car has no wheels, but at least it has some nice blinkers".

I offtanked Patchwerk in the 10 man. He would hateful me for ~7-8k. Tell me how Sacred Shield is going to help at all if I pop it on that tank to use DP. It will absorb 25-30% of ONE HIT every 6 seconds(and only after an unmitigated hit before that), and Patchwerk hatefuls quickly. Now don't get me wrong, Sacred Shield is far from useless. It's just not useful enough to make up for DP's terrible usage for Holy. It has great utility when preventing AoE damage ticks on several people(assuming you can spare the GCDs from tank healing, of course), it's reasonable to throw on someone getting hit fairly slowly, and it has use as a supplement to healing. It is not good as something to fire off in order to make sure you don't need to heal for 15 seconds. Sacred Shield scaling is very nice, and now the spell can actually be cast by Holy Paladins, but it does not solve any of the issues people are bringing up.

edit: as a note, the DP change was actually live in the last beta build. My normal naxx 10 group included a holy paladin, and I would regularly LoH him for the additional mana it granted because he couldn't take the time off healing to pop DP(I was ret or prot). When you have other people in the raid blowing 20m healing CDs to give you mana back because you have no form of active or passive mana regen, that is a problem.

That thread just got a blue reply:

"If I can let you in on a little secret, there are a number of rabid druids at Blizzard who really have a vested interest in seeing the class succeed. You're in good hands." -GC Yes indeed, Ghostcrawler, yes indeed.

Yes, we have many Holy paladins too. You'd be surprised who they are. We talk about their issues all the time.

You had some thoughtful things to say in your post, but your tone and subject are over the top. Try again and maybe you'll get a better response.

Eek!
I guess quoting blizzard employés and disgreeing with what they have said qualifies a post as ''over the top''.

Well, 25 pages of Holy Feedback were clearly not enough - let's write some more.

EDIT: beaten

No, it's the entire post.

Being outraged is a great way to preach to the choir - but if the reader doesn't agree with all of your premises/assumptions, then it does seem "over the top".


ie, on Divine Plea:
Explain more about how DP is realistically unusable. Why can't you click it off after regenning for a partial amount of time? How about coordinating with other healers? It may seem completely obvious to you - but skipping straight to the outraged conclusion doesn't explain anything to the developers.


If DP was 5 seconds, would the mechanics be acceptable? 8 seconds, like evocation? What's a better duration for Divine Plea, and why do you think that's the right number? Describe more of your thought process on how you evaluate the ability, and the developers may end up agreeing with you.

To be fair, the OP was being a douche in several places and he was taking quotes out of context from other forums and spinning it into meaning stuff it didn't.

At least the reply means GC has read the thread.

I normally try not to get too involved in the over dramatization over at the official boards, however I did go and read this one. What's funny is it reminded me of something I hadn't really looked at/realized until now: Almost all the promised fixes of the initial launch of WotLK beta have not made it.

Going into WotLK, the initial beta promised so many things that would fix almost all (or rather the far majority of) problems Holy Paladins had in TBC. It seemed to have an answer for every issue:

-No mobility: Instant Holy Light procs
-No AoE: The original BoL AoE HoT
-No HoT: The original BoL AoE HoT + low hanging Sheath in Ret tree
-No active regen: The original Divine Plea, 50% of total mana every 2 mins for a 6 second casting time sacrifice
-A "shielding talent" at level 80

Only a few beta build later we have:

-No instant Holy Light
-No AoE heal BoL
-No HoT from BoL
-Sheath not really accessible for a "Holy" build
-DP pretty much gutted to the ground
-Sacred Shield's mechanics are arguably too cumbersome to be a major boost in anything

To dumb it down even further: AoE heal, HoT and instant heal -> No AoE heal, no HoT and no instant HL?

In retrospect, it's almost funny how over-promised this stuff seems now, considering none of it seems to have made it. Really? All the smart ideas the devs had had to be axed or mutilated into a form that's not an equal replacement?

Going from a promising outlook of "almost all your problems will be fixed" to this, you have to wonder what went wrong. Fingers crossed the pressure from the official boards as well as what's being written here will result in some re-balancing or even reverting of some of the changes.


