GSH

You can melee-heal with Holy Light or Flash of Light using the default UI without mouseover/clickcast macros. You always could. How did you guys melee-heal before mouseover/clickcast macros came into use? Press heal button, then click target's frame. Doesn't switch your main target or turn off auto-attack.

You can't do this with Holy Shock, as Shock will use damage mode instead of healing mode. Yet you need to be able to do this for melee-healing to revolve around Shock.

Edit: Also, Righteous Defense was perfectly usable without the macro. Hit RD button, click target player frame or target-of-target frame. The macro just made it automatic.

 

Briana

I'm on the beta and just recently hit 75. Using my BV tanking gear, the same stuff I had when I entered the beta, I have 715 BV on my character sheet. Currently I have both the 30% increase to BV talent and the 15% increase to SotR through the top end shield talent.

6 second cooldown, low mana cost... my standard SotR strike hits for 1726 holy damage every time and crits for around 3600. My highest crit was approx. 4200 with wings popped.

I haven't seen much data posted on this thread about real values for this spell. This spell alone is going to produce a huge amount of our threat.

 

Malleus

I don't use mouseover. The second-best Healadin in my guild does. We have equivalent gear and neither of us slack off. I've been ahead of him on the meter in practically every raid for the last six months - by as much as 40% effective heal and 10% raw heal some nights. "Gimped hardcore"? I don't think so. I think you would gimp yourself if you were used to using it and stopped, but that's different.

I'm not overly keen on mouseover in the first place, and even less keen on the idea of it being necessary. Most new players don't even know that mouseover exists as an option, let alone how to program a macro to use it. Making its use essential for effective healing turns the learning curve for Healadins into a precipice.

 

bellator

Just done a little JoL/W testing on beta.

It's not possible to test exactly how things work when judgements are refreshed by other paladins (CS) etc, since neither melee nor CS refresh judgement.

The one thing I was able to test were two paladins judging the same thing. The way the mechanics appeared to work was that a) they didnt stack and b) the mana/health returned was based on the most recently judged judgement. So if paladin A judged light which returned 700 per hit, then i judged light which would return 400 per hit, the health i would receieve from that point on was the 400 per hit.

This would lead me to believe that if a prot pala has jol on the boss, even if the ret paladins CS refreshed the jol based on the ret palas stats, a subsequent prot pala hit would probably update it again based on his stats (which wouldnt be ideal).

This however got me thinking. Perhaps the bug with melee/cs not refreshing judgements isnt fully bugged. Perhaps it's being changed so that only CS can refresh the judgement. This would mean that at the start of the fight, a prot pala could judge jol and a ret jow. The ret would maintain both judgements based on his stats, and the prot pala would not be overwriting the jol from meleeing the mob. From this point on the prot paladin could judge justice whilst the ret pala keeps the judgements ticking away with CS

 

flyingtoastr

Meters mean nothing for healing, all that matters is that your assignment stays alive and you don't go OOM. I personally usually sit last on our healing meters on BT nights because I like to go afk for trash, but it doesn't mean I'm a bad healer.

Again, I highly doubt you will have to sit on Holy Shocks to be an effective healer, I'm sure you can roll-face-on-FoL and still do fine. It is the exact same with priests now; you don't have to sit on Clearcasts to be a good priest, but the great ones know how to cast-cancel for as long as possible to get those OO5SR tics. It is a very good thing when they put in mechanics that allow you to grow as a character and player if you are willing to put in the time and effort to learn, something the paladin class has been missing for a very long time.

 

Altirias

Fair enough.

Every spec will have incentives to judge almost as soon as possible anyway, so there's little need for melee refreshing of judgement debuffs. The fact that CS would refresh all judgements, and set higher return values would mean that this talent keeps a very good utility in raids, as well as being a major source of dps.

 

Palados

After reading a blue post about nerfing Lifebloom, two points raised there showed their intention to change the healing approach.

1. They want people to use ALL or nearly all of their spells in healing arsenal regularly.

Similar thing was done to shamans - their single target spells were buffed to break the trend of CH spam. Priests got their CoH nerfed as well. I am pretty sure that they will buff 'bad' spells and 'nerf' good spells till they achieve the balance they want to. Therefore BoL WILL be a viable spell, especially taking into account that it's a 51pointer.

2. Second point is more interesting. Some sentences imply that all these big changes for healers are made to force people to be smart and, actually, not compete between each other. Aka when druid puts a HoT on a target after AoE you would not want to throw a downranked heal to top that target, etc. Mana is supposed to be a valuable resource. So far all are concerned how we should regen our mana. While the question that we should ask ourselves (according to developers) is : How can we use our mana most effectively? I am guessing they want us to achieve much better coordination in healing team, to utilize strengthes of different classes and to reduce the general overhealing and crosshealing.

