Yes, but using Holy Shock is itself a reduction to HPS unless you're moving and the 4pc bonus is not enough to compensate for it. On heroic Hodir there's a lot of movement, but Val'kyrs?

This bonus is not about improving our HPS, though. It's about reducing the drawback Holy Paladins suffer when we have to move.

While it does reduce the drawback somewhat on a fight like algalon where the paladin may absolutely have to move and also land a quick top off on the tank, its still a fairly weak 4tpc for the spec. It doesn't really increase mobility in that you can run around HS'ing and holy lighting while scenarios like the algalon one with a hard and fast hitting boss require movement so sporadically that good communication/composition of the healing team is going to marginalize the effect of this bonus.

Personally, I'd still like to see more done with regards to Sacred Shield in the 4tpc bonus realm as I actually think a bonus that buffed that ability significantly would have a more noticeable impact then any real increase in mobility or HPS. Unless of course, IoL in its original form was reintroduced, which obviously wont happen.

Except that the HoT portion of T9 was the one of the main reasons FoL users were sticking with SP builds.

Movement in heroic Val'kyrs in our strat (similar to paragon's first released video of hardmode) is either very high (ball catching) or non-existent (melee range).
In the case that you are ball catching this is a huge buff as you'll be constantly moving to grab/avoid balls. (we actually only have druid/priest healers doing this).
In the case that you are in melee range you'll get an autoattack whenever you use HS, which on average, refunds the cost of the HS, causing it to be a massive increase in HPM. (I stay in melee for SoW and uninterrupted healing...)

HS has 3 primary purposes:
(1) Landing a heal in time to save someone that won't survive 1.X seconds.
(2) Landing a heal while having to move or avoiding an interrupt effect.
(3) High mana efficiency while being in melee range of a boss.

In a fight that has an anti-melee gimmick and minimal movement/no interrupts, HS is only really useful for (1), and in that case the set bonus will have diminished value. If you think critically about this situation you'll realize that there are only a few fights in t8/t9 (thorim, vezax, beasts).

Tier 10 Holy Relic: Your Holy Shock spell grants 85 spell power for 15 sec. Stacks up to 3 times.

I like it better than the T9 relic (that didn't have a 100% proc chance like this one), however I fear that the item level 200 one will still be better.

Fully stacked it's 255 SP.. versus 113 "extra" mana when using our strongest healing spell. We'll still be doing more than 500 healing with that 113 mana, so it's pretty much the same boat we were in for T9, only now we have to use our least mana efficient spell to keep up the buff.

The only time I see us using this seriously is in arenas or something.

I agree with the t10 libram comments, and even think that it just complicates things even further especially for people who are reluctant to use HS, but use their haste-heavy HLs to cover the gap. Yet another stack and countdown to watch while trying to keep up with the healing. Someone's eyes will bleed. For HL build, imo the heroic libram is still unbeatable. Anything that doesn't give mp5 stacks or haste stacks won't beat the heroic libram imo. With FoL builds, there's the state of art PvP librams with nice boost to FoL, which will also keep dominating arenas (my opinion against the comment that t10 libram can be good in arena). Another reason for me to believe that it'll be quite weak is because, with the new tier of items, I normally expect to see higher stats than today. So the benefit from being able to cast an additional HL thanks to the mana reduction of heroic emblem libram scales with every new tier set as the stats increase and HL mana cost stays the same whereas the additional SP from t10 libram will see a diminishing effectiveness as paladins continue gearing up.

As for the increase in FoL oriented players: I see nothing wrong with them in terms of healing hardmodes, given that you have a solid raid healing squad. The very nice thing about FoL is the sustainable and predictable stream of healing on your tank(s). Assuming thre will be more 2-3 tank encounters in the game, your flashbot, as you'd like to call them, will ensure a quite stable 6-7.5k HPS (to be increased with new tier content) without much fluctuations due to DP or high difference between hit/crit as in the difference with HL hit/crit. The very questionable thing is whether your trials have the gear for the high SP/mp5 requirements of the build imo.

Nothing wrong with 'flashbots' per se... it depends on your healing composition in raids.
If you have Multiple holy paladins, then there's an advantage to having one of them use a diffrent healing strategy.

It's the same reason why you don't want to take ONLY holy paladins to heal your raid, even if they have the highest total throughput (even if you have a SPriest to cover PWF, elemental shammy to cover totems and balance druids to cover druid buffs).

The true strength of your healing team comes from versatility in what they can do, not from getting the X people with the highest raw HPS potential.

Mind that that strength of the FoL style really comes into its own on heroic Anub due to its sub-30 mechanics and the usage of gimmicky block tanks.

