You won't be able to squeeze a melee hit in a GCD, unless it's a 1.5s one (like judging).

It will be closer to .15 seconds. If the bonus will act like most cast time reducing abilities, it will be a straight 13% haste buff, which for a 1.3 second holy light (which is not really that far fetched in Icecrown gear) means .15 seconds.

At the soft haste cap, HL is around 1.3 seconds with all raid haste buffs. If it's going to be implemented like this, I don't think the 4 pc is going to be worth pursuing. Casting a HS then HL to proc a 0.15 cast time reduction on the HL is going to be more inefficient in terms of mana usage and in terms of HPS then just chaining HLs. I don't see it changing the use of holy shock any; it will be kind of an emergency heal/heal to be used while moving, not something that should be used on cooldown.

The 2 pc bonus meanwhile looks very nice. The best use of it will probably be to macro divine favor to holy shock and then chain a HS-instant FoL for a situation where you have to output a heal but can't stand still to cast. This will just let you do this once every minute instead of every 2 minutes.

If this goes live as is, I will probably go for the 2 piece then take the best offset pieces.

With DiSac a Ret Paladin in a party with 2MTs will mean that it is unlikely to last very long at all.

Ret Paladin with 35k health

Maximum amount that can be transferred 70k in a 5 man party

so 7000 DTPS transferred or less to last the full 10 secs

That is 7000/0.3 = 23333 DTPS incoming on 2 MTs
This is fairly moderate damage for 2 MTs. It is 11666 DTPS average for each.

And this does not allow for any AOE

So to last 5 secs the incoming DTPS raises to 46666 DTPS on 2 MTs.
Which is more normal these days.

While you have a point with regards to Tremor Totem, Mana Spring Totem is raidwide and was changed to be so once they made it share the mana regen category with Blessing of Wisdom.

In any case, the inability to switch players in and out of groups during combat should mostly limit any DiSac-manipulation to pre-fight buffing.

Sorry, I meant mana tide totem, not mana spring totem.

Neither does Power Word: Shield. For Retris (and Paladin OTs with downtime), DiSac will be best used as if it were a very big PW:S with backlash.

The way I see paladin healing after the BoL change is not as a raid healer that helps on tank healing, but as a tank healer that helps the raid, mostly since our raid healing tools are quite limited. So the question you often need to ask yourself is not whether the raid needs that big heal, but if the tank needs it. HSing someone that's about to die is an edge case and considering you're losing quite a bit of HPS on the tank by doing it, in tank healing situations, you need to take a chance with your tank's health. This is made worse by the fact that BoL heals have a ~.6second delay (Or is this based on my latency? I did some rough testing and while my latency varies a lot, the BoL heal delay varied from .1s to 1 second, looking close to double my latency, not two UNIT_HEALTH updates as I orginally thought), which makes estimating the actual health/incoming heals for the tank harder.

Two further points in your posts, DTPS is, generally, the abbreviation for Damage Taken Per Second, and the Improved LoH buff is most likely to stack, since it's 20% reduced physical damage, vs 20% reduced damage.

Only if you don't have windfury buff. But with windfury buff and melee haste scaling better than spell haste, even a 1.8 sec base weapon will be faster than a spell GCD at approximately 650 haste. And with just a little more haste autoattacks will be under 1 second anyway.

Hm, yeah. Might be true, was basing that on some pre-3.1 calculations I did. But experience tells me you don't get in a melee swing if you incur a spell GCD.

My personal experience makes me disagree with this sentiment. I feel that straight casting an HL/FoL mix is smoother then doing an abrupt holy shock and holy shock is the most useful in movement situations. On Algalon, for instance, when you're moving from a cosmic smash and the tank gets a quick hit: bam- Holy Shock. If they really wanted to encourage HS more, one of the bonuses would either give it a secondary effect such as bouncing to another target, refreshing SS, or a HS critical reducing incoming physical damage by 10%.

As for the 4tpc, I really think they should reintroduce the original IoL. Its a moderate price, wearing 4tpc pve gear for pvp holydins to pay, but would significantly increase the value of crit and would have the bonus of drastically increasing raid healing synergy because a HS crit would trigger a free FoL and HL. Our glyph choices would also instantly get really interesting for pve.

If you're sniping raid heals with holy shock, I can see why you might think the set bonus is good. But I haven't thrown a heal at the raid during a progression encounter in months. Holy shock is largely worthless for strict tank healing, and I feel that's still the strongest playstyle for pallies. If heroic Icecrown is anything like heroic ToC, there really isn't any reason to heal the raid as a paladin, since every fight but Faction Champs (a unique fight that breaks a lot of PvE assumptions) has two tanks taking simultaneous damage.

For most hard mode fights, you have 2 tanks taking alot of damage. The best use of a holy pally is healing both tanks at once using Beacon. You should only be casting a heal on the raid if neither tank is taking damage. Using holy shock as part of your normal rotation both reduces your HPS on the tanks and also is less mana efficient, so reduces the length of time you can maintain that HPS without using divine plea. I can see your point in single tank encounters and maybe ICC will change things by having more of those.

Crit is still a weak bonus, so the change doesn't mean much, just that 51/17 is likely better (being able to use it every 2 minutes instead of 5 minutes, allowing you to save bubble for other reasons). All Ret has going for it is 7% run speed and being able to use a different boot enchant.

