Well, MMO-Champion is reporting that the previous beta build, 13183, will not make it to beta servers and has been replaced with 13189, which has a couple of things that affect us holy paladins.
Holy
- Speed of Light has been revamped to only affect Holy Radiance – Speed of Light – Grants 1/2/3% spell haste and reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 30 sec. Casting Holy Radiance increases your movement speed by 20/40/60% for 4 sec. /
- Clarity of Purpose now reduces cast time by 0.3 sec at Rank 2, down from 0.35 sec.
I don’t really know what to make of the Speed of Light changes. It feels as though Blizzard just removed almost all the synergy in our tree.
Speed of Light (3/3) currently gives you 30% spell haste to Flash of Light, Holy Light and Divine Light after using Holy Shock along with the speed boost and lower Holy Radiance cooldown.
While an extra 3% spell haste overall is arguably better than 30% haste to three spells after use of a fourth spell (Holy Shock), it now feels as though we no longer have any spells that work really well together. Or almost none. Assuming the Infusion of Light proc from a crit Holy Shock still reduces the cast times of Holy Light and Divine Light by 1.5 seconds, that’s still one bit of synergy between the spells.
But what else is there? Nothing, really.
Discipline Priests get Evangelism and Archangel and Atonement. If I could freaking Exorcism to heal, I would think seriously about Denounce. That would be some synergy. Holy Shock, Denounce proc, Exorcism on the mob, healing a nearby party or raid member for the amount of the Exorcism. Note that this isn’t actually something I want, but it would be some synergy between our spells.
Similarly, look at the holy priests and Chakra. That talent is the definition of synergy, where one talent (Chakra) gets popped and depending on what state you enter, the spells specific to that state are improved.
What do we get? Infusion of Light (which is a crit proc) increases the cast time of two spells by 1.5 seconds.
There’s also Daybreak, I suppose, since it procs off the casts of FoL, HL and DL and leads back to HS. But that doesn’t compare at all to the priest talents.
Anyways. I seem to have gone and rambled. That’s a shocker, eh? ;)
The Clarity of Purpose change is definitely there for rets or prots and is probably there to nerf PVP paladins of other specs to prevent them from healing. Holy will always take all three points, but .35 seconds isn’t substantially different from .5 seconds, so whoever was taking 2/3 Clarity of Purpose was benefitting from saving a point. By changing it to .3 seconds, that adds a total of .2 seconds to the cast times of HL and DL, so 2.7 at base. More time casting means that’s more time in which you can be silenced, which leads to being counterspelled or silenced or otherwise locked out of your entire spell kit for the next 6 seconds or whatever. Which feels like an eternity.
Then I have to comment on this:
Retribution
- Zealotry now requires 3 Holy Power to use, but does not consume Holy Power.
So immediately after gaining 3 Holy Power, a ret can then beat your face in with a 3HP Templar’s Verdict, then Crusader Strike and get another 3HP and then Templar’s Verdict you in the face again! For ret pallies, this is awesome.
I mention it because I want to be able to say “this is awesome” about some of our changes or some of our spells.
I’m disappointed with the overall lack of synergy in our tree, the lack of awesomeness about our 31pt talent and I keep waiting for it to get better. This build (assuming it brings with it the previous changes) will be okay, but it’s not The Build Where Everything Is Fixed. And I’m starting to be concerned that things just will not be fixed, not for some time. I’d love to be wrong, but I kind of don’t think I am.
- Speed of Light has been revamped to only affect Holy Radiance – Speed of Light – Grants 1/2/3% spell haste and reduces the cooldown of Holy Radiance by 30 sec. Casting Holy Radiance increases your movement speed by 20/40/60% for 4 sec. /
- Clarity of Purpose now reduces cast time by 0.3 sec at Rank 2, down from 0.35 sec.