 

Yenadar

I remember reading something that they were combining melee haste and casting haste into 1 haste stat. Is this true or false?

If true, then the throughput power of haste is now also coupled with a faster swing timer. Granted, there is still the 4sec internal cooldown, but that shouldn't affect anything as it stands now, since you will be swinging periodically. Haste would simply reduce the amount of time you have to sit on a spell before that first/next swing happens.

I have rarely been holy, almost exclusively prot, however in TBC raiding into Sunwell, when I am healing, I nearly -always- attempt to get in melee range somehow, and keep seal up, and it has done great for me time and again. I rarely have to, and when I pose a risk to the raid by doing so, (Archi, Felmyst) I don't. However even in holy gear, I am still running around 14k health, 18k armor, and the rest of the prot benefits, so I have massively less personal risk by standing in there than any other healer in the raid. Heck, I even normally drop salv and put up imp RF for those healing times, to make sure I am leading all healers in threat as well.

We are plate wearers, and I simply can not believe that Blizzard wants us to stay out of melee range. I recognize that they don't want to force us into melee range, but I can certainly see them giving us tangible benefit to to being in melee range, even if the mechanics of it aren't working right in Beta yet. But then again... it's Beta. Not Live. They have time to work on it.

 

Palados

I think it would be very ineffective tactics in 25mans. Let's analyze what we know so far. Bliz intention is to break both chaincasting in any form and use of only one spell most of the time. I can see only one way of designing the encounter around these changes. Damage will be:

a) Fairly predictable.
b) Spikes will be big, but relatively rare. Or often, but absolutely predictable (Patchwerk is an example).
b) Between spikes damage will be really moderate, so that HoTs will be enough and chain-FoLing will be a waste (you would better regen mana to cover big spikes instead).

It still leave the space for FoL spam (that is equivalent to a very good HoT) for something like Sear in twins fight, where usual hots are not enough to cover the damage. But I believe that chain-casting FoL will be ineffective enough to not justify a spot in a raid if you have 2 paladins already. Paladins main goal would be topping the tank with fast/instant HL_max_rank and Holy shock. But topping only after a moderate or big spike. I could easily imagine a fight where paladin would be irreplaceable in the sence that he would make a fight much easier - if boss rarely, like once in 30-40sec, could two-shot (even with some margin) a tank in 2sec time interval. Only really fast and really big heal would prevent the death in this case. And other classes big heals are either too slow or instants have too big CD.

Another situation is something similar to dark barrage. In the case when you CAN'T allow your healers to chaincast on one raid person to not go oom too fast, paladin seems to be a logical choise to produce a high HPS for a short time.

 

Palados

Some people may say that priest or shammy could single target heal too, but they also could AoE heal. Thus why bring a paladin? I think the aim of the designers will be around the lines, that if encounter is tuned to have any 2 AoE healers, then 3rd AoE healer would be forced to single target heal (that paladins do better) and benefits of 3rd AoE healer would be really marginal. AoE heals, as any other healing spells, will be non spammable. It means that encounters should be designed around this fact. If AoE is rare and weak enough to be easily covered by two people, third person will bring nothing. Also, the fact that AoE is slow and rare also makes BoL much more powerfull than it was evaluated to be in spam-aoe-heal situation.

 

◊ Cathela

True.

Also, Hammer of the Righteous is considered a physical ability, meaning it can be cast through silence.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

yamamoto

Horrible reasoning. I know 80% of healers out there think this way as well, and its depressing. The mark of a GOOD/GREAT healer is to effectively heal one's target as well as helping out in some dire situations. The reason my guild has killed Twins, M'uru and, to a lesser extent, KJ are our healers' ability to know when to leave their target to save someone. Shamans/Priests are great, but they are not gods, sometimes, especially during progress people make mistakes/are a bit too slow to react. Thats where the more "advanced" healers help pick up the slack. No one is perfect and Guilds/healers do best when they back each other up.

But I mean, if you want to make it easy and spam Rank 7/11 on one target the whole night and watch as how your FoL or HS could've saved that guy that got a nasty Flame Seer or an unintended blast from a Void Sentinel, by all means, continue to do so.

 

Mordekhuul

So how much of your old pally tanking gear have you replaced by 75? I'm guessing not much, and that tanking gear drops more in later zones?

Also, did you switch over from some of your +dmg tanking gear to any banked warrior-style tanking gear at all?

