If they are going to increase the mp5 values on gear by 25%, i'm wondering if it would be a logical thing for them to increase the mp5 on gems accordingly as well? If they increase the (x stat)-3 mp5 gems to (x-stat)-4 mp5 (I know it's a 33% increase if you increase it by 1 mp5) or the 7mp5 gems to 9 mp5, will those gems then be worth considering instead of straight intellect gems seeing how the relative value of mp5 compared to int will be increasing due to talent nerfs and probably a replenishment nerf?

Its also possible it will work like Haunt, renewing the duration on the HoT but not adjusting when it ticks. That would make a lot more sense on their part. That way with FoL spam you'd get the healing from the FoL's you cast, and an additional 25% of a FoL every 3 seconds. Not great, but not terrible. If only it was useable on raid healing instead of tank healing.

But really, we don't know yet. We lack the information to make reasoned arguments and to figure out how to adjust our play style. The one thing we do know is that MP5 is getting better and other mana returns are getting worse, so it might be worth stocking up on a sp/haste/mp5 set.

Glyph Seal Of Wisdom judging every minute (or earlier if you raid is dependent on the debuff you are applying)

vs.

"Glyph of Seal of Command: Redesigned to cause the Paladin to gain 8% of base mana each time the paladin judges Command." (MMO-Champion)

Speccing into SoC and judging every 8 seconds.

Which returns more mana?
Seems like this is gonna turn into another debate of "OMG You have to run around and so you don't get reduced mana cause you're not spamming HL's".

Considering Judgement costs something like 5% of base mana, you'd only be looking at 3% of base mana per Judgement, in addition to losing the -5% mana cost Glyph of Seal of Wisdom.

I not sure what to think about the changes. I'm kind of excited and sad at the same time. I'm taking a wait and see approach to this patch. I am concerned about the changes to mana regen. It might be that as another person wrote we will be forced to group healers for mana tide and such. I do believe there will be a lot more use of Divine plea. Haste and spellpower are looking a lot better right now. Are Paladin going to start putting some MP5 gems in our sockets now?

I would hate to see our mana regen get hit so hard we are left outside of raids because our mana regen can't keep up with what is needed.

I will wait and see what happens. I do like a lot of the changes, it's just I don't know how the regen changes are going to effect us as healers. Anyone have any thoughts?

I ran the numbers using my own personal WWS reports, and I'm looking at a ~20% regeneration nerf across the board. I think with the boosted MP5 numbers (and a ton of MP5 on gear), smarter Seal of Wisdom usage, and more "effective" healing due to Beacon changes, I'll be able to maintain my current level of healing.

Mana not used fundamentally outshines mana regained. Add this onto the fact that during a fight where you're able to judge command that consistently to gain mana, you might as well just use SoW+JoW and melee for the 4% max mana + 2% base mana chance.


As for my comments on the changes themselves...

The nerf to Illumination is really going to hurt most of the HL spamming times. It means we'll have to be even more "skillful/cautious" in putting our heals out, and with that going to be harder on mana in general once you factor in our intellect nerf too. We'll see if it's made up for by the buffs we've been given.

The FoL+SS mechanic is something I rather enjoy, and it gives the prot specs + 4pt8 some better use. Of course, FoL in any form still can't compete with HL for healing, but it is still a buff nonetheless and has its uses.

The BoL buff is certainly welcome. It helps our efficiency and allows us to do some raid healing without worrying as much about the tank. I still see an issue though where the transferred heals may not "reach" the tank in time given latency, but it won't be disastrous since if I'm raid healing when the tank needs heals more, I should be focusing on the tank anyway.

Mp5.. We'll see how it turns out. I hope it keeps us at about the same level we were prior to the Illumination nerf. I say hope, but it's almost certain it'll lower our mana regen overall from items and our usual casting. Still, so long as we can keep the heals up and complete the fights without unreasonable strain, it should be fine.

So, crit went from being ~80 to ~115 percent as effective as MP5 per item point (depending on fight and spam level) to ~30 to ~45% as effective as MP5 per item point. Additionally, this hurts our regen from int. Even with all the changes, Int is still going to be our best regen stat, but MP5 will be close behind it, and I would venture to guess that if you don't use DP (at all) and you don't have a mana tide in your group MP5 will probably outperform int.

