I disagree. The toughest, most healing intense fight i've encountered (and i've done almost every hardmode except for mimiron and yogg) was Iron Council. In my guilds strat, me and another holy paladin basically alternate holy light bombs (non stop, no exceptions) onto the maintank. We pause to allow the other to divine plea + jow melee swings to top themselves off. This allows us to go into the final phase will full mana which permits us to holy light bomb all three of the remaining tanks four times.

The only downside I'm seeing is our regen phases may take a bit longer, but strict cooldown management with Divine Plea and Divine Illumination could easily counter these loses.

It wont be as simple as blindly spamming HL's anymore, but then again, thats what we wanted isn't it?

If you're racing to beat each other's spell casts, you have a botch in your assignments or you're floating too much healing for the damage incoming. There's really no bigger flaw in raid healing then having healing collisions unless it's a fight that requires redundancy.

Of course it begins to cover the loss; the point is not that it completely offsets the loss, but rather that you have options for when you need them. Again, the assumption is that you will no longer spam heals non-stop, a luxury we've always had and a luxury that all raid leaders leveraged by running a barebones tank healing team using at least one Paladin.

You really shouldn't be in a position to have a raid+tank healer for "a short while". There will be a learning curve, sure, and some testing to ensure the approach is feasible. Again, it's the vision that's important here, not the exact details (yet). The change is good, and creates a new dynamic for healing compositions.

I had a whole long post worked up for this, but lost it. Luckily, SirSilk seems to have summed up my opinion on this matter pretty conclusively. If all changes make it more or less to live, look what we have left.


We will remain primarily a tank healer, via Beacon of Light. On 1 tank fights, we'll be using BoL on tank and spamming heals on random raid members (probably melee). Where we will do decently well is a 2 tank fight when tanks can stay in range, but to be honest, we're pretty good at that with proper beacon usage as it is already.

A word on mana. I took last weeks Iron Council (Medium-25) parse to see how it would have effected me there. I used this because I had it on hand and I remember ending the fight at something like 50% mana. I would lose 32,500 mana between Illumination (27k), and Replenishment (5k). Too compensate, over a 7 minute fight, I will need to gain about 385 mana5. I'm also omitting the 5% nerf to Divine Intellect which will hurt initial mana and slightly effect regen. Granted, I was not using Divine Plea often due to the MS and was rarely in melee range. Also, was using a 2:1 HL/FoL ratio (roughly).


After the patch, we will move from being a top notch tank healer able to sustain high HPS for long durations, to a mediocre tank healer and mediocre raid healer. Smart heals via a buffed range Chain Heal and PoH/CoH are still much better raid healing tools then glyphed HL and by a pretty good margin. Our options are to either significantly reduce HPS by mixing in more spell power and mp5 while using FoL to a large degree (and in an era of 40k+ tanks and FoLs that do only 10-15% of that, making us an inferior tank healer), or to continue to attempt to use HL primarily and find new mana returns.

In a game where min/max'ing is the key, being in the middle ground is not a good thing. The flash of light HoT is going to be generally irrelevant for PVE unless it can A)proc via Beacon, B)stack ala lifebloom, C)tick despite constant overwriting.

Honestly, with Illumination now nerfed 70% of it's original value, I'd rather they just scrap it and give us a new heal halfway between Holy Light and Flash of Light, in both cost and output.

(Maybe I was the only person who LIKED stacking Int and casting HL. Additionally, now the awesome proc from [Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings] will be significantly less useful. Glad we gave ours to a shaman, who's picking up a great tank healing buff in the form of -10% damage reduction proc on crits.)

Exactly what I was fearing too.
Paladins didn't have a hard time on hardmodes as someone stated earlier - au contraire, we are the backbone of all the major hardmodes. Not having to worry about the tank because you've got 2 pallies and a constant 20k HPS on him was great, and I really liked to have my specific niche. Having us compete with raid healers who outrace us simply by the fact of having smart heals covering multiple targets is major league BS.
I do have our guild's val'anyr and I'm not too happy about it.

My only solace is that we've got a month, maybe two, of PTR coming, which will undoubtedly change much, if not everything.

Probably closer to two, and even then, I suspect little will actually change. I HOPE that the Mortal Strike effect on Divine Plea will at least be done away with, as it is our only reliable mana return at this point, and unlike priests and druids, we gain very little from innervate. I doubt that it will be, because blizzard seems to be very against INT stacking (I do not understand why this is so). Every class has a stat which will fundamentally be the 'best', why can ours not be INT?

[Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings] just makes me a very sad panda.

The good news is: I get to be back in the mana tide group again. Yay team!

You're not the only one. When GC had that post that read:

1) Holy Light isn't fun
2) Int isn't fun.
3) 70% overheal isn't fun.
etc


I was thinking "I actually ENJOY all of those aspects of healing." I play a Holy Paladin because I know my HL spam will always keep a tank up. The new prot-paladin "Cheat Death" mechanic would've been worthless before, as if the tank is being healed by a Holy Paladin, he'll never get low enough for it to activate.

