Remember the libram is a "chance" to proc the extra SP. So more than likely, you're going to judge on cooldown (as many paladins already do) unless you're in a healing intensive spurt that you can't afford to spare gcd's (i.e., Plasma Blast).

The odds of JoW continuing to stack (although this is the first I've heard of it) are pretty abysmal, since that would lead to stacking paladins a la Sunwell shamans. If this is in fact currently the case, I guess we ought to make the most of it while we can. It will not last.

Not having to judge quite as often does technically save you mana, but judging costs less than a Flash of Light. The mana expenditure is completely negligible, even if you judge on cooldown with it talented to 8 seconds.

But the fact that it's not even 100 seconds just lowers this bonus to new levels of insanity. So now instead of judging 3 times per minute, we can get by with judging 2? Our tier set bonus is 1 extra second freed up out of every 60? Think for a second about how much haste that is equivalent to, if you're spamming non-stop for 60 seconds. Our set bonus is the equivalent of less than 50 Haste Rating--except that 50 Haste Rating would be more useful in every conceivable way.

And the 4-piece set bonus is pretty much solidly inferior to 4PT7. 4PT7 gives you -5% to all Holy Lights you cast. 4PT9 gives you -1.5% (.05*.3, right? Check my math, it's 1:30 am and I'm an artard) reduction to all Holy Lights you cast. You can claim that it also gives you increased HPS on Holy Light, but HPS has never been Holy Light's area for improvement.

There had better be some damn godly stats on this set for me to consider breaking 4PT8 or even 4PT7 for this malarky. Whether or not the 2-piece is better than the already confirmed to be horrible 2-piece T8 bonus is also pretty irrelevant--that's like a hunter stating he'd rather have a bonus to attack power whenever he wingclips than a bonus that grants strength based on agility.

In summary...

2PT7: Good
2PT8: Phenomenally Bad
2PT9: Phenomenally Bad

4PT7: Phenomenally Good
4PT8: Good
4PT9: Marginal

Any way you slice it, we're looking at set bonuses that are getting progressively worse with each tier of raiding content. I'm guessing 4PT10 will be "Your Seal of Justice now has a 20% higher chance to stun the target if you have Crusader Aura active."

And I'm not just saying this to bellyache. I'm saying surely there's a point where the better set bonuses of lower level gear outshine the increased stats of higher level gear. When is it going to be worth finally letting go of what little good things we have and learning to love the bomb?

I suppose that's a question we can't answer until we know what sort of damage we'll be expected to cope with next tier.

The sacrifice in raid utility / versatility isn't really worth it, and since it only affects DPS, there are points beyond which extra applications do nothing. A ret paladin might need 1 full-time JoW and 50% uptime on a second in order to achieve mana neutrality (random figures, they'd vary based on encounter / buffs / etc anyway), while a mage may need 3 full-time JoWs to avoid having to evocate on a particularly long / AoE heavy fight, and 0 on another short burn fight.

In short, there's enough of a benefit in keeping it up if you've got the paladins in your raid already, but not worth stacking your raid for it by any means.

Finally, just remember that these set bonuses are data-mined and quite likely placeholders / experimental. Look at the ele shaman bonus and tell me that you expect that to go live.

I hope it is a mistake (set bonuses). Look at other set bonuses. Shadow priest has insane set bonus (Devouring Plague), same resto druid or resto shammy.
From the other hand - Druid's spell power relice has only 9 sec duration.
There are obvious mistakes and i'd say let's wait a little.

In addition i must say that i was a bit sceptical about possibility to have all those changes to BoL to go live. But reading more and more blue posts it looks like they really defend this idea and it will go live.

It's also worth to mention new BS spell plates are also pretty good, especially a chest (insane mp5).

I had assumed the "chance" to proc was simply a internal cooldown to prevent shamans spamming chain heal or Paladins spamming judgment for overlapping procs. Overall set bonuses have been diminishing. The priest 4 pce which has been 25% crit to prayer of healing in the past , 10% and is now 5% crit for T9 is a good example of that. Blizzard have made it clear they will nerf any bonus or proc that discourages uptake of new gear. But using offset/crated gear over the set may be the best choice.

I did the PTR and I put SS myself and 1 cast flash the HoT proc alot...for 1 cast...it like SS > Flash > HoT proc > wait for 12 second > Flash > HoT proc > wait for 12 second > repeat until SS it about to be running then refreash it and it wow...-_- I wasn't sure about beacon yet

Someone mentionned stacking JoL earlier, which is rather intriguing. Any possibility you could test that ?

The setup for post 3.2 raids will differ massively from current-mt-healer assignments. I would expect 2 paly´s inderectly healing the mt by beacon and focusing on raid-dmg (placing the occasional fol-hot / SS on the mt) and an additional disc-priest smoothing out the dmg-spikes.

-> more raid-healing, mt still save

to some extent we already use this setup on some encounters. But there will be still phases were HL-spam is simply necessary, but i expect them to be not very long.

I wish they would reevaluate Illumination in terms of talent point cost, it's becoming increasingly inferior while staying a requirement for talents further on and still costing 5 points.

Edit: About the set bonuses, for the DPS warrior set the 4 piece is amazingly good for arms and amazingly irrelevant for fury (5% crit to slam and execute.) On the one hand I'm hoping these are early ideas and they'll come back and change this, but on the other I don't really care all it means is that you'll be using stuff other than the tier set. Just hope you don't get to look like a clown ala the vanilla DPS warrior with herod's double shoulders, yellow helmet and pink boots.