Hmm, I grant there's a place for it, it just seems like it only really shines if you end up assigning multiple healers to tanks, which rather defeats the principle benefit of Beacon anyway. On our Heroic Anub kill, Flashing the raid with beacon on a tank would have just about countered swarm on the tank, while doing very little but give extra healing to Anub. Ofc, we let everyone except the tanks sit sub 1k HP and relied on excellent reflexes from cold healers. Possibly I'm just an unreconstructed dinosaur, but the merits of Flash just never appealed to me.

What the? No - you heal both tanks via beacon/FoL on Heroic Anub. The fact you are using a block tank means a lot of small hits, and the haste buffs implies frequent hits. Any massive healing you do with HL simply gets converted back to Anub HP. If you use two add tanks, then just diversify appropriately given that the add tank damage will be even less due to the frenzy mechanics.

If you are not using a single block tank add-strategy, then just use whatever makes sense for what you are doing. Perhaps you are confused by the nomenclature of "one tank" Anub strat, since it implies one tank for only adds. You still have a dedicated tank on Anub.

What good is predictable healing when the damage isn't predictable?

Please elaborate, the advantage you speak of isn't obvious.

Edit: This reset convinced me that strong FoL mighty very well be better than HL at Anub, depending on setup.

I'll answer my part:
first off, tank damage IS predictable. Maybe we had a confusion of terms?
There are phases and special boss abilities (mimiron: plasma blast, Twin Valkyrs:when one in shield, the dtps increase for the other tank). There's the fluctuation in the incoming damage, which is not the same as being unpredictable. I think these fluctuations are referred to as "spikes". If you have a predictable and stable stream of healing, the fluctuations will have a minimum effect. A constant 7k HPS on tank with 6k-10k FoL heals every single second that your healadin is standing still and casting can as well be better than a 5k to 20k healing casts every 1.35 - 1.40 seconds depending on a hit/crit or under the effect of DP (which is again minimal with FoL since mp5 shines with that build)

I disagree. If ~7k HPS is enough to keep the tank up, than tank can 'live' without healing for 6-7 seconds - plenty of time for different HL numbers to average out (to a higher HPS than FoL spam). And if tank risks to die within 2-3 HL casts, then 7k HPS simply won't cut it.

Or put it this way - spiky but higher in average HL spam will only be more dangerous than FoL spam if you have very high burst on tank. But in this case FoL won't be enough anyway. So I would choose higher average HPS tactics - HL build + HL spam.

The fact that leading guilds with world firsts on hardmodes are using flash pallies should probably signal that it's not a nonviable build. I agree with having a HL pally and a FoL pally being useful diversity, and if I recall correctly that's the setup that Premonition used themselves.

You know Diamond is an int-stacking/HL paladin and is in the guild with the world first Anub and world first tribute to mad skill, yeah? Maybe something has changed though! The leading guild argument is always silly.

Anyway, you can page quite a few pages back when the FoL/HL debate first came up and see good points on both sides. At this point it's as much stylistic as it is functional.

1)
When you already have 2 holy paladins covering both your tanks... The 3rd holy paladin isn't going to be performing efficiently since nobody else in the raid is taking high enough damage to make use of the big HL heals.

On a fight with just 1 tank, you get the same with the 2nd holy paladin, he's not performing efficiently.

It makes sense putting the extra paladin(s) on raid healing and in that job the faster FOL's will be better at covering a larger amount of people.


2)
In a fight where the tanks are taking big hits fast (say every 1.25 seconds), you'd guess the best healing strategy is to just have everyone spamming their biggest heals so each individual can fill up the HP deficiency. But that doesn't necessarily work out. If everyone is using 1.5sec heals, and heals get synchronised the boss might get 2 hits in between 2 heals (of everyone) and you have a dead tank. A dead raid is not far away.

Yes, you're supposed to stagger the heals, but how are you going to organise that with people having various amounts of lag, and any technology you could use will equally have delays making precision timing in the order of fractions of a second near impossible.

Now... If someone's spamming fast heals, and those fast heals are large enough to get the tank up by enough (even just barely) to survive the 2nd hit, you're not out of the sh.t yet, but you've just bought yourself enough time for the 'big healers' to cover the real damage.

It's an extreme, but even withotu a boss as extreme as that it's easy to get enough holes in the healing to get soemthing like this to happen. The HL paladin still needs to cast Beacon, they still want to cast judgements for the extra haste, SS and DP's, those are all extra GCD's where no healing is happening. Murphy's law dictates that there WILL be a time when all your tank healers decide to do one of the 'maintenance' spells all at the same time...

