Category: patch 4.2

T12 Bonus Changes, Mana Costs

Kurn / / cataclysm, gear, healing, paladins, patch 4.2, ramblings

MMO-Champion has the new T12 set bonuses for us, as well as a post by the blues about why they’re raising our mana costs significantly.

Old set bonuses:

Paladin T12 Holy 2P Bonus: Casting Flash of Light, Holy Light, or Divine Light on your Beacon of Light target has a 40% chance to grant you 2% of your base mana.

Paladin T12 Holy 4P Bonus: Your Divine Light also heals a nearby injured target for 20% of the amount healed.

New set bonuses:

Holy Paladin 2-Piece: Old bonus removed and replaced — Healing with Holy Shock has a 40% chance to grant you 6% of your base mana.

Holy Paladin 4-Piece: Old bonus removed and replaced — Your Divine Light, Flash of Light, and Holy Light spells also heal an injured target within 8 yards for 10% of the amount healed.

My thoughts: (Edited May 14, 2011)

The 2pc is a lot better. 40% of the time you cast Holy Shock, you will only spend 1% 3% of your base mana instead of 9% (which is the current cost) or 7%, which is the new 4.2 cost (at least as of build  14107). Actually, you will probably need to have 7% mana (1640) in order to cast, but when this procs, you will probably get a refund of about 1406 since the real cost will be around 234 mana. Since Holy Shock is our cheapest heal that costs mana in 4.2 (Holy Light will be 12%) and is our primary method of Holy Power generation, this is a nice little bit of mana back. Remember, though, this could be on an internal cooldown, much the way Eternal Glory is!

With this bonus, it seems that they want to further emphasize the use of Holy Shock and so it is now taking Flash of Light’s place as an uber-cheap heal. In the old days, Flash of Light was stupidly cheap and even if you had pretty much no mana whatsoever, you could always afford a Flash of Light.

The 4pc is better, but not a ton, IMHO. They halved the healing of the splash heal to 10% from 20% but let us use more of our spells AND there’s no “you must heal the beacon” requirement. We still have to use a casted spell, but it can be any of the three casted spells. Even with the increase in mana to Holy Light, we’re still going to be using that quite a bit.

Mana Costs

Zarhym said:

We increased paladin mana costs because they were too efficient at healing. In raid encounters, for instance, paladins were sitting at 40% of their mana while the other healers were flat out of mana. Paladins were casting Divine Light as their main heal because they didn’t need the efficiency of Holy Light. You personally may not have been in that situation, but when looking at the overall picture, as well as running plenty of tests, this was our conclusion overall.

To which I say, “you know what? This is what you get when you design mana-free heals. You have now introduced Holy Power to the paladin class and the holy paladins now have two resources with which to heal.” But no other class has that. Blizzard now has the unenviable task of balancing holy paladins between the maximum amount of holy power one can possibly generate (through use of Holy Shock, Crusader Strike, Tower of Radiance and the Blessed Life talent), plus their mana costs and regen rates in current gear levels VERSUS everyone else’s mana costs and regen rates.

Essentially, they’ve screwed up by giving us Holy Power and we are forever going to be overpowered if they tune our mana to what other healers have, but forever underpowered if people don’t make smart use of Holy Power or, perhaps more importantly, don’t smartly generate Holy Power.

It’s still early in the expansion and I’m still trying to find what’s right for me. I like to tank heal. So I have Tower of Radiance. But on a fight like Chimaeron, where I am not tank healing, I don’t pick up Tower of Radiance. Instead, I take advantage of the crazy raid damage that fight has and I pick up two points in Blessed Life. The last time I killed Heroic Chimaeron, I picked up 12 Holy Power that way instead of the 0 Holy Power I would have generated since I am emphatically NOT healing my beacon target on that fight.

There are much better players than myself out there, much more progressed players than myself, who have probably figured out the balance as it works best for them and it’s probably also a very efficient way for them to heal, which is likely why they’re better players than I am. (Though I would challenge anyone to heal through heroic Maloriak, keeping their tank alive, at 3fps at some points, though. I would totally win.)

So my thoughts are that Blizzard has screwed up. We will never be tuned “properly” because of Holy Power, unless they specifically limit the rate at which Holy Power is generated. They’ve already taken steps to do so — Holy Light on the beaconed target no longer gives Holy Power, as it used to with Tower of Radiance. Blessed Life now has an internal cooldown and cannot occur more than once every eight seconds.

