Holy Paladin Mechanics Change

[Szordrin]

As some of you know, with the massive amount of intellect that a holy paladin can stack (gaining SP, int, and Crit), MP5 has become something of an after thought. Even so, there are Holy Paladins that can now choose how they want to heal, reactionary or proactive. In my opinion, this allows Holy Paladins the option to really have a choice in how they want to heal instead of spamming Flash of Light non-stop.

Here's some examples: I (and I believe Cerryan, probably more as it's mainstream) spam Holy Light because my crit sits around 45% in my PVE gear and spec, my mana pool is around 23k, and Divine Plea (even though it has been nerfed) is enough to keep my mana around for the duration of most fights. Rarely do I ever need to use a mana potion but getting there was rough during the itemization change.

I know that there are some Holy Paladins that stick to Flash of Light now that we have sacred shield, that's fine too. As long as you keep the tank up I don't see a problem with it.

And of course, no matter which way you heal, everyone should be using Holy Shock as it is quite an amazing spell now, especially with the glyph.

To the point: Blizzard has announced that they are going to tweek the mechanics of Holy Paladins in order to make MP5 more important to the class. To paladins who have spent the time changing their gear set from BC to Wrath with the importance of Crit, this is a huge impact and could possibly push us all back to using Flash of Light. Frankly, I dont see how it would stay Holy Light as MP5 still is inferior on the items now compared to the mana regained through Illumination on HL.

My opinion: I'm not happy with this prospect of a change. I don't even know what will happen so I am staying hopeful... like, adding to Illumination and saying that for every % of crit you get so much MP5. That wouldn't screw up the majority of the gear I've gotten from my 25 man raids because.. to be honest, I have maybe 60mp5.

I have this awful feeling that we (Holy Paladins) are going to be pigeon holed back into the way we had to heal in BC, where all we could ever do was touch the Tank and on special occasions have a different target.

Maybe I'm wrong. I have no clue. But it's certainly something I want to discuss with the fellow Holy Paladins here on TNG.

[Zethrin]

I'm gonna be annoyed if this MP5 change converts us back into FL spambots, and especially if happens before I get back into WoW. I was looking forward to being able to stack INT and throw HLs at 80 and not have to worry about mana. Spamming Flash throughout BC got boring pretty fast.

Though either way, wouldn't Beacon at least ensure we can't be pigeon-holed back into the single-target main tank healer mode?

[Szordrin]

It is and isn't. The HL Glyph works better in trash and AoE damage than Beacon does.

At least, that's how I feel.

[Villayna]

Well, between beacon, shield, useful holy shock, and the HL glyph, there isn't much they can do to make holy paladins as boring as TBC.

I still change up between HL and FoL. If anything I use FoL more now than I did in TBC.

[Lailinarel]

I find that on my pally I preform best by weaving my Holy lights in with my FoL's. Flash is still incredibly efficient and extremely effective with Sacred Shield, and with a beacon on the tank I can keep up my Light's Grace buff by tossing out holy lights onto off tanks and raid members, thus keeping my heals up on the tank, while keeping the buff up that allows me to 'Oh Shit' heal the crap out of the tank if he suddenly gets hit hard.

A great example of this is in motion is being assigned to the OT for Emalon 25. When a lightning nova goes off I can throw a holy light or two at the raid and keep heals on the OT, FoL a few times here and there and be content with the way that the world works.

I'm not a big fan of the idea of needing to re-itemize my gear, but at the same time, I'm only in naxx 10 gear on my pally so it's not a terribly huge deal for me.

[Skaadvik]

I heard about this, and I'm not excited at all about it. I was geared (in a literal and figurative sense) at the beginning of LK for FoL spam, but since the last patch I switched over to Int stacking and (mostly) HL spam. Until now, I didn't keep or roll on heavy Mp5 gear when I was winning or wearing crit gear, respectively. If this turns out, I'll roll with it, but I really like where I'm at right now. I have between 25 and 28k mana self buffed depending on the gear I'm wearing, and like Szor said, i currently have enough going on to keep my mana pool up. The Jewelcrafting trinket makes a big difference, too. In long fights it can effectively increase my mana pool by 5k or even more.

[Keraph]

I also still most definitely use Flash when it suits my purposes better, though as Szo said I am indeed heavy on the Holy Light. Save General Vezaxx, I've run out of mana during a boss fight like, 5 times since the start of my Wrath raiding. That's -really- not a lot. It's nothing like Burning Crusade healing, when I really WAS a flashbot, and more or less forgot about the existence of Holy Light save for the rare occasion when I just needed a brutally large heal. Holy Paladins are no longer the one-button bots they used to be. They CAN be, and if you play one like that you'll probably still heal pretty well, but we have at least enough options now that if pressed to our full capabilities, we can do a lot more than we used to.

As far as the MP5 change goes, that's not the only thing they're planning to do with holy pallies, so it's not as easy as just saying "MP5 sucks". Blizzard seems to want to shift us away from our 'tank healer only' focus, and I guess give us more versatility? Personally, I'm happy with where I am right now, but one of the things they mentioned in a blue post was about making it so that we could also be decent raid healers, making it so that if a raid has more than two holy paladins, healing for the raid wouldn't suffer. Depending on how they do this, I won't mind it (TS tends to have like 3 or 4 paladin healers in our 25 Ulduars on a regular basis), but we'll have to see what plans they have. As far as MP5 goes, they have mentioned at least increasing the amount of MP5 on gear with it, for the same item level cost, making it a bit more effective. I'm still HATING the SP/Haste/MP5 gear that seems to be all over Ulduar plate, but more MP5 would make SP/Crit/MP5 gear pretty lovely, imo.

