I wonder if they give the ability to remove the forbearance with Glyph of Divinity. As Ret or Prot do not take this.

Hopefully they change the way either the glyph works, or the effect talents have on the holy LOH tree. Unless I'm overlooking something, this is just their workaround to the "2/3 phase" prot/ret pally 1v1 fights.

Until they find a workabout for this that actually makes sense, it looks like LoH'ing a prot pally would be completely retarded. 50% damage redux or less that half of that talented. I'm sure they'll figure out some way to make LoH a viable raid utility again... except right now, apparently being able to heal to full health in 1 GCD, every 11 minutes is overpowered, whereas druids do it every 30 seconds in 2 GCD's.

C'est lavie.

the FoL HoT is not transfered via beacon.

As for the loh change, it makes neligible difference to those without a prot pally MT and is a much needed change/'nerf if you will' from a pvp perspective. Even those guilds who do use a prot pally MT shouldn't be worried THAT much, if your tank is in a situation to need a LoH AND his bubblewall soon after then you have serious healing issues, also 4pt prot T9 reduces forbearance to 1min30. But I'm sure blizz will add a deep holy or prot talent to fix it, if loh stays this way.

I don't agree. The part of PvP that matters is only arenas and LoH is unusable there. It's not a PvP nerf, not an intended PvP nerf anyway.

In PvE it makes a huge difference, because LoH is a panic button and if you used LoH, it's already because you had a momentary trouble with healing. Doesn't mean you're a bad healing squad or you must never use LoH and tanking CDs right one after another. You can do so to have the 10-20% physical damage reduction as an extended tanking CD.

I hope it won't make it live this way.

Actually PvP is the main reason it is being changed, go read any of the countless GC responses regarding paladins in pvp.

So yes LoH is being changed to balance prot/ret in pvp.

Here we go, another brainless change to loh

( for those who didn't read it yet :
Lay on Hands is now affected by Forbearance and can now be cast on self again - Heals a friendly target for an amount equal to the Paladin's maximum health and restores 1950 of their mana. Once healed, the target cannot be targeted by Divine Shield, Divine Protection, Hand of Protection, or Lay on Hands again for 2 min.)


I really don't care about using it on myself, but with this change we can't use it on prot pallies anymore, it 's too risky to block their divine protection for 2 mins in exchange for a heal and a poor damage reduction if talented; I admit that I don't use it so often, but this is our poor Nature's Swiftness, I don't like the idea of checking tank class before trying to save em :\
They should apply forbearance only when cast on self, that would be fair even for occasional pvp

Sry but I don't accept to screw my glyph settings due to a pvp change because they can't pull out a better idea to balance that spell

Maybe on 50% of occasions, but what if the tank in danger is the main/off prot pally without beacon? We can't even place BoL in a sub-optimal way (e.g. the tank with less incoming damage) just for the chance to throw that LoH on the right target, it would be a huge penality on efficiency

With SoulStone having a 15min CD now, I can't really see why lay on hands needs nerfing.

You can self res from a soulstone with a lot of health and mana and deathcoil->dot->fear someone when they aren't expecting it.

Lay on hands isn't nearly as powerful!

Also, locking tanks out of their CDs because of someone else's actions is a horrific game mechanic.

Yeah but you forget about essence of LoH for holy - Improved LoH, it's pretty good CD for certain situations.

and don't forget about the delay due to beacon of light.
forbearance when LoH used on self sounds like quite a viable solution tbh. But even then, they must make sure LoH can be cast on people who have forbearance as long as the caster is not casting on herself.

I wouldn't like LoHing any tank and then dying to penetrating cold because I couldn't bubble. I think the Beacon workaround is viable though. You can easily plan your healing so that you heal another tank and beacon the paladin. Who takes less damage doesn't matter much.

It's probably not going to work to put this on the Improved Lay on Hands talent, because it isn't deep enough in the holy tree. If they did this and leave Improved LoH where it is, you'd only need to go 12 pts into holy to pick it up, which means prot and ret pallies could potentially grab it, especially in PvP specs.

This is a good change for the long haul because it'll force Blizz to take a look at the forebearance mechanic. It's stupid that our class is balanced around abilities that are apparently so gamebreaking that they had to introduce a debuff -- for one class only! -- that prevents using said abilities back-to-back. Bubble and bop were at least conceptually related enough to tie their cooldowns to each other, but now they're adding FB to a majority of our cooldowns over thirty seconds.

It smacks of poor class design, and the more crap they tag with the FB debuff, the faster their eventual overhaul of the paladin class. FB is a shortcut for the designers to avoid tackling some core issues for our class, and I hope they overuse it to the point of absurdity so that we can begin to move toward meaningful change.

There's no "potentially" about it for Ret Paladins. DiSac is not worth spending 11 points on post-nerf, and they can't spend 17 points to improve it without losing core talents. That leaves the base 3.3 Ret spec at 5/5/53 +8, with the general consensus being that taking Aura Mastery will bring more to the table than knocking 2 minutes off your HoP CD.