I honestly don’t know what to think about the new changes. Before this, I may have had to pop cooldowns (Wings, then Favor, possibly Aura Mastery and Sacrifice) on 85 Heroic trash to keep the tank alive, but it was fun to maximize my Speed of Light haste increase to speed up Divine Light. This is both a loss in throughput and complexity.
Now? Passive increase benefitting a Tier 1 Talent. 3% haste for three points? Shadow Priests get this in Tier 1 of their tree, but haste speeds up their dots. Paladins currently have the least value for haste when compared to all healers: we have no hots that will improve from it. Take a Holy Priest: having enough haste to add another tick to renew increases its healing by 25% and the upfront heal afforded via talents.
It is hard to see this vision of what they imagine a Holy Paladin doing well.
It’s not really surprising that Blizzard are having trouble getting Holy Paladins right, considering that they blew up the previous healing style completely and started over from scratch. What boggles me is that they really seem to have no overall vision for what they want this class to look like and are just randomly flailing right now. For instance, they introduce the holy power mechanic but haven’t really done anything with it (really? One holy spell that works with holy power? That’s the best you can do, Blizz?). Our mastery ability is passive, completely unrelated to anything else that we do and with the default UI you can’t even tell that it’s doing anything at all. If they take away what little synergy we have, then all we have left is a collection of random spells in plate armour. Yay.
Speed of Light is one of the things I like about the ‘new’ Paladin healing box.
Correct me if I’m wrong on this, but wasn’t the chief goal of the talent tree pruning getting rid of passive talents? At least in its current form SoL provides some interactivity. This new version just strikes me as — and I hate to use this word — ‘meh.’
One other fabulous thing about this new Beta build is:
http://wow.joystiq.com/2010/10/15/city-tabards-giving-reputation-in-latest-beta-build/
I wonder if that can help me achieve my goal of getting Crusader or possibly net me an Elekk. That would be neat!
@KURN
Honestly all the Holy Pallys are stacking Haste so they NERF IT, surprize!!!
I keep telling everyone if you go Crit like the intended vision of Blizzard we will be better off as they will then unnerf Haste. They want us to value CRIT, if you stack Haste in favor of other stats they neft it to make up for it.
Now if everyone was stacking Haste and Crit at the same time we would not have gotten a nerf to Haste. Really no one listens to me.
So far I’ve done alright. I haven’t had the opportunity to get back into ICC yet but it seems like the “old group” is itching to try out raiding once again. So hopefully this coming week I’ll get back in there.
So far, I have been having some fun. Dungeons are a lot more fun, but everyone wants hLK25 parses, etc. to be the judge of things. I did do a few attempts at ToC10 and that was okay, but one thing I have noticed is that our heals cannot fix stupid now. People in the pug just stood in fires and died, or grouped up when they had the burning bile debuff or didn’t remove their poison debuff fast enough. Mana wise I was holding up perfectly fine.
I have also found a great use for GoLoD. Instead of looking at LoD as an AoE heal, it’s actually a very strong BoL heal. You *have* to hit at least 5 people to make it worthwhile, but 5+ and the healing only gets better and better. This is how I see it. GoLoD reduces the effectiveness by 20%. Looking at it from a BoL standpoint assume LoD heals (and probably overheal too if you use it the way I do) for around 50k. BoL xfers 25k. That’s a pretty good tank heal. GoLoD will then heal for 40k instead and BoL xfers 20k. Using LoD glyphed, on cd, is 20k heal every 20 sec. That’s pretty good. But before you think I’ve gone bonkers and I’m batshit crazy.. that’s likely only 25 man numbers. Glyphed, LoD is xfering about 1950 per target I hit. So if I hit 5 targets, that’s a 10k heal. Again, the more targets I hit, the better it gets. It also counts towards pets. So if your 10 man has a few melee, and a few pets (hunters/locks) then you’ll likely see better mileage. All in all, with some good positioning and preparation, you could turn LoD into a really potent tank heal. Something to help out when HS is on cd or your HP is low.
