I agree with the recent posters. Deep Ret may look more "sexy", but in the end if you are serious about healing in PvE you will do a 51/x/x build. PvP builds aren't set in stone.
Holy Shock is too good to miss and if you don't yet know why, ask a good Resto Shaman why they use Lesser Healing Wave.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
I wasn't trying to say holy is good; ret tools nerfed or moved deeper I don't think there's other choice than holy. Certainly there's still viable stuff there and people will spec it, but I just don't see it pulling ahead.
Holy is pretty bad and the new kings situation it's just down to /roll to who has to spec for it any given raid. Which is to say it's completely retarded. Kings is a pure raid buff doesn't make any sense as a talent. Its position confuses fresh players too, it's not even a good buff until at least 60+.
Holy Shock might not be necessary for all situations in raid healing, but it's very useful on certain fights like loatheb. The place I find I need the extra burst is the occasional heroic.
But regarding beacon, the issue I have with it that makes it nice but only a boost and not amazing is you can't guarantee the healing to the secondary target. Even in 10 man scenarios you can't keep up the main tank and offtank, you just help out significantly on the offtank. You haven't reduced the fact that the other tank still requires a healer on him.
In the use of putting it on the main tank and not the offtank, there is no way you can reliably ensure he'll get the heals he needs when raid healing. Basically Paladins will place exactly the same, but beacon can be viewed as a powerful hot on a 2nd target.
If you have it on MT you are sure every ninja heal you do won't kill him. In 10 man the beol is great, reduced effectiveness in 25 but still a nice skill. And it's new, offers stuff to explore, not a boring mana cost reduction.
But regarding beacon, the issue I have with it that makes it nice but only a boost and not amazing is you can't guarantee the healing to the secondary target. Even in 10 man scenarios you can't keep up the main tank and offtank, you just help out significantly on the offtank. You haven't reduced the fact that the other tank still requires a healer on him.
Bacon doesn't need to obsolete a 2nd healer in dual-tank scenarios to be useful though. In fact, I'd go so far as to call that too powerful. The mana cost is a bit excessive, but if you land even 1 Holy Light that heals both people for the full amount during that minute you've made up the cost right there. Anything more than that is gravy (and if you actually use it I assume you'll be healing a lot more than just that). I don't claim it's perfect, especially for PvP as it puts a huge DISPEL ME sign on your target, but it does have a lot of potential.
Compare it to druids keeping HoTs active on the 2nd tank. In both cases you add a buffer to the 2nd person. The main difference is we only have to cast something on the secondary target once per minute where they're averaging one cast every 7 seconds or so.
Holy shock actually is a required spell for tank healing, in my opinion. It currently absolutely is not possible to holy light spam in any form and even keeping up Light's Grace is slightly problematic. My current holy crit rate borders around 40%, and holy shock 50% (with tier bonus). At that level, spam flashing becomes quite viable with a HS thrown in on the off chance the tank takes a big hit and you land a dud of a flash. Couple this with the haste trinket off of Maex 10 man (which seems to proc more as of last build-anecdotal), I was able to get away with FoL, HS, DS and BoL rotation on patchwerk on single healing the hateful tank and having my heals replicate on the MT.
Don't underestimate what a 51% crit rate on a spell means. At this level, IoL starts becoming quite useful and you see synergy emerge between FoL, DivShield, HS and IoL proc'd Holy Light..if the haste trinket procs, (and it does a bit), even better.
Its also helpful to get used to the idea of HS, especially on an encounter like Meaxxna (sp?) where you get a potential nice heal right out right after a web, and as someone mentioned earlier- Loetheb.
A mechanic change I'd like to see would be BoL being castable on multiple targets with maybe a decay factor introduced after the first one.
I'd also really like to see either a PoM type single target spell or some sort of HoT mechanic introduced to holy. While our stand still throughput in healing is extraordinary (I averaged 4khps minimum for all of nax10). Our skins were still saved by Guardian Spirit on fights like Grobbulus and Anub'Rekhan (especially before our tank got geared) where I was moving and could ONLY spam HS. While nax for the most part is very tame as far as raid movement goes, especially compared to Sunwell, it still highlights a gaping hole in our toolbox. One that I'm sure Arena paladins can attest too.
*Our 10 man healing group consists of : Resto druid, holy paladin, Holy Priest
Bacon doesn't need to obsolete a 2nd healer in dual-tank scenarios to be useful though. In fact, I'd go so far as to call that too powerful. The mana cost is a bit excessive, but if you land even 1 Holy Light that heals both people for the full amount during that minute you've made up the cost right there. Anything more than that is gravy (and if you actually use it I assume you'll be healing a lot more than just that). I don't claim it's perfect, especially for PvP as it puts a huge DISPEL ME sign on your target, but it does have a lot of potential.
