◊ gcbirzan

There are situations where, indeed, keeping a mana pot in reserve for later on is a good thing, on mimiron type fights, where you get plenty of regen time between phases and you might end up overflowing your mana. If you do overflow your mana on any other kind of fight, then the fight is too trivial to consider anyway. But if you're NOT overflowing mana, then using your potion at any time will be equally beneficial, except it will allow you to cut down on your DP use, reducing the chances of your tank getting gibbed. As I stated, this is exactly the same reasoning behind stacking more intellect. Do you lose anything if you pop a mana potion early during the fight if you don't overflow your mana? No. Do you gain anything compared to using it when you run out of mana? Yes, the ability to use DP less. Even if your tank does live, there is no reason not to go the extra mile to minimise the risks.
Also, I never said I cannot sustain my mana without a potion, it just makes me use DP less.

 

Terlig

Looks like they changed 4T9 Bonus to something much more sensible:

It's amazing bonus in compare to previous 5% HL crit.

 

Jackinthegreen

The question is though.. Is the duration increased, or is the heal itself doubled? My guess (and hope) is the heal itself is doubled, but we never know sometimes with the way Blizz words things.

Are the tier sets available to be tested on the PTR by the way?

 

◊ madsushi

An additional change:

• Item - Paladin T9 Holy Relic (Judgement) - Each time you cast Holy Light, you have a chance to gain 234 spell power for 15 sec.

It appears that they've seen our reluctance to drop the Heroic Libram, and have sweetened the pot with a very solid SP boost every time we cast one of our basic spells.

Author of the Rogue and Holy Paladin columns on WoW.com

 

kirmit

As a Holy paladin without dual spec, I was wondering what impact the cast time of Exorcism would have on dps viability.

Currently you would cast Judgement, Exorcism, Holy shock before getting into melee range. With the change in 3.2 casting Exorcism first is the best option. But even with the change to cast time disruption, your next Exorcism cast will likely take longer than the default cast time.

My apologies if this is deemed to be an irrelevent question.

 

Varuk

I wouldn't say it's irrelevant. I cast exorcism quite often in ulduar actually -- there are alot of periods where raid damage is low and the DPS requirements are high, at which point I throw my chip in with exorcism, judgement, offensive holy shocks, shield of righteousness if I'm in melee range, etc. Stuff like Hodir at spots, XT during heart, Mimiron p3 when the head is down, Yogg Saron p2 especially during stuns, Freya when the Conservator spawns... I'm sure there are more examples. And yes, exorcism being a cast is definitely going to hurt that. It's still going to eat the same amount of time as it does instant cast, we just won't be able to move while casting it.

It'll hurt a bit, but honestly I'm not too worried.

 

AlcapwnedYou

Interesting change, but given the fact that FoL still heals for too little in PvE for keeping a MT up, I don't see how a throughput Relic helps us in comparison to dropping the mana cost. Now, if they raised the ante to say boost the effectiveness on FoL on our SS targets, by a solid percentile, then Blizzard would be seeing more FoL utilization that they are looking for.

 

agoat

The libram change makes the idea of a FoL build a little more apealing. HL to keep lights grace up. Libram procs help out the FoL spam. This would allow you to react faster with a HL in the event of a spike.

 

Varuk

The new libram is still abysmal compared to Renewal, especially in the face of huge mana nerfs. The new 4pc bonus is still awful. I still don't plan on picking up more than one piece of t9 with how poorly it's all itemized. And I'd honestly say that, even with the Illumination change, the old 4pc bonus was better.

 

• Mex

Not quite sure what to think about the new 4pc. Although FoL builds will never be viable for the plethora of reasons already mentioned, by the same token FoL shouldn't be completely ignored anymore. It'll be tough to weigh up exact worth until we see more of CC's actual content, but I'd certainly keep an open mind regarding new bonuses and librams.

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. ... this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

 

Penicillin

1. Potions are off the GCD.

2. Who ever dies with 0 mana left? Unless you do that first pot was usually wasted.

I think there are many fights were you can get up to 100% mana meaning the pot is better used for emergency. Mimiron phaseshift with DP (and maybe a tide). Phase1 IC HM is pretty cakewalk, if someone pops a tide or whatever I can usually get back on full mana. Phase1 Yogg (with some keepers though). P1 Thorim HM (or beginning of P2 for that matter).
The only fight were I would say it doesn't even matter is probably Freya HM and there is still no real upside to popping it early. (all other bosses are to easy to consider mana, or doesnt apply to like general).


Appart from this discussion I have considered posting here for a long time. My thesis is that 99% of all paladins suck.
Reason being that they seem to have the impression that they need to chaincast HL for every fight of the game and never step out of a heal. There are phases on certain bosses where this is almost true (P3 IC HM, end of P2 Thorim HM etc) but EVEN then I would argue that precasting + stepping out not only means you will never really go oom but also is safer!

