A much simpler fix, which wouldn't effect the low geared healadins nearly as much ->
Illumination for HL is effectively 75% at the moment. It is based on 60% of base cost of the spell, and via t7, libram, glyph we can reduce to the cost of HL to 80% of base cost.

Simply making illumination give mana based on the actual cost of the spell would reduce our current reduction (with above modifiers and 50% crit) from 50% reduction in cost to 44% reduction in cost. A 12% increase in mana cost of HL compared to current, in addition to the mana lost via illumination during divine illumination.

FoL needs a serious buff to become a healing tool again though. HL is beating it in both HPS and HPM (Glyph dependent). In BC FoL was just around because it was twice the HPM. Buffing the FoLglyph mechanics (OH counts, HoT stacks, ticks every 2 sec) might due the job.

The problem with those solutions is that they encourage stacking more Intellect to make up for the change.

It is weird that now we can get HL and FoL to be around the same HPM, but that is what happens when you add 20% mana reduction to your main spell from gear/glyphs.

Too true, and often overlooked. A change in the way these mana reductions stack would also potentially wrench a few things. I think the idea of HL infinity (at least in 25-mans) should be possible, but the possibility of it at the first-WotLK tier raid gear remains questionable to say the least (if anything, it should be near the final tier). This is purely subjective though.

I think FoL is still doing pretty reasonable as a filler spell for the most part as far as HPS. I still gain fairly decent mileage against the damage ranges that we run across. Its relative strength can only scale so far though, as SWP taught us. I suppose we could also adopt a view that Blizzard may potentially want us to leverage the flash glyph and bread & butter holy light for our steady-state healing. Seems slightly far-fetched as I believe glyphs were always meant to be optional, not principles for design.

Why keep looking for "solutions" to HL spam when it's the only way paladins can be viable in future (harder) content. It's not like we have a lot of tools and we deliberately use the overpowered one to cheese encounters.

Also your view of illumination is completely wrong. It's a % cost reduction that is present in most healing talent trees. It shouldn't even be considered when comparing mana gains between classes.
We have 30-40% reduction on HL cost. A holy priest spaming gheal has 15% reduction all the time, 25% extra on overheals (most of them), and another aprox 10% from clearcasting. Serendipity and clearcasting both scale with gear just like illumination. Do you see them discussing how blizzard should nerf GH hpm?

I have been using SS a lot and it is truly awesome. I have not used Hand of Sacrifice, what Naxx 25 boss fights would it be good to try it? Patch is the only one that comes to mind but that maybe a risky proposal.

Nobody can make that statement on viability without seeing the content.

A lot of the classes are discussing infinite mana syndrome, to be honest. More in terms of replenishment effectiveness and other class specific things. This isn't necessarily unique to Paladins, we just happen to have the best tools to leverage it and the 10-man Method Sarth3D video really brought it to light.

I use SS for any RSTS predictive abilities; hand of sac can mitigate these RSTS abilities as well. I use Hand of Sac for a few things. It's absolutely necessary on Sarth3D, it's handy on other variations of Sarth for mitigating flame breath damage as well. It can be useful on Malygos if you think a breath+melee gib is coming, etc. I've typically been using it for mitigating gib scenarios (where it won't kill me, obviously), otherwise the GCD is generally more useful for normal healing. I've toyed with the idea of Sac'ing nasty frost tomb chains, but have never really felt pressured to its necessity.

Generally speaking though, always remember that a Sac does use a GCD so you need to weigh the opportunity cost of simply healing versus Sac. If your own healing can maintain the target, it somewhat defeats the purpose of a Sac, if you need to keep healing something else and simply want to mitigate, then a Sac GCD has reason.

I love SS, I try to use keep it up all the time (even though I don't use Flash much).

HoS is great on the big Spider during web and right before the various breaths of death that the Dragons do.

Thanks, I need to use HoS more. It is too bad that WWS does not track the absorption amount of SS. Hopefully the author will build this in at some point.

I'm sure Discipline priests would rejoice at any absorption mechanic metric. I personally would be very grateful for even a rough approximation of how effective SS can be. I think it's great, but I can't help but feel I might be over estimating its usefulness or attributing another ability's effect to it.

Problem is: does your own combat log show absorption and tag it with the appropriate ability/who cast it?

The combat log will say Tank1 takes x damage (x absorbed). It doesn't say how the tank got damage absorbed, but at least the damage absorbed should be able to be looked at with a parser that is looking for that information.

I do not know if WWS or Stasis tracks absorbed damage.

The problem is with stacking absorb effects. Sacred Shield doesn't stack with it self, but I presume it would stack with PW:S not positive though. Either way there is no way to tell whose SS it is. Say two Paladins cast SS on a target, how would it know which one proced.

I think regarding the infinite mana syndrome all blizzard is going to do is give us a lot more haste, people are seeing it now already. Pretty much every poster I see on the forums here is talking about how all the gear they're finding is giving haste and sacrificing a few other points for it. Right now with 25-30k mana pools and a 1.8 second HL yes we can just sit there and hit our holy light button until the boss is dead, but there's most likely going to come a point where we need more haste for the HPS and also to lessen the gaps between our heals or else we don't get the heals off in time. I think if everybody was running around with 1.3 second holy lights instead or something close to that we would have something else to say about how much HL spam we can maintain. I'd suspect the same is going to apply to the other classes saying the same things.