You speak the truth. I ran the numbers on my own parses and typically found myself with 20-40k mana deficit depending on the fight. Combined with the fact I had almost completely stopped using Divine Plea and Glyphed LoH on myself I believe the nerf won't be as insane as some people are making it out to be.

In my last Hodir fight I cast 161 HLs 90 of which were crits. If the nerf goes through at 30% (which hopefully it doesn't, feels like they overnerfed it a little) I'll get back 34470 less mana from Illumination. I found that I'd often follow up my heals on Light's Beacon targets with heals on the Beacon'ed MT. If I ease up a little on that, simply because of the new Beacon, it should work out that I end the fight with 25% or less mana instead of the 100% I often end up with now. Not so bad.

The question is: Is Haste/Mp5 gear superior to Haste/Crit gear?

By an order of magnitude. Best case scenario, 3.1, you can receive 15% more mana per item point from crit than mp5. This same scenario in 3.2 mp5 will outperform crit by almost double, and in other more reasonable scenarios mp5 will outperform crit by nearly triple.

Blizzard thinks this: crit rating is too strong, MP5 is too weak, stacking Int at the expense of all else isn't fun, spamming HL mindlessly isn't fun and solely healing the MT for 5+ minutes non-stop isn't fun.

They've stated as much and the changes we saw today addressed all these concerns to some extent.



Now, I won't touch on whether these changes are buffs or nerfs, or anything else of the kind. There are still too many unknown variables at this point to be able to have any sort of relevant discussion on that subject. Instead I'll look at two different scenarios that could be open to us, depending on how some of the mechanics will end up working.



First build: Sheath Spec
Spam Flash of Light all day long while wearing all out Haste/Spell Power gear and gems. Aim for something like 800 Haste and 3200 Spell Power raid buffed and Glyph of Seal of Light/Flash of Light/Divinity. Judge for mana while bringing Imp Devo/Divine Sacrifice for a hard mode build.
This goes off on the assumption that the new Flash of Light HoT is actually decent: either it works off of total healing done (as opposed to effective healing) or it rolls like Ignite/Deep Wounds. This spec would still be able to sustain very acceptable tank HPS with the HoTs from Sheath and the new Flash of Light, along with a powered up Sacred Shield.



Second build: Cookie-cutter "I do hard modes"
Alternate between healing someone with increased healing talents (Quick Recovery, Vampiric Blood, Nurturing Instinct, etc) and raid healing while keeping Beacon up on whoever your "real" healing target is. Never cast a heal on the Main Tank every again. Gear for Haste/MP5 and keep gearing for Haste until you hit the GCD "cap" and then start stacking Spell Power/MP5. As with the previous build, use 4pcT8 with Glyph of Seal of Light/Holy Light/Flash of Light and aim for 600+ Haste and 2800 Spell Power raid buffed and a very healthy amount of Int/MP5.
You basically raid heal and main tank heal at the same time, when there is little to no raid damage going out, spam on people with the healing taken increasing talents to maximize your throughput on the tank. Only use Holy Light when necessary and/or to keep Light's Grace active.



With what we do know, crit rating healing plate is now borderline useless and it's all but impossible to sustain all out Holy Light spam for more than maybe 2 or 3 minutes. Intellect is still an excellent regen stat but it no longer trumps MP5 by such a large margin. Also, Meteorite Crystal (Algalon 10man Int trinket) and Spark of Hope pretty much become the two BiS regen trinkets for us seeing as it's safe to say that we can use Meteorite Crystal in conjunction with FoL spam for crazy high regen and Spark of Hope will be ridiculous with FoL being a spell we're once again forced to use.
4pcT7 is pretty much dead and we may also expect Ulduar hard mode plate loot to be re-itemized if the crit rating change goes live as it has been announced.

I'd like to add an interesting note on the (potential) resurrection of sheath healing. The power of the talent is twofold: 1) the obvious hot, 2) the AP->Spellpower conversion.

Now of course, we don't stack AP at all. But with full raid buffs completely talented, not wearing a single point of AP on our gear we can net at least 2111 Attack Power during a fight. Sheath converts this into 633 additional Spell Power.

To gain an equal amount of spellpower from Holy Guidance, you'd need a total of 3165 Intellect, a number which was not even remotely fathomable in this expansion. And intriguingly, the Divine Intellect nerf makes this number even more far off.