[Szordrin]

Right.

I had forgotten to mention that Haste + Mp5 is a little illogical in my opinion. Mp5 will tick every five seconds, where as haste will speed up our casts. That's basically why I see crit as being more effective as a mana return since... right now my HL speed is 1.3-1.4 seconds and Flash varies between 1.1 and 1.0 depending on how my trinkets activate, thus I regain mana per cast rather than a consistant amount over 5 seconds.

So.. then where will haste go especially within our spec? To make us focused on Mp5 or giving more importance to it definitely (in my opinion) will take back from the focus of haste and Judgements of the Pure will be.. meh. I only see this causing more mana issues than before based around itemization.

I mean, for this to REALLY work, Paladins would need -alot- of Mp5 on their gear.

Maybe I am crunching my numbers wrong but it just seems.. so backwards.

[Keraph]

Paladin

-Judgement of Light: Now heals for 2% of the attacker's maximum health instead of a variable amount based on the spell power and attack power of the judging paladin.
-Lay on Hands: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 10/20% instead of increasing the target's armor.
-Sacred Shield: When a paladin casts Flash of Light on a target with this buff, they also now place a heal over time effect on the target, healing that target for 100% of the Flash of Light amount over 12 seconds.

Talents
Holy
-Beacon of Light: The healing amount on the Beacon of Light target is now based on the total healing done (including over-healing) instead of the effective healing done. Radius increased to 60 yards. Multiple Paladins can now have this active on the same target. Buff indicating a player is within range of the Beacon target is no longer displayed.
-Divine Intellect: This talent now gives 2/4/6/8/10% increased intellect instead of 3/6/9/12/15%.
-Illumination: This talent now returns 30% of the mana cost of the spell instead of 60%.


So there's the significant healing-related Paladin changes from the new patch, since nobody's brought it up yet in this thread. I'm a little bit worried for a few reasons. Now, I definitely like the idea of having some sort of HoT, and the Beacon buff is great as well. What worries me though is that generally, tank healing involves consistent, heavy heals, and even if Beacon now gives full healing to the target (in this case, the tank) regardless of overheal, I generally don't raid heal using holy light. It's slow, and most of my healing targets don't even need that much healing. So that means that at best, the tank is getting healed by flash spam, which isn't always enough. Obviously there will be situations where the tank is still going to need my full focus, and at that point the mana loss from 5% less intellect and the nerfed mana regen on illumination is going to cut my sustainability by a notable amount. I'll have to play around a bit on the PTR to get a better feel for how this is affecting me, but like I said, I'm worried. Any other thoughts?

[Lailinarel]

While it might hurt your sustainability, consider the fact that with 3 beacons on the tank the amount of actual healing you need to do will likely drop, granted this is in theory because a lot of variables come into play, beacon uptime and so forth, but I think the changes leave a lot of room for good players to make it work.

[Szordrin]

So there's the significant healing-related Paladin changes from the new patch, since nobody's brought it up yet in this thread. I'm a little bit worried for a few reasons. Now, I definitely like the idea of having some sort of HoT, and the Beacon buff is great as well. What worries me though is that generally, tank healing involves consistent, heavy heals, and even if Beacon now gives full healing to the target (in this case, the tank) regardless of overheal, I generally don't raid heal using holy light. It's slow, and most of my healing targets don't even need that much healing. So that means that at best, the tank is getting healed by flash spam, which isn't always enough. Obviously there will be situations where the tank is still going to need my full focus, and at that point the mana loss from 5% less intellect and the nerfed mana regen on illumination is going to cut my sustainability by a notable amount. I'll have to play around a bit on the PTR to get a better feel for how this is affecting me, but like I said, I'm worried. Any other thoughts?

You missed something that wasnt under the paladin buffs however. Now that we're going to have more emphasis on MP5, they are increasing the amount of it on gear by 25%. Also, replenishment regains 1% of TOTAL mana instead of .25% of base(i believe?). Huge buff for Holy Paladins with replenishment in their group. We can still stack int and regain a ton of mana through raid buffs. It puts more importance on how a raid is created but.. I think Bliz thought this through a little more than I expected. I'll give my word once I test the PTR tho.

[Zethrin]

If I'm not mistaken, replenishment has actually been nerfed from 0.25% every second to 1% of mana over 5 seconds, which is effectively 0.20% every second...

Replenishment has according to Wowhead (http://www.wowhead.com/?spell=57669) always been based on maximum mana.

Wowinsider has linked to a Holy Paly blog (http://iamapaladin.blogspot.com/2009/06/ptr-32-initial-impression-for-holy.html) that claims we're the worst healer in raids now on the PTR, but I can't tell if that's just QQ that we're no longer effortlessly mana efficient or a serious concern.

[Szordrin]

Ah, if that's true than I have misread...

And then yah, I would believe us being the worst now.