My immediate suggestions would be:

-Restore IoL
-Change DP to only "silence" for ~6 seconds or remove the healing penalty and reduce the mana return (~30% base mana)
-"Plus one ability" in deep holy to make holy more desirable. A Sheath like HoT, something similar to the original BoL.

Really it wouldn't take much to make holy desirable and in good shape, the question is, what are they waiting for?

This ties directly in to what I was trying to get at but failed. Regardless of the apparent use[less|ful]ness of Sacred Shield, Blizzard considers it one of the new Paladin healing tools. I haven't actually read the post GC refers to yet, but speaking in general of posts here, when you say "Holy still only has two heals! Fix please!" you will get ignored because Blizzard considers that flat incorrect. In their eyes there are five "healing spells" for Holy Paladins at level 80: FoL, HL, Holy Shock, Beacon of Light, and Sacred Shield.

Any post you make that does not behave as though that is the case, regardless of how useless you may feel those spells are, will simply be ignored as invalid. Saying "Change Holy's healing style after four years Blizz!" will only be greeted with "We gave you new tools, you figure out how to make a new style out of it instead of ignoring them."

So if you think the new tools should be ignored, that is what you need to explain. You can't just write them off as though they didn't exist. Avitus' post above with numbers as to why Sacred Shield isn't the answer is a good first start, I'd think, but it needs to be expanded upon and experimented with.

This is just my impression from reading the beta boards and seeing what gets good responses and what doesn't. IMHO, YMMV, etc.

I think with the HoT issue they're expecting all healing pallies to have the FOL glyph (even though they just nerfed it).

Exxeragation can be a good tool to get your point accross.

Yes, of course you can use cancelaura macro's to smoothen out the drawback of DP, however at times even stopping to regen for a couple of seconds could cause a wipe.
Holy priests used to cheat on the 5 second rule by canceling casts whenever out of 5 second rule and the tank is topped already at the last moment.
Similarly, we could '' cheat'' on Divine Plea to get some mana regen in.
Also, a very nice time to use Divine plea would be Gruul's ground slam MK2

The -100% healing done was applied to make it like it's original version:
Both with this -100% heal and with the channeled cast time healing is impossible, but the new version allows mobility and you're interrupt immune while DP'ing.

Paladin balance is very tricky, seeing holy is an entirely different class than ret and prot.
If this ability wouldn't have a drawback, it would be to powerful for holy.
If this ability would have a high cooldown and no drawback (so that it's good for holy), it would be to weak for prot and ret.

A nice solution would be removing the drawback, make the mana gained base mana rather than maximum and increase the duration.
This way, it will regen a lot of mana for prot/ret and decent for holy.

Sacred Shield is a good tool. But it plays to our strengths, not to our weaknesses. It's an ablative effect like a HoT when the target is taking consistent damage. For it to prevent damage, the target has to take damage twice within 6s. Barring some sort of continuous damage, that means it's going on the tank.

It is a pretty cool spell. But it's not like a HoT which you can use to top up DPS in addition to ablating tank damage, or heal one-time raidwide damage.

Look at Rasputin's edit to see why DP is retarded. Acceptable mechanics on DP cost is zero hindrance to any healing throughput.

The IoL nerf is because a holy can kite melee indefinitely in 2s with PoJ, JoJ and freedom. Basically meaning that druid+war will always lose to holy+war. But druids are better against casters being able to get out of LoS faster so I didn't see the issue there. Obviously they did. And it could have served to inject some casters into the bracket, right now melee is the obvious choice due to having unlimited resources.

That was a good post, GC's condescending bickering about his tone was laughable. People are pissed because there's nothing else they can do, they wrote up all that feedback and it was good for nothing. I don't know how she says they have 'many holy paladins,' the only swift changes I see to the spec are the obvious powerful abilities which become apparent in pvp.

EDIT: for DP, if they mean, as they say, for DP to be a 'choice you make' sort of speak - they have to add alternative ways to regen mana. If they say they 'if using DP wasn't a choice we would've doubled your mana' well, they didn't double mana instead of shadowfiend, innervate and mana tide. The spec needs vastly more regen than available currently for basic function. Just like ret did before JotW. So either DP is it and the have to make it so or DP remains a 'choice' and they add something else.