What this means is that a Sheathadin purely gemmed and chanted for Spell Power can obtain higher Spell Power levels (and by extension, stronger Sacred Shields) than any traditional holy paladin possibly could.

To me this signifies that Sheath could become the "discipline" paladin spec--we give up the extra raid healing potential that Beacon brings, because we have to focus on the MT entirely. However, we make up for this by providing an infinite stream of HPS coupled with more powerful single-target mitigation.

However, this is still completely theoretical. The Sheath hot has two negative properties: It does not work off overheal, and while it does stack, every crit will refresh the tick counter to 3 seconds--so you will never see a tick unless you go 3 seconds without a crit. This makes the big appeal of Sheath the supercharged Sacred Shields more so than the hot. That being said, this nature of Sheath causes it to perform as an acceptable Holy Shock substitute. You stand still and charge up the hot through spamming Flash, then when a movement phase comes up, you can run freely knowing that the 7k Sheath tick will keep your tank from croaking before you can get back into position and spamming again (sheath ticks I've seen in current content have ranged from 3k to 15k depending on the circumstances).

If the FoL hot works PRECISELY like the Sheath hot, then it won't be phenomenally good as we're hoping it will be. However, it would be a powerful addition to Sheath's viability. Currently, you only proc a hot when you crit. With this, you would proc a hot when you heal no matter what, proccing two hots when you crit. Rolling and supercharging the hots would be very powerful tools for normalizing tank damage--because you can rest assured that the tank will never go a single second without a several-thousand heal from one or more of three sources (Flash, FlasHot, Sheath).

As I said, I'm quite certain these changes will allow you to use a Sheathadin to fill any hole that you would have a Disc Priest.

It might be intriguing, but wouldn't you be sacrificing an awful lot for this? I mean, Sheath has always been strong due to the fact AP buffs are more prevalent than intellect ones. I just don't see where a sheathe pally would be able to output even remotely close to the level of a new Holy Pally. Your sacrificing raid healing AND main tank healing for purely main tank healing.

Its nice to look at the changes in 3.2 in a bubble, but Resto Shaman gained considerably in the main tank healing capabilities due to increase healing effectiveness and better cooldown management. The 15% armor buff makes them logical choices to fill our old shoes while we explore raid healing and beaconing on the tank to support them. All in all, I've always felt our raid healing capabilities far exceed that of shaman due to the quality and speed of which we can land heals on a raid. It seems silly to ignore this new potential (largely what we have asked for as a community I might add).

It is for certain a viable alternative however we must see how the new flash/sacred shield hot works exactly before signing off on it.

There is also the note that "supercharged Sacred Shield" requires 17 points in Prot, and with a Sheath build it's likely going to be 18 to pick up that last point in Divine Strength. The Ret tree requires 43 points in it for Sheath, so we're left with 10 or 11 in holy, which automatically go to 5/5 in Spiritual Focus, 3/3 in Healing Touch, and 2 or 3/5 in Divine Intellect.

My questions: How good will the mana regen be, especially if we're stacking Spell Power? How much healing and mitigation will it be? Will that healing be comparable to a 51/x/x build?

Innervate doesn't even begin to cover the loss of mana from the illumination nerf, and the same is true for the mp5 buff (which is somewhat offset by the replenisment nerf). Click me(choose buffs gained) to see how much illumination returns compared to other mana regen skills in Algalon 25, where you must spam HL non-stop.

To me it looks like they changed it from "only bring paladins to tank heal" to "only bring paladins to raid heal". We cannot sustain the same HPS on the tank we have now, not even close. We don't have the -10% phys. dam. taken buff either.

3.1: Paladin keeps the tank up as long as needed thanks to superior HPS and longevity
3.2. Paladin keeps the raid and tank up for a short while before he runs out of mana and has to melee or FoL

Would you rather have a tank healer for the whole fight or a raid+tank healer for short while? I know a lot of you say that you don't use plea or LoH, but that's not gonna help you when your guild benches you because you mana pool doesn't last at Algalon.

Is it really so hard for them to realize that the reason we spam heal is the way bosses deal damage? What help is a hot when the tank can die in between 2 hot ticks?
They say buffs to fol need to be carefully considered because of pvp and the solution they come up with is pretty much only a pvp buff. Then they nerf HL spam without giving anything back in terms of tank healing (unless they don't fix healing multiplicators and we're gonna end up spaming fol with something like 35% bonus).
Also, regarding pvp, didn't anyone in their design team considered dangerous having a class with 60yd range on heals?