There’s already a limit on how often we can cast Holy Shock (6 seconds) and Crusader Strike (4.5 seconds) and there’s a less-tangible limit on how much Holy Power we can gain from Tower of Radiance, due to the exorbitant mana costs of Flash of Light and Divine Light — which are only going to get more expensive.

I don’t think the limits are firm enough, though, and it’s going to make balancing us a really difficult job for the next few major patches.

My two cents.

4.2 News: Holy Paladin Tier 12, Mana Costs

Kurn / / gear, paladins, patch 4.2, ptr

So MMO-Champion has some data-mined information out there for patch 4.2 from the PTR build 14040. Since we don’t care about the legendary staff since it has hit and we can’t equip staves, I’ll just focus on the Tier 12 holy paladin set and the class changes.

Tier 12:

At first glance, and remember that this information can be changed at any time, our tier does  not suck.

Tier 11 had absolutely no haste on any of it. There was mastery and crit, and a lot of it.

Tier 12, on the other hand, looks much more promising.

First of all, despite the fact we have a skirt again, it looks pretty darn awesome.

Second of all, the stats are pretty great.

Immolation Mantle, our Tier 12 shoulders: 282 Intellect, 454 Stamina, 229 Spirit, blue socket (+10 int bonus, which means we’ll just put an intellect gem there anyways) with 134 crit. I know, it’s not fantastic, but it’s not bad.

Immolation Greaves, our Tier 12 legs: 368 Intellect, 611 Stamina, 271 Spirit, a red and a blue socket with a 20 int socket bonus and 233 haste. Yummy! So much nicer than our current tier legs, which are so inferior to the Legguards of the Emerald Brood.

Immolation Headguard, our Tier 12 helm: 348 Intellect, 611 Stamina, 239 Spirit, a meta and a red socket with a 30 intellect socket bonus (tasty!) and 245 haste rating. Yay!

Immolation Breastplate, our Tier 12 chest: 368 Intellect, 611 Stamina, 276 Spirit, two blue sockets with a 20 intellect bonus and 225 critical strike rating. Eh.

Immolation Gloves, our Tier 12 gloves: 282 intellect, 454 Stamina, 0 Spirit, one red socket with a 10 intellect bonus and 176 crit rating and 204 haste rating.

Looking it over, our shoulders and our chestpiece are the likely places where we’ll ditch one of them for an offset piece after we’ve acquired the 4pc bonus, as neither of them have any haste. The shocking thing here? There is absolutely no mastery on any of our tier 12 gear. Instead, we have loads of haste.

I’m actually looking forward to collecting my tier gear, assuming these stats stay the same.

There’s only one other intellect plate piece of loot that’s been datamined so far and it’s a pair of shoulders: 282 Intellect, 454 Stamina and 213 Spirit, with a blue socket (10 int bonus) and 162 mastery.

I might stay with heroic T11 before swapping out to that (assuming I have heroic T11 shoulders. I have the Heroic Burden of Mortality at the moment, but would swap the crit on the tier for the mastery on these), but I guess we’ll see what other changes are in store for us before I make up my mind on that.

Mana Costs

Again, this is just PTR information and is subject to change at any time.

Divine Light will go from 30% base mana cost to 35% base mana cost.
Flash of Light will go from 27% base mana cost to 31% base mana cost.
Holy Light will go from 10% base mana cost to 12% base mana cost.
Holy Shock will go from 8% base mana cost to 9% base mana cost.

Again, this is subject to change, but it seems odd that they dropped the cost of our spells by about 10% with 4.1 and now want to raise them across the board again in 4.2. I guess we’ll see what happens in future builds and launch day. :)

Tier 12 Set Bonuses

Kurn / / paladins, patch 4.2

The various news sites have a first look at Tier 12 set bonuses. (MMO-Champion, Wowhead)

Holy Paladin:

Paladin T12 Holy 2P Bonus: Casting Flash of Light, Holy Light, or Divine Light on your Beacon of Light target has a 40% chance to grant you 2% of your base mana.

Paladin T12 Holy 4P Bonus: Your Divine Light also heals a nearby injured target for 20% of the amount healed.

