In World of Warcraft: Cataclysm we’ll be making several changes to class talents and abilities across the board. While this list only outlines some of our plans for the paladin class, we want to give you a look at the new high-level abilities and an overview of how the new Mastery system will work with each talent spec.
New Paladin Spells
Blinding Shield (level 81): Causes damage and blinds all nearby targets. This effect might end up only damaging those facing the paladin’s shield, in a manner similar to Eadric the Pure's ability Radiance in Trial of the Champion. The Holy tree will have a talent to increase the damage and critical strike chance, while the Protection tree will have a talent to make this spell instant cast. 2-second base cast time. Requires a shield.
Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.
Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85): Summons a temporary guardian that looks like a winged creature of light armed with a sword. The visual is similar to that of the Resurrection spell used by the paladin in Warcraft III. The guardian has a different effect depending on the talent spec of the paladin. For Holy paladins, the guardian heals the most wounded ally in the area. For Protection paladins, the guardian absorbs some incoming damage. For Retribution paladins, it damages an enemy, similar to the death knight Gargoyle or the Nibelung staff. 3-minute cooldown. 30-second duration (this might vary depending on which guardian appears).
Next you will find a list of some of the paladin spell and ability changes, followed by our intentions for improving each talent tree for the release of Cataclysm. There will be further changes, but those revealed below should offer some insight into our goals.
Changes to Abilities and Mechanics
* Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.
* Cleanse is being rebalanced to work with the new dispel system. It will dispel defensive magic (debuffs on friendly targets), diseases, and poisons.
* Blessing of Might will provide the benefit of Wisdom as well. If you have two paladins in your group, one will do Kings on everyone and the other will do Might on everyone. There should be much less need, and ideally no need, to provide specific buffs to specific classes.
* Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.
New Talents and Talent Changes
* We want to ease off the defensive capabilities of Retribution and Holy paladins slightly. We think the powerful paladin defenses have been one of the things holding Retribution paladins back, especially in Arenas. One change we’re considering is lowering Divine Shield’s duration by a couple of seconds. Having said that, Retribution does pretty well in Battlegrounds, and Battlegrounds will be a much bigger focus in Cataclysm since they can provide the best PvP rewards. Furthermore, the healing environment of Cataclysm is going to be different such that a paladin may not be able to fully heal themselves during the duration of Divine Shield to begin with, so this may not be a problem.
* We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. In addition, we want to add to this spec more PvP utility. Right now the successes of the Retribution paladin in PvP seem to be reduced to either doing decent burst damage, or just being good at staying alive.
* We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target. The intention is that the paladin can use it on their main healing target. That said, we would like to improve the Holy paladin toolbox and niche so that they don’t feel quite like the obvious choice for tank healing while perceived as a weak group healer.
* We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains the expensive, fast heal and Holy Light is the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light will be changed to work with Flash of Light. We like the ability, but want paladins to use it intelligently and not be constantly healing for twice as much.
* Holy paladins will use spirit as their mana regeneration stat.
* Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we're looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.
* Holy Shield will no longer have charges. It will be designed to improve block chance while active, and will continue to provide a small amount of damage and threat.
Meditation: This is the spirit-to-mana conversion that the priest, druid, and shaman healers also share.
Vengeance: This is the damage-received-to-attack-power conversion that all tanks share.
Critical Healing Effect: When the paladin gets a crit on a heal, it will heal for more.
Block Amount: We want to keep the kit of the paladin as a tank who blocks a lot. So by contrast, the warrior tank will sometimes get critical blocks, but the paladin will absorb more damage with normal blocks.
Holy Damage: Any attack that does Holy damage will have its damage increased.
This concludes this Cataclysm preview for the paladin class. The development of these changes will continue to evolve in the coming months. Please be sure to provide any feedback and thoughts you might have on what was covered here.
Here's a bit more clarification on some of these changes. Also, please keep in mind that this is merely a preview and we'll still have more to go in testing up to and including any other changes that aren't listed here in the preview.
We've updated the Flash of Light reference to make it a bit more clear in the original post as follows.
