i've seen on official forums they added Global Cooldown on Judgements on latest beta build. so basically we get 10% haste if we lose 3 seconds out of 30 to Global Cooldown from Seal and Judgement. that's 10% wasted time. kinda evens out. and for that we have to spend 7 end tiers talent points in Enlightened Judgement and Judgements of the Pure.

now compared to priest's Test of Faith and Divine Providence and druid's Replenish and Gift of the Earthmother sounds... awfully low.

Good news. Looks like the HotR bug with Strength is gone. The spell properly scales with AP both white and green. From the brief testing I did tonight just to check, anyway. You should all be seeing much beefier HotR hits now.

Still not normalized. I really think they're going to need to normalize this spell eventually, though.

Add in an extra 10% from Shaman totem plus whatever you get on your gear. Then factor in that they redid the Judgement mechanics, you end up with 1.2 to 1.3 seconds out of 30 seconds on the GCD to get a 10% haste buff for the 28+ other seconds. Not too shabby.

Plus if you don't need the haste because the encounter is trivial then you don't need to waste the GCD.


Now if they could only give some sort of Expertise or -dodge/parry effect to deep Holy to increase their soloing viability like they did Enlightened Judgements...

This depends on how it plays out. The utility factor of providing say Judgement of Wisdom alone is substantial, and it seems doubtful there's enough Prot/Retri Paladins there to keep both Wisdom and Light in every raid, especially 10mans.

It's still a teensy bit "meh" to have to spend those points just to get status quo back, but in theory it'd allow to place Judgements without any effective loss to healing throughput. In theory.

Judgments are still doing huge damage, and I don't have Art of War here even in the new form.

That's a stunned command crit though. That, at least, is intended... currently. They changed the formula for the melee and spell judgements, the caster judgements dropped in damage by 25-50%, and the base values of the melee judgements went up by about the same amount the caster judgements went down (~1800 base command/blood judgements on my tooltip indicator).

Casting the judgement spells now incurs a GCD.

Looking at the tooltips for coefficients it appears that:-

JoC = 30% Weapon Dam + 36% AP + 58% SP
JoB = 46% Weapon Dam + 36% AP + 58% SP
SoR = Weapon Speed * (5%AP + 10%SP)
JoR = 45% AP + 73% SP
SoV scales at 0.034 SP + 0.07AP per tick
JoV = 36% AP + SP% AP which increases by 10% per stack of holy vengeance. ie on a full stack = 54% AP + 87% SP
JoL = 36% AP + 58% SP damage and returns 18% SP + AP in health per proc
JoW = 36% AP + 58% SP damage and returns 9% SP + AP in mana per proc
Consecration seems to to scale at 4% AP + 4% SP per tick
Exorcism scales 15% AP + 15% SP
Holy Wrath scales 7% AP + 7% SP

Any change to Holy Shield in regards to scaling with something other than spellpower? Also can you confirm that it went back down to 4 charges base?

A couple of thoughts at this juncture:

Mana costs

This whole mana cost thing still makes me wonder. I've not heard anyone really talking about what their base mana is looking like as they level past 70, and with the developers literally doubling the mana cost on many abilities, but no increase in base mana, should we expect to see some other mechanics changes coming or is it more likely a simple oversight from blizz?

Healing

I read a report from a holy paladin that he's been able to participate in proper melee while healing on the PTR. He used JoL, plus BoL and the odd HS/FoL and was able to basically heal the instance fine. However, it was an all-melee group. He mentioned that they ran the same instance later on with one of the melee replaced by a hunter and he was no longer able to perform this role nearly as easily. He mentioned that with the need to heal the hunter, he lost a lot of mana return from not being able to melee and gain mana from JoW and had some tight situations. He also mentioned that he could have healed fine with traditional FoL spam, but was trying to see if he could play as a hybrid. Anyway, this got me wondering as to whether it's likely they'll change JoL to act like JoW (i.e. able to proc for ranged and spells). Seems that this would need to be about the only change they'd really have to make to bring a holy paladin over into a melee-healer mode, at least for small instances.

