The strength of the Sacred Shield absorption buff is based on the casting paladin's Spellpower at the time the father buff was applied, not at the time the absorption buff is triggered.

Note that this is another (small) advantage that Prot subspecs offer. With a 60-second duration SS, you can yank noticeably extra mileage out of Spellpower trinket procs. It's interesting to consider that the standard 45-second ICD of most trinkets and proc effects prohibits a naked Sacred Shield from benefitting from more than at best 1 out of every 2 trinket procs. Meanwhile, depending on RNG, a prot-buffed Sacred Shield could potentially maintain a near-100% uptime with buffed trinket effects.

850, assuming they ever fix it, spellpower translates to an extra 638 damage absorption on each shield proc. The total absorption you gain from this proc per Sacred Shield cast under varying circumstances would be:


Naked Shield, No 4T8: ~2,871

Naked Shield, 4T8: ~4,466

Prot-Sub Shield, No 4T8: ~7,273

Prot-Sub Shield, 4T8: ~11,101


Even if it remains at the curious 751 spellpower number, you get the following gains by applying SS under the proc effect:


Naked Shield, No 4T8: ~2,534

Naked Shield, 4T8: ~3,941

Prot-Sub Shield, No 4T8: ~6,418

Prot-Sub Shield, 4T8: ~9,805


This is another example of how your gear and talent choices are interrelated and change based on each other. You could correctly state either that the trinket becomes more valuable with a prot sub-spec and 4T8, or that a prot sub-spec and 4T8 becomes more valuable with the trinket.

Either way, smart application of Sacred Shields during the buff could prevent anywhere between an extra 2,500-9,500 damage depending on your gear and spec for absolutely no extra mana cost. In essence, the trinket gives you a free non-crit heal every minute or so. In addition, it applies 751 extra spellpower to all spells you cast in the other 8-9 seconds of the proc that you're not spending refreshing Sacred Shield. Finally, consider the benefits we reap from 108 Intellect and you see why this trinket is so widely coveted by paladins. It's BIS for many classes though, so you should expect heavy competition. And if you are lucky enough to acquire one, you really owe it to your guild to put the proc to its most use.

Pandora's only gives 750 sp because that is what the spell database has in it. So the item devs didn't coordinate with the tooltip writer.

All spells that use sp gain it at the time of casting, so recasting SS at a Pandora proc may be a good idea.

If i'm correct the increased effect of absorption only happens during the time that the pandora's trinket is proccing. As soon as the proc is over the amount absorbed goes back to normal.

Sacred shield casted without proc - Normal absorption amount 2417 damage

Pandora's plea proc on the same sacred shield: 3095 damage absorbed

Same sacred shield after the pandora's plea proc is over: 2417 damage.


To make sure of this a sacred shield was casted while the proc was up, and the amount absorbed was recorded. Results:

First shield absorbed 3095 damage

Every subsequent shield after the proc finished absorbed 2417 damage.

Small off topic question, How do you all feel about Guiding Star replacing The Turning Tide as BiS weapon, excluding Val'anyr, of course.

Is the Haste / Mp5 going to replace all of my beloved crit / haste gear?

[Aesuga, Hand of the Ardent Champion] is the new best in slot excluding Val'anyr as of 3.1.2, it has also been discussed previously in this thread.

It would make sense that Sacred Shield takes spell power into account not when you cast it on a player, but when the actual shield procs on that player. I see it working where you cast SS on your tank, he'll take a hit, and proc a shield based on current spell power. In that scenario, it would all depend on what your current SP is when the tank gets hit and SS is off cooldown, meaning you'd 1-3 buffed SS from pandora's plea depending on timing and having 4pT8.

That's all assuming that's how it works.

Ummm...for Holy Paladins or Resto Shamans?

Constellus sacrifices 12 Crit, 22 Haste, and a yellow socket bonus for 37 spellpower, 4 Int, and 2 Stam. It's more a sidegrade than a "much better than." The only reason I would choose Constellus over Aesuga is if I was trying to create an SP-optimized set to combine with 4T8 and a prot subspec for super shielding. Otherwise I'd prefer the crit and haste, as I assume many holy paladins would.