There is a 25 page official Holy Feedback thread in the beta forums. Countless threads about Holy have been posted in the weeks since our last Holy tree update of approximately a month ago. People are now posting their experiences in Naxxramas and heroics to try and persuade the devs that things are not fine.

Despite all that, we are not getting anywhere. No suggested change has been implemented, absolutely none at all.

So what kind of changes did we see? JoTP made to affect melee haste and set 1 min - no effect for Holy. DP more than doubled in duration and added 100% -healing. Beacon fixed to not double heal on its target, Sacred Shield made to scale - bugfix. The useless (PVE) Glyph of FoL made further useless by decreasing its power. Of course, the IoL change, which was one of the very few new talents that everyone in beta loved. Is there anything I missed? Possibly now the 4sec raidwide ICD on JoW, which still needs independent confirmation(?)

Despite the devs having had access to tons of suggestions, opinions and ideas, Holy has not changed whatsoever.

The sad thing is that with holy's plight the other two areas of the Paladin's roles will end up receiving less attention in future patchs as Blizzard is forced to keep going back to Holy due to perception (true or not) of the spec's shortcomings, much like Ret in TBC.

Protection seems to be missing that something that gives it a good argument to supplant the Warrior as the best MT. That is to say there doesn't seem to be a good reason for a Raid to take a Paladin MT if a Warrior is available. The same may be true with Druids (I don't know much about the class), but a Death Knight will be another story. Thanks mostly to the DK newness factor and the "way" they tank I can see them being given a few more chances then the more "established" tank classes.

Retribution has some serious concerns about their scalability with other plate wearing classes and may find their abilities being picked apart as a means to get people back in holy thanks to the fun Ret healer. Holy and Protection are both fairly boring trees with few WOW abilities like Retribution. In the case of Holy these buffs lack the "sexiness" of the solutions Retribution has in mana regeneration and healing. In WotLK we see JotW and SoL giving Ret a HoT, something Holy wants, and a very "fun" mana return mechanic. Meanwhile Holy is still a very vanilla spec that hasn't evolved that much from Vanilla WoW it just gotten more efficient at it. My fear is that unchained from a "boring" spec into a more interactive one Blizzard will have to push healers back Holy by turning the clock back to lolret.

On an aside, I've been curious as to is why they didn't put JotW in the holy tree to go along with the other judgment effects they had going. It makes a certain thematic sense considering the debuff JoL and JoW give is rarely assisting the Healing paladin. Yet it somewhat made sense with the addition of DP being the OoM button for Holydins, then the past two patches came about and things changed. DP is clearly a now a stronger Prot & Ret tool, allowing them to get back lost mana while keeping up the fight but hamstringing Healers to be a between phases tool. Yet with JotW I'm not sure why Ret would need DP in most cases so I'm left scratching my head. With GC most recent posts giving us very little if any insight as to the thought process of Blizzard development I'm quite concerned. All this doom and gloom will continue to taint the process until we are back to TBC levels of cynicism.

That's not all we lose. We also lose much if not all of the benefit from using Holy Light as an emergency burst heal with Divine Favour guaranteeing an Infusion. Let's assume for a second that we have 20% spell haste - not unreasonable in deep Holy, as haste is more common on gear and we get 10% just from Judging. That gives us the following:

DF+Holy Shock: 0s
GCD: 1.2s
HL13: 1.2s
Total cast time for HL: 2.4s

DF+HL13: 2s
Total cast time for HL: 2s

With nerfed Infusion we do get off a decent small heal right away, but that's counterbalanced by the Holy Light being a guaranteed crit. Total healing done will be roughly even, but DF+HL13 heals it faster, increasing HPS over the critical time. DF+HL13 also costs only 12.6% of base mana, compared with almost 40% of base mana for DF+HS/HL13.

Nerfing ret healing doesn't produce more healers speccing holy if holy still sucks. It produces more people speccing ret for damage or prot or people rerolling resto/priests. Which is why I never understood this line of thinking to encourage a spec.