Flash of Light remains a fast heal, but will be more expensive to justify the cast speed. Holy Light will be the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light needs to be changed so that its benefit is letting the paladin heal two targets at once, not letting the paladin get two heals for the mana cost of one. It’s intended to save GCDs and targeting time, not mana.
In addition we’re changing the paladin heal design to match that of the other healers. Holy Light is the middle heal. It’s very efficient, but not particularly fast and doesn’t have a lot of throughput. Flash of Light will be the faster heal that costs more mana. (Currently paladins sort of flip the model around by having a fast, efficient heal.) Holy paladins can talent into an additional heal that is like a giant Holy Light. It might take three of these big heals (or two crits) to get a tank from death’s door back to 100% health.
Currently on live, Beacon of Light is a tool that allows paladins to target more than just the main tank. In Cataclysm if it just doubles their healing, it is going to be overpowered. We have two ways we might handle this and we’ll experiment to see which feels better. The first is that Beacon only works on some heals, such as Flash of Light or Holy Light (but not the big one). An alternative idea is that Beacon increases the mana cost of a heal cast on a beaconed target, since you’re essentially getting a double heal. Under this model, Beacon itself would cost no mana.
Also on the live realms currently, paladins have huge mana pools and massive throughput. The trade-off is that they are excellent single target healers and much weaker in other roles. We want paladins to be slightly more interchangeable with other healers. In Cataclysm, you should be able to have a Holy priest on the tank and a Holy paladin on the raid. We’re not sure we’ll back off of the current healing roles completely, but we definitely want to add more breadth to those whose roles are currently too narrow.
As for the Guardian of Ancient Kings. First, it's important to understand that this is not a pet nor does it have a pet bar associated with it. Second, it's also not meant to last for very long. So, it's not a pet in the traditional sense. It's a friend in need when you need it, but not a permanent companion.
That new instant attack for prot paladins that does aoe damage and blind? And to be blunt, sounds superior to heroic leap for aoe tanking in every capacity?
That attack could have a 10 min cooldown. I'm pretty sure we didn't specify in the preview, so I'm not sure how you'd decide it's better or worse in any situation. Maybe it has a 5 sec cooldown but we nerfed the threat generation from Holy damage so severely that paladins are utterly dependent on it now. I just don't think we gave you the information necessary to draw that conclusion, and this is partially why we didn't provide that information.
Any elaboration on how you intend to separate the single-target and AoE tanking niches?
I'd be happy with even vague generalizations, though I would understand if you preferred to avoid saying anything that might get used as a forum bludgeon later.
No, it's not really that. We just have a couple of different avenues we're exploring and we didn't want to have say models A, B and C in different large paragraphs. The ideas just need a little more time to bake.
And I'm not entirely sure how you're using "niches" but I am talking about wanting Prot paladins to use slightly different rotations against single targets than against groups. The addition of Crusader Strike (and maybe Holy Shock?) alone start to provide that.
> GC said AOE threat being normalized between tanks > Previews don't make this extremely clear > GC also said the previews are just previews > there must be more coming down the line to make the first two observations align!
Divine Storm will get the Whirlwind treatment (less damage per target but unlimited targets).
The difference is that paladins fit their rotations around cooldowns while warriors do so around a limited resource. So it's entirely possible a paladin will still use DS when other attacks are on cooldown. (It will depend on what exactly the Ret rotation looks like, which we're still developing.) Divine Storm also provides a little healing too, so it's not exactly the same as Whirlwind. We probably wouldn't want to get to the point where Rets feel the need to have their single target spec without DS and the cleave spec with DS. (And without knowing the numbers, it's going to be difficult for any of you to insist that this will or will not happen.)
In general, we don't want buttons that are good against single targets to just be better against groups of targets. It makes rotations too static and makes numbers hard to balance since "cleavey" specs can do so much more damage against tight packs of enemies. Some higher damage is fine. It just too extreme right now.
These are previews, not patch notes. Just because we didn't mention anything doesn't mean there is no chance of it changing.
The paladin class was still in 'development' when blizzard released fairly in-depth details of the other classes. Paladin Cat. info was released April 16th.
A few things we know so far:
Retribution paladins will give up some defensive abilities in favor of more offense (dps).
