The way I understood it was that aura-like effects would not stack with each other, but self buff effects like Judgements of the Pure, a mage's Icy Veins etc. would stack.

I feel sorry for blizz on this one. This spell will still be great in the very situational use where the majority of the raid takes raid damage whilst standing in the same location, but aside from that, yes it is weak. However what choice do blizzard have. If they put a spell in that can heal the entire raid then they cant give it a 140% coefficient with 30 yards range and allow a paladin to chain cast it. It becomes too poweful. However without these things it is weak when it comes to healing only say 5 people. Blizz could cap it at five people and boost it's power but then it's just another CoH etc.

The sheath HoT effect sucks for a healer build, agreed. But it still might be worth it for the AP->SD conversion.

If you can get BoM (i.e., 3 paladins) and stand in the right place to pick up Battle Shout, SoE, Unleashed Rage, etc, you could come out with ~1500AP at level 70, which would translate into 450 spellpower. Not too shabby, and it might be worth the 3 points you lose in Judgements of the Pure.

To be entirely honest, you're getting 30% of your STA as SP. I wouldn't be complaining too much about that, STA is one of the cheapest, if not the cheapest, item stat in the game. You're effectively doubling the value/cost ratio of STA. GIven a statmod of .67 (according to WoWwiki), you can essentially say each point of stam is worth 1.5 that of anything that. Well, toss in 30% of that as SP (a .7 cost, same source), you're effectively increasing the value of STA to 1.5 + (.3*(1/.7)) or 1.93x any other stat. That's a pretty hefty bonus, especially considering tank gear tends to stack stam to very high degrees anyway.

I mean, just looking at the maintankadin in my guild, with just kings he has 1664 stam, which would equate to ~500 SD. With full buffs, he'd probably be up to ~1750ish, or about 525 SD, which is more SD than he currently even has. So with just that talent, he'd be more than doubling his SD, with no additional investment.

[E] Added quote.

Yeah, that seems like a fundamental problem for any raidwide heal: It's hard to balance both the best possible case and the more normal case. Basically any "fix" for this spell has to change the relationship between the small-group case and the large-group case.

The two ideas I can think of:

1) Cap the total healing, similarly to the AoE damage cap. Balance the mana cost, range, healing amount and coefficient so that the spell is useful for a 5-man, and then cap total healing at 10 times that amount. In other words, full healing on up to 10 people with the healing per person falling off as people over 10 are added to the area of effect. If you want to clump the whole raid up for RoS p3, you'll only get a small amount of healing per person (which is still useful) No beacon-stacking; each target only gets healing from the beacon that would be strongest on him/her. Limit each paladin to one active beacon at a time if necessary for balance.

2) In addition to the current effect, set a larger area (30 yard radius?) where targets only get half-strength healing from the beacon. So you'd have the current effect on closely-stacked people, but you could also use one beacon as a weaker wide-area raid heal.

Kind of an odd change for an ability that's basically a one-shot threat burst at the beginning of a fight. I wonder if they want us working it into a tanking rotation somehow? The cast time would seem to prevent that.

I never thought of that. With the conversion talent, SP will scale up with Kings. Keen.

I think they're trying to move Prot Paladins into a more dynamic rotation, with a single AS/Consecrate in the beginning, and Hammer of the Righteous working as a multi-target Sunder Armor. For more than 3 targets, the initial Conc will get their attention, and then you'll tab-target/HotR a couple times to hold them there.

With a .5 second cast time it could become a nice new "extra threat" nuke when HotR and SS are on cooldown (just cast it right after a swing from a boss). Honestly though if they want it that way the cast time should indeed be removed entirely.

It could also be a simple change so that you aren't dumping 20% of your total mana just to pull a mob.

I remember a post from Eyonix discussing his experiences with a protection paladin. He stated that one thing he would like to see change was AS having its cast time lowered so that it could be used more readily during combat as either an extra threat boost while tanking or hitting targets that you taunt back to you on their return.

So my guess would be they want us using it more often, specifically after a pull. Maybe they are keeping a slight cooldown for PvP reasons? IDK...

I see it more as a 5 man buff. It's infuriating to wait for the Prot paladin to drink after each and every pull, and the 1.7k mana spell at the start of each fight does not help that. (on a 4k~ base mana pool, especially)

Experienced Prot paladins don't do that, but not everyone gets the joy of running with an efficient and effective tank.

I've actually been waiting on an AS mana reduction for a while... seriously, when starting a pull with full mana: cast AS, Consecrate, Judge/reseal + holyshield: that's half mana gone before mobs hit you. The mana cost on AS is prohibitively high for no reason.
Although the cast time reduction does seem to be along the general lines of making tanking more interactive.


@ Ret DPS numbers - these seem crazy ATM, especially compared to current gear standards. Yet so did ret DPS on the eve of BC, so much that we got nerfed heavily for it and have only just been buffed back to that level... so don't make too huge assumptions until we know what every other class has at 80.

@ Prot Weapons: Again, whilst slower weapons will boost HotR damage, that is the only ability: it already has high innate threat also, so it's not like it is completely useless with a fast weapon. However, if we pick a high Spellpower weapon (250+) that is an insane amount of threat, even though we will probably aim for more Strength on the rest of tanking gear.

@ Other new abilities: Are any of the tanking abilities off the global cooldown?
Currently we have:
Judgement / Reseal (macro'd so cast together), Consecrate, Holy Shield, Righteous Defense.
In WOTLK we will have: Consecrate, Holy Shield, Hammer of the Righteous, Shield of Righteousness, Reseal (every 30 sec), Righteous Defense, Avenger's Shield.
Are any of these going to be removed from the GCD? I'd like to see one of Holy Shield or Consecrate off it: that way they can be macro'd together

Actually, I wonder if this is a mistake. Rank 3 was never that much mana. Rank 5 was however. I wonder if they looked at one talent tree, saw the rank 5 stats, and then looked at the other and saw rank 3 stats and forgot to check the ranks when comparing.

compare the highest rank listed in the talent tree:
Paladin - WotlkWiki - Wrath of the Lich King Information

to the Rank 5 spell at the wotlk wiki site:
Paladin - WotlkWiki - Wrath of the Lich King Information