You can just look at Sunwell. On Kalecgos, you might be able to squeeze a few ticks while you run to a portal or some such, but I'm pretty sure most guilds attach paladins to follow tanks, so you are constantly healing them, and if not there are always plenty of other people to heal. On Brut, you'll never get to use it. On Felmyst, you could do it during the breath phase fine, except that you don't need it there because even spamming HL the entire ground phase, I go back to full mana during breaths because of SA and spriest. But still, it would work here. On Twins, you have no down time, so you can't really use it. On M'uru you might get a few ticks between sentinels if healing that, or on the sides between waves. You'd never get a full one off. And on KJ, you could maybe get a few seconds here and there during a bubble or something, but there is so much damage being flung around here you really need to be healing most of the time.

So yeah, in all of Sunwell, you can reliably use it on one fight, and maybe get occasional ticks on others. That doesn't seem particularly amazing.

After reading the notes from the last patch and perusing GC's comments on the paladin board, I've been wracking my brain, trying to figure out what perspective makes her comments make sense. Sure, she can get stuff wrong sometimes, but she's certainly not stupid. Rather than just grousing about the unfairness of it, I thought it might help if I could deduce WHY GC/Blizz think holy pallies are all that and a bag of chips.

I'm not in the Beta, but I've done some poking about and I've got an idea, just looking at PvE. Blizzard has said a number of times that mana management will be a much bigger deal in WotLK than it was in BC. Replenishment is pretty meh, potion sickness, priests are crying over how their mana regen was nerfed, etc. One thing no one talks about is holy pally mana efficiency.

We're all thinking about healing from the context of throughput as being the pinnacle of healing value. But what if Blizz intends to squash mana recovery so hard that mana management will be the new most important thing?

If Blizz thinks holy pally mana efficiency is vastly superior to that of the other healing classes, in the context of that strength being more valuable in WotLK than it was in BC, it would go a long way towards explaining a lot of their actions and comments which otherwise seemed downright asinine. "Pallies are awesome healers"???? Well, perhaps if you viewed them solely from the context of the amount of health they can heal from a single mana bar, perhaps that's true.

If pallies are already super efficient (relatively) Blizzard doesn't want to make them any more so by making DP actually useful except in a total dire emergency (or in PvP after you've been mana burned down to nothing). And if the rumored nerf to JofWisdom is true (which would be brutal), that's not so much a nerf to paladins as a massive nerf to mana regeneration to dps everywhere.

Taken from this context, perhaps Blizz feels that holy pallies's total lack of healing flexibility is actually a reasonable price to pay for their ability to stand in and heal seemingly forever compared with other classes. GC commented that every healing class thinks its the worst. Browsing the forums, this simply ain't so. There's no WAY priests and shamans are upset about changes to their healing like paladins are. Druids aren't as sad as we are, but they're also not exactly happy. However, that doesn't necessarily make GC wrong. If you go through the boards, the big (perhaps only) thing priest and shammy healers are upset about (and druids especially) is running out of mana. Perhaps GC knows that their mana travails are simply going to get worse, and holy pallies will look good by comparison.

I'm starting to look at the various healing classes and talents to see how well this holds up, but I'm generally a tank not a healer, and I'm not in beta, so if anyone has data like this handy, it would save me a bunch of time.

Edit: clarity

I'm utterly flabbergasted at these changes. It's almost like the person responsible for paladins went to get a sandwich and the druid dev ran over and mucked about with their stuff.

I'll hold my bile until I see how things are at release, but this is a very depressing road to be going down. Like so many others, I was looking forward to playing holy again. Oh well, I've been having a hoot with ret so far and still love my class, I just for sorry for everyone whose guild leadership will force them into the TBC heal-bot position again without understanding the new (current) mechanics.

Dare we say Plea is the new Hammer of Wrath?

Unless some horrible scaling issue turns up, if they don't touch Ret for a while they'll be doing us a favor. It's fine, don't touch it "please".



That said, regarding this holy mess we're in, people on Beta should send feedback regarding all the holy nerfs and hopefully it will get reverted. That's the best we can hope for at the moment.

Lost in all of the horrible Holy nerfs is a huge nerf to retribution and protection paladins.

According to the parse provided earlier JoW has a buff unique cooldown. So it will proc no more than once per 4 seconds. This cooldown used to be per player, cutting its raid effectiveness by 90% or more in a 25 man.

Can someone with beta access please [BUG] this and see if it is intended?

This changes all theorycraft for every dps with a mana bar by a substantial portion, as well as greatly diminishing the raid utility of protection and retribution paladins.

Done.

