While paladins have become accustomed to DS in its current form, keep in mind that a 20% raid-wide damage reduction is incredibly powerful even for 6 seconds. Every healing class would love to have this.

I honestly think the idea of cheesing the effect by putting the pally casting it in an empty group or a group with people outside the instance is overblown and not that relevant in a real life situation, because

1. If you do that, you sacrifice the party damage reduction. This can be huge in helping healing (for example, if the paladin is in a group with 5 healers, it lets the healers focus a little less on healing themselves).
2. It's going to take a very extreme amount of damage to cause Divine Sacrifice to break. As calculated above, assuming 25k raid buffed health, it will take 4000 damage taken per second for a full 10 seconds to break the effect. That's just an insane amount of damage, and there is nothing currently (except enrages or other mechanics that are designed to be instant wipes) that deals that type of damage. Assuming 5 healers, each healer would have to output 20,000 effective HPS to heal through that level of damage, which isn't really realistic, and probably won't be even in full ICC gear. Therefore, the damage cap is probably never going to be reached anyway unless you pop it during an enrage, so why bother trying to exploit the groups?

Remind me when the last time was that you used your raid save to mitigate an ability which lasted 12 seconds?

Are there that many skills that last over 6 seconds?

The 6 sec duration with no link to DG seems like an okay change, you don't have to worry about the damage or health limits. Specing for both aura mastery and DS/DG would you good damage reduce abilities, what can work together every 2 min or alone every 1 min.

Would a tank be able to use DS and cancel it right way, to give the raid DG?

The way its currently worded is that DG only works while DS is active. However, they could probably use Divine Protection and then DS with relative safety.

If it is, then it's easy to make a macro that casts DS and then cancels it. It's off GCD, so should be more or less instant.

* Lay on Hands can no longer be cast on yourself.
* Aura Mastery now lasts 6 sec. (Down from 10 sec)

Aura mastery will have the same duration as the new DG, they do fall in the same category so i guess that makes sense. On the other hand i don't like the LoH change, it was a nice 'save me' ability to have.

I mostly used LoH on other people anyway, but the AM nerf + DG nerf doesn't help the overall news. Holy is still a strong healer, but the inclination to stack them may not be as great.

The good news is I don't feel as compelled to pick up AM as Ret in 3.3, so makes picking talents easier.

Hmm, from Holy's point of view, the big loss will be the LoH mana return, which I confess I haven't used for quite a while, but knowing it was there if needed was a pleasant crutch in certain encounters. Oh well, if anything this means I'll be more inclined to just use it whenever applicable in future, rather than sitting on it in the event of mana meltdown.


Since it wasn't mentioned, and there's a miniscule chance the chap the asked the question hasn't yet discovered, make sure you have beacon up when you pop this trinket, and spam Flash on other people, since the beacon heal will add an extra stack. If it so happens that you have all the other cooldowns up at the same time, and anticipate no great need of them (DI, DF) pop those too, since those will add a stack. I'm not certain, but SS procs during the effect also seem to add a stack (though perhaps I imagined that). Essentially, just cast whatever fast cheap spells you can if you intend to milk this for maximum regen. I personally just pop it on cooldown temporarily slow down mana expenditure (in effect), but 'milking' it in the manner Sansei describes can give you a extra mana pot every 2 minutes. Oh to be a Shaman with the 'Plunk 4 totems down at once' spell...

edit - double post

Likely the LoH nerf will not go live - World of Warcraft - English (NA) Forums -> Recent 3.3 PTR Paladin changes

Apparently the change is already reverted back to how it currently operates. It seems as though they're just trying to figure out ways to bring down paladin tanks to its "proper" level. Of course, doing so through abilities and spells available to all paladins has a lot of unintended consequences (for instance, as noted by Joanna, the Glyph of Divinity)

Going from 130->260 resistance represents a shift from ~20.31% to ~33.76% average elemental damage resisted. That's an increase of roughly 13%, for an ultimate reduction in damage taken of roughly 17%. It's not disgustingly broken, but it's still within a stone's throw of the new DG against any shadow / fire / frost damage.