I'm wondering, between now and Wrath, what might be "better" tanking gear to stock up on instead of seeing is harded, and also wondering if Blizzard will re-itemizing any of our old tankadin gear. Certainly a good warrior tanking weapon might be useful in Wrath?

 

tpfca

In a nutshell: meters mean little more than a recorded activity finder.

What WotLK will acheive in ensure that a group of healers becomes efficient, coordinated. And thanks to previous talents, Paladins tend to have the upper hand in that respect, at least in most guilds I have been in.

I'm quite pleased with the new talents and game mechanics tweaks.

 

Jessie

I'm still holding out hope that they reitemize the t6 protection set, changing some of that spellpower to strength. It seems like that's on their to-do list, but that doesn't mean it will actually happen. As it stands, it seems like a good mix of ret and prot gear could be the best way to go. Also, somebody needs to convince blizzard to take off that pesky rogue/warrior requirement on the MH [Warglaive of Azzinoth] and let me use that damn thing to level.

When we look at you we don't even see the testicles on your chin. We see the testicles in your heart.

 

Kortar

Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're saying, but you can target-redirect offensive spells just fine. If you're melee'ing away on your target, you could have a macro such as "/cast [target=focus] Holy Shock" Shock a secondary target.

In any case, click-casting has been around since the earliest days of WoW. The reason it become popularized with BC has to do with the nerfing of auto-targetting macros that allowed you to select targets based on criteria like "the lowest health player within range who is not already being healed by another healer".

I don't use DoTimer on my Mage, but that doesn't mean tracking DoT target/timing isn't darn useful for my Warlock farm-bot.

Paladins can not move & cast, nor do they switch targets all that often. So the benefits of click-casting aren't all that high for them. But if I'm raiding with a Holy Priest, it's actually noticeable if they're not using a click-cast mod (either that, or they have extremely bad lag).

While true, it should be noted that the Druid was being foolish putting down the HoT in the first place. No matter how good your healers may be, they have no control over the auto-targetted heals generated by Chain Heal, AA and CoH. That HoT will get sniped, and there's absolutely nothing you can do about it.

 

Amera

As a friend of mine once said, the difference between a paladin and a priest on trash is that the priest gets one-shot, while the paladin takes two. Almost any trash mob and certainly any raid mob designed to threaten an actual tank will still one-two shot a holy paladin. I was one-shot by a cleave on trash on our Tuesday clear, and one-shut by Brut on a wipe. I understand we are "more durable," but the only time that actually matters is against zerg adds or something (like skeletons on Myst). As far as melee on bosses, how is that durability helping you at all? Your only threat is either magic damage, which are no more defended against than anyone else, or cleaves, which require you to watch your positioning. In both cases, a priest could stand right next to you and melee the mob too and not suffer any additional adverse effects.

Yes and no. Certainly knowing when to do this is a great skill, but it's also a pretty rare occurrence. If my Void sentinel tank is at 100% and the feral tank at the door drops to 20%, I could drop a heal on the feral. But the Void easily has enough burst to kill my tank in the 4 seconds it would take me to land another heal, so I don't do that. If he dies, it is my fault. You make the highlight reels by dropping your coverage on a QB read to get an interception, but you also give up touchdowns when you are caught out of position. Realistically speaking, as our class goes, we should really only be floating against bosses who lack burst damage to punish you for tossing your GCD elsewhere.

 

GSH

You can't do it without macros. I contend that Blizzard will never design around a mechanic/playstyle that requires macros to even function.

 

levk

So what, infusion of light tooltip doesn't stipulate that holy shock crit has to be a heal. It's not like blizzard is trying to hide this macro stuff, it'll be up on the general forums the first day people can spec into infusion. With all the focus and mouseover goodness. And if people are too ignorant or lazy to take advantage of this flexibility it will be their handicap. Countless hunters still don't know the first thing about rotations and that will never change. The world will always have retards.

 

Kortar

This is a consequence of gearing choices more than anything else. Right now, your average Paladin would wear tissue paper if it had the right mix of +healing/+spell critical.

However, WotLK really nerfs the scaling on Holy Paladin spells. Look at Greater Heal vs. Holy Light. Holy Light is 25% larger, casts 0.5s faster, and costs about 60% more. Normally, this would mean Holy Light is a lot better than Greater Heal. But Holy Light scales at about 2/3rds the value of Greater Heal with talents (and likely even worse once everything is taken into account) - it is probable that at level 80 gear levels, your average Greater Heal will heal more/cast than your average Holy Light. As a consequence, the breakpoint between spellpower/critical is significantly lower on a Paladin than a Priest. Assuming that you could freely select gear as desired, it wouldn't surprise me to see properly geared Holy Paladins running gear with a 1000 less spellpower than the properly geared Priest healing alongside them. What they'll have instead is piles and piles of critical bonus - which also affects melee.

