The answer to both questions is no :p

From my own personal testing the splash is considered to be a heal from [Glyph of Holy Light] and not me therefore it doesn't count towards beacon, this may have changed though?

And on the stacking of SP the same problem arises with the value of SP over the value of intellect, sure you might get lots more healing from the glyph but at the same time if it's not smart healing (like before) then you could just end up with a whole lot more overheal and at the same time a lot smaller effective fight mana pool.

"Hateful Strike: Patchwerk will use this ability at a 1 second frequency on the target in melee range with the highest HP who is also one of the top three on Patchwerk's aggro list. Cannot be used on the main tank unless there are no other targets. Does 79,000 to 81,000 raw physical damage which can mitigated by armour and parried/dodged. This is about 23,000 damage on a partially Naxxramas geared tank. This ability will add threat to the three most threatening on Patchwerk's aggro list."

Yes you are right, its both.

My point of view was mainly fights like sapphiron where the whole raid takes dmg all the time and don't need to be spread out, there the glyph would be gold worth - especially if it works with Beacon of Light.

Your point is valid but at the same time most people will be topped up as much as possible and with so many bits and pieces being thrown around by the other healers I don't think that you will find you get as much effective healing from it as you'd expect unless you are running light on healers. Circle of healing/Wild Growth may have been nerfed but this will only force priests/druids to use other things. There are also going to be shamans which will still be doing as always and healing melee/range/whatever only now their heals wont have been sniped by CoH/WG before they hit.

A priest throwing about PoM, renew, CoH, PoH and druids throwing about lifeblooms, Wild Growth, Regrowth -> Living Seed and shamans throwing Chain Heals everywhere will still destroy the effective healing you COULD get from Holy Light glyph and we'll still be used for Main tank healing on such fights since that's what we excel at, in a 25 man raid you'll not be able to snipe enough healing from the raid healers to keep your tank topped up on such fights using only Beacon. Glyph of HL was already a golden glyph on fights like these just for throwing a HL on the melee and watching the numbers, the change for me only means that it's not exclusively for use on the melee and hitting a more spread out group of casters will give better returns.

I'd like to second my view on this.
I think the change was not made to change any mechanics for holy paladins. It's only 20 yards because of huge hitbosex of raid bosses, the glyph was pretty much out of service (given you heal MT or OT mainly)

The only outcome we can get from this is that we'll rely on HL more than ever before. With good deal of haste coming with new itemization, talent builds and raidwise totems and such, HL takes not much longer than FoL because you will now keep Light's Grace up 100% of the time. It's just now you are being encouraged to use your HL more instead of FoL with this change. So, I see no change in overall healing tactic. And it's obvious that using HL for aoe healing in raids can not be relied on. It's just a fix that will give us a little extra, not a whole new perspective for healing.

There seems to be a lot of discussion on Holy Light spam vs Flash of Light effectiveness. On fights where raid-wide damage is constant, I don't see any competition. In fact, if you have one holy paladin in your raid, with beacon, judgement of light, and holy light/glyph spam, there really is no other class that can come close. The following Sapph WWS was even with 7 healers in the raid (so theorteically people should have been HoT'd and topped off, etc.)

Sapphiron

Even if you discount beacon and judgement, effectively just giving holy light spam numbers, I'm still way above anybody else. I'm missing Naxx next week, but I'll ask another of our holy paladins to get some data on FOL+beacon+judgement.

I submit for discussion that paladins with sufficient haste, spellpower, and mana are more effective AoE healers than any other class.

For patchwerk, melee shouldn't really worry about their HP status. Since hateful hits for more or less 23k, the second tank will always have to be well above 23k HP by the time the next hateful strike happens (or someone dies, in which case it doesn't really matter who. In fact, it's better if a DPS dies). Since your DPSers aren't supposed to really have more than 23k HP (at least not a lot more and even that would probably require specific top end gear, assuming no pvp gear), they should always be safe if you're keeping your tank safe. Of course, since it's actually difficult to perform (hateful happens very often when means a lot of healers need to be spamming the OT and even then bad luck isn't impossible), it's better to just use 2 tanks in which case you even moreso don't need to worry about the HP of the melee.


When it comes to SP and overhealing, I'm not saying more SP doesn't increase overhealing. What I'm saying is you can't diss SP due to overhealing while ignoring the virtual overhealing caused by not using all your mana. If you do that, you devalue SP while not proportionally devaluing int/crit/mp5, even though that "overhealing" claim you make really works to devalue ALL of those stats. Which one gets devalued more when you take overhealing into account? Hard to say, and it probably has a strong dependancy on the actual fight, so at the end I prefer to assume it affects both equally.

Just like you don't have too much mana until you HL spam non-stop (preferably without using DP), you also can't have enough SP until your non-crit heals heal the tank from 0 to full (preferably flashes). Yes, both are not realistically reachable, which is why I find rawr's modeling quite effective.

FYI, glyph of holy light counts as a Nature spell (so 5% less crit) that doesn't count as a Paladin healing spell (so no Beacon heals from it). The old Flash of Light HoT worked the same way.

