Actually you can say exactly how much shorter will your spam ability be. Now illumination effectively insreases your mana pool by 1/(1-0.6*crit). In 3.2 it will increase your effective mana pool by 1/(1-0.3*crit). Thus you could spamheal (1-0.3*crit)/(1-0.6*crit) shorter. For 50% crit chanse (crit=0.5) this will translate into 1.21 shoter period of time. If, for example, now you could spam HL for 2min (120) seconds then in 3,2 you could spam for approximately 100 seconds (assuming that mana pot and loh will cover int/replenishment nerf). I wouldn't call 20% time nerf as WAY shorter duration for possible spamheal.

I will repeat myself again: if tank requires to be HL bombed non stop or he dies, then encounter design is flawed and no other healer could replace paladin in MT healing department. If he doesn't requires to be spamhealed, then with 50% crit you could replace about each 4th HL by FoL and keep this cycle as long as HL spam pre 3.2.

Paladins raid healing isn't about topping the meters like Resto druid's spamming Rejuvs. Our job raid healing isn't healing up the gradual damage, but the burst damage that actually kills people. It won't put you as high on the heal meters, but doesn't mean it is any less valuable.

Let us compare Paladin and CoH priest. Looking at the parses from our thorim hard mode and factoring overhealing, our priest CoH ticks for 3200 per person. That translates into 16k healing done on the whole group each 6 seconds. Let us assume that paladin cast HL each 1.5sec (that is reasonable number). In 30 seconds (5 CoH cycles) priest will heal group members 16k HP each. At the same time paladin can cast 20 HL - 4 HL per group member healing each of them for the very least 40k (assuming no crits and no HL glyph splashes).

My point is that the 'effectiveness' of current raid healers compared to paladin if they heal the raid at the same time is related to 'smart' targeting and healing a few people at the same time with one spell. Thus paladin will land his heals on already semi-healed targets. To make a good comparison - let paladins heal one specific group in Mimiron phase 2 and you will see that one pala will do it as effective by rotating HLs as priest using AoE heals. Because if one person would die during noHL period of 7.5 sec then that person would die before the second or third CoH lands anyway.

If you look at priest healing during Mimi phase 2 you will see that they actually do a CoH, occasional PoH (when lasers shoot at the group direction) and fill the gaps between those spells with loosely (compared to HL) single target heals.

P.S. One more thought how you can compare pala and other classes raid healing - look at RAW healing done and not effective one. Since it describes the potential possible healing in the worst scenario. I think if you assign pala at raid healing, then his RAW healing will be actually the highest.

Two new things from GC:

On the new FoL:

"It stacks with other paladins. You can’t built a stack with it. You will reset the HoT if you keep spamming it. The goal is to get paladins to use both HL and FoL. FoL currently isn’t getting enough use, so we added this extra bonus for it to work with SS. When you SS someone you may want to Flash them too. We aren’t trying to turn paladins into only spamming FoL. Sometimes you won’t want to stomp on your own hot. Sometimes you will (like when you are about to have to run and can’t heal again for a sec). "


Re: Beacon of Light - You can now have one target be the main recipient of multiple beacons.


So, essentially the new HoT is a bonus. Apparently some added healing we get with no drawback/nerf. I still think it is too good for arena, but I could be wrong.

FoL built paladins have long been the subject of laugh-tracks, but with the latest changes, I have to wonder if we may see them coming into play...

Messing around with rawr, I can get my FoL spam up to 6400 HPS. That's not alot, no... but if you can convince a hunter in your raid to spec into Spirit Bond and bring a Tenacity pet with the Blood of the Rhino talent, all heals done on that pet are increased by 50% -- and with beacon transferring overheal, that means you can spam on this pet and it'll all transfer to the tank. If you can get your hunter to do that, and yes it would hurt his DPS by a ton, you could have 10,000 HPS on the tank, perfectly sustainable, completely infinite, just root yourself in place and cast FoL on this hunter pet. It's close to how much HPS chain-casting HL can give, except it'll still be sustainable after the patch.