Divine Plea really just needs a single change so it stays usable for all Paladin specs without giving a really high amount of regen to Holy Paladins. It just needs to provide some (balanced) amount of mana immediately upon clicking the ability, and then regenerate the rest over the current 15 second duration. 10% mana instantly, the remaining 15% over the 15 second duration, regenerating 1% every second so that you don't have to wait for ticks. Numbers here aren't perfect, but seemed in-line with what other classes get as mana regeneration abilities. It also allows some extra functionality for the ability for Ret and Prot as it gives you a quick immediate burst of mana when you've run dry.

It even makes it more analogous to Bloodrage, which it was compared to by Ghostcrawler before.

I'd comment on the other matters for Holy Paladins, but I think other people covered that well enough. Divine Plea just seemed to me like it needed a minor tweak to turn it from "Meh" to "Usable".

If Wrathblood is right (and explanation is quite reasonable), then I could understand GC saying that palas are good healers. However this should imply, that they will actually design the encounters around very wise usage of mana. That is not the case in the first tier so far.

To explain Wrath's point just imagine that you could spend only and purely 4 mana bars during the encounters. Paladins, who have the most effective heals, will shine.

The short of what you are saying is that because flash of light is efficient, we should have nothing else and continue to be flash turrets from now until forever. I would really hope that isn't their ultimate design decision.

How's this: 10% on use straight up and then the DP buff is 5 charges 3% each over 15 seconds, each heal cast dispels a charge.

Of course that is what they are trying to do with us. But it's not working properly.

Lack of AE heal makes us struggle at such encounters and the absurd difference between the FoL and HL mana cost leads to greatly varying numbers as far as mana consumption goes and/or healing output goes. To simply say that this is going to be a class-defining difference greatly misses the point: we are not competitive healers in PVE under these circumstances.

Could you guys describe some WotLK encounters that you're struggling with as a Holy paladin? Specifics are very helpful to back up your points.

Uhh... third boss of Nexus. Caster chick, splits into 3 copies of herself at 50%. Can't remember her name for the life of me.

Anyway, that fight is incredibly hectic because of her abilities. The major one is that she uses in Phase 1 picks everyone up and throws them around the room, damaging everyone in the process. With IoL and BoL it actually wasn't too terrible to deal with; BoL the tank and HS/insta HL the group to keep people up. Now as a Sunwell level holy paladin I am having trouble with this fight, as once I use that HS I'm stuck twiddling my thumbs while everyone takes damage because I can't cast.

The final boss of Nexus is bad too. Requiring everyone to move or take damage cripples a Holy Paladin, as we either trade damage on ourselves for the party or only heal every 6 seconds. With a smart, well geared group it isn't terrible, but with the average WoW populace's skill it will be a major problem.


From what I've heard of Naxx Patchwerk is nigh impossible for a Holy Pally, as the Hatefuls come so quickly and hit for so much you're stuck spamming Holy Light, which we can't maintain without strong regen (and Divine Plea just doesn't cut it).

Apparently, Maexxna and Sapph (among others) make Holy healing a living hell.
For Blizz defense, the feedback on "How we are actually doing in game" is close to zero. The so called "Holy tree feedback thread" is filled up with comments about how such ability could or could not be usefull in theory, but those comments lack the "in game" perspective , and after all it's the only thing that matters.

I agree with Avitus: please people lucky enough to be on Beta, try to provide more in game feedback on how we are doing, especially against heavy Aoe and mobility encounters, we don't have much time left.

2v2, 3v3 arena. Mana drains are complete and total hard counters to deep holy specs.

The Void Walker in Heroic Violet Hold (when 4 manning the zone, shows how quickly ae stress burns our mana)

The Mage Fight in Heroic Occulus.

The last 2 heroics are definitely doable, but damn hard. I enjoy a challenge but they do show flaws with our class.

Extrapolating Sunwell Fights to WoTLK, since the only mechanic change we have for PVE healing is Beacon of Light. I can't imagine once we hit Icecrown any guild bringing in more than 1.

What can the paladin do for all these scenarios? Flash of Light. Nothing has changed about that.

Mana is a pretty large issue on fights like Patchwerk, and the new Divine Plea really hurts. The 50% seemed excessively harsh with the new 15 second duration, 100% with 0 healing for the MT healer...no bueno. The mana issue comes from Holy Light having an insane mana cost, the reason we downranked as much as we did was a) max rank Holy lights overheal so much all that power is pretty worthless, and b) mana costs. The downranking nerf essentially took another heal from our arsenal.

Frankly the reason I enjoy speccing deep into ret is it breaks up the monotony and allows for the excessively high mana costs of shock and light to be usable. I get to judge every 8 seconds, and with the extra mana I can throw out a holy shock, maybe a holy light. Deep Holy is pure Flash of Light spam. Things like JoTP feed our overheal and cause us to go oom, it's a neat talent once we reach mobs that require spam healing but that is simply not a viable method of healing anymore.