Compare it to druids keeping HoTs active on the 2nd tank. In both cases you add a buffer to the 2nd person. The main difference is we only have to cast something on the secondary target once per minute where they're averaging one cast every 7 seconds or so.
Oh I agree, I'm didn't mean to imply that it should negate a 2nd healer. It's a great way to get heals onto a second target especially in double tank scenarios. What I was trying to get across is that it doesn't solve our AE problems, and that it's true strength is only in double tank scenarios where it acts like an incredibly powerful hot on the 2nd target. It's usefulness drops quite a bit in single tank encounters.
The problem with beacon as I see it is that it is static once placed. You can't move it around to decide who gets the healing, reacting to changes in the fight to squeeze effective healing out of the spell. You set it and then leave it alone. The only type of damage that works against is consistent damage over a period of time. The only people who take that sort of damage in the quantities the spell heals for are tanks. This means that Beacon is only truly useful when healing a second tank. In other situations it will likely overheal for such a large amount as to make it questionable whether it's worth the mana, or simply not be on the right target at the right time. Perhaps Blizzard intends the spell to be situationally useful such that it only really shines in situations in which two people are taking large amounts of consistent damage and to be far less useful in other times. The only issue I see with that is that the spell is partially billed as being a solution to Holy Paladin healing issues regarding AE damage. This is only true when you are one of very few healers; ie 5 mans and some encounters in 10 mans. In 25 mans you will never see this side of the spell being used, making it a very situational tool.
Now as I've said elsewhere, for the single talent point it's certainly worthwhile to pick up Beacon once you're at 50 into Holy, despite its drawbacks. So I continue to see the problem in the Tier 9 and 10 talents. Trying to put points into Holy to reach it, I get to 43 points in without too much issue and I'm now stuck with either Enlightened Judgements and JotP, or buying a bunch of mediocre lower level talents to get to 50 points. Perhaps I'm being reactionary, but I still feel like JotP is boring and of middling power for its place in the tree, so it hurts to have to slap points into those Judgement talents for it. Of course once you're 43 into Holy you're going to finish it because the good Ret talents stop at 18 and don't pick up again until 30+. So I see the issue that you can get mid-deep into Holy without much issue, and then you're forced to take distasteful talents in order to get to the single remaining decent Holy talent, because there's not much else out there to get at that point.
That's not how I'm reading it, or how I'm seeing the tree. What I'm seeing is this (and no personal insults are intended to anyone): I'm seeing a bunch of people who really want to spec Ret, but told their guilds they'd stay healers. I'm seeing a bunch of people who really want to do DPS, who want to have the neat DPS talents in Ret, and are trying to justify taking them.
You're exactly right, but for the wrong reasons. People want to spec Ret because Ret has two tools Holy really needs: active mana regen (without retarded penalties, although admittedly the one we do have is finally getting some love) and a heal-over-time. Holy gives you some more crit, situational cast-time reductions in Holy Light, a questionable amount of haste, and a questionable multi-target healing buff... really not a whole lot of discernable value past 31 points. Bonus: by speccing Ret, you also get to do some damage on your own without needing to respec or carry around a warrior in your back pocket. I know this has already been discussed to death, so suffice it to say that if Blizzard does indeed come through with yet another Seal/Judgement damage nerf as anticipated, Holy will be in really terrible shape for soloing.
Originally Posted by burghy
If you have it on MT you are sure every ninja heal you do won't kill him. In 10 man the beol is great, reduced effectiveness in 25 but still a nice skill. And it's new, offers stuff to explore, not a boring mana cost reduction.
Incorrect, no such guarantee exists. It will still be quite possible to kill your tank by trying to snipe someone else's assignments. Beacon only heals its target for the effective amount you heal on someone else, and is itself quite prone to overheal. If your tank is down 15k and you're busy trying to snipe a 1.5k heal on a DPS, it doesn't matter that you crit him for 20k, your tank still only gets the 1.5k. Because of this, no serious raid is ever going to tell (or allow) a paladin to rely on Beacon for MT healing while he does a poor impression of a rolling Lifebloom stack.
Originally Posted by Tilted
Compare it to druids keeping HoTs active on the 2nd tank. In both cases you add a buffer to the 2nd person. The main difference is we only have to cast something on the secondary target once per minute where they're averaging one cast every 7 seconds or so.
