Rasputin

I hadn't actually thought of that since I haven't really adjusted to the new scaling of SoW. I'll give that a try.

 

Noules

Actually, paladin spells -are- also scaling faster, due to the BoL being 'baked in'. FoL apparently has a 100% spellpower coefficient while the 'standard' 1.5s spell has a 85.6% coefficient.

And to address the issue of pally heals somehow becoming less efficient in WOTLK:

FoL is easily the most mana efficient scaling single target heal (assuming base mana values among the classes are the same or very nearly the same):

FoL: 1.5s / 7% (* 7/6) = 25
HL: 2.5s / 29% (* 7/6) = 10
Flash: 1.5s / 18% = 8.33
GH: 3.0s / 32% = 9.375
Nourish: 1.5s / 9% = 16.7 (!)
HT: 3.5s / 39% = 8.97
LHW: 1.5s / 15% = 10
HW: 3s / 25% = 12

Note that what is actually being compared is (a proportion of) coefficient/mana, but for most spells coefficient ~= base cast time (FoL/HL being better than normal being the main exception). The FoL/Flash ratio is 3.0.

On live, the heals are (note that these are in different units from the previous list, and should be evaluated as ratios between spells of the same list):
(a scaling factor of 1000 is included to make the values neater)

FoL: 1.5s / 180 = 8.3
HL: 2.5s / 840 = 2.98
Flash: 1.5s / 470 = 3.19
GH: 3.0s / 825 = 3.64
HT: 3.5s / 935 = 3.74
LHW: 1.5s / 440 = 3.41
HW: 3.0s / 720 = 4.17

The FoL/Flash ratio is 2.6. The WOTLK FoL is actually more mana efficient as spell power increases compared to the live version versus the priest heals (not surprising, since they essentially turned a fixed increase - BoL - into superior scaling, which is vastly preferable with more gear). The only current spell more efficient than HL besides FoL in WOTLK so far (at least, pre-talents) is Healing Wave; on live, HL is the least efficiently scaling direct heal.

In fact, the only direct heal that even seems to come close is Nourish, but from what I've read the mana cost on Nourish is currently smaller than would be expected from earlier in the beta (where Nourish was ~80-90% of the cost of Flash heal). Given all this, saying that our healing efficiency appears to be going down seems quite unwarranted.

 

◊ Cathela

I guess what I find weird is that there's no way to make a piece of gear that turns the tables and puts points into a stat that's great for DKs, but useless for paladins and warriors. So there will be gear that's good for all three classes, and gear that's good for the shield-users but not so good for DKs, but there won't be any gear that's good for DKs but not so hot for paladins and warriors. It seems kind of surprising they'd deliberately create an imbalanced situation like that; it's kind of like when those tanking bracers off of Attumen were restricted to warriors for the longest time. Maybe not quite as blatantly obnoxious as that, but still pretty obviously unfair.

(Unless I'm missing something.)

Very nice work, Noules. Also, when you consider that paladins have (I believe) the smallest base mana pool of the healing classes, the gap in costs and efficiency gets even wider. Barring any changes, you have conclusively proved me wrong on this.

However, in my defense:

The change from static mana costs to a percentage of base mana changed the relative costs of the spells quite a bit, and at the time I first said that our healing efficiency was going down, it really was. (I swear! I did the math!)

EDIT: Looking at those numbers, it appears that standard healing spells are getting a spellpower coefficient exactly twice their old +healing coefficient, which was determined by normalizing the cast time against a 3.5-second standard, e.g. Flash Heal gets a coefficient of 2*(1.5/3.5). Paladin heals are apparently being normalized against 3.0 instead (hence the 100% coefficient for FoL).

What makes you say this is a product of the BoL change? Wouldn't that be more accurately done just by modifying the base healing amounts?

I guess I don't see what the developers are trying to achieve by giving us faster scaling. (But apparently they're doing it, so /shrug.)

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

 

Tpyo

Am I reading this right? Am I to believe that the Paladin's capability to heal uninterrupted while having as many mobs on him/her as they want is now being taken away? Or is this the same effect as always but just worded differently?

If I'm reading this right, we'll have a 70% chance to not take interruption from damage, and a 30% chance to take pushback but at a 35% reduced amount. Not only does this add a high rate of frustration and a huge nerf to the Holy spec in both PvE and PvP.. but it increases the amount of potential RNG.

All mechanics are being changed in the same way, Earth shields etc.

 

kharen

They've changed (or will shortly be changing) all pushback-resistance talents/buffs/etc to the same mechanic, where it reduces the pushback, rather than flat-out avoiding it. Since the change to cap the max pushbacks at two, the old system just wasn't very good (you could have a high chance to avoid pushback, but since hits that didn't actually cause it weren't counted towards the max of 2 pushbacks, you'd get just as much pushback as someone without any pushback avoidance most of the time).