My reasoning behind this is precasting combined with avoidance on tank. I think it is better to have a heal incomming when the tank takes a hit then to sometimes land the heal 0.1 sec after he gets hit and sometimes land it 0.1 sec BEFORE he get hit. If it lands after wow that's really nice to get him up but landing it before can mean that he dies before next one lands (on Algalon this is VERY true). If a tank never dodged or parried and all bosses hit fast like Algalon sure then landing all HLs are probably safer.

With my playstyle I have a hard time seeing the nerf affect me at all. On the upside I would think that the beaconchange would only increase my output, and probably by alot.

 

Olib

I think many paladins do suck, I've been asked many times why i've gemmed int for example. But I don't agree with cast cancelling, maybe I'm just crap at it as I've not practiced, but with a 1.35 second cast with .1-.25 seconds (for me anyway) taken up with lag that doesn't leave a lot of time left to think. There is also a strong possiblity, especially on fast hitting bosses, that the tank will be hit just after you cancel it, HL's landing every 1.5 seconds at the latest should stop the tank dying. I accept you could time a heal to land between each hit with a boss having a 2 second swing timer, but if the boss has a 2 second swing timer you should always get a HL in anyway if you are spamming.

I've also seen (due to lag difference I suppose?) HL's I've cast on the tank heal damage I didn't see happen, had I been cast cancelling I would have already cancelled and the tank would be on 50-75% health, because I was spamming the damage was instantly negated.

 

Penicillin

Yes that is the case of the heal landing 0.1 after.

The thing with restarting the heal means that even if the tank takes a hit right when you do it its still allready incomming. As opposed to when you land it and he gets hit you have to start it right then, only that 0.05 sec lagg-difference but still...imo.

 

Olib

The tanks on full health, you cancel and he is hit. You start the cast again.
The tanks on full health, a heal lands, he is hit. You start the cast again.

I don't really see much difference other than cast cancelling reduces mana usage and increases risk as you will never get those lucky heals as the damage comes in, and there is a huge increase in probability of human error as it requires you don't cancel your cast too soon or too late (which is quite tricky with lag and a 1.35 second cast). If it works for you then fine, but if mana isn't an issue then as I see it it's just increasing the risk.

I can't really comment on mana until next patch, since we have the very powerful SoW, DP, nerfed illumination and many of us will put more mp5 on our gear may mean its not a huge issue with intelligent play.





Regarding mana pot usage that has been discussed in this thread: I've got to agree with leaving it until you need it, we have several things to help with out mana that have short cooldowns meaning we can use them many times in a fight. Why waste a once per fight cooldown IF you can safely use other things first? If you know there is either insufficient damage or sufficient healing to cover you if you use DP, use DP! Save your mana pot for times when everything is either on cooldown and you need mana, or you are in a situation where you can't use DP and need mana. If you use a mana pot and never touch 100% mana again in that fight, fine its the same difference, but many times i've seen my mana get back to full at which point the pot was wasted.

 

Harmann

It's certainly a LOT more worthwhile to actually attempt to maintain this HoT with 4pc T9...with great gear you could crit a Flash Heal and get an HoT rolling for 1,200 HP/S, or ticking for 3,600 every 3s. Not a trivial amount at all anymore.

Can't help but feel like this should almost be either baseline or built into the upper Holy talents. More leaning towards the 2nd for both increasing the value of deep Holy and for encouraging Arena Pallies to stay deep Holy.

 

Aditu

I completely agree with you, this mechanic needs to be part of the holy tree and not a set bonus. Who knows, we may actually even see it in the next talent revamp with the upcoming expac.

I'm really hoping that they allow the FoL HoT to stack and continuously roll as opposed to resetting with ever FoL cast. I can kind of see an interesting game of keeping track of big FoL crits to maintain a rather large HoT on the tank, but then I can't help but think that mechanic would have worked much better with Holy Shock as its not cast as often. I think a better developmental direction would be to add this mechanic to HS and increase the spell coefficients of FoL to make it slightly more inline with HL.

We could also use a talent to tie in HL to HS/FoL/SS but thats asking for extra dessert at this point.

 

Terlig

I think you can get much more HPS. While you can get 9k crit FoLs without problems with wings up, you will get like 2.2k ticks mutiplied by 2, so theoreticly 4.4k ticks on tank (or even more with special buffs) ...

In addition. Imagine raid healing. Your rets keeping shields up, holy pallies, and so on. You can get sometimes INSANE healing from such ticks, even without special buffs...

 

TimWischmeier

In it's current iteration the healing from the FoL-SS-HoT does not transfer over Beacon.