Holy paladins (and only holydins) will spec into cleanse magic.
Protection paladins will lose some of their AoE threat-generation.
Every other healing class has received a new heal, in most cases a 'leveling heal'. We can probably hope for something along these lines.
The ability 'Vengeance' will be turned into a (protection) talent tree bonus, along with 'Damage Reduction'.
Edit:
We want to add to the Holy tree a nice big heal to correspond with Greater Heal. Flash of Light remains the expensive, fast heal and Holy Light is the go-to heal that has average efficiency and throughput. Beacon of Light will be changed to work with Flash of Light. We like the ability, but want paladins to use it intelligently and not be constantly healing for twice as much.
To me, this looks like they just nerfed holy paladins by 50%.If a tank recieved a 20k heal every 1.3 seconds, now HL spam healing will only heal the tank every 2.6 seconds, halving possible HPS? Perhaps is will be okay in cataclysm to allow a tank not to be topped up 100% of the time? To me it looks like the new beacon will be tuned for arena, less so for PvE.
I wonder if blizzard would have implemented this change if paladins had decided to stack +Haste or +SP gems and enchants
Healing Hands (level 83): Healing Hands is a new healing spell. The paladin radiates heals from him or herself, almost like a Healing Stream Totem. It has a short range, but a long enough duration that the paladin can cast other heals while Healing Hands remains active. 15-second cooldown. 6-second duration.
This looks like holydins will have more reason to stand in melee. Hopefully it heals more than the totem! Note that is has a short (15 second) cooldown, the same as another button that doesn't instantly heal a tank (Judgement). There may be fights where a holydin will skip casting either spell.
Holy Shock will be a core healing spell available to all paladins.
I believe that Holy Shock is more powerful than Exorcism. (Therefore replace it in the ret rotation when it becomes available (or use it when every other dps move is off cooldown, dependent of mana?). Also, Many of you will remember the PvP "Shockadin" from burning crusade.
Three new baseline spells, blessing of Might and Wisdom are being combined, baseline Crusader Strike and Holy Shock, new talented abilities for all specs, and a likely bubble nerf.
Blinding Shield we've seen before but I at least never entertained it as being give to Paladins. Guardian of Ancient Kings feels nice and very useful but we've already seen two pets/minions introduced and later made permanent and I fear that we're starting down a disappointing path here where one Paladin spec may become a pet class.
It will be interesting to see the details for healing hands (cast time, mana cost, power). If it's instant or a very quick cast, it might actually be useful for retribution paladins to use on high damage fights since they'll be able to hit the melee clump quite easily.
Also, as a GCD-capped class, 30 minute sacred shield sounds quite nice.
Formally Xyrm/Zurm, the Ret Pally. Now playing my rogue, Zyrm, more casually with RL friends.
With Holy Shock and Crusader Strike available, us tanks might actually have to think about our rotation mid-faceroll. This does seems like a large number of buffs with minimal nerfs.
Guardian of Ancient Kings feels nice and very useful but we've already seen two pets/minions introduced and later made permanent and I fear that we're starting down a disappointing path here where one Paladin spec may become a pet class.
Guardian of Ancient Kings feels more like a cooldown, not a pet. They even mention that it's like a guardian spell (think a DK's Gargoyle and not a Ghoul). Having it function differently according to your spec also seems very interesting.
Crusader Strike will be a core ability for all paladins, gained at level 1. We think the paladin leveling experience is hurt by not having an instant attack. Retribution will be getting a new talent in its place that either modifies Crusader Strike or replaces it completely.
Protection paladins need a different rotation between single-target and multi-target tanking. Likewise, we're looking to add the necessity to use an additional cooldown in each rotation.
Sounds like they are trying to get consecrate out of the single target tanking rotation, probably replacing it with crusader strike.
Admittedly Healing Hands and the Guardian of Ancient Kings (does anyone have a picture or video of what that WarIII resurrection spell looks like) are still pretty much unknowns at this time, but I am wondering about what this actually means for 'our niche'.