In that build that you posted, you're not taking improved might. Realistically, most times you only have one ret pally, holy pallies generally spec Divine Sacrifice so won't have improved might, and prot pallies will generally want threat increasing talents. Therefore, a PvE ret paladin is likely required to take 2/2 improved might, so they'd only be able to have 1 point in Improved Lay on Hands.

Here is my idea for balancing this:

I would remove the current Divine Favor talent. It's been a really weak ability for a long time, because we typically crit 40-50% of the time anyway, so all it does is essentially increase the crit percentage on one spell by 50% every 2 minutes. Here is how I would redo that talent.

Reduces the cooldown of Lay on Hands by 6 minutes. Your Lay on Hands spell will no longer cause Forbearance.

That would make LoH a base 14 minute cooldown, reduced to 5 minutes with Improved LoH and the LoH minor glyph. As someone mentioned, LoH is essentially comparable to Nature's Swiftness. It does heal for a little under twice as much as a Nature's Swiftness-Healing Touch, but this would be balanced by the longer cooldown. Also, it's far enough into the holy tree that you would not see tank geared players reasonably able to pick it up to get 50k+ heals.

I assume people agree with me (no one has posted otherwise in the 3.3 Ret thread) that 5/7/59 would be the common Ret build for 3.3. Shorter/longer HoP/HoF are useful in ICC.

The other reason why I like imp LoH talent to not remove forbearance is a Prot pally could get it (just lose a lot of threat) to get the LoH cooldown back. Also I like the LoH talents would further reinforce that a Holy Pally should pick up the talent.

Gormok is a prime example for this terrible change. You are essentially prevented from casting LoH on any tank in this fight if you use the DoT removal tactic. Really shortsighted so far on blizzard trying to push Rated BGs...

A change like 'Lay on Hands heals for [50% Caster's Max HP] * [Caster's Max MP / Caster's Max HP], would be better IMO.

A paladin with 20k health and 40k mana would cast a 20k LoH. A paladin with 20k health and 10k mana would cast a 5k LoH. A paladin with 50k HP and 10k mana would cast a 5k LoH.

That is, if the intent is to reduces the power of LoH for Prot/Ret but not holy. If their intention is to reduce the power of LoH across the board, then I think we just have to take it.

In PvP, that one certain crit can be the difference between life and death. I'm just starting to arena at the moment, and for me it is often on cooldown whilst I am trying to kite sometimes. It guarantee's a HS crit which means I can follow up with a FoL on myself when I'm being chased by a melee.

I disagree with you, and I posted in the 3.3 thread. Given the testing I've done on PTR of ICC content and the expectations we have of the hard modes, I do not expect to see many high-end rets not taking aura mastery.
It wouldn't be a difficult extension to take Imp LoH too.

I really hope this isn't the way they fix it. People take the Divinity glyph in order to have another "mana potion" every boss fight or so when it's needed. For those of us who don't want to cast LoH on ourselves but use it either as another damage reduction cooldown or our one-and-only "OH SH)@#(%" button, it's not going to change things.

The more I think about the change the less happy I am with it. I suppose it's somewhat balanced by the fact that it will only be problematic on Paladin tanks and they have AD anyway (although I still feel helpless having to rely on it in this manner).

I find it very hard to swallow that they want to gimp the PvE effectiveness of Holy using this in raids. Everything posted on the subject by GC and their various "fixes" to what they feel to be LoH's unbalanced nature points in the other direction. What clinches it is the fact that it only gimps Paladin tanks in raids - if they wanted to nerf the power of the spell across the board I would have thought a different change was in order. I'm not saying that it means that they will definitely make sure it's still useful to Holy in raiding situations where a paladin is also main tanking, but I do hope they're at least thinking about the effect on us.

EDIT: Another possibility, besides just the PvP ones, might be that the devs consider paladin tanking too strong (and you'd find many in the community, both paladins and not, who agree). This could be one end-around to fixing that, even though doing it this way has the effect of removing one of our useful spells.

I must say i'm very surprised by the change to LoH, i was quite surprised to reads GC reasoning behind the nerf. I was never under the impression that classes were usually balanced around BG performance.

Blizzard's current philosphy surrounding other powerful class specific abilities appears to be a reduction in CD. Both soulstone and reincarnation having their cd's reduced for example.

I much more inclined to agree with Lutador that this is a stealth nerf of sorts to Paladin tanking that unfortunately also has a knock on affect for Holy and Ret.

I don't really think the impact this has on Glyph of Divinity is really going to be that big of a deal. Right now, we basically have a choice between Divinity and Beacon for our 3rd glyph slot (HL and SoW are generally seen as mandatory for HL builds). Divinity gives more theoretical mana savings, while Beacon gives a constant effect and saves GCDs. They are about even in terms of real world mana regen, because realistically, you are not going to be popping self LoH on cooldown every 11 minutes; you will be saving it until you need it. This change basically forces us to go to glyph of Beacon of Light, but we don't really lose anything from it. The loss of LoH as a usable tank cooldown is a much larger issue. The Improved LoH talent is going to need to be either removed or reworked; I doubt any holy paladins will be taking it if it stays the same and the changes go live as announced.