And personally, I don't like this perception that we are effective 1 button healers. I use Holy Light, Holy Shock, Flash of Light, Sacred Shield (every 30), Beacon of Light (every 60), Divine Plea/Arcane Torrent (every 60), and Judgement (every 20) constantly on every boss. That's 7 buttons alone before Hand of Salv/Protection and Divine Illumination.

Hey, I'm sorry that our class had a good raid identity, a clear-cut role, and had great synergy with 4 different stats. But we don't want MP5 on our gear so, screw it, lets just change all that. Sweet.

I'm just in a very bad mood today

I think you're being a little too doom and gloom about this, it's awfully reminiscent of the general priest community when the CoH nerf came into place in Naxx.

To put this into perspective, you're comparing a raid style that's more or less single target to two smart heals (PoH/CoH) that are very much suited for raid-wide damage. In other words, your Paladins are going to be much more appropriate for deep damaging RSTS raid healing than raid-wide aura damage, and no change is ever going to come to equalize that playing field. At least now, you're dual purposing and providing a good layer of redundancy on the tank. As for chain heal, it's a good comparison, but I would never say chain heal beats something like HL in every single circumstance or vice versia. Again, it all depends on the damage pattern and the best tool for the job.

It's worth noting that PoH has been very much knee capped as well (85% to 50% or something? I'd have to recheck the notes), and CoH has its own limitations; you will probably still find good niches for your Paladins considering that nearly all raid-wide damage auras typically mix in very harsh RSTS effects (hardmodes: Steelbreaker, Freya, Mimiron, etc; a theme we've seen throughout many tiers of content as well).

At the very least, there needs to be an additional incentive to actually use Paladins for dedicated tank healing in this current vision, because I see no reason why you would ever want to do so, outside of conserving mana on casting beacon of light.

How about two-tank fights like Vezax or Freya? We don't necessarily need to be put on raid healing, especially considering the raid-healing abilities of other healers. In fact, I'd argue that, since our raid-healing capability seems like it may be nerfed (less mana overall means we have to be more careful about our spam) and we've gotten a couple tank healing buffs (FoL HoT and the nerf to crit forcing us to take points in Prot instead of Ret).

Seems to me like the best case scenario for our healing style is going to be 2 tanks and melee taking heavy damage (kind of like the start of Auriaya, but if the melee took sonic blasts rather than ranged).

Essentially, we're given more license to raid heal, but that doesn't mean it's our imperative. We're still damn fine tank healers.

I don't see the learning curve. We didn't get any new tools. If I want to conserve mana, I wait a moment before casting the next HL. Doing nothing is a very poor mechanic.

2 tank fights are already well defined for beacon. If both are taking damage (and at least 1 will due to being the boss MT), then beacon works perfect for it already. Changes do not help us very much in multi tank healing (only benefits us when MT has long avoidance streak ironically) and only serve to significantly reduce both our regen and our throughput.

By good raid identity you mean you always had at most 1 holy paladin whose sole job was the spam one spell on one target, and keep up 3 buffs. If mp5 problem was the only issue they had with Holy Paladins they would have just left us with the overall replenishment nerf and mp5 buff.

We are going back to a more TBC style. Where he don't just spam our highest HPS, but we watch, plan, and predict when the tank is going to need to Holy Lights compared to Flash of Lights. Plus we have the added bonus of trying to maximize our raid healing effectiveness at the same time. Its much more fun when mana, who you cast on, and what you are casting actually means something and takes thought on how to maximize there effectiveness.

I dont know what you were doing in TBC, but I seem to remember casting Holy Light almost exclusively in Sunwell (pre-3.0 of course) by downranking to the appropriate spell that would allow you to have enough mana for the duration of a fight while chaining mana pots (which is what our T6 set was aimed at). Flash was reserved for healing yourself or other incidental damage. Black Temple progression days seem like forever ago, but again, I remember wearing T5 4pc for a long time to once again accomidate downranked HL.

Maybe we just have completely different playstyles, but I do not see how this moves us back to a "TBC style".

I think this has always been a big misconception unless the damage being done to either tank is of such a level that it is not able to be a sub 4 second lethal window and thus you're able to pretty much single or 1.5 heal one of the two tanks (Sartharion, Vezax, Freya). In any scenario where you simply have to spam to prevent a gib, you'll almost always have a second healer with you cutting into your effective healing, which knee caps your BoL throughput in the grand scheme of things.

If you're waiting to HL while raid healing, I'd argue you're probably do something wrong. The art of direct raid healing has always been the on-the-fly reprioritization of who to heal and the ability to telegraph the damage. It's the simple fundamentals of raid healing, and it's something a lot of Wrath-born Paladins will have to pick up on top of a new mana model. TBC Paladins will probably feel right at home, maybe too at home if the mana model does play out to be borked. I think Blizzard will be sensitive to the mana model though, because I doubt they want to recreate a Sunwell scene for Paladins again.

While you could do that at times in Sunwell if you had a Shadow Priest, I for one did not most of the time. I was also talking about style of healing for TBC content besides Sunwell.

I remember healing very aggressively outside of my assignment, as only Brutallus had the capability of gibbing your tank (unlike now, where we have so many bosses capable of tank gibbing that we must use external CDs to survive) and resto druid hots were so very strong to lean on. BoL change enables this greatly.

