Firing off all those judgements certainly does blow a lot of GCDs, but if the nerf to JoW is real, there might be a lot less need to be judging every 20 seconds. At 1 judge/minute, JoP starts looking more attractive.

The JoW/JoL issue is probably a bug. I don't get the impression from the blue response that it was intended:
MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Judgement of Light/Wisdom internal cooldown

Though that is only my impression mind you.

It would be a pretty lame well to balance JoTP.

What about making judgment spells cause your next flash of light to be instant? Makes up for the time lost, but it would step on infusions toes quite a bit.

Honestly I'd say they need to either dump JotP or the GCD for the Judgments, I mean it makes little sense to have an ability that the mechanics behind it make it less effective. Perhaps it would be better if the Judgments allowed for the next spell to be instant cast? With the changes to IoL it seems Blizzard wants to get away from instant HL, so I dunno. Personally I keep coming back to the talk of a midrange heal and wonder if somehow the Judgment mechanics could somehow answer that need.

Also how are the Healing glyphs working out? Is FoL and HL useful or are you finding them lacking? It seems to me that because we have so few heals to begin with playing with either is kinda risky. Would a Holy shock version of either of them be a better alternative?

I don't entirely disagree, but we generally won't be chain-casting in raids anymore (FoLspam aside) - the 10% haste shouldn't be looked at at a throughput increaser, but as a reactivity improvement.

The healing glyphs are very disappointing. HL spalsh heal is pretty bad, and we can't turn 1 of our 3 heals into a crappy HoT. Normal flash is pretty much the only raid viable spell (holy light for bad situations, but not sustainable at all), with holy shock for group. The flash of light glyph almost is insulting, we know you want a HoT, you could have a HoT, but you can't have a hot.

Glyph of Holy Light could be pretty good, if the radius were only a little larger. 10 yards would be fantastic, but even 8 yards would make this one pretty top-shelf with intelligent group positioning. I'd also like to see the heal percentage bumped up to maybe 15-20%, but that would just be gravy on an otherwise good glyph.

Glyph of Flash of Light on the other hand is awful. It needs to be retuned to something like 80% of the healing up front, and then 100% of that as a HoT. Even that's pretty marginal, honestly. You could try to make the HoT applications "roll," but then some joker will probably sit in front of a boss for three hours building up the stack to six billion HP or so, which wouldn't be very cool with encounter design. I don't really know how to make this one really appealing without completely breaking it.

They HAD to put Judgements on the GCD because we lost a GCD once Judgements no longer ate the Seals.

A GCD-less Judgement would allow Ret to do something like a back-to-back-to-back AW + Judgement + Divine Storm that's synced with your white swing.

That being said, JOTP seems to be the perfect place to remove the GCD of Judgements, since the only instant you can combo it with would be Holy Shock if you're that deep into Holy.

I completely disagree that Judgement's GCD should be removed. As a general rule of thumb, all spells should have a GCD. The only exceptions are meta-spells which only affect other spells (old Judgement, Divine Favor, etc), and apparently pure reactive spells now (Kick, Counterspell). Judgement fits into neither of these categories.

As long as Judgement is on the GCD and we have to judge every 20 second the "big" deep holy talents are pretty terrible. They have to do one or the other.

What about JoP adding a heal? Your judgements heal the target's target, or up to five people standing around him, or something else that uses the GCD constructively without hurting throughput. Just trying to provide a counterexample.

Using the bugged boomkin exploit two nights ago, I was able to get into PVE raiding gear that was a majority mix of T7/7.5 (unenchanted). I currently sit at about 20k health and 21k mana raid buffed with ~40% crit rate. Given that this gear is the first tier of 3, I'd wager that we're in for quite a few nerfs coming over the course of WOTLK. Our healing throughput scales directly with the amount of damage a boss is going to be doing on our target.

The best example of this was healing the MC targets on Rezuvious(sp?). Every other holy light was a bomb 15k crit and this caused the glyph proc to heal all melee around for a bare minimum of 1.5k. My healing throughput for that fight, sustained, was 10.5k HPS and while I had to stop every so often for DP, the insane crit rate (with garbage gems btw) made mana depletion manageable. Our raid makeup wasn't remotely ideal for mana return, but I was able to sustain 75% healing up time on that specific fight.

The story continued on the same path for tank healing on trash. Again, via proxy, the more damage the tank took the more healing I was doing to him, OT and melee forcing our priest to /follow and keep renews and pom up but nothing more. The highlight of the night was being able to keep both the MT and OT alive on patchwerk nearly by myself, again through those bomb heals and adversely, in this case, forcing melee to disengage and take a slime bath every so often.

On most boss fights, when I wasn't showboating, I could maintain our T7 geared tank's health with mainly flash of light and holy shock, and my mana never dipped below 70%.

Now Nax doesn't particularly have AOE damage fights, movement, or complicated platforming outside of a few specific encounters, so the straight Tank-and-Spank style lends itself heavily to our form of healing. However, thinking back to the sheer difference between T4 and T6, and extrapolating that to the difference between T7 and T10, I'm almost giddy at the sheer throughput we might potentially sustain.

On the downside, healing as a paladin is eerily similar to dpsing on a warlock in that its fairly easy and banal. Most of the time I tossed Sacred Shield around just to have something to do other then single heal the MT. If the tank happens to be particularly geared, this translates into casting flashes around the raid at a rate of about one every several seconds just to keep the crit buff up for mages.

