Biggest thing that occured to me was imp BoW. Very recently Blizz decided to make BoW and Mana Stream exclusive, and provide the same benefit (a very good change imo, paladins having two 100% unique blessings was a bit much). I would assume that the shaman mana/healing totem buffing talent will replicate imp BoW, and since it's a pre-req for mana tide, shamans will end up having to take it I think. This makes imp BoW less appealing than filling out IoL / imp LoH for me, but we'll have to see how things play out, and as with everything else it'll come down to your specific circumstances.

I've got a question. I recently came into the possession of a Forethought Talisman and was wondering if anyone had done any testing on it with Glyph of Holy Light, to see if it will proc off the Glyph heals. I've searched the forums and didn't see it mentioned, so I figured I'd throw it out there to see if anyone has any info on it. Thanks

I miss a "middle-heal" as well. FoL might cut it in 5-mans/pvp to some extent, but when HL is the only thing we need(can use) with good enought HPS to not get our members killed it´s the only thing i´ll use.

A "solution" could have been if they instead of giving FoL increased crit with the glyph of FoL they could have for example made it that FoL hits för 20% more but costs 20% more mana. Or mabye do that to the Sacred Cleansing talent that it increases the manacost and effiency of FoL by 10/20/30% or something.
But i guess that needs to be at least 50% of our total healing to be good enought to mabye start gemming away from int and try to get more towards mp5/sp. I have´nt run any numbers on it tho(no math genius here..,),
It might have a negative impact in pvp(too good?).

FoL is going to get less and less used as content progress and dmg/hp increases as well.

A suggestion that I saw on the Blizzard healing forums was for an eclipse-style functionality with FoL and HL, giving us a reason to use FoL but preventing it from being overpowered outside of reasonably high levels of HL usage. The premise is interesting, but the boost to FoL would have to be significant (ie, not just a higher crit %) in order for it to be superior to HL. And even then, mana constraints would likely need to be tightened if it were to be presented as a viable alternative to pure HL spam.

No, the trinket only procs from heals directly cast by you, and the Glyph doesn't count.

It doesn't matter how much you can cast HL when it comes to INT gemming. No matter how little/much HL you can cast in a given setup, INT will be the best stat to increase how much healing you can do (which is by casting more HLs). The only way to change that logic is to nerf mana regen (or FoL efficiency) so badly that we won't even have the mana for FOL spam. Even in that case, though, INT will probably still be best as it'll increase how many FOLs you can cast.

The only realistic way to make other stats useful is nerf int-based regen and balance it elsewhere. The nerf to DP made things more interesting but even with 0 DP uses int is still too much better than other stats, and we still find plenty of chances to use DP since it's practically impossible to design a fight that's healing intensive for 100% of the time, lasts long AND is actually possible to live through. Even the best geared paladins can't spam HL 100%, the only reason everyone say they only use HL spam is because they can for the % of the fight that actually requires significant healing, or because the fights they're talking about are very short due to DPS overgearing it.

But if we add a cast time to HS, our movement reduces again(not that it might be a big factor in upcomming content) which is why i thought fol might cut it better as it´s rarely used anyway.

I agree on the FoL causing a lot of the problems for paladins, but somehow i am confused about what the devs really want with the holy paladin. They have worked a lot(Ghostcrawler even posted a few times) with the other classes to get them to push more than just CH, LB, CoH etc and push more buttons.

Our more buttons are´nt really that much of a healing-tools more than convenient which has led us together with the terrible output of FoL to only cast HLs. Atm i throw a HL if the person i´m healing is -3k or -10k, and if there is a 10k or 1k overheal does´nt really matter.

Now i dont really know if they have other plans, but as someone else said that we are more or less going to be "tank-only" healing in uldaur and let the others cover the raid-healing. Which is a bit unfortunate i guess.

I know Int-gemming will probably always be the best scaling stat for pushing more casts and regen is "too good". But somewhere i hope that we actually get to choose a bit more stats and make a more "fun" set for our paladins without gimping too much.

