We have it good, right now. T7’s holy pally bonuses are pretty rockin’. Paraphrasing:
(2) Set: Your Holy Shock has an additional 10% chance to crit.
(4) Set: Your Holy Light cost is reduced by 5%
But the T8 ones blow. A lot.
Here’s what I wrote on the Paladin forum:
I have to say that I continue to be underwhelmed by the Tier 8 Holy Paladin set bonuses.
The latest change makes Sacred Shield’s tooltip effectively read like this, when wearing 4/5 Tier 8:
Each time the target takes damage they gain a Sacred Shield, absorbing 500 damage and increasing the paladin’s chance to critically hit with Flash of Light by 50% for up to 6 sec. They cannot gain this effect more than once every 4 sec. Lasts 30 sec.
So 7 hits get partially absorbed by Sacred Shield instead of 5, when you have the 4-piece set bonus. Well, that’s better than 10% more damage absorption, IMHO, but it’s still not *good*, especially given that we can only cast Sacred Shield on a single target now.
A bonus is something additional that we should want to work for, as I see it. I was having bad luck on valorous drops for T7, so I saved up and bought my shoulders and pants because I really wanted the bonus. A 5% reduced mana cost on Holy Light, in conjunction with my Glyph of Seal of Wisdom was great — 10% off the cost of Holy Light. And the two piece bonus was great, too, 10% extra chance to crit on Holy Shock, a much-maligned, rarely-used talent from the old days of pre-Burning Crusade. It gave holy paladins a reason to use it again, apart from Infusion of Light.
I don’t want to lose either of these good bonuses for:
(2) Set: Your Holy Shock critical heals now also place a periodic healing effect on the target, healing for 15% of the Holy Shock’s heal amount over 9 sec.
(4) Set: Your Sacred Shield can now trigger its effect every 4 sec instead of every 6.
Honestly, I don’t know why I would bother to work towards those. What benefit do I gain when I lose 10% of my crit on Holy Shock or 5% lower cost on Holy Light? By “upgrading” my gear, I will effectively lose 10% crit on my best mobile healing spell and be paying 5% more mana on a spell I use extremely frequently, given the amount of tank damage going out. I’ve tested out Hodir, Kologarn, Iron Council and Flame Leviathan on the PTR (although FL doesn’t matter for the purposes of this post) and Steelbreaker in particular, hits like a truck. I’m basically spamming Holy Light just to try to keep up with the damage on the tank, wondering when I can afford to lose 50% of my healing to Divine Plea or when I can afford to judge really quickly to get my haste bonus up. I may be over-using Holy Light to an extent, but the incoming tank damage can be incredible, especially if a mob like Steelbreaker has even a part of his foot inside his rune circle. Fusion Punch packs a wallop and huge heals become mandatory, as I see it.
So I honestly would recommend changing the 2 piece to be the same as the current T7 4 piece and leave that as it is — 5% reduction of cost to Holy Light. That would encourage me to get two pieces of T8 as soon as possible, and would have the additional bonus that my transition between T7 and T8 will be relatively seamless and painless. My T8 won’t sit in the bank while I wait to get another piece for the bonus, because I’ll already have it via the 4-piece bonus of T7.
And while I appreciate you recognizing that 10% more damage absorption to Sacred Shield was a weak bonus and you’ve made steps to correct that, I beg you to reconsider that change as well. Leave the shield bonuses to the priests. A paladin’s core talents are fast, efficient heals that benefit largely from crit. Maybe something along the lines of:
(4) Set: Your Flash of Light and Holy Shock critical heals grant your Holy Light spell an additional 5% chance to critically heal on the next cast.
or
(4) Set: Your Holy Light cast time is reduced by .5 seconds. (Does not stack with Light’s Grace.)
or
(4) Set: Your Holy Shock critical heals have a % chance to refresh your Divine Plea cooldown.
or
(4) Set: Your Holy Shock critical heals have a 10% chance to cause your next Holy Light cast to cost 0 mana. (45-second internal cooldown?)
I’m not asking for holy paladins to be buffed like crazy. I’m just asking for the developers to look critically at the bonuses they’re implementing for our T8 armor. Something useful is all we’re looking for, something that reads like something we want instead of something that looks like the tooltip on a glyph we would want to avoid.
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Anyone else have any good T8 2/4-piece bonus suggestions?