37 sp, 4 int, 2 stam and 19 mp5.
Mp5 is not useless, it's too expensive but that's another story. For example assuming 1.3s HL, you get around 10mp5 from the extra crit on aesuga (including the socket bonus) while chaincasting. You can't just ingore it when you compare gear.

hum, they really want us to take MP5 plate from Ulduar .. I hope that they'll not ends with an Illumination nerf as GC said here (or maybe they want us to ask for innervate from feral druids!), it's not like healing pally are OP right now. Really I don't see the problem with pally, our mana regen is pretty imba, OK, but our healing skills are so limited, we are far below priest/drood and we always need the +15% armor buff from shaman or priest on tanks.
This will ends up with illumination down to 33% and Plea reducing heal by 75%

Source: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Discuss Itemization without insulting devs

Ps: Sorry for the whine but i'm really disappointed when reading things like this.

Gear wise, the itemization is, for the most part, terrible. MP5 is completely outclassed by Intellect and MP5 would only be attractive if it were possible to run OOM in Ulduar. Most Paladins going for all out SP/Crit/Haste loot are at or nearing the soft cap on haste by hitting the GCD cap. At this point, an extra 1000 SP won't make that much of a difference in our healing style/capabilities, but having extra Intellect will: not having to plea as often or as long is going to help a Paladin a lot more than a wee bit more overhealing done. And let's face it, we're already competing with Ret Paladins for overhealing...


Moving onto what GC said: I find it terrifying that they're even considering making Spirit useful for Holy Paladins. Giving us Spirit plate doesn't fix the biggest problem with Paladin itemization: having to fully itemize for gear that only 1 spec can use is obnoxious at this point. Just looking at how far itemization has come since Sunwell tells us that Blizzard doesn't want to go with the "this kind of gear is only ever useful to one spec" mentality: polearms for Druids, FAP on all Druid weapons, spell damage/+healing merge, Spirit being useful (to some varying degree) to all Cloth and Leather casters, DK/Prot Paladin/Prot Warrior sharing plate, Cats/Bears/Rogues sharing DPS leather and Hunters/Enh Shamans sharing mail. Our gear is the only one that Blizzard hasn't gotten around to fixing and I think the reason is that the only permanent ways to fix this problem is by making huge changes to itemization or even to the Paladin class.

I'm talking about making Holy Paladins heal with normal Strength gear and having the same AP coefficients on spells that DKs get. That or forcing us to simply wear mail and stop making new spell plate. Because in the end that's the real solution: stop having to create spell plate to pollute loot tables.

They modified priest regen scaling from Crit with the change to Holy Concentration: it gives better regen with a balance of Crit and Spirit/Int regen (instead of scaling with crit + spell mana cost). I think something similar is the future of Illumination. Make crit increase mp5 regen for a short time.

It really doesn't matter how massively we overheal, since if you look at total healing meters (not counting overhealing) we destroy everyone else normally.

I wouldn't read too much into his statement, GC just was just pointing out an example of how they can change Holy Pally gearing. He wasn't saying that is what they are going to do (and nothing else), and if they ever decide to do something like that they could very well do it at the same as addressing our loot being good for only 1 spec. I don't have the quote handy, but sometime during T7 he acknowledged the problem of Holy Pallies being the one spec using our current loot. Personally I would much rather use mail with caster stats, then having some weird system for converting Strength gear to caster stats.

It's not that holy paladins don't care about regen stats. It's all based on the fact that MP5 gives only regen. Fights where you end up with 6k-7k mana or even more mean that your MP5 stats didn't do anything for you. Int gives great regen, and also gives spell power and crit which aren't wasted if you don't need the extra mana/regen. Also, we are able to itemize for intellect to the point that our regen is fine without stacking MP5.

It's a pretty important misconstruing of the classes mechanics and players gearing aims to say that Holy paladins don't care about regen because Illumination is too strong. If anything, we're gemming/gearing exclusively for regen with the side effect of better throughput. They might worry more about the fact that large increases in SP levels hardly seem attractive to most of us and realize it's because, at some point, one massive heal to spam becomes too massive and your left with 2 options to make tank healing challenging or interesting:

1. Even bigger hits which end up one-shotting tanks (no fun to be had there, but it's the only way to challenge our big heals)
2. Give us something else to cast whose throughput scales with the SP rather than haste so that we can start benefiting from some of these huge SP upgrades and maybe itemizing past the haste soft-cap.