Obviously, we don’t know how these bonuses will work, yet, but there are a few things here that are interesting to note. Typically, Blizzard ties bonuses to spells they want us to use a lot. Witness our 2pc bonus (and any other healer’s T11 2pc bonus): it’s 5% crit on Holy Light/Heal/Healing Wave/periodic Lifebloom heals. (Never mind the fact that a lot of people go for offset pieces due to the lack of haste on tier, at least for paladins.)

Let’s talk about the 2pc bonus first.

a) You need to be casting Flash of Light or Holy Light or Divine Light. This effect does not trigger from Holy Shock, Word of Glory, Light of Dawn, Holy Radiance or, it appears, triggers from Beacon of Light.

b) You need to be casting those spells ON your Beacon target. This is in line with the Tower of Radiance talent that some paladins forego entirely and is, perhaps, Blizzard’s way of trying to encourage us to cast on our Beacon directly.

c) There’s a 40% chance to get back 2% of base mana. Do you know how much, or, rather, how little mana 2% is? Try 468 mana. So we have to cast a heal that’s about 7k (FoL) or 2k (HL) or nearly 8k mana (DL) in order to have a CHANCE to get 468 mana back. Not sure about you, but unless this changes, I’m just going to heal as I normally do and consider that mana to be icing on the cake.

It’s particularly insulting to us, given what the other healing classes are potentially getting. (And yes, I know, it’s datamined PTR info that’s subject to change.)

– Druids: Your periodic healing from Lifebloom has a 40% chance to restore 1% of your base mana each time it heals a target.

That’s a 40% chance to gain 186 mana each time Lifebloom TICKS. Lifebloom ticks (unhasted) once a second. Good resto druids, as I understand it, should ALWAYS have Lifebloom ticking on someone for Omen of Clarity procs, due to Malfurion’s Gift. In our first-ever heroic Chimaeron kill, my resto druid had 423 ticks or tick/crits of Lifebloom.  40% of that is 169. So, roughly, 169 chances to proc the bonus, assuming no internal cooldown.

– Priests: Your Flash Heal, Heal, and Greater Heal spells cause you to regenerate 2% of your base mana every 5 sec for 15 sec.

That is a 100% chance (no percent chance, no chance of failure) to regen 412 mana every 5 seconds for 15 seconds. So that’s 412 times 3 for a total of 1236 mana every time they use Flash Heal, Heal or Greater Heal.

– Shaman: Your periodic healing from Riptide has a 40% chance to restore 1% of your base mana each time it heals a target.

That’s a 40% chance to restore 234 mana on each Riptide tick. And you can have more than one Riptide going at once.

Clearly, the holy paladins have been screwed over here. The shaman and druids have the same chance as us to proc, but are restricted to one spell. However, that one spell (for both of them) ticks constantly if the class is being played well.

The priests have the same spell limitations as we do (short, expensive heal or the long, cheap heal, or the long, expensive heal) but don’t have the percent chance, nor are they limited by target the way we are, since our heals MUST be on the beaconed target.

d) The possibility of an internal cooldown exists. This isn’t unheard of. Eternal Glory‘s 30% chance to make Word of Glory not cost any Holy Power has a 15-second internal cooldown.

All said, I think the two-piece bonus COULD be great, but the mana returns are too low, we’re too limited in terms of our targets and, frankly, every other healer is going to get more procs off of their bonuses than we are, should it stay the way it is.

And now for the 4pc:

Raid-buffed, my average Divine Light hits for about 30k and crits for about 45k. So the 4pc bonus is going to allow me to hit my target for a bit more than that (given gear upgrades meaning more intellect), so let’s say about 38k and 52k for a DL hit and a DL crit in a raid with 4 pieces of T12.

20% of 38k is 7600 and 20% of 52k is 10400.

So my 4pc bonus will allow me to heal some random person near my target for 7600 or 10400 or some value in between?

– Will it be a smart heal or will it just heal anyone? A pet? Someone at full health?
– Define “nearby”

My concern here is that the radius will be small and that the heal will be random. If it is not random and if the radius is about the size of the old Glyph of Holy Light, this is a nice bonus. If it heals the player with the lowest health in its decently-sized ranged, I’ll be thrilled.

Sadly, my gut tells me it’s random, won’t care if the target is a pet or at full health already and will be pretty useless sometimes.

Having said that, no one knows how these bonuses are actually going to work. We’ll have to wait and see. I just really, REALLY hope these get some work done on them before 4.2 releases.