I'm already at a 1.5s HL and can maintain spam for a 5min rather easily in nothing near full T7.5. Yes it requires me potting and use of Arcane Torrent on cooldown, but it's still possible. More importantly, if they start handing it haste everywhere I don't really see what would keep us from dropping a few plate pieces for mail/leather/cloth with regen stats or more crit on it. As a last resort, we might simply keep older pieces of gear, as additional SP isn't nearly as attractive as it used to be and upgradind to the next tier is often more about SP than anything else.

I am at 1.39 Holy Lights in a raid situation and they are absolutely invaluable. I posted in this thread earlier about my intent to switch my gearing and literally next Naxx25 I got a lot of the incidental pieces with sp/crit/haste. I can now easily keep melee stacks up during a Frost Blast on KT and can actually do respectable numbers on Malygos by raid healing.

I really don't see any end to this either - it's very catch22. If you take out the massive power of HL bombing, you really need to re-evaluate the entire paladin healing toolset as FoL is still just a very powerful HoT that works in very specific situations (Patchwerk spamming, healing 4h caster damage)

For aoe, you usually should only need to heal 4 targets. 3 targets if you can avoid any of the damage yourself. Beacon the tank and FoL/HL the other 4 depending on damage. If your group knows how GHL works, they'll clump up when possible. We learned to do it for chain heal. SS is worth using always if you know the AoE damage will be returning, like aura damage.

If the AoE damage is heavy (Sapph 10 man 2 healer with just MotW for FrR), beacon the tank, and just use pure HL with SS when you get a break. The glyph helps every so often and you can use DF-shock followed by hasted HL to catch up if whoever needs it. Once in a while you might have to spot the tank with a heal if everyone else isn't taking enough damage.

PTR NOTES
Excuse me? 20 yards? Isn't that a bit much? Paladins will soar so high up raw healing done. Will Blizzard change holy light to compensate? This is a major step to serious AoE healing.

Edit: taken from the front page of MMO champ. I can't see it on PTR test notes yet, so take it with a pinch of salt.

I just can't see how this doesn't end in a major nerf for us if it goes live. It's way too good. With my ability to liberally use Holy Light without mana concerns and the fact that it's 10% of a fairly massive non-cooldown having heal?

Oi, I'd almost rather this didn't go live if it is indeed real.

Let's not go all crazy here... it was already quite powerful at 5yds in ideal conditions and no one seemed to have any problem with it. 10yds seemed more appropriate as it gave it a little more versatility then only pure tank&spank fights. 20yds... well, the first round of PTR patch notes had 10yds in, so I don't really understand what prompted the change to 20, however keep a few things in mind:

1) It's limited to 5 targets, so yes the expanded radius increases the percentage of the raid covered by your heal, but the only gain is in the chance at finding targets below 100% HP.

2) Yes, there's no cooldown, however it's also 10% of the top end of your HL. So on a crit you're looking at 1500HP or so, 900 on regular hit. I can't remember right now if the splash can itself crit for another 2x multiplier (and in fact, this might be something they are changing with this patch as well... to be investigated please), but it would only rival CoH/WG for amount heal in this particular double crit scenario.

3) It's effective in some situations, yes, but it still ends up with a very large amount of overhealing as it currently stands. Bottom line is this change, at best, is simply going to reduce the amount of overheal we see on this ability and finally gives us access to this much touted "smart healing' everyone's been sampling since 3.0 came out.

The splash of the Glyph of HL can crit, however it uses your Nature spell crit rate.

My PTR client doesn't work, so I can't check if the 20 yards is really in the game.

Assuming it was 20 yards, that will help make up for the cooldown on CoH/WG, and would make it so two Holy Pallies can duo heal Naxx 10.

I could see the crit splash off a crit HL being targeted for adjustments. It's exactly the kind of double multiplier scaling they've had problems with before (hello original Art of War!) But you're correct, assuming most raids were taking at least 1 holy paladin, this does offset the CoH/WG cooldown. They may simply want to ease raid groups into the existing content with the new 6s cooldowns and gauge whether they require a nerf or not to still be at the level of difficulty they were aiming for.

So, here's a question on glyphs.

Post 3.0 at 70, one of the major glyphs to have was Glyph of Divinity, partially because of its synergy with Glyph of LoH and partially because we really needed more mana regen options with downranking and chain-potting nerfed and no access to DP. However, it's been pretty well agreed on this thread that we can easily get to the point where chaining HL causes no mana problems, making this glyph not so much of a necessity - same with the other regen-focused glyph we could get back then, Glyph of SA. So that looks like one glyph spot open from what we originally assumed would be the Holy Major Glyph Trinity - Divinity/SoW/HL.

There has also been some discussion on fights that need greater mana efficiency versus fights that need greater throughput, and changing gear for those.

But instead of changing gear for those situations, has anyone thought of glyphing both SoW and SoL, and simply changing which seal you use based on what the fight needs? Yeah, using SoL would be a cut to our mana efficiency, but if most of us are ending fights with 60% mana or more, is that extra efficiency really necessary when we need HPS more than HPM? And getting a flat 5% bonus to all heals via a glyph is a lot easier than picking up 5% haste or SP through switching gear.

On the flip side, 5% extra healing does seem kind of piddly when you realize it'll only give you a 1k bump on a 20k crit (which is about what I'm seeing now in Naxx10) - hence my asking if it's worth it. And it's always possible that losing the benefit from the SoW glyph would hurt our mana pool too much. So has anyone tried it out? Any thoughts?

Until they fix the bug with loh (I suppose it's unintended to have double gains when cast on yourself) a 2nd mana pot is still very helpful.
And regarding sol, that 1k bump it's more than 200 sp :p