We also still have no word on if AoW is intended to reset the swing timer or not.

Mostly good news for Holy:

I think the new IoL is a good compromise. An instant FoL is not as good as an instant HL, but it helps mobility much more than its previous version.

Assuming you have 8 in Ret, if nothing else the debuff gives 3% more crit to attackers.

It would be interesting to know if the changes to JoW/JoL were intended.

I am seriously wondering if that is retribution's fault or us having far better gear than we should's fault though.

I transferred a level 63 paladin in greens to beta also and she's currently killing mobs in Northrend at about the same pace as my equal-level deathknight on her way to 80. Both are noticeably slower than my S3/4-gear Paladin and my raid-epics Mage.

Did you actually read what you quoted to the end? I'm saying everything but that. Notice the "if" clause in the quote (guess the comma threw you off? Yea it is sorta badly placed).

What bugs exactly? You mean Judgement of Wisdom providing 2% of total mana instead of providing mana based on the spellpower/ap of the Paladin judging it? (For example?)

Or are you refering to the bug who put a internal cooldown to the Judgement rather than the person who proc the Judgement's effects?

There's zero chance the internal RAID-WIDE cooldown currently on JoW is intended. It makes the spell completely useless in 25-man raids. If you assume 18 people in your raid are actively attacking a mob with this debuff up, that averages 1 proc every 72 seconds per player. Whoopee.

At this point, just make sure someone (hopefully lots of people) has reported it as a bug on the beta forum, and let them fix it.

I hate to sound like a n00b, but what is this "DS" of which you speak? The only Paladin abilities or talents I can bring to mind with those initials are Divine Strength, Divine Shield and Divine Storm - none of which have anything to do with boosting spell crit.

The recent change to IoL appears to put us solidly back on the RNG when responding to the requirement for burst healing. Now that it also affects FoL, the very next heal that is cast after a HS crit will consume the IoL buff.

Basically if HS crits we get to sub it seamlessly into a FoL spam rotation but if it doesn't then it produces a 3 second hole. HL still has issues with the GCD when a crit IoL proc combines with the LG buff. The difference between this and before is that we can't maintain FoL spam while sitting on a fast HL to counter spike damage.

I'm not that experienced in PvP, maybe this was a buff in Arenas but it certainly feels like we lost some versatility in the PvE game.

I think this is only really an issue if you assume HS is part of your rotation in general. However, I'm not sure that you'd be using HS in practice unless you really needed the quick heal (in which case following up with a faster HL/FoL is often perfectly reasonable) or if you're on the move (in which case an instant FoL is exactly what you want).

Also, using HS in general introduces a 2 GCD 'hole'. If you get an instant FoL, the 'hole' is simply pushed to the next set of GCDs. That's sort of the point - heal now that you pay for (somewhat) later.

I'm also not so convinced that having HL be shorter than the GCD is necessarily a bad thing in of itself. It's obviously not as nice as it being instant, but being faster is still better responsiveness, and you don't lose throughput unless you're moving.

You're right sorry about the 3 sec hole - instant FoL just delays it like you said. Basically all this change does is makes us unable to sit on a fast HL while maintaining some throughput with FoL. I'm just not seeing this latest "buff" as a good thing.

With regards to HL and the GCD though, I guess the fastest possible HL is great for reactive burst healing. Time will tell if they let us get away with reactive healing and if it is truly practical for raid leaders to rigidly assign healing targets to avoid sniping.

If they do that, they won't be getting JotW or Repentance. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

Of those three that you suggested, only the 3rd (Sacred Shield) provides any sort of healing or mitigation on your healing target. In a fight like Patchwerk (where Holy is meant to shine *pun intended*), the damage is constant and fairly predictable so Beacon helps greatly but IoL doesn't because even if you get an instant heal you won't need to use it until the next time you would have landed your major heal anyway.

The opposite way, where IoL will help on movement/bursty fights, Beacon is pretty much a liability.

Hrm, maybe I've answered my own musings there. IoL and Beacon are designed to address two different situations.

If that's the case then, it seems a very clunky mechanism to work around the fact that we cannot do such things baseline at all.

Oh damnit, Sacred Shield.

SS, not DS. Shield brain fart.

On the current PTR Glyph of Flash of Light is triggered by overhealing. This is either a bug or the reason for the previous glyph nerf. The hot ticks for 840 at level 70 (~1000 sp, with talents + glyph).

great threat, very informative.

I do have some question of my own regarding paladin tank that I have not been able to find a topic for anywhere else.

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First question is in regard to the new redoubt. Previously we used to have redoubt to increse by 10% our chance to increase block chance by 30%, which was useless. Also we had shield specialization which used to increase our amount of damage block, which was really good until the change in wrath that made it useless because it does not increase the block value gained from strg, only block value from items that are not going to have block value because we now share gear with death knights that do not need block value.

New redoubt = old redoubt (useless) + shield specialization (will be useless in wrath). Therefore mixing to bad talents into one; you still get a bad talent.

So my question is, if I am missing something, or if I am wrong on the mechanics of this talent? or if I am correct and and this talent is plain useless?

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My second question, is regarding crit chance.

Our new combat expertise talent suffer a 4% stamina loss for an increase on 6% crit chance. Also protection warriors have the exact same talent. In additional to other talents that increase the chance for a particular ability to crit.

So my question is, are tank going to need crit chance in wrath or is blizzard just F#$@ing with us and our talents?

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I apologize if these question were answered some where else, but I have not been able to find any information regarding them.

Thank you very much for anybody who is able to answer this concerns, since they will significantly change the way I spend my talent points.

I'm starting to really like the Holy tree. The new talents are making old ones better. Divine Favor never really did it for me; in pve crit rates are high enough, and 90% of heals over healed anyway, in pvp it was ok but not nearly as powerful as Nature's Swiftness. Now with IoL it should be useful in all situations.

For anybody that's interested I did some quick math: with Benediction, Illumination returns 66.66% on HS crits. Does a IoL FoL benefit from benediction?

Great, thanks for clearing that up. Now can I remind you that we were talking about specs for post-patch Paladins, not post-WOTLK Paladins, and as such it really doesn't matter what our lvl80 skills do?

Paladin (holy) changes didn't came with last patch (at least for eu), but judgements seem fixed.

Wow they actually managed to make new IoL worse than the two others.
IoL Version 1 was fine, except when it ended in a critical instant HL, clearly overpowered in pvp, but could have been easily fixed, as discussed here and on the Beta forums.

With IoL Version 2, if you got an HS crit, the idea was to wait for your target to get enough damage to use your 1sec HL, and in the meantime to use FoL or another HS. Loosing the instant part sucked hard, but at least it was still a nice Hps boost.

Now with IoL Version 3, the effect is consumed on your instant FoL, leaving us with waiting 6 sec for another HS. In a hard hitting Boss Pve situation, we definately lost our NS-like "oh shit" button, thanks to the GCD between your crit HS and the one second cast time required for HL, and we'll all agree FoL, even instant, doesn't fit into a "oh shit" scenario.

I agree with teeny - this IOL change seems to illustrate our lack of a mid-sized heal all the more.

They couldn't have IOL make HL instant-cast because it's too big, but then having IOL make FOL instant-cast either robs us of the proc because we can't cast anything else, or wastes it on a FOL that didn't need to be instant-cast cast because we can't cast anything else.

Also, I'd like to bring up how Judgements are still on a 20 second duration for Holy at this point, which is a complete mismatch given that the 15% haste effect is now 1 minute long.

The removal of Crusader Strike's Judgement-refreshing ability was justified by the assumption that all three Paladin specs would be judging at least once per 20 seconds to keep up their own debuff, but this is called into question once you consider just how little effective haste you're getting from JOTP if you keep spending a GCD 40 seconds too early anyway.

Come on, it was discussed already. Haste in WotLK is NOT for chaincasting, it is reactive stat. With reactive healing bosses can't unload too much damage (otherwise we would be forced to chainheal). And if we aren't chaincasting, there are loads of free GCD. I don't see any problem with 20sec judgements and 1min haste buff to be honest assuming Bliz sticks to their 'no chaincasting' ideology.

Since at this point Judgement of Wisdom / Light have a raidwide 4 second cooldown it is hardly critical to maintain 100% uptime. They are useful, but if you have a difficult healing period and don't refresh them for a bit it simply isn't a big problem. As a raidleader I would expect you to renew them during lulls in healing, but don't make it a priority.