Havn't read much of this as yet, but can we get a 3.2 thread for Holy Paladin now and move some of these posts into that?

We probably will when it goes live, or at least hits the PTRs.

I think the direction of the FoL change is good. Why? When mana would matter, the more intelligent MT healing style would be to cast FoL and change to HL when you need to heal more damage or you anticipate a big hit.

Why don't we do this now (besides the fact that we can ignore the mana saving aspekt)? Because you are essentially wasting cast time. You are 0.5 seconds into FoL cast. The tank gets a second hit in a row, drops low and you have to ramp up your hps to HL. You have to wait another 0.5 seconds for the GCD (can as well let FoL finish casting) and another 1,4 seconds for your HL to land. Had you been casting HL anyway, you'd only be 0,9 seconds away from your HL landing, instead of 1,9.

Would the FoL hot be good enough that longer time would be not putting your tank in danger, so that FoL would be feasible. In it's current PTR version (read: assumed implementation!) it will tick every 3 seconds for about 800 (in my gear, 2050 SP). It's not much when you take into consideration that you cannot spam FoL becaus it will reset the duration and the hot will not tick at all. Additionally, a tick of 800 will not help you with the time problem when you have to switch to HL.

If the developers really intended to make FoL feasible at MT healing, they could make the hot stackable (not rolling, just stackable, with each stack running out individually) and make it tick every 2 seconds. If you reduce the duration of the hot to 6 seconds (and perhaps reduce the coefficient to like 60%), you would end up getting 3 4k ticks when you switch to HL. That would not be supersavy, because you have to keep casting FoL to keep the hot ramped up at full strength. That way you would be able to make a choice in MT healing rather than risking tank death like it is now.

Anyway, it is a good thing they nerf illumination and replenishment. It is just crucial that they do not take away our ability to heal a tank through heavy damage. If we lose that niche, that would be a problem because despite BoL transferring total healing done we are not that capable of AE-Healing.

About gemming in 3.2, I seem to recall the last time that there was indepth discussion of builds that strongly leaned on SS/FoL, stacking spellpower gems was considered as a viable option, given low mana costs and high crit rate involved. In 3.2, would holy/prot builds be looking more at red spellpower / purple spellpower/mp5 gems, or is int going to remain unquestionably the best?

Has anyone run the numbers to see whether 4pc T7 + 51/0/20 becomes completely invalidated with 3.2?

Personally, I can see the 4pc bonus possibly being viable on certain fights (Algalon or any other fight that requires constant spamming), but I can't imagine that the 8% crit, 10% instant mana reduction and 15% runspeed could match the utility of DiSac, a 20% buff to SS, 6% damage reduction and 5% added healing.

I kinda liked the idea of choosing either a ret or prot subspec and having either of them for separate situations, but now I think we'll be looking at a cookie-cutter build with 2-3 points differing here or there based on the pally's preference.

But, if we are spamming FoL on the tank to use some new HoT mechanic, then how do we take advantage of the new BoL changes? Especially since we are being nerfed in the mana regen department as a result of the BoL change. If all these changes do is result in us spamming a different spell then what is the point? FoL, FoL, FoL, HL...rinse repeat doesnt seem any more exciting.

As many have pointed out, a small HoT on one target and the ability to "raid" heal while still healing the tank seems like small gain/loss when you think about how much we lose in the power MT healing department due to the severe mana regen nerfs.

Not to mention, how effective is our raid healing really going to be against all the smart heals. Our heals are fast, but we still have to pick a target and pray that it lands before a smart heal if we want to actually heal something besides our beacon target. Besides HS, we aren't actually guaranteed a raid heal. If we are trying to raid heal with FoL then every smart heal is enough to have healed our one target.

It seems like they created a mishmash of buffs/nerfs without examining them as a whole. Imo, we now have the illusion that we can raid heal. When in reality, we can try to raid heal while actually just healing the MT less effectively than we did before.

Edit: And let us be honest, by this time in Ulduar, the only real fights that matter are hard mode encounters. That is where it seems we took the biggest hit in our healing capabilities. Almost all normal encounters can be healed by non-paladins.