The ultimate irony came when Paladins were realized to be one of the best raid healers when it came to the final fight: Kil'Jaeden, when you realize the damage pattern fit the Paladin SOP so perfectly while the fight was so counter-chain heal due to the positioning. The haste/regen buff enabled Paladins to play in the fantasy land of not having strict mana limitations and an innate haste buff.

Again, I feel this kind of discussion punctuates GC's point that there will be paladins who will be able to leverage this style aggressively and successfully. There will probably be Paladins who cannot (or won't), and I think there needs to be a second mechanism in place to distinguish the two styles further, especially for single tank fights. Unless of course, their intention is to simply not reward these types of Paladins as well.

[e]As a random aside: the FoL hot is very much insignificant to me too. I think someone in design forgot the SS buff is restricted to one target.

Ok, I'm not a math guy, so I'll leave that up to those that are.

If the current Illumination nerf goes through, what happens to the value of crit, and what do our best gear choices become? Do we just use the same gear (crit/haste), with less mana return and accept it or do we move more towards haste/mp5 gear? Or crit/mp5?

Besides the 5 points we have to spend on Illumination, there are 11 more points in the Holy tree that are crit related. So, in the standard 51/0/20 Holy/Ret build, we have 24 points invested in crit. Clearly the value of crit as a mana regen source drops dramatically, so doesn't the value of these points drop too? Even if you drop ret and go into the prot tree we still have 16 points in Holy that are crit related with almost no options to replace them.

I just always looked at the crit talents as ways for them to lessen the costs of our spells without having all the other classes complain. Sure, there was always the extra (over)healing of the crit, but that was never the goal I had in mind with crit. Perhaps I'm just confused and all these other abilities lost no value.

I'd also like to put forth the idea that future raid encounters may include intense raid damage that can't be healed effectively by a quick CoH/PoM/Flash Heal combination; something on the order of multiple people taking 15k+ hits at rather quick intervals or having fights that require multiple damage soaker groups. In these situations, Paladins would nicely couple with Druids, Priests and Shamans as they would soften the initial blow and we'd be able to follow up with a top off + spash healing via the glyph.

It would be nice if they found a way to add more synergy between SS and HS/HL as well so that we'd actually want to do some kind of FoL/HS/HL SS target rotation based on what the situation is warranting. For instance, how about having a HS critical add a PoM like mechanic if SS is on the target where on the next source of damage, target health is increased by the full value of the crit and that effect then jumps to nearby targets with a 25% reduction in health returned per jump? Something like this would actually make Divine Favor a strategic decision rather then reflex / afterthought.

In my opinion there should be aditional changes to allow more interaction between our 3 healing spells.

Maybe a change back in the talent "infusion of light" to allow instant holy lights again would make sense so that we could do flash of light on tank and holy shock everytime it's up, so that we could seat on proc to give one big holy light when needed.

I don't really care if they had to increase the cooldown of holy shock again because of pvp, the thing is that the way it was designed before the wotlk release was way better in terms of interaction between all our healing spells, and that's what we miss now.

We are now just thinking of ways to make flash of light more powerfull or ways to keep our regen while using holy lights instead, what i think is that all our spells should be used together in most fights and there should be an advantage for doing that.

[quote=SirSilk;1285474]Ok, I'm not a math guy, so I'll leave that up to those that are.

If the current Illumination nerf goes through, what happens to the value of crit, and what do our best gear choices become? Do we just use the same gear (crit/haste), with less mana return and accept it or do we move more towards haste/mp5 gear? Or crit/mp5?

Besides the 5 points we have to spend on Illumination, there are 11 more points in the Holy tree that are crit related. So, in the standard 51/0/20 Holy/Ret build, we have 24 points invested in crit. Clearly the value of crit as a mana regen source drops dramatically, so doesn't the value of these points drop too? Even if you drop ret and go into the prot tree we still have 16 points in Holy that are crit related with almost no options to replace them.QUOTE]


Ive been passing up mp5 gear for so long, even bad mouthing it, I am really not looking foward to telling my guild, Ive changed my mind and would like all the mp5 gear now. But anyways I to am wondering what we will be looking for in gear now? I am assuming haste/mp5 but I think crit will still be good, are ppl just turning away from cirt because of the smaller mana return?

To give a comparison (I forgot to save the numbers, so its from memory), at 1.0 second Holy Lights, mp5 will be 20 something percent better then the equivalent amount of crit rating in terms of mana restored. At 1.5s Holy Lights, Mp5 was around 80% better from my recollection. The way I see it, crit will be useful for mana regen if we manage to GCD cap Holy Light (because of the itemization mechanics/choices), but we probably will not have the total mana to make use of such a feat.

I was talking about waiting to HL while tank healing. The problem I see now is that even with the BoL change we are still the tank healer, but our initial target is someone else in the raid. If a tank needs a certain amount of HPS, we don't have the option of /stopcasting or using FoL if no one in the raid has lost enough health. And with all the powerful raid healing tools the other classes have, I can't really see us as a raid healer.