The Holy Paladin Guide for WotLK - Page 104

Saladin · 03/04/09, 12:57 AM

Originally Posted by frmorrison

One push of 3.1 is to make Healers care about mana, so the badge item devs got the idea and put MP5 on all the SP plate. Paladins can still chain HL in 3.1, so maybe changes are coming.

Right, which is why I say that we can be somewhat forgiving of that--somewhat. Intellect is our prime regen stat, followed by MP5 or Crit based on your holy-to-flash ratio. We can assume from these pieces that Blizzard doesn't want our regen capabilities to scale much further than they already are. At the very least, it's disappointing to see that we won't be "progressing" very much in terms of efficiency as we upgrade our gear (unlike in burning crusade, where a crit-laden T6 paladin could blow a kara-geared FOLer out of the water). Maybe we'll see a big jump with T9, but for right now Blizzard is basically saying, "This is where your mana regen is staying--get used to it."

Originally Posted by frmorrison

The additional stamina is not eating the item budget, and with all the AoE around you will want more stamina (from higher item level gear).

...I must really misunderstand how item budgets work. Are you saying that a piece can have 2 or 200 Stamina and it won't affect how much Intellect it has on it? I really didn't think it worked that way. If that's true, then I'm even more puzzled as to how an iLevel 226 item downgrades Intellect from an iLevel 213.

As I learned things, I thought that an item could have 40 stam and 60 int, or 60 stam and 40 int, but they all came from the same iLevel budget pool, so that you couldn't have an item with 60 stamina AND 60 int.

In any case, we can agree that this much stamina does beckon heavy raid damage in the future. With a downsized and neutered GHL, we may have to try to work FoL into some sort of raid healing rotation much more often.

Eldadelin · 03/04/09, 4:07 AM

Valorous Redemption Tunic:
1155 Mana.
2.04 Haste
20 Mp5
99SP

Valorous Redemption Headpiece.
1155 mana
99 SP
20 Mp5

Valorous Redemption Greaves:
1155 Mana
1.11 Crit
2.01 Haste
99 SP

Combined:
3465 Mana
4.05 Haste
40 Mp5
297 SP
1.11 Crit.

-
Fallout impervious Tunic
1080 Mana
1.33 crit
1.77 Haste
99SP

Faceguard of the Succumbed
1080 Mana
.91 crit
1.86 Haste
99 SP

Bone-Inlaid Legguards:
1080 Mana
1.09 Crit
99SP
22Mp5

Combined:
3600 Mana
3.33 Crit
297SP
3.63 haste

With offset you gain:
135 Mana
2.22 Crit

Lose:
.72 haste
18Mp5

Atm, the Gloves and shoulders are BiS for T7.5

It's not letting me use the wowhead link, for some reason, I'm probably doing it wrong.
Correct me if I'm wrong.

Edit: I did however take your advice, and I'm grabbing the frosty blue sets for quick fights, and Uld. Thank you.

Sansei · 03/04/09, 7:52 AM

Originally Posted by Eldadelin

... and I'm grabbing the frosty blue sets for quick fights, and Uld. Thank you.

What are the items in that frosty blue set(offset) you guys are talking about?

Thekuvaz · 03/04/09, 9:31 AM

Its the Ilvl 226 items that has a frosty blue colour looks like they are giving the new badge gear the same colour.
[Elevated Lair Pauldrons]
[Boots of Healing Energies] etc ..

Tzeni · 03/04/09, 10:57 AM

Originally Posted by Saladin

...I must really misunderstand how item budgets work. Are you saying that a piece can have 2 or 200 Stamina and it won't affect how much Intellect it has on it? I really didn't think it worked that way. If that's true, then I'm even more puzzled as to how an iLevel 226 item downgrades Intellect from an iLevel 213.

As I learned things, I thought that an item could have 40 stam and 60 int, or 60 stam and 40 int, but they all came from the same iLevel budget pool, so that you couldn't have an item with 60 stamina AND 60 int.

In any case, we can agree that this much stamina does beckon heavy raid damage in the future. With a downsized and neutered GHL, we may have to try to work FoL into some sort of raid healing rotation much more often.