Feels like a total gimmick... but it would be a great way to keep that tank up. The toughest part is getting the pet in place.

So does this mean next patch we will be using HL still, FoL every 12 seconds, heal raid and make the most of DP/SoW? I had my fingers crossed for some limited HoT stacking so that we could hopefully use FoL until the tank got hit hard then switch (with the HoT hopefully providing some healing whilst HL was cast) but that doesn't seem to be the case.

Also I guess items like the crafted plate boots & waist will now be pretty good, exchanging the crit for mp5 and most likely gaining gem slots too.

It is, yes, but if it isn't fixed, do you think we'd actually use that trick? I find it interesting, and possibly useful in a fight where the tank gets completely destroyed, but I'm not certain I'd use it beyond that. What are your thoughts?

I sit at 250-300ms latency almost always. If we are to heal the main tank by HL/FoL + Beacon, will latency be an issue?

I have noticed a delay from when i cast a spell until the beacon receives the heal. Does the beacon heal happen when i cast it on my target or does the server need to register the landed heal, detect if a beacon is within range, and then issue the heal?


Assuming my 250 ms latency, how long should i expect the beacon heal to land from the time i finish casting it on a heal on a target?

I also see small delays on my BoL target thus we can assume that indeed the information about heal travels to the server then back to the client and probably back to the server again. However if you CHAINcast something it won't matter (except the first heal in a sequence). Say if you have 0.5sec delay then one second fol on someone and BoL target will look like this:

(1sec) FoL lands (1.5sec) BoL gets FoL (2sec) FoL lands (2.5sec) Bol gets FoL

So the time between FoLs will be the same.

Exactly, and the only fight these days you might not chaincast on is Vezax.

speaking of which you won't resfresh your beacon if you cast it before the pull and filled your mana.

I don't want to be overly negative, but aren't those the hardest fights? I mean, we're only benching our resto shaman (every time) for Mimiron and Algalon, but even Blizzard knows that doesn't make them OK. I doubt we're going to be the next resto shaman, but it's a very real example.

Assuming the tank doesn't take consecutive hits while you're FoLing that mage.

I think Blizzard has made it quite clear that the BoL buff is the only compensation we are receiving (technically it's the other way around) for the Illumination nerf. We shouldn't expect any significan't additions to the patch notes.

Doesn't PW:S do that better? The situations where a paladin would be the best healer for healing raid damage don't come so often. I can only think of Freya and Mimiron ph1. I.e. continuous damage on a single raid member.

You will run into problems when targets can die within one burst+heat wave combo (hard mode). That means a priest with an aoe heal would keep everyone alive, while a paladin would keep two people alive (exaggerating a bit) and at good health.

If you look a priest healing during Mimi, it's nothing like you suggest: World of Logs - Real Time Raid Analysis

Comparing raw healing doesn't make sense to me, since raid damage is what kills people even if you overheal some of them (unlike with tank healing).

Are you suggesting that you shouldn't be able to make a tank unkillable by slapping enough healers on him? At Algalon you need to have three healers on the tank and you still face the chance of having him die because he took consecutive hits when one of the healers had to move. And no, you don't need three paladins. You don't even need one, because disc priests can do it just as well.

A couple of points I would like everyone to consider:
1. Will you need more aoe healers because of the JoL nerf?
2. Ulduar, unlike Naxx, doesn't become meaningless, bar significant nerfs, when Coliseum is released. Paladins being all right there doesn't make them all right overall.
3. Maybe the regen nerf isn't so bad. To me it looked very dramatic when I was looking at the mana I would lose at Algalon, but if Palados is right, maybe it won't ruin me.

I wouldn't be surprised if Blizz changed the BoL heal to be similar to the DK talent Necrosis, i.e. no extra bonuses effect the heal, the Beacon target just gets healed for the original value and no double dipping of bonuses occur

-- though that wouldn't change the "gimmick" pet talent in question

Necrosis just takes some % of the autoattack/Rune Strike damage dealt and deals it as shadow damage. The autoattack is still affected by armor penetration and everything else, just Necrosis doesn't "double dip" on shadow damage modifiers.