The glyph is a "dumb" heal, it just picks 5 people within 20 yards at random and heals them, no matter what the HP is. This is good news for pet classes, so more chances for them to get heals.

I agree that Holy Light is completely the way to go forward, but your WWS shows us nothing that we don't already know. Judgement of Light heals for insane amounts, had it been a protadin that was putting up JoL instead of yourself your numbers would have been almost matched by his (extra healing taken into account through the conversion and less healing to be covered by the raid). To break the numbers down a bit about your actual HPS and healing done by discounting the JoL procs.

1018499 healing * 0.72 (28% overheal removed) = ~733319 effective healing done in the fight by JoL alone.

1624377 - 733319 = 891058 Effective healing done by actual healing.

891058/313 (effective/fight time) = 2846 effective HPS
1624377/313 = 5189 effective HPS

And there we show that of your "effective true" HPS, 2300 of it was provided by JoL which is almost half and in all honesty not especially impressive. Now lets look at the effective HPS of Glyph of Holy Light

442397*0.69 (39% overheal done) = 305294 Effective healing
305294/313 = 975 effective HPS.

Now my rough maths (because it is and always will be rough) does appear to show that GoHL did provide 1/3 of your healing overall in the fight, which is a significant amount but I don't see any reason why this is godlike, had I thrown heals onto the melee constantly during a fight pre-patch I would have seen similar numbers from GoHL just with more overheal caused by CoH/WG getting in first. The extra range now just makes GoHL hit more players if you are throwing a HL raidside, it was never useless before and it wont be revolutionary now is my entire point.

Well, as long as most of the Paladins are unable to select more players than the MT for their Holy Light, it won't be that much of a problem. (and at least from what I see in the US-Forums, most Paladins simple ignore the fact, that HL can be cast on more than the MT :>)

Endo (and holy pallies), Avenging Wrath no longer causes a GCD, update your op ;p It's nice to have AW back to a frequently usable level in both pve and pvp, don't you think?

Good to hear about the change to AW, it will be a great healing ability now.

On Sarth10+3 we normally have a priest heal the Sarth tank and I heal everyone else, then we just totally ignore portals until all drakes are dead. With Beacon of Light a Paladin can be very useful raid healing, especially if it is more burst damage on a few people (e.g. Malygos P1/P2) instead of a lot of people taking lower amounts of damage (e.g. Sapphiron). When Twilight Torment becomes active I can just keep JoL up, and cycle through HLs on the raid, with BoL mostly healing the Drake tank except for some direct HLs if he gets some burst. This was before the buff to GHL so I was getting very few procs (3-4% of my totaly healing), it will be interesting to see how much it heals this week.

I would could care less about how well I can top meters on Saph, its an easy healing anyway. I think currently the best fight to try to compare gear and play styles is Sarth+3 (more so 10man version), its the only remotely challenging healing fight until Ulduar.

Only very short-sighted individuals are really concerned about the HL glyph change... when you consider the mechanics, the increased range didn't suddenly turn it into a better CoH. The numbers we're seeing thrown around must be weighted against:

1) CoH/WG cooldown... meaning the raid is no longer kept at 100% through AoE from spamming these two abilities. HL glyph utility just went up because for every CoH used, you get to land 3-4 HL splashes on targets actually showing health deficits.

2) Increased range means it actually has a chance at hitting melee groups on some encounters where it didn't previously... Sapph is a prime example... melee couldn't be within 5 yards of the tank without getting cleaved.

Ultimately, if we ignore the individual fight WWS results (I actually witnessed a paladin gloating about how OP he now was and posting his Patch meters to demonstrate how great the new glyph was.... really?), total healing done hasn't gone up significantly, but effective healing done has and glyph is responsible for most of that increase. On the majority of parses I've seen so far, it was, at most, a 4-5% increase. So our overhealing has gone down and our effective healing up, mostly due to the glyph actually finding non-full targets... I'd suggest this is more likely a consequence of the glyph filling the void left by CoH/WG than the new range being "oh so amazing".

Ah. I was simply showing the potential of Glyph of HL. I didn't mean to "flex" my numbers; I am showing the possibilites.

However, after looking at it more deeply, I'm not sure how WWS is reporting data (eg. I am getting results that make no sense.) What i want to do is to look at potential (raw healing) of Holy Light and Glyph of HL in the above WWS. (or a wws of some other encounter with similar healing style)

Endoscient's play style described in the above post is what I'm looking to develop and compare to other classes' AoE healing abilities.

It seems to me that stacking Int is the natural progression of holy paladins in wow.

Its got the the stage that my guilds other paladin and myself are sitting over 30k raid buffed, and we're outputting 80% overhealing in hc naxx.

I don't see this as a problem mind you, I'm quietly hoping Ulduar will give us more apt healing chances.

