It's not that. I personally believe Sheath of Light spec is about the best paladin healing spec. But that is largely due to the fact that Enlightened Judgements, Judgements of the Pure and Beacon are so not so great and Infusion of Light is not exceptional either. That makes new Holy tree talents mediocre at best. I have nothing against people speccing whatever they want, but would be nice to have some strong healing talents to actually have the option to spec 51 or more in Holy if we want to.

Infusion of light is an impact, playstyle changing talent. And like they said, they're working on beacon. It's nice to have the option to spec for aoe heal, so I hope they don't go into a totally different direction like they did with art of war. But say they increased range to 20 yards and halved the cost. Is that big enough of a carrot for you? I really like 60/11/0 (well other than anticipation) I get absolutely everything I want in holy. It will be 'the other' spec. Likely I'll pvp with that. And not to say it's better or worse than sheath, it's a different toolset.

Of course Beacon and Sheath of Light spec are completely different toolsets. I'm just saying that NOW we don't have 2 equally good but different specs to chose from. We have only 1 and it's a bit strange compared to other healers have. I'm waiting for Beacon but I'm skeptical it will be made that great to draw at least half of people away from Sheath of Light.

What I find highly unusual about the whole Sheath thing is that it's exactly what they said they didn't like about the way warlocks scaled. It's looking more and more like the DS of the pally trees, where it's power is far too great to give up and outweighs that of the 51-pointers in other trees.

However, if they nerf it, they're cutting down on Ret dps by a significant margin, which I'm not sure they want to do. The intent looks to be to help establish Ret as a wanted dps class, and not just for utility.

On a related note, however, check out this quote. It was regarding the Moonkin spec, but it could be applicable, somewhat:

I can't find a source, but it's currently on the front page of mmo-champ.

Even when Beacon is buffed and the 10% haste talent is implimented, people will still spec Sheath for healing (assuming Sheath isn't changed)

This is great, because having various viable choices is outstanding game design.


For example, Druid's Lifebloom will not be as great as it was and Healing Touch will be usable in Tree form. Druids can likely still use Lifebloom a lot but they can instead focus on Direct heals instead of HoTs, or even a combination of the two.

All three styles will likely work well enough, and Paladins are heading in the same direction.

Take divine strength so your judgements are more better

I think judging every 30 seconds can fit well into a reactive-healing holy build.

Suppose you're 50+ holy and you're healing a tank. There's a druid rolling lifeblooms on the tank, and maybe a spam-healing priest/paladin doing cast-and-cancel or whatever. So the basic healing is covered, and your job is to manage damage spikes.

With WoA (10% haste) and JotP (10% self-haste) up, FoL is a 1.2-second cast and HL is a 2-second cast. With Light's Grace up as well, HL is 1.5 seconds. GCD is 1.2 seconds.

The big advantage of instant heals is that you can just about guarantee they won't get wasted on overheal. So, you shock once every 6-9 seconds or so: whenever you see some daylight in the tank's health bar, you zap it.

If your shock doesn't crit, you do a couple of HLs, cancelling if necessary (1.5-2 seconds each, depending on whether LG is up). Once shock comes off cooldown, you once again shock the first time the tank's health drops. Continue as necessary.

When you do get a shock crit, you have an instant HL you can sit on until you need it. At this point, you can re-judge and refresh JotP if you need to; it'll cost you a GCD, but you have a large instant heal up your sleeve, so you can recover quickly if the tank takes a spike during that time. You could even use that time to Divine Prayer if you need to; break it and use your instant HL if something happens to the tank in that time.

Basically, the whole point of this build would be to keep as much haste and instant-casting available as possible. One Holy paladin doing this would be far more effective than another pure cast-and-cancel spammer.

Basically what Cathela is saying is that a full holy paladin will once again have to be pro. That type of playstyle is what I've been wanting since I rolled this character and now it looks like we may finally get it. Combine that with the necessity to be in melee range while you're doing all of this (auto-attacking for regen) and we have a true battle-style healer with some active button pushing and thinking involved.