I really don't agree with statements like that, including ending the fight at 0 mana means you have exactly the right amount of mana. These statements go on the assumption that for a given fight there is a static amount of mana that we need to use. Unless if you are spamming Holy Light (when not keeping buffs up) you could make use out of more mana. More Holy Lights means your tank has a much higher incoming stream healing for when bad RNG strikes. That is the value of extra mana regen. Not making sure you have mana to cast healing spells for the whole fight, any reasonable gearing/gemming strategy can do that already.

As many others have stated, Intellect is primarily a regen stat, with throughput side effects. Crit is also primarily a regen stat with some throughput on the side. MP5 is the only pure regen stat we possess.

Conversely, SP and Haste are our only primary throughput stats. If paladins genuinely did not care about regen at all, then we would do nothing but stack Spellpower and Haste. No one does this. It's simply not the case.

What I take away from not only this comment, but GC's comments on healing as a whole lately, is that Blizzard plans on addressing the unanimous bellyaching over Ulduar loot by straining healer regen even more.

Speaking for healers in general, GC has stated that Replenishment is next on the chopping block if and when it's decided regen needs a nerf (and all signs are pointing that way). Speaking specifically of paladins, we know that Illumination is the prefered Holy mana regen knob to turn.

The thing I'm not sure developers are being communicated clearly from the player base is that the reason none of us want MP5 isn't because we're not concerned about regen--it's that it's the least efficient regen stat to stack. We can get so much more out of either of our other two regen stats (Intellect and Crit) than we could with an equivalent amount of MP5 that it becomes pointless. Since launch we have lamented this in hopes of Blizzard doing something to make MP5 more valuable, such as loosening up on its budget cost.

That's clearly not a solution that's on the horizon. Blizzard's not sure that Regen is good enough to be nerfed, but they're damned sure it's not bad enough to buffed. Expect them to stick with the status quo or cut it.

So what we're looking at currently is that Intellect > Crit > MP5 for regen. Blizzard is leaning ominously towards making Int = Crit = MP5, or worse, through nerfing Replenishment and Illumination respectively.

Hold on to a few of those plate MP5 pieces for when the boot inevitably falls.

I wasn't trying to make that generalization. I was just using it in the example of how MP5 sometimes is useful and sometimes is not useful. It's a static stat which does not scale and does not contribute to other stats. On the other hand, Intellect is always useful, even if you end the fight with extra mana. That's because you gain more spell power and more crit with intellect.

That's nothing new, I know. However when we can itemize and gem so that intellect alone can completely cover our regen by itself, MP5 becomes a pointless stat. I'd argue that if you find yourself in a single fight where you go OOM and someone dies as a result (assuming you are maxed out for int), then you should start swapping out haste gear for mp5 stats. The safer way to do it is to go into new/difficult fights with a few pieces of your MP5 gear on, and then once you see how it's going start to swap it out for burst and throughput.

I find it odd that GC objects to paladins stacking crit just because it increases our output in addition to our regen. It's like he's forgetting that through talents spirit increases the output of priests and druids as well.

First of all, this makes no sense in relation to Holy Paladins. We already know we're the only class and spec that can use our type of gear. There's no reason that it cannot be itemized with the stats we desired, as they proved throughout T7 and with the better itemized T8 gear.

So apparently the design team considers MP5 and Spirit to be "the" regen stats, to the omission of both Intellect and Crit. Since we can receive no benefit from Spirit as spirit plate doesn't exist and we never drop Oo5SR, this shows that the developer's intent is for us to turn to MP5 for our mana issues and NOT Intellect or Crit.

Consider that, per itemization point, Crit and Intellect are both offer more regen than MP5, not even factoring in the throughput bonuses, and that makes for some pretty clear handwriting on the wall.

Again, am I the only person who considers this statement completely nonsensical? Holy Paladins have been denied HoTs, AoE heals, and other raid healing tools under the premise that we're supposed to fill our specially crafted tank heal niche. Yet we're being held to the same mana restrictions of other classes with simply more healing tools.

Quite frankly, you could remove the healing penalty on Divine Plea altogether and allow for a 100% uptime, but we STILL wouldn't outstrip shamans, priests, or druids when it comes to their jobs--raid healing--simply because we don't have the appropriate spells to cast.