What he means to say is that Stam is cheaper than other stats in iLevel budget. Meanwhile, MP5 is probably the weightiest stat you can get on loot.

In the comparison you made between the two items, the extra stam does not eat the item budget nearly as much as the two sockets and the 29 MP5.

Edit: Besides, increasing stamina is a required part of the raiding game going forward. As healers get better gear that will enable them to heal vastly more, one of the ways to challenge healers is by giving them more to heal. This can either be done by increasing the frequency of damage (which leads to spam-oriented playing style) or by increasing the size of damage. Of course, if they increase the size of damage, then players will have to have more stamina in order to survive those strikes and the healers have an opportunity to heal it up.

So in away, increasing the stamina on raid pieces is another tool Blizzard can use to help challenge healers on future fights. Who knows, if damage gets large enough then even paladins may have to start gemming/enchanting for throughput when our HLs only heal 25% of a person's health rather than the 50% or so it heals now at 2K spell power.

Tinwhisker · 03/04/09, 1:47 PM

Originally Posted by Tzeni

Who knows, if damage gets large enough then even paladins may have to start gemming/enchanting for throughput when our HLs only heal 25% of a person's health rather than the 50% or so it heals now at 2K spell power.

That might be true to an extent but I don't think we'll ever see a point where a single HL won't be able to effectively "top off" a raider. At that point most group healing spells become too weak to be of much use unless they can be spammed like the previous incarnation of CoH.

Tzeni · 03/04/09, 3:14 PM

Originally Posted by Tinwhisker

That might be true to an extent but I don't think we'll ever see a point where a single HL won't be able to effectively "top off" a raider. At that point most group healing spells become too weak to be of much use unless they can be spammed like the previous incarnation of CoH.

No, you're right that for raid healing it's improbable that we will ever feel a need to increase the power of HL (as it's more of a tank healing spell, anyway). But it is possible that priests will need to increase the power of CoH. My core point really is that HP, healer HPS, and boss/event DPS all need to scale together as gear levels increase. One increasing without the other is not possible, as far as I can see. Perhaps in the old days when all healers were really tank healers, simply increasing Tank HP with Boss DPS was enough. But that is clearly no longer the case, with the raid/environment damage that is now in vogue.

Meanwhile, it's not necessarily true that Mana Regen needs to scale upwards, as the only way for the devs to challenge that aspect of a healer (at least for paladins) is to keep lengthening the fights. Or for other healers who actually run out of mana-- to increase the speed of damage, which then brings us that back to the frenetic spam-healing that Blizzard has already said it wants to avoid.

Roknroll · 03/04/09, 4:12 PM

The new badge items makes me wonder: "What's coming with mana regen?". I expected to get a mix of items where 1-2 would have mp5 on it, and the other 1-2 would have crit/haste with no mp5. Ideally, I would have liked to see the new badge items as an obvious (but not huge) upgrade over current best in slot gear..

Progression (we hope) in Ulduar will be a lot slower than Naxx, so it'll be weeks or months for some people before they collect 16/23/32 badges. For most people, I'd imagine that you'll be doing only a few Ulduar bosses the first 1-2 weeks, and slowly adding more per week going forward. It's going to take a while to get these for people starting out in Ulduar. Since we already have several iLvl 226 items in the game, Blizz should make the effort to itemize the new badge items so that they're more desirable than current items of the same level.

But due to the way iLvl budgets work, it might be a tad difficult to make them really stand out as superior items. I have a feeling that a lot of these items will get turned into items for newly acquired raiders with no DKP to spend. They might have a decent mix of T7.5 gear, but haven't been farming like everyone else with BiS items all around. For them, it's a way to run Ulduar with the raid while others are winning the new waist/neck/gloves/legs, and then upgrade to some iLvl 226 pieces using badges (until they earn the DKP to get raid items).

Pirjo · 03/04/09, 5:57 PM

The new items do clearly have a few trends:
1. Additional stamina.
2. Similar distribution as t7.5.
3. Are not best in slot, just like valor gear.