Holy and gearing

It occurs to me that if they simply added a holy talent that converted str to int+mp5, they would essentially be able to make all paladin specs wear the same plate as Warriors and DKs, thus removing the need for SP/MP5/Int plate entirely. It seems like a rather simple change, if you think about it, and would eliminate a niche set of armor from loot tables entirely. It puzzles me as to why they haven't implemented this. Thoughts?

On the topic of mana costs, I tried my hand at figuring out just how much we'd use against how much we'd gain, and the prospects look quite rosy. I posted it here.

It's quite oversimplified though, as it assumes being able to get off every ability exactly on the cooldown, and I assumed that JoW is still a flat 50% chance to proc per melee/spell hit.

I invite someone to come up with a more ... elegant computation, but my own off-the-cuff numbers suggest that CS, DS and Judgements are completely self-sustainable, with some excess left over for other abilities.

Is this correct? It used to be 9% from what I understand. Bumping JoW to 18% would be... enormous.

Rozetta,

Can't tell from the tooltip about scaleing, but will try to test when i get a second.

As for healing, its almost impossible to tell until heroics/raids, but with the great increase in mana costs, bigger downranking penalty, instant HL talent, and most importantly potion sickness indicates a change away from the current philosophy of spam healing back to the more enjoyable days of vanilla wow.

I would guess FoL+HS will be out core heals interspersed with instant Holy Lights. It will be more about efficient healing than spam healing.

This of course is just a guess, one i hope comes true as half the reason i went casual in wrath was due to healing becoming far less dull compared to vanilla.

Am I the only one who is a bit worried about how Divine Plea will play out? The problem with the current fights is that there is no time to take 5.4 (+ any hast you might have) seconds to relax and regain your mana. If you take sunwell for example, I think the only fight where there is actually time to do this would be Felmyst when he is about to land. The problem already exist for [Glimmering Naaru Sliver], which is why it is perceived as a fairly useless trinket for most classes.

I can see the usefulness somewhat in arenas, but if the fights in PvE remains somewhat true to the fights in Sunwell, the ability simply wont have much use there.

Can anybody in the beta test how AoW now works? Can it be cast if stuned? Do you gain stun immunity during the duration?


Edit: and if it works while stuned, what happens with 1 point in AoW 33% -> click HoF until it works?

It only breaks stuns. It does not prevent new stuns from being applied during Hand of Freedom's duration.

If you yourself are stunned, you can use Hand of Freedom on yourself to break the stun.

My *edit* was to late. DO you know something about this?

I was thinking a little on what I previously posted about moving Holy to "ret" gear with a str->int conversion. My thought process went through the possibility of healadins taking mail, leather and cloth healing gear (like in vanilla wow), until I realised they already have a mechanic to discourage this. The same conversion talent should give armor->MP5. This way, a holy paladin would benefit already from the crit on ret plate as spell crit, the str converted to int and the armor->MP5 would naturally encourage plate for "free" MP5. The only other thing left is spell power, but there's a talent already there to convert int to SP.

I dislike making specific suggestions, but I could hint at the fact that replacing Divine Intellect with such a talent would open up a variety of neat hybrid holy-based specs.

In this scenario, naturally the paladin could still equip non-armor items of either category - a healing shield + weapon would beat a 2-hander (armor->MP5 in addition to the better caster stats); other slots could allow the player to pick and choose caster or melee stats. My guess would be that the paladin might choose the melee non-armor items anyway to boost hybridness and solo play, or pick up a set for each when a stand at the back "and I heal, and I heal" style is needed. Either way, it also frees up a lot of unnecessary loot table clutter, frees up the paladin's bag space* and allows for a much more fluid hybrid playstyle.


* currently a good WotlK paladin will need to have in their bags or bank: Holy PvE, Ret PvE, Prot PvE, resist items, [Holy PvP|Ret PvP] and perhaps a grinding set. Consolidating Holy and Ret gear frees up potentially 2 bags worth of gear, possibly more if you can consolidate grinding gear also, although the paladin may carry a handful of swappable non-armor items for a transition in playstyle (e.g. 2-hander/tanking 1-hander + tanking shield/healing 1-hander+healing shield, rings, trinkets, cloaks, necks, librams, etc)

I like the idea of a 50% mana return ability, though I'm not too fond of it being a channeled ability. Taking a breather in a DPS race or even worse, stopping healing in unforgiving encounters won't work, an innervate like self buff would make a lot more sense.

