I was excited to log in to WoW after patching (I didn’t like the streaming patch) to see if anything changed for holy paladins.
Near as I can tell, two things have changed. And also, I don’t know if something is intended or not, but good gravy, there’s an interesting mechanic to talk about.
1) Infusion of Light still reduces the cast time of Flash of Light by 1.5 seconds. But now it ALSO, as advertised, reduces the cast time on Holy Light by 1.5 seconds. So your FoL is instant, which isn’t in the tooltip (we are told the tooltips are borked), but Holy Light’s cast time reduction works, where it did not previously.
Edit: Wow, I need to play less beta and get more sleep. I was wrong. I read that I was going from a 2.3 second cast to a 1.8 second cast as a 1.5s cast time reduction. What I am actually seeing, however, is the Speed of Light haste bringing it down that 0.5s.
Sleep deprivation is bad, mkay?
2) Rule of Law in the first tier of the ret tree has been changed from a 3-point talent to a 2-point talent. The tooltip now reads:
Increases the critical chance of your Crusader Strike, Holy Shock and Word of Glory by 5/10%.
That’s 5% crit gone from Holy Shock and Word of Glory, unless they’ve changed the talent to be 7%/15%. I can’t tell; my crit rating is terribly low at 82.
And the interesting mechanic is this…
As long as you have a beacon on someone and even one charge of Holy Power, you can heal that person for free indefinitely.
Check it out.
Edit: I’m totally late to the party on this, btw. ElitistJerks was talking about this the other day.
Edit: Also, guild ranks are saving! I don’t know if all the associated rank stuff is being saved, but I was able to promote people in my guild to officer without, you know, promoting them to GM first!
Hahaha, that’s so cool! I think it’s working as intended, but it won’t be very effective unless you’re (almost) out of mana and need the free heals from Word of Glory. Likely, things are going downhill so fast by then that it really won’t matter too much. Cool, nonetheless!
How is Holy Light with the new reduced cast time and haste buffs? Does the shorter cast time make it more viable (or rather, “better”) to use in dungeons?
Kaboomski – No, Holy Light still sucks unless your Holy Shock crits and gives you Infusion of Light. Since Holy Light is still a 2.3+ cast time for me at 82 with my 1000+ haste… hang on. I think I might have done my math wrong. And I can’t double-check, because the beta realms are currently down.
I feel like it was a 1.3s cast with IoL, Speed of Light and JotP up, but I can’t remember. I’ll check ASAP, though.
But really, Holy Light’s healing is pretty crappy. No one JUST takes 6k damage anymore (which is why the WoG thing may have been intended or even just overlooked and then they went “meh, who cares?”).
I’d rather use my haste from Speed of Light to cast Divine Light, to be honest.
Damn, that’s pretty bad. I sincerely hope they give Holy Light a bit more power, because if what Blizzard says is true, it’s not their intention that we would have to cast Divine Light all the time.
Can I just say that I’m glad that Shield of the Righteous is back? I’ve felt so awkward while it was away on vacation. I’m quite anxious try out its conjunction with Holy Shield, combined w/ the change to Consecration.
Kaboomski – I guess it really depends on what the spell hits for at 85, although not using Holy Light much from 80-84 and then expecting miracles at 85 is just… well, naive, I think.
Dayden – It sounds like some neat synergy between your moves. You use Shield of Righteousness and then that puts up Holy Shield for you, based on how much Holy Power you have, which is now generated by Crusader Strike OR Hammer of the Righteous, which share a cooldown for prot. Right? haha, a little complicated, but it sounds fun. I’m not sure I like Consecrate only being 10 seconds out of every 30, but hey, that’s definitely not one of my key abilities.
I can’t believe they put a cooldown on Bear Swipe! Six seconds? SLAP IN THE FACE. ;)
How are you doing in dungeons? Are you going splat? You should let me know when you’ll be on during the weekend; we should run something together.
BTW, you’re promoted to officer on beta. I hope it sticks properly. :)
I’m still going to reserve final judgement until I try it myself, but while I am anxious to try it out, I think it’ll feel clunky. They changed HS to be passive so that tanks wouldn’t have to worry about keeping it up. But really all they did was change us having to hit HS, to hitting SotR every 3 stack to keep the shield up. Consecration will just be used for my tank and spanks.
I think most tanks won’t want to pop their SotR until they’ve got a 3 stack of HP, so it leaves our basic rotation to be CS, Judge, (filler, filler). CS, Judge, wait. CS, SotR, Judge, repeat.
Current prots have a busy, but easy enough rotation w/ 969. They’ve taken 2 of the 5 abilities off, so it’s going to feel like we have less to do. I’ll also need to get used to using Holy Wrath in my rotation.
As far as my tanking experience thus far, I’ve made it as far as the 2nd boss in BRC (no one could really grasp the beam mechanic), and toyed w/ the Neptulon encounter in Throne of the Tides. While I’m impressed w/ the ramped difficulty/complexity, I think the overall damage may need to come down. T10 geared tanks are taking a whooping, whats going to happen to people that leveled fresh to 80 and are just wearing blues/quest greens?