Integrate JotP with BoL, have Beacon heal the beaconed target for the damage of your judgements.

I think the current incarnation of JotP is fine.

If you're judging every 20 seconds, that means that there's some value to 100% judgement uptime. That suggests that you'd judge every 20 seconds WITHOUT the talent. In that case, you really gain 10% haste as advertised.

If 100% judgement uptime is not important, then it's acceptable to maximize your haste gain by judging once every minute. With the old 30 seconds, this was a net 5% haste gain if the judgement was useless. (10% haste -> 33 seconds of cast time. -1.5 seconds for the Judgement leaves 31.5 seconds of effective cast time -> 5% effective haste)
With 1 minute, this is a net 7.5% haste gain. (10% haste -> 66 seconds of cast time, 64.5 seconds -> 7.5% effective haste)


It does look like 100% JoW uptime has been greatly devalued, though. (5% base mana -> 5 procs of 2% total mana for the whole raid instead of each raid member)

Does JoL work like JoW now? If it still works like it used to, JoL is a useful "heal" for the GCD.


edit: That said, if JotP still needs to be made more attractive, I think it should reduce the GCD of Judgements. That would up the effective haste contribution of JotP to be closer to 10%.

I'm going to look at it from the perspective of Sunwell raiding, since that's this board's audience. JoW or JoL is worth the GCD but say on Brutallus, it's incredibly risky. Before my guild added a ret paladin, I would bring imp. Seal of the Crusader to the raid. Only took a single death before one throws out all the value and says f that healing is more important.

The overall issue with JoTP is haste itself is no longer an interesting stat for paladins. I stacked the heck out of it in Sunwell, but with the downranking nerf it's just as valuable as it could be. So while it may be 7.5% haste gain, it's no where near a 7.5% increase in healing.

Is JoL healing good? It doesn't hurt. But it's so unreliable and it only hits dps classes that you're AE healers won't see any reduction in their workload as a result. The only one that is important to keep up for PVE is JoW, and really that only applies to raids where in 5 mans people just med up after. If you have a ret paladin, they'll keep up JoW and for most fights you'll end up judging once a minute. If you're alone you're keeping it up full time because of the 3% crit as well.

If nothing else is done to it though, I'd agree removing the GCD would make it a more attractive ability.

Edit: Has anyone figured out an application for sacred cleansing yet? JoTP one can at least argue it's value but I see that as being another purifying power.

I think the issue is that judging is inherently useful to a Ret or Prot paladin, but not to a Holy paladin. JotP is a nice sweetener for judging once a minute, but no more than that. Basically a Holy paladin has to sacrifice the utility of his judgements, or sacrifice healing time. If the rest of the deep Holy tree was appealing anyway, this wouldn't matter much. But as it is, this is another drawback to something that's already not appealing to many players.

I don't PvP much, but a 30% chance to get 30% resistance really just sounds far too chancy to be worthwhile.

Thanks for the post, it is nice to see some positive information. Paladin healing is like pre-3.0 Warlock playing, however with two buttons instead of one. Post-3.0 Warlocks of every spec have more spells to use, and Beacon could be that spell if only it was changed.

If you are bored, at least post 3.0 you could add some noticeable dps, Holy Shock/Judgement do pretty good damage.

I do. I played around with a BoL PvP build on the 3.0 test server, and picked it up (dropping JotP, which I find to be less PvPish). Simply, if I was going as deep Holy as BoL for PvP, I would definitely get it. You cleanse a LOT in open PvP and it ends up proccing more often than not each time you cleanse-spam somebody. And it has a cute little animation.

I didn't feel BoL was part of an optimal PvP-heal build pre-IoL nerf however, and it's definitely not worthwhile now. So no, spend your points elsewhere. Like, you know, in Ret.

(Edit for early morning grammar.)

I havn't been able to find an answer to this anywhere: Does Hand of Sacrifice work pre or post mitigation?

Suspecting it's pre, since it might be too strong otherwise, and I seem to remember that BoSacr works this way.

It could be neat to steal some tank damage for heal->mana in raids, or scaling up HL by casting Beacon on yourself and healing the tank with Sacrifice. But if you increase total damage by doing this, it may not be a good idea.

The current BoSac is post mitigation actually, and because of that actually somewhat useful. I haven't actually tested Hand of Sacrifice yet as I keep forgetting about it, but I don't think it changed to being pre-mitigation now. It's got a much longer cooldown and shorter duration now, which should compensate it's relative power.

I _think_ that the mage talent arcane absorption (the one that gave you spellpower for damage absorbed through shields) rolled but individually. Each aplication would stack with the next but it would then expire bit by bit as you stopped absorbing. A similar aplication to FoL glyph would make it so we could keep a decent HPS hot as well as the Flash spam on one target, if you heal something else for each heal you dont send to the MT his HoT decreases (due to stacking mechanics) and the effect would then stack well with haste, something that is always a plus on abilities.

I think the radius is so small because they don't want you to heal the melee when healing the tanks.
Glyph of FoL on the other hand I really don't understand it's purpose. I can only see it good for ret, but in that case it's a very wierd choice considering the way it interacts with sheol.