It is getting rather comical at this point. Look at rank 1 of this talent from the eyes of a total newcomer to paladins next expansion: "You have a (insert crit % here) chance to have a 20% chance to regain 30% of the mana of any heal you cast." This has long been an issue with the holy talent tree, and it's getting worse unfortunately. Spiritual Focus costs most casters 2-3 points as opposed to our 5, and the entire tree is littered with useless talents like Purifying Power and Sacred Cleansing that can't even be considered situationally useful. Divine Favor is also long overdue for a revamp (+60% crit for one spell every 2 minutes? This needs to be a 60 second cooldown at least), and the entire tree boils down to Holy Shock, Beacon, and some Haste. It actually does very little to improve our healing capabilities.

To be quite frank, I would rather they gut basic paladin healing abilities and allow us to improve them to current standards through Holy talents. Make Holy Light cost 33% of mana baseline, and let holy talents knock it down to current cost, or something to at least give us the feeling we're getting noticeable improvements for our talents. The list of talents that holy paladins actually get excited about is getting very, very slim. No one looks forward to playing a class with an entire talent tree full of useless shit that you have to wade through to get two decent talents at the end.

Ultimately, the only difference between a holy paladin's healing and a ret/prot paladin's healing (assuming both are wearing full healing gear) is that the ret or prot paladin's heals are 15% smaller, 15% slower, and cost 15% more mana. That's not a hell of a lot of distinction. The only reason we're accepting this is because the new Beacon promises to be OP, and it most assuredly better be.

The state of the holy tree was apparent to most holy paladins even amidst the claims of revamped prot/ret trees pre-3.0 launch. The problem comes down to too few spells to modify in any meaningful way and results in 5 point talents that every other class spends 2-3 points on. I've had it argued to me that Spiritual Focus is 5 points for us because we gain "more" from it - but under the new pushback mechanics, it's lackluster at best (and almost completely irrelevant in most PvE).

Correction however, Divine Favor is 100% crit chance on a 2 minute cooldown - a Nature's Swiftness effect would probably be more worthy of such a position in the tree (and indeed that was what DF was during WotlK beta with the old Infusion of Light talent - except requiring 2 GCD instead of being truly instant).

Are you saying stacking Judgement of light would stack more for aoe healing....or?

I think he was implying that Divine Favor is really only 50-60% additional crit, considering a lot of paladins run 40-50%+. So looking at it that way, its really not good. Sort of like the rest of the tree.

So has Boots of Healing Energies - Item - World of Warcraft Jumped to the BiS list over Poignant Sabatons - Item - World of Warcraft given the PTR Changes? I'm going for a haste/sp/mp5 set. While you wait for crit I'm spamming heavier faster heals with mp5

Actually you're right and Saladin is wrong, as most protadins could tell you. You can have judgements up on multiple targets (and AoE tanking I frequently do).

Sure, but only the last judgement you cast will have the active debuff. The rest are just icons. Try judging two targets with light and get a friend to hit the one you judged first. No little green numbers will come up.

I assume Algalon's 239 mail boots are the best, since they have a lot of int and two sockets. Of course it depends on want you want to weigh.

Would [Treads of Destiny] not be better than the [Boots of Healing Energies] since the sockets allow for more customization? I've been going over items with another paladin in my guild and trying to figure out what items we want to aim for now, but its very difficult now that regen may actually matter - previously I would just go for whatever increased my burst most and use paladin tools effectively to keep my mana high.

Rings / Belt / Chest were the slots where we were having most trouble. Excluding the Algalon quest rewards I was thinking 2 of the following for the ring slots: [Signet of Manifested Pain], [Pyrelight Circle], [Fire Orchid Signet] or [Radiant Seal] but I couldn't really make a decision, perhaps when there is 25% more mp5 on the latter two rings it will be a closer call. For the belt we felt it probably came down to [Plate Girdle of Righteousness] or perhaps [Belt of the Fallen Wyrm] with the main problem being not knowing how crit & mp5 will balance out especially with the mp5 buff still to come. Lastly chest we were looking at these two mail chests: [Chestguard of the Fallen God] & [Breastplate of the Stoneshaper] or perhaps this plate one: [Quartz-Studded Harness] (I'm pretty sure the [Breastplate of the Devoted] is still chest BiS but our guild hasn't done heroic Heartbreaker yet).

Of course, this is irelevant since the Algalon boots have more stamina than the two you linked. Generally, AoE isn't affected by armour in many cases. Even then, I think the difference in stamina would more than make up the loss of armour, in terms of EHP.

What do you mean by 'multiple JoWs will stack'? In my experience, if I judge Wisdom after someone else, only my debuff is on the mob. In fact, I just tested this in Ulduar to confirm.

It is interesting that you are considering abandoning crit in the face of the illumination nerf and hoping that the mp5 buff will make up for it, but i suppose if you're happy spamming FoL and you think that it will be hitting fast enough and hard enough to keep the tank up then mana won't be an issue anyway.

I don't agree personally (and even feel the need to stack more crit along with mp5 to try and make up the difference but, like i said; interesting.

They will still be crit in my gear. And The regen talent is still there. I still have my judgements. I should be fine. Even with my crit lvl now You still have to be crafty with your mana.

Kadas: He isn't hoping anything. The math I've done clearly shows that mp5 outperforms crit nearly three times over. Post patch, the winning strategy will be to stack mp5 to the point of ignoring crit.