Torq, I wouldn't compare sheath to demonic sacrifice. You can't really breakdown healing on paper like you can break down damage; healing comes down to situational warcraft. As a warlock all you care is throughput and every step you make in that direction yields 100% return no matter what. Which is why people come up with rotations and stuff for damage classes. There are no winning rotations for healing. Healing is about utilizing the tools you have in a given situation. Sheath forsakes tools (all the cool stuff in holy like cleanse resist, half curse duration, resistance to dispels on hand spells, guardian's favor, 10% haste) and throughput (beacon) for different tools (HoT, judgment of wise, sanctified ret, even PoJ) and throughput (30% ap to spellpower, HoT, conviction).

I think he was comparing them more on the level that everyone is trying to spec 23+ down ret now, just as every warlock specs 21 down Demo. Interestingly it also has some connections in the fact that those first 20 points in Demo are pretty bad while those first 20 points in ret aren't particularly good either.

Not if they keep FoL and HL resetting your swing timer.

They're better than prot

5% crit is better than 1-handed weapon spec? Benediction (lol) is better than 15% more damage on your three main threat nukes?

Come on now. There are some good abilities in early ret (deflection, improved Judgement), but the remainder are very "meh" tanking abilities. Same exact thing with Demo for locks. There are some decent early abilities (Improved HS, Fel Intellect) but most of it is very marginal (how useful is Fel Dom to a shadowbolt spamming lock?).

I mean the first 20 points of prot from a holy perspective.

They could do as they (according to the changes) have done to shamans, change it from spellpower to damage and healing, which is basically a 50% nerf for the healing bonus.

Let's not get into this again. Remember, Improved Devo alone is more raid healing than you gain with everything in the ret tree put together.

But then you're nerfing ret pallys because Holy Pallys are exploiting positions. The simple easy solution is to just drop the damn talent 2 tiers.

C'mon now. This attitude tells you that no small increase will ever be the difference. Why get epic gems? Why get those gear upgrades? Why get Blood Frenzy, CoE, Misery, or any other small percentage increase talent/ability? Because when you synergize all of these talents and abilities appropriately, it gives your raid the dps to kill Brutallus before he enrages, or the healing to make it through a Flame Sear/Shadow Blades combo. I can easily see Imp Devo making the difference in a kill on a boss like Twins or M'uru without even factoring in the extra 600 armor on your tanks.

While I have no doubt that Devo Aura can and will be valuable, its benefit is almost completely intangible. Druids get the backslaps and hoorah's for their ticking HoTs that caught the tank during a spike and Rogues get the kudos for their big numbers. No one ever high-fived a Paladin for his bonus armor or went "nice JOTC!" for the 3% crit.

The most boring game mechanic is rolling your face over Flash of Light for 4 hours a night.

It's so funny how many people get worked up over Sheath's HoT given just how weak it is. The only time it will ever heal for an appreciable amount is on a crit after a massive damage spike. Every other time it is going to be so small it is insignificant. The fact that it doesn't count overheal makes it incredibly hard to maintain (and thus you can't count on it) and makes it scale inversely with your tank's gear (better gear = less damage = less effective healing = smaller HoT).

And since we're really arguing BoL/Prot versus Sheath you're also losing 10% spell haste, which incidentally is also a massive HPS boost.

Hm, Blood Frenzy is only 1% more and people get very very worked up over it. Improved FF is only 3% as well and our rogues whine to the sky and back when we don't have it.

Small != useless.

Those are damage buffs and I absolutely agree they make that difference. Healing will not.

Why is the metric of value visibility as opposed to effectiveness? I understand that it is a valuable point in penetrating the consciousness of the players in the game, but at the end of the day what matters most to the type of people who frequent these boards is what WORKS best. It might take more work to get that effectiveness across to the players without awesome buffs showing up like LotP or UR, but that in itself doesn't make the buff any less worthwhile. I'm not really sure what point you're trying to make other than that paladin buffs need to be more visible?

Why bother speccing into the Holy Tree at all then? All it's doing is giving you marginal increases in healing that stack up.