That said.. everyone seems to be surprised that throughput is drastically lower. I’m not that surprised considering BoL got neutered. Tank swapping fights (Toravon, Gormock) are particularly troublesome because you’d have to swap BoL to keep generating HP. And that’s probably my second largest concern in the new healing era. With a simple 1 tank fight, HP generation is fine. In a tank swapping fight on the level of the two mentioned above, HP gen is going to suffer, or you’re just going to suffer from overload of swapping BoL each time. So that is a drawback. Again, something like say.. icehowl, or saurfang, even festergut are fine. LDW, Gormock, etc. are problematic.
And the largest complaint I have.. is the overall feel. It’s too slow (not cast times slow) HP generation slow. I have 2 HP, HS comes off cd, I hit HS followed by WoG. Depending on how fast I hit WoG, it may not be a 3 HP WoG but a 2 HP WoG. I don’t like that. Not one bit. It seems slow as molasses for our procs to occur even on daybreak. A lot of times I’ll follow up a HL with a HS, and daybreak procs from the HL but doesn’t get used in my HS. Now I have daybreak up with HS on cd. I hate that. HATE HATE HATE that. The other thing that I downloaded, was a mod called holy trinity. I disabled all the cooldown monitoring it comes with since I have another mod for that, and just have the moveable HP bar tracker. That thing, on its own, is amazing. I now have it right by my grid and I went from not noticing eternal glory procs at all, to now knowing when it procs. The single largest improvement in my healing rotation/feel/effectiveness I would have to say comes from that mod alone. I also feel that it updates faster than the stock blizz ui bar. As well, I play with blizz unit frames, grid for raid frames, and my UI scale set to lowest. The stock HP tracker is so small and not in my field of view, that I miss HP generation and EG procs all that time. This mod is definitely a life saver.
All that said.. I find it fun, I think it’s a move in the right direction and if the only problem is throughput, that can easily be adjusted for. The current beta update doesn’t make much sense to me, but I’m sure we’ll see other talents etc. fill in the loss of 30% haste lost on SoL, much like we saw IoL gain HS crit which was removed from RoL. Mechanically I find it a bit slow, it’s not as “tight” as I’d like it to be. Mana wise I haven’t had any real issues (yet, again, haven’t done ICC yet), and BoL on tank swaps.. I just don’t know. That’s not smooth, and not helpful to be healing the second tank without BoL up. If I had to point fingers, I’d say HP generation is not fast enough! I would allow HS on BoL to gen 2 HP, I would allow FoL when cast on targets not affected by BoL to gen 1 HP, and I’d have LoD gen 1 HP as well. I’m rather optimistic, and so far having fun.
@FALLON
Remember the original Mastery that was CRIT and after all the QQ they changed it to temp shields?
Guess what the vision is for Holy Pally?
We screwed ourselves by QQ on Crit, now it costs more and Haste gets nerfed as we started to stack it. We screwed ourselves.
They want Holy Pally to stay the same, slow huge heals or fast small heals and small AOE heals. Now that Mastery has changed it is tough to pull that off.
This is also why DP stays the way it is now, stacking Haste ensures DP stays the way it is now. DP was to force us to be more efficient not to spam smaller heals like we did in WoLK.
But do not listen to me, not like I did not say do not stack Haste.
@Rahmiel
How much crit to you have?
It affects all your healing spells including HS and WoG. Haste does nothing for these and you cast them the most on cooldown.
I know everyone hates crit but that is not going to change how we heal to Blizzard, we are always going to be a Crit based healer, just like Elemental is Crit based. We are not going to be a Disc Priest based healer.
We do not need more HP as if all heals were bigger accross as a whole then it would not be a problem, but stacking Haste to cast faster lowers each cast amount by killing crit off.
If we keep stacking more Haste I bet we see another nerf of it.