How does this help Holy Paladin durability? Well, it doesn't. But it gives the impression that the intent is for Paladins to actually swing the big pointy sticks they carry rather than act as mobile weapon stands.

And in terms of durability, the difference between 'one shot' and 'two shot' is actually pretty big. You can't heal one-shot. Holy Paladins are tougher than Enhancement Shaman (heck, Enhancement Shaman don't even carry Shields in raids), and no one tells them to stand in a corner off to the side so they won't be in melee range of the boss.

 

JettJaguar

Nonsense. Blizzard has been designing content around AddOn functionality (glorified macros), since Ragnaros was the final boss in the game. They usually import much of that functionality into the UI at some later point, CT Raid, threat meters, etc. Further, as I believe you said earlier, it doesn't require macros. Click on the friendly, cast Holy Shock on them, right-click on the boss, and voila. Perhaps they are on the verge of another UI breakthrough where you can make every spell, no matter what your target, give you the glowing hand (then it wouldn't require a macro and would meet your game-design-validation criteria).

 

◊ Cathela

So in the last 24 hours I've run both of the level 70 instances, one as prot and one as holy.

Last night I did the Nexus, as prot. This was the first time I'd specced prot in the expansion, so I was getting familiar with HotR for the first time. Group was DK/druid/hunter/warlock, with gear ranging from Kara to T6.

The new mechanics feel good. HotR uses a throwing animation and actually has a little gold hammer that smacks the target and bounces (at least that's what it looked like, but it moves fast so who knows). The primary target has to be in melee range, but the bounce distance looks to be about the same as AS, so you can chain it to mobs a decent distance from you. Seeing six numbers pop up from a pack of mobs (three hammer hits, three seals) is very satisfying. If you've got SoW up, you can triple-proc it and your mana bumps up very noticeably. We ran into several silencing mobs, and it was pleasant to discover that HotR can be cast through silence.

Seal management takes some getting used to, since you don't have to re-seal after every judgement now, but they don't las long enough that you can just forget about them for half an hour like you can with blessings. They sit in that middle ground where you have to think about them once every fight, but they aren't constantly on your mind.

It's hard to tell how well balanced threat generation is, since I was in T6 tanking gear, which on the one hand is a much higher ilevel than the instance is designed for, and on the other hand doesn't suit the new tanking mechanics at all. I had mana issues from time to time, but I expect I could improve on those with some practice switching seals and such, or by switching out for some DPS gear or whatever. But I held aggro all right; we didn't wipe and had only a few deaths, so for now it's working okay. (I'm going to get one of my guildmates to make me the green crafted tanking set, but since most of the PuGs on the beta realm include people with T5/6 gear, I'm not sure how well that'll work just yet.)

Also had a little time to solo as prot afterwards; nothing fancy, just some of the Gordunni ogres above Shatt. Wearing dps plate is the way to go for that. Round up 3 at a time, holy shield, seal, hammer/judge away, and things die pretty fast. Not quite as insanely efficient as Ret grinding, but still very nice by any reasonable standard.

One other thing that's pretty obvious, but hadn't occured to me: The +healing -> spellpower shift works out to be a very nice buff to prot paladin healing. Between that and TbtL, I was getting crits around 8k in my T6 tanking gear. Granted it'll be lower than that in "real" tanking gear, since prot paladins in WotLK won't have spelldamage all over their gear. But still, it's very nice, and it at least gives the impression that off-healing as prot won't feel as pathetic as it does now.



This morning I got into an Utgarde Keep run as a healer, 55/0/7 (level 71). Group was a Ret paladin, Prot paladin, warlock, hunter, and me. My first time speccing holy in the beta and frankly I can't even remember the last time I healed a 5-man.

The melee-healer things seems to work all right, but it requires some knowledge of when it's safe to do it and when it's not. Several times I ran in to melee and got smacked up by some kind of short-range AoE/cleave/etc. So you have to know what you're doing.

As far as I can tell, Judgements of the Pure does not work at all. I tried judging and then checking stats: my haste/spellhaste tooltips on the character sheet did not change, my weapon speed on the character sheet did not change, my spell-tooltip cast times did not change, and I didn't notice things happening any faster. I don't know if it's bugged, or if I was doing something wrong, but I couldn't get it to work no matter what I tried (I tried different judgements, different seals, etc.) I definitely could have used it, because when things started moving fast, they really started moving fast.