To keep up my HL R8 spam on live, I use mana pots every 2 minutes, drums of restoration, shadow priests, alchemist stone, oils, flasks, etc. Divine Plea was going to be the welcome addition that prevented me from using 20 gold a run on consumables. The only time I ever can afford to use R11 is when the tank is about to die, or say Entropus where going oom in a minute doesn't matter.

I'd scroll up to see why Sacred Shield is just a mediocre ability, and definitely not something that can be relied upon during the 15 seconds of doing nothing while using Divine Plea.

Regarding the latest patch, I see this outrage stemming from infusion seemed to be the 1 cool new mechanic we were getting. Of course it seems OP in PVP to shock and then heal someone to full, but it was finally something different in PVE.

Edit: Maexxna is another nice example. The enrage portion is insane, overall the healing is easy for that fight, but we've had runs where I was doing 90% overheal up until the tank dies. Flat out spamming Holy Light, and he gibs. Bring in a resto druid and his health stays smooth and high, zero difficulty. I wish I still had the WWS from that run because it was remarkable. I literally did twice the amount of single target healing that Maexxna did damage and the tank still was gibbed.

Double Edit: Here is the thing, I like difficult ae encounters. I found healing in HMgT to be stressful on certain boss fights, but it felt good to win. What bothers me most is when I'm asked to log onto a priest or shaman for X Y Z fight. As it stands even if I leveled my Paladin in WoTLK, I'm going to be leveling my priest for when my guild needs raid healing.

If they insist on the DP 'cost' being significant, I'd like to a mechanism similar to the DK snare (reduces movements speed to zero, slowly goes back to normal). In other words we cast Divine Plea, our effective healing drops to zero and then slowly comes back over the 15 seconds. I think it keeps the 'flavor' they seem to like but makes it so we could actually heal through the downside without simply canceling the buff.

I don't think it's entirely fair to compare Divine Plea against Evocation (etc...), note that it's less effective than the others and say that Paladins are disadvantaged by the new skill since the other classes already have their regen mechanic and Paladins are gaining one. That's still a clear buff whatever the drawbacks.

I haven't been able to find a stat value analysis for holy paladins in wrath yet. Since it seems like healing endurance is going to be a major issue for us in 3.0, has anyone really taken a look at the value of stats for mana regen, taking replenishment into account, before I go and duplicate someone's efforts?

It looks to me for pure mana regeneration purposes, assuming you have replenishment active all the time, that if you have kings and divine intellect a 10 int gem will yield more mana regeneration than a 4 mp5 gem, completely discounting the other value int provides.

Is it possible we may see paladins begin stacking int?

It's a clear buff to Ret and Prot.

You simply cannot use it in a 10 man. By their own admission we're the MT healers. How can we give up 15 seconds of healing on the MT? What fight could we get away with that. The issue Holy Paladins have is we need mana, but if Paladins theoretically have Divine Plea we won't be given any new tools for it.

TBH with JoTW and Blessing of Sanctuary, I'd just drop the ability and lower mana costs for holy shock a little bit and Holy Light a lot. Another ability that could use a mana reduction is Beacon of Light considering how situational it currently is. The mana cost is prohibiting it from being as useful as it should be in group healing scenarios.

Edit:
Just scrolled up and saw someone else beat me to it. I really hope they do, DP is not a fun ability at all, it's pure hassle for holy.

This was brought up already, maybe a hundred pages back. Int is the best stat for regen. It doesn't mean mp5 is bad, it's just bad on an item that doesn't have int due to how ilvl budgeting works.

Yeah, I guess my question is whether people who are actively playing in the beta think it's likely we'll need to start gearing with mana regeneration as our primary consideration come 3.0, and whether that might be via a lot more int in the future. My guild is hoping to continue raiding when 3.0 comes out, assuming it's even possible. I'll go see if I can find that old post--I've been trying to avoid all the ups and downs of beta changes until patch 3.0 is looming, which it seems to be now.

Thanks, I did some looking before I posted but didn't find it. WTB thread index, PST.

Thought of another example of a fight where I had trouble with my assignment.

25 man 4 horsemen.

I was assigned to healing the second tank in the front and it was him and I. He was tanking an insane amount amount of damage, and I was forced to move every 3 of the debuff with the tank and stand on top of him. Required essentially spam healing, but it was the transition that proved fatal. He got hit and it dropped him pretty low, so I had to cast a holy light. In the quick time frame he was meteored and 1 shotted because I couldn't keep up with him.

This was before the infusion nerf, so I imagine it's not even worse. (Used LOH on the previous transition)

We ended up winning the next run when we assigned some extra dps to stay on top of the tank and absorb some of that damage, so it's something that can be managed.