Any combination of buffs and talents that would give you 100% pushback resistance on live will instead give you 100% reduced pushback. But as this is a beta, and as such a work in progress, some stuff has been moved to the new system while other stuff hasn't (and some stuff has been changed over but the tooltips haven't been updated yet, etc).

 

Rheyah

You'd have to modify each spell depending on the level of Blessing of Light availible to it and have it scale downwards depending on level (which is what BoL would have done before the downranking changes). It's impractical mathematically - it was better just to use the coefficients to make up for the loss.

 

bellator

Couple of Changes that I havent noticed anyone mention.

1) Divine Storm is now correctly inflicting holy damage not physical (can anyone confirm HotR is also fixed)

2) Health regenerated by Divine Storm is 20% of total damage not actual damage inflicted (ie if a mob has 1 health and you do 1000 damage, you get 200 health back not 0.2)


If they calculate pushback resistance like othe % modifiers, 100% reduced pushback will only halve the pushback time not remove is completely.

 

bellator

Just wanted to check, but people do realise that the actual size of the paladins heals on beta has been increase right? It's not just the coefficients that have changed.

Rank 11 Holy Light

Live: Holy Light - Spell - World of Warcraft

Beta: Holy Light - Spell - World of Warcraft

 

SirM

I also noticed this, on live server my hl 11 heals for around 4500 noncrit and on the beta server it's around 6000. Same with fol 7, 1900 on live and 2400 on beta. Not only are the heals sizes bigger but also divine intellect gives 5%more int and thus more spellpower.

 

Hulabaloon

Remember all the discussion several pages back about how our healing would all be based around HS and instant HL? Thanks to Noules' calculations on our efficiency, it seems like FoL spam will still be just as effective as it was in Heroic/T4/T5 content. Yawn.

 

Noules

Actually I'm not certain that the higher spellpower coefficients are due to the BoL bake-in; I remember someone suggesting that that might be the reason for it and it stuck to my mind. I do agree that reproducing the BoL effect would be most accurately done by modifying the base values - but the change in coefficients doesn't seem accidental given that virtually every other spell follows the cast speed formula. What the change implies to me is that BoL was/is being equated to the Empowered Healing talents and that the new coefficient change is closer to what they had in mind for BoL.

 

Prinsesa

Is/Was Divine Storm normalized? I seem to recall someone on this thread saying that the only reason HOTR was unnormalized was because it's supposed to be an instant attack that deals non-physical damage, and the interaction between normalization and spell damage was bugged.

"We do want Sanctuary to be the tanking seal"

- Ghostcrawler

 

Noules

This was my concern as well. Basically it seems like instead of FoL + keeping up Light's Grace, we'll be doing FoL + keeping up Infusion of Light. While it's an upgrade in the sense that Infusion of Light is better than Light's Grace, and that we'd be much more mobile, the actual rotation looks to be very familiar.

I'm not sure that it will ever be viable to have the sort of dps/healing hybrid that the new Judgement talents kind of imply without a significant change to fundamentals of the class. The problem is the opportunity cost of dps - that GCD you spent is a holy shock or FoL or 75% of a Holy Light. If there's time to do anything besides heal, chances are pretty good that you've brought too many healers.

Warhammer seems to have addressed this issue by making the HoTs be the primary source of healing, and making the direct heals extremely inefficient in both player time and mana. This felt very odd at first, but upon reflection it's quite brilliant: you spend about half your time putting up HoTs (both time and mana efficient) then you have the option to spend the rest of your time debuffing or decent DPS, or using inefficient heals if you absolutely need a bit more healing throughput. The decision process changes a little if there's a lot of multiple target healing needed, but for straight tank healing it works beautifully. If you choose to do nothing but heal, you find yourself doing nothing for significant periods of time (your HoTs are already stacked, and the incoming damage doesn't always warrant using the inefficient means of increasing healing output).

The FoL glyph seems to be a step in the right direction - if the HoT throughput of FoL is good enough to approximate FoL spamming without actually FoL spamming, freeing up a GCD to do other things becomes a lot more reasonable. There's still the problem of spending that time casting HL being better use of time than the debuff/damage, though...basically the objective would be to have diminishing returns on player time to healing effect.

The sort of thing I'd like to see is for FoL to become a regrowth-like effect (already possible from glyph) with a short HoT time (~6s to fit the rotation), for HL to be a very strong heal with a penalty for spamming (an 'exhaustion' effect that decreases the amount healed by Holy Light for the next 6s by 10%, stacking upto 5x, perhaps), and for Judgements to have more effects. Maybe Judging Light would also clear Holy Light Exhaustion...or maybe there could be a 'life tap' judgement that would transfer health from your judgement target to its target.