In a typical fight, you have one tank, one tank healer, and the rest are on the raid in some form or other. What are the consequences of one of the 4 Holy Priests going oom? The other 3 Holy Priests cover his assignment for 15 seconds while he regens enough to keep going. What are the consequences of the 1 Holy Paladin going oom? Instant raid wipe, because raid healers typically can't just magically swap to a tank healing role.

Mana is the limiting factor on Priests, Druids, and Shamans. If they had infinite mana, they could keep a raid up with half the number of usual healers.

Spells are the limiting factor on Holy Paladins. We can heal 1-2 targets and that's it. It doesn't matter how much or how little mana we have, we will never be effective raid halers. It is more important that we never run oom than the other healers.

This feels very much like a shortchange. We're being told that we can't have similar healing tools to other classes and that we can't fulfill other healing roles, but we're expected to conform to the same mana rules as the other classes.

Still calling this. Give the "less bleeding-edge expert guilds" the 6 months to gear up that we'll have before the Argent Coliseum, and definitely before Icecrown Citadel we'll see a nerf.

The most recent GC statement also patently ignores that the classes he names, for the most part, have talents which allows them some throughput benefits from spirit - while mp5, for us, offers no such incentive... Int does however. The entire comparison isn't valid as far as I'm concerned.

Moreover, it still doesn't address that every other healing class actually has incentive to stack SP to some extent (on top of haste/regen -int/mp5/spirit/crit) while we do not. Particularly now that SS only shields one target.

Well, to play devil's advocate, Shaman don't have any talents that give them an MP5 -> throughput conversion. And even though SS only stacks on one target, it is arguably the most important target. It's just that we gain more single-target HPS through diminished DP usage that Intellect provides than extra spellpower applied to SS.

I'm really surprised they didn't increase SS's spellpower scaling given it single target nature.

I largely agree with the sentiment responded by many of the Paladins here. I found Ghostcrawlers comments a bit hasty. I know he comments on the fly, and knows his stuff, but it seemed apparent he was focusing on one aspect of our class while simultaneously ignoring the other components. For example; he mentions that we were forgoing mp5 because we didn't need any more regen. Its not that exactly, but as others pointed out crit is our regen stat and we stack it high enough to increase BOTH our regen and our throughput.

I also liked the comments about how even if we did have unlimited mana, at best we could spam it on 1 target at a time. Beacon isn't reliable enough to forgo having a healer on a two tank situation. We are forced therefore to bring in another Paladin capable of doing the job on the 2nd tank.

What I find frustrating about the situation is the historical overview of Paladin mechanics. When Illumination was introduced it was a fantastic idea, but it was started at 100% which was quickly abused. Instead of addressing the situation by introducing a regen mechanic that made sense for our class, they dropped in the hastily created and often changed Divine Plea. We have seen what, 15 different iterations of this spell since its introduction? The Paladin class is so poorly pieced together at this juncture its the PERFECT opportunity for them to address not only the direction they see for the holy paladins in their game, but also the gearing situation that is constantly bemoaned by all. I disagree with people in that too many classes need strength gear, the only ones I could think of were DK's, DPS Warriors, and Ret Pallies. Thats not a huge pool of players compared to casters (priests/mage/warlock), who often compete over similar gear. I find str based healing completely viable, but it would have to be done in a reasonable way and would require a complete overhaul of the class. This is something not likely to see the light of day anytime soon, however, and would likely have to wait for an expansion.

In terms of gearing, why not continue down the route they have already found popular in terms of obtaining badges and trading in pieces for gear of your choice? You could effectively eliminate the random drop nature of the game and instead focus on setting the bar higher for obtaining gear. Hard modes or any increase in difficulty increase the badge rewards. It seems the route they are taking already so I don't see why they don't complete the cycle and make everything a badge turn in. At the very least, I suppose, they could leave weapons to the random drop nature in an instance.

Alot to be discussed, but it seems utterly impossible to communicate with anyone on the Blizzard staff. The people who troll the official forums are utterly useless when it comes to discussing logical methods of change. Anything relatively intelligent is bounced down to page 7 within five minutes because no one who reads the forums really understands the class enough to respond (in general).