To those of you boasting over the insane amount of healing you do post 3.0: You do know that Recount was bugged, and the "Healing done" tab was not effective healing, but raw healing done?

I myself was very surprised by the asumingly high HPS me and the paladins in my guild had. Recount showed that me and another paladin was rocking around 2600-2700 HPS on Kil'Jaeden with around 1,1 million healed, but when a WWS report came we discovered that all paladins had around 67% overhealing, which placed us at around 350k effective healing.

Numbers redone on HOTR vs Spelldamage weapons.

Hammer of the Righteous: Threat = 1.9 * (DPS + AP/14)*4*1.1 (1h spec).
1dps provides 1*3*1.1*1.9/6 (duration) threat = 1.393 Threat.

Melee Swings: Threat =(DPS+AP/14)*Spd*1.1
1 dps provides 1*1.1*spd/spd threat = 1.1 threat

1.1+1.045 = 2.493 TPS from 1 weapon DPS.
As near as i can make out from my spreadsheet, 1 SP provides 0.38 TPS (compared to AP, which is 1:0.5tps)
Each DPS sacrificed off an epic weapon provides ~7 Spellpower
7*0.38 = 2.66 TPS

Spellpower weapons retain 57.5% of a melee weapon's DPS, and the remaining 42.5% is converted to spellpower.
SP Weap TPS: (0.575*2.493+0.425*2.66)*DPS =2.564*DPS
Melee Weap TPS: (1*2.145)*DPS = 2.493*DPS
Spellpower weapons win out by ~3%.

Compare that to the other bonuses of melee/tanking weapons:
Higher Stamina, Defense/Dodge/Parry, Attack Power/Strength, Expertise, Crit....
Tanking weapons FTW! well done blizz.


It looks like Glyph of Holy Light was reduced to useless again: back down to 5 yards....


Some very nice buffs in the latest build: in particular the Judgement of Light change. If Holy had talents for JoL, or if JOL scaled better for holy than it did for ret, it could become a real signature healing move of the holy class.

Lets talk more about what exactly holy paladins should do with their other talents besides the 51 in holy. While I agree that imp dev aura is a fantastic choice, especially when coupled with divine guardian, im having a hard time passing up conviction and benediction, personally.

I fully expect all my raiding holy paladins to be 51/0/18+2. Imp Devo is covered by ToL aura and the Ret talents are too good as a secondary tree to pass up. 8% crit and 10% off Holy Shock and all the Hand spells, Judgements etc is very enticing, and there's nothing worthwhile in Prot before Imp Devo for Holy raiders. Of course if you don't have a Ret Paladin to pick up Kings you might need to go into Prot, but when given the choice 51/0/18 seems like the clear winner.

Why would a Prot Paladin NOT take Improved Devotion?

There isn't anything else to take at that tier as you're going down the tree, threat is so high that you can focus on mitigation talents and never worry about losing aggro, and it provides you with the 6% increased in situations where you're not running with a Tree Druid.

I agree. The biggest loss for Prot to get 0imp Devo is to get Reckoning, which isn't that great since threat isn't an issue very much, so also losing Ret Aura isn't too bad.

Also ToL gives the same healing bonus, so I would guess without a Protadin around, you can get normal Devo and ToL aura at the same time.

Bit off topic: I thought of an interesting idea for the Prot 11 point talent. I'll take it to the suggestion forums if anybody thinks it's worthwhile.

insert clever talent name here: While active all targets are classified as Undead.

This could be a passive effect or a CD with a duration or charges. This gives tanks more threat abilities, ret more dps abilities, and with the glyph gives pvp players a spell interupt, and a CC. Holy paladins would become more of a threat. This would also help the developers balance pve. As it is now, ret dps changes significantly based on mob type.

If that's an always-on ability it would be pretty OP.

It would essentially be allowing you to spec into:

More burst/damage (exorcism)
Another stun and AoE dmg/threat (holy wrath)
A fear spell useable on anything (instant cast with glyphs)
A spell interupt that damages enemies (exorcism glyph)
1% more damage against everything (sense undead glyph.
Ret will get extra bonuses from crusade.

While I like the idea, the only way I could see it being balanced would be with a cooldown (1-3min) with a short duration (15sec max) and maybe as well as charges. But with restrictions like those we'll become balanced around the fact that every few minutes we will have a fear/interupt/extra stun/extra damage.

However while I think about it an ability more along the lines of:
'When activated your next Exorcism, Holy Wrath, or Turn Evil spells become useable against any target. 30+ second cooldown.' Would pretty fun.