Except that a druid can actually afford to do this thanks to their arsenal of HoTs, and are completely unbound by the restrictions of effective healing on both targets. Additionally, said HoTs persist for the full duration even if the casting druid himself is incapacitated or silenced; Beacon requires the casting paladin to keep healing to be at all useful.
The Holy tree still remains pretty pretty godawful past Holy Shock, and the entire paladin healing paradigm is both limited and boring, a realization I think Blizzard is finally coming to (q.v. Ghostcrawler's recent posts). Hopefully they can come up with something good soon, because no one really wants to see a repeat of "lolret" in any paladin talent tree.
Well, so far people who did naxx in decent groups report here that Pala healing is the strongest of all healing classes and the most boring one. So no, no one will say lolholy. But it doesn't change the fact that it's boring.
Incorrect, no such guarantee exists. It will still be quite possible to kill your tank by trying to snipe someone else's assignments. Beacon only heals its target for the effective amount you heal on someone else, and is itself quite prone to overheal. If your tank is down 15k and you're busy trying to snipe a 1.5k heal on a DPS, it doesn't matter that you crit him for 20k, your tank still only gets the 1.5k. Because of this, no serious raid is ever going to tell (or allow) a paladin to rely on Beacon for MT healing while he does a poor impression of a rolling Lifebloom stack.
If your tank is down 15k and you snipe 1.5k on a dps you are dumb. I know perfectly how BeoL works and I don't understand why people only look for edge situations ignoring the normal ones.
They could have alleviated the boredom problem by making sacred shield a less ackward mechanic, thus giving another proper tool.
Incorrect, no such guarantee exists. It will still be quite possible to kill your tank by trying to snipe someone else's assignments. Beacon only heals its target for the effective amount you heal on someone else, and is itself quite prone to overheal. If your tank is down 15k and you're busy trying to snipe a 1.5k heal on a DPS, it doesn't matter that you crit him for 20k, your tank still only gets the 1.5k. Because of this, no serious raid is ever going to tell (or allow) a paladin to rely on Beacon for MT healing while he does a poor impression of a rolling Lifebloom stack.
If your target is down 15k it's on you to heal the right person. As much as I'd love for Bacon to account for overheal, the current incarnation actually requires thought, which is a plus in my book. Others have alluded to wanting something that distinguishes good from bad in the world of Holy pallies, and this certainly fits the bill.
In regards to "sniping" someone's assignment, this is a new tool that raid leaders should adapt to. If there's a ton of AoE damage and the paladin can keep up the MT while helping the other healers top of the raid, more power too 'em. If during the process the MT spikes dangerously low, just switch back to healing him until he's topped off again. This isn't relying on the talent, it's squeezing out more effectiveness because of it.
Except that a druid can actually afford to do this thanks to their arsenal of HoTs, and are completely unbound by the restrictions of effective healing on both targets. Additionally, said HoTs persist for the full duration even if the casting druid himself is incapacitated or silenced; Beacon requires the casting paladin to keep healing to be at all useful.
This is a bit of a straw man argument. Nobody mentioned silence, and that's an obvious weakness to all healers (it's even worse for druids who get silenced without HoTs active since they only have NS+HT to react with on a 3 minute cooldown, so it goes both ways). The biggest difference between the two classes is a druid cannot maintain maximum throughput on any target if his attention is divided amongst others. Again, I'm not saying the talent is perfect, but if we're going to make comparisons we need to at least be fair about it.
The Holy tree still remains pretty pretty godawful past Holy Shock, and the entire paladin healing paradigm is both limited and boring, a realization I think Blizzard is finally coming to (q.v. Ghostcrawler's recent posts). Hopefully they can come up with something good soon, because no one really wants to see a repeat of "lolret" in any paladin talent tree.
The problem right now is HS and BoL are too gimicy. They're situationally awesome. On the fights they're great, they're great. On the fights they're not, jotw/sheathspec is better.
Easiest solution is to combine enlightened judgements and judgements of the pure into a single 5 -point talent that increases the range of your judgments by 4 per rank, 1% hit per rank, and restores 2 mana (tweak as needed) to paladin anytime someone in your raid procs JoW per rank. Less effective then jotw, but you don't have to give up a gcd every 8~20 seconds to make it worthless.
Make sacred cleansing give a 33/66/100% chance for your holy shock to proc cleanse. Add a new 3 point talent in place of enlightened judgements that increases the amount your spell power affects holy shock/holy light/flash of light by 6/12/25% or whatever the relevant coefficients are to make it trump sheath.
Then the fact of the matter is we still have no AE healing solution. What they should do is just make it work in reverse. Whenever you heal the beacon target, it heals a nearby damaged ally for X amount. Would work much more effectively now that CoH is a smart heal as well.