The one thing I do like about this patch (even if it had a lot of nerfs regarding ret at least) is that it seems to solidify how judgement damage will be (and that it's not wildly out of proportion).

Without the freak accident of what AoW was, the baseline judgement damage is still very considerable. Compared to live, you could almost say we gained a new instant (judgements on live are a joke and mostly a tool to get buffs from libram/minimal damage).


I find the 3 min forbearance humorous, what are they so afraid of? :P

All these abilities still have a SP coefficient as well as AP coefficient, so Consecration and Holy Wrath will still be higher using a spell damage weapon. As for single target it will all depend if the Spell Damage coefficient provides greater tps than the tps increase of HotR when using a slow weapon. Hopefully HotR will win out on this one.

New Spell: Divine Plea (5 Minutes cooldown, Channeled) - While channeling this spell, you gain 50% of your total mana over 6 seconds.

That is so awesome for holy .

Glimmering Naaru Sliver is considered useless because you need to channel for a full eight seconds to get a paltry 2000 mana. A Paladin with just 12k maximum mana will return 1500 mana in a single GCD spent channeling Divine Plea. The two really are not comparable.

Tell me where in SWP you will be able to stop MT healing for 5 Seconds (allowing for haste) reliably without putting a tank in danger?

Looking at the current prot tree, I can't help but think we'll see some more changes down the line for this one. I made some quick builds and it seems that there really is a problem grabbing a decent set of tanking talents with the current bloat. I also have to wonder, despite all the feedback I've read, that certain talents still exist as they do (Redoubt and Reckoning being major culprits here.) It's honestly a headache to think about speccing prot at the moment and I can't imagine it will be all that fun in the long run.

My other main problem is that there's a definite lack of synergy between this tree and holy or ret. It definitely feels like wasted points to create a holy/prot or ret/prot build. There needs to be more synergy between the first 4 tiers of prot and deep holy or ret.

My personal suggestions would be the following:
- remove Redoubt completely
- modify Shield Specialization to give 10/20/30% block value and 2/4/6% block chance
- move Reckoning to where Redoubt currently sits in Tier 2, but unlinked with any other talent
- fold Spell Warding into Improved Righteous Fury
- lower the point-costs of Ardent Defender and Combat Expertise to 3-point talents (with the same current max values)
- swap Anticipation and One-Handed Weapon Specialization
- modify One-Handed Weapon Specialization to give 1/2/3/4/5% more damage and healing while a one-handed weapon is equipped
- modify Blessing of Sanctuary to either a passive ability for the paladin or a modification to Devotion Aura

With these changes, you cold keep Kings at the 11-point spot and not worry about only getting it if a full-prot paladin is present. The synergies between holy/prot and ret/prot become apparent:

- holy could benefit from an small boost to healing and damage from the new One-Handed Weapon Specialization in tier 1, and go on to pick up Guardian's Favor and Stoicism for extra resilience in the healing role and pick up kings/imp RF/toughness on the way to Divine Guardian and Imp. Hammer of Justice
- ret could benefit from Divine Strength in tier 1 , followed by Reckoning in tier 2 and follow a similar path to holy on the way to Divine Guardian / Imp. Hammer of Justice
- with reduced point costs on some talents, combined with the de-coupling of a 5-point talent to shield specialization, a full-prot spec can now comfortably pick up tanking talents while being able to pick up deflection or perhaps even seals of the pure

To be honest, I'm not too keen on the number of mana-reduction talents in deep-prot. It seems like a band-aid fix to the inflated mana costs and, again, they seem to me like "must have" talents, and simply nothing original or exciting. If they must have a deep prot talent to reduce mana costs, I see no problem (given prot's appalling PvP viability) in giving a blanket "all your spells and abilities cost x% less mana" talent instead of categorizing the discounts over multiple talents.