This perspective does change a bit when doing 10 man raids. Although those fights in TotGC are 2-tanked, there are phases / bosses where I raid-heal (this applies to some Ulduar hardmodes, too). Those are P2 and P3 of Northrend Beasts, Jaraxxus (we 2-heal him) and as a significant example, I do raid-healing on Algalon just BoLing the current tank. So at least in 10 man raids it is very possible for a Holy Paladin to do significant and intended raid healing.

Having said that, I still use HS only as a life saver (read: you can't afford another 1s or 1.4s cast time before FoL or HL will land) or when moving. In that light, the 2pc bonus is quite ok, because 1 minute roughly is how often I need those HS to save someone (when being on the move, you usually do not need that much HPS by design). The 4pc bonus however is quite mediocre in that light. Sure, it's nice to cast your next HL 0.15 seconds faster after having to run out of the fire or saving someone in the raid, but it's not more than that.

Or, more to the point: the 4pc bonus is rather of situational use and does not come in to play when doing our main job.

I think i've just been trolled, so here goes an overall reply to everyone contributing to the discussion about how to heal 2 tank encounters.

First off, why would all of you assume that we use single holy paladin in 2 tank fights? Thanks for trying to give a lecture 101 to holy paladin, but you should know better that when you have single tank, you beacon the tank and heal the raid regardless of beacon delay or not. You might have the occasional direct heals on the tank when raid is topped off or you want to catch up with the healing but can't afford to let the delay kill your tank.

On 2 tank fights with two holy paladin (according to our healing team in our guild, I prefer using 2 paladins opposed to 2 resto shamans), you use 2 beacons, two sacred shields and 4 FoL HoTs rolling on the 2 tanks. You treat the other tank no different than a raid member when damage comes, meaning you heal whoever needs the heal most in that sort of setup. Before you assume anything, this is still with two holy paladins healing. So, if the tank that you don't have beacon on is the raid member who needs your heal the most at the time, you cast a heal on him, else, you cast a heal on the raid. not too far different than healing an encounter with single tank. Thanks to the help from your shaman, priest, druid HoTs keeping the armor buff and having the HoTs rolling on both tanks, two paladins spamming both tanks aren't always the best way to heal in such a healing setup. Make no assumptions, there might be phases where heavy tank healing on both tanks are needed.

I say you could as well have to use HS in your rotation _if_ it's needed. Be it because of a dead healer, or an unexpected spike damage on a DPS, or anything that'd have killed the DPS if you hadn't used your HS on him/her. I think everyone must have at least one moment where they thought they could save someone if their HS wasn't on CD. So claiming that you use HS only while moving is imho not using the tools that were given to you to do your job.

Somebody even said something about sniping heals. Are you even reading what people type? Sniping heals doesn't count as "when there's a need for it", does it?

And for the tier bonus, I found it not too bad that the bonus makes up for the time lost with GCD in the long run, and the amount of crit paladins carry raidbuffed gives some good chance for instant FoLs that you can use to refresh your FoL, or just use for healing in general. I might change my opinion once I see it in action in the next raid content. Just don't troll straight away with holy paladin basics lecture and jump to assumptions when you hear something that you yourself don't do in raids.

You might be overhealing your tanks, especially if you raid with more than one holy paladin. Even on Twins you could probably cast 1/3 or even 1/2 of your heals on the raid assuming one paladin (this is speculation on my part since we always raid with two paladins).

Same with Sansei's 4 FoL hots.

2 piece bonus - While your Divine Illumination talent is active, your healing spells are increased by 35%.

The changes can be found here

2p seems very strong now, although we can only use it every 3 minutes. It'll be interesting to see whether using DI and AW will effectively negate DP... If the bonus works like AW does, then it'll come down to 17.5%. Coupled with AW we'd see 77.5% of our usual healing, but for half cost during that time If it's 35% no matter what, then we function at 95% healing with DI and AW up.

It seems powerful enough that it could be a 4p, unlike our current one.

With the tier-10 set bonuses being better than tier-9, it would be advised not to avoid them this time around, right? I mean having increased healing while we regen (although still in the negative) and every 6 seconds (5 if glyphed) to have a 1 second HL seems like going for the 4pc bonus would be a good idea. As it was stated earlier in this thread grabbing the glyph for HS would increase our HPS by quite a lot.

My question is: Will there be some sort of ICD for the set bonus or will it really proc every time we use HS?

It's Divine Illumination, not Divine Plea. And this does make the two piece set bonus actually worthwhile, as the poster above you said, it can almost negate a Divine Plea.
As for an ICD, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that it would be retarded to put an ICD on an already underpowered set bonus like that.

Er, sorry for not making that clear. I usually combine DI, DP, and AW in the same macro as I feel it gives me the highest regen back when I need it without having to pop defensive cooldowns to keep the tank alive. With DI giving the boost in healing, the regen compared to our output would both be higher.

Really though I'm just comparing the tier-9 and 10 sets against eachother, and because of how much the tier-9 bonus sucked I feel as if the steady decline in our set bonuses isn't going down this time.

T9 was more oriented for SP builds, and a traditional HL build will go ahead with T10 gearing, provided the itemization is not very poor.