I don't understand the IoL change. Is it that if I get 2 points in that talent, my SS proc is like it currently is? If so, I think the aim is to wipe prot/holy from the PvP healing completely. Although it only worked for 2v2 and 2v2 was really not much rewarding anymore anyway. And oh, yea, It'll hurt ret and prot paladins own sacred shield procs. Basically again, hurting PvP a lot more than PvE.

As for Divine guardian, my first impression was that it was a huge nerf from being able to have it up for 10 seconds (almost twice as long), especially considering the damage reduction on the raid was 40% (twice as much), so it was a quadruple nerf in that sense. And yes, I've used it many times back in the days during tantrum, used it for whole duration for anub last phase, used it for quite many places for the whole duration. But now that there's the question of canceling DiSac and keeping 6 seconds damage reduction, making it viable for tanks to use, this is something interesting for PvE. Though it looks rather like a considerable buff for PvP side (30% damage redirection which will be halved when applied to paladin + 20% damage reduction for 6 seconds), which is perhaps a reason for them to justify the nerf in prot and ret sacred shield procs and aura mastery nerf: to balance paladin untility in PvP a little. /shrug

Aura mastery is again a big PvP nerf as much as PvE. It was a powerful tool. I don't think anybody stacked paladins jut for the sake of aura mastery, and they won't reduce the number of paladins in the raid just because the duration is down to 6 seconds. I'm unhappy to lose 4 seconds of it, but I think I'll get over it after two beers. let's call this an understandable nerf.

Yes, IoL makes 3.3's SS work like it does today. There are still Prot and Ret healers around, so this will put another nail in the coffin for those specs.

Okay, so, another paladin on the server -- in a different guild -- started laughing at my mana (40k buffed) and my gems decision. You can look at my armory and you can look at his armor:
The World of Warcraft Armory

He states that +10 stats to all gems are better than the +12/+10 gems. I haven't tested this as I really don't have the money to test differentials. But, I guess I could use Rawr. Anyways, I wanted your guys' input regarding that. Obviously, I'm a Holy Light paladin (being the holy pally in the guild), so that would have to pertain to that, as well.

Much appreciated. <3

Sorry, I haven't used prismatics in a very long time, so I was unaware of the unique equipped part of it. The question still stands, though. Is it better than a +12 spell power/+10 intellect gem?

If you want to test something, rawr is good to setup an environment, PTR is good to see it in action without losing gold live game. I used to set my "new" UI, test my new gemming, and try to find out new ways of playing on the PTR.

At least the Rotface damage was Shadowstorm, so the aura wouldn't help at all. I wonder if this dual-school damage is a trend in ICC.

It also cuts down on the survivability of those specs in general. Even with only 800 SP (easily attainable by "standard" Ret and Prot paladins) the SS procs absorb ~1k damage. Assuming a best case scenario (before talents) a Ret or Prot pally can prevent over 5k damage over the duration of a standard cast. Not an insignificant amount for PvP and over the course of a Raid fight a lot of damage prevented.

Additionally, other pally FoLs can activate the HoT of the proc; the reduction in proc rate curbs one Holy paladin from initiating several powerful HoTs nearly simultaneously over a raid.

Wrong question.

The nightmare tear is prismatic and counts for red, blue and yellow. You only need this one gem to get the meta to activate.
a 12SP/10Int gem alone wouldn't do since you also need a blue gem somewhere. So the question really is...

Is a 20Intel +10stats + 1 socket bonus better than 12SP/10Int + 10int/5Mp5 + 2 socketbonusses ?


It depends on how good the bonusses are. Only ones here are the somewhat mediocre SP bonusses.
you currently have a green socketted without even getting the bonus which is a waste.


imo... Replace the green with int, replace the orange with int and put a nightmare tear in your head (offers the best bonus). Since your head has a JC gem, that would would go to either the legs on hands one.

I believe what he meant is for straight intellect gemming. He probably meant +10 all stats (so you can activate your meta by gemming every remaining sockets with 20int), not +10 stats to all sockets which doesn't make sense. If you think of using orange and green gems for the meta a loss of 10 intellect each, then he is right, since +10 all stats will save you one socket to gem with 20 intellect.

You should only think about 10 intellect versus 12 spellpower+5mp5. I'd use two hybrid gems for a possible 2 socket bonuses on the way, but it's completely up to what you want to have as your high stats.