 

Kortar

At level 70, Druids have the least, Priests have 10.5% more, Paladins 24.6% more, Shaman 24.8% more (at level 70). Prior to WotLK, base mana differences were pretty much irrelevent. Post-WotLK, these differences may change to reflect the changes to casting costs.

In terms of heal-per-percent-mana (and ignoring the unknown potential discrepancies in base mana):

Nourish 2035/9% * 1.2 (HoT benefit) * 1.1 (Tranquil Spirit) * 1.1 (Gift of Nature) * 1.1 (Gift of the Earthmother, conservative estimate for raids) = 361.14 hppm, 0.115238 coefficient/percent mana.

Greater Heal 4270/32% * 1.15 (Improved Healing) * 1.05 (Twin Disciplines) * 1.1 (Spiritual Healing) * 1.16 (Improved Holy Concentration) = 205.60 hppm, 0.088139 coefficient/percent mana.

Holy Light 5166/29% * 1.12 (Healing Light) = 199.51 hppm, 0.057471 coefficient/percent mana.

Healing Wave 3250/25% * 1.05 (Tidal Focus) * 1.18 (Healing Way) * 1.1 (Purification) = 177.18 hppm, 0.0825 coefficient/percent mana.

Flash Heal 2040/18% * 1.05 (Twin Disciplines) * 1.1 (Spiritual Healing) * 1.16 (Improved Holy Concentration) = 151.84 hppm, 0.068127 coefficient/percent mana.

Flash of Light 832/7% * 1.12 (Healing Light) = 133.12 hppm, 0.142857 coefficient/percent mana.

Lesser Healing Wave 1720/15% * 1.05 (Tidal Focus) * 1.1 (Purification) = 132.44 hppm, 0.0775 coefficient/percent mana.

This disregards Illumination (as well as the benefits of critical healing), and sets Nourish scaling based on 2 HoT (which is almost certainly a very lowball estimate in any multi-healer environment). Under such constraints, you'd need about +30,000 spellpower to catch Nourish.

If you presume a Sheath spec (Sheath of Light, Conviction, Illumination, Holy Power) and 25% critical pre-talents, you end up improving the throughput of Flash of Light by 49% while reducing the cost by 21%, bringing Flash of Light to 240.00 hppm/0.172857 coefficient/pm. A 15% critical rate on our Druid would provide him a 14.25% boost in throughput, raising Nourish to 412.61 hppm/0.115238 coefficient/pm. Under such assumptions, you'd only need about 1500 spellpower to match Nourish. However, this not only represents a significant gearing discrepancy (10% more critical from gear for our Paladin) but it also doesn't account for more than 2 HoT on the target.

So my suspicion is that on a tank in a raiding setting, Nourish will outperform Flash of Light under almost any reasonable assumptions of gear (Nourish is natively much higher hps than FoL can ever hope to match). However, Nourish's effectiveness disappears when it's used as a heal on non-tanks due to the heavy emphasis on stacking HoT for its benefits. Left as an exercise for the reader is calculating the mana efficiency of the entire Druid tank healing cycle of heals.

For non-tanks, Flash of Light is clearly the highest efficiency heal of the single target heals. However, it should be noted that multi-target heals are in a league of their own in terms of efficiency. For example, CoH runs at 790.61 hppm, 0.370408 coefficient/pm.

 

Isollae

I have a power question regarding Divine Storm. while i love what i see about it, for it is without question a much needed ability, It is easily comparable to a level 35 warrior skill (whirlwind) and a 20 point shadow priest talent(although this is more of an inverse comparison), So the question is...Is Divine Storm, at 51 points, over priced?

From an end game stand point, id say probable not as you'd get it any way, but from a hybrid/leveling perspective waiting until 60th is kind of ugly.

 

Hulabaloon

Some good ideas there. I particularly like the 'Arcane Blast' style HL debuff, it could create some nice synergy between FoL, HS and HL as long as the initial strength of the heal is enough to compensate for the fact that we can maybe only cast it once every 15-20 seconds. Also, I also see no real reason for LoH not to be on a shortened c/d now that the armor buff is comparable to a priest's Inspiration - it will be hitting for less than HL anyway.

On another note, there's currently a thread on mmo-champion complaining that a Death Knight's DoTs can crit, if Blizz apply this mechanic to other spells it could be a good omen for BoL, a spell that has never really sat well with me as it has no way to integrate with the defining characteristic of the Holy Paladin - Illumination.

 

Fiola

To add on to this, when you look at base healing amounts on Live, HL is universally less HPM/HPS than equivalent spells of other classes (untalented). When you include BoL, then it has the highest (base untalented) HPM/HPS.


Giving HL/FoL the best (base) scaling seems to be following that original "design intent".

 

GSH

Berfore we get too excited, remember that it could just be a bug. Maybe the Paladin developer miscalculated the proper coefficients and used 3.0 as his base instead of 3.5.