Bam, suddenly deep holy is damn sexy. No longer do we have 10 filler talents (seriously wtf?) between IoL and Bacon. Bacon is now no longer situationally awesome but pretty much always awesome.
Easiest solution is to combine enlightened judgements and judgements of the pure into a single 5 -point talent that increases the range of your judgments by 4 per rank, 1% hit per rank, and restores 2 mana (tweak as needed) to paladin anytime someone in your raid procs JoW per rank. Less effective then jotw, but you don't have to give up a gcd every 8~20 seconds to make it worthless.
Make sacred cleansing give a 33/66/100% chance for your holy shock to proc cleanse. Add a new 3 point talent in place of enlightened judgements that increases the amount your spell power affects holy shock/holy light/flash of light by 6/12/25% or whatever the relevant coefficients are to make it trump sheath.
Then the fact of the matter is we still have no AE healing solution. What they should do is just make it work in reverse. Whenever you heal the beacon target, it heals a nearby damaged ally for X amount. Would work much more effectively now that CoH is a smart heal as well.
The judgment part would definitely be good, seems strange spending 7 deep holy talents on judgments. I'd definitely prefer the new beacon to the old beacon, it doesn't change anything with us being boring but it would help AE. Perhaps the extra cleansing effect on Holy Shock could ignore magic? I'm not sure I like the idea of UA locks fearing us to the point where we need the instant heal and then we're silenced. Either way I really hope they do something to sacred cleansing, I'm not sure that this would work though.
Corronach: Another option would be to have HS remove, rather than dispel, the effect.
Re: the 'Holy just want to be Ret' discussion, I emphatically disagree with this. I want to heal, and be good at it. I also want to be level 80 as soon as possible, and if I can heal 90% as well as deep Holy (IMO, a low estimate) with mostly Ret talents, and level 50% faster, which should I pick?
Out of curiosity, can lvl80 Tanks tell us what kind of numbers they have for Stamina?
T
Then the fact of the matter is we still have no AE healing solution. What they should do is just make it work in reverse. Whenever you heal the beacon target, it heals a nearby damaged ally for X amount. Would work much more effectively now that CoH is a smart heal as well.
But that would be even more boring. Most of the time you'll have it on mt and heal the melees.
You already have coh, wild growth and somehow chain heal doing that, without the restriction to chose a target ahead of time.
Why this hunt for efficient solutions when the main complaint people have with the tree is that it's boring?
Easiest solution is to combine enlightened judgements and judgements of the pure into a single 5 -point talent that increases the range of your judgments by 4 per rank, 1% hit per rank, and restores 2 mana (tweak as needed) to paladin anytime someone in your raid procs JoW per rank. Less effective then jotw, but you don't have to give up a gcd every 8~20 seconds to make it worthless.
Make sacred cleansing give a 33/66/100% chance for your holy shock to proc cleanse. Add a new 3 point talent in place of enlightened judgements that increases the amount your spell power affects holy shock/holy light/flash of light by 6/12/25% or whatever the relevant coefficients are to make it trump sheath.
What they should do is just make it work in reverse. Whenever you heal the beacon target, it heals a nearby damaged ally for X amount. Would work much more effectively now that CoH is a smart heal as well.
Bam, suddenly deep holy is damn sexy. No longer do we have 10 filler talents (seriously wtf?) between IoL and Bacon. Bacon is now no longer situationally awesome but pretty much always awesome.
I like this suggestion, although that new Sacred Cleansing + those other buffs may be too much, remember GC doesn't want to make Holy Pallies the new Resto Druids in Arena.
Millions of words are written annually purporting to tell how to beat the races, whereas the best possible advice on the subject is found in the three monosyllables: 'Do not try.'
I like this suggestion, although that new Sacred Cleansing + those other buffs may be too much, remember GC doesn't want to make Holy Pallies the new Resto Druids in Arena.
Remember we're a far, FAR cry in any serious conversation about 2v2/3v3 compared to Druids. When comparing new sacred cleansing (deep holy talent) to how amazing Abolish Poison (baseline) is, it doesn't seem all that great anymore.
I like this suggestion, although that new Sacred Cleansing + those other buffs may be too much, remember GC doesn't want to make Holy Pallies the new Resto Druids in Arena.
We might be able to last with them, but unless we have an offensive ability deep holy won't be as good as resto druids.