Fast heals and no need to DP (as well as damage prevention and hots) means you flatten out the spikyness of the damage on your tank. The FOLadin may not be able to keep the tank up alone and even 2 FoLadins may not, but it can buy you the time you need to finish casting those big heals.


3)
A FOL healer will have a bigger SS. Damage prevented is always better than damage healed. Your tank may also have the FoL hot on them, this will also help with keeping him alive.




I'm not saying FoLadins are better than HLadins, I'm not even claiming the other way around. I'm just saying you need to look at the healers in your raid as a TEAM, and they work best when they work together maximizing their individual strengths and covering for eachother's weaknesses. As good as HL is it has weaknesses. Each extra HL paladin you add in your raid instead of another type of healer, strengthens the weaknesses of the HL paladin, while at the same time offering less means to cover for them. There's fights that may be heavily stacked in favour of the HL type healing, but there's also fights stacked against it. You want your healing team to be as strong as it can be, but you also want it to be versatile enough you can handle the wide range of fight mechanics.

Why are you asking rhetorical questions? Yes, I believe damage is always predictable on the tank. when I say predictable I'm talking about small periods of time (phases, ability durations), not a 3 seconds frame. When you have such high spikes, afaik, it is when you start using cooldowns to decrease the spikes' effects, save a killing blow, w/e. Even that is supposedly predictable in practical life mainly as it's quite rare that you have to use cooldowns reactively, unless you had bad RNG, lost some healers, or didn't notice where you're standing. It seems to me that you're not actually asking questions, but trying to make a point. I suggest you save all of us the trouble and just make your point. I'm not advocating either spec, and I am using the HL oriented build/spec/style myself. I only shared the info that I've got thinking you were actually asking for them. Those are the info that Zaroua was kind enough to share with me when I was asking him some insider information and differences of FoL style to the cookie cutter HL style. I'm sure he can give more details if you want to learn more.

I'm sorry, when did I say it was enough to keep a tank up? Not to mention the EHPS shouldn't be much different (if not higher) with a proper set of gear/gem etc in the long run. I expect the EHPS to be situational, but smoothing out your HPS with minimal fluctuations sounds good to me.

Why do i not use the FoL spec then? (rhetorical question) Because raid healing is gimped by a lot with FoL build, and the current state my guild is raiding benefits from it more, and I like my non-smart AOE heals thanks to glyph of HL. IT boils down to the point where somebody a few posts above me just pointed that the choice is also personal style rather than the generalization of which is best .

Mathematically, FoL is a substandard spell in nearly every respect. The only argument that can be advanced on its behalf is that having multiple paladins undermines the effectiveness of HL for many fights (which is true). However, a FoL pally isn't benefiting the raid any more than ANY other healing class would, and the same logic for switching to a FoL build could be used to just remove the paladin from the raid and bring a different class.

To me, the "merits" of FoL seem to lie not in the fact that it's a good build, but rather that it's less bad than other options in an already-suboptimal situation. Like if I had to build a campaign slogan around FoL, it would be, "When life gives you lemons, stack spellpower."

Is your argument that the FoL build is substandard not just to other Holy Paladins, but any other healers you could bring along?

If that's what you're saying, there's several responses. The FoLadin might bring some other utility (paladin specific, for instance) that's not covered by the raid already. Additionally, you might want to bring in another holy paladin (even if you have 2 in the raid already) because that specific player is a stronger/better healer than anyone else you can bring. This probably isn't the case for many people in this situation, as I doubt high-end raiding guilds are hurting for healing talent. But for some guilds it might work.

That leaves us with the point that the FoL build is very much dependent on your raid composition, healers, goals, etc. Which is what the FoL people have been saying from the very start, it's just no one seems to be listening. I can definitely see the power in a constant, consistent stream of FoLs on the tank without any need to divine plea. Not enough to keep the tank alive on its own, but enough to smooth out the damage if something goes wrong with the other tank healers.

I've read through most of the thread and I'm still having a tough time getting a bead on the value of the T9 4 piece, especially at lower gear levels. I've got 3 pieces of the 232 and enough badges to get a 4th, but I've also got the 245 offset chest and legs from the 25-man. So, what I'm trying to figure out is whether its worth it for a non-FoL build to go for the 232 4-piece or sport 4 245 offset pieces, which seems to have a better stat allocation over all. Anybody got any insight on that?

Do this. The flash HoT is really low for a HL paladin (due to stacking Int), so you will get a minor gain out of it, but it isn't worth avoiding use of 245 items.