So, 2 and 3 basically just mean... expect the same triple sets of gear for each slot, and not being able to get the best one (socket, crit, haste, SP) without it dropping.

1 has an interesting effect. Blizz is making max HP scale at a similar rate as HPS. Remember HPS is a based on many factors multiplied together, all of which increase with high ilvl gear. I personally would have loved to see a larger stam increase with all the massive HPS/DPS increases wrath brought...

• Mex · 03/04/09, 6:25 PM

People are reading too much into this badge loot thing, I think. Blizzard has said before that they want gear to be a choice, rather simply an extra +X to your 'best' stats every tier. With that in mind, I am fully expecting there to be an array of haste+crit gear in Ulduar for us to choose from. What will be interesting this time is how much of our set will be 'ideally' itemised, and how important the set bonus turns out to be. Currently we're quite lucky in that three of five pieces of a set with an indispensable four piece bonus for us are intelligently (snicker) itemised. Who knows, we may see something like "Your judgements increase your spell and melee haste by a further 5%" (effectively removing our need for 160-odd haste on gear).

Remember also that many people are hitting the haste soft-cap already. If they were to make straight 213->226 upgrades to similarly itemised pieces, they'd be losing some of the value of that haste (although not a huge deal, since HL will still constitute the vast majority of our button pushes). In these situations, it may make more sense to drop a haste pieces or two in favour of some good old fashioned MP5 (mostly for the lack of other options than any real attractiveness though).

However it plays out, I think trying to discern Blizzard's intended direction for mana regen from the badge loot is misguided. Blizzard hasn't exactly gone to great lengths to conceal this information, already stating that they're relatively happy with Paladin regen levels, and that they want mana to be a consideration for all healers (although those two statements may still strike some people as contradictory). I'm quite confident that we'll see crit/haste gear in Ulduar, and even if we don't, the solution will simply be to collect haste + mp5 and crit + mp5 pieces, and switch between them based on the fight. We don't exactly have a lot of competition for spell power plate drops.

One thing that I did want to bring up though, were the changes to tank cooldowns, particularly warrior and paladin cooldowns. I'm not positive, but I believe that Shield Wall can be talented and glyphed to a 40% reduction on a 2 minute cooldown, and likewise Divine Protection can be talented to 2 minutes at 50% (although forbearance would presumably mess with this). Druid barkskin is being improved to 30% with talents (although I'm not sure if this talent is reachable by ferals), or 22% if I'm misunderstanding it. In any event, we're seeing tanks become equipped with cooldowns short enough to be used multiple times per fight. What interested me primarily was the way in which these cooldowns could interact with Divine Plea.

Already DP can be synched with a DK tank's IBF and/or other cooldowns to negate a significant portion of the healing penalty. This of course assumes that these CDs are being used at regular intervals to increase overall damage reduction over the course of a fight, and not as one-offs to prevent single one-shot abilities, or short periods of high damage output (eg Sarth's empowered breaths, sparked Malygos). Now of course, DK damage intake without these cooldowns is quite high, and they rely on them to be competitive with other tanks, but most of them will still require healing for at least short periods without any of these cooldowns up, and that is something that as healers we need to be able to deal with. What I'm getting at is that we're going to need to be able to heal them without any CDs up anyway (although perhaps on specific hardmode encounters we may need to rotate Hand of Sac, wings, etc to cover these gaps), so the damage reduction and healing reduction fairly effectively cancel each other out.

Maybe I'm putting too much emphasis here into numbers and not enough into how fights will play out in practicality, but it does strike me as a concern, particularly because I remember Blizzard stating that in their internal testing for healer regen, they found that healers were roughly equal, assuming no time out of the 5 second rule and no divine plea use for paladins. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the exact post where this was mentioned, so maybe I'm just imaging things, but if this is true, then it allows us to gain a significant amount of mana (7500 at 30k) every one or two minutes with very little opportunity cost. Now for the most part, this will only really occur in fights where tank damage is steady for the entire duration of the fight (eg Patchwerk), and not where cooldowns are intended to be used to soften short periods of otherwise extremely high damage. It may turn out that Blizzard has balanced damage around tanks using these cooldowns as often as possible, and even with the reductions, we may need un-DPed heals to keep up, but I can't see that happening on more than a few fights at the moment.