We've got to a stage where we can spam holy light through trash and bosses, and this is with only the mana breaks we manage to steal between pulls when no ones looking ;3

I can't imagine why anyone would want to stack spell power, crit and haste and go flash of light = \ you may have more succinct and punctual heals, but you won't get the raw mana gain from divine plea with a 30k mana pool, or replenishment which also works off max mana pool. Or for that case Arcane torrent if you're a blood elf, or Divine hymn if you're partied with the priests.

these are my dodgy numbers here, correct me if I'm off:

Holy light, no crits, with 1850 spell power ( very easy to maintain with a huge int pool ) and lets say 400 haste, as thats also easy to attain

HL= 10-15k healing, every 1.5 seconds

Flash of light, with say 2200 sp? and stacked haste, closer to 600ish.

FoL = 5-7.5k every 1 second.

I'm pulling these numbers out of my backside, if anyone has more researched figures, please pull me up on this, but it looks the me as though:

Over 15 seconds.
HL = 100-150k healing + 5 1-1.5k heals every heal on raid members.
FoL = 75 - 112.5k healing.

Holy Light also gets 6% crit out of talent, which FoL does not.

It just feels like everything about our class screams at us to stack int, and at the same time all this overhealing is just detering people.

Yes, that is what alot of this thread was about if you took the time to read it. How int gives the best returns via increased HL usage due to a combo of gear bringing HL HPM inline with FoL HPM. If a paladin is getting detered by Overheal, they need to roll a druid...

This discussion keeps popping back up, but in general I haven't seen much in the way of number crunching to prove anything. Endo and others have repeatedly proven through mathematics that Holy Light spam* maximizes your healing output, stacking int makes mana consumption a non issue, stacking haste make the time difference between flash and holy light negligible, and that int is the most valuable stat at the moment. From the numbers I have seen, there is nothing to indicate that focusing on flash of light or holy shock, or stacking stats other than int, will yield more sheer output than Holy Light spam*. And the benefits of "losing" 10k mana haven't been mathematically proven (actually I believe someone proved it to the contrary a few pages back, integrating flash of light "picky" healing aka minimizing overhealing versus pure holy light healing)

As it has been mentioned before, you're expressing your opinion of playstyle (what you think is best), not providing the numbers or analysis to explain why avoiding holy light spam* is useful (what the theorycrafting determines is best). And, having also been mentioned, the fact that you can heal without Holy Light spam* doesn't mean that come ulduar, or harder content, or understaffed healing spots you will be able to keep people up with your preference in healing style.

Crit flash of lights still heal for less than a noncrit holy light, so even placing the two "on par" for crit doesn't increase the value of flash of light. Plus, Holy Light's *slightly* increased cast time barely makes a difference when it comes to even raid healing - glyph for Holy Light and the extra glyph heals should help fill in the gaps that strict flash of light spamming would miss. Are there cases where flash of light is better than holy light? most certainly...but making the claim "I never run out of mana" does not help in the numbers discussion.

*Holy Light spam does not necessarily entail non stop Holy Lights on single target with GCD's only given for DP. Holy Light spam is interrupted by judgements, refreshed seals, DP, beacon...it just focuses primarily on holy light for the strong majority of healing.

If all we ever concluded was "everyone do whatever they feel is best", then there would be no need for this forum at all. We would all just go off and do our own thing and that would be that.

Anyway, if you find you're not running out of mana with 20K, then I suggest you're not outputting as much healing as you are capable of doing. The simple fact is that the more HLs you can do, the more healing you'll provide. Hitting FL-- ever-- is a drop in HPS, so you'd want to avoid that as much as possible.

However, it's not like the case for stacking haste (or spell power) ends there. I can imagine stacking for haste if you find that you can pretty much continuously cast HLs for the entire fight duration and find that only by hitting your heals faster (or harder) can you provide more healing. In other words, if it's a short fight you stack haste/SP, otherwise you stack Int.

However, in neither scenario can I imagine that stacking haste because you want to hit some FLs would be a valid excuse. The problem at the moment in choosing either scenario is that we haven't yet seen a fight that would require either one, and often it is the content that you are pushing that will determine optimal gearing. That being said, the only challenge that exists right now at ANY level is more one of sustainability (3D sarth, Malygos being my benchmark here) than of burst healing... and thus the suggestion that gearing for Int is the premier choice for the raiding paladin.

Sorry to post so soon, but ghostcrawler is apparently hotfixing GoHL (as of 12:05 today, I have no idea what time zone). Bringing the radius down to 8 yards, allegedly.

Yes its true, you can find his post on the blizzard forums.
I agree with them nerfing it (look at it doing 50% of a Pally's healing on Saph), but I would rather it been nerfed some other way. With a small range restriction it can still do a huge amount of healing if people position correctly. Something like keeping the range at 20, but having some restriction like the total amount healed can't be greater then 20% of the Holy Light would be better in my eyes.

something like adding an internal cooldown to it? say it can't proc more than once every 10 seconds

Considering they're hotfixing this, I don't think your solution (or any more involved solution of the same vein) is feasible. I'm sure they'll be revisiting this glyph in the future, but this seems like the easiest fix to make on the fly.

It is still decent at 8 yards for places where you'll really be needing it (after vortex, KT melee, Sapphirron). Just not as outrageously good (since people will spread out after vortex and on Sapph, you still need to target a melee on KT instead of just spamming the tank).