 

Saladin

Well, you do have to admit that Blizzard seems to be listening to the general outcry that we only have one real healing spell and trying to give us a more involved healing "rotation." As it stands, we're looking at the following "priority" for healing:

Is JotP up? __ No __ Judge
|
Yes
|
Is Beacon up __ No __ Beacon the MT
|
Yes
|
Is Sacred Shield up? __ No __ SS the MT
|
Yes
|
Is FoL hot up? __ No __ FoL the MT
|
Yes
|
Heal the raid



The FoL hot strikes me as your "safety net" for the tank; combined with SS absorbs, it normalizes tank damage while you're raid healing in erratic bursts. It won't keep your tank up by itself, but it should keep you from falling behind while you work your beacon mojo.

On the "rotation" as a whole, I'm... not really sure what to think about this. Blizzard is really trying to make holy paladin healing more engaging, and I appreciate the effort they're making. But we're approaching a point where complexity is being added for complexity's sake. Complexity does not necessarily translate to effectiveness. If any of us were asked "Do you want a more complex rotation or a more effective rotation?" we all know the right answer.

Holy paladins are already next to impossible to play without special addons and macros to monitor all our buffs (and having to target the mob for judgements). This sort of priority is pushing us even closer into the realm of being the "affliction locks" of healing. Is this good or bad? I'm just not sure yet.

EDIT: I forgot to mention though that I still prefer 4PT8 to T9. I'd rather have a 50% increase in our damage shield, which actually raises a tank's EH, than a 100% increase in a hot that may or may not get utilized depending on how quickly the tank gets topped off. That being said, the huge iLevel gap between T8 and T9 may somewhat offset the loss of 5 extra shields per minute through the colossal increase in spellpower. Whether or not I'll bother picking up any T9 depends almost entirely on if I found offset pieces that can make up for the drops in haste. 676 gets harder to maintain with each tier of raiding.

 

Saladin

^To answer your question.

However, multiple paladins are still an incredible setup for tank survivability even without resorting to convoluted hot rolling tactics. Two paladins should be plenty to keep the tank up entirely through Beacon--and by the time you cross the threshold and bring 3, there's no need to even bother with the FoL hot on the MT. Collateral healing from the raid will make him basically indestructible.

 

Sven

Currently, I use a combination of Grid and Bigwigs to monitor my SS/Beacon – grid shows who has it, Bigwigs shows how much time is left on it.

I'm wondering if there's not a better way to track SS and Beacon, given how important they have become in 3.2. As well, does the SS-Hot show up as its own separate buff that can be added to Grid, or are we going to have to track it differently?

 

Aditu

This is not a true statement at all. Of all the healers, Holy paladins are the easiest to play because we have so few things to keep track of. I hardly consider keeping track of judgement haste as anything remotely akin to DoT or HoT tracking. In fact, we have so few things to keep track of and so few spells to use that we'd be the ideal mobile healer by virtue of having more mental bandwidth to be raid aware it not the fact that we only have one mobile healing spell.

As for the 4tpc and the 1 sec tic- I'm slightly hopeful this makes Divine Favor quite useful in conjunction with Valny'r procs: DF + FoL + beacon to fill the shield bubble while not necessarily focusing entirely on the tank.

 

Fizzlebeard

I use Paladin Beacon of Light and Sacred Shield Tracker (here) which shows time remaining (in bars) who its on (name on the bar) and flashes your screen with the icon of a spell when it needs refreshing (I've set it to 5 seconds remaining). It does this for JotP/SS/Beacon for all paladins. I hope the author includes the SS HoT in the next patch.

 

Arthaal

I would have agreed with your statement pre-3.0 - It would have been a stretch when wotlk launched (especially with 2 min seals thrown in), with the addition of the SS-FoL-HoT system, I'd have to say I flat out disagree. Druids might come close in the keeping track of timers department, but even then, paladin complexity compares rather favorably.

Yes there is judgement haste, but there is also BoL to refreseh, SS to keep up, a new HoT mechanic to keep rolling on as many targets as you have SS up (one per paladin in your raid basically - since they stack) and DP to manage. All on minute cooldowns or less.

Percent modifiers R'US

 

Aditu

I suppose we're arguing semantics here but are any of those really difficult to manage in the sense that you need to maintain a razor's edge in lapses? Currently certainly not. You don't have to be perfect with managing these rotations and you'd still perform within tolerance. At the end of the day, it doesn't matter if you have SS on the tank or not so long as you can manage DI and DP on cooldown and judge once a minute there's nothing else you have to keep track of.

The SS + FoL mechanic will require more thought, but I really cannot in anyway agree that playing a paladin healer is a brain crushing endeavor. If anything, I'm looking forward to actually having something thats at least a little challenging to fit into my spell rotation.