Holy Shock is nice now. I was using it pretty much every cooldown; in my gear it was healing for around 2.5k noncrit and 3.5-4k crit. I started off without using a macro and just detargeting the mob before I cast, which was doable, but it was uncomfortable and didn't feel smooth at all, so about halfway through I made a mouseover macro and things felt much more fluid after that.

Infusion of Light is awesome. Basically once that procs, it's kind of "free time" to do whatever you want for the next 10 seconds or so, or until the tank drops to 60% or so. At that point you just bust out your insta-HL and go back to the normal routine. The only part I had trouble with was paying attention to the buff; several times it ran out before I was expecting it to, which led to a few tricky situations.

FoL was still useful, but I found myself using it mainly as a patch-up heal on DPS that had lost 20-30% of their HP, especially when shock was on cooldown. I had to chaincast HL a few times when serious damage started rolling in.

Didn't get much of a chance to try out Beacon. For one thing, I forgot to train up ranks when I specced holy. The second boss of the instance was dropping out some massive group damage, but it didn't occur to me at the time to try Beacon. Tried it on the last boss and noticed that the rank 1 version was ticking for around 410 with my gear; after I got back to IF and trained it up it seemed to tick for about 480. So it seems to hold up fairly well with downranking. It uses the rez/CH casting animation, but there's still no actual animation for the beacon effect.

The DF+shock+HL trick works well, but the GCD in between can feel like forever when you're thinking "OMG gotta heal the tank nownownow!" It's not quite as good as NS for that particular purpose, although it's pretty close.

I only got low on mana once, during the second boss encounter, when there were random shadowbolts hitting everyone and I was basically just chaincasting HL all over the raid. But I didn't use DI (I'm a healing noob, as I said), I forgot to train Divine Prayer when I hit 71, and as I said I didn't even try BoL. So if I'd been thinking ahead I probably could have come out of even that fight pretty high on mana.

Also did a little holy soloing before the instance. At level 71 in BC raid epics it's basically like playing a caster. You judge at 30 yards, shock when they close to 20, and usually you can throw a hammer right after the shock.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

levk

I'm curious how you guys would spec should there be a 3.0 patch - these talents at 70. Post them up and since there's a lot of hard decisions you'd have to make at 70 write something about it. As a healer I see just full 61 holy (fairly obvious), but I'd really like to try sheath however that would be at the loss of divine illumination and any reason to judge which would hamper adjustment to this new playstyle (something like this)

 

◊ Cathela

Regarding the whole Can-you-play-this-without-macros question:

First, based on my experience in Utgarde Keep this morning, it's possible to do melee-healing effectively without having a mouseover macro for Holy Shock. Possible. But it's not fun, and if I didn't know how to make a macro for it, it's not something I would want to do as a regular part of my gameplay.

Second, the majority of players of this game play it on a very casual level, don't read the forums, don't bother with addons, etc. To these players, the current design of paladin healing in WotLK is going to be frustrating to manage. It was frustrating to me to heal without a macro, and I at least had the advantage that I understood why I couldn't use holy shock to heal people without a macro. Newer players will find it not working, and most of them won't even understand why it's not working.

Personally, I love the melee-healing arrangement. I think it requires more skill to play effectively, and it's more interesting and more fun. But regardless of what sophisticated players like ourselves may prefer, Blizzard didn't make the zillions of dollars it has today by making its games difficult to play for people who don't use macros or download addons. I don't want them to gut the melee-healing mechanics (from a purely selfish standpoint if nothing else), but I'm afraid that's what they will do if they can't find some way to make it work intuitively from the base interface.

Third, this thread has started to take a negative turn over the last page or so as people have debated whether mouseover macros and such are "needed" to play well or not, and there are some ugly implications being made about people's playing skills. Let's try to keep this discussion civil and be respectful to the people we disagree with. Everyone who's interested enough in the game to find their way to this board and this thread has probably played enough to have some kind of clue what they're doing, even if their observations and thoughts about the game mechanics don't exactly match up with yours. Nobody knows everything about this game: not me, and not you. Let's try to remember that.

My comrades are my weapons, and I am their shield.

 

• frmorrison

Judgements of the Pure has never worked in the Beta, but I am sure it will soon.


Regarding 3.0, I would spec 50/11 for Holy (need Kings, Beacon and Judgements aren't great yet), 51/10 Protection (need Parry), and Ret would do 5/54 (15% strength).

DK - Ashbane Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor.