I believe that means the application of the healing from Beacon, considering there was roughly a 1.5 second lag time from when you healed a target and it transferred over to the Beaconed target.

This is very true, but we're also receiving some smoothing buffs. More paladins will get their 4pc or spec out of Ret and pick up Divine Guardian, we're receiving the FoL HoT, and with two Paladins casting Holy Lights onto raid members, if the tank ever does get smashed, he's getting healed 50% harder than before. GC also mentioned in the 3.2 notes that we're moving away from "OH MY GOD TANK DEATH" to a more controlled and less CD controlled environment.

Edit: I'm going to start the Holy Paladin 3.2 thread, so we can talk about the changes there.

What the? No.

I'm guessing someone is just clueless over in the documentation land. Beacon used to have a cast time back in beta if I recall correctly.

Are you sure? I could be wrong - but I don't remember it ever having a cast time unless it was very early on.

I have also noticed a delay between the actual heal and when the beacon heal arrives.

In 3.2 this will bring up an odd situation. The tank just took a big hit and needs a heal asap. The rogue is also low on health and could use a heal. You can choose to heal the rogue, and the transferred beacon heal might not get to the tank in time. Your other option is to heal the tank, in which case you are being less efficient.

The other problem that could arise would be the rogue dieing during your cast, now the rogue and tank are dead.


Because of these two possibilities there will still be a reason to directly heal the target you have beacon on.

GC's comment on this:


Beacon of Light is still instant and is still on a 1.5 sec GCD.

Please take patch notes that are not listed as part of our official patch notes with a grain of salt. I would even take our official patch notes with a grain of salt.

Since it hasn't been brought up yet: Patch 3.2 now on PTRs

T9 Set bonuses and librams from data mined 3.2

At first glance, this looks like even less useful set bonuses than T8. Blizzard continues the trend of gradually reducing the effectiveness of Holy Paladin set bonuses as time goes on. *sniff* 4pct7, I miss you.

2pct9 offers an odd bonus that really is only slightly helpful in the toughest healing situations in the game and 4pct9 doesn't look so sexy with the planned Illumination nerfs.

As for the Libram, even if that chance to proc is 100%, I can't imagine a time where I'd rather have that over my Libram of Renewal or Furious Gladiator's Libram of Justice.

These changes are already up in the 3.2 holy thread.

I agree though, the bonuses and libram are disappointing.

Libram looks underwhelming, although 2T9 could potentially be very good. As healers, many holy pallies don't think too much about keeping their judgements up, using it once a minute to maintain JotP haste, but with JoW stacking it's a fairly significant raid buff to maintain 100% judgement uptime. 2 minute judgement debuffs actually seem incredibly powerful (if it's not a placeholder value, then I can definitely see it being looked at / nerfed in PvP), allowing you to judge once a minute for JotP and still maintain ~100% uptime on two targets at once (eg Kologarn + arm, or Yogg + immortal, whatever). 4T9 does seem quite underwhelming though.

Ret / prot bonuses at first glimpse both look incredibly powerful though, as do their librams.

Madsushi, I haven't been able to locate a blue post about this in the last month or so, would you still have a link around ? Anyway such a huge buff (+50% !) seem so vastly OP that I can't see it making through the PTRs :-(

Now you've got me questioning it, here's the pieces I read:

Now we change Beacon so that the overhealing counts. Paladin healing is going to go up, probably by a lot. We can argue how much it's going to go up or how of that will be effective healing. But it will go up a lot, especially considering the glyph of HL will get more use. Considering how much higher paladin regen is than other healers, it has a long way to fall before it would even be at parity.


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The nerf to Illumination was almost entirely because of the buff to Beacon of Light. Beacon can now provide massively more healing in some situations.

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The Beacon change (through the HL glyph) and the SS change give paladins a little more versatility in raid healing and healing on the run. The Beacon change with a nerf to mana regen would have made paladins the strongest healer in the game by almost any estimation.

It currently the PTR data file says 10 more seconds (so 30 seconds of debuff if not removed).

Glyph of HL is nice in that you can HL bomb the melee group for high HPS on the Beacon. However, this high HPS is not sustainable for long periods (which is intended).