My gut reaction is that by changing Beacon of Light to only work with "expensive, fast" FoL instead of the "go-to" Holy Light, they are actually enforcing the single target healing role more? If that rule would apply to the current game, any Holy Light not cast on a tank would be quite a gamble.
Of course, it says "Beacon of Light will now work with Flash of Light", not strictly that it will NOT work with Holy Light. I'd like some clarification here, because it sounds Beacon will be less useful.
I'm also slightly bemused by the 30-minute Sacred Shield. Maybe I'm doing things wrong, but I change Sacred Shield more frequently than I do Beacon of Light.
If this odd wording means that FoL will be the only spell that is transfered to the beacon target than paladins will basiclaly remain in the same position they are now. Except instead of spamming HL we will be spamming FoL, and instead of stacking Int we will be stacking SP. It will be TBC all over again...
Basically we will probablly be healing like the Premontion holy paladins do know
Assuming that they plan to make flash of light prohibitively expensive in spam situations, I don't see us spamming it on a tank. What they're going for is paladins only healing one tank target primarily, with their beacon on another tank or some other target (themselves even) where they can then flash of light if the situation turns out to need it - but not constantly spam it.
Btw, you'd stack int to gain spellpower in cataclysm. Overall, the changes were fairly logical and make sense when you look at where they want to take healing.
Assuming that they plan to make flash of light prohibitively expensive in spam situations, I don't see us spamming it on a tank. What they're going for is paladins only healing one tank target primarily, with their beacon on another tank or some other target (themselves even) where they can then flash of light if the situation turns out to need it - but not constantly spam it.
Well spamming 1 tank with beacon on another is exactly what we do now, and spamming a tank with beacon on ourselves is what we did alot of the time when Beacon didn't include overhealing.
If they are planing to increase the cost of FoL so that it costs more mana than HL, then its entierly possible that we will end up stacking spirit and spamming FoL. If FoL continues to have a high crit chance through Sacred Shield procs then mastery could be conisdered our throughput stat.
If we able to stack spirit to the point where FoL won't cause mana problems, I can see no reason to use HL if it doesnt transfer to the beaconed player.
And with enough mastery a FoL crit would probablly hit for the same amount as HL, which would mean that FoL heals for 200% of HL if you include the beacon heal...and thats not even including the HoT.
By far the most useless mastery bonus i've seen any class/spec receive..
This mastery bonus also supports my theory of FoL spamming. If FoL continues to gain crit from sacred shield then critical healing effect wouldn't be as useless as it is now. In fact this is the only explanation I can think of for giving us a mastery bonus that currently seems so useless.
Don't think about crit healing using the current healing paradigm. Right now any crit heal is, excluding some extreme circumstances, overhealing and generally a complete waste. The aim in Cataclysm is for topping players off to be a thing of the past, meaning that we'll frequently be healing with the goal of pushing a player into a reasonably safe zone rather than making sure they're maxed on health all the time. In these circumstance, critical heals have a high probability of no overheal whatsoever.
What I lack in intelligence I make up for in verbosity. Monte's LoL Blog
Admittedly Healing Hands and the Guardian of Ancient Kings (does anyone have a picture or video of what that WarIII resurrection spell looks like) are still pretty much unknowns at this time, but I am wondering about what this actually means for 'our niche'.
That was the Guardian associated with the spell in Warcraft 3 - think of it as a generic Tyrael (quick picture from the editor).
Guardian of Ancient Kings (level 85):
Paladins getting a pet ? /facepalm
The suggestions on the official forums for Wotlk were littered with these and it was shot down each time by a majority consensus of paladins. I can't say I'm really looking forward to this. For a level 85 ability, I'm finding this really underwhelming. How awesome it looks visually, isn't going to change that.
Holy shock:
The wording says HS will be a healing spell for all specs. A nice change, having an instant heal does come in handy. I doubt HS will become a damage spell for all specs, and I hope it remains a (talented?) damage ability for holy. Otoh, making CS available for all specs, also means that maybe Holy doesn't need HS to do damage anymore when doing some soloing.