@Richard
I don’t have much crit. Most of it comes from my talents. Crit is only 13.4% but it’s low for a few reasons. In pre-4.0 I stacked haste/mp5 for the content. The content has remained the same, so I figured as a good test I’d see how I do in the same content with the same gear. Further compounding my crit, is the fact I’ve reforged crit into mastery. I really wanted to see how mastery stacks up. I’m ~14% mastery and 27% haste. I can reforge, and take equal haste/crit into mastery, or just straight haste to mastery.. maybe.
I do agree with you that crit is likely more valuable for us in the future, after combat ratings are increased when we level.. but for right now, with the gear we have it’s tough to turn away from haste when haste is pretty much on everything. I do have some crit/spir gear. But as I mentioned, I don’t seem to have mana issues, and throughput (so far) does not appear to be a huge issue, or as large as others claim it to be. To me, it’s apparent that tactics/assignments pre-4.0 will not cut it post 4.0. I don’t see that as blizz screwing up as a lot others do, but I’m not saying paladins are 100% fine and others need to l2p.
Numbers aside, mechanically I like what they’re doing but it’s not tight enough. That’s my review so far. And I have no idea what stats are good to have. I may have more spirit than I need, I may have too much haste and not enough crit (throughput), but I don’t see how modelling can help with that. One thing that’s always attracted me to playing a healer is the fact that healing isn’t 1231212312123 like some dps rotations. It’s always been about “feel and flow”. Some people want to be casting 100% of the time and gear accordingly. I gear according to what I feel will get the job done. And back in Sarth10, stacking INT was the way to go and I never looked back since. I didn’t just spam HL 100% of the time either. I’m getting off topic, anyway..
Stacking haste shouldn’t lead to haste nerfs. Stacking haste to any large degree ignoring other stats should be detrimental on its own. If it’s not, then it should be tweaked by blizz. But I don’t think if every paladin suddenly started stacking crit, blizz would then nerf crit.
@ KURN
I finally got back on live today. Took some time to learn and mess around with the changes. Still do not have set right and my Vuhdo does not let me know about procs, I will have to figure it out. My average gear scores says 262 so I am not in anyway top end gear. But I do get 30k Divine Lights and got a 40K in a duel today.
Thanks for you thoughts. And what I like about this build is all the spells I cast.
I have only 8% Mastery so far but I think my ideal build would be 30% Haste, 40% Crit, and 12% Mastery. Short of Haste by 8% and Mastery by 4%. My Crit is at 36% so I am only going to slightly favor Crit over Haste.
Ok so here we go this is what they want from us:
http://cata.wowhead.com/itemset=933
Looky looky crit crit crit….
@Richard
Yeah, that set’s stats have been known for a while. Just because those stats are on the gear does not mean that’s ideal. Besides, there’s reforging so perhaps we’ll reforge some into haste to fill in for our offset pieces (rings, trinkets, etc.) Haste will be playing a diminished role, but I do not think any stat can be outright ignored and called “garbage”. And at the same time, I do not think any stat will be the go to stat at the cost of any other. I’m hoping we’ll need to gear more like dps and say.. (just going to make up numbers here) reach a minimum of 800 spirit, 25% haste, 22% crit base, and then stack mastery. I mean, having some numbers to “reach” would be nice rather than “just stack spirit and haste and let crit/mastery come on gear”. Just need to find that sweet spot.
http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=27292693370&pageNo=3&sid=1#40
Mou.. I just don’t know what to make of this.
(I hope a good friend of mine doesn’t see this post, she’s already been sat from raiding with her hardcore guild because holy paladins can’t cope with the demands of ICC 25man on heroic, and is incredibly upset with the shape of things currently).
I can’t say I’ve been particularly effective as a healer outside of 5mans yet, I’ll comment back when I know how I do personally in 10mans.
I view stacking more Haste then Crit as pretty much the FoL Build in LK.
And stacking slightly more Crit then Haste as the HL build.
But equal Crit and Haste may be the best choice.
Problem now is with low Crit and Haste we suck at keeping up.
Why I think we will get a slight buff to bring us up the speed.