However, they certainly could code in something to make the Beacon heal to not take into account +healing effects, but currently Beacon takes into account that.

Currently with divinity, Beacon does double-dip the healing bonus. I would assume it would work with similar bonuses. They might change it in 3.2 however.

Edit: Too slow

I think you're being unrealistic to even think about using pets etc in such ways. Even if beacon does gain from +healing effects after patch, its very unlikely anyone will sit spamming a pet when you could be healing people taking actual damage and getting 150%+ effective healing done per cast.

I'm inclined to agree that the pet healing modifiers are going to be addressed before the end of the PTRs. There's just no way a gimmick like that would get through (plus it would truly be a sad state of affairs to have us sitting spamming a pet in some corner 60yds away from the tank every fight).

I recall that early on in the 3.0 cycle, when Beacon was first announced, transferring overheal was often discussed and generally regarded as "OP". Many wishlisted such a version of the spell. In that light, I believe we are being given an ability which has the potential to be very powerful and could certainly expand our regular healing role, particularly in smaller groups and 10 man raids. Realistically however, end game raiding remains a 25man affair, and in that setting, all the scenarios discussed over the past few pages detailing various exploits or pigeon-hole healing "rotations" are very likely to be the reality.

Personally, I don't see how me spamming random people and healing a tank is more interesting than me solely spamming a tank. Yes I'm gaining in HPS output over the entire raid, but I remain bound to a single spell (unless they gut regen enough to force me to use the entirely unappealing FoL - hint: fixing it by making the mediocre version of my bread and butter my only option isn't fixing it).

The main issue I see with paladin and shaman healing remains the lack of tools when compared to druids and priests. Moreover, the two classes have become oddly similar in their toolset since wrath came out - HS vs Riptide/Sacred Shield vs Earthshield/FoL vs LHW and two major differences: bread and butter single-target vs multi-target roles defined by HL vs CH and regen focused on crit vs flat mp5 (and that difference is headed for phasing out as well). And this is my main gripe with this change to illumination - make me spend 24 pts. on crit talents then gut the one talent that makes spending those points make sense. Couple that with the announced changes to watershield and improved watershield and you can't help but see the double standard being applied here - the propsed improved watershield means a greater than 85% chance of getting a 300 mana cost CH (assuming each bounce of CH can trigger the effect) - couple that to a base 300mp5 from having water shield on you and you can easily see how that level of consumption can become spammable with little thought to conservation.

CH only procs IWS 30% of the time it crits. With a 40% crit rate, that comes to a 48% chance to proc IWS, if it chains fully. The base on Water Shield is 100 mp5, not 300. We can use a major glyph to boost it to 130mp5.

Even if pet modifiers aren't included, Blizzard has specifically stated that the HL Glyph will proc Beacon as well. This means a 40-50% INCREASE in the amount of HPS that our Holy Light can produce, even if the original HL is all on people at full life. If we're healing 5 guys who are taking any sort of damage, you're looking at 150% healing on the tank and 100% healing on the DPS (100% of a regular HL, that is), and we're healing 250% of our normal Holy Light's healing even though it's mana cost was not increased by 250% (with the Illumination nerfs). Our HPS has been increased greatly (even on a tank). 150% of a Holy Light on a tank simply by healing a melee group (which may or may not even need the healing) is actually a huge buff to our HPS. If we're having to heal 33% less often because our HLs are hitting the tank 50% harder... Illumination's nerf may have been warranted.

I think the circumstance madsushi ilustrated here is a perfect example of why haste will be so much more crucial to us. Being able to reactively heal with lightning fast holy lights will ultimately save our mana pool in extended fights.

You don't always have the option of healing reactively.

"Light's Beacon now has a 60 yards radius (up from 40 yards) and an instant casting time. (Down from 1.5 sec)"

What does the instant casting time mean? Is it the application if the Light's Beacon buff, or the application of the healing from it?