Divine shield:
If the duration gets reduced, then we'll have to insist on a similar reduction in cast time for hearthstone !! ;-)
"We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. "
Obviously Blizzard hasn't been keeping up with the times. The rotation at current isn't unforgiving at all. Just mash anything off CD, you can even blindly hit any button at random. It doesn't even matter if you mess up and hit the wrong priority ability, overall damage will be very similar. The various simulations have been showing this that it doesn't even matter much what priority you use as all the various priorities end up having very similar DPS within a few percentages of eachother. The only problem with a "weird" rotation is the chance you'll run OOM.
If anything, there currently isn't enough of a difference between a bad, a good and an awesome paladin. The only distinguishing difference between bad/good/awesome at current is making the most of cooldowns such as AW, speed pot etc. Assuming you make it past the "move out of fire" skill of course.
"We feel Retribution paladins need one more mechanic which involves some risk of the player pushing the wrong button, making the rotation a bit less forgiving. "
Obviously Blizzard hasn't been keeping up with the times. The rotation at current isn't unforgiving at all. Just mash anything off CD, you can even blindly hit any button at random. It doesn't even matter if you mess up and hit the wrong priority ability, overall damage will be very similar. The various simulations have been showing this that it doesn't even matter much what priority you use as all the various priorities end up having very similar DPS within a few percentages of eachother. The only problem with a "weird" rotation is the chance you'll run OOM.
If anything, there currently isn't enough of a difference between a bad, a good and an awesome paladin. The only distinguishing difference between bad/good/awesome at current is making the most of cooldowns such as AW, speed pot etc. Assuming you make it past the "move out of fire" skill of course.
I think you misread this part. They said that ret is currently forgiving, and they want to make it less so.
Also, as a GCD-capped class, 30 minute sacred shield sounds quite nice.
On Ret:
This somewhat confused me. They want to make Ret (and Holy) less defensive, yet with a 30 min SS a Ret would be stupid not to have it on themselves. That's pretty powerful defense (though dispellable in PvP). The only thing that would make sense is if Sacred Shield is converted into a Holy Talent rather than baseline.
In general I would support moving Ret away from defensiveness, being a GCD locked class and having defensive cooldowns with expected use (Hands of Salv, Freedom, Protection) made us potentially overly versatile, again potentially at the loss of personal DPS (GCDs used on utility, not DPS).
A pseudo-pet (a la Gargoyle) available 1/6 of the time (30 seconds duration, 3 min CD) sounds fun, especially if it is Holy damage, which would work directly into our new Mastery bonus.
Crusader Strike baseline is phenomenal - leveling Paladin deserve this. If Ret alters/replaces it, is it too much to hope the replacement/alteration would be the same, yet Holy damage? Again, this would work into our Mastery (current CS and DS would get no love from the Mastery). With CS on the shorter 4 sec CD it would be less likely to have the PvP issue the original Holy damage CS had in 3.0 (pre-Wrath).
On Holy:
Regarding healing spells: huh?
Flash of Light is a fast, inefficient spell? That will require heavy re-work. To my understanding it's been, bar-none, the most efficient spell of any healer since vanilla. It's sidelined in Wrath as efficiency is unnecessary and small heals are ineffective.
Holy Light as the medium heal is (again, to my understanding) heavily inefficient in regards to mana. I think once in BC we did a comparison and HL was the least efficient heal of any class, setting Paladins on both ends of the spectrum. Only due to scaling (+% Int talent and Kings), stacking Int gems, and how DP functions has HL spam been effective despite the inefficiency. Which is good, since huge frequent heals have been required in Wrath.
I was expecting a mid-range heal between the two, not a new, larger and slower spell above Holy Light.
Final and largest "huh" is Beacon. They intimate that Beacon will only function to replicate Flash. First, I certainly hope the timer is extended (1 min default, 1.5 glyphed) just to clone FoLs feels harsh, especially compared to a 30min SS. It could drive a Holydin back to raid healing in that you could Beacon tank and spam FoL on the raid. Except FoL is supposed to become the inefficient fast heal, so why would you want to be spamming it?
I'm sure they'll work it out, it just seems that all of Paladin healing requires re-work. No small task.