Furthermore, don't expect us to be ripping up every other talent tree in the game at this stage. We will continue to change talent effects before Lich King ships, but don't expect a lot more massive rejuggling of the trees themselves. The dual-spec feature will shine more light on talent design (more on that at Blizzcon) and we'll have a better idea of what we want to do with trees when that goes live. Some talent trees are nice and lean, and some probably have some points we could trim here and there.
GC posted this in the druid forums.
Somehow, the Holy tree fits the "nice and lean" (perhaps not the nice part) and the "points we could trim" categories. Seems like that shouldn't be possible. We have Spiritual Focus and Improved Concentration aura which need to be trimmed. For myself, I have trouble figuring out where to put points 19, 20, 25, 35 just so I can keep moving down the tree. Those four points as well as the two extra we have to put in Spiritual Focus seem like six wasted points. I'm not impressed with Aura Mastery, Imp. Lay on Hands, Imp. Concentration Aura or Imp. Wisdom, but I'm forced to put 4 points into them.
I truly hope that GC wasn't refering to the Holy tree... our tree looks too much like the one in TBC to be finished.
Yes, Shadow should do the same dps as other specs and classes, provided you have similar gear and skill. Replenishment is considered a buff just like all the other buffs. Its one exception is that having more than one in the raid can stack to some extent.
They aren't considering replenishment to be a utility that a class needs to sacrifice dps to get. This means Shadow priests and survival hunters should be expecting some buffs to bring them up to real dps level instead of us getting massive nerfs to knock us down to their level. Although I think we will still be getting some nerfs since we can explode people and I have heard ret is above other dps in raids. Anyone have actual numbers relative to other classes in beta? Do they change much against demon undead where we can use exorcism and divine wrath? I've seen things all over the place but I don't know enough to say how ret feels compared to other classes.
We're probably seeing inflated numbers in Naxx parses specifically because of Holy Wrath, Exorcism and Glyph of Sense Undead, although it does call into question how much of that (if any) should be reined in.
I see beacon as the same thing as the hunter talent Readiness on live. Good talent, but not worth the investment to get to it. Beacon is fine, but the talents you need to pick up to unlock it are not. Buffing tiers 8-10 makes holy more attractive. Making an active talent that is fun makes it sexy.
Furthermore, don't expect us to be ripping up every other talent tree in the game at this stage. We will continue to change talent effects before Lich King ships, but don't expect a lot more massive rejuggling of the trees themselves. The dual-spec feature will shine more light on talent design (more on that at Blizzcon) and we'll have a better idea of what we want to do with trees when that goes live. Some talent trees are nice and lean, and some probably have some points we could trim here and there.
To me, the second part is the best. If they're planning on implementing dual-speccing shortly in to wrath, most of the ret/holy issue goes away. Bacon better for dual-tank encounters but Sheathe better for single-tank fights? Who cares! Just flip your spec to whatever's best at the time. It would be kind of interesting to be a class balanced around the idea of dual-speccing, even if it's unintentional.
I just cleared all of Naxxrammas 10-man on my holy paladin and have some numbers to add to the discussion on beacon of light. First is Saphiron, this is a fight with lots of AoE healing. The other healers you see in recount are another holy paladin, and a circle of healing priest (respec'ed from shadow). The images are from recount; I didn't think to run a combat log.
For the Saphiron fight, 31% of my healing is from beacon of light. I had beacon of light on the main tank, and would raid heal when his life wasn't in immediate danger. If I knew some one was in range and down some health, I healed them instead.
This experience has really sold me on beacon of light. I have been using it to raid heal while keeping the main tank up to great effect. At one point the circle of healing priest ran out of mana, leaving just the two paladins to keep up the raid, which we were able to do. Furthermore, on this fight I was able to keep mana up for, as you can see on the screenshot, a 9 minute fight. My mana gained breakdown was: 34.2% divine please (38,462 mana), 26.7% illumination (29,981 mana), 25.8% spiritual attunement (28,987 mana), 13.3% replenishment (14,981 mana). I did not use a mana pot for that fight.
The second of of Kel'Thuzad, just for more data. The other paladin healer died about half-way through the fight.
I am really liking how holy is shaping up. Its fun, requires much more thought and awareness (who to heal with beacon up), and the mana issues are non-existent with good gear and the new divine plea. In fact, on any fight where I can melee the boss with regularity (Malygos 10 man), I simply cannot run out of mana. Each proc of seal of wisdom nets me 800 mana, and often another 400 from judgement of wisdom on the boss.
I should also add in some information on the gear level I was at. I was using all raid epics from Naxxrammas 10-man with the expectation of libram, which was an old level 70 epic. I had ~23k mana buffed, 20,074 unbuffed mana.
10/06/08, 5:34 PM
Similar Threads