That's not to say nobody will ever spec holy. A ton of people will spec it, just like there's a ton of people who spec 3/5 mace 2/5 swords, MS, and spam slam dual wielding krol blades all at the same time (yes I saw that, unfortunately, no armory link)

- Agreed, AoW FoL isn't Holy Shock. But with the buffed FoL scaling, AoW gives you a cheap instant heal hitting for 2.5k and the 15s counter means you can in fact save it. It may not be HS as far as on demand healing goes, but it certainly gets us partway back.

- Judgement! For example with SoCorruption: Unleashing this Seal's energy will deal [1 + 0.28*SPH + 0.175*AP]. Now admittedly this won't hit for as much as a Ret paladin's, but in T6 ret vs T6 holy gear + sheath you're looking at very similar pre-damage modifier values on the judgement (686 as Ret vs 585 as Holy) and we're only missing out on Holy Vengeance as far crit multipliers go - as such I've crit Judgment for 2800 with AW up and my HoW stil crits 70% of the time.

- fine, warlock teams split DPS. They'd be the exception, not the rule.

But seriously, we're not saying the fact deep ret is viable is a good thing. We're saying it's ridiculous when a healing class specs into it's solo DPS tree to heal better than a deep holy build.

Or a deep holy talent that exempts Flash of Light from the Divine Plea debuff.

Beacon of Light is going to be largely useless in Arenas because of how easy it is to dispell and how much mana it costs us to apply it. I see no reason to every waste mana on it against a team with an offensive dispeller. There really isn't any good reason that it is a magic buff.

Be that as it may, Blizzard has been quite clear that they think Holy is fine, and nerfing Ret to encourage deep Holy is the only solution they are willing to undertake at this stage. All other Holy feedback to date has been discarded as being "over the top," or "our numbers (which we won't show you) say differently." The catch-22 here is that without some explanation of testing methodology from Blizzard as to how they are reaching the conclusions they are, it is literally impossible to provide any feedback they would accept.

I'm not sure how you're reaching that conclusion. From a throughput perspective, an instant 4k crit shock plus an 8k HL 1.2 seconds later is far prefererable to a 12k crit HL in 1.67 seconds (assuming LG is up, 2.08 seconds otherwise) no matter how much more mana it sucked up. I'm not saying you had to recklessly drain your mana pool on shocks every cooldown, but if a tank is about to die, your mana situation has to take a backseat to keeping him alive lest the raid wipe. Now that tool is gone, and with it goes another emergency button.

Come on now, several classes have an arena build that doesn't go deeply into their healing tree. There's a lot more to healing in arenas than just output. A hybrid build makes a lot more sense in a fair bit of situations, and I'm not sure I'd say that a 35/36 build is something that's unintended for arenas.

A raid paladin gives up a lot of throughput to go that deeply into ret. Haste, beacon, the range of judgemnts, etc. But in arenas, honestly, the ability to heal when you need to + utility is a bit more. Is there some fundamental reason why a hybrid build is bad in this case for arenas? Six second holy shock alone is huge. 3 global cooldowns after using it, it's back up. And the truth is, I spend enough time hiding like a little girl behind pillars to be able to get some use out of DP every time the cooldown comes back up. Even if it's only for 5 or 6 seconds.

I'm disappointed that they didn't put a cooldown on IoL instead of weirding it up, but for pve we still have a decent build that I don't think requires a ret nerf to fix. And a Holy Light cast time of < 1 second is much more likely to get off than one that's twice that.

No one likes to be pigeonholed - but that's the way of it from the horses mouth - We're single target healers in raids, and in 5 mans we can spread out enough heals that its good enough to get the job done.

Thing about DP cost is it's beyond annoying in this iteration. A warrior bloodrage is excellent if you're for example up against a paladin/priest he starts a heal and you find yourself out of rage for pummel or that druid is getting away and you don't have enough for piercing howl/intercept. Bloodrage is off gcd so it's unparalleled in these situations where you need rage RIGHT NOW. DP should be the same, using DP at an inopportune time will cost you getting it burnt before you really need it. For pve it would become automatic yeah, but same with bloodrage, mana tide etc.