Another thing to take into account in all this is the effect of healing boosting effects like Nurturing Instinct on feral druids. If you're just planning on spamming Holy Light to heal the tank an extra 20% on the initial hit can make a significant difference. Next patch 6 kitty melee groups soaking up all the Holy Lights we can throw at them . 180% return on the tank 360% return total.

I'd probably elaborate more on the AoE thing. In one of the previous threads someone mentioned the simultaneous damage like XT's versus something that may or may not affect the entire raid like Council.

My guess is lag could be involved too, since communicating all that info back and forth between client and server can clog up the plumbing so to speak and cause inconsistencies.

Do you kitties want the dps loss? They would have to loss two dps talent to make your heals do 20% more, and you willn't be always healing them.

This is the standard dps build I run on my cat in ulduar for dps.

Talent Calculator - World of Warcraft

It's pretty standard although with a few places to tweak it depending on what you want to focus on.

The places I would pull points would be either from:

• Imp Mangle: Really only hurts dps on fights like Kologarn and for druids who don't have an arms warrior....like me.
  
• Imp leader of the pack: No real dps trade off here although it does provide a small amount of raid healing. Hardly a fraction of the healing JoL does.
  
• Feral Swiftness: This will affect dps on high movement fights but with feral charge and dash the trade off really isn't that bad.
  
• Feral Instinct: Some druids may already not have points in this, having put them in Feral Aggression instead so this may be a mute point. This of course would reduce dps on fights with lots of AoE damage.

Frankly if I had to choose I would go with Imp LotP first, then Feral Swiftness. If you have an arms warrior at every raid then maybe Imp Mangle.

By far the best option is a BM hunter pet with Blood of the Rhino and the Hunter having Spirit Bond, a 54% bonus compared to 20%.

In addition, in case people were wondering in regards to the following, I calculated the "Tank Heal" that would be received if you used beacon with the pet beside the tank for Glyph procs from the SS that Trixia Posted. The healing taken by the tank should be around 98,000 from the first heal in that shot. (Almost 10k coming from the glyph proc)

Hmm, on further inspection, there is:

Paladin's Holy Light Heals Crab for 0. (30695 Overhealed)(Critical)
Paladin's Beacon of Light Heals Paladin for 0. (30695 Overhealed)

Now either the paladin did not have the Divinity Talent, SoL Glyph, nor the 6% healing buff, or something is not as we understand with beacon (at least on the PTR). Can someone confirm a beacon heal for larger then the initial heal on the PTR?

Nice. While I'm fairly certain these kinds of buffs to pally healing weren't intended and will probably not make it to live it's this kind of buff that actually could make FoL a usable spell for tank healing. Lets say you are suppose to heal the tank, if you spam FoL on a hunter pet with Blood of the Rhino and Spirit Bond on you're going to be hitting the MT for about 7-8k ever 1.1 seconds or so. Then if the raid takes damage you can put up a quick HL on the raid which will also hit the MT for somewhere between 12k and 17k and crit for 18k to 25k depending on how many people Glyph of HL hits. This is just rough napkin math though.

Interesting... I was under the assumption that the beacon heal was counted separately for all the modifiers, and as such it was double penalized by Divine Plea's healing reduction (and Mortal Strike if you were healing 2 MS'd targets). They removed that double penalization, but I had thought it was tested that the positive bonuses still worked. My paladin is apparently still copying over, so I can't test it. I think there was some talk about this double dipping in the 3.1 thread, I'll try to find it.

Edit: There is some talk about it on p34, but there is also a post on p3 that says they didn't get the double dipping.

Nodrak: They removed the double dipping with Divine Plea by changing Divine Plea to only reduce Holy Light, Flash of Light, and Holy Shock. Healing done by Beacon of Light is not affected beyond the reduction of the base heal. It wasn't a fundamental change in how Beacon worked, it was just a quick fix.

Also, it is highly highly highly unlikely that these modifiers and how they interact with beacon will go live. And if they do, I plan on quitting healing, because I absolutely will not regem spellpower and spam flash on a pet. Not even remotely interested in that.