In any event, I thought I'd bring it up to see what others think about it, and also perhaps to see if anybody else remembers Blizzard commenting on regen levels with / without divine plea.

Saladin · 03/04/09, 6:44 PM

I do remember GC stating that one of the objectives of the dev team was to sync up regen between healers so that it's roughly the same, but not that they had already reached that--and not with the exclusion of Divine Plea. I'll have to do some digging and see if I can find that.

You're right that we shouldn't run around screaming the sky is falling because the badge loot sucks. However, several classes complained about the poor itemization of Naxx and Tier gear when Lich King shipped. Blizzard's response to this was, as you said, that they didn't want to make everything a clear upgrade because that made the gear selection process too boring.

They also said that they didn't want the first round of gear to be too optimal, because they wanted to leave room for improvement in future gear. Specifically, this was stated in regards to haste on the hunter tier sets--that Blizzard had to put some "B-rated" stat on the armor in place of more crit/agility/attack power because the piece couldn't be so perfect that there wasn't room for future improvement.

So what we got was a declaration that current gear is suboptimal so that future gear may be improved. But if we're looking at future gear, and finding that it isn't even up to par with the current gear, that creates an odd little paradox. However, I do want to support your advice that we shouldn't stress ourselves out too much over badge loot for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it's all on the PTR and liable to be changed.

That being said, Tzeni's comments on stamina do make a lot of sense and helped illuminate some of my own obtusity. Increased stamina is indeed a fact of life for raid progression (hello Najentus!). I'm just not certain how long Blizzard's "no clear upgrade" policy will last, and to what extent.

• Mex · 03/04/09, 8:06 PM

Originally Posted by Saladin

But if we're looking at future gear, and finding that it isn't even up to par with the current gear, that creates an odd little paradox. However, I do want to support your advice that we shouldn't stress ourselves out too much over badge loot for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that it's all on the PTR and liable to be changed.

Remember, we're not looking at 'future gear' here, we're looking at four (?) pieces of it. Consider the current badge gear in the game ...

We have EoH giving crit + MP5 (neck, shield), crit + haste (belt), and SP with a haste proc (trinket). Then there's EoV giving haste + mp5 (cloak, boots, bracers) and crit + mp5 (ring). 1 of the 8 pieces gives both crit and haste, and yet those are stats that are obtainable on plate healing gear for every single slot (although we forgo this in one slot in order to get 4T7), except perhaps trinkets, which are a different story.

There are 89 iLvL 200/213/226 spell power plate items in the game at the moment (although I lazily didn't filter out PvP gear). With 14 encounters in Ulduar, we'll probably see a slight reduction in this number, but we're still only looking at ~10% of the total array of available plate healing gear. I would also expect a good portion of the better itemised gear to come from hard-mode encounters.

Tzeni · 03/05/09, 8:05 AM

Mex makes a good point. None of the current badge gear is BiS or even close to it (to my recollection, anyway). It's mostly meant as fill-in gear if you're a bit behind on gear and can't catch up due to an abundance of demand for a certain armor type within your guild.

Similarly, this badge gear is probably meant to serve the same funtion: serve as a convenient upgrade for off-specs or people who are a little behind in gear. I'm sure all the BiS gear that we'll all be striving for will come off bosses and be better itemized, with less MP5 and more Int, haste, and crit. However, I do anticipate seeing the higher stamina values persist.

Kallell · 03/05/09, 4:23 PM

It would be nice to see an eventual move away from paladin specific gear (plate caster), and perhaps build shaman and paladins to use similar gear. Not that we are worlds apart right now, but it would be an interesting idea. Either that or some means of converting DPS mail/plate into healing gear via talents (similar to how DPS gear translates to "caster" melee deathknights) would be nice and provide some much needed loot simplicity.

Krillict · 03/05/09, 5:45 PM

Based on the way shamans and paladins are built I doubt that in the future we will ever have similar stats to where we can share gear.