Well, they could tag any of the gears to bring down the HL loop (at least temporarily until one of the other untouched mechanics bridges the gap). If you look at any Stasis parse of a spam scenario, here's the typical mana regen payout: Patchwerk : Silmeriah

So, there's some "logic" to nerfing illumination, but I agree that I don't think the nerf should necessarily be there, since that mp5 figure is grossly inflated due to a stand-still spam scenario and it's also typically only really viable in 25-man raid settings with full raid buffs (all the crit synergies really inflates this too). The regeneration mechanics related to int can certainly be questionable, but really what's at fault here is the massive stat pouring they've put into the first tier of gearing. Everyone is dancing around with higher mechanics than every seen in Sunwell (30% base crit before talents/raid buffs is borderline incredible).

If you want to stem HL spamming, then you must break one of the mana regeneration gears for the interim since everything works so cohesively. Illumination would possibly be too severe, replenishment is too global, so that leaves plea. I've mentioned it before, but to reiterate: the most painless change would probably be forcing holy paladins to be conscious of when they choose to divine plea. In this vein, the 20% coefficient on the healing penalty is probably ripe for the picking.

Consequently, a base mana change would probably work fairly seamlessly as well.

Personally, I don't think its gonna be a nerf to the way int scales for us with divine plea, replenishment ect. The largest chunk of mana returned on any fight is still illumination, even if there is more moving around ect. I feel the nerfs are more likely to be targeted at the gear/items that allow us to reduce the mana cost of holy light, (Glyph SoW, 4 piece, libram), or how these items interact with illumination (returning 60% of the initial cost, not the new)

Crit rates are higher than we have ever seen them before, but its not all from the additional 8 from ret talents. Since spell power and healing are the same its opened up so many more gear choices with crit on it. We can put crit on our helm/shoulder enchants, so many more rings/necks/capes/wpns ect have crit on it, and so on.

Personally, I am stacking crit over int, I am not convinced int is enough of mana return to stack over crit, and comparing the parse Silmeria posted compared to my own, my assumptions seem reasonable so far (where my mana from illumination + plea + replenishment + totems was greater in nearly identical time frame). I also enjoy the bursty nature of not only my holy lights, but IoL proccing that much more.

I hope I'm not just sticking my head in the sand here, but I'm not convinced that a nerf is going to be likely or necessary--at least not without heavy compensation.

Paladins are the single most niched healing class in the game. We may be able to tank heal better than a shaman, but a shaman can tank heal better than we can raid heal. Priests and druids are both valued for their versatility, and that's really what it comes down to. A shaman, druid, or priest, can heal effectively in any position, while a paladin can only heal fantastically in one position and horribly in every other. As someone else said already, the ONLY thing that a paladin brings to the table is raw healing throughput. We're supposed to be the healers who never go oom and keep the tank up for as long as the fight takes, whether it's 3 minutes or 10, because quite frankly we cannot do anything else.

I understand we're all a little gunshy because of what happened in mid-BC, but Blizzard has acknowledged that those tactics were too severe and they don't want to repeat the debacle that BT/Sunwell was for holy paladins. Considering that the community has been asking for four years now for 1) hots, 2) aoe heals, 3) more than 3 heals, and Blizzard has stonewalled on the "tank healer" position, they cannot afford to start farting with our throughput. Unless, as I stated before, they're willing to compensate with more versatility, which they have all but sworn never to do.

Note that I'm not ranting about how horrible our position is--it seems we're starting to settle into the "nice, but not required" niche that promotes true class balance. I'm okay with that. I'm even happy with that. It's just that paladins are in the position now that prot warriors were in during Burning Crusade: the best boss MT's, but absolutely deplorable aoe tanks. What did Blizzard do in this case? They opened up the MT position to more classes, but also made warriors capable aoe tanks. I have enough faith in Blizzard to believe the same will happen here, if anything happens at all. Either paladins will be left alone in our little niche cubbyhole, or our niche will be diminished in exchange for a wider arsenal of healing capabilities. Whichever way you look at it, we win.