Ah yea, that change makes sense, I guess I should read tooltips more often. As for beacon, its in a sorry state of affairs mechanic wise. If its not allowed to function independently for healing multipliers, then any sort of tank based healing modifier like DKs/Paladins have for tanking or spells like Guardian Spirit (and the hymn if that still does it too), or even encounter buffs doing the same would fall flat. (Say a fight like Netherspite, with increased health and healing on the tank instead)

And even if they change the double dipping effect, we can still heal pets for a 54% increase provided you can find/convince a BM hunter. It just seems rushed and not well thought out on blizzard's end. Perhaps even more insane is that as our mana continues to increase, it will inevitably allow us to sustain Holy Light again unless fight length's keep getting longer. If fight lengths do not increase, this change will eventually be a massive throughput bonus that will stratify tank healing even more so then currently.

I get the same sense that these changes weren't very well though out. Making mana more of an issue would be the right move if they were truely trying to make us cast a larger variety of spells but in the same move they're buffing HL by a ridiculous amount via the changes to Beacon.

It seems like their plan was to have one or two holy paladins in a raid both with beacon on the MT spamming FoL and the occasional HL on the raid and letting that healing act like rolling multiple lifeblooms on the tank use to in TBC, which is certainly doable but with how much HL is getting buffed in terms of HPS they would really need to reduce it's mana efficiency.

Most of the problem I think is from Glyph of HL. I know it may sound ridiculous but if they changed it to work on FoL instead of HL and changed the modifier to 20% per target from 10% then I could see raid FoL spam being worth it.

A feral druid loses far, far less DPS from two talent points than a beast mater hunter loses from using a tenacity pet.

This won't go to live, so it's all useless conecture. However, a feral druid would be the better choice than the BM hunter, as you wouldn't have to sacrifice 10-20% of the BM hunter's damage output (which is already much lower than a "proper" hunter spec such as MM or Surv). You also get the added bonus that kitties can move out of the fire and keep themselves alive a lot better than a hunter's pet who's being controlled with two basic commands while its master dodges the fire himself. It's completely possible for tenacity pets to be one-shot through a shock blast / mine combo in phase 4 Mimiron as the hunter focuses on dodging rockets and lasers.

Simply put, a feral druid is more durable (even factoring in tenacity pet talents), sacrifices much less DPS to serve the role, and still counts as a permanent AW. Asking a hunter to first spec into a subpar tree, and then bring a subpar pet, is asking too much of a purported DPS class, unless you have no ferals and it's your only option short of a rogue.

It would be hard for a dps druid to be more survivable then a pet with these talents, which is usable by any spec hunter for a bonus twice as big as using a druid.

Also if you want to abuse the Glyph of Holy Light, you have to be near the tank, which will probably mean being infront of the boss, which is probably less of a dps loss for the pet then the druid me thinks.

You are not taking into account Beacon. Pre-SSing would use 2 GCD's and give 4 FoL's worth of healing total. Not SSing would use 2 GCD's and give 4 FoL's worth of healing total. The difference is who and how long the healing takes. The former is 4 FoL / 12s, the latter is 4 FoL / 2s

If you do a rotation to match the HoT duration, you could HoT 6 people, for a total of 24 FoL worth. If you skip SS, you end up with 12 raid FoL for a total of 24 FoL worth of healing, however again the time period for the HoT's full healing is still 12s longer.

It hardly seems worth the effort - by the time you applied the SS, the damage would probably be healed up by someone else.

You're also assuming that the actual HoT is going to be effective healing, and not just wasted overheal.

In the topic of accumulating % modifiers, the lowest DPS loss would be a Feral or Mut. rogue to spec into their talents. The highest modifier is obviously a BM hunter with a tenacity pet. The middle, and the route I would take if this goes live (it won't), would be getting a Survival // Marks hunter to just take a tenacity pet -- less of a modifier than the BM hunter, but only a 200-300 DPS cost instead of nearly 1k. Another thing to note is, with the next patch, tenacity pets can use Roar of Sacrifice on other raid or party members, and with a paladin babysitting them they most certainly will not die from it, so doing this also adds a cooldown to the raid.

A quick test on current live servers had beacon not double dipping either Avenging Wrath nor Divinity, both targets received the same healing. Considering this, the total potential is not nearly as high assuming this applies to all modifiers. The best one could manage is +59.5% using a BM pet and having it in range of the tank for glyph splashes.

Hmm, a bit of a boost for us I guess.

PvP Items

* Hateful Gladiator's Libram of Justice now Increases spell power of Flash of Light by 293. (Up from 236)
* Deadly Gladiator's Libram of Justice now Increases spell power of Flash of Light by 331. (Up from 267)
* Furious Gladiator's Libram of Justice now Increases spell power of Flash of Light by 375. (Up from 320)
* Relentless Gladiator's Libram of Justice now Increases spell power of Flash of Light by 436. (Up from 404)


Not huge, but it does seem they realize our FoLs are more LoL for most things. Now if only they'd give us a way to stack our healing on an SS'd target we'll have better reason to use it. We'll have to wait and see how the encounters go in 3.2.

Healbot tracks your buffs (you can set which) on ppl health bars - and it works perfectly with SS and BoL - within second i can realise WHO has my SS/BoL atm and when it will expire. Personally i prefer this than additional addons, but you need to use HB. It works also in 3.2, i wonder if i could use it to track FoL HoT as well ...

I think the FoL HoT change is too restrictive and boring because SS is too restrictive. It would be great to see SS changed to a medium-cooldown ability (like 10 sec) instead of 1-target only. Another option is to make the FoL hot available after HL or HS are cast to mix things up (high mana cost constraint on the former and cooldown on the latter, to not make FoL too powerful). The developer intent seems to be to get more spells used/mixed and the changes still do not seem to achieve that at the current stage. I feel like I am still best off stacking even more intellect and spamming HL, and perhaps making an alternative spellpower set for spamming another spell doesn't seem very exciting either.

Out of curiousity, what's your rationale for taking Beacon over Divinity? Glyph of divinity is really nice for turning LoH into an extra mana pot, which can make or break a long fight. And the mana return is bigger than the mana gain from fewer bacon casts, even without benediction.

You will see 7,800 mana returned every 11 minutes via Glyph of Divinity and self-casting LoH.

Beacon costs 1,450 mana (with SoW glyph) every 60 seconds. For 11 minutes of uptime, this costs 15,950 mana to keep up. With Beacon glyphed, you save 5,365 mana if you're keeping it up, on expiration, for 11 minutes.

This nets a total mana difference of 2,435 mana. However, in order to achieve these numbers, you have to spec 2 points into Improved LoH (non-optimal unless someone else brings Improved Blessing of Wisdom). You also sacrifice LoH and the improved LoH buff by casting it on yourself. The Beacon glyph actually gives you more GCDs to work with, and provides a larger benefit to you even when you use LoH on a non-self target. In addition, BoL is "always" up, in the sense that the glyph can be utilized on every pull, instead of once every 11 minutes (hey, trash is still important).

In patch 3.2, Improved LoH is being changed to a flat 20% incoming physical damage reduction as well. This means that the buff from Imp LoH is now another paladin healer CD we can use to save a life during high-damage situations; the effect will be that Paladins will have fewer opportunities to self-cast LoH.

If you cast BoL "on cooldown" (that is, reapply it whenever it runs out), you save 1 BoL cast every 3 minutes. That is, you save 1537 mana every 3 minutes with BoL glyph.

LoH gives 1950 mana to it's target. That's 3900 with Glyph of Divinity when using LoH on someone who can fully use that mana, and 7800 with Divinity glyph and LoH yourself.

So, it depends on the fight which one is better. Shorter fights generally favor BoL glyph, because you won't have LoH available on every try. Longer fights like Mimiron hard or Yogg Saron tend to favor LoH, because typically you will have LoH up in near every try.

There is another aspect to it: BoL Glyph is always available in a way that if you actually cast BoL on cooldown, it saves you the mana. Divinity glyph may not work as your mana potion, because sometimes you may actually need to use LoH as an emergency heal on a non-paladin tank. Additionally, BoL frees up a GCD once every 3 minutes.

Edit: Not fast enough.

I've not had to LoH myself for mana since the first week in ulduar, inc. all hardmodes upto firefighter. Been using the Beacon glyph for months now, mostly just for the convience of having extra time to choose a optimal moment to refresh beacon. Any fight that is long enough to stress your mana to the point you'd need to loh generally has periods were you can melee for SoW/Plea regularly.