Well, trading about 20% effectiveness from illumination (for 50% crit paladins) for up to 50% more healing on tank while healing raid at the same time seems a good trade-off for me. Maybe our raid healing 'role' will be helping shamans on melee group or even replace them for that assignement for some fights.

Just think of it - casting HL 20-25% less often will let you do it as long as you could now, but these HL could potentially (and in many fights quite reliably) heal for 30-50% more. In general for most fights it will be HPS gain without actual effectiveness nerf.

It can be 'effectively' imagined as replacing haste with spellpower - you will lands heals slower but bigger. With ability to spam really heavy (up to 50% more than now) stream of heals for 20% less time. Doesn't look grim at all for me, except specially designed fights where all players have to spread out.

Where have they stated that HL Glyph will proc beacon as well? I believe the references that GC makes to BoL and HL Glyph are the fact that we will now be casting HL onto a group (mainly melee) and have a chance for glyph procs whereas before the tank was getting spammed HL and the glyph was hitting few people.

I am researching this now.

Yeah, noticed there seemed to be some typos. 10 seconds more doesn't seem quite as impressive. If you're aiming for 100% uptime then it saves you 1 GCD a minute, which is a very minor throughput buff.

I get the exact opposite feeling. 2PT9 seems like the hands-down weakest bonus in an entire expansion of steadily declining set bonuses.

First off, the ability to keep 100% uptime on two targets is totally irrelevant, as you seem to have forgotten one crucial line in the tooltip: "Only one Judgement per Paladin can be active at any one time." Go out and test this out with an 8-second cooldown on judgement--you can cast it on two targets, but the effect will only apply to the latest one you cast it on.

Second, if you have just one prot paladin and one ret paladin, or two ret paladins (both of which are very common situations for many guilds), the set bonus becomes inarguably useless and adds nothing at all to raid performance whatsoever. Maybe in some guilds there's only one ret paladin and one holy paladin responsible for keeping up both judgements, but even then it doesn't allow the holy paladin to overcome any boundaries he couldn't before--now he has to judge 1/3rd as often. We're talking about going from 3 seconds lost out of every 60 seconds to 1 second lost out of every 60 seconds. In other words, you're gaining 2 seconds of extra time every 60; or, an extra holy light.

And this is all assuming you're spam casting. Since we're trying to control our mana expenditures, most paladins find they have plenty of GCD's they're not doing anything in that they can spend on a judge.

This is a downright deplorable set bonus. The 4-piece makes sense as a 2-piece bonus, but there's really no way you can justify the current 2-piece.

Please don't take this for whining, but I can't help but notice that every tier (starting from Wrath launch) paladins have complained about gear/set bonuses to be told "it's not the highest tier of gear yet, we don't want it to be overpowered--it'll be better next tier." And every tier has gotten progressively worse bonuses. This one is even more of a joke than T8 is.

You're right about judgements, I'd always read it as one judgement per target per Paladin.

Unless they fixed it though, multiple JoWs will stack, so ideally you want as many up as possible. If this has been changed then the set bonus loses a lot of its appeal for 25 man raiding, but maintaining a high judgement uptime as a holy pally is still a very good practice.

It's not purely about the GCDs either, judging less frequently means less mana expenditure as well.

In any event, it turns out that it's not 100 seconds, but 10, which makes it a much more underwhelming bonus. Regardless, it's hardly as bad as many are making it out to be. I'd take it over 2T8 any day.

hmmm... Even if GHL does count towards healing the tank too, it only even procs now when like 60% or more of the heal is effective, so its not as powerful as some people are making it out to be.

Its not unusual to be sniped by my own beacon heal, ie it lands 0.2-0.3 seconds before my direct heal. As Australian raiders we often have the best connections available to us.

For the t9 2 peiece set bonus, the T9 Libram is presumably meant to be a upgrade for the Holy libram you picked up in the first weeks of raiding,using that means your going to be judging every 20 seconds regardless.

Do you use smoothping?

The T9 Holy libram is not an upgrade for me. When healing, I don't want some random spell power proc or a use for more spell power trinket, I'd rather have something constant that I can count on working 100% of the time. Since HL and GHL are still great spells in 3.2, using the heroic badge libram seems to be the best option still.

The beacon heal seems to arrive in the next "batch" of events. Not exactly sure how much the delay is server side though.