BoL been baked in is far more likely to contribute to the increased base healing of our spells, than to our scaling.

 

xi0nic

I definitely agree with you here, I feel that the new skills Retribution Paladins are getting are just a band-aid to cover up the problem. The Seal/Judgment system is just boring. Leveling as a paladin does not have nearly as much interactivity as other classes do, even with the changes on Beta. The new clicky skills aren't active until at least level 50 when you get Crusader Strike, and then 60 when you get access to Divine Storm! For the first 50 LEVELS all you do is (on live) seal of crusader, judge, seal of righteous/command, autoattack, judge/reseal...no buttons to press, no interactivity, no fun.

While I feel that your question was mainly about the relative power of the skill (which I agree requires far too much to get), I think this just speaks to the state of the retribution spec as a whole. Holy/Prot are the same way.

Let's take a look at the activated skills you can pick up while leveling:

Level 4 -- Judgement
Level 6 -- Seal of the Crusader(removed in Beta)
Level 8 -- Hammer of Justice
Level 20 -- Consecration, Seal of Command (Ret only), Exorcism (not usable on all targets)
Level 22 -- Seal of Justice
Level 30 -- Seal of Light
Level 38 -- Seal of Wisdom
Level 40 -- Holy Shock (Holy only)
Level 44 -- Hammer of Wrath
Level 50 -- Crusader Strike (Ret only)
Level 60 -- Divine Storm (Beta Only)

That is all. Any other upgrades are defensive/healing, or rank upgrades. The two skills that have made the spec feel the most fun by all reports are obtained 50 levels after you start playing. I just think there's something terribly wrong about that. After Level 20, you will spend 30 entire levels sitting around praying for Seal of Command procs. That is just not good design.

With the Seal/Judgement changes, all that will be changed is a bonus to damage done because of the scaling factor, and more judgement buttons to clutter up the spellbook. Things may feel a bit more interactive this way at least, but not in the press-button-to-do-damage way that other classes enjoy.

 

Noules

From what I gathered from the resto druid thread, the Nourish mana cost is almost certainly a bug. Before the change to the percentages, Nourish cost roughly the same as Flash Heal (slightly less expensive). If the Nourish cost is correct, I agree that it would be the best single target heal under most circumstances given talents.

 

◊ Cathela

In other bug news, Improved Holy Shield is not granting you extra HS charges.

Thanks for the info, Bellator (I actually noticed the DS/HotR change and I think I removed the "bugged" notes from the OP, but I'll check.)

Prinsea, I'll try to test normalization when I get a chance. (I'm about to level on beta so I'll be heading back to Azeroth and I can get some lowbie weapons there.)

EDIT: After testing with multiple weapons, I have come to the conclusion that all three spells use normalized AP.

I still think there's room for some change to the healing style. If you're tank-healing and you proc an instant HL, your best move at that point is to just hold onto it until you see the tank take some damage, and use it at that point when you'll get very little to no overheal from it. That can open up some interesting possibilities, I think.

Yeah, you're right about this and about all the trees being like that.

One fairly easy change that would help at least a bit would be to switch CS and Repentance in Ret, and drop Holy Shield from 31 down to 21 prot (pending whatever the hell they decide to do with Sanctuary). Not only would that give leveling paladins earlier access to the more interesting talents, it would also open up some decent hybrid healing/soloing specs for the 70->80 grind.

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

 

xi0nic

I'd love to see those changes go through, but then Repentance might need to be changed a bit as well, being a 41 point talent it should be a bit more powerful. Even just lower CD+longer duration.

 

Shuror

You do know Repentance functions like a Sap/Blind hybrid on the beta, do you? 1 minute duration, 10 seconds in PvP. 1 minute cooldown.

That is, if you ask me, easily worthy of a 41 point talent.

 

Noules

Well, the problem here is again of opportunity cost - the fact that you have Infusion of Light up doesn't prevent you from continuing to heal via FoL. Healing as much as possible with FoL is still preferable since it's so much more mana efficient. If there was some mechanic that actually prevented you from getting ideal throughput through spamming (like the FoL glyph) then you really have more options since you get diminishing returns on spending more time healing.

The fundamental problem is that no matter how instant our healing becomes, it's always more mana efficient for us to spend the time healing. Given the two resources of time and mana, FoL means that we can always convert time efficiency into mana efficiency. So more time we are given (e.g. Infusion of Light) more FoL spam makes sense, rather than the other way around.

In order for it to make sense for paladin healers to do something other than heal, there must be some cutoff in the conversion from time efficiency to mana efficiency.

 

• frmorrison

Comparing leveling in Beta to Live, on Beta you can spam judgements (due to JotW), however in Live due to mana inefficient spells you cannot (unless you want to drink every pull).

Also, a leveling Pally in Beta may use Cons in the rotation to due better mana efficient spells.

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