It would be solved more effectively by having buffs not overwrite each other, but only the highest buff applying.

Did it confuse effective healing/raw healing only for paladins or for every other healer as well?

For every other healer as well.



vs Wow Web Stats

Glyph of flash of light - Your flash of light heals for 50% less initially, but heals for 140% of its initial effect over 12 seconds.
Beacon of Light - The target becomes a beacon of light to all targets within a 40 yard radius. Any heals you cast on those targets will also heal the beacon of light for 100% of the amount healed. Only 1 target can be the beacon of light at a time. Effect lasts 1 min.

My question is this: How does the HOT effect from flash of light, if you have the above glyph, transfer to the beacon of light? When the HOT effect is applied to a target, it is reset if you cast another FOL, so what I'm wondering is if you cast FOL on multiple targets of the raid does the HOT tick off from ALL of them on the beacon of light? Or does it go on them as a HOT effect therefore resetting every time you heal someone in the raid? I'm assuming this glyph would be pointless if the effect didnt transfer in a stacking manner through beacon of light onto the beacon, but not sure.

In a perfect world, or even a semi-perfect world, I agree with you. The issue I have is that certain warriors seem to only remember to refresh battle shout at the beginning of a fight. So my thirty minute buffs that I used reagents to cast on the entire raid is wiped out by one button press, and then two minutes later we have no ap buff. I realize that on any raid with competent people, this won't be an issue. However.... Pugs, friends of guildies, etc. happen, and even if they're only non-progression raids, it is still irritating.

I finally got so annoyed at one of the warriors in a ZA pug that I just told everyone who wanted BoM after he knocked it off with Battle Shout, despite the fact that I told him repeatedly before the raid to not use Battle Shout unless he was actually going to keep it up, to send him a tell every time it faded. Honestly, I'd even prefer they simply make Battle Shout have a thirty minute duration. Problem solved.

One thing you're missing though: With talents, Divine Shield becomes a raid-wide shield wall

Raid-wide shield wall once every 5 minutes isn't going to out-weigh 8% crit all the time unless there's a gimmick encounter that calls for it (in which case the holydins will spec for raid-wide shield wall for the gimmick encounter and then respec back afterwards).

I would like to have some feedback on some issues about Holy Paladins, that are the Holy DPS being low and problems in pvp / arena. Of course what is important is what we will get when the expansion comes out, but the feedback from Beta and live after the content patch can help to solve this issues. I will try to explain what i think is wrong about this issues.


HOLY DPS:

1 - People in beta are reporting that Holy dps is around 75% of a Disc/Holy Priest. You can check this thread for calculations: WotLK Beta (US-English) Forums -> Holy Paladin DPS Seal Comparison

2 - I'm not trying to bring back the leveling discussion of a few weeks ago, the issue is more broad then that. Holy dps being so low will have severe consequences on our ability to grind daily quests, defend ourselfs from ganking or help our mates in 2vs2 arena.

3 - In fact, most of Holy dps is from holy shock, that was buffed, while seal of righteousness was nerfed badly. This is even worse for arena 2vs2, because Holy Paladins have to rely in Holy Shock to heal, so all is left to do some damage is seal of righteousness that is so weak.

4 - Shield of righteousness doesn't help much, because it scales with block value, that Holy Paladins don't have. It's really sad that we have to use abilities designed to other trees, just because we don't have anything else to use.

5 - I would really like to know if Holy Paladins doing much less damage then other healers is really intented or a consequence of balancing retribution damage or just one issue that wasn't looked yet.

Solutions:

A) Make seal of righteousness one talent from the Holy Tree, tier 2 or 3, and improve it's damage scaling with spellpower.

B) Make a deep Holy talent to improve seal of righteousness damage.

C) Make seal of righteousness scale more with intelect then spellpower and attack power.


HOLY IN ARENA:

1 - Holy Paladins are reporting that his heals are scaling better after patch, which is good but maybe just a consequence of the folding of blessing of light into our spells. Some new talents are also good but have some weakness when used in pvp / arena: beacon is dispellable and divine plea too.

2 - Hand of sacrifice and hand of freedom have longer cooldowns then previous blessings, so this is a nerf to Holy Paladin's mobility.

3 - Infusion of light was the hope that we had to make Holy Paladins viable in any bracket of arena, but now it was nerfed and even the promessed instant flash of ligth after one Holy Shock crit may not be enough to make Holy Paladins competitive healers in 2vs2 and 3vs3.

4 - In Season 4 of arena Paladins were competing with Hunters for the last spot in arena representation and to my knowledge there isn't any Paladin in the Major Gaming League (3vs3 competition).

5 - It seems that Holy Paladins will be more viable then before only in 5vs5, because we have better healing output now and our regen is ok, since other healers regen was nerfed. However, 5vs5 arena is the more complicated to organize and takes a lot of time and effort to coordinate one team and to be sucessfull.

6 - Druids and Priests have gamebraking abilities like cyclone and mana burn that allow them to have control over one arena game and can turn the tide to their favor. Paladins don't have those abilities or the ones we have are deep into protection tree or retribution tree.

Solutions:

A) Give Holy Paladins a new ability, that can turn the tide in favor of us, instead of just running away and line of sight, which was nerfed with those hand spells, by the way. The idea that came to my mind was one improved consecration that would have much wider range and would slow enemies for some seconds.

B) Restore infusion of light to give Holy light instant cast after holy shock crit but prevent it from having another crit or restrict it with one cooldown. In fact this new version of instant flash of light really ruined the spell for pve healing, which is bad and didn't give much to Holy pvp.

C) Plate gear should had much more to Holy Paladins in terms of survivability, it's not balanced since resto Druids and holy Priests are much harder to kill then holy Paladins in arena. Armor should have one effect that is similar to resilience, but in a small extent, or something else that could help us survive more.

D) Holy Paladins DPS should really be revised, so that we can do some small burst in arena, and not to be so easy targets in pvp.


I'm sorry if this post doesn't follow some forum rules, because i'm giving some sugestions to what should be changed in terms of Holy, and do hope that i can get some feedback from the people testing this issues in the beta or in live after the latest patch.

This will probably my latest post here, so I wish you all good luck ingame and in real live, and i would like to thank Cathela for making this thread that is so informative for us all.

Is this sustained DPS or just "grinding" DPS? There's a huge difference between the two when you can run up to a mob and crit Judgement/Holy Shock/Shield of Righteousness and then get a Hammer of Wrath crit to kill your target in less than 10 seconds versus not being able to do anything else between Holy Shock/Shield of Righteousness because you have no other buttons to push.

Best example: for Noth/Loatheb/Thaddius in 25 man Naxx, I spent the whole fight DPSing because the healing requirements on those fights are almost non-existent. With only 4% chance to hit plus raid debuffs and no expertise save my Dwarven racial, my Seal of Righteousness/Shield of Righteousness was terrible, which meant the vast majority of my DPS was from Holy Shock, Exorcism and Consecrate. Being able to do damage every 6 seconds with a terribly weak Consecrate - the damage sucks bad without any real damage modifiers - is bad design. As others have pointed out, it only gets worse in PvP where Holy Shock is needed to heal or when mobs aren't Undeads/Demons. The PvP burst is great, the sustained damage (as in, damage when your Avenging Wrath isn't up) is terrible and a complete joke.


In the end Blizzard will have to bake in a lot more DPS into pure healing talents (like the hit% on Enlightened Judgements) to make Holy Paladins a more viable spec overall. Then we'd need real offensive/CC abilities for PvP and all that crap - Holy Paladins still need a lot more work.

I just want to echo what the past 3 posters have said,

I'm surprised offensive utility wasn't on the to-do list for Paladins for this expansion. Abilities like Cyclone and Mana-burn make PVP healing a lot more fun, especially in BG's when you can't rely on your teammates knowing how to play.

Grinding dps because that's what that thread was qqing about.
As for pvp, the kind of damage holy does is perfect (instant, burst, extra dmg at low hp).

And I'm not really sure you can make a point that a healing spec needs better sustained dps in raiding, especially from the second most versatile class in raiding atm (druids being first).

Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't mind more dmg for holy. But I'm pretty sure blizzard wouldn't add both damage and utility and I prefer the second.

Most holy palas forget shield of righteousness in wotlk mine premade char crits for 1500. So its ok to add it as burst dmg

I PvP as holy pala in BGs for achievements and I am pretty fine with DPS I can unload even if it's not sustained. Bigger range on judgements is nice, HS (in SWP gear) hits for quite a lot. I could do around 150k damage and close to 300k healing at the same time in relatively fast WSG and AV (will screenshot next time).

I have to admit that in arena I couldn't do much damage since HS will be reserved for healing. However in BGs I seem to be perfectly fine and do more damage than any other healing class except, maybe, shamans.

Crits for 1500?

Never seen anything like it.