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.

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).

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...

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Loot simplicity is boring. Figuring the trade offs of gear is a significant part of the process of playing.

World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Ghostcrawler says....(re:Spellpower plate)

Ghostcrawler mentioned there that it would be nice to get rid of plate caster gear, but it´s not easy to do =)

I think it would be nice tho to be able to have the same set of gear for playing ret or holy and just switch talents. That would make the dual-specc even greater than it already is going to be.

As it is now i think it is nice to have "holy-gear-only" as i have no competition for it, but it also means carrying around 3 sets (5 mabye 6 sets if you pvp a lot) for playing other specces and that is a bit "annoying" not that i use the bankslots for other stuff tho.

I still keep a lot of the plate mp5-gear just in case they do something stupid and make mp5 better than int.

The pro of having a plate-set that is only for "us" is that when they design it it´s holy paladins only that need to be in the calculations thus making it a bit easier/better to make the correct stats on them.

As a Holy Paladin you have the choice of taking any other spell piece in the game. I am not sure how you feel that you do not have options. You have the opportunity right now to use mail. You have the opportunity to use leather or cloth if you like. Frankly, I would rather not be forced out of plate because when I am running RD in order to keep healing aggro off other, less armored, healers, I enjoy not being one shotted by the mob before the tank picks them up.

In regards to the statement about gear that is only applicable to one class, I would submit Leather Spellgear with spirit. I really don't see Shammys or Pallys scrambling for it, so it is effectively only a Druid item.

I would rather not see all of the classes/specs become so homogenized that we no longer need gear differences. As they say, variety is the spice of life.

But it can go to boomkins or trees though. Leather spellpower gear is similar, but not as stark as healing plate in this regard. Spellpower plate is the only armor type that is used by one spec of one class.

Mail with Spellpower and Hit on it is used only by elemental Shamans. To be fair, the only such mail is Tier gear and two Wintergrasp PvP pieces.

More PVP nerfs. Also baseline 40 yard auras, not sure if holy will gain an 11 pt talent.

I ignore the talent when spec'ed Holy, and Ret really doesn't either since Command is only useful until from level 20-64). Prot's new 11 pointer is a 150% Divine Guardian-type talent.

I like the idea of the new Prot talent combining with Sac and Divine Guardian, especially to counter all the upcoming AoE damage. Not sure if that is better than 8% crit + run speed though.


Legendary item proc:
Val'anyr Hammer of Ancient Kings - (Passive effect) - Your healing spells have a chance to cause Blessing of Ancient Kings for 15 seconds allowing your heals to shield the target absorbing damage equal to 15% of the amount healed.

I think the bigger nerf is this new Warrior skill.

Shattering Throw *New Skill* - Throws your weapon at the enemy causing [ 50% of AP + 12 ] damage (based on attack power), reducing the armor on the target by 20% for 10 sec, and removing any invulnerabilities. 25 Rage, 30 yd range, 1.5 sec cast, 5 min cooldown


Edit:
On the plus side, the epic mace looks like a total Holy Pally weapon to me.

Val'anyr Hammer of Ancient Kings - Equip Effect -- Your healing spells have a chance to cause Blessing of Ancient Kings for 15 seconds allowing your heals to shield the target absorbing damage equal to 15% of the amount healed.

I really doubt the new prot 11 pointer isn't replacing Divine Guardian outright. (EDIT: MMO-Champ shows both talents still up, but is this really what we've come to? Replicating our own talents to fill up trees?) Leaving both talents up seems really redundant. If it is replacing DG, it's a pretty weird change as well though: I mean who wouldn't DS when 30% of the raid damage is redirected at them? This would just mean pressing 2 buttons and reduces the effective cooldown of the ability itself to 5min for anyone but a protection paladin not currently tanking anything dangerous and being used as a raid wide damage soak.

The changes to SS really guts the talent for anyone who used it more than as something to cast on the MT every 30s between spamming and the infusion places it squarely as more of a PvP talent than a PvE one (I loved those sub 1s HL DF + HS + HL combos!)

Yeah, with the raiding paladin running at 50% crit on his HL already, the extra crit from Infusion of Light will just turn into more overheal.

Not having done much PvP, but I'd assume in it's current state the IoL+HL synergy is quite powerful in combatting burst.

Infusion HL is mostly useful for avoiding (somewhat) interrupts and maintaining mobility. The fast heals are nice for getting Light's Grace up. It's a negative change for pvp. I'm cautiously not that worried about Shattering Throw, it has a casting time, the warrior has to drop into battle stance, you can LOS it.

I don't like the sacred shield change, but a nerf is a nerf. If we can get scaling for it with Sheath spell power (intended?) that would be a step in the right direction.

If the changes go through to live, I'm expecting to shake up our stat stacking priorities. Specifically, haste should become a lot more important since Light's Grace / JoTP are now the only talents that affect its cast time. Meanwhile, the only purpose for IoL will be proccing mobile FoLs. Thus, our 2PT7 loses it's already marginal PVE appeal, and crit gets relegated to even more of a "just a regen" stat.

Sacred Shield is very troublesome in light of the amount of raid damage we're looking at Ulduar throwing out. There were many times in heroics and naxx that I would SS a group of 5+ raiders who were about to take some damage, beacon the tank, and then keep the tank up with 5 FoLs critting on each of the newly procced SS's.

This means our only options for raid healing are the now-non-critting GHL heal, and good old flash spam. Could count JoL too, if a ret paladin isn't present. Here's to crossing our fingers for some sort of raid healing solution.

My prediction is that Divine Sacrifice is actually the new Holy 11pt talent to replace Aura Mastery. That's the only way I can make sense of it seems a poor 11pt'er for Ret or Prot IMO.

That would also enable Divine Guardian to remain in the Prot tree if anyone wants the utility.