Now, that being considered, I've seen a lot of paladins cockily referencing Beacon and SS as all a paladin needs to cope with aoe damage. And yes, I do love these tools, they're a huge boon and do allow us to handle things we simply couldn't before. However, I'm not sure how they're sufficing to aoe heal in a raid environment, so perhaps I am doing something wrong. Obviously, we beacon the tank so that we can heal the raid without fear of him dying while we do so. After that though, things get hairy.

There is the option of just straight FOL spamming everyone who's taking aoe damage, which may be acceptable provided the damage is neither heavy nor instant (ie, Spirit Bolts on Zuljin, Vortex on Malygos). Even though either 10 or 25 people will be taking damage depending on the raid size, let's just focus on a sample of 5 people, since that's pretty much the aoe heal standard.

For 5 people with fully hasted FOL spam, it would take 5 seconds to top them all off.

However, if we try to SS/FOL combo those same 5 people, we come up with a whopping 10 seconds of casting spent on just 5 people. Yet this approach has the added benefit of absorbing damage and jolting up our crit chance.

I doubt there's a clear answer here of "you should always use FOL spam" or "you should always SS first, then FOL spam." It seems like there are specific scenarios wherein the first method would be favored and then certain scenarios wherein the second method would be favored. How do we define these scenarios? For those paladins who are forced to cope with aoe damage, when do you find yourself using SS and when do you find yourself just mouseovering FOL as fast as you can?

I´m a bit confused and not really sure how to get this question right. But in concern of gearchoice, i seem to often pick mal/cloth items instead of plate just because i dont get why we get sp+mp5+haste instead of for example sp+crit+haste. I´ve read a lot in this thread and others as well.

Mabye it´s me who is bad at getting it right in my head, but everytime i´m offered an upgrade i seem to lose at least 1% crit in favor of haste or mp5. We are currently only running 5-/10-mans and the gear i personally really want only comes from 25-man. Am i gearing wrong or is it just that gear-design is´nt as it should be?

My gameplay is moslty spamming hl´s as i find mana not to be an issue, only time mana is a bit strained is on sapph. We dont have a boomkin/shaman either to give us 5% crit in raids. I´m running with 1840 sp, 34% holy crit and 5,43% haste.

Somehow i see my self getting oom even faster if i stack more haste. I´d rather keep my hl´s as it is and chain it than have for example 1,5 sec hl´s and either stop casting or run oom from chaining it. We runt druid/paladin as healers and i´m basiclly always tank-healing.

Actually if they want to stop HL spam they should look for the reasons why it's needed: lack of a "rank 7-8 HL" spell and the requirement that tanks are topped of.

I can't really see why paladins mana should be nerfed at all. My paladin have almost the best gear I can get now and in normal fights like Sartharion and Malygos I'm not going below 60 % mana without using any pot or LoH on myself. Same goes for all other healingclasses in my guild and raid.

But for fights like Sartharion 10man 3 drakes alive it's pretty hard not to go oom. Last night was my first time and I had a hard time to keep the MT alive with breaths taking him down to 10 % HP. I was the only healer on him for most of the fight and I also keept BoL on our OT. I used DP on every CD with max of maybe 10 sec delay.

Our groups other 2 healers had a harder time keeping their mana up but that's also beacause they were healling the raid. I'm pretty sure that if they could heal the MT as good as a paladin can that they would have same or even better mana than paladins can.

Paladins have always been a MT healer. If you want to AOE heal people should roll another class. They gave us BoL so that we could heal 5man heroics with alot of Aoe. It isn't that hard at all if you have a group were people are not taking stupid damage.

EDIT: Also forgot to say that we didn't have a replenishment nor a mana-tide. I was also specced 51/20/0 for Divine guardian which prob will be used on hard encounters like this one. So there I lost 8 % crit. If I did have all of this my mana would have been better. But also the other healers mana would have been improved also.

I wasn't aware that sheath didn't affect sacred shield and that blows. I wasn't asking the ret to put out sacred anyway just more of the other holy paladins I raid with. I still have some flash of light spammers who need some more direction!

I am asking for 1 global cooldown every 2 minutes for a handful of fights that both benifits the raid and the paly's mana pool. Is that hard to understand? Maybe what you call "terribly non-optimal" is pretty extreme.

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.

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.