I agree on the fact that it would restrict our movement slightly, but would it decrease hugely? If such a change were to be made you'd be able to have an "Infusion of Light" proc stacked on heavy movement fights to allow an agreeably small buffer to be allowed for short distance moving. I've yet to be involved in a fight where I've had to move for such a long period of time that a tank will get 2 shot and by providing an instant flash for on the move every tank if HoTted should survive.

Looking at Ulduar now and most of the testing done (I admit to having not seen every fight) that very few have required a large amount of movement where the tank would die that quickly. Bosses hit hard but between a couple of healers it should be safe enough to get through happily. Personally I think we really need some class designers looking at the current plight of the paladin as a whole. All 3 of our specs require some more flavour, a couple more buttons and some more skill synergy of the likes that Holy Shock has with Flash/HL.

And on the comment of "tank-only", it's always been like this for the Holy Paladin. Raid healing has never ever been strong for us and especially now our "raid" healing feels stronger as no longer do I have to worry about my tank if I need to throw a heal elsewhere if I'm maintaining SS and Bacon, the change to SS although irritating beyond belief for 5/10 man healing isn't a huge nerf to 25 man raiding unless you were maintaining SS on multiple tanks/players consistently in the majority of fights. I'm looking forward to the challenge Ulduar has to bring and actually feeling like a strong tank healer compared to others again now that mana has become an issue for everyone.

I dont think here is any scenario where we cant move for a few seconds and the tank will die, and if that is the case, we still got the bubble or LoH to keep the tank alive. And i liked your idea about HS, i just thought FoL would get a use as it´s not used more than a few occations here and there while HS is used much more.

I do enjoy tank-healing and that is one of the reasons i moved from priest in tbc to paladin late-tbc just before wotlk hit. And i rarley have huge problems healing raid as well as tank with HL-spams. But it gets a bit harder when running 10-mans when we are 2 holy paladins instead of a paladin + priest/druid/shaman. Not that harder means less fun. I just think blizzard can do better with paladins in general and as you say make more synergies with the trees/spells.

Int will be superior to mp5 until either mp5 is buffed, or int/replenishment is nerfed. Comparing 5 item points of each (5 int or 2 mp5), with kings + replenishment it takes over 7 minutes for the increased regen from the mp5 to make up for the increase in initial mana you get from Int. That's baseline, before you take into account talents that add benefit to int, or its effect on spirit regen if you're a druid or priest, or the crit it gives, or abilities like divine plea and innervate which scale with it in some way. Spirit got buffed in BC, int got buffed when replenishment came along, the result is mp5 being left behind as a stat.

I think people might be underestimating what flash is capable of. Yes, it didn't scale in TBC, but it got a 25% coefficient boost as compensation for losing Blessing of Light. if you spec and glyph for it come 3.1 (ie Divinity and glyph of Seal of Light), you can get almost almost 1.25 more healing for every additional spellpower, to put real numbers on it, if you geared for 3k sp raidbuffed, which is perfectly doable, you should expect FoL to hit for >5k. Unfortunately this does require you to want to max out your FoL, which hurts your mana and as a result your ability to use HL, which will always provide superior HPS. Given the traditional paladin role of healing predominantly a single target taking a lot of damage, speccing and gearing around HL is preferable.

FoL isn't bad in itself, it's just so different from HL that you can't really use both, so you've geared around HL and it's bad with your gear.

I think this idea would remove all functionality from the spell. As it stands now Shock is a life saver, for example topping an ice blasted mellee on KT while not affecting your healing priorities elsewhere. Shock and Flash are only under rated because Holy Light is so spammable with a 30 k mana pool raid buffed, with replenisment, oom is a long forgotten concept, but thats not to mean they are lesser spells and cannot be used to great effect. Current content does not exactly give a clear picture and maybe we will need a * inermediate* healing spell with a cast time, but the most likely way this will be achieved is a simple set bonus buffing Flash to the required level. I have healed naxx 25 with nothing but holy light and also nothing but Shock + Flash + SS and the only major difference is about 50 % overheal.