Prot:
Injecting thought and consideration would be good. Ret at least has variety in that our attacks have differing CD, so a true "rotation" is something like 3+ minutes long. Prot can easily uses the same rotation every single time, single target or AOE. While Blood DK Tanks have a set single-target rotation they follow, they at least alter for AOE situations. Variety could make Prot tanking more fun and interactive.
I'm glad they realize Paladins will involve a lot of work (many passive talents - they want to chuck those, remember) and are starting now. I always shudder when they tackle us late. Those patches that sit on PTR for 3 months and get a Paladin change in the last week before they go live, and subsequently require a nerf on live, drive me crazy. There is hope for proper testing and balancing so they don't have to arouse the ire inspired by nerfbat after making it active. Nerf during testing, please, that's why you test.
Rock: "We're sub-standard DPS. Nerf Paper, Scissors are fine."
Paper: "OMG, WTF, Scissors!"
Scissors: "Rock is OP and Paper are QQers. We need PvP buffs."
Keep in mind they are trying to make healing in Cataclysm be less about always healing from x%-100% on pretty much every spell. In the case where you get much less overheal and don't have people at 100% as often crit becomes more valuable on the merits of "more healing done" rather than currently where it is valuable for "effect x on crit".
Fair enough that hasn't really happened before and it is certainly not the case in Wrath but if they can manage their intention then bonus crit isn't that bad.
Pretty underwhelming preview. I almost wish they'd held it back until Friday and gave us a bit more.
There's very little here that indicates anything will be changing from the perspective of Holy. Cleanse is being changed to...be exactly like it is now (what?). No word about Holy Paladin regeneration mechanics - I have to assume Divine Plea and SoW are going to get nerfed somehow, or stacking int is still going to be the ideal solution, especially with every pally getting CS (though it would be amusing to have a 4.5s mana cooldown).
I'm reading the Beacon of Light changes to be that it only works with Flash of Light and not any other heals. I don't understand how they think this will mechanically change how the Holy Paladins plays unless Flash of Light is actually less than half the efficiency of the 'efficient' heal (in which case it would be extremely difficult to justify using FoL in the first place). If the values are close, we'll simply be doing FoL spam (maybe more slowly) rather than HL spam. One possibility is for Beacon to transfer less than 100%, but if FoL with Beacon is less efficient than the alternative, it would be very difficult to justify using Beacon. I realize Beacon is probably rather overpowered (especially in an environment with little to no overhealing) but it's hard to imagine a situation besides Beacon being a staple just like now or Beacon being an extremely niche spell. I really think they need to rework it somehow - maybe instead of transferring the heal, the Beacon target always receives a FoL worth of healing regardless of heal used? That would roughly maintain the efficiency relationships and allow BoL to be used both in a throughput and efficiency mode.
Healing Hands looks somewhat lackluster too. I hope at the very least it will be changed to be targeted rather than actually originating at the Paladin (perhaps as a Holy talent?). The 'short range' part also is a concern considering this is the only group healing spell that we know of for Holy Paladins. Since it's also on a relatively long cooldown and is the -only- group healing option, it doesn't sound like an interesting choice for Holy (is group getting hit? Hit button, go back to doing what you were for the next 10-15 GCDs).
Guardian of Ancient Kings sounds like a mostly useless but fun spell for Holy, though I can see its uses. I have to wonder about yet another long cooldown, though, combined with DS, BoP, DiSac, HoP, Aura Mastery... It feels like we're collecting 3m cooldowns rather than any real change to our playstyle. I presume GoAK is our answer to healing on the move/healing while disabled, which is to say that it's a long CD HoT.
I don't really understand the niche Blinding Shield is supposed to fill. No cooldown listed, so it could be rather overpowered barring diminishing returns for PvP. I was wondering if it was our interrupt, but you need a shield, making it difficult to use for Ret - who likely needs it the most, given that Blizzard indicated in the Druid preview that they expect melee DPS to be able to interrupt. It sounds like a neat ability, but I'm not really sure what need it's filling (then again, being cool might be sufficient if everything else falls together).
The Sacred Shield change is nice, but it removes another interaction from the healer, instead essentially becoming a damage reduction buff. I'm guessing this is mostly for non-Holy specs. Not directly related, but presumably the FoL-SS interaction(s) will be changed as well.
The Critical Heal mastery is probably the least interesting of the special healer mastery abilities. About the only good thing is that it (should) scale better than the other mastery choices. The downside is that Holy Paladins may again become very strong healers without the healing being very interesting (alternatively, the mastery will be balanced for the endgame and be very weak early on).
All in all, the preview seemed pretty contradictory. They said they wanted Ret to become less of a defensive DPS spec, but there's nothing here that seems to work in that direction - if anything, it's the opposite, with Holy Shock becoming baseline, Healing Hands currently seeming to favor melee, and effectively permanent Sacred Shield. Nothing in the preview suggests that Holy's playstyle will change, nor is there any indication that Holy's strength/weaknesses will change besides the vague allusion that Holy needs more tools (actually, we have a lot of tools; they're just on very long cooldowns).
My impression for holy paladins is they're wanting to us to be healers at melee range, primarily healing a single tank and providing additional healing to the melee dps.
Seal of Wisdom will provide unmatched mana regeneration as Blizzard's resurrects mana pool management in raids. Judgement, SoR, and now crusader strike will provide a steady stream of SoW procs.
Our tank healing will become less spikey with Sacred Shield's change. Beacon of Light will constantly feed a potent critical HoT effect to the tank from every SS active for each paladin in the raid.
As we're meleeing the boss to fill our mana pool, we can provide added healing to the melee dps with our new Healing Hands.
When we're not doing any of the above, we're spamming our "go-to" Holy Light heal.
My impression for holy paladins is they're wanting to us to be healers at melee range, primarily healing a single tank and providing additional healing to the melee dps.
Seal of Wisdom will provide unmatched mana regeneration as Blizzard's resurrects mana pool management in raids. Judgement, SoR, and now crusader strike will provide a steady stream of SoW procs.
Our tank healing will become less spikey with Sacred Shield's change. Beacon of Light will constantly feed a potent critical HoT effect to the tank from every SS active for each paladin in the raid.
As we're meleeing the boss to fill our mana pool, we can provide added healing to the melee dps with our new Healing Hands.
Unless I'm misunderstanding your second point - it's incorrect:
We want to increase the duration of Sacred Shield to 30 minutes and keep the limit to one target.
Yeah my point is retribution and protection paladins (much to my chagrin) do not keep their sacred shields up. Changing the mechanic to a buff will provide holy paladins additional sacred shields in the raid to toss a FoL on and channel the HoT effect onto the tank. This healing strategy will be more significant now because FoL has an extremely high chance to crit on sacred shields and our crits will be larger.
Yeah my point is retribution and protection paladins (much to my chagrin) do not keep their sacred shields up. Changing the mechanic to a buff will provide holy paladins additional sacred shields in the raid to toss a FoL on and channel the HoT effect onto the tank. This healing strategy will be more significant now because FoL has an extremely high chance to crit on sacred shields and our crits will be larger.
It currently doesn't channel the hot effect over beacon - so there's no evidence that it will in the future. FoL has to hit a SS for it to channel, whereas beacon is what heals the secondary target - so no hot is applied.
More so than any of the other class previews, and as Blizzard warned earlier, the Paladin preview is difficult to get an impression of how we'll be playing the class at lvl85.
Holy seems to be undergoing a complete re-work re. spell balancing from the sounds of things.
The real changes for Ret and Prot are still work-in-progress, all the preview gives is more acknowledgement of the issues that they're trying to fix; both have fairly brainless rotations, for differing reasons, and Ret is a little too defensive (although 30min SS, with Art of War and Holy Shock back to back seem like a powerful combo). It seems we'll need to wait and see what changes are brought in to fix these issues before we can start champing at the bit.
"It's not a pet." While that may be true now, we haven't even started the beta yet. Somebody is going to ask for it, Blizzard will consider it, and then it will be a pet. Temporary at first, permanent with talents or a glyph.
If they made it a short duration proc like the Val'kyr and gave it an internal cooldown, that would keep it out of pet realm. The fact you can summon it at will means that one day we'll be